Brush With Celebrity: Jean Shepherd

[purchase a book by Jean Shepherd]
[purchase some recordings by Jean Shepherd]

The inspiration for this theme was a bit that David Letterman used to do when he was on NBC, and his show was stranger (and Dave was nastier) than when he moved to CBS and the earlier timeslot. He called it “Brush With Greatness,” and they would have audience members discuss encounters that they had with celebrities, usually ending with a “writer’s embellishment,” that took the mostly prosaic events to some weirder place. For example—this brief story about selling Ted Koppel classical records, embellished to end with a heavy metal jam with the newsman.

My subject today, Jean Shepherd, would have, I think, appreciated the concept of the writer’s embellishment. Shepherd, who passed away in 1999, was hysterically funny, but he was really more of a humorist than a comedian. He was a raconteur who made his name telling stories on the radio. He was an author, TV personality and worked in movies. There is, if you look online, a pretty large cult of Shepherd lovers who maintain websites devoted to his work, and books have been written about him. If, though, he is remembered broadly today, it is as the writer and narrator of the movie A Christmas Story, which I have to admit, I didn’t really like.  The video above is an early version of the story that later became the movie.

Shepherd’s life story is shrouded by mystery and obfuscation, so although there are many sources for information about him, it probably pays to take much of it with maybe a whole shaker of salt. For example, his obituary in the New York Times, noted that he was “believed to be at least 70.” The obituary, strangely, ends with a statement from a “friend and business advisor” that Shepherd had no survivors, followed by a quote from Shepherd’s living son Randall, mentioning that Shepherd also had a living daughter. He may or may not have been considered for the job hosting the Tonight Show after Steve Allen, but instead the job went to Jack Paar. He might have been the model for the radio host in Kerouac’s On The Road. And he occasionally made public statements that were confounding. He was a man with a huge ego, who seemed to resent the fact that perceived lesser talents were more appreciated by the public. Donald Fagen has written about his conflicted feelings about Shepherd.   If this has piqued your interest about him, and I hope it has, just start Googling.

For 31 years, from 1966-1996, Jean Shepherd performed at Princeton, typically during Reunions, as a fundraiser for WPRB. As a freshman from the New York area, I was aware of Shepherd, was not really knowledgeable about his work. I guess that I considered him more of interest to my parents’ generation. But as second semester started to come to a close in 1979, people at the station started to get excited about “Shep’s” annual appearance. I was planning to stay for Reunions to perform (among other things) with the marching band, so I agreed to help out with the show, which, I was guaranteed, would be amazing.

If anything, it was better than that. Playing to a packed house of about 1,000 in Alexander Hall, in the heat, Shepherd spoke, for about 2 hours without a break, without notes. He told a long, involved story, with digression piled upon digression, before tying up neatly. And, did I mention that it was funny? Not only “ha ha” funny, but poignant, clever and thoughtful. The story was certainly based on things that happened to him, but were embellished just enough to make them amusing. It was really mindblowing.

After the show, we walked over to Holder Hall, and into our basement studio for pizza and beer (sorry, FCC), and conversation with an open mic. Shep, which I now called him, was friendly, interesting and engaging to the staff and people who called in. This was repeated at the end of my sophomore year (where I moved closer to the mic), and again, my junior year, where as program director, I was one of the discussion leaders.

By this time, it was clear to me that Shep had a photographic memory, which explained how he could deliver his shows so perfectly. He remembered my name each year and asked me about the Mets (he was an avid White Sox fan), despite the fact that I was probably one of hundreds of people he met while performing.

As a senior member of the WPRB staff who also had a car, I was tasked to take Shep to his hotel after the show and studio session (so, I didn’t drink that much beer. Really.) If you are familiar with Route 1 near Princeton, you know that it is lined with hotels of various quality, and back in 1981, it was the same, if somewhat sparser. There are nice chain hotels, and independent motels of various reputability. If the place I was supposed to drop Shep off with actually charged by the hour, I wouldn’t have been surprised. He looked at the place, looked at me, and shook his head, saying, in his sonorous voice, that he wouldn’t stay there. Instead, I drove him north on Route 1, to a nicer hotel near Newark Airport. I never heard that he sent the station a bill.

Now, if this was the old Letterman show, I’d tell you that Shep also paid for a room for me, and the next morning, the two of us flew to Vegas for a weekend of fun and excessive drinking. But it isn’t. Instead, I shook his hand and drove back to Princeton, to finish Reunions, for a weekend of fun and excessive drinking.

The Other Guy: Walter Becker

Steely Dan: Slang of Ages

Steely Dan: Slang of Ages (live)

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Steely Dan got their start forty years ago, but they only qualified for this week’s theme with their last studio release, 2003’s Everything Must Go. Until then, Donald Fagen always handled all of the lead vocals. One thing that becomes clear from listening to Fagen’s solo work is that, with Steely Dan, he is usually singing the words of Walter Becker. Becker has a cynicism and a sense of irony that are missing when Fagen writes for himself.

One stock character in Becker‘s writing is the sexual predator. You find him, in various forms, in Everyone‘s Gone to the Movies and Cousin Dupree, just to name two. Slang of Ages features him in a less threatening form. Here, he is a down-on-his-luck would-be Lothario, trying to pick up a woman in a bar. This character is not Becker, but rather someone he wants us to see and understand. We don‘t have to like him, and we are even allowed to laugh at his misadventures. But the laugh must be a nervous one, because the character shows us urges we try to deny in ourselves. The way the song is written, it is even possible that the entire encounter takes place only in the narrator‘s mind. In the end though, it does not matter if it is real or not; we have still seen what Becker wanted to show us.

Becker speak/sings his way through most of the lyric here. He can carry a tune when he needs to, but this delivery suits the character. Nevertheless, based on the evidence of this performance, Donald Fagen is certainly the more expressive singer. There is no sign that Steely Dan has any intention of doing any further albums, although they continue to tour. It may be that they decided that Becker should take this vocal because it would be his last chance to do so in the studio with Steely Dan.

I found a nice fan-made slide show for this song. As a bonus, I have also included a live version, also from 2003. The live video should have cut off thirty seconds before it does, however; the song that Donald Fagen begins to introduce at the end, if you’re wondering, is Peg.

Album Cover Art: Donald Fagen - The Nightfly

Donald Fagen: The Goodbye Look

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This week’s theme is right up my alley: I’ve run a batch of articles on some of my favourite album cover art over at my joint. And for your benefit (or really mine, for I am crazy busy at the moment), here’s a recycled post from that series, which also features the cover in Geoviki’s post which precedes this one.

Released in 1982 and Donald Fagen’s first solo outing, The Nightfly album evoked the sounds and spirit of the 1950s and early ’60s, without sacrifice of Steely Dan’s jazz-tinged rock. The cover concept clearly seeks to communicate the content, and it is simply executed with Fagen as an old-school radio DJ burning the nightshift with the help of Chesterfield Kings and copious amounts of black coffee. He is the sardonic DJ Lester, still unfettered by playlists, on the independent Baton Rouge station WJAZ who speaks to us, through the RCA 77 DX mic, on the title track.

Look long enough at the cover and listen to the title track, and armed with clues you may begin constructing your own backstory. In front of him is a Sonny Rollins album, so we know DJ Lester specialises in jazz and, as the lyrics advise, communication. What else does he play when he is not condescending his listeners with cynical tales about the absence of love in his life (which explains his nightfly existence)? Surely some more jazz, Coltrane or Parker perhaps. I like to think he branches out into some R&B to lighten up the pre-dawn darkness of 4:10am.

There is a rich irony in the cover’s relationship to the music it seeks to illustrate. Where the graveyard shift DJ is spinning crackling vinyl platters and the lyrics recall the Cold War (just on New Frontier, there are references to The Reds and nuclear shelters, Dave Brubeck as the latest thing, the young Tuesday Weld), The Nightfly was one of the first albums to be recorded entirely digitally. Issued before we were dealt the cursed dominance of the compact disc, this is a quintessential CD album whose charms are not, unlike much other music, boosted by the warmth of vinyl.

The photo itself, by James Hamilton, was shot in Fagen’s New York apartment, in which the radio studio (presumably just the two walls we can see) was temporarily built. Fagen might have assumed the collective persona of the DJs he listened to when he was much younger, but he cannot be accused of method acting: the photo had to be reshot when an engineer in the recording studio pointed out that the microphone had been incorrectly positioned…

After Midnight: The Nightfly

Donald Fagen: The Nightfly

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I’m not sure where everyone is this week, but this post proves that, notwithstanding our theme, posts can be done in daylight hours. The Nightfly was the first song I thought of for this week’s theme. Donald Fagen recalls a time when a late-night DJ was a friend who informed his audience and played music you wouldn’t get to hear otherwise. It’s the same role we bloggers try to fill now.

Hope and Change: I. G. Y.

Donald Fagen: I. G. Y.

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For his first solo album The Nightfly, Donald Fagen created a fantasy version of the 1950s. Here, a late night DJ can turn all of Baton Rouge on to all sorts of music, a bomb shelter becomes an ideal site for a teenager’s party, and romance is in the air. And, in the song I. G. Y., science makes all manner of miraculous things possible. I. G. Y. stands for International Geophysical Year.

The actual International Geophysical Year was a dream come true for the international scientific community at the time. It lasted from July of 1957 to December of 1958; astute readers will note that this was actually a year-and-a-half. The period was chosen to coincide with a peak in sunspot activity. The IGY was an international effort to study various geophysical phenomena, and byproducts of this period included the launch of the first scientific satellites and the construction of the first research station in Antarctica. IGY featured the cooperation of scientists from 67 countries. At the height of the Cold War, these countries included both the United States and the Solviet Union. If you would like to know more, there is an excellent article on the subject here.