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Jean Shepherd knew how to work an audience with the modalities of the class clown-cum-cheerleader call-and-response kind of comic. "Hey, Gang!" he would yell, in a personal appearance. . . . "Excelsior!" And the crowd would roar back. . . . "Excelsior, Shep! Excelsior, you fathead! Flick lives!"
Over the years he developed a lexicon of catch phrases understood only by his loyal listeners. He blew enthusiastic and terrible kazoo renditions of "The Sheik of Araby" and "When the Saints Go Marching In." He organized the famous and perfect "I, Libertine" hoax, in which his WOR listeners (the "night people") joined him in openly inventing and promoting (to the clueless "day people") a nonexistent best seller, which indeed wound up on the lists, and even got banned in Boston, without having been written. (Shepherd then teamed up with the science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon and quickly wrote a book so titled.)
The inventor of free-form radio, shtick radio, hip radio, he worked pranks, philosophized, concertized on jew's-harp, kazoo and nose flute, and was way, way better at radio than anybody else, then or now. And that might have been that, a gifted and amusing guy, and an offbeat asset to New York radio — except that he was an artist and an innovator, and one of the tiny handful of radio geniuses ever to exist.
What he did was make literature — fresh, right in front of your ears — like a guy making pizza in the window of a restaurant. He would state a theme at the beginning of a program, begin spinning his story and then digress wildly, digress from the digression, appear to forget all about the narrative and begin talking about some contemporary issue. (The seasoned listener would be watching the clock now.) The 45 minutes were mostly gone. There was no way Shepherd could possibly bring all these threads together. There was no way he could achieve an ending. Two minutes left. The story was still out of control. The mind raced, trying to figure out how he could possibly end it. It was like watching an amok speed-chess game. No way out. A minute to go. He can't do it!
And then . . . with 45 seconds left . . . amazing! Everything came together. Incredibly, the unexpected perfect climax — the theme music was coming up — and Shepherd uttered the final syllable just as the music hit full volume, and you realized you were open-mouthed, rapt, as if you'd just watched an athlete make an impossible save.
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Following is the January 23, 2000 response to the article from Randall Shepherd. (Shep's Son)
I would like to thank you for your warm recollection of my father Jean Shepherd's work in your year-end remembrance. But I especially want to thank you for placing his appreciation piece next to that of his old pal Shel Silverstein. To see these birds of a feather side by side one last time gives a new meaning to the expression ''on the same page.''
Randall Shepherd
Irvington, N.Y.
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