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JEAN SHEPHERD–Obdurate Acts, Extenuating Circumstances (5)
THE SHEPHERD’S LIFE
A Tragedy in Obdurate Acts
and Extenuating Circumstances
♦
Cultivation and Leveling of
A Great, Communicating Art Form
And then the chick said, “Who listens to radio anymore?”
The guy says, “I sat there for a while and drank some of my wine, and my wine wasn’t piquant anymore.” (Jean Shepherd, April, 1960.)
.
Nobody worth his salt is listening to the radio at this hour of the night, I can tell you that. And I can tell you this–nobody worth his salt is doing radio at this hour of the night.” (Jean Shepherd, August 22, 1964)
Radio–when it was the major communicator
to the great American public.
By the late 1950s, the attention paid to radio by the public and the advertisers declined drastically with the onset of rock and roll and television. That Shepherd’s rise, with his genius for the medium, could not sustain itself through the historical happenstance of TV and rock, was a cultural phenomenon beyond his control. For him, a tragic cultural decline in the media he’d mastered.
It’s sad that a whole art form grew to fruition and suddenly disappeared It would be as if somebody had invented painting and great painters had flourished for–oh, maybe twenty years and then everybody forgot about painting because everyone discovered ceramics…–because radio can do things that television and the movies and the stage can never do. It plays with the imagination and the mind [in a way] that I think no other medium can ever approach. Some great actors rose to become really fine artists in the field of radio back in the 1930s and early 1940s. And the whole–the whole canvas is gone now. (Jean Shepherd, July 9, 1960)
From emceeing important jazz concerts, he enjoyed the lesser artistic thrills of live shows such as the Limelight broadcasts, with the attendant young accolades elbowing for his attention.
His style and content on the radio was to be as open and descriptive of his life and ideas as possible. To be a mentor toward the thousands of youngsters who followed his every word. His overwhelming secret need, it seems, was to keep his private person as safe and as unknown as possible. He kept parts of his private life secret even from his close friends. From anything he might ever have said in person or on the airwaves, one would not have known that, as an adult, he ever had a girlfriend, any wives at all, and any children such as Adrian and Randall Shepherd. He definitely had such girlfriends as “The Vampire Lady,” Lois Nettleton, and Leigh Brown, and four wives: Barbara Mattoon Shepherd, Joan Warner Shepherd, Lois Nettleton Shepherd, and Leigh Brown Shepherd.
Despite the many instances and circumstances in which he was an important mentor to thousands, through his personal weaknesses he could sometimes be dismissive and cruel, and, deny the parenthood he had to Adrian and Randall (It is possible that, with his consistent denial of parenthood, the opening part of his last will was just a sad, inexplicable error.):
Jean Shepherd was an original–a creator. It’s been said that Shepherd, in his career, copied himself a lot. True, but, in his defense, he created a tremendous amount of original material–and, when he chose, it was his to copy. What is of special concern is the contrast between the burgeoning of the late 1950s and his leveling off from then on, and the great loss of momentum in his last decade.
Some prefer Shepherd’s more honed stories published in print. From the early 1960s, he published 23 of his kid and army stories in Playboy, but these were not original written stories, they were his edited and augmented stories originally improvised on the radio. I prefer his tellings on the air, with all his spoken abilities such as tone, volume, pauses, sound effects, and the shorter, more focused, spoken words. I commented on a Customer Review on Amazon.com’s page regarding my transcripts of Shep’s Army, in which the Reviewer writes that the printed stories are less readable when you take the content from tape: “Yes, there is definitely a difference between my edited transcriptions of Shep’s radio stories, and his previously published stories. For one thing, readers should be aware that (in my understanding of the matter), all of Shep’s published stories come from his stories broadcast on his shows–but he not only edited them for print, he augmented them with a fair amount of written content–he added to what he improvised on the air. One might then discuss whether Shepherd was a better improvising radio storyteller, or a better augmenting-writer-for-print. I, for one, prefer his creative improvisations–for me, this is his claim to uniqueness and immortality.” (And, truth is, I prefer my transcripts that remain truer to the improvised radio tales than I like the Shep-augmented stories that were printed. Note that my complete transcripts are not of any of his previously printed stories, which are copyrighted.)
As for his many curmugeonly complaints displayed in so many of his later published comical articles, I for one don’t find many of them funny.
Indeed, the fine and highly regarded 1983 movie of his, A Christmas Story, is an amalgam of his previous stories. And a movie is a collaborative effort. Mainly: the script by him, Leigh, and director Bob Clark, yet, the movie indeed, with his narration, is a high point of his later years–every time I watch it I laugh and tremendously enjoy it.
Compare the high level, high-ranging activities of the late 1950s “burgeoning” seen in the chart below (click on each part to enlarge) with the self-copying and more minor work from the 1960s onward. [I created this chart in 2002–to help me better visualize the over-all sweep of Shep’s creative works while working on Excelsior, You Fathead!–and also for the pure pleasure of seeing it in this form.] Remember that the stories, seeming a great burst of creativity in the second and third sections, plus the three long-form TV dramas (all collaborative works) are based on the radio originals. For me, his great accomplishment in his later works is the two-part (1971 and 1985), uneven and incomplete television series (If only he could have created another 100 or 200 episodes!), Jean Shepherd’s America:
Stay tuned for Part 6
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JEAN SHEPHERD–Obdurate Acts, Extenuating Circumstances (4)
THE SHEPHERD’S LIFE
A Tragedy in Obdurate Acts
and Extenuating Circumstances
♦
Consolidation
Why and how he was switched from the more innovative overnights (at the NJ transmitter) to the in-studio, earlier-in-the-evening slot, is unknown. That he seemed to have retained the impetus of the overnights into Sunday evening, is a major victory. He seemed to have retained the slow and easy-going style of the overnights (I’m assuming this, as the following, much shorter broadcasts are of a different kind–still seemingly loose, and definitely improvised, but a bit less free-flowing.) That this schedule gave way to those earlier, 45-minute weekday segments, also represents a change that resulted in a different kind of show with its own very high-quality use of the radio medium.
My chart, shown in the previous post on the subject–as well as in a much earlier post–shows the difference in his career trajectory. Most noticeable in the programs themselves would seem to be the much larger percentage of school-age listeners and what I observe is the absence of contemporary jazz.
Many prefer his more refined and organized, 45-minute improvised radio to his long, Sunday evening, looser style. There is something easier to take, more conventional, more traditional as art and organization in his 45-minute style. He recreated himself, and that is a great accomplishment. The variety from night to night over about seventeen years is a marvel to behold. His commentaries, wit, philosophical bits and pieces, his cuckoo musical interludes with jews harp, nose flute, kazoo, and head-knocking, his stories that seem both improvised and sometimes, somehow well-formed, coming out just right at the end of the show. We revel in the variety, the unexpectedness, the mastery.
Comic strip artist Bill Griffith, in his “Zippy the Pinhead” tribute, expresses it well: HIS WIT WAS LIKE A LIFE RAFT TO ME. I CONFESS…I WAS A CULTIST…AND JEAN SHEPHERD WAS MY GURU. WHO KNOWS WHAT DEEP SUBCONSCIOUS EFFECT HIS LATE-NIGHT LOQUACIOUSNESS HAD ON ME…?
The large influx of high school and college listeners was a good thing as far as sponsorship was concerned, and Shepherd also enjoyed the adulation. But he did not so much like the intense crowding of his personhood that such cult-like celebrity brought.
As I’ve suggested before, I believe that, despite such masterpieces of his post-1960 WOR days as: Eulogy of JFK; Morse Code and Mark Twain; March on Washington, etc., Jean Shepherd’s creative heights leveled off at the very high standard he maintained for another decade-and-a-half.
Stay tuned for Part 5 of
THE SHEPHERD’S LIFE
JEAN SHEPHERD–Obdurate Acts, Extenuating Circumstances (3)
THE SHEPHERD’S LIFE
A Tragedy in Obdurate Acts
and Extenuating Circumstances
♦
Burgeoning
“It was unique and it was profound and it was real genius!”
1956-1960
The chart below should be seriously contemplated for comparison with Shepherd’s fine,
but less far-flung creative work, from 1960 onward.
One might title this period
High On a Mountaintop.
Jean Shepherd’s first years in New York, starting with the beginning of
his “overnight” broadcasting,
were an assorted fervor of glorious activities.
Below are some major examples.
♦Far-flung extemporaneous monologs, “invectives”♦
♦Within New York City’s highest levels of artistic activity connected with The Voice, Greenwich Village, the avant garde, etc. Shepherd associated with such as: Amram, Silverstein, Feiffer, Antheil, Gardner, Mingus.♦
♦Look, Charlie theater piece ♦
♦Cassavetes and the promotion of Shadows♦
♦Village Voice and The Realist♦
♦I, Libertine and The America of George Ade♦
♦Promoter and participant in the forefront of modernist jazz♦
♦As Lois Nettleton put it, “He had headlines!”♦
♦
Jean Shepherd must have felt himself to be an
innovative master of the highest
modern urban/urbane arts
–and rightly so.
The above list is extraordinary and unprecedented. A major problem is that we have as yet no available examples of his early 1956, overnight, four-and-a-half-hour shows to give us a reasonable idea of what they were like–we can only assume, for now, that they were probably similar to and even more loose than his subsequent four-hour Sunday night broadcasts. My impression is that he played some extended–if not complete–cuts of the major jazz masters of this period. (Talking from 1 AM to 5:30 five or six nights a week most probably was a bit different from Sundays only, 9 PM to 1 AM.)
I repeat here, from an earlier post: In an interview with Doug McIntyre, January 2000, (Just a few months after Shep’s death) Lois Nettleton commented that Jean’s improvisation on radio was a higher art than acting:
“…acting is not shallow, it is an art with depth and all of that,
but it seems almost–almost, less profound,
less important than what he was doing.
I mean I think what he was doing was so–
it was unique and it was profound and it was real genius!”
♦
Stay tuned for Part 4 of
THE SHEPHERD’S LIFE
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JEAN SHEPHERD-favored arts and artists Part 1 of 2
Shepherd sometimes talked about, or in other ways indicated, what arts and artists he loved
and even hated. What did he “vibrate to?”
MUSIC AND SOUND
He’s known for hating city-folk music and rock and roll. One wonders how much of it he’d heard, especially the later, most sophisticated styles of rock. It’s certainly understandable that he would hate the fad of relentless even rhythm of piano chord-plunking background that nearly covered the sound world of radio for an interminable time–back in the seventies was it? But how could he not vibrate positively to such masterpieces as “Satisfaction,” “Respect,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Great Balls of Fire” (surely, in its sound, the most erotic rock song ever!), “Life’s Been Good,” and “Who Put the Bomp”(one of the most playful, funniest songs I’ve ever heard!) Rock and roll expanded into so many sophisticated varieties over the decades, but I never heard Shepherd comment on rock after his early put-downs and his inaccurate prediction of its imminent demise. (His good friend in his last years says that they talked about rock and roll–but what did they say about it?)
We know he loved classical music, opera, and modernist jazz–and jazz was an essential part of his professional life as announcer, commentator, emcee, etc. And, of course, his style of talk flowed with the rhythms and style of jazz.
He turned many listeners (myself included) on to Django Reinhardt, whose two-finger style (necessitated by an old injury) had a lovely, lilting effect. I do believe that a major force in the great sound his group produced was his jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli.
He much-enjoyed, for its cuckoo-ness, Paul Blackman’s “one-man-band.” He frequently played various Dixieland jazz pieces by various groups. (In a book I just read parts of, The Village: A History of Greenwich Village, it comments: “It was no coincidence that a renewal of interest in old-school Dixieland jazz occurred around the same time….Dixieland was big in the Village clubs throughout the 1950s.”) His favorite old jazz piece must surely have been “Boodle-Am Shake” by the Dixieland Jug Blowers. (See my EYF! page 409, the beginning of the final chapter, titled “These Guys Can Play at My Funeral Any Day” for the lyrics to “Boodle-Am Shake.” The book also includes my puny attempt to describe the sound, but one must see http://www.flicklives.com to hear a bit of it.)
He was also fascinated by the myriad sounds that make up the world–and that we hardly notice–such as those of airplanes and train engines.
ART
He hardly had anything to say about visual art that he might have cared for. Picasso, maybe? He palled around with Don Kingman, Shel Silverstein, Leroy Neiman.
WRITING
Shepherd loved reading, and sometimes discussed and read fine poetry (including haiku–undoubtedly for its precise concision, and the amusing–if not quite fine– Archy and Mehitabel for its sharp and quirky irony and wit),
novels including Moby Dick and Look Homeward, Angel. He once commented that “Nelson Algren is probably as close a–a blood brother as far as philosophical outlook on–on the world…as anybody I know in literature. When I say blood brother, I mean to me. If there is anyone I vibrate to it’s probably Algren.”
HUMOR
Among humorists/comics, he definitely liked Mark Twain, George Ade (sharp and ironic criticism of ordinary people), Paul Rhymer’s “Vic and Sade” (gentle but pointed commentary on small-town mentality), P. G. Wodehouse, S. J. Perelman. He gave an enthusiastic appreciation of Jack Benny on the air.
•
“Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal”
Stay tuned
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JEAN SHEPHERD–Degrees of Separation
Thinking about Shep, Lois Nettleton, Sinatra, and The Beatles.
Ringo, it’s reported, asked Frank Sinatra, through an intermediary, if he would record a song in honor of his wife for her 22nd birthday, Aug. 4, 1968. Sinatra recorded and sent to her (Maureen Starky) his reworded rendition of “That’s Why the Lady [Maureen] is a Champ.” It’s said the original disk is rare, but the audio is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyyF8_cq7SM. 
•
Degrees of separation?
Shepherd∋The Beatles because he traveled to the British Isles and traveled with them/wrote the Playboy interview appearing Feb, 1965, despite having disparaged them numerous times.
ZERO DEGREES OF SEPARATION
•
Shepherd∋Sinatra because Shep was zero degrees from The Beatles, and Ringo got Sinatra to write “That’s Why the Lady is a Champ,” which makes Shep and Sinatra one degree.
ONE DEGREE OF SEPARATION
•
Shepherd∋Sinatra because Shep and Lois Nettleton were romantically linked, and in part married, from 1956 to about 1967–and Sinatra was romantically linked to Lois Nettleton in 1971-2.
ONE DEGREE OF SEPARATION
•
Shepherd∋Sinatra∋eb because I once met Shep, and spoke and corresponded with Lois, I’m some mixed-up combo of degrees of separation to Shep and ‘Ol Blue Eyes, too.
? DEGREES OF SEPARATION ?
•
Nick Mantis∋Barack Obama∋eb because I know Nick, and Nick suggested to Obama in 2006 that he run for the Presidency [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko-6WiU6MK8].
ONE DEGREE OF SEPARATION!
•
This is all quite amusing to the main person involved (me, sorta). But, though there are some legitimate connections in “degrees of separation,” a lot of it is happenstance. What seem to me of somewhat more significance are the circumstances in which people diverge in ways unexpected. Shepherd and myself, for instance– for all my enthusiasm and obsession with Shep and his work and way of thinking. For example, Shepherd was a great enthusiast of classical music, opera, and modernist jazz–and he intensely disliked rock and roll.* I, on the other hand, like (but only rarely listen to) classical music and opera. Modernist music (Gillespie, Parker, Coltrane, etc.), although I recognize it must be extraordinary, find it totally incomprehensible–in ten seconds its apparently (to me) insistent meandering drives me nuts. Jean did turn me on to the sweet, elegant jazz of Django Reinhardt:
Jean [Django’s non-Romany first name] Reinhardt
Among other musical enthusiasms, I’m attuned (pun) to The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, Dylan, Springsteen, a handful of the more popular pieces by Eminem, as well as late Sinatra.
MASTERPIECE!
•
Where have I gone wrong–or at least missed out?
I would love to understand/appreciate Parker/Gillespie/Coltrane, but I never will–just listening carefully doesn’t cut it.
Shepherd should have been able to understand/appreciate some of the finer rock and roll–and even Eminem,–but as far as we know he never could. He never, to my knowledge, played rock on his broadcasts.
[More ironic in the caption than “Tambourine Man”
would have been “Like a Rolling Stone”
or “Positively 4th Street.”]
Shepherd, why didn’t you like what I like
and why don’t I like what you did?
As some inexplicably say, “That’s what makes horse racing!“
•
* Shep’s good friend during his last years says that he and Jean talked extensively about rock and roll. Did Shep actually listen to it and think about it–maybe even positively? Strange!
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JEAN SHEPHERD and THE VILLAGE
Shepherd, on his radio program, promoted Greenwich Village, The Village Voice, and other aspects of the then-prominent culture identified with it, such as jazz and the Beats. He narrated a TV video about it and narrated the commercial film “Village Sunday.” (His love, Lois Nettleton, plays the part of a young woman strolling along, observing the scene.) He obviously appreciated the Village culture, and in the 1970s, live there for years.
I recently encountered a 600-page book, The Village–A History of Greenwich Village, 400 years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues (John Strausbaugh, 2013).
I’ve read the sections on the 1950s and 1960s, encountering a few good pages with an overall description of Shepherd, especially regarding the I, Libertine affair. My Excelsior, You Fathead! is mentioned in passing and is listed in the bibliography. The chapter with the Shep material, titled “Village Voices,” focuses on, among other items, Shep, Mailer, and the Voice. Epigraphs for that chapter:
You have no idea what a terrible lure this place is to people who live outside of this place. –Jean Shepherd
Greenwich Village is one of the bitter provinces–it abounds in snobs and critics. –Norman Mailer
[I do believe that the Shep quote refers not specifically to the Village but to all of New York City.]
The Shepherd-section, hitting most of the high points in a few pages, containing little if anything not generally known about him, ends with:
Despite his adoring listeners, Shepherd increasingly chafed at limitations of regional radio. After leaving WOR in 1977 he concentrated on film and television with some success, the bittersweet (mostly bitter) 1983 holiday film A Christmas Story, which he wrote and narrated, is considered a seasonal classic. But he never quite achieved the status he thought he deserved as a modern day Mark Twain or Will Rogers and withdrew to Sanibel Island off the Florida gulf coast where, a self-professed sorehead, he lived in relative seclusion until dying of natural causes in 1999. No doubt he’d find some rueful satisfaction in knowing that today copies of I, Libertine are collectors’ items going for as much as $350 for the hardcover and over $200 for the paperback.
[If one has the persistence to wait, one can get a paperback these days for about $50]
I enjoyed and found well-done, the author’s extensive material on the Beats, Shepherd, the folk scene, Mailer, the Voice, the emergence of Bob Dylan, and other surrounding material. There are no major errors regarding Shepherd, and the author seems to have used good and knowledgeable sources. Few if any other descriptions of Shepherd that I’ve encountered seem so on-the-mark. One might assume that the rest of the book is also good.
Village Voice front page,
with Shepherd, Nettleton, and Ann Bancroft.
______________________________________________
JEAN SHEPHERD-Whiz-Bang Biography of Jean Parker Shepherd, Esq.
•
What’s Shep all about, anyway?
Who knows?
All about?!?
I wish I knew.
Chapter 1 ??? Chicago South Side??? I’m a kid, see. Hammond, W. G. Harding.
Chapter 2 …Dorothy Anderson, Helen Weathers, Flick, Eileen Ackers, Patty Remaley, Ester Jane Albery, Randy Shepherd, et al…..
Chapter 3 !!! Steel-mill mail boy!!!
Chapter 4 !?!?→↑→↓ Crowder, Murphy. T/5 →↑→↓,!?!?
Chapter 5 Cinci, Philly, married (Barbara Mattoon), divorced, married Joan Warner.
Chapter 6 NYC, Jazz, WOR, burgeoned, night folk, divorced.
Chapter 7 Libertine, ↓ fired/rehired=Sweetheart, married Lois Nettleton↑.
Chapter 8 Playboy, IGWTAOPC, divorced.
Chapter 9 TV
Chapter 10 ACS (aka In God We Trust, etc.)
Chapter 11 Married ↑Leigh Brown. April Fool=1977: bye bye, WOR.
Chapter 12 Lady Finger Lake Road on Snow Pond Lake: Sanibel Island.
↓Leigh died 1998. JPS died: RIP 1999↓.
Chapter 13 ↑Radio Hall of Fame, EYF!
Chapter 14 Seinfeld nails it↑.
Chapter 15 Pulitzer Prize, Nobel Prize, Oscar, Obie, etc., etc., etc., (Not altogether true.)
But why doesn’t Shep have far more important tributes–like Harvey Pekar, creator of the American Splendor graphic/autobiographical novels? Recently a statue was created in Pekar’s honor, installed in his favorite Cleveland library:
Pekar stepping out of a “comic book page”
on a real library desk.
Oh, sure, Shep got a Community Center:
But, is Shep immortalized in a booblehead? Pekar is!
NO!!!
(not yet)
[Bobblehead is ridiculous, right?
But how many of us would like to see (and possess)
a Jean Shepherd bobblehead?
Damn near all of us fatheads, right?]
•
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JEAN SHEPHERD and GLENN GOULD Part 2 of 2
What do Gould and Shepherd have in common?
Part 2, in which Shep enthusiast
Joel Baumwoll discusses the matter.
•
In this Part 2 post about Glenn Gould and Shepherd, I present my original inspiration for discussing Gould–a couple of years before I began blogging about Shep, I read an intriguing email (12/27/2010) discussing the similarities between Glenn Gould and Jean Shepherd. I’d printed it out and filed it, and now its author, Shep enthusiast Joel Baumwoll, has given me permission to reproduce it here. Thanks, Joel, for this:
American Masters played a fascinating biography of Glenn Gould tonight. As I listened to the story unfold, I was struck by the parallels between Shepherd and Gould. The enigma that was Gould was purposely created by him to keep his distance from all but those he chose to share his life with. He was a genius who detested audiences after having been a great performing success. He considered them a mob. He retreated to a security of recording where he could control every moment, every utterance and decide what he would put out there.
He decided to create a radio program on CBC where he talked and explored human nature and his own nature. The shows described were very much like many of Shep’s programs. I would love to hear these programs. I am sure they would be as fascinating as Shep’s deepest programs were.
He was obsessive compulsive, dominated every relationship, was a total control freak and eventually became quite paranoid. People said he would talk to them for hours on the phone or in person, and would not stop talking. [I’ve also read that he would call friends in the middle of the night and expect them to listen to his long monologs.] Yet his genius of music put him in a class so far above others that established and recognized pianists and musicians said he was in a class by himself. His technique left them in awe, he refused to trod any path but his own, and refused to retread any path. “Why should I play Beethoven like everyone else has and has been heard before?” he explained when he did a rendition of a sonata that was so different from any ever heard.
His Goldberg Variations were at once a work of wonder and so deviant from what people knew of Bach that they were amazed…. [Most famously, he recorded them proficiently at an incredibly fast speed–in later years he re-recorded them more slowly.]
Unlike Shepherd he loved children. But in many other ways, he was quite similar in his habits and eccentricities. I left the program amazed at how similar in so many ways these two geniuses were in their art and in their lives.
Another Shep enthusiast, Dolores Nocturni added her thoughts:
You don’t develop technique like [Gould’s] without incredible discipline, and I’m not sure Shepherd had it. Gould came to hate audiences because they got between him and some ideal of perfection he could only achieve in the studio. Shepherd craved audiences (the Limelight shows, colleges, Carnegie Hall), although I believe he was best in the studio, talking one-on-one to solitary listeners. Maybe that’s a Gould connection, too.
Otto Friedrich, his biographer, commented that as for control, for Gould: “over the years it became a passion, an obsession. It was the need to be in control, really, that drove him from the concert stage to the recording studio.” One might remember that A Christmas Story director Bob Clark commented that Shepherd’s need for control became an impediment to him in work on the film.
•
Library and Archives Canada:
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/glenngould/028010-1040.03-e.html
In the 1960s Gould began to take a strong and active interest in radio and TV documentaries, nearly all for the CBC. He was the deviser, compiler, interviewer, writer, narrator and even producer of many of these programs, which ranged in subject matter from contemporary music to Newfoundland, from Stokowski to the Mennonites. He approached the technique of the documentary as a composer might approach the fugue or sonata movement form, or even an opera. Weaving together spoken voices and background sounds in counterpoint to each other, Gould achieved highly inventive and original effects. [As one commentator put it, in the documentary “The Idea of the North,” Gould used human voices to musical effect. I think Shepherd would have applauded this.]
•
One can grasp clues suggesting for us Shep-enthusiasts, some similarities (but not exactitude), between Gould and Shepherd. [For the following quote, I use color and underline to indicate my suggested similarities.] In the New Yorker of April 18, 1994, Anthony Lane reviews the documentary “32 Short Films About Glenn Gould,” in which he writes:
…it is Gould’s achievement to engage us not only with the demeanor of his performances but with their suggestion of larger virtues beyond the piano–of a living temperament, a limber philosophical stance, unlocked by its keys….Gould was a solitary, but not an eccentric; rather, he made himself central, and drew people in. He was one of a band of impassioned ascetics thrown up by our century, all of them immune to intellectual half measures; this means that Gould groupies are a scary lot, who tend to read Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin and Simone Weil, although it’s probably safe to say that Gould was the only one with a taste for tomato ketchup and Petula Clark.*
* [I’d love to know in what ways both Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol found
Petula Clark so fascinating–and in what ways they’d disagree.]
•
What genius does not have some neurotic personality disorder that somehow goes along with his/her extraordinary ability? One aspect of Gould seems to have been his obsessiveness–yet he obsessed on such a variety of fields of interest–seems like a contradiction. “Incredible discipline” is a less judgmental way of approaching the related issue.
In their intensity and obsessiveness, Gould and Shep were somewhat different. (Gould appears to me to have had a much higher pitch of intensity and obsession.) Each could be a delightful human; but when they were in one of their “moods,” I think I might have felt uncomfortable in Shep’s company and I think that in Gould’s company I’d have been in a state of shock.
I greatly admire them both.
•
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JEAN SHEPHERD and GLENN GOULD Part 1 of 2
Canadian pianist/genius Glenn Gould (1932-1982) was a strange and fascinating person. He’s most famous for his interpretations of Bach’s “The Goldberg Variations.” I’ve always been intrigued by what makes artists of various kinds tick–go about their work–at least in part this is envy–wanting to be like them. (However, I’m a very conventional sort of guy–except for a few of my inexplicably “uncharacteristic” activities–for example, I’ve spent a good part of the last 15 years focusing my attention on a personage named “Shep.”) I think there are some similarities between Shep and Gould.
Although I listen to very little classical music these days, I’ve got a couple of Gould recordings and I’ve read a major book about him to see, in my own conventional sort of way, if I could somehow understand his ticking. (Yes, I know–people like Gould can’t be understood by reading books about them–but maybe a bit of understanding can be grabbed?! For the most part, in my Excelsior, You Fathead! I didn’t try to understand Shep–I felt it much more important to describe and appreciate what he’d created. And as for interpretation, I tried to give quotes and suggestions from others who knew him, adding what Whitman referred to in another context as “faint clues and in-directions.”)
The book I read years back, Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations by Otto Friedrich, says this on its back cover:
He was a virtuoso of the piano who inspired an almost religious fervor in his fans, yet he hated performing and left the concert stage forever at the age of 31. He was a tireless advocate of the technology of recording, an artist who looked forward to a time when mere musicians would be rendered obsolete.
He was a notorious–and some thought, a deliberate–eccentric, who muffled himself in scarves and gloves, liberally dosed himself with pills, and once sued Steinway & Sons because one of its employees had shaken his hand too roughly. He lived in hermetic solitude and liked to call himself “the last Puritan,” but those who watched Glenn Gould play piano saw an eroticism so intense it was almost embarrassing.
One encounters many descriptions of Gould that might well make one think that he was a totally goofy guy. Why did he wear gloves and be so ultra sensitive about his hands? Why did he perform with his own odd piano seat (His father had made it for him and it made him feel more physically comfortable than any regular seat he’d ever sat on. It was unusually low, so that his hands on the piano keys were at a seemingly strange angle). Critics complained about his odd mannerisms on stage: singing loudly while playing, waving his hands about. It’s said that he approached each performance “from a totally re-creative point of view”–that is, with the aim of playing a “particular work as it has never been heard before.” Why did he abandon public performance? Many other oddities. But each had its “reasons”–he was not just the cuckoo he appeared to be on the surface. Watch the film “32 Short Films About Glenn Gould.”
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What do Gould and Shepherd have in common?
Stay tuned for part 2, in which Shep enthusiast
Joel Baumwoll comments on the matter.
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JEAN SHEPHERD-A CHRISTMAS STORY 2014
Another holiday season and another
Christmas Story show-fest!
A Christmas Story, the musical, this year is scheduled for NYC’s
Madison Square Garden Theater,
again starring, as Shep the creator and on-stage narrator,
Dan Lauria.
(Who had played the father in the popular sitcom, “The Wonder Years,”
which was the unacknowledged inspiration of
Jean Shepherd’s style.)
I was invited to the musical’s opening on Broadway and the after-theater celebration. Despite some trepidation, I attended, and very much enjoyed it. It was wonderful to see that Shep/narrator was given a prominent part as the on-stage commentator for the action. The sets and musical numbers were good, and I applauded appreciatively.
The Cleveland Street museum dedicated to A CHRISTMAS STORY has various activities and more and more related items for sale. Among the new, ACS items, my son Evan found in a Long Island store, is a calendar (pardon the cropped scan):
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Among the other Christmas Celebrations, Twisted Sister, a few years back, did their own version of Christmas songs for an enjoyable album, some of which is on YouTube. What one might imagine being tasteless, I found quite enjoyable. Followers of this blog may remember that Dee Snider,whom I interviewed for 3 hours in my Shep Shrine is a very enthusiastic Shep fan. He feels that some of his own style on his radio program is influenced by Shep’s radio style. (The following Dee-related commentary and images are totally unsolicited–eb)
Interestingly, Dee Snider, front man of the group, is, when out of stage gear, an articulate, delightful guy with some rather conservative attributes, including the decades he’s been married, and his traditional sense of Christmas.
Dee being interviewed in 2014 for his Christmas musical.
I was surprised to see that he’s created his own Christmas musical opening in Chicago this year and, he hopes, headed for NYC’s Broadway next year.
He describes the story line thus:
“A struggling heavy metal band who sells their soul
to the devil and
finds the magic of Christmas instead.”
Yes, Dee Snider has a positive Christmas spirit.
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Recently a video game based on A Christmas Story emerged.
Oh me, oh my:
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When I was a little kid my parents would wait till I was asleep before setting up our Christmas tree and arraying presents under it. I woke up to encounter Christmas morning just about the same as does Ralphie and Randy in that favorite movie we watch every year.
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Christmas Eve morning: I just encountered (after many searches), an image of Dan Lauria’s poster on the theater facade showing him as Jean Shepherd–with the title! Read those immortal words! I first saw this as I stood on line waiting to see the opening performance of the ACS musical–it gave me great hope (soon to be justified) that Shep would get his rightful place in the production:
As a Shep enthusiast, my gratitude for this
recognition knows no bounds!
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MERRY CHRISTMAS
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