This is a great song by Donald
Fagan, half of Steely Dan, from his 1982 album, The Nightfly. It’s a jazzy song
that evokes the early 1960’s in its rhythms and lyrics…
Yes we’re gonna have a
wingding
A summer smoker
underground
It’s just a dugout that
my dad built
In case the reds decide
to push the button down
We’ve got provisions and
lots of beer
The key word is survival
on the new frontier
It name checks Tuesday Weld and Dave
Brubeck as the singer tries to interest “that big blond” into accompanying him
into the bomb shelter to
…pretend that it’s the
real thing
And stay together all
night long
And when I really get to
know you
We’ll open up the doors
and climb into the dawn
Confess your passion your secret fear
Prepare to meet the challenge of the new
frontier
The title, The Nightfly, and
especially the cover photo on the CD, evokes a memory to me of Jean Shepherd,
best known as writer/narrator of the classic A Christmas Story, and legendary
late night radio story teller out of New
York.
I first saw jean Shepherd on the PBS
series, Jean Shepherd’s America, back in the early 1970’s. It was a show where
he drove around various places and talked to the camera as if it were you in
the passenger seat. This led me to seek out his fiction, collected in In God We
Trust: All Others Pay Cash; Fistful of Fig Newtons, Wanda Hickey’s Night of
Golden Memories, and Ferrari in the Bedroom.
In the 1970’s and 1980’s PBS made
several TV-movies from the stories featuring the Parker family: Ralph, Randy,
Ma, and The Old Man. The Phantom of the Open Hearth (1976), The Greta American
4th of July and Other Disasters (1982), and Ollie Hopnoodle’s Haven
of Bliss (1988).
Donald Fagan wrote an article for
the online magazine Slate several years ago about finding Jean Shepherd’s radio
show on WOR in New York, which ran from 1956 to 1977 and observed…
…I
learned about social observation and human types; how to parse modern rituals
(like dating and sports); the omnipresence of hierarchy; joy in struggle; “slobism”;
“creeping meatballism”; 19th Century panoramic painting; the
primitive, violent nature of man; Nelson Algren, Brecht, Beckett, the fables of
George Ade; the nature of the soul; the codes inherent in “trivia”; bliss in
art; fishing for crappies; and the transience of desire. He told you what to
expect from life (loss and betrayal) and make you feel that you were not alone.
But then he went to see “Shep” live
in 1965 at an appearance at Rutgers University.
What
I saw that night at Rutgers wasn’t pretty. In the studio, his occasional abuse
of the lone engineer on the other side of the glass could be seen as the
petulance of an artist trying to make things work on the fly. But, incandescent
under the gaze of all those kids, his self-indulgences looked more like
straight up narcissism and his “hipness” was revealed as something closer to
contempt by the end of the show, he’d crossed the line between artist and
showman and then some. No longer wanting to meet the great man, I left before
the reception, scraped the ice off my windshield, and drove home…
I have to admit I agree with him.
Several years ago I bought a bunch
of mp3’s on EBay of hundreds of Jean Shepherd’s WOR radio shows. In fact, those
mp3’s take up a large portion of the 30 GB on my Zune. I’ve listened to all the
shows from 1956 through 1969 and while I marvel at his storytelling, his
disdain for so much of pop culture in the 1960’s becomes very off-putting.
He openly mocked the Beatles as
talentless flashes in the pan and whenever he mentioned some of the great writers
of the 60’s, specifically Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, it was always
smirkingly (is that a word?). Shepherd’s fiction is great fun to read, it can
be laugh out loud funny, even, but I would never consider it the equal of Catch-22
or Slaughterhouse Five. It stuck in his craw he wasn’t considered their equal
and it came through on his shows in the 1960’s.
From reading a biography and his
obituary in the NY Times, it’s clear he became somewhat bitter and dismissive
with those who followed in his footsteps (he got mad at his close friend Herb Gardner,
because he felt A Thousand Clowns was based on him) like Garrison Keillor,
whose News from Lake Woebegone monologues come closest to evoking the spirit of
Jean Shepherd’s 45 minute monologues.
It’s
amazing to me how he was able to keep up the quality for 21 years doing 45
minutes a night for most of that time.
It’s
also kinda cool that in one of the shows from the late 1950’s, in tracing his
career in radio, he tells how he came to be doing a radio show in Algonquin,
Illinois, my home town, and no more than 1500 people at that time in the late
40’s. I can’t find any record of Algonquin ever having a station, but it may be
that since he grew up in Hammond, Indiana, he was familiar with the town, and
liked how the word sounded.
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