Sheplives

Last Summary Update: 12-21-2015

Nostalgic for radio in pre-trash era
Airdate: Thursday - May 25, 2000

audio

I need a copy of this show. Do you have a copy? email me

First Spoken Line After Theme Ends

Not Determined Yet

Show Description

Jean Shepherd died last fall and, I realize now, not enough attention was paid. Shepherd was a genius of radio, a precursor of Garrison Keillor and better than Keillor (who is very good). He was, above all, a storyteller and he would sit in his studio at WOR in New York night after night, enchanting his listener with tales. Shepherd is perhaps best remembered as the author of "A Christmas Story," an amusing, nostalgic story that, in its movie form, has become a holiday perennial, but his great talent was his ability to talk all night long in a manner that engaged the inquiring mind. I was introduced to him in the mid-'50s, when I happened upon his show as some friends and I were making an all-night drive to New York City. We listened as he told a funny, bittersweet story about his childhood that touched our own recollections of childhood. It went on for a half-hour or more. Then, when he was done, he told another story, no less fascinating, about his time in the service. It went on for 45 minutes. Eventually we turned to each other in amazement and said, "Who is this guy?" I followed his career after that, catching the show when I could, and was never disappointed. Check that. There was a public television show, about Halloween I think, that didn't quite make it He was a radio guy. His only rivals for radio supremacy were Bob and Ray, the madcap comedy team that produced their daily masterpiece in Boston. Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding were not on for hours at a time, as Shepherd was, but they were on every day and every day they produced hilarious skits, parodies and commentaries, doing all the voices themselves; I'm talking fall-down-roll-on-the-floor funny. It was amazing. Shepherd's humor was gentler, less obvious, but no less amazing. I thought of those people the other day when an Internet journal of opinion called TomPaine.com took an ad out in The New York Times attacking the radio "shock jock" Don Imus for the vulgarity and bigotry of his daily show. Imus is the second most successful syndicated morning radio personality, behind Howard Stern. I pretty much agreed with the ad, but it was dispiriting to be reminded that mainstream radio humor, once the province of the like of Shepherd and Bob and Ray, is now inhabited by bottom-dwellers like lmus and Stem. I've tried to listen to Stem once or twice but I've never been able to get beyond two minutes. It is simply awful stuff, sexist, racist, borderline obscene and profoundly unfunny. And, as I said, he is by far the most popular morning radio personality in the nation. Advertisers line up to be associated with this clown. Talk about the dumbing down of America. Lmus is better than that - his show is occasionally funny - but not much better. He generally lets others - notably his producer Bernard McGurk, a boorish lout who makes John Rocker sound like Mr. Rogers - do the heavy lifting so far as the bigoted humor goes, and it goes pretty far. Immigrants, gays and, especially, black people are referred to by vile epithets. Journalist Gwen Ifill, an African American, has been ridiculed as "a cleaning lady" on the show, Cuban-American singer Gloria Estefan as "this little Chihuahua-looking ho" and the New York Knicks as "chest-bumping pimps." lmus, who could be mistaken for Keith Richards' black-sheep brother, habitually attacks people for the way they look, often using his surrogates for the job He or his crew have called a wheel-chair ridden journalist "a cripple," a woman who suffered the amputation of a leg "a pogo stick" and a media critic "a boner-nosed, beanie-wearing Jew boy." All in good fun, he says. Say wha? That stuffs fun at a Ku Klux Klan smoker, not on national radio. What makes the show far more remarkable than Stern's however, is the fact that Imus has achieved respectability usually reserved for Federal Reserve chairmen. It's a politically oriented show and its roster of guests reads like a Who's Who in Washington media: Jeff Greenfield, Tom Brokaw, Tim Russert, Dan Rather, Cokie Roberts, Andrea Mitchell and Howard Fineman, along with politicians like John McCain, AI Gore, Bill Bradley, Sen. John Ashcroft and Sen. Joseph Lieberman. Two years ago Time magazine picked lmus as one of the "25 most influential Americans." The tragedy of that is that it's probably true. As an old editor of mine used to say: "What the hell ever happened to standards?"

So far there is no Description for this show

Commercials (All times approximate)

Not Determined yet

Music (All times approximate)

Not Determined yet

Needs to be ID'd

Engineers, Staff, and Guests in Booth

Not Determined Yet

Instruments and Special Effects Played During the Show

Not Determined

Rating

None Yet