In 2003, I won two tickets from Steve Dahl’s show to attend the taping at the WTTW studios of a Soundstage with Lyle Lovett, and his guest, Randy Newman. As a huge Randy Newman fan since the early 70s (more on this in future postings), I was psyched to see him more than Lyle Lovett, who I had heard on WXRT (“Chicago’s Finest Rock”), but had never become enough of a fan to purchase a record (record?), I mean CD.
It took over four hours to tape what eventually became an 81-minute show. Mr. Lovett started the show with 4-5 songs, then they stopped and said they were going to start all over again, so clap like you’re seeing him for the first time, which we did.
It was a great show and his backup band/vocalists were superb. I ordered the Live in Texas CD the next week. I especially liked “If I Had a Boat”, which is the one I added to my playlist after burning the CD to my Zune.
Randy Newman sang “Political Science (Let’s Drop the Big One)” the song that got me into his music in 1972, after I saw it performed by David Steinberg during his comedy show at the Mill Run Theater (now long gone) in Niles, Illinois. I went out after that show and bought “Sail Away”, “12 Songs”, and “Newman Live”. Albums were 3 for $10 at Skipper’s back then.
At the Soundstage taping he also did “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today” and “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” with Lyle Lovett.
Before the taping we saw Steve Dahl, who was also one of the producers of Soundstage at the time, standing in the hallway of WTTW as we went in to the auditorium. I wanted to say something to him like “Thanks for the ducats”, but I wimped out. I have a hard time speaking to my heroes. I once did the same thing at a dinner I attended for Harlan Ellison in the 90s.
Lynn and I had actually met Steve 9 years earlier in 1994 when I won tickets from the Dahl show to the Kane County Cougars, the local Class A baseball team. This was when Steve was on WLUP AM1000 with Bruce Wolf, after his acrimonious breakup with Garry Meier. The tickets also included a ride from the studios at the John Hancock to the game with Baderbrau beer served on board.
Then, as now, we lived in Elgin, and were much closer to the Cougars’ field in Geneva, but we wanted to ride the bus and meet Steve, so we drove to Geneva and took the Metra train in to Union Station, then took a cab up to the John Hancock where we got on the bus with other winners. However, there was no Stever or Bruce or Lane Closure (Leslie Keiling, their traffic reporter) on board. Bruce wasn’t coming and the bus would pick up Steve and Lane on the way, in Hillside. In the meantime, we drank Baderbrau and settled in for the ride.
In Hillside, Steve and Lane climbed on board and I handed Steve his first of several beers (he stopped drinking the next year) and we rode to the game. Along the way, Steve asked us what he should say to Garry Meier the next day. After the breakup with Garry, Garry was given a show of his own on middays at WLUP FM, Steve was put with Bruce Wolf on the AM, doing sports talk. However, after a year or so, Garry’s ratings were low and the next day was to be his last. Steve was planning on going in during the broadcast to wish him well. If you listen to the clip from that show, awkward does not begin to cover it.
Anyway, when we got to the park, we were set up over the right field wall, where there was a deck with a hot tub and tables and chairs. We watched the game at Steve’s table, downing several more beers and a couple spectacular Pork loin sandwiches and I think at some point I finally exchanged some small talk (I’d been listening since just before Disco Demolition in 1979, so I was familiar with his oeuvre) and we took a great photo with him just before we left to take a cab to our car at the Geneva train station.
That reminds me, I used to have the whole Sox broadcast of the Disco Demolition Debacle on videotape, but I taped over it back in the early 80s. When I bought my first VCR, a Magnavox in 1978, I not only had to finance the purchase of the machine, $800, but also the blank tapes as well. When they first came onto the market, from the late 70s to the mid-80s, blank tapes were $25 EACH. Every few months, in the early 80s, a catalog store in Mount Prospect, whose name escapes me, would have a sale of 5 tapes for $100, a steal! I remember my first movie rental as well, from a Fotomat (“what’s a Fotomat, dad?”), it was “Harold and Maude”, and it cost $12 for 5 days. To purchase one movie, it was $40 to $70. Ahhh.. good times.
When I bought my first VCR I also bought 12 blank tapes, for $300. And since you could only get 4 hours on a blank VHS, I taped over most of my original tapes at some point. I had some cool (to me anyway, I was sort of the anti-cool, then as now) shows, besides Disco Demo, that I wish I’d kept. Soupy Sales had a show that WGN ran in the middle of the night and that Model T VCR had a timer to turn it on and off, you manually changed the channel. Also, I had the whole run of “I, Claudius”.
Oh well, I still have a copy of the “Bleacher Bums” with Joe Mantegna and Dennis Franz, “Disco Beaver From Outer Space” from HBO, when the National Lampoon was attempting to cash in on “Animal House” fever, and “Ripping Yarns” the Michael Palin series from the late 70s.
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