In truth, even at home, listening on the radio, I’d noticed a strain of grandiosity creeping into Shepherd’s routines. Apparently, he’d originally gone to New York with the idea of being a stage actor or making it big on network TV. But it’s easy to imagine mainstream producers and network execs being put off by Shepherd’s contrariness and intrinsic marginality. Supposedly, when Steve Allen retired as host of The Tonight Show, he’d suggested Shepherd as a replacement. NBC ended up giving the job to the eccentric but more cuddly Jack Paar. In any case, as the years rolled by, Shepherd rankled at being confined to the ghetto of radio and must have come to see his crown as King of the Hipsters as a crown of thorns.
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. Anyway, the cool early sixties were over and the boiling, psychedelic late sixties had begun. Shepherd was no longer part of my world.
Not long ago, in the absence of any books, films, music, and so on, that seemed to give off any light, I started looking back at some of the things that used to inspire me as a kid, including Shep’s old shows, many of which are now available on the Internet. Hearing them almost a half century down the line has been a trip. Despite the tendencies I’ve already mentioned (plus the gaffes one might expect from a wild man like Shep ad-libbing before the age of political correctness), much of the stuff is simply amazing: the guy is a dynamo, brimming with curiosity and ideas and fun. Working from a few written notes at most, Shepherd is intense, manic, alive, the first and only true practitioner of spontaneous word jazz.
I’ve done a little catch-up research: Shepherd stayed on at WOR until 1977, when the station did a makeover. His books, collections of stories based on the same material he used on the air, sold well. He had a successful career on public television and continued to do his bit onstage into the nineties. And, of course, there was the collaboration with director Bob Clark on A Christmas Story. But I’m sorry to report that the narcissism thing kept getting worse as he got older.
Like a lot of fine-tuned performing artists, Shepherd increasingly exhibited the whole range of symptoms common to the aging diva. He became paranoid and resentful of imagined rivals, whether they were old ones like Mort Sahl or upstarts like Garrison Keillor. At the same time, he disavowed all his radio work, claiming that it was just a temporary gig on his way to some fanciful glory on the stage and screen. He even seemed to want to kill off his childhood, insisting that all those stories and characters were pulled clear out of his imagination. Old fans, for whom he had been almost like a surrogate father or big brother, were often met with derision when they approached him.
He didn’t drink himself to death like his pal Jack Kerouac or OD like Lenny Bruce, but gradually succumbed to that very real disease of self-loathing and its accompanying defenses. Disappointed in the way the world had treated him, he retired to Florida’s west coast and died in 1999.
Although Shepherd almost never divulged details about his private life, he wasn’t shy about giving us a bit of unflattering self-analysis, as this fragment of a show from 1957 attests:
Protective coloration is extremely important in our lives . . . We are in the weeds all the time because we find it better down here in the weeds . . . Look at me . . . I am not at all what I appear to be . . . This is merely a mask . . . that more or less covers up the real me that’s underneath. The real me is a saber-toothed tiger. I couldn’t dare go down the street the way I really am. I’d get shot in five minutes. They’d have me in a wagon with a bunch of Doberman pinschers.
To an adolescent back then, long before a therapeutic vernacular had entered the language, this was reassuring news. It’s possible that Shep’s greatest lesson to the gang wasn’t just “Things are not what they seem” but rather “Things are not what they seem—including me.”
In the Clubs
I started going to jazz clubs in New York when I was twelve or thirteen, first with my older cousins Mike and Jack, and then later on my own. I remember seeing the mighty Count Basie band at a matinee at Birdland, with the great Sonny Payne on drums. When the whole band pumped out one of those thirteenth chords, you could feel the breeze on your face.
Once upon a time, the jazz club was a mythic place that signified urban romance, free-loving hipsterism and the Dionysian rites of the Exotic Black Man: in short, the dread possibility of ecstasy. As a survivor of many nights in actual jazz clubs, I can testify that the image was only partly correct.
Like most of the finer things in life, jazz is an acquired taste. As a suburban youth, I would often ride the bus up the New Jersey Turnpike through the industrial wasteland that must be crossed before the island of Manhattan is won. The combined sum of several weeks’ allowance would be burning a hole in my pocket. After docking at the dependably sinister Port Authority terminal, I’d take the AA train to Waverly Place in the West Village, which by then had pretty much completed its transformation from bohemia into Bohemia Land. Tourists nursed espressos at the Cafe Wha? and the Cafe Bizarre. At Figaro’s coffee shop on Bleecker and MacDougal, I’d order a burger and listen to my heart pound as I watched the exquisite, joyless waitresses slink around the room in black leotards. An epigraph on the menu read “Where the Beat meet the Elite.”
By the early sixties, jazz, having already been displaced as America’s dance music of choice by rock and roll, was facing another crisis. College kids, after a brief flirtation with bop and cool jazz, had chosen “folk” music as their official enthusiasm. Unlike gnarly post-Parker jazz, guitar-based roots music was totally accessible and irony free, and almost anyone could play it in some form. Moreover, the leftist anthems of the Depression were easily adapted to become the official music of the early civil rights movement. New clubs featuring Dylan, The Tarriers, Judy Collins, Richie Havens, and the like were pulling in a huge share of the business. Nevertheless, the Village was still the best place to hear jazz in its last glorious incarnation.
At the Village Vanguard, my distress at being the youngest person in the audience would dissolve as soon as the music started. In the early sixties, gods stood on that tiny stage. A lot of them drank J&B and smoked Luckies, but they were gods just the same. Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane were still youngish, fearless and working at the summit of their creativity. The proprietor, Max Gordon, once he got to know my face, used to seat me at the banquet next to the drum kit and give me a flat bar Coke. The cover charge was, like, seven bucks.
One of my favorites was bassist/composer Charles Mingus, who’d always bring along his demonic drummer, Dannie Richmond. Every time Richmond started banging out that triple time, the vibration of his sizzle cymbal would move my glass toward the edge of the table and I’d have to push it back to the center. I remember Mingus halting a tune in midgallop to lecture us on race, politics, cheating record companies and hypocrisy, both black and white. Watching this tempestuous artist at work, I found the extramusical events just as exciting as the music. I have to admit cringing, though, when Mingus, on one of his rougher nights, started screaming “Uncle Tom!” at old Coleman Hawkins, who was sitting at the bar. Hawk just gave him a world-weary smile and took another swig. Once, when I complimented pianist Jaki Byard after a set, he actually sat down at my table and graciously answered some questions about the music.
As the premier club in New York at that time, the Vanguard attracted a crowd that was a mix of serious fans and tourists. Of course there would always be the young preppie in a blazer sitting with his date, attractive in
a little black dress. Imagine a split-screen: On the left, the kid’s eyes are wide, his face is flushed; he’s transfixed. He can’t believe he’s finally in a real jazz club twelve feet away from the great John Coltrane, who’s blowing up a hurricane.
His date, on the right side of the screen, is in hell. Although she’s heard her boyfriend talk about jazz, this is her first real exposure. She’s been in this tiny, smoky, smelly room for almost an hour now, nursing screwdrivers and being forced to listen to four Negroes create a din that sounds like nothing imagined on God’s earth. She’s got her head in her hands down on the table because it hurts, a real pounder behind the eyes. Most humiliating is the fact that her boyfriend has forsaken her for a black man who seems to be using his silver horn as a satanic instrument of masturbation. The two sides of the screen merge when she finally pulls on her date’s arm and demands to be escorted out. In the clubs, this classic scene can still be glimpsed today, always interesting, always poignant.
Two of the most mind-blowing musicians I got to see at the Vanguard were both patriarchs of early jazz who were still active in the sixties. Earl “Fatha” Hines had been a member of Armstrong’s original Hot Five and, during the thirties, had been the main attraction at Al Capone’s Grand Terrace Ballroom in Chicago. As if that weren’t enough, the band he’d led in the forties, the one that included Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Gene Ammons and Wardell Gray, was the first big band to feature bebop players and arrangements. Hines’s gold lamé jacket, legendary smile and many-ringed fingers had the same effect on me as I’m sure they had on the crowd at the Grand Terrace. And then he began to play. I pretty much knew what to expect: he still played clean and swinging. I suppose it was my romantic imagination, but the music seemed to be enhanced by a sonic glow, an aura earned on its journey across an ocean of time.
The same could be said of the music of Willie “The Lion” Smith. In the twenties and thirties, Willie had been one of the mighty virtuosos who developed Harlem “stride” piano. In the sixties, Willie was still sharp and strong, a past master who seemed to have walked straight from a Depression rent party into the present, complete with cocked derby, milk bottle glasses and clenched cigar. He’d worked up his act into a seminar in jazz history, alternating pieces from his repertoire with stories about the musical life of Harlem, the cutting contests, the gangsters and the nuances that defined the styles of his contemporaries James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Luckey Roberts and Eubie Blake. He had a special affection for his protégé Duke Ellington, whose works he generously performed.
Claiming that his father was a Jewish gambler, Willie peppered his tales with Yiddishisms and made a point of wearing a Jewish star. Though the jive was fascinating, the real fun began when he commenced his abuse of the Steinway, his phenomenal left hand pumping like a locomotive as the right filigreed the melody. After knocking out his version of “Carolina Shout,” Willie’s comment was “Now that’s what you call . . . real good.” But he could be lyrical too, as he was on his own “Echoes of Spring.”
One more thing about the tough, road-hardened African American entertainers from the twenties who had to be heard without the benefit of microphones, men like Willie, Earl Hines, Coleman Hawkins, Ellington’s band: they could play REALLY LOUD!
Bill Evans at the Vanguard was always a gas. Those familiar only with his studio recordings don’t realize what a spry, funky hard-charger he could be on “up” material in a live setting. When he played quirky tunes like “Little Lulu,” he could be funny, too. Of course, even then, he rarely shifted out of that posture you see in photos, doubled over at the waist, head inside the piano as if trying to locate a rattly string. By the late seventies, I noticed that this quintessential modernist had developed an odd, loping shuffle in his right-hand lines, as if he was regressing to an antiquated rhythmic style dating back to Willie Smith’s day. What was up with that?
Real fans and serious hipsters remember Slug’s Bar on Third Street between avenues B and C. The neighborhood was dicey but the sounds were happening. Some nights, the audience would be just me, eyes darting around nervously, and maybe two heavily medicated patrons nodding at their tables. Cedar Walton, Jackie McLean, Art Farmer and Jimmy Cobb were among the regular performers. In 1972, trumpet star Lee Morgan’s girl shot and killed him out front.
Around 1965, the folk/rock club Cafe au Go Go started a Monday night jazz policy. These were jam sessions featuring top players who happened to be in town. The one I attended was one of the best all-around nights of jazz I ever saw. The rhythm section alone—Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Willie Bobo on drums—began the set. The other players—Hank Mobley on tenor, Dave Pike on vibes and Curtis Fuller, I think, on bone—fell by as the night went on. Jamming on standards and blues for over two hours without a break, Mobley and Kelly were monstrous: hard-swinging and composing in the moment. It was the shit and I knew I was lucky to be there.
When the civil rights movement became more militant in the mid-sixties, the music followed suit. In those years, a lot of jazz was motivated by righteous political fury, or directed toward a spiritual catharsis. The clubs, overwhelmed for the moment by the rock revolution, began to close. The Five Spot, the Half Note and, finally, Slug’s, all gradually vanished. The Village Gate managed to survive only by switching to rock and Latin sounds.
In the eighties, the jazz scene returned, “healthier” than ever. You’d go to hear acts in nifty, wholesome “club environments” and “art spaces.” No smoking, of course, no nodding junkies, no heavy boozing—in fact, no vice of any kind except, perhaps, the criminally high cover and drink charges. The clubs that presented the top mainstream acts all had a suitably mainstream look and were very strict about reservations. One night in the eighties, I took some friends to Michael’s Pub, then home to Woody Allen’s Monday night gigs, to see a piano trio. The atmosphere was tense and the maitre d’ was rude—there was no romance at all.
We split before the set started. Bring back Slug’s!
Uncle Mort
As I remember, Mort Fega’s radio show Jazz Unlimited came on at midnight and ended at five or six a.m. In order to escape my parents’ wrath, I had to pull the radio under the covers. I’d usually drift off before the closing theme.
The Nightfly character from my first solo album wasn’t supposed to be a stand-in for any particular jazz DJ. But there were a few actual radio personalities of the time that went into the mix. In the early sixties, a number of Manhattan’s powerful stations were blasting hard bop throughout the metropolitan area. If you knew where to find it, you could hear great jazz around the clock.
After school, I’d rush home to hear Riverside Radio’s fabulously erudite Ed Beach. Ed’s show, Just Jazz, would use its full two hours to focus on just one player, or even one aspect of a player’s career. After playing a favorite cut culled from his fabulous record collection, he’d tell you details about the recording session and make witty asides, drawing you in with his classical actor’s voice and diction. I remember a program devoted exclusively to Johnny Hodges’s work with small groups in the forties and fifties. There was another that covered trumpeter Blue Mitchell’s work as a sideman. Ed was talking to fellow fanatics only: dabblers, keep out.
Jazz critics Dan Morgenstern and Martin Williams both had excellent jazz shows back then, and I remember a droll dude named R. D. Harlan on WNCN. After midnight, I could always tune in to WADO and hear King Pleasure sing DJ “Symphony Sid” Torin’s wiggy theme song:
Play anything cool for me and my baby
We don’t want to think we’re listenin’ to lazy
It’s got to be Prez, Bird, Shearing or the Basie
The dial is set right close to eighty—
Let ’er roll . . .
On Friday nights, Sid was still doing remote broadcasts from Birdland (“The Jazz Corner of the World”!). I’d close the door to my room and blast live music by Basie and Mingus out of that li
ttle Zenith table radio. Unhappily, Sid, an important advocate of modern jazz since the early days of bop, was, by the mid-sixties, pegged the “jazz traitor” for switching to a mostly Latin and Afro-Cuban playlist.
My main man was WEVD’s all-night DJ Mort Fega. Unlike Symphony Sid, whose growling hepcat routine seemed out of sync with the Kennedy era (“No, dahling, I’m not goin’a play Etta Jones tonight”), Mort had no jive persona to sell. He was laid-back, knowledgeable and forthright, the cool uncle you always wished you’d had. I looked forward to Mort’s between-track commentary as much as to the music itself. With Red Garland’s “Mort’s Report” playing softly in the background, Mort, with the grace and enthusiasm that reveals itself only in the most bona fide jazz lover, would carefully list every soloist and sideman.
In those days, giants, as jazz fans like to say, walked the earth. They also recorded quite frequently for labels like Prestige, Blue Note, Columbia and Impulse, and Mort played them all—Miles, Monk, Rollins, Mingus, Coltrane, Bill Evans and so on. But he also had his own, somewhat lesser known, personal favorites. One was Oliver Nelson, whose exquisite Blues and the Abstract Truth album he helped to popularize. I recall frequent playings of Kenny Dorham’s “Sao Paulo” with Joe Henderson on tenor. And it was on Mort’s show that I first heard the exhilarating jive tales of His Royal Hipness, Lord Buckley. Many of his over-the-top routines, recorded in the mid-fifties, still resonated with the times. In Buckley’s Mahatma Gandhi bit, “The Hip Gan,” Mr. Rabadee, the band contractor, asks Gandhi to tell him which one of the instruments he digs the most. The Hip Gan tells him that “the instrument, you ain’t got here.”
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