With all the energy peaking over The Grateful Dead’s 50th anniversary shows, here’s a little excerpt from my upcoming book — “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac” — that shows part of why we keep coming back.
These shows at Red Rocks in ’82 were part of the largest gathering of Beats ever assembled, before or since — and The Grateful Dead played the half-time show.
Here’s what it was like as we arrived . . .
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And man — what a scene! A Grateful Dead party on the top of a gorgeous red rock mountain with a natural amphitheater carved right into it! And the colors immediately start to kick in — 10,000 tie-dyes, maybe more, tripping through nature’s brilliant rock masterpiece to nature’s brilliant rock band under a brilliant multi-hued sky at a giant family reunion. Everyone’s infectiously smiling, and hugs are free n flowing.
There’s girls in short shorts and bikini tops, and guys in short shorts and no tops. There’s colorful clown costumes complete with jester bell caps, and straight looking doctors and lawyers and such with close-cropped hair, ironed alligator shirts and expensive watches … coming to their 100th show. There’s people walking around with giant backpacks like they just came down from the Himalayas, and unencumbered wide-eyed Coloradans at their first show, meandering in mouth-opened silence.
Moveable feasts surround every car, van, customized truck and psychedelic school bus — every one with a different state’s license plate — and you can just walk right up and start talking to anyone who looks interesting. “Strangers stropping strangers just to shake their hand …”
Veterans could talk to veterans, but someone at their first show was absolutely golden and had an All Access Pass to everything. Deadheads really make a fuss over show virgins — anyone who has the interest and the courage to make the trip is immediately embraced. It can appear to the uninitiated like a most intimidating world that’s functioning on a very evolved party level — and if you haven’t been through the arc of a night even once, well, help’s on the way.
Which reminds me of a beautiful moment from the Dead’s Rainforest Benefit a few years later at Madison Square Garden — the ninth of a nine show run when they broke the Garden record for most sell-outs at the world’s most famous arena by anything other than a sports team. All sorts of special guests joined them that night — Mick Taylor, Baba Olatunji, Jack Casady, Bruce Hornsby (who later became a member of the band for about a year and a half!), Hall & Oates (?!), and … The Muppets via satellite!! And at one point Suzanne Vega came out, this petite fragile sensitive singer who I was hanging with on the bar stools at Folk City in the early ’80s when we were all regulars there and before she became famous. So this now well-known tiny delicate flower walks out onto this giant dark and Deadly stage in this roaring arena full of the only unbroken chain of raging concert goers since the sixties, thinking, “We aren’t in Folk City anymore!” But the beautiful part was — with this petrified little bird at center stage and all the spotlights on her, Jerry walks from his normal spot in the shadows by his amps to the front and center line and stands right beside her and looks to her and plays to her and smiles to her … and carries the whole room with him. He gave her his 100% attention, and by so doing, he brought this whole crazy rock ‘n’ roll audience with him — and graciously handed them to her. It was the most touching generous beautiful thing.
And that’s the spirit we DeadHeads show to everyone, especially the most fragile among us.
. And on a whole other level — there’s countless tour-heads strolling the scene holding up gorgeous hand dyed, hand lived t-shirts for sale, and quickly flipping them around so you can see the back as well. Asking 15, but they’ll take 10. Some are printed with classic all-purpose Dead lines — “The bus came by and I got on” — and others are customized just for these shows with “Dead Rocks” or “Mountain Dew” along with the dates.
In between unicyclists and bike riders and girls twirling hula hoops are people hawking bumper-stickers like “Grate things happen to Good people” and “Who are The Grateful Dead and why do they keep following me?” or buttons with the original family motto “The Good ol’ Grateful Dead” which was first winked between the knowing as early as 1966, or carrying bags of gooey-gum-balls (basically, round pot brownies), or there’s a long-haired girl in a long-flowing summer dress with tinkling ankle bracelets passively carrying a small rack of homemade jewelry as she silently and blissfully wanders the rows of cars in the spiritual belief someone will just walk up and buy one. And someone does.
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You can order a copy of the book from CreateSpacehere
So … hold on — the guys who made Pet Sounds were the same people who made the The Monkees’ “music”?! And the goofy band on those Sonny & Cher albums were the same cats who played The Byrds’ Mr. Tambourine Man? What?! Crazy! But true. And they have a great story — told by the players themselves in this new documentary The Wrecking Crew — which was the name they were dubbed by the old guard they replaced — because these whippersnappers and their new-fangled rock n roll was “wrecking” the music business.
What happened was — because L.A. was where television and movies were being made, they built a lot of different recording studios — and they were very busy. Add to that the Beatlesization of the world, and by ’63 or so, the star-maker machinery for pop music was in full rage. The old maestros of the musicals were suddenly getting invaded by smoking, bearded, dungaree-wearing beatniks. Who could play. A few years hence, groups of young people would form themselves into bands and this whole manufactured record-company-creation of pop stars would become obsolete, but while it happened, this same loose collective of 20 or so players made the music on everything from Sam Cooke to Paul Revere & The Raiders.
You’ll hear more Top 10 hit records in this documentary than in any film you’ve ever seen. And they’re all played by the same people! You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’, Strangers In The Night, Everybody Loves Somebody, Good Vibrations, California Girls, Help Me Rhonda, Surf City, California Dreamin’, Monday Monday, Aquarius/Let The Sun Shine In, Be My Baby, Da Doo Ron Ron, Up Up and Away (In My Beautiful Balloon), These Boots Are Made For Walkin’, Windy, Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves, Love Will Keep Us Together, Wichita Lineman, Galveston, Eve of Destruction, Mr. Tambourine Man by The Byrds, A Little Less Conversation by Elvis, and The Beat Goes On and on and on …
And besides all that, members of the Crew also played the famous sax melody on ThePink Panther Theme, the galloping electric guitar on the Bonanza theme, that ridiculous Green Acres song, the acoustic guitar behind the M*A*S*H theme, the Mission Impossible theme! … and Batman fer gawdsakes! Not to mention the music in Cool Hand Luke, The Deer Hunter, Cocoon, Field of Dreams, Caddyshack, Around The World In 80 Days and on and on.
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And that’s a whole backstory on the film — it was made by Denny Tedesco, the TV producer son of the main guitarist in The Wrecking Crew — but in order to include the music that makes the story he actually had to do a Kickstarter campaign to raise the funds for the music rights! He wisely started shooting interviews back in the ’90s when the Crew were all still alive, and it was finished as a film in 2008, but has taken until now to get the licensing fees paid!
The documentary itself is really fast-paced and snappy, with choice stories of how licks were written and what life was like for a working session player. One of the producers had a great line — “If you want to be successful in this business — never say no until you’re too busy to say yes.”
The story’s told by not only a bunch of the core Crew themselves, but also Brian Wilson, Leon Russell, Frank Zappa, Cher, Nancy Sinatra, Glen Campbell, Jimmy Webb, Lou Adler and a host of others. Basically these musicians were The Beach Boys. The Mamas & The Papas. The Association. The 5th Dimension. Gary Lewis & The Playboys. Glen Campbell’s band. Phil Spector’s band. Herb Alpert’s band. They were taking on more different roles than the busiest Hollywood actors. And as the wonderful bass player Carol Kaye put it: “I was making more money than the President of the United States.”
There is a stark contrast between the lives and the music in this documentary and that depicted in other recent excellent behind-the-scenes docs including the one about another studio scene, Muscle Shoals, and about another batch of unknown but widely heard musicians, Twenty Feet From Stardom, but put together they weave a rich tapestry of the stories behind the music you’ve been dancing to your whole life.
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In select theaters starting Feb. 20th, 2015. DVD release to follow.
It’s New Year’s Eve in the universe ………..and we’re on a mission.
The Wizard of Wonder called on Christmas Day. Seems The Pranksters are needed for a little Merry Jerry conjuring on New Year’s Eve in O-Hi-o. The official good-time resident Grateful Dead-vibed band of the state, Adam’s Ale, is having their big album release party, and they’re loopin in a few friends to bring it home.
A nice addition to the magic ‘n’ mystery is — it’s being held in a church-cum-theater called The Mission, just down the road from the Football Hall of Fame in Canton — disguised as best you could possibly be by a surrounding buffer of industrial warehouses — in a hidden forbidden green-space under old-growth trees, down by a creek at the end of a road where nobody er nuthin comes snoopin ‘cept those invited with an underground wink.
And thus we Merry Pranksters from Indiana, West Virginia, North Carolina, Canada and more roll in for this Woodstockian New Year’s in an old performance space with a half-dozen jazz ‘n’ Dead-friendly bands, and a whole night of magic, madness and mischief.
It was all put together by Adam’s Ale bandleader John Welton — the kinda guy who knows all the best players in the state. The psychedelic power-trio Big Black Galactic, the funk bomb droppers Jive Bomb, and Ohio’s own homegrown Prankster, Smilin’ Joe, are just some of the musical caravans that carried the vans fulla people from all corners out to the dancefloor and up to the rafters of surreal euphoria.
At the far end of the main room from the stage, the playful character who rescued this Mission also believes in physical play like us Pranksters and has filled the space with foosball and ping-pong and bumper pool and pool tables … and air hockey! which this traveling prairie Canuck grew up on and hadn’t seen in millennia! Not to mention a huge fully functioning kitchen that’s churning out everything from sizzling fresh stir-fry and pizza to bacon & egg breakfasts the next morning.
We’ve got the whole playground to ourselves — and anything goes. Trapeze artists are flippin around mid-air in the old theater wing, fluorescent hula-hoops are spinning easy hallucinations, homemade bars are being set up next to tents in the indoor camping sections, castaway couches surrounding the dance floor are filling with necking couples, easels are set up that people are painting on, gems and jewelry are being sold by craftspeople on tables, non-stop music’s makin’ the masses move, and crazy Pranksters are tootling the multitudes as everyone becomes instant family.
Patty Cake and Stage Left, who’ve also driven down from The Great White, are bouncing balloons they’ve rigged up with glow-sticks inside, and have a bunch of clothespins with funny or prophetic expressions written on them that they’re surreptitiously clipping onto people’s clothing when they’re not looking. Grandma Tigger and Mountain Mama are dancing around with bags full of glitter and iridescent rainbow tinsel and streamers and such and are sprinkling it on people making everyone sparkle in the flashing psychedelic lights. The Wizard of Wonder dons a different costume every 90 minutes, adopting different characters and keeping the masses guessing all night. Brother Pooh Bear is in charge of liquor and brought a case of crazy indy brews and ciders and wines and is manning the bar and instigating toasts every chance he gets. And Tater Bug brought a couple of her teenage musician sons who weave their way into some jams but stay off the toast.
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Before the festivities roar into gear, Gets Things Done talks to promoter / bandleader / Bill Graham-of-the-night John Welton, whose CD release event this whole shindig is, and he’s got it all mapped out, including how his band’s going on at 11 which’ll lead into the balloon drop at midnight, and he conveys the whole blueprint to us M.C.ing Pranksters, and all the world’s a go.
‘Cept it was the craziest show-producing thing I ever seen — and I’ve been doin this since I was 16 and have worked with said Bill Graham and stage managed and produced shows all over the world. The way staging of multi-act shows works is — there are always delays caused by personnel and/or equipment, and the stage manager / promoter are in a constant battle with the band on stage to get them off when they’re suppose to. And on this night, even though we’d started nearly on time, as the first band Big Black Galactic funked on including really interesting interpretations of Pink Floyd’s Money and The Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows —> Within You, Without You in an otherwise all-original set, as they’re getting to the end of their allotted slot, they say something from the stage to that effect, and Big Bossman John is meanwhile happily engaged in a pingpong game at the back of the house, and calls out for them to go ahead and play a few more. Never seen that happen before. Throwing off your own show’s schedule, especially when you’ve got a hard deadline of midnight everything is built around. But that’s just the kind of 21st century acid test we’re living.
So, this is all happening … then this Steve-Goodman-meets-Bob-Marley songwriter Smilin’ Joe comes on, and he’s playing these funny perfectly Prankster topical tunes like Help Me Find My Way Back To My Tent and I Believe In Circles If They’re Round about not believing in false prophets but only in things you know to be true.
Then the funk-jam powerhouse Jive Bomb fly in . . . and they need to be off by 11 in order to get John’s own headlining band on for the midnight magic — but as they’re reaching the end of their set, again, they say something to this effect, and again John calls out from the back of the room, this time from the pool table where I hear him proclaim he’s now won 38 games in a row on this table! to keep on playing … and he says out loud, though it seemed mostly to himself, “Maybe just keep rollin till midnight,” as he cracks another ball into the corner pocket.
Here’s the guy who’s put together this whole massive event to promote the release of his CD, which should obviously have his band on stage for the key pre and post midnight slots, but he’s just la-de-da … lettin it roll out however the vibe feels. Never seen a looser approach to show production in my life. Bill Graham would be hemorrhaging about now.
Eventually there’s a bonafide balloon drop from the cathedral ceiling, corks’a poppin, noisemakers screeching, glitter flying, genies unleashed, wishes granted . . . and finally the headliner takes the stage — a New Orleans quality quintet complete with Dr. John voodoo vocals and squawkin’ dirty trombone with comical lyrics to balance their serious groove.
There’s the bass player formerly of Ekoostik Hookah in his satin wine-colored Jimi Hendrix smoking jacket delivering a passionate knee-dropping Isis, while the psychedelic Solar Fire Light Show flashes dancing colors all over the room, and the reggae-meets-funk-meets-jazz starts melting faces and limbering limbs as the dancefloor begins to bubble like gumbo on the grill.
And all set long the original lyrics are baptizing the room in a harmonic hymn of music as medicine — “Heal your heart with musical medicine” — “I’m closer to God whenever I hear it” — “If you’re sinkin’ down deeper than you’ve ever been, and feelin’ like you’re never gonna smile again, let the music be your friend” — “I wear my music on me everywhere I go” — “Move your body with righteous vibrations” — “You’ve got to free yourself if you want to be yourself” — “I’m gonna make a difference in the world with my songs somehow” — “It’s not the singer, it’s the song; with the best of intentions, how could it go wrong?”
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And this musical Elixir rolls on for a couple ever-expanding sets through the first several hours of 2015 until by 3 or 4 o’clock the final peak’s been climbed, the final silver mined, the church bells chimed, and the guitars lined, as the final spunions spun, and the post-show groove-down’s begun.
And in the looseness of the gooseness, visionary John scheduled Sister Charmaine to step into the air on her keys and fill the mellow with her Tori Amos-like etherial voicings — a sort of choir in the church, a female voice all alone after an all-male high-energy funk-jazz powerhouse of a night — a contrast, a soprano, a Carole-King-meets-Fiona-Apple singer-songwriter at the piano to refreshingly cleanse the palette.
And as she’s winding down her solo choir, so is the audience, as people are gradually retiring to various indoor camping sites, while Gilligan’s homecookin restaurant in the back corner is quietly serving up late-night recovery dishes, and all the musicians are starting to really play together after they no longer have to play.
And up on stage after Charmaine’s gone, I notice some kids setting up — I guess in some exit filler slot — prolly sons of one of the many middle-aged masters we’ve already been groovin to. With the room largely emptied out, and us having been raging since … well, day before yesterday … it was time for Gets Things Done to Get Some Lie-down on the giant air mattress the Wizard of Wonder set up in the Pranksters’ 10-person tent. And … good ol’ Wiz — none of this would’ve happened without his twisting my arm from afar and settin up not only the tent but this whole Prankster summit — the Next Generation Kesey katalyst ringing the bell that our kat ears are trained for herding.
Lying down on the heavenly air in the theater’s acid echoes, my body thanks me for the horizontal while my mind dances in the sky of kaleidoscopic rainbows spinning to the music from the other room.
And this is when things get weird.
As I’m going on this wondrous visual and auditory ride floating on air … I’m thinking … there’s no way this music’s coming from those kids on stage … they must have put on a tape … drift off in the swirling spectrum … dreaming in the immensity of it … distant music scorching a soundtrack and conducting a light show … and wait … Zappa’s Muffin Man?! … naw … must be a weird live recording … drift away … ou … nice colors … morphing fractals … drift back … is that … Peace Frog by The Doors?! … what is happening out there … must be a mix tape … ride the lovely lightning waves … but then … Crash! into the shore of … massive cheering … ??? … the room was empty … the night was over … there’s no one there … the headliner’s done … who the hell is screaming in joy? … and who the hell is playing?!
After a couple more of these I-can’t-believe-what-I’m-hearings — that’s definitely Willie Dixon’s Spoonful ! — I realize this thing must not be over! and roll myself off the air mattress onto solid ground where from I can rise again in the sleeping silence of this echoing church and weave back into the performance space — into one of those moments that so rarely happens …
All the other band members who were still here and a few still-standing Pranksters are gathered like for an all-star final bow — except weir not on the stage but at the foot of it applauding this … kid … who was obviously channeling something from way beyond.
I quickly learn it’s some quartet called Jojo Stella — with a 24-year-old old-timer driving the kit in a ball of sweat, a 20-year-old calmly thrumming Leshian lines on the 5-string bass, a 21-year-old goateed jazz beatnik on the keys who luckily loves the sound of the Hammond B3, and out front this hair-in-his-eyes 22-year-old singing like a young Keith Richards with gusto, or if Tom Waits was dosed and really going for it. He’s got this bluesy, personality-rich timbre and story-telling style that’s emotive like Tina Turner, but growly and old and edgy like Howlin’ Wolf. And then there’s … his guitar playing! … uncategorizable for sure … a Hendrix unconventional openness to playing every part of the instrument … with a thrashing Neil Young passion but with precise Jeff Beck or John Scofield jazz lines … but somehow tinged with heavy metal riffs … and all run through a filter of old-timey Robert Johnson blues.
And just as I had emerged from my psychedelic hibernation, people are steadily drifting up from downstairs, rising from sleeping couches, stirring from their nests, and the once empty New Year’s Eve-littered dance floor is filling again at what’s it gotta be? 5AM?
The eyes I was looking into before my air mattress ride were retiring eyes, satiated eyes, drifting off eyes … and now in front of the stage it was balloons popping as Frank would say — every face lit up, every jaw a little dropped, every eye beaming electrified brightness at What the Wow?! — including in the hair-covered eyes of our wailing bandleader who knows well he’s left this Earth and is flying with family in some uncharted galaxy without a net.
“Are you seeing this, too?” every face is gasping.
And Brother John who put the whole thing together for his band’s big CD release party is not only not bemoaning these kids miraculously stealing the show and having things run until 6 in the morning … but he’s on stage cheering them on! Their hour set had grown to two, and he’s giving these little raps between songs, telling them to keep going and how they’re the new generation that’s gonna carry the torch for us geezers … just as we had advanced the story from those who came before.
And although I was hearing Paul Simon singing, “It’s late in the evening and he blew that room away,” instead they broke into a Young Man Blues / Love Supreme medley! And they’re not just playing them, they’re changing them, readapting with new lyrics and altered melodies into this hybrid of psychedelic jazz rock … by these … kids.
And they’re improvising like crazy … and feeding off each other and following different paths as the guitar pairs into a duet with just the bass, or just the drums, or just the keys … and this is all prestissimo — and suddenly we’re in a downstairs jazz club in Manhattan for the after-hours set when the front doors are locked and it’s just fellow magician musicians collectively powering the room and creating the elevation where any leap is possible — dancing on tightropes crisscrossing the stage — no separation between band and audience as fellow players are yelling “Go! Go! Go!” and “Yes! Yes! Yes!” just like Kerouac captured Cassady doing at the birth of Bop.
And suddenly I realize Mountain Mama is standing next to me, and we look at each other with speechless amazement. Eventually I hear her lean in and say, “This is the kind of performance people are going to be talking about 20 years from now. You know? Like — Were you there?!”
If you’re a Cat Stevens fan — and you know who you are! — stop reading this.
Close the link and go somewhere else. Anywhere.
Keep your music and memories intact. Beautiful gardens are too hard to find in this world.
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Okay? Nobody here who doesn’t want their bubble burst?
Just makin sure.
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Holy historic frickin weirdness!
Apparently “Cat Stevens” died a long time ago of a self-inflicted something back in the 1970s, and he is not currently on tour. As brother Barnaby caught me afterwards, “That was not Cat Stevens on stage. That was some guy named Yusuf playing Cat Stevens songs.”
I hate to say it … I love the guy’s music … but sadly there was just no authentic anything there. Just . . . nothing. “Soulless” was the word that kept coming up in my mind over and over all night in hopes of it being dispelled … but it never was.
This is a guy hitting the jukebox (which, hey! I love to hear ’em too!), but this is not “a band” by any stretch … in fact, what WAS this? It can’t be a money grab. He’s loaded. He’s not trying to reestablish himself in music or he’d have a top-notch band … and be doing more than 6 puckin shows! Like, … what is this? A toe in the water of a sea he swam away from a long time ago?
Sumpthin’s off here . . . and I’m a fan! And in fact I’m a little “off” meself, and I actually think his new album rocks! But … boy …
The Cat who wrote those songs — that beatific joyful soul bouncing on a stool, the cherubic smile … doesn’t exist …
I flashed on Donovan — similarly cherubic guy — peace & love — same era, same dozen Top 10 Hits — you go see that guy today and it’s a very soulful experience — he makes you feel like you’re the only one in the room . . . that connection between an authentic artist communicating … with an audience he has no fear walking among … [See Security Warnings Ahead]
And who knows what it is with Yusuf’s religious stuff — but not only was there no Allah / Islam at all (and I didn’t spot a hijab all night), this was more of a Christian gospel show if anything — Morning Has Broken being a Christian hymn he turned into a hit single, and his Curtis Mayfield cover of “People Get Ready” is straight-up gospel —
but it’s more that this guy hasn’t been functioning as a band, as a performer, as a conveyor of songs — he’s superficially warm, but with these pat showbiz lines you can hear echoing from every place he’s said them for years.
And he’s definitely not a “band” guy . . . like, you know how at the end of a show the bandmates come together and hug after their amazing once-ever journey … and salute the audience for their role … yeah, well, there’s none of that here. Bandmate connection nor audience acknowledgement.
Picture, if you will, any major singer-songwriter type person you’ve seen in the last year, or five, or ten . . . call up that band in your head . . . the one supporting Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Paul McCartney, Phil Lesh, Roger Waters, Robert Plant … all similar hit-rich people from the same era … where you wouldn’t even need the front guy those bands are so good. I mean, I saw Gordon Lightfoot last year — and his band was better than this! And by that I mean — they were part of the equation, the conversation, the storytelling, participants, accents, taking a solo for a ride … some fuckin purpose other than musical wallpaper.
But then — when the players are set back 25 feet away from the leader in the far corners of the stage, in the dark, with the rhythm section separated from the keys & guitar by a 50 foot train station such that they can’t even see each other — it’s pretty hard to lock into a groove.
And then there was the part where — you know how you hit the men’s room right after a show — I can only speak for the pants side of the divide — but people are whoopin’ and singing the songs and “Hey, wasn’t that great?!!” And, “How ’bout THAT!” And everybody’s yippin and yappin and jazzed from the magic they just experienced . . . but the basement of Massey Hall (the only men’s room in the joint) was a fuckin morgue. Not one person was saying a thing — it was creepy ominous weird — and this is a huge bathroom with like 50 guys in it — and … dead. Nuthin. Like when you’re at a sporting event and the home team’s lost and no one’s talking about it and everyone just wants to get out of there. That.
Oh — and then before it started ! … don’t get me started! . . . all I’m sayin is, there’s sumpthin screwy in the belfry. You won’t believe it but . . . so, fer one, it was this whole ticketless ticket scheme to circumvent scalpers — which is admirable in theory — except … they have to check every single person’s credit card and print a ticket — and even every guest’s photo I.D. … for why?! — and there was a line around the block from 6:00 til 9:00 . . . for an 8:00 showtime …
and THEN half the time when people got to the door the credit card scanner didn’t work — and they had to go stand in a second line … and it’s like minus ten celsius — and they’ve been waiting for an hour on the first line! Good times!
and THEN there’s the full blown walk-thru airport metal-detectors … with guards and wands … and you put your stuff in this grey bin while you walk thru and they search you … sick shit. Over the night I talked to a bunch of longtime Massey staff and they’ve never had anything like this. And even the will-call guests like Ron Sexsmith I spotted … had to empty their pockets and go thru full-on full-body metal detector. Any of my showbiz friends ever remember seeing this?
and THEN … you can’t take photographs! . . . maybe with a flash, sure, I can understand that … but people paying 2 or 3 hundred bucks a seat should be able to take a lousy picture with their phone for their kids — especially since they couldn’t buy them tickets cuz a person could only buy two. And so all night there’s these photo narcs running around poopin on these pleasant aging beatific hippies just wanting to have a good time one last night in their life.
and THEN you couldn’t even stop pre-show in front of the stage to check it out — seriously … I mean, like, a half hour before the show … just standing there checking out the stage gear … and “You can’t do that.” What?
At one point I circumnavigated them, and got talking with the guitar tech, cuz I wanted to ask about that cool lookin National electric he’s playing. And the guy says, “It’s a piece of shit. A $3,000 piece of shit.” 🙂
And then the fuckin security narcs swoop in and that’s the end of that little chat.
So . . . all this shit’s goin’ on …
and then … “Cat Stevens” comes on stage … right? … except it isn’t Cat Stevens at all. Whoever this guy is, he’s definitely not Cat Stevens. And he should stop using his name.
And for sure I dig — despite the fatwa and all that shit … this cellularly walking Cat-Yusuf human was given the Nobel “Man of Peace” Award, and gives tons of money to charities and stuff, and I’m sure in his weird convoluted heart he’s trying to do good things … but … music’s sure low down on that totem pole.
remember “I hope I die before I get old?” How that made so much sense when we were dumb. I mean, young. … before we learned that artists can, y’know, grow.
This is really a case where a guy retired from the big leagues long ago, and never really kept up his chops … and now he’s comin back in the World Series … at least he’s chargin World Series prices for a nearly seven-game series of theater shows … and he’s comin in with these School of Rock kids backing him singing the old hits … passionlessly … I mean, beyond the showmanship way that he pretended he gave a shit, it was so fucking inauthentic … I got the feeling he didn’t even “get” his own songs. Or at least didn’t give a shit. Maybe I’ve been blessed and spoiled over the last many years seeing all the masters I mentioned above, but this was the least authentic musical show I’ve attended since I can’t remember.
Here’s this guy singing, “If you wanna sing out, sing out, … If ya wanna be free, be free …” who brought the first airport metal detectors into Massey Hall, and won’t let his fans take a picture of him on stage or stand in front of it. It’s a pretty fuckin funny idea of freedom this guy’s got.
And, y’know, I keep trying to get to the music here to tell you about it … but there was just so much bullshit in the water … and it was so phoney … just … Not Real. And I’m 10 rows back on the floor right in front of him. This is not a real guy makin real music. And the kicker — his new album is rockin. If he’d only apply himself, this guy might get somewhere.
On the upside, they got a really purdy (Peace) Train Station set and bigsky backdrop … dressed ‘er up mighty fine, but, Musicians Alert: if you weren’t in on a song, you had to sit on a bench outside the faux Train Station acting like you’re hot and waiting for a train …
And musically . . . every fucking song was 2½ minutes or less, made to Casey Kasem / Jack-radio Jackshit order. I mean, really? The only time he broke out of the rote bullshit was when he was playing the new stuff. Which is so weird! I mean, maybe he can grow this groove . . . there’s an optimistic line to follow . . . and maybe someday he’ll get back to the promised land of soul in sound.
In the meantime, I’ll always have the memories of hearing Peace Train at Massey Hall — but boy was it weird!
If you wanna hear the hits of Cat Stevens sung in the original voice you can theoretically do that in one of 6 theaters in North America. And if you’re there and close your eyes you can maybe hear it like you once heard it … but if you opened your eyes and looked at this guy, in so many ways … he’s not there. So … keep that original image and sound alive … “preserve your memories” as Paul Simon put it.
Cuz like a lot of others, Cat Stevens died in the ’70s.
We Are Continually Exposed To The Flashbulb Of Death
The Allen Ginsberg Photo Exhibit University of Toronto Art Centre Sept. 2nd – Dec. 6th, 2014
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I’ve been going to Beat gatherings for 30 years — and even at the very first one — the Kerouac SuperSummit in Boulder in ’82 — I actually knew a couple of people — the beatific publishers Arthur & Kit Knight who I’d hung with at an NYU book fair the year before. I’ve been to about 50 billion of these things since, both mega-huge conferences and tiny club readings — but never once where I didn’t know a single person! It’s always an “old home week” of hugs n howdies at these things … but here I was for the first time walking into this nearly naked gallery all alone … no schmooze, no booze, no wailing music from a bandstand in the corner, no cluster of smokers out front. No one.
But tons of Allen!
The show’s on the University of Toronto campus, which is a trippy other-world to begin with — one of those massive, sprawling, tree-filled labyrinthian fantasylands of old stone castles and planetariums and co-ed touch football games in the rustling leafs with Marshall McLuhan’s ghost breezing around. I finally found the show in the very back of a dark cluster of galleries in some wing of one of the hundred buildings, and the whole hour + I was there, there was all of one couple and two other lone women who wandered around for a few minutes … once again reminding me, “I’m not in Manhattan anymore.”
The wall inside the front door.
A funny thing — they’re playing, fairly loudly over some crystalline speakers mounted in the ceiling corners of each of the five big rooms, Allen reading Howl and Kaddish from 1959, and Father Death and some other meditations with the harmonium. Somehow in clean and proper Canada, his shocking candid candor sounds as jarring here as it probably sounded in middle America in the 1950s. Ya just don’t get a lot of “fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists” round these parts.
About 200 photos are on display of the nearly 8,000 that came with the massive archival bequeath. For old beatniks, there’s not a lot new here, but … there were a lot of shots that included ol’ Allen’s peepee. Those pics you’ve seen of him nekked but covering up also had other shots on the same roll … and for just a moment it did feel like I was back in New York again.
(Taking photographs was strictly prohibited, you understand. 😉 )
. It’s a collection of all Allen’s greatest hit snapshots — Jack on the fire escape with his brakeman’s manual in pocket; on the beach in Tangiers; Burroughs & Jack play-fighting on the couch — and most of them printed on large 18″ x 12″ paper with Allen’s chickenscratch captions nearly big enough to be readable! . 🙂
My favorite might have been the bearded Lucien Carr portrait sitting at a dining room table in 1986. Besides the touching capture of a quiet touch of grey moment between two brothers, photos of him post-1950s are so rare period. And a crazy thing — in discussions about Lucien on one of the Beat message boards a few months ago, something hit me — I bet in some weird ironic way, Lucien may have been the most widely read Beat of them all, with all his years writing wire copy for the U.P. that went into countless newspapers all over the world. I thought this was some pretty new thinking — I’d certainly never seen anyone suggest it before — because we all want Allen, Jack or Bill to be The Beat Supreme … Well, imagine my surprise when I squint at Allen’s chickenscratch under the Lucien portrait and he’s written, “More eyes read his anonymous wire-service prose than Jack K’s & mine all these years, I’ll bet.” !! . 😮
There was one flat glasstop display table in the middle of each room with various smaller snapshot prints and other ephemera, and the whole museumy nature of the space brought flashbacks of that historic Whitney show in ’95.
It’s great that Allen’s photos have been preserved, and that exhibitions are rightfully devoted to him, but even with his peepee hangin out, Beat shows just don’t feel right in these pristine, fancy, sanitized, sterilized showrooms. As much as everyone in the Beat world strove for that imprimatur of respectability — me and Allen included — once there, it just doesn’t feel like home — and only made me long to be sitting on some wobbly chair in a small crowded club listening to barely published poets howling out their lives.
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For the first-meeting-Allen story at that Jack summit in ’82 check out Meeting Your Heroes 101.
Or for another tale from that crazy Boulder adventure soon to be a major motion picture check out this Allen, Edie & Henri Cru riff.
Or for, say, a Carolyn & John Cassady adventure there’s always that classic Northport Report.
Or here’s a tribute to my late great friend Carolyn Cassady.
Or here’s me tellin some tales of all this stuff on YouTube.
Or here’s where you can buy a bunch of different Beat photo prints nearly as good as these — taken at the Jack Summit in ’82, including some seen in my book — from the Lance Gurwell Collection.
How “Down & Dirty” Captured Johnny Winter’s New Spring
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Johnny Johnny Johnny … where for art thou, Johnny?
In the long strange lineage of tragic rock n roll irony — see: Keith Moon sitting in the “Not To Be Taken Away” chair on his last album cover — Johnny Winter made his “comeback” documentary just in time to leave the building.
Johnny was messed up for decades — mostly methadone, booze & bad management — and all in his already compromised albino’s body. The hero of the story turns out to be one Paul Nelson, who joined Johnny’s band as his complementary guitarist, and finally “risked everything” by telling Johnny his manager was killing him. He knew he could be terminated on the spot, but instead turned out to be The Hundredth Monkey — the final person in a long line who told Johnny to get away from the man who was keeping him too “medicated” to think — yet another tale of a music business slimeball taking advantage of the very artist he was being paid to protect.
Paul Nelson & Brian Hassett at RIFF opening night.
With his new guide’s guidance, Johnny was weaned off anti-depressants, booze, methadone, cigarettes, and pot, in that order, and came out of the darkness and into the light. Once this happened and he was lucid and presentable for the first time in decades, Paul told the record label it might be a good time to do a documentary. As the fates would have it, shortly after this, a Texas-born, New York-based indi film & video maker named Greg Olliver heard Johnny spryly soloing on an NPR interview and approached the label about making a film on the still living legend. And as the fates would furthur have it, the guy turned out to be a true auteur with a storyteller’s vision and musician’s timing who basically ended up shooting and creating the whole optical opus himself.
This could never have been made back in the day when you needed a crew with lights and sound and production. It was shot entirely on a small Sony digi in such close backstage / bus quarters even one more person would have been too much.
This may be the most open, honest “warts n all” rock doc you’ve ever seen. The Beatles and Metallica may have faught on camera, but this is a senior citizen surrounded by “family” who long ago stopped giving a damn what anybody thought.
This has the raw confessional intimacy of the Maysles’ “Salesman” — except it’s about a famous public figure. Almost universally, entertainers (and their handlers) overly manage every image, every soundbite, every split second of exposure. Johnny, being from another century and another planet — Bluesmania — just doesn’t give a shit about bullshit. All he ever cared about was the sound his fingers could make, and the stories his smoker’s cords could sing. Once filmmaker Olliver passed the entrance exam, he essentially became part of the band, and was there when Johnny woke up, went to bed, and everything in between.
And the bonus is — he’s a helluva filmmaker. You’ll love when the movie opens and closes with “Highway 61,” fast-cut to the lightning beat of Johnny’s playing. Then there’s the long-exposure time-lapse road shots that bring the poetry of the highway to life worthy of Kerouac. And there’s a beautiful sequence where Johnny has (what turns out to be) the last drinks of his life on his 70th birthday in New Orleans that is the most realistic cinematic portrayal of a drunken revelry ever captured on screen — the distortion, the pacing, the volume, the confusion, the surreality, the dreaminess, the mayhem, the unhinged laughter . . . all echoing that classic Rick Danko–Janis–Jerry scene in Festival Express — with Johnny in the role of Rick. We can love their playing, but it’s also a joy to see them playing with their friends.
As Paul confided after the opening night RIFFscreening in Toronto, he saw to it that the four tall Stoli-on-the-rocks Johnny ordered only had about a half ounce of booze each. But with his frail tiny body off the sauces, combined with Paul’s placebo psych-out, Johnny got himself quite smashed — or thought he did — and had one helluva final birthday.
This is what it’s like to be in the krewe of a blues / rock legend on the upswing.
There’s the autograph-hound scene — comedically edited, creating a funny Buster Keaton routine of the put-upon nice guy being trampled by the outside world.
We see the tricks brother Paul came up with to get his boss to eat food and drink water, the physiotherapy to build back his muscles, and the little boy’s joy shining through an old man’s body.
We see historic footage of Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Son House, Willie Dixon, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Freddie King and all the rest who created the music Johnny built upon.
Blues Brothers — John, Muddy, Johnny & Dan.
We hear contemporary masters like Warren Haynes, Derek Trucks, Billy Gibbons, Joe Perry and others explain how Johnny inspired their approach.
We meet Edgar Winter, Johnny’s beloved younger brother, who had been kept apart from his hero elder sibling by the evil former manager, and we see them hugging again, and their vastly different lifestyles of the limo-riding rock star with hit singles that’ve been licensed up the wazoo in ads and movies and who didn’t spend his money on dope, versus the dyed-in-the-Blues junkie. As Paul summed it up after the screening — “That’s the difference between success in rock n roll and the blues.”
We see Johnny playing records at home, recording in the studio, on the road, playing gigs, and classic TV appearances over the decades. We see the arc of his musical life from his first guitar teacher, to playing the closing night of Woodstock with The Band as his opening act; From B.B. King letting this 17 year old kid sit in for a song, to Johnny producing Muddy’s late career comeback album; From his early Johnny “Cool Daddy” Winter persona as a young regional hit-maker in Texas, to getting the biggest record company advance in history at that point.
We hear him tell stories about the first Rolling Stone article mentioning him that changed the trajectory of his life, and his recent Christmas when he was given the gift of being methadone free.
We see him playing with B.B. King and Muddy Waters, and singing a passionate, monumental “Georgia On My Mind” via Ray Charles at a karaoke bar in Japan.
We hear the stories about getting beat up as a kid and the prejudice in the South — “It’s just nuts. Just cuz you’re a different color, they don’t like you. They don’t like black people because they’re black, and they didn’t like me cuz I was too white. It’s just stupid.”
We hear a deejay explaining how seven years ago when Johnny came in for an interview he was so out of it he gave one word answers and didn’t seem to even understand the questions. It was so embarrassing, they couldn’t air it. As St. Paul first began his Mission, Johnny came back and was answering in complete sentences. And now we see him at the same radio station telling long colorful tales in full paragraphs.
This was supposed to be an upbeat story of redemption, the old “overcoming obstacles comeback” routine, until one night in Switzerland in July Johnny ran out of breath in his sleep, and this suddenly became an invaluable eulogy, a priceless profile that couldn’t be made now, any way any how. And yes, Johnny was still alive and well when he attended the film’s world premiere at SXSW in his home state of Texas.
In the last scene in Johnny’s movie — both this one and writ large — he said, “Most of the stories about musicians with drug problems don’t end well. But mine has,” as he laughed in his transcendent ageless twinkling send-off sparkle.
Giant hearts all around.
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Some Bonus Extra Weird / Cool Things learned from “Down and Dirty“:
— “What made you first pick up a guitar?” Johnny: “Chuck Berry.” !! (and the movie has a scorching version of him doing “Johnny B. Goode” circa 1983)
— He’s still playing the same Gibson Firebird guitar he bought in 1970 for $225. (!) And like a happily long married spouse, he still calls her, “The coolest lookin’ guitar I’ve ever seen.”
— Edgar Winter played with Johnny at Woodstock. In fact Edgar says, “Woodstock changed my life.” And Johnny called it, “Still one of the coolest things I’ve ever done.”
Although the film is still being screened at festivals around the world, it was shot more for the small screen than the big, so I’m sure it’ll be on some movie network / Netflix / DVD store near you soon.
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For another great movie on debauchery gone bad then gone good again check out Festival Express.
I’ve been waiting for this book for a long time! As a teenager in Winnipeg in the ’70s, Neil was a god to us. We drove the 500 miles to Minneapolis during grade 12 at Kelvin to see him for the first time — and to our great dumb-luck fortune, it was the Rust Never Sleeps tour!
I went and found his picture in the old yearbooks in the Kelvin library, but beyond that it was really hard to find out anything about his life in the Peg. Just like Lowell Mass ignored Kerouac for decades, Winnipeg never really embraced any person from there who did anything with their lives. It’s so sad. And so stupid.
Well — everything’s changed now! Woo-hoo! FINALLY I got to read about every gig, every band line-up, every guitar he ever played, every girl he ever flirted with, every teacher he had, every house party he went to . . . FINALLY the detailed scoop!
It feels like the author interviewed every living person Neil ever came in contact with. I happened to go to the same high school and community clubs where he played, but I gotta think this book would bring that world to life for anybody from anywhere. It was high school, it was dating, it was insecurity, it was being broke, it was a search for adventure.
But the biggest take-away for me was how Neil didn’t give up. How he kept re-approaching from different angles all the obstacles of having a band and making his way in music. Things were hopelessly bleak — no amp to play through, bandmates for whom music was far from their first priority, very limited gig options, pressures from teachers at school, a broken marriage by his parents, being a weird kid in a new town who was shy and awkward and couldn’t play sports and didn’t cotton to authority — I mean, EVERYthing was against him. This is the template storyline of somebody who went on to become some famous badguy … or one of the millions of petty criminals we never hear about.
And it wasn’t like he was some sort of genius prodigy. When you read biographies of those people, they’re so above-&-beyond and different from most of us that you can’t really imagine yourself in their shoes. But this isn’t some Stevie Wonder or Stevie Winwood playing with the masters before they’re old enough for a driver’s license. This guy was next to helpless, I mean hopeless — no babe magnet, no supernatural gifts, no money, no father figure … and stuck in Winterpeg a thousand miles from anywhere. There’s no WAY this guy should ever have amounted to anything.
And that’s the beauty of the story. And why anybody can relate to it and be inspired by it. All he did was keep at it. All he did was not give up. When Winnipeg didn’t work, he went to Toronto. When Toronto didn’t work he went to New York. When nothing else worked, he went to L.A. When bands fell apart he formed new ones. When he didn’t have an amp he played through a stereo. When his car dropped dead on the side of the road he jumped on the back of a motorcycle and kept going. He always found some way to keep moving forward, around all obstacles, against all odds. And that’s what makes this so inspiring. Don’t give up. Don’t give in. Don’t be denied. Cuz you might end up in the supergroup of your dreams.
My tribute to the late great Carolyn Cassady on the one year anniversary of her passing …
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Or “The Pranksters Invade the Woodstock Museum” . . .
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Or here’s opening the Marry Prankster Reunion weekend in 2016 . . .
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Or here’s debuting the “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac” at The Pranksters in Wonderland . . .
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Or here’s a riff for French filmmaker Noemie Sornet’s documentary on Kerouac and “On The Road” . . . including the Adventure Story of the movie premiere in a palace courtyard in London . . .
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and part two including “On The Road’s” final cut world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival and meeting Walter Salles and that whole Adventure . . .
“I’ve got to get back to the land and set my soul free … “
Two of the coolest events of the ’60s just came together in the 21st century — and I lived it from start to finish.
The Merry Pranksters’ Bus, which pulled out of Ken Kesey’s house in La Honda on my June 14th birthday in 1964, came to Max Yasgur’s farm where Woodstock was born in 1969. Since then each of these events — painted buses traveling around full of fun-loving friends, and gatherings in fields for weekend concert communes — have become part of world-wide culture.
But this is where it all began — with a Bang!
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And this time it all began with an unplanned dash — when the Kesey krewe got cancelled last minute out of some other festival and suddenly was heading for … Woodstock! … of course! … where it was supposed to be goin’ in the first damn place!
Mmmm … home again … Gotta be there —on Max’s farm, where Woodstock as we know it began … and where the Oregon creamery boys first joined up with the New York dairy farmer.
If you don’t know the backstory on Max, he was a respected, if iconoclastic, ‘elder statesman’ farmer and thousand-acre landowner in this area of Sullivan County, NY, even though he was only 49 years old at the time of the festival. (And what a 50th he must have had that December!) Max was known to speak his mind and go his own way in a conservative old-world rural culture that was very much go-along-get-along.
The festival organizers were kicked off of their months-of-development site just 30 days before the festival was to begin. Max had been reading in the local papers about the trouble “these kids” were having, and told them when they first met, “I want to help you boys. You got the raw end of the deal.” He had a very evolved philosophy of equality and justice — a living 20th century Thoreau, he was a pro-active ethicist for whom a handshake was a binding contract — and injustice did not sit well with him. Plus, he was also a pretty sharp businessman.
Picture Woody Allen meets Jack Benny – as Max is noodling around his farm all weekend licking the end of his pencil and jotting down every bucket of milk a cow didn’t deliver to make sure he was covered for it. But beyond his pencilings, because it was Max, and the respectful relationship they evolved, the promoters spent months and tens of thousands of extra dollars restoring his land to what it was when they arrived.
One story, to give you the idea, and something only his wife Miriam could relate: When word spread that Max was talking to these ‘hippies’ about having this banned festival on his farm, somebody put up a sign along the Route 17B road in front of his house — “Stop Max’s hippy music festival — Buy no milk.”When Max & Miriam saw it for the first time, as she recalled — “I thought, ‘You don’t know Max. Now it’s going to happen.’ That did it. He just turned to me and said, ‘Is it alright with you?’ … I knew he was not going to get past this sign, so I said, ‘I guess we’re gonna have a festival.’ And he said, ‘Yup, we’re gonna have a festival.’ And that was it.”
Max would have been a great political leader or writer or millionaire businessman if just a couple cells had been different. But ol’ Jack Fate cast this activist philosopher as a farmer — who happened to have a perfect natural amphitheater in the same neck of the world as that little artists’ colony that Dylan happened to stumble into a few summers earlier.
And thus, in one of the festival’s innumerable karmic twists, the organizers were thrown out of the town of Wallkill and onto Max Yasgur’s farm along Happy Avenue in Bethel(hem). There was a whole lotta Shinin’ goin’ on with this man and this moment..
And up to his homestead we did roll — bought in 1985 by Roy Howard and now run by his widow, Jeryl Abramson, in The Spirit, letting Woodstockians the whirled over gather on Max’s land every anniversary since 1998. And this was only the second year it’s been legal!
Jeryl Abramson taking The Oath at The Bus.
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As soon as you come up the small rise onto the land — there’s Max’s house — where the deal for the festival was consummated — and where it’s honored with an official historical marker befitting an official historic figure.
And there’s … The Bus! The Magic Bus. The Kesey Bus. Furthur. The psychedelic painted school bus that spawned it all.
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It wasn’t the same Beat-up 1939 International Harvester that Neal Cassady drove across the country in 1964 or came to Woodstock in ’69, but as Father Ken maintained: It was the same spirit — much like Max’s homestead wasn’t the actual field for the concert in 1969 — but was the same spirit being created by its current inhabitants.
The Bus at Woodstock ’69
In the Crazy Karma 2014 Dept.: So, we hang out Thursday night in the anticipation glow, then I retired to the nearby cheap motor hotel I found for the night — flipped on the CNN — and there’s Kesey’s bus!! . . . wait–what?!?! And there’s Kesey & Babbs talkin’ about La Honda and the birth of it all! And they’re ravin’ on about Kerouac!!! Rub my eyes and ding my bell! It’s their series “The Sixties,” and the “Sex, Drugs, & Rock n Roll” episode! Jack didn’t make Woodstock or ride on The Bus — but here he was being described on CNN as The Father of us all ! — the On The Road back-to-the-land mountain climbing searcher who put into poetic prose the rose we were all smelling so sweetly.
And The Chief saw to it that they were reunited in the driver’s cockpit of the new starship to deep space.
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On Friday morning, there was Zane bright and early manning the merch tent, selling everything from painted toy buses and fridge magnets (I got one of each), to prankster t-shirts and DVDs of “the world’s mightiest home movie” as the original Pranksters dubbed their footage from the first trip (I scored a shmancy original Acid Test poster t-shirt – already had the movies).
Floating around The Bus were the film crew — appropriately from British Columbia — and all sorts of Next Generation Pranksters like Chris Foster who appeared as The Wizard, Carmen Miranda, and a psychedelic cowboy over each of the three days, and actually lives in Bloomington, Indiana, where I’d just recently summited with Neal’s son John Cassady, director Walter Salles, and On The Road scroll preserver Jim Canary for the “On The Road” movie premiere.
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And then there was Milton, the George Walker of this incarnation, responsibly covering the practical bases; and Thumpah who came from the High Times Cannabis Cup tribe and had actually filmed my induction of Jack and Neal into the Counter-Culture Hall of Fame in Amsterdam in 1999. And in the role of Babbs on this tour of duty is Lieutenant Derek Stevens making sure the operation ran with military precision. Or at least Prankster precision.
But this was no dosed-kool-aid acid party. It was a business, and they’re rightfully concerned The Bus is a blazing target in this crazy militarized America — so they have to play it clean.
The real action and spirit evocation was out in the woods where decades of the owners hosting events had resulted in dirt roads and footpaths and campsites and drum circle centers and full-on stages for non-stop performances all day and night. There were deliciously elaborate kitchens making the best pizza I’ve had since New York, and a breakfast guy making vegi-rich omelets that put the best restaurants to shame — in price and quality. Then there was the giant tent general store selling everything — camping supplies, toiletries, first-aid stuff, cigs, batteries and whatever a prankster or camper of eternity might need.
Then there were the art installations, like Christopher VanderEssen’s, who created a florescent blacklight dreamcatcher weaving through the woods —
and custom painted clothes like on the back of the new Kesey Acid Test poster t-shirt — with Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, The Grateful Dead and The Merry Pranksters listed as the entertainment!
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Or Eddy Miller the bubble man using giant nets to create clouds of bubbles sparkling across the fields as little kids screamed in joy chasing them …
and eyeful Canadians captured them …
It’s where you’d meet people named Dragon Fly or Band-Aide or Thumper or Normal or Sky or Lake, and every single person is saying “High” to every single other person in this church of camaraderie. . . . “Everywhere was a song and a celebration …”
Meanwhile, back at The Bus, I ended up talking to this colorful couple, Rick and Sherry. He went to the first Woodstock, arriving Thursday morning, parking his car on site, settin up their tent in the woods, then wandering over to the field where they found a spot 30 feet from the stage and never moved (or went back to their tent and car) until Monday! He was wearing this cap of rainbow dreads, and she was under a colorful jester’s hat with dangling bells, and to be quite confessional, I was feeling a little under-dressed.
And they were like most of the people I met here — super smart. This wasn’t a bunch of brain-dead loogans, but rather highly evolved explorers and sophisticated pranksters. People who knew how to Adventure, and survive on a farm for a long weekend, and how to make fun happen.In fact, it was over an in-depth discussion of Obamacare (not positive) that Rick & Sherry & I really bonded, and were joined by The Wizard, Chris Foster, talking through his costume, and the four of us thereafter became a fairly inseparable quartet — and by Sunday realized we would be for life.
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The Spirit of Woodstock was alive — and being created by the people — not rock stars or anyone else dictating from on high. It was an organic connection among souls who’d been driven to drive some distance to spend a formless whacky weekend in the woods. Not only was no one aggressively drunk, but I never heard a harsh word spoken over four days. When I first heard someone impatient and frustrated a few days later, it sounded so foreign and out of place and unnecessary and unhappy.
And that’s what these things do — the fabric of your soul becomes dipped in a rainbow dye and permanently transformed by the swirling colors of love and happiness and peacefulness and camaraderie all collectively blending together — all based on happenstance … with a purpose. Who knows what’s going to happen or who you’re going to meet? But tossing yourself into this tribal gathering of like-minded Adventurers, you’ll go lots of somewheres cool.Like the endless jam sessions going on all over the fields — with the Grateful Dead dominating the airwaves — and sumpthin I never saw before — a tent with two drum kits!!
Then there was the woman running the booth for the non-profit Eden’s Rose Foundation that sells handmade alpaca clothes and hardwood carvings (including of the Ice Cream Kid and Cats Under The Stars and all sorts of Grateful Dead images) made by native tribes in the jungles of Peru and Brazil and Bolivia, and the money goes directly back to the local tribes to keep their ancient cultures self-sustaining.
And hanging here at this soulful booth I learned about “spunions” — the new term for people who are well spun and happily blazing in the middle of the night. And in this scene — where no one is drunk and stumbling around and starting fights, but so many are so high — it really puts a lie to our drug & alcohol laws. High people wander through the woods like a pack of wild comedians cracking each other up, their laughter heard long before you see them, or like gentle little children in a fairy tale amazed at everything they see. Hanging at the booth and seeing all the traffic flow in and out, it would have been completely different if they were as drunk as they were high.
And in a perfect parallel corollary, the Woodstock Museum Director confirmed what friends and facility staff had already mentioned — that it was the drunks, particularly at the “country” shows that were the only times they had problems.
Anyway . . . There was this HUGE arc of people — an anthropologists delight! — from 4 & 5 year old kids running around playing, to 70 & 80 year olds shuffling along who’d been at the first Woodstock — and both ends of the spectrum beaming beatific faces of joy. Whatever your age, there was a gorgeous farmful of friendly people to play with.
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And a funny-nice thing from Sunday afternoon — all weekend we’d been hearing excellent bands play their own stuff along with The Dead, The Band, Santana, CSNY, etc. … as you do at any of these Woodstock reunions or music festivals in the woods. But all of a sudden I’m hearing some girl singing “Brand New Key” by Melanie!
“No way! This is so great!” Melanie and I had a memorable flirty evening on the night of the Folk City Anniversary Concert and afterparty in New York in 1980-something, and I always thought she was the real deal — very spiritual and spirited. So, I’m boppin’ away to this, and what does the girl singer on stage do next? but the hit song Melanie wrote about her historic unplanned performance at Woodstock, “Candles In The Rain.“
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And dancing in front of the stage is Rachel, who’d been Stage Manager on the main double-stage all weekend. You don’t meet many women stage managers period, let alone running the main stage of a major festival — with acts one after another using two stages side-by-side so each band has the other’s performance time to set up. And they had a different act every 15, 30, 45 minutes from 9:30AM till 3AM. Finally by Sunday afternoon here she was dancing with me and everybody else to “Candles In The Rain.” And after it’s over we have a big hug, and I say, “How great is it to hear Melanie played at Woodstock?!”
And she goes, “And by her daughter no less!”
“What?!?!“
And sure enough … a little later I’m hangin’ at the Blue Bomber which was centrally located between The Bus and The Woods, and I look over next to me and there she is! Jeordie, Melanie’s daughter, with her guitar player! And the poor bastards are trying to open some nice indi beers without an opener.See … that’s the difference between our two countries — even cool Americans don’t know how to pop a cold one with a lighter. And these micro-breweries have quite the pop with their lively brews — and I could send those puppies half-way across the field, impressing the hell out of ol’ Melanie Jr. And suddenly we’re huggin’ n flirtin’ and I’m thinkin’ this whole Woodstock thing is alright.
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Back at The Bus, there were any number of adventures. At one point they said they wanted to go “out front” to take some pictures with The Bus on The Farm. ‘Course I wanted to be in on that, but Prankster plans are like dreams — they might be real or they might go poof — they might be right now, or in ten days, or just a goof.
At some point I’m hanging in the woods at the dual main stages when a telepathic spark went off in me bean — “Wait a minute — maybe they’re takin’ the picture!” And as I walked out into the clearing — sure enough — The Bus was missing! I scooched as fast as my skinny legs could scooch me back to The Mighty Blue Bomber, jumped in to go find The Bus, and Boom! right around the corner there they were parked under Yasgur’s big barn sign! Bolted over with my camera … just as they were coming down off the roof! . . . Bummer!!
But there was no way I was going to miss this if I could do anything about it, so I ran over and spotted this girl Angie Lee I’d been talking to in the scene, handed her my camera with instructions to shoot away like crazy, then ran to the back of the bus before everyone got off, and climbed on up and said I had to get my pic with the Woodstock and Yasgur’s signs — which was a bit forward of me telling these stray cat Pranksters what to do — but sure enough they went for it — and it led to a whole new round of shots — with other photographers falling into the scene who’d missed the spontaneous moment earlier now catching it, and suddenly there was a whole second photoshoot going down cuz I’d insisted on it!
As my new best friend Sherry wisely says, “What’s meant to be will not pass you by.”
See … these are the truths you re-learn at Woodstock.
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Or then there was the time The Bus was thinking of maybe going to the original Woodstock site and museum just a mile down Route 17B at the new Bethel Woods Arts Center. ‘Course this plan muddled around all day until I decided I wanted to go over there for reasons also including porcelain facilities and free wifi. So I did, parking with a nice view of the road, and sure enough before long this bright blue bus came barreling along out of the dark tree tunnel with a loaded rooftop including Thumpah tootling the multitudes with his flute and everyone whooping and waving and pranking the unsuspecting touri wandering the fancy grounds.
Furthur at the Woodstock corner — Hurd and West Shore Roads.
And just as this was happening, in the magic Crazy Karma synch that is Pranksterhood, Museum Director Wade was just leaving for the day and spotted them and screeched over in his car, and offered to let The Bus drive up the walkway to the front doors of the museum! So, suddenly there was the larger-than-life psychedelic Magic Bus parked at the doors to Woodstock, just like the first Bus had been. And of course Mr. Museum Director comps us all in (normally $15 per) and before you know it the unsuspecting museum goers are overrun with Camp Prankster colors and voices and giggles and music.
I hadn’t yet shown Zane the fancy Bethel Woods pamphlet that had an aerial shot of the ’69 crowd on the front cover — and a Prankster bus on the back!
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And just as I’m showing him this, we turn a corner in the museum — and there it is! A bus based on his Dad’s is the promotional and literal centerpiece of The Woodstock Museum! And we climb aboard and … they’ve made a movie about The Bus and the Hog Farm that’s playing on the inside windshield of the bus! And they’re interviewing Max’s son Sam … and I’m … sitting with Ken’s son Zane … in a psychedelic school bus at Woodstock watching a movie about his Dad’s psychedelic school bus at Woodstock … while Furthur’s sitting out front!
Mind = blown!
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Or there was the time we all went for a Pranksters Walkabout late Saturday night, about 20 of us in a roaming nomadic crazy loud krewe with light sticks and magic wands and guitars and flutes and drums and pretty girls and silly boys making noise and begetting smiles and breaking into song as we ambled along.
At some point we found ourselves at the giant nearly abandoned 3-ring drum circle in the jungle dark, and the band members and some singers broke into funny falsetto versions of Led Zeppelin songs, while Zane’s throwing out zany one-liners like his father would — delivered dry and coming from some alternate universe. Somebody mentioned the bell that fell off the bus and almost hit the follow car, and he goes, “That car isn’t done being hit yet.” Somebody said, “There’s certain things that must remain unsaid.” Zane pops, “That’s the first rule of Prankster Club.” And it was all in perfect harmony with The Unspoken Thing — San Francisco comic and de facto Prankster Robin Williams … who we just lost and were collectively mourning.
It wasn’t dark, but it was getting there. Comedy in the dark, but not dark comedy. You didn’t know who was riffing unless you recognized their voice, and everyone was playing along, banging the gong, beating the drum, all with a Robert Plant falsetto as the giggling soundtrack.
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Or there was that sunset moment on Sunday where I was tuned into the simultaneous sacredness of the celestial and human event, and going around suggesting to people like new Prankster Moray that I use their camera to take pics of them in that special light, when Zane picked up on what I was doing, the moment I was capturing, and he rounded up the stray cat krewe and wandered us out to the open field between Max’s house and barn and took our jumping-for-joy-Woodstock photos.
And Zane tells us this story of how his Dad would gather people for sunset and watch for the green flash of light just as the sun crosses out of sight, and of course we all do this … and I think I’m seeing flashes — but it may have been from all the jumping we just did!
Anyway, as he’s telling the story in his big booming Oregon farmer Kesey voice — he was looking me right in the eye and telling it directly to me. And I’m thinkin’ this whole Prankster thing is alright.
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Later I started riffing with the Canadian film crew, some B.C. buds that went by Colby and Puds, and even though it’s late in the proceedings I’m spewing my usual nonsense that to some people occasionally sounds articulate, and Puds sez, “I gotta interview you for the movie. Would you mind?” It felt like I hadn’t had a shower since July or a night’s sleep since June, but The Bus was clanging it’s bell to leave for D.C. in the morning, and now the bell hath tolled for thee.
Puds starts lookin around for a set — someone’s on The Bus doin’ sumpthin’ — and he remembers the giant Woodstock banner he bought that afternoon using Prankster dollars, which was just play money they printed but were able to trade for cool shit. So, BOOM! We hang the flag over the inside of the back door of their equipment truck (which Zane calls, “Our trunk”) and climb inside and do a whole long interview there where I riffed on some lessons I learned from Father Ken (soon to be available in my book about our first hang), and how I could see the father in the son with his quick dry one-liners, and how the bus has influenced generations — and even in my three-days-of-Woodstock madness I knew any answer had to be 15, 30 seconds tops. No long winding Brian stories here — conscious to speak in soundbites cuz they’re making such an epic new Mightiest Home Movie that there’s gonna be a whole lotta noodles to tootle.
And by the time we’re done, it was 10:30 Sunday night, and Lieutenant Hassett’s watchin’ his watch and knows the only nearby beer store is closing at 11, so in this wonderful living flashback to our Canadian roots, me and ol’ B.C. Puds make a last-dash Beer Run just like the old days — two wise Canucks swimming away from the ducks to try our luck and sure enough! Bingo! We’re bongo with bounties of brewskies for blast-off!
And after Zane and I had not really connected when I first arrived, by the end of the last day, it was just he and I together at the back of The Bus as he wound up the giant flags into ropes so he could tie them to the ship — the Stars & Stripes and the Oregon State (the only state flag in America with something on both sides, he tells me with pride) in preparation for their highway-driving departure in the morning. It was just the two of us rapping and wrapping the show — about what worked (everything above plus the impromptu gig they did one morning that I missed), and what didn’t (they shoulda been parked down in the woods), but he had a beatific smiling calm about him that another show was successfully done, and of all the sites they visited this was the first one The Bus had been to before, and that living history was meeting living history (maybe it was me who said that) and that the two family reunions had blended so well..And by now the Woodstockians and Pranksters have morphed back into the world around us, and maybe you can’t even recognize who we are. And The Bus has continued it’s Trip, toootling the multitudes in Washington and New York and Cleveland and Chicago on the never-ending Road Trip started by Jack and driven by Neal and jumped on by Jerry and captained by Ken that’s still hugging hearts with loving arms and ever going → .
And if you wanna go Furthur still — here’s the part where I compared the first Obama Inauguration to Woodstock — and one Michael Lang, conceiver and creator of Woodstock, chose to use it as the climax of his book on the matter.
Or here’s the tale of first meeting Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, John Clellon Holmes and Herbert Huncke at “the Woodstock of the Beats” — the Boulder ’82 SuperSummit — where I also met Ken for the first time and he invited me back to his house and I wrote a whole book about it coming out later this year.
Larry David & Jerry Seinfeld were the Lennon & McCartney of comedy.
That’s the way I see it, anyway.
Larry was a Lennon — mercurial, opinionated, sharp tongued, bull-headed, idea generating, creatively uncompromising, a supremely gifted artist born to his medium, with an enormous elaborate expansive vision.
And Jerry was the McCartney — an equal creative master, but more easy-going, conciliatory, more camera-friendly, certainly more camera-comfortable, and definitely more “pop” and popular.
They each excelled at things the other didn’t — while collaborating in their common passion — and making each other laugh. They found their equal, their sparring partner, their riff mate, their sentence finisher, their line perfecter, their bullshit detector — or as Jerry called it, their “cross filter.”
Like Lennon & McCartney, Larry & Jerry might have ended up having successful individual careers had they not met the other, but the two forces collaborating, bouncing ideas off each other, harmonizing on both the surface and the deepest levels, created something that outshone all their peers around them.
Both the band and the TV show lasted 9 years, and the dissolution of each was a major cultural event when it happened. Here you can hear Jerry citing The Beatles as the reason for ending the show when he did.
And they were both Fab Fours — both based on four creative characters, all of whom were masters of their domain. I mean — their instrument.
And it was the senior creative pairings who selected their supporting players, which in both cases were integral to the endeavour’s overall success.
And each one of both pairs went on to acclaimed solo careers, but in this case Larry was more the hit-making McCartney with his Emmy-winning “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and Jerry more the reclusive John with his unannounced small club appearances and out of the mainstream (not on TV) “Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee.”
And in the synchronistic symmetry of it all, both pairings had a fellow creative genius in the booth with the same name as one of the principals — Larry Charles collaborating with Larry David, and George Martin with John, Paul, George and Ringo.
And both tandems were based first and foremost on writing — 2:30 songs or 23 minute episodes. Without the writing, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. .
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Early in the Seinfeld run, Jerry said, “People always ask me, ‘What show is your show like?’ And I always answer Abbott & Costello.” The rapid-fire banter — or what Jerry calls the “musical math” — runs through the whole series, especially in, say, The Bubble Boy, or the classic Kramer–Newman exchanges in The Ticket when Kramer’s been hit on the head and can’t remember his alibi. Although there was a wide spectrum of colorful characters to employ, the dialog Larry & Jerry were naturally predisposed to write was up-tempo duets.
And in further keeping with their love for Bud & Lou (as they called them) and their other comedic hero duo Laurel and Hardy, they were conscious to have the physical distinctions of the short chubby guy (including Newman) and the tall lanky guy — with the hair that started to stand straight up and make him even taller by season 3.
Larry & Jerry even bequeathed George Costanza the middle name of Louis as an homage to Lou Costello; and as Jerry says, he saw his role as the Bud Abbott straight man. He talked about some of this with places like the New York Times and Major League Baseball (and here) discussing “Who’s on first?”
The brilliant comic Larry Miller said of the Seinfeld–Abbott & Costello comedic harmony — “They’d both take a premise that it tissue thin, and just keep dancing on it.”
Jerry talks a bit about his love for Abbott & Costello here —
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And here’s the ’93 Abbott & Costello special he refers to —
Their roots in the classic comic masters runs deep.
Jason Alexander said Ralph Kramden was a big inspiration for how he played George. Michael Richards talks about studying the Marx Brothers and how he consciously brought that ensemble rapport to the Seinfeld team. Among other things, the show did their take on the classic stateroom scene from A Night At The Opera in the episode where Elaine’s using a broom closet as a fake apartment. At different times Jerry can be seen doing the besieged and flustered Don Knotts. And of course the futile yet never-ending scheming by the less than honorable leads follows in a direct comedic lineage from Sgt. Bilko to The Three Stooges and W.C. Fields.
Another source Larry & Jerry drew heavily from was The Jack Benny Program where an always put-upon well known comedian played an always put-upon well known comedian of the same name, involving the typical events and wise-cracking characters in the performer’s life. And their homage extended to stylistic choices like using exaggerated facial expressions as punch lines, putting a painfully petty cheapskate front and center, and being happily impolitic, unsentimental, and unrepentant — living up to the famous Seinfeld writers/cast motto: “No hugging, no learning.” 😉
A noted cinephile friend of mine, Ted The Fiddler, pointed out other subtle connections between the two show’s writing styles — “Having Kramer hit a golf ball into the ocean at the end of an episode as the credits roll, and then George finds a golf ball in the blow hole of a beached whale two weeks later. The idea of setting up the joke a week or more before the punch line. Each joke having three punch lines, each one getting a slightly bigger laugh. 19 major events in a half hour show … the pacing of the show. As a big Jack Benny fan, those are the echoes I enjoy the most.”
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When Jerry, Larry & Larry describe the motivation behind the writing, they use words like tight, dense, clean, no fat. In fact, the shows were so scrupulously trimmed that a “scene” might be less than 5 seconds with only one word or line of dialog before the next fast cut. Because of this precision sculpting and intricate four-story plotting, Seinfeld scripts often ran up to 70 pages — 20 pages longer than a one hour show.
Also of interest — every joke, routine, and script Seinfeld ever wrote, was originally written longhand on a yellow legal pad using a clear-barrel blue Bic pen. From his first days striving to be a comedian until the present, he’s never varied from his method.
Here’s an excellent NYT video on how he crafted his material –
The initial casting was so determinative to the success of the show. The talent and alchemy of The Founding Four was the reason it became a show. The series was such a longshot to begin with and got the smallest first season order in the history of network television — 4 episodes. If they had scored about one percentage point lower in ratings, it would not have just made the cut for a slightly longer trial of 13 episodes for a second season, which it then only barely survived to be given a full order for the third season. If the three hired principals — Jason Alexander, Michael Richards and Julia Louis-Dreyfus — had not been as exceptional as they were, it never would have survived those lean early years.
When the show first aired, prolly like most people, I focused on George. Jason Alexander was already a well-known (and Tony-winning) theater actor in my and the show’s hometown of New York, and he was the fresh television voice of the never-heard-before Larry David.
When I revisited the series in reruns, I couldn’t take my eyes of Julia, especially when she was not delivering lines — all the little things she was doing to support the moment.
And then in the last year, watching all the outtakes and interviews and the “How It Began” doc and so on, Michael Richards has absolutely blown me away. What a masterpiece of a character he created. And it was largely Michael who did that. Kramer was written (at first) as a “hipster doofus” but it was Richards who came up with the idea that Kramer was not dumber than everybody else — he was smarter. And that became the key to how the character evolved from Larry & Jerry’s original concept.
As Jason Alexander put it, “Michael drove himself to these levels of creativity that were extraordinary. I don’t think I’ve ever come across another actor that had that combination of manic drive, that off-beat sensibility, and the genetics of what his body could do to create that character. It was one of those kismet meetings of actor and role that becomes legendary.” Or as Jerry Stiller put it succinctly, “He had a mercurial mind in a weightless body.”
If there had to be multiple takes, he would play every one differently, which in turn kept his castmates on their razor’s edge. And he was so funny, as the blooper reels reveal, he regularly caused the other actors to lose it in the middle of a scene, often literally doubling over with laughter … and the whole time, he never breaks character.
And then to learn how he studied with Stella Adler (who studied with Stanislavsky, and who taught his Method to Brando, De Niro and loads of the other best actors you’ve ever seen) … and all of the on-set stories about his concentration and preparation … and how he was the first of them to win an Emmy … then won three of them … and how he’s equal parts cerebral and slapstick, and an absolute master of both … he’s now up there in the very highest pantheon of actors in my book, even if just for this one character … one who can pratfall alongside Basil Fawlty and Ed Norton as the funniest physical characters in the history of sitcoms.
He did the role for 9 years and there isn’t a bad Kramer episode. In fact there isn’t a scene — or line — that he doesn’t absolutely slay.
And as a funny aside and proof of his effectiveness, the producers eventually had to instruct the studio audiences to not applaud his entrances because it was throwing off the timing of the scenes.
I highly recommended this clip on how Michael Richards created Kramer —
On a personal level, during the entire run of the show, I was the same age as the characters, living uptown in Manhattan, working and performing in the arts (like Jerry), with all sorts of crazy friends like Kramer and George, and a girlfriend whose face looked very much like Elaine’s.
For us New Yorkers, it was kind of “our” show, and it always sort of surprised us that it was also so popular everywhere else. The issues were our issues — parking spaces, urban dating, transitory jobs — and the characters were the characters we lived with — cab drivers, street people, oddball proprietors. It was so definitively New York — even though the creators were by then living in L.A. — like James Joyce creating Dublin from France.
In fact, the out-of-town popularity is exactly why the show was picked up in the first place. The first four episodes did well on the coasts and in large urban markets, but what surprised NBC was that the ratings in small towns in the Midwest were the same as they were in New York and Philadelphia.
It really did become “Must See TV” as the NBC slogan of the time called Thursday nights because you knew whatever you did the next day, somebody’d say, “Did you see Seinfeld last night?” … plus … you really wanted to see it!
My theory is that although it was a take on big city life, Jerry himself grew up in the quintessential suburban town of Massapequa (Long Island), which could be Anytown, North America. As Jerry said of his world, “Massapequa is an old Indian word for ‘near the mall'” — with noodgy parents, gossiping friends, and the same first world problems and aggravations that everyone else was trying to shake off by watching a little tube after a long day.
. And then there’s the whole Kerouac angle I love. One of my favorite authors was an early proponent of using the stories of one’s life as the subject for his autobiographical novels — and here’s autobiographical comedy! There hasn’t been a sitcom in the history of television that was the writers’ real lives as completely as Seinfeld.
When the network made one non-negotiable demand for the first season greenlight, it was that there had to be a strong female character equal to the three male leads. Larry David thought of an old girlfriend, Maggie Cassidy, I mean Monica Yates, who became a friend after they broke up, and realized that was the way to do it. Jerry had had a similar experience with the comedian Carol Leifer, and so with each of the creators strongly grounded in the concept of the ex-girlfriend as friend, Elaine Benes was born.
And of course the roman à clef copping extends to the real nextdoor neighbor named Kramer — and to countless scripts — from the Soup Nazi to waiting in a Chinese restaurant, from negotiating rules with an ex so they can have sex to the entire show-within-a-show storyline. And they also actively encouraged and mined the other writers’ and friend’s real-life moments and stories as comedic fodder. The B.O. in the car, the cutting a chocolate bar with a knife and fork, the trying to help a small neighborhood restaurant and endless other storylines and details were plucked from their personal conversations and turned into national conversations, yada yada yada.
. But I mean … the whole Kerouac / Beat symmetry … set in New York … almost in the same neighborhood around Columbia … young New Yorkers on the town, on the make, out for kicks … with George Costanza as their Gregory Corso or Henri Cru, always scheming, always workin’ the angles, but never hitting the jackpot.
Kramer is obviously Burroughs — the tall, skinny, knowing, oddly dressed, unpredictable eccentric who didn’t quite fit in with the others but yet was somehow part of them.
Jerry is clearly Kerouac — at the center of everything and using his friends as the inspiration for his work. And of course Jack’s longtime hometown of Northport isn’t that far from Massapequa in geography or mindset.
The Beats never really had an Elaine, but in a way she was the Ginsberg through-line, collaborating with all the others, ambitious, always with an eye for the boys, and an ability to turn on the charm and work the room that the others just didn’t have.
And if anybody’s Neal Cassady it’s the behind-the-scenes (unpublished) Larry David, the catalytic partner for Kerouac/Seinfeld, the manifestation of the entire enterprise, the “god” the others looked up to.
And I think I’m fine with keeping Leo & Gabrielle as Jerry/Jack’s parents. But since we’re here, I’m gonna go ahead and cast Truman Capote as Newman, Lou Little as the Soup Nazi, and Peter Orlovsky as Puddy.
Some tasty tidbits I came across on the journey …
NBC President Brandon Tartikoff after the Michael Richards audition: “Well, if you want funny … .”
George Shapiro and Howard West, who managed up-and-coming comic Jerry Seinfeld in the ’80s, also handled Carl Reiner, so they had regular contact with his son Rob, who had just started Castle Rock in 1987 (along with 4 others), and who ended up producing the show starting in 1989.
For Jason Alexander’s audition, and in his performance in the pilot and first couple episodes, he was playing George as Woody Allen. A couple episodes in, he found out George was based on Larry David, so then began doing “the best Larry David I could.”
It originally premiered as “The Seinfeld Chronicles” before being shortened to “Seinfeld” — but when Jerry & Larry were developing it and submitted the first script, they called it “Stand-Up.”
Just before the show first aired, Jerry asked the most experienced veteran in the ensemble, Jason Alexander, if he thought the show had a chance. Jason answered it didn’t, “Because the audience for this show is me, and I don’t watch TV.”
Larry David wrote / created and was George. Jerry ditto Jerry. But it was Larry Charles who specifically focused on / wrote for and developed Kramer (along with Michael Richards).
Every episode title (except “Male Unbonding”) begins with “The…” then names something from the episode. Larry & Jerry instituted this because they didn’t want the writers wasting time creating clever titles.
Although Larry & Jerry have official writing credit on only 60 and 16 of the 180 episodes respectfully, they re-wrote / transformed / “worked their magic” (as the other writers put it) on every script once it was handed in.
Not only were the NBC execs famously opposed to the Chinese Restaurant episode, but also to the entire show-within-a-show story arc. And so was Jason Alexander. (!) They all quickly came around, however, once the first shows were taped.
Both Jerry and George had two dads. Each of their fathers started out with actors who were replaced by different actors by the character’s second appearance and thereafter.
Keith Hernandez found out after-the-fact that his two-episode storyline was written to be cut back to one if it turned out he sucked.
Joshua White (of the famed psychedelic Joshua Light Show of the late ’60s) actually directed an early episode of Seinfeld (“The Library,” 3rd season, 1991). He had directed a Carol Leifer special the year before, so that’s prolly how it happened, but it certainly shows the renegade Prankster mindset of the project. 😉
And yet, from what I’ve learned, none of the principals drank at all, and definitely didn’t use drugs. Just about every other artist in every medium I’ve ever loved, had a drug or alcohol problem. But all four leads plus L.D. (and probably most everybody else, if that was the standard set from the top) were mind-bogglingly stimulant-free.
Jerry’s fictional apt. was at 129 West 81st Street, apt. 5A — but the exterior used in the show is actually a building in Los Angeles. Then the real Jerry Seinfeld ending up buying his multi-condo New York uber-pad at West 81st & Central Park West.
The trademark funky bass lines between scenes were actually played on a Korg synthesizer. Bummer.
Out of the four central characters, Kramer is the only one to never have had an “inner monologue.” ie; He’s the only character whose inner thoughts we never hear.
During the show’s run, players on the Buffalo Sabres nicknamed their teammate (and the greatest goalie of all time) Dominik Hasek, “Kramer” because he was so weird and funny (to go with his tall and lanky).
Michael Richards crossed over and appeared as Kramer in a first season episode of Mad About You, playing the guy who subletted Paul’s bachelor apartment.
In another crossover, on The Larry Sanders Show, Hank (Jeffrey Tambor) wakes up on Jerry’s couch.
But most cooly — Sopranos creator David Chase suggested after both series had concluded that his show and Seinfeld should have switched endings.
Think about THAT for a minute. 😉
Various recurring and one-off guest stars (many of whom were not “stars” at the time) —
Jerry Stiller (as George’s father)
Lloyd Bridges (in his final TV appearance)
Philip Baker Hall (the great character actor from Magnolia, Boogie Nights, Argo and about a 150 other movies)
Paul Gleason (who was Jack Kerouac’s friend in the early ’60s)
Brian Doyle-Murray (Bill Murray’s brother)
Bill Macy (Maude‘s husband)
Robert Wagner and real-life wife Jill St. John (Diamonds Are Forever)
George Wendt (from Cheers, whose time-slot Seinfeld took over the following year)
John Randolph (as George’s first father)
Bill Saluga (the “You can call me Ray, …” guy)
Candice Bergen (as Murphy Brown)
Teri Hatcher (and she was spectacular!)
Raquel Welch (and what’s more than “spectacular”?)
Bette Midler (who’s always spectacular!)
Marisa Tomei
Jeanneane Garofalo
Amanda Peet
Catherine Keener
Carol Kane
Kathy Griffin
David Letterman
Larry Miller
Bob Balaban
Stephen Tobolowsky
Clint Howard
Peter Krause
James Spader
Bryan Cranston
Pat Cooper
Wilfred Brimley
Fred Savage
Corbin Bernsen
Bob Odenkirk
John Larroquette
Jon Favreau
Jon Lovitz
Judge Reinholt
Jeremy Piven
Mario Joyner
Taylor Negron
Ben Stein
Courtney Cox pre-Friends
Kristin Davis pre-Sex and The City
Michael Chiklis pre-The Commish
Debra Messing and Megan Mullally pre-Will & Grace
Rob Schneider and Molly Shannon pre-SNL
Sarah Silverman pre-anything
Ana Gasteyer in her first television appearance
Denise Richards, age 21, playing a 15 year old with cleavage
the Farrelly brothers (as writers) before they’d ever done a movie
the Flying Karamazov Brothers in their first and only acting appearance
and Keith Hernandez and numerous other baseball players.
The Vagaries of Network Scheduling:
Season 1 — The pilot originally aired at 9:30 PM on Wednesday, July 5th, 1989, following Night Court.
The four episodes of the first “season” were run as a summer try-out in NBC’s prime slot following Cheers at 9:30 PM Thursdays, in May and June 1990.
Here you can watch Jerry first talking to Johnny Carson about the show the night before the series premiere (starting at 6:30 on the clip) —
Season 2 — ’90 – 91 — When they came back for 12 episodes as a mid-season replacement in January of ’91, they were first slotted in their original 9:30 Wednesday spot following Night Court (replacing the soon-to-be-cancelled Dear John starring Judd Hirsch) and up against time-slot winner Jake And The Fatman. But when NBC’s soap-opera satire Grand underperformed in the post-Cheers slot, they were moved back there for the next 7 episodes, before once again being bumped back to 9:30 Wednesday by the end of the season.
Season 3 — ’91 – ’92 — When they came back for their first full (22 episode) season in the fall of ’91, they were still in their original Wednesday slot following Night Court (now it its final season) but they still consistently lost in the ratings to Jake And The Fatman. At least, for the first time, they stayed in the same slot for the entire season.
Season 4 — ’92 – ’93 — In the fall of ’92 after Night Court finally ended its 8-year run in the spring, Seinfeld moved into their 9 PM Wednesday slot for their 4th season, followed by a new similarly New York 30-something show, Mad About You. But then half-way through that season (in Feb.) they were switched back to the prime 9:30 Thursday slot behind Cheers when Wings was failing to hold the audience. Finally having cracked the Top 30 rated shows in the country (finishing 25th overall for the year) Seinfeld became the network’s heir-apparent when their top-rated Boston bar show finally closed its doors to much hoopla that spring.
Season 5 — ’93 – ’94 — At the start of the fall ’93 season Seinfeld took over the prime 9 PM Thursday slot once Cheers vacated the premises, where they would finish as the 3rd overall show in the ratings for that season.
Season 6 — ’94 – ’95 — Thursdays, 9 PM (for the next 3½ seasons) — finishing the year as the #1 highest rated show on television.
Season 7 — ’95 – ’96 — Thursdays, 9 PM — the last season with Larry David. Finished as 2nd highest rated show of the year, behind only George Clooney’s E.R. (also on NBC).
You can watch the cast and crew talking about the impact of the Larry departure here —
Season 8 — ’96 – ’97 — Thursdays, 9 PM — again finished 2nd only to E.R.
Season 9 — ’97 – ’98 — Thursdays, 9 PM — until January ’98 when the network moved it up to 8:30 for its final five months. The show finished its last season #1 overall in television ratings. The only two other shows in television history that ended while in first place were I Love Lucy (in 1957) and The Andy Griffith Show (1968).
Most watched TV episodes of all time in the U.S.:
#1 — M*A*S*H finale (106 million viewers) #2 — Cheers finale (84 million) #3 — Seinfeld finale (76 million)
Bloopers and Outtakes
You’ve prolly seen every episode many times and there’s no chance you’ll ever see anything new, right?
Don’t be so sure about that!
Check these outtakes! They’re as funny as the show.
Once you get started with this, if you’re on YouTube you’ll see all the other seasons appear in succession at the top of the righthand column.
Also check this “Must See TV” — The Making of An Episode — if you wanna know how this masterpiece was painted. Spoiler alert: it’s all about the writing … 😉
And you can read all the scripts for every episode here.
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For a time-coded and annotated breakdown of Peter Jackson’s epic The Beatles: Get Back and one of the most-read stories here in Brianland go here.
For a great documentary about John Lennon’s first solo concert in Toronto in 1969, check out this clip-rich story about Revival ’69.
