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PART 1
"Jesus - I remember that day well!"
Jean Shepherd was once described in Cue magazine as "a philosopher without portfolio, a wit who never tells a joke."Shepherd was, to a generation of metro New York youth - mostly guys and the types never voted "Mr. School Spirit" - a bastion of charismatic iconoclasm. From the late 1950s to the late '70s, he practiced the art of the intimate, humorous monologue on WOR-AM radio, usually for 45 minutes a night. No in-studio guests, zero listener phone calls. For that matter, he didn't air many commercials (and those few were for unusual advertisers, like the Rover 2000-TC auto). The show was entirely based around the mesmerizing transmissions from one man's imagination.
Shep reminisced about his hapless days in the Army signal corps, and about his boyhood in Indiana's Great Lakes industrial wasteland, immortalized by the imaginary town of "Hohman." Shep's domain, said Herb Gardner, was "a world of long trolley cars, itchy wallpaper, tin-foil collections, creative sitting, lumpy letters and empty Ovaltine cans." Though he rarely discussed current events per se, Shepherd offered wry observations about the national scene. He was fond of quoting acerbic humorist H.L. Mencken, and his perspective on the country could perhaps best be summed up by the Sage of Baltimore's reply to the question, "Why, if you find so much lacking in America, do you live here?" HLM's reply: "The same reason men go to zoos."
"Shepherd is merely a vehicle," said satirist Paul Krassner, "for communicating to us not only that the emperor has no clothes on, but also that we are all naked emperors.
"Shep evoked New York's beat scene (he was part of it) during the 1950s, spinning first-hand vignettes of Kerouac, Mingus, Feiffer and Ginsberg. Upon first arriving in NYC, he wrote for the nascent Village Voice, and later for Playboy, Krassner's The Realist, and Car & Driver. His best-selling books included In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash; Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories; The Ferrari in the Bedroom, and A Fistful of Fig Newtons. The multi-media hacker wrote and narrated the perennial film classic A Christmas Story, and scripted and hosted the PBS-TV series Jean Shepherd's America. Details of his adult life were cloaked in secrecy, and upon his death, uncertainty swirled around his true date of birth, some circumstances of his three marriages, and his refusal to acknowledge his two children born to his first wife.
Shep was a seminal influence on many present and former WFMU staffers and listeners. His passing on October 16, 1999, prompted these recollections. -I.C.
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LOU "THE DUCK" D'ANTONIO hosted a free-form program (for many years called The Hour of the Duck) at WFMU from 1962-1990. He lives in Randolph, VT, and hosts Jazz Spectrum on the Point in Montpelier.
I'm sitting in the cafeteria of the Public Service Coordinated Bus Company in October '58. This annoying character by the name of Dundas McDonald interrupts me - I'm regaling my fellow diners with another story about my sainted, but feared Granma Rebecca, who'd just been arrested by the NYPD for bringing her umbrella to bear on the shiny pate of the manager of the Brooks Brothers store in Manhattan - to say I should listen to this guy on WOR. He sounds just like me, but he rants about things like steel mills and GI life.
Having been in and around radio since the fourth grade - my listening tastes were quite refined - I was chagrined to realize that I may have been missing something, so I tuned in. I heard this guy talking about a Gogomobile, and my wife says "Who IS that, Lou? He sounds just like you!" I didn't hear it. Not a bit. This guy was a blooming, bloody genius. Irritating. Corny at times. Lousy at doing "voices." Narrow and opinionated. But, man did he SPEAK TO ME. He knew the possibilities and uses of the medium. And therein lay the genius. He came to occupy a place in my radio pantheon alongside Ransom Sherman, Ken Nordine, Bob and Ray, and Red Barber. They all had THE GIFT.
At 'FMU, from time to time someone would say I reminded them of Shep, or refer to the Duck as a Shepherd ripoff. Never bothered me. What did tick me was that only a scant few made reference to the other role models - though I openly stated that one of my riffs, a pitifully undertalented organ virtuoso, was a bastard nephew of Bob & Ray's intermission musician, Webley L. Webster. Nobody seemed to mind, and that really pissed me off! No matter what we do, we're successful at life if we respect the elders, while embracing the new, and what we are is a synthesis of all that. No listener ever accused me of being an Uncle Louis ripoff - because they didn't know my uncle. But there was more of him in the Duck than Shep, Red, Bob, Ray, and the rest.
During an Hour of the Duck one evening in the early 70's - on my birthday - a listener calls to say that Shep over on WOR had just played the portion of the William Tell Overture that I used for my WFMU closing theme, and grunted "Happy Birthday, you fathead" toward the end. I figured the listener was playing with my head, so I mentioned it on mic, and another person called to verify.
Next day I write a note to Shep asking him about it. A few weeks later I received in return a sorry-ass form letter thanking me for my nice note and my interest, and inviting me to join the bastard's fan club. Enclosed was an autographed 8 x 10 glossy. I sent it back, along with a Polaroid snap of the Duck that had a wine stain in the lower left-hand corner.
On the Sunday I got word of Shep's demise, I came on mic during Jazz Spectrum to back-announce a set and head into a spot break. I hadn't planned to do a tribute, eulogy, or anything. But the break ended with an incredibly stupid commercial for athlete's foot powder. Impelled by some uncontrollable force, I launched into a Duck-worthy Ramble that somehow meandered its way to Shep, and I concluded by saying that if there was one soul out there who remembered him as I did - before he became the bitter denouncer of all the brilliant stuff he did on radio - I would appreciate hearing from that person.
A minute later, as I'm spinning Mingus, the phone lights up. "Hello, this is the Point."
"EXCELSIOR! YOU FATHEAD -- AND QUACK! YOU BASTARD!," came the reply. And he disappeared into the night.
PART 2
VIN SCELSA was a free-form broadcaster at WFMU, where his program The Closet ran from 1967-1969. He hosts Idiot's Delight, heard Sunday nights on WNEW.
I remember the first time I heard Jean Shepherd. Whenever I was home sick from school (circa late-1950s), I spent all day in bed listening to the radio. At night, my mother would send me off to sleep by putting on "easy-listening" WPAT, and I would drift in and out of fever dreams with their dentist office schlock in my ears.
On one such night, I suddenly couldn't stand another moment of those godawful syrupy strings ... and I reached over to the table radio next to the bed and started fiddling with the tuning knob. Dialing through the AM whine and static, I landed upon the chuckling voice of a man who immediately sounded to me like the aural personification of what was, up until that moment, my bible of irreverent, hip "outsider-ness"- Mad Magazine! Suddenly, there in the dark, I found myself in the presence of a grownup who not only used words like "clod," but actually talked about "kidhood" with such accuracy that my fevered 11-year-old brain immediately sensed a kindred spirit! That's all it took - one tale about Flick, Schwartz, Randy and Ralph - kids just like kids I knew! - growing up in a Midwestern steel town under the weary beer-soaked gaze of "The Old Man" ... and I was hooked! Since his show was on after lights out, I became one of those kids forced by parental prohibition to listen to Shep surreptitiously, with a small plastic transistor radio tucked under my pillow, like a partisan glued to a clandestine rebel radio station! Listening to Shep became my own private excursion into a world of hip, jazzy, literate humor that was totally different from anything in my middle-class Italian Catholic upbringing. My mother would have been shocked to hear someone like Shep speaking over her WOR - the station that kept her company during the day while she did household chores - her Rambling With Gambling bastion of middle-class conformity.
For a precocious pre-teen, exiting the becalmed Leave It To Beaver 1950s and entering the brave new world of the soon-to-explode Sixties, Jean Shepherd was my first and perhaps my most influential guide into a realm of rebellion, non-conformity, art, music and joy. (Not to mention a main inspiration for getting into radio! During the early years of my career, if someone said, "You remind me of Shep!" or "You musta listened to a lotta Shep as a kid!" - I glowed!) And he was my personal secret - which only added to his mystique. It would be years before I knew anyone else who listened to him; and then, of course, I discovered that just about anyone I had anything in common with grew up hooked on Shep, with a radio tucked under the pillow, just as I did.
Jean Shepherd showed me that the little plastic box under my pillow could contain a magical world; that radio could present ideas, stories, characters, and words word words, in addition to music. Shep taught me that nothing can be more provocative on the radio than the honest-to-goodness sound of an infectious laugh directed at life's absurd and beautiful ironies. Shepherd cut through the bullshit in whatever medium he inhabited - radio, print, nightclubs and lecture halls, television and films - by speaking a witty, down-to-earth, unique brand of American truth.
Ain't no one else ever gonna come close to what the man accomplished ... in the dark ... with a microphone, a kazoo and 50,000 watts!
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BOB RIXON has programmed free-form, monologue-heavy radio on WFMU since 1981.
Although Shep seemed to occupy a space at the center of the Beat scene in New York City, he comprehended (as did Kerouac) that the movement's rejection of middle class life for existential "cool" was bogus. Those hipsters with the beards & those chicks with the berets were all clearly products of their upbringing & of Time magazine, their affected language copped from jazz musicians.
Of course, I didn't understand this at age 12. But I did see the connection between the societal rituals & the blasted, industrial landscape of Shep's Indiana & the New Jersey I knew. Those of us who lived on the fringes of Paterson, Passaic, Newark, Perth Amboy & New Brunswick were intimately familiar with that landscape & those rituals. Our rivers were bubbling brews of toxins. Smokestacks choked at the sun. We inhaled massive amounts of diesel fumes when we stood on bridges trying to drop rocks down train engine exhaust pipes. I loved the fields behind my father's plant in Woodbridge, across from the prison. I have no idea what those dirt mounds contained, but I enjoyed playing on them. We didn't think much of the air being bad or the water poisonous, because those problems were linked to jobs.
Shep understood this. His dad brought home a paycheck & that was all he needed to know. He fished in a stinkpot of a lake because that was the lake for fishing. He tolerated the eccentricities of people because being "average" is about Madison Ave. & insurance actuaries. Nor did Shep idealize childhood. He correctly saw it as a litany of traumas beginning with psychotic playground bullies & ending hunched over a toilet after the prom, puking one's brains out, any chance of getting laid utterly lost.
Underneath Shep's cynicism lay a true empathy for life as it is really experienced in America. He was neither a snob nor an elitist. But he was funny as hell. I wish more poets had listened to him.
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IRWIN CHUSID observed his 25th anniversary as a WFMU broadcaster on February 20, 2000. His book Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music will be published in May.
The demise of Jean Shepherd caught a lot of his fans off-guard. Death is often unexpected, but in Shep's case, he had long ago ceased to exist for many once-ardent loyalists. Reading his New York Times obit was like discovering a forgotten trunk of adolescent memorabilia: baseball cards, Robert Benchley anthologies, and scuffed 45s. Shep's death rekindled fond memories - but also symbolized how yesterday's heroes are trinkets on today's souvenir keychains.
I was a fanatical listener to Shepherd's WOR radio broadcasts throughout my late '60s high school years. His edgy, satirical monologues seemed the perfect mindwash against the purity-civics mental hygiene a clueless adolescent absorbed in classrooms every day. Shep should've awarded degrees. I learned more about the realities of life each night from his crafty 45-minute diatribes than I did in a 6-hour school day. I'll never forget Shep's observation that people are not created equal, that societies - even supposedly egalitarian ones like America's - consist of hierarchies. Get used to it, he chuckled, and know your place. Seems obvious now, but to a 16-year-old, it was an eye-opener. Shep's mixed-media career and sly perspective impressed and influenced me tremendously. The guy did radio, wrote fiction and screenplays, gave unclassifiable live performances - a perfect role model for a teen afflicted with chronic short attention span. Shepherd was a raconteur, bon vivant, wry observer of the American animal. He was a beatnik who actually made a living. I was introduced to the work of legendary debunker H.L. Mencken through Shep, who dropped the writer's name often enough to intrigue.
I wanted to grow up like Shep: with not one career, but many, free to explore whatever piqued my curiosity, eager to venture into uncharted professional terrain. Which is exactly what I did: radio, writing, producing, playing drums, teaching, and maneuvering along the fringes. Largely thanks to Shep, when people ask what I do for a living, I'm at a loss where to begin. "Lots of things," I sigh, before reeling off a litany of "hats." I must strike new acquaintances as a hopeless dilettante.
But I'll bet being Jean Shepherd meant never having to explain what you did for a living. You were "Shep," no resume necessary. In the '60s and '70s, I attended Shepherd's amusing standup shows at Seton Hall University. A solitary figure onstage, pacing around and pontificating before "friends" in an 800-seat living room. Later he appeared annually at NJ's Summit High School doing much the same thing: detonating verbal fireworks for 90 minutes, padding restlessly back and forth, brandishing a hand-held mic like a Rabelaisian evangelist, unaccompanied by music, sound effects, or opening acts. When I interviewed monologist Joe Frank in 1991 and asked about his early radio mentors, Shepherd was the first name evoked. Frank rhapsodized glowingly about Shep's intimate approach, how a faceless voice could mystically communicate one-on-one with an unseen listener. I went to see Shep at SHS with several WFMU colleagues in the mid-1980s. During the Q&A session which invariably followed his good-natured, rambling monologue, our admiration was deflated by Shep's metamorphosis into an arrogant, self-absorbed asshole. He boasted about his numerous awards, made a big deal about how much A Christmas Story had grossed, and seemed intent on playing up his status as a cultural icon. His braggadocio was devoid of irony or restraint. One fan asked if he would ever return to radio. "Yeah," Shep sneered, "when you go back to eighth grade!" This was a performer who held his audience in contempt. I left the hall with a sense that this man was no longer worthy of my respect or attention. He was dead, far as I was concerned. The obit appeared a dozen years later.
PART 3
DAVE THE SPAZZ hosts chimpified radio on WFMU Thursday nights from 8-11 pm, and is a recovering Stooge-aholic.
I first encountered Jean Shepherd in the early '70s after another grim night at Shea Stadium. Usually by the fifth inning, the Old Man knew in his bones that the game was over long before the pungent aroma of loss permeated the ballpark. As was our custom, me and my brother raced the Old Man to the parking lot to get a jump on homebound traffic. Sailing the Mercury Cougar at 90 mph onto an empty Whitestone Expressway was a slight compensation for another evening ill-spent. Even if the game sucked, at least we could beat those other losers back to their respective dens of defeat. Typically, we'd tune in the rest of the Mets Malaise on radio station WOR for the ride home. But one night was different. We must have left near the end of the fiasco, because the Old Man punched up the Jean Shepherd Show on the car radio - and my life was forever changed.
Who the hell was this guy on WOR recounting intimate experiences that somehow linked a 1938 Hupmobile to a plate of French toast? Why was he gabbing on ceaselessly about illegal gypsy tollbooths and Morty the tuxedo rental guy from Al's Swank Formalwear? What motivated a grown man to kazoo and sing along with "The Bear Missed the Train" and "The Sheik Of Araby"? My brain did flip-flops in the back seat and I recognized that I was onto something big.
As I listened to Shep yammer on, it dawned on me that there really was a world out there! And it was as routine and moronic as I imagined it to be! Was I aware of what a great storyteller he was? Or how his effortless segues bordered on the surreal? Or how he made the exotic mundane and vice versa on a five-night-a-week basis? Not likely. I just knew that he was funny as hell and that I was hooked. The classic days of radio were long dead by the time I started listening to Shepherd. That mattered little to me as I glued my eleven-year-old ear to the speaker that night in the back of the rattling Cougar. I made a pact with myself never to miss another episode of the Jean Shepherd Show. What Gangbusters and The Lone Ranger were to Shep, Shep was to me.
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MIKE "SPORT" MURPHY's album Willoughby was released on Kill Rock Stars Records in 1999. He lives on Long Island, and guest DJ'ed on Irwin's program in July 1999.
"You've got to listen! Last night he did a play-by-play of the Christians versus the lions!" Yeah, yeah. Just to shut up Matthew Mignone - who ran up to me every day in the schoolyard of Brooklyn's Holy Name Elementary, babbling about his favorite radio show (RADIO show?) - I tuned to WOR to check out Jean Shepherd. Somewhere between the opening post-time fanfare and the closing theme's final chord (accompanied, as it would ever be, by a mysterious vocal noise that sounded like Shep not quite done yapping yet), the hook sank. Every night from then on, I camped under the blankets with my transistor savoring Shep's riffs on whatever came to mind: tales of Schwartz and Flick, analyses of "slob culture" and GI ribaldries... all chuckling forth from the ether in the conspiratorial voice of some hepcat uncle. He'd begin on some seemingly banal topic, then wander off-point with a slew of "by the way's" and "incidentally's," always returning for the perfect wrap-up just as that damn galloping music crescendoed up behind him. It was electrifying... as if Ken Nordine were channeling Mark Twain. I even relished the nights when Shep seemed uninterested in weaving his verbal tapestries, content to spin ridiculous old time records and twang his jew's harp.
Almost alone among my childhood heroes, Shep held my attention through adulthood, and a possible reason may be gleaned from Shep's introduction to the published script of his outstanding 1976 PBS film The Phantom of the Open Hearth, a distillation of several sorta-autobiographical stories of young Ralph.
James Broderick, the actor playing Ralph's father, was not quite nailing the subtext of a scene in which he slips the kid a 20 spot before the junior prom. Broderick figured the exchange was meant to convey the thorny Old Man's inner tenderness, but Shepherd took him aside and asked him to imagine what this family would be like two years after this scene. "I suppose Ralph goes in the Army or something, and the Old Man gets older, and maybe more unhappy," Broderick offered. Naw. Shep hit him with: "One year, almost to the day of Ralph's prom, in fact the week of Ralph's high school graduation, the Old Man comes home, announces he's leaving the family, and takes off for Palm Beach with a twenty-year-old stenographer with long blond hair and a Ford convertible. They never hear from him again."
The stunned actor then played the scene flawlessly. (Subsequent portrayals of the Old Man - by good actors like Darren McGavin and James B. Sikking, who never received Jean's corrosive coaching - were lovably gruff and bumbling. Which is why A Christmas Story has become a holiday perennial, while The Phantom is a forgotten work of genius.) Well aware of this heart of darkness in his work, I was a bit less surprised than others in the audience at a live Shep appearance almost fifteen years later. To a packed school auditorium on Long Island, an aging and brittle Jean Shepherd brutally tore down all vestiges of the hepcat uncle, spitting venom at fans who mentioned his radio work and departing the post-show coffee-n-cake reception with a curt "Let's get the fuck out of here." I was full of whiskey, and found the incident grimly hilarious... but these poor schmoes - to whom Flick and the gang were treasured, lifelong friends - left heartbroken. Ralph had become the Old Man! As bitter a twist as any in Shep's work: I'M THE BLIND DATE!
It kinda made me love him more, because despite such unforgivable callousness, there was a purity to his bile that again brought Twain to mind: "The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven." If the Twain comparison seems pretentious, let me compound the sin by asserting that Shep's best work in the medium he mastered (radio, contrary to his own fervent protests) stands alongside that of H.L. Mencken, Preston Sturges, Ernie Kovacs and Lenny Bruce in theirs - sawtooth-sharp, and All-American as the roller derby. Shep made school nights tolerable for countless young wise-asses. He persuaded John Cassavetes to make Shadows. He brought virtuoso, complex wit to pages, stages, and screens. He imbued his radio broadcasts with a bone-deep cynicism, mile-wide warmth, and raging intelligence unfathomable to devotees of, say, Howard Stern's easy crassness or (Shepherd imitator) Garrison Keillor's hokum.
Shepherd taught many of us to recognize the exact pitch of laughter that would save our sanity here in Hell.
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BRUCE LONGSTREET was station manager of WFMU from 1974-1975 and 1981-1985. He hosted a free-form show here from 1972 to 1985. He has lived in California since 1996, and currently spends his evenings glowering at the radio.
Shepherd sang the song of the Great American Non-Existent. Hordes of reasonably ambitious and industrious lower middle-class and middle-middle class folks with more or less conservative sensibilities that were bugged because life's vicissitudes had decreed that they were never going to be a Mickey Mantle, a Mahatma Gandhi, or a Harpo Marx. Or for that matter, Rita Hayworth, Joan Baez, or Shirley Chisholm. We were just going to be, well, us, and how do we come to grips with that? I imagine he was terrified of those battalions of pimply-faced 14-year-olds with transistor radios under their pillows, catching his live act broadcast from NYC's Limelight café after midnight on Saturday. These kids imagined him as some sort of leader, when he probably just wanted to be a guy on the radio. I was among that mob of adolescent disciples. There were a half dozen of us Shepherd cognoscenti at Alexander Hamilton Junior High in Elizabeth, New Jersey. For a while I was saddled with the nickname "Flick" after my frequent, furtive scrawlings of "Flick Lives!" on classroom blackboards. The moniker embarrassed the hell out of me. That wasn't the point. The point is that Shepherd represented the first hip grownup most of us encountered. He knew jazz. He knew baseball. He knew radio. He knew Shel Silverstein and S.J. Perelman. And he hadn't suppressed the memory of the agony of adolescence.
He might be the only artist whose voiceover on a TV beer commercial brought delight instead of contemptuous sneers of "Sell-out!" I recall a Rheingold spot which played often during Mets games. Shep was always straightforward, and really leaned into it. A professional job. His attitude came through as if to challenge us civilians with, "I'm a radio guy, I'm an actor, I'm a performer, and this is how people like me make a living. Got a problem with that? Besides, haven't I already taught you not to pay attention to beer commercials?"
Shepherd has left us here to soldier on gamely, but mostly without effect. Some days you win, some days you lose, some days you get rained out, but you've gotta suit up. We're all Bucky Dent wanting to be Ozzie Smith and we ain't gonna make it and we know it. So we gotta figure out a comfortable way to run out three score years and ten with that knowledge.
Excelsior, You Fatheads!
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