by Paul Shaffer
When I popped the question, Hiram’s eyes lit up. “You kidding?” he said. “I’m in.”
What I didn’t know was that, due to mitigating circumstances, Hiram had hocked his guitar and had to steal it back to make the gig. But make it he did, and in NBC Studio 6A at 12:30 a.m. on February 1, 1982, in New York City, Late Night went on the air.
It was, from the outset, a beautiful thing, a cool combination of casual and off-the-wall, Dave in his chinos and Adidas footwear, me in my jeans, open-neck sports shirts, and Elton John frames, the band smokin’ from the get-go.
The debut show was one of the best—also the scariest. Bill Murray was the guest. His idea was to sing “Let’s Get Physical,” the Olivia Newton-John hit, while actually doing an exercise routine. Bill showed up to discuss the bit, but the discussion was cut off when he said he had to go home to feed his dog. He never came back for rehearsal. Things got even more tense when, just a few minutes before air time, he still wasn’t there. There was no substitute waiting in the wings. No Bill, no show. Finally he came running through the door and we kicked off the routine, totally unrehearsed. We hadn’t even worked out the key. I figured it out as Bill, crooning lounge-lizard style, went from jumping jacks to pushups. At one point he grabbed our female stage manager and did the Shing-a-ling. Somehow, the thing came off—rough, but funny as hell.
Late Night was designed to be different. Unlike Johnny, there would be no second banana, no Ed sitting up there with the host. Later I read that it was Johnny’s explicit intention that Dave not engage a big band. Johnny didn’t want Letterman’s show to echo his in any way. Thus we were free—and even obliged—to travel down new paths.
I admired Johnny’s man, Doc Severinsen, who had played trumpet in the band led by Skitch Henderson, Steve Allen’s conductor on the original Tonight Show. World-class musicians, including stars like Urbie Green, Clark Terry, Ernie Royal, Ed Shaughnessy, Shelly Manne, Pete Christlieb, Tommy Newsom, Grady Tate, Eddie Safranksi, Bucky Pizzarelli, and Lew Tabakin had passed through the ranks.
Now we were carving new wood; we were breaking from tradition with a quartet whose music, unlike Doc’s swinging band, didn’t harken back to the forties or fifties; at the start of the eighties, we looked back to the sixties and seventies for our inspiration.
After our first show, by the way, we got a compliment that still gives me shivers, a message from Tony Williams, Miles Davis’s drummer and one of the swingingest jazz cats on the planet. “It’s a fresh kick,” he wrote in a telegram that we hung in the dressing room. “Keep it up.”
Night after night, Dave kept it up with his wacky antics. Wearing an all-Velcro suit, he plastered himself against a wall; he leaped into a tank of water dressed as an Alka-Seltzer tablet, and into a gooey cheese dip dressed as a chip. Dave opened up the studio by going outside with remote cameras peering into all sorts of unlikely places. He liked to have slow-mo instant replays of the ripe watermelon falling from the roof and splattering on the pavement.
When I was hired, I was told Dave wanted someone to play off. Could I be his foil? Sure. But as those early weeks passed, the opportunity to kibitz never presented itself. I was frustrated.
My friend Harry Shearer, a supporter since SNL, urged me on. “You’re a witty guy, Paul. Let your witticisms fly. Grab the mic.”
But when I grabbed the mic, it was dead.
“What gives?” I asked the engineer in the audio booth. “I tried to speak, but my mic was off.”
“Sorry, Paul,” she said, “but I think they want it off.”
I sought out the producer. “Is my mic supposed to be off?”
“No. On.”
“Then tell the engineer.”
The engineer was told and I was on.
Now what?
The next night when Dave said, “Say hello to my good friend Paul Shaffer,” I was now positioned to take Harry’s advice. “Well, thank you so much, David, and if I may say, it’s such a nutty, mah-velous thrill to be with you this evening. In all of broadcasting, there’s no finer a cat than Your Groovi-nence, my good sir.”
Dave broke up. After the show, he said, “That was great, Paul. Give me more.”
In time, I did. In time, I developed a kind of strange persona. I had spent my life studying the show-biz vets of past eras. Now was my chance to honor them by parodying them. I sincerely adored their insincerity. Their talent was inarguable. Their need to sound educated was my education in jive talk. I loved their language. I took it as my own, even as I illuminated its ludicrousness. I had fun.
For example, I’d tell Dave, “Forgive my hoarseness. I’ve developed a bad case of Vegas throat.”
“What’s that, Paul?”
“Well, man, when an entertainer performs two shows a night in an air-conditioned showroom and then goes out into the dry desert atmosphere, the reed can lose its resonance. Hence, Vegas throat. Can you dig it?”
“Paul, have you been anywhere near Las Vegas in the past year?”
“Not at all, man, but spiritually, like my mentor, Mr. Sammy Davis Jr., I suffer from a chronic case of Vegas throat.”
Once I conspired with our director to set up a split screen—Dave on one side, me on the other.
“David,” I said. “What time is it out there? Here in New York it’s 12:45.”
“Paul, I’m six feet away from you. What are you doing?”
“You know, Dave, I just love that split-screen telethon look with Frank in L.A. talking to Joey in Atlantic City.”
“Talk to me after the show, Paul.”
“Ouch, man.”
It would take years to run out of show-biz clichés. But when I did, I had no choice but to give Dave what he really wanted—natural conversation.
Undoubtedly influenced by Steve Allen’s off-the-wall bits, Dave took it further out and gave it stranger twists. One of my favorite early bits involved Bob Dylan’s favorite character, Larry “Bud” Melman, whose real name was Calvert DeForest. Calvert was a pudgy older guy who wore thick horn-rimmed glasses and personified the lovable nebbish. On one Christmas show, he was set to read “The Night Before Christmas” with kids sitting around him. The prop book was in French because the prop people presumed Calvert would be reading off cue cards. But the cue card people presumed that he’d be reading out of the actual book, and that the book would be in English. So—no cards. The upshot was that Calvert was stuck reading a book to the kids in a language he didn’t know. For several long minutes, he just died out there, fumbling and stalling and, in essence, saying nothing. He was confused, the kids were confused, and the audience most confused of all. When the camera came back to Dave, Dave’s only comment was “It was magic, wasn’t it?” I howled.
I also participated in one of the most bizarre of the early routines. This one was suggested by producer and head writer Merrill Markoe. One day she asked me for the most esoteric information I could think of concerning pop music. I mentioned various guitarists who had played for Parliament-Funkadelic. That was the genesis of this skit:
Dave, Calvert, and I are taking a walk down the hallways of NBC into a deserted stairwell.
Dave says to Calvert, “Who played the guitar solo on ‘Not Just Knee Deep?’”
“You mean the song that ran over fifteen minutes on side A of Funkadelic’s Uncle Jam Wants You album from 1979?” asks Calvert while the audience thinks, How the hell would he know?
“That’s the album,” says Dave, “and the guitarist had to be Eddie Hazel.”
“You’re wrong,” I break in. “It was Garry ‘Starchild’ Shider.”
“You’re both wrong,” Calvert insists. “The guitarist was the great Michael ‘Kidd Funkadelic’ Hampton.”
And so the conversation continues, each of us arguing over whose esoteric knowledge of Parliament-Funkadelic is more accurate, until Calvert pulls out a gun and points it at both of us.
“This is a stickup,” he says. “Just shut up and give me your money.”
At that point, the
erudite discussion ends while Dave and I hand over our wallets to Calvert DeForest.
Dave also liked featuring stand-ups like Ellen DeGeneres, Jerry Seinfeld, and Jerry Lewis’s friend Richard Belzer. Belzer has been my friend since the seventies when I was a recent New York arrival. I met him at a party given by Gilda. At the drop of a hat, the guy would break into his rooster-on-acid imitation of Mick Jagger doing “Satisfaction.” I was impressed. He was, in fact, the first stand-up I’d met in the city. After we talked for a minute, he said, “I need to run over to Catch and do a late set. Be right back.” “Catch” was code for Catch a Rising Star, the famous comedy club where everyone from Andy Kaufman to Larry David had appeared. I loved such show-biz talk. I loved being at a party where a comic could run off to a club, do his act, and return ninety minutes later and give you an in-person rundown of everything he’d just done on stage. I felt blessed.
Some years later, Belzer invited me and Tom Leopold to Catch. By this time, the Belz was the host. After introducing a stand-up, he’d head downstairs to hang out in the basement with an ultra-hip group of insiders. Soon Tom and I became regulars. I’d call Tom and say, “Shall we descend into Belzer’s world?” Eventually the phrase would be truncated to simply, “Shall we descend?” That meant traipsing down to the basement and hanging with the Belz, who would have us in stitches. I’d be down there saying, “Isn’t it great to be hip enough to know Belzer and avoid sitting upstairs in a comfortable air-conditioned nightclub where cute waitresses take your order and bring you whatever you want? Isn’t it far better to be down here in the sweltering heat with the pipes dripping water on your head while Belzer gives you his unbiased nonstop critique of the comics whose acts you can’t even hear?”
The Belz popped up again in my life when he was the warm-up comic on the very first SNL. That was an especially beautiful night because my parents had flown in from Canada. As testimony to their hipness, they went directly from the airport to Jilly’s. When Dad, quick to characterize entertainers, heard Belzer, his comment was “Richard is an intellectual comedian.” Many years later, I took my father to the Friars Club, where he had dinner with Belzer and Robert Klein. He again characterized the situation, saying to himself, “Young comics zinging each other.”
My dad was capable of his own zingers. Once when he and Mom came out to catch me with the Blues Brothers in Hollywood, he was walking through the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel when he happened upon a nun in full habit.
“Going my way?” he asked her, referring to the Catholic-themed Bing Crosby film from 1944.
The sister looked at him and zinged him right back. “Everybody’s in show business.”
My mother could also zing. When I got on Letterman and started kibitzing with the boss, I once asked Dave on camera, “Have you ever had one of those Freudian slips when you mean to say one thing and something else comes out?”
“What do you mean by that, Paul?”
“Well, at dinner with Mom last night I meant to say, ‘Pass the salt,’ but what came out was ‘You bitch, you ruined my fuckin’ life.’”
Big reaction from the audience.
Dave picked up the phone and called my mother in Canada.
“Mrs. Shaffer,” he said, “this is Dave Letterman, and we’re doing the show right now. I just want you to be sure and watch us later tonight. You’ll be especially proud of a certain conversation between Paul and I.”
“Paul and me,” she said, correcting his grammar.
Dave put his hand over the receiver, looked over at me, and said, “I see what you mean now, Paul.”
But of course he was only kidding.
I could never convince Mom of that, though. She was convinced that Dave never had her on the show again because of one thing alone: she had pointed up his grammatical mistake on national television.
And while I’m on zingers, allow me to document the recent roast of Richard Belzer. It was my debut as an official roastmaster. I took the role seriously. I was also heartened by the fact that it was not televised but was the first roast in history open to the general public at the prestigious Town Hall. It is my strong conviction that these roasts should not be televised. The presence of cameras diminishes the intimacy of the insults; and intimate insults are what roasts are all about. This is how I opened:
“Town Hall—last time I was here I was eating Odetta. Seriously, though, my question tonight is ‘What makes a man the Belz?’ I begin with the notion of courage. When I approached Richard about this evening, he said, ‘Paul, nothing is off limits. Do what you have to do. Say what you have to say.’ So Belzer has no problem with my joking about the fact that his lovely wife, Harlee, is a former softcore porn actress. And the reason he has no problem is because there’s such a big difference between softcore and hardcore pornography. In softcore, it just looks like she’s rimming out the black guy’s anus.
“But, I ask you again, what makes a man the Belz? We who are privileged to call ourselves Richard’s close friends know that he endured a tough childhood. His own rabbi sucked his cock. This was right around the time of Richard’s bar mitzvah. But that doesn’t make him the Belz. It makes him a man who’s gotta jerk off into a tallis, but it doesn’t make him the Belz.”
A tallis, of course, is the prayer shawl of the Jewish faith.
The Belz, Jewish to the bone, loved every minute.
Chapter 31
Blues, Brother
I loved John Belushi. Everyone who knew him loved him. You had to. John’s craziness only made you love him more. That’s because no matter what he was doing—even dancing on the graves of his fellow performers in that classic SNL film piece—you knew that he had a heart of gold. His energy was not normal. Neither was his love of life, on or off the stage. You wanted to be in his company. He wanted to make you laugh, and he did. He wanted to make you happy, and he did that too. His spirit was something to behold: Those close to him—coworkers, friends, and family alike—are fortunate to have known him.
When the news came of John’s death, my reaction was disbelief, then shock, then unrelenting sadness. The magnitude of the tragedy took a long, long time to sink in. Cathy and I went to John and his wife Judy’s house on Morton Street in the Village. Judy stayed downstairs, where she mourned alone. At one point I was asked to join her. “Paul,” she said, “the memorial service is going to be held at St. John the Divine. John loved Jackson Browne’s ‘For a Dancer.’ Please play it in his honor.” She also requested that saxophonist Tom Scott play a solo on the song. Tom had been in the Blues Brothers band, but he and John had had a falling out during the making of the movie Neighbors. It was important to Judy that this song serve as their reconciliation.
The service itself was quite amazing. I know John would have found it amusing, if only because it was the first church service I’d seen with a velvet rope and a bouncer with a list. It was like trying to get into Studio 54. I barely made it past the rope myself. Afterward, during the limo ride to the after-funeral, I heard a woman say, “I was thinking about how John’s brother Jim said in his eulogy that so many people here had probably taken their first limo ride with John. I had my first Lear ride with John.” For whatever reason, that struck me as so funny, I had to repeat the line. “Had my first Lear ride with John.” My companion and former Blues Brother drummer Steve Jordan fell out laughing.
Years later, I was in Los Angeles. I had just flown in from New York and was at the car rental office near the airport. The clerk recognized me and said, “I know you played with John Belushi. He was a great star. You know, he was in one of our cars when he had his little thing.”
Dear God, I thought to myself, the man is describing John’s death as “his little thing.” Then I asked myself, Was he really in the car when he died? Well, no, not literally. Contractually.
The more I considered the “had his little thing” phrase and the unapologetic pride with which it was uttered, the more I was convinced that John would have appreciated such a description of h
is demise. Irony—deep, rich, and always a little twisted—was at the heart of John’s comedy.
Chapter 32
I’m No Homophobe, or How I Came to Co-write “It’s Raining Men”
Even after I was hired by Letterman, I continued to play recording sessions. I did so because I liked the work, the challenge, and the camaraderie. When the phone rang in the morning, the caller might be anyone from Yoko Ono to the ad man/mad man in charge of the new Speed Stick campaign. I was always ready to run out to a studio gig.
Enter my good friend Ron Dante. Ron was an early supporter of mine, a lovely guy and Barry Manilow’s producing partner. Barry was on top of the world and Ron was right there with him. I’d played on some of Barry’s early hits, such as “Somewhere in the Night,” “Jump, Shout, Boogie” and “Ready to Take a Chance Again.” Ron was ready to take a chance on me again when he came looking for an arranger for his new artist Paul Jabara.
Paul would win an Oscar for writing the disco hit “Last Dance” by Donna Summer. But back in the seventies, he was just a new artist with a few hot ideas. Would I write arrangements for him? Sure.
By the way, to say that Paul was gay would be like saying Ben-Hur was a movie with a small chariot race. Paul had a strong sense of how to speak to the gay club audience.
I arranged a few early disco tracks for Paul, including a song called “One Man Ain’t Enough.” Apparently it wasn’t, because the song never went anywhere. But Paul was definitely working toward a groovy thing.
A few years later he called me, very excited. “Donna Summer’s been cold for a little while, and I got the title that’s gonna bring her back. You were so great arranging ‘One Man Ain’t Enough,’ I want you to help me compose this one.”
“What’s the title?” I asked.
