by Paul Shaffer
The coda to this story took place in the exclusive celebrity-hangout restaurant Nobu in the downtown Tribeca district of New York City. I was dining with Harry Shearer when who should walk in but Mr. Gibson himself. As he walked by our table, he stopped, regarded me, and said, “Ah, the Slasher.”
“Hi, Mel,” I said. “I hope the first-aid kit helped.”
“Very funny,” he replied with a hearty laugh.
Another bizarre cross-cultural phenomenon took place between me and the honorable senator from Idaho, Larry Craig, he of the wide stance. This occurred before Craig’s unfortunate arrest in an airport bathroom. Strangely enough, we were involved in a musical collaboration.
Cathy’s brother Joe had arranged a fund-raiser at his home in Washington, D.C., for a worthy children’s adoption organization. He asked me to play at the event and requested that, as part of the program, I include Senator Craig, a supporter of the cause. Apparently the senator had a broad knowledge of Broadway musical tunes. In some circles, such knowledge would be viewed suspiciously, but I cared not. I was delighted to go to the Capitol and meet with the senator. We chose a song to perform together. In retrospect, the choice seems unfortunate—“Any-thing You Can Do I Can Do Better”—but at the time it seemed right, especially sung with a set of special lyrics. We performed it in my brother-in-law’s home. The Shaffer/Craig duo was received warmly, and a great deal of money was raised. The benefit was a success. After that, I never saw the senator again on either a personal or professional basis to the best of my recollection. I swear.
Returning to the subject of Shaffer slipups, I am obliged to include an incident involving that fabulous star of the silver screen, Miss Julia Roberts. Millions of men, myself included, have secret and not-so-secret crushes on this delightful actress. But few are actually designated to ask her questions about her love life. Alas, that was my mandate.
When Miss Roberts appeared on Letterman, Dave was understandably nervous asking about her personal life. She had just ended a relationship. Because she is so genuinely sweet, one does not want to invade her privacy. During the opening segment, Dave danced around the issue. He was afraid to ask her whether she was dating again and, if so, who the lucky guy might be. His reluctance added to the humor of the interview.
In the second segment, there was a discussion of whether the delicate question should be asked by me. Always a good sport, Julia asked the audience to vote—“Should we allow Paul to question me or not?” The yea’s had it, and the camera turned in my direction.
“So Julia,” I said, pausing for comic effect, “are you getting laid these days?”
The audience went crazy as Dave jumped out of his chair, screaming, “Paul, are you nuts!” He came over to the band area in a mock assault on me, but Julia, putting her arms around Dave from behind, held him back.
When Julia and Dave returned to the desk, Dave continued the charade, saying, “Paul, Julia may be very sensitive about the topic. This isn’t a bachelor party, my friend.”
Julia continued the chastisement, adding, “That was wrong on so many levels, Paul.”
Then Dave, a master of timing, allowed a beat or two to go by before turning to the gorgeous movie star and saying, “But what about it, Julia?”
Julia loved the whole thing and, as we went to commercial, came over to plant a kiss on my forehead. Eugene Levy saw it and said, “She kissed you like Snow White kissing one of the seven dwarves.” I’ll take it.
Before getting off the subject of ladies, let me mention one of pop culture’s favorite creatures, Miss Britney Spears.
My Britney incident coincides with the period when she had just presented her husband, Kevin Federline (K-Fed, as he’s known among the Us Weekly crowd), with divorce papers. It was all over the news. As it turned out, Britney was in New York and had called our show, saying she’d like to come on.
Well, if Miss Spears excels at anything, it’s proving that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Her request to appear on Letterman was her way of saying, “Yes, I might be going through a divorce, but I’m slim and I look terrific.” (At the time, she was still sporting undergarments.)
Be that as it may, Britney had become somewhat of a regular on Letterman in that she had developed the habit of dropping by to say hello unannounced, much like Bob Hope used to do with Johnny Carson.
Realizing this, one of our producers set about orchestrating a gag. For musical accompaniment, I was to play “Thanks for the Memories,” a wink and a nod to the Hope/Carson connection. The song, of course, was Bob’s theme.
Cut to me, riding the elevator, with none other than the luminous Miss Spears.
She looked fantastic.
After exchanging cursory greetings and pleasantries, I wanted to explain why, when she came out later that evening, she’d hear this old-fashioned song, so I said, “You know, you’re a regular Bob Hope, dropping in on our show all the time.”
And she said, “Who’s Bob Hope?”
“Well, dear, before your time, there was a beloved comedian named Bob Hope.” Nada.
“He was wildly popular during the golden age of television.” Zilch.
“He went all over the world with the USO, entertaining the troops for morale.” Still no reaction.
“There’s a street named after him in Burbank,” I said. “Oh yeah! Right!”
We rode for the next several seconds in silence. I heard her thinking. Then a lightbulb lit above her adorable head. She broke into a smile and, pointing right at me, said, “Oh, you’re Dave’s deejay, aren’t you? That’s who you are!”
Let me say that I respect the art form of the deejay. And though Ms. Spears’s characterization of me may have been somewhat unorthodox, I began to think, In the Spears universe, deejays are what’s happening. Deejays are cool.
Thus, I took the handle of deejay as a compliment.
But then I thought even further. Perhaps there was some merit to actually becoming a deejay. Why, the deejay Grandmaster Flash was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame! Wouldn’t I like to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? What’s more, celebrities dated deejays. Deejay AM dated Nicole Richie and recently was seen with Mandy Moore. Deejay Samantha Ronson dated Lindsay Lohan. I’d like to date Lindsay Lohan. Maybe the deejay life was just what I needed. I’d call myself deejay PM because I only work a few hours in the afternoon taping Letterman.
Ms. Spears has since moved on with her career. I, meanwhile, have begun to study turntablism. I’m making progress. I’m getting pretty good.
Chapter 40
On the Night Shift
Whole books have been written about what have come to be known as the Late-Night Wars. They were waged in the early nineties when the glorious reign of Johnny Carson was coming to an end. As Dave’s friend and loyal soldier, I was close to the action but not really part of it. My position was clear: whatever was good for Dave was good for me.
When rumors first started flying, Dave called me into his office and said it plainly: “They’re thinking about giving us the 11:30 spot, Paul. What do you think?”
“That’d be great. But I’m also loving this late spot. I’ve been having a ball.”
“Well, let’s just see how it plays out.”
Ultimately it played out in Dave’s favor. CBS gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse—the 11:30 spot, creative freedom, and a beautiful midtown theater on Broadway. The network was willing to renovate the Ed Sullivan Theater, historically one of the most important venues in American entertainment, for our exclusive use.
At the time, I had started my second album, this one with the band. Naturally I wanted to call it The World’s Most Dangerous Band. The musical concept was my group playing Booker T.—style numbers like “Green Onions” and “Hip-Hug-Her.” The entertainment concept was to do it like a party. Guests would pop in between songs to greet me. I especially liked Lou Reed’s line: “Sorry I’m late, Paul, but I had to come all the way over from the Wild Side.” Marty Short
showed up as old-time songwriter Irving Cohen: “Give me a C, a bouncy C.”
Ringo dropped by.
“I’m knocked out that a Beatle is here,” I told him. “Will you sit in, Ringo?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Great, man,” I said, “will you play ‘Love Me Do’?”
“Absolutely,” Ringo agreed, “but that’s the one Beatles song I didn’t play on.”
Phil Spector’s appearance was a coup. When we had our brief party chitchat at the start of one song, I put his voice in a booming reverb, as if he traveled everywhere with his own echo chamber.
I regret all the tragedy that has surrounded Phil in recent years. We’re not as in touch, but the mad genius will always be my friend. I will continue to praise his work and honor his exalted place in the history of our musical culture.
I was thrilled when Eartha Kitt agreed to say hello on the record. I ran over to the Carlyle, where she was appearing. In between shows she was totally in character—an impatient, mysterious goddess. She purred her answers to my questions, but, alas, I was so nervous I messed up the tape recorder and came up blank. But Eartha had pity on me. She dropped the goddess bit and invited me back the next night. More relaxed, I explained that Letterman would soon be moving to the Ed Sullivan Theater, where she had appeared countless times.
“Yes, my dear,” she said. “Ed was so devoted to me he built me a special dressing room above his on the third floor.”
“Why, Miss Kitt,” I said, “that’s the very dressing room that’s been assigned to me. What an honor!”
The sultry singer purred her approval and gave me fabulous party chatter for my record. From that moment on, I have never undressed in my dressing room without invoking the image of the eternally seductive Miss Eartha Kitt. When she recently passed, I lit a candle and placed it atop the dresser that had once been hers.
The final guest at the record party was my pal Richard Belzer, playing his iconic character Detective Munch. Munch came in at the end to bust us all. It was a blast.
The problem, though, was that I couldn’t call the record The World’s Most Dangerous Band. Apparently that name belonged to NBC as “intellectual property.”
“Maybe so,” said my father, who had come to New York for a visit. “Legally they may have you, Paul, but as I recall you’re on excellent terms with NBC president Robert C. Wright.”
Dad was right; Wright and his wife, Suzanne, had always been especially cordial to me.
“Call the man,” my father suggested. “With one wave of his wand he can make the legal problems disappear.”
When I called, Wright’s secretary put me right through.
“Happy to hear from you, Paul,” said the network exec. “Sorry to see you go.”
I explained my situation. It seemed a most modest request. Just let me keep my band’s name.
“It is certainly reasonable,” said Wright, “but I’m afraid that matters of intellectual property go beyond the jurisdiction of this office. There’s nothing I can do.”
Oh well, I lost an old name but gained a new network.
The record, produced by Todd Rundgren, was mainly cut in Woodstock. Woodstock, in rural New York state, has a distinguished musical history, but as previously noted, I don’t like woods. Who needs fresh air and clear country skies? I would have preferred to work in polluted Manhattan where the fumes from Tin Pan Alley are too powerful to ever die. I nonetheless put up with the beauteous bucolic setting, made the double-CD record, and was forced to call it Paul Shaffer and the Party Boys of Rock ‘n’ Roll: The World’s Most Dangerous Party.
The World’s Most Dangerous Band, as both a name and an entity, had to be retired. A new birth was required. The powers that be wanted a larger configuration than the quartet of Shaffer, bassist Will Lee, drummer Anton Fig—one of the giants of his instrument, who can play with Kiss one day and Dylan the next—and master guitarist Sid McGinnis, renowned for, among other things, his work for Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon. For this new band, Dave suggested a name along the lines of Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra. I bought his suggestion immediately. I liked it because of its historical resonance; I thought of Skitch Henderson and the NBC Orchestra. Skitch had been the Tonight Show’s first musical director, followed by Milton Delugg and Doc Severinsen. I was happy to carry a name that referenced such a noble tradition.
But how to augment the band?
My first picks were Bernie Worrell—the keyboardist and “Flashlight” behind George Clinton’s unending funk—and the wonderfully versatile and inventive guitarist Felicia Collins, whom I stole from Cyndi Lauper’s band. Turned out that Bernie was covering some of the same territory as I. The redundancy didn’t quite work, and I realized I needed to add horns. Horns meant arrangements and more complex voicings. A horn band can never be as flexible as a simple rhythm section. But the players I chose are masters of flexibility: Tom Malone, whom I knew from SNL and the Blues Brothers, plays every ax from piccolo to tuba; Bruce Kapler knows more tunes than I do; and Al Chez is the Maynard Ferguson of rock and roll.
With this new band, I’ve had any number of occasions to back hip-hoppers. The show insists on a more musical presentation than just a turntable and a rapper. The show insists on all-the-way live. It got all-the-way live when we jammed with Jam-Master Jay and Run-D.M.C., Snoop Dogg, The Game, and 50 Cent. Live Hip-Hop—What A Concept!
In moving from a quartet to an octet, our new band mirrored Dave’s move from NBC to CBS. Things got bigger and better. Whereas before I let the guests come out to bare applause, now I was asked to create what we in our industry—and by our industry I mean, of course, our business—call “play-ons.”
My band and I would get together before the show and, for ten minutes or so, it’d be free-association time. Everyone would throw out ideas for songs that seemed to match the guests. I’d pick the one that made me laugh hardest and use it for the play-on.
Examples:
Ellen DeGeneres: “I’m a Girl Watcher.”
Marv Albert, who famously insisted that his hairpiece was a weave, not a wig: “Dream Weaver.”
Tom Snyder and Craig Ferguson, who at different times had been tapped for a talk show after Letterman: “I Will Follow Him.”
Nicole Kidman: “Skin Tight.”
John McCain: “Beautiful Loser.”
Kyra Sedgwick, star of The Closer: “The Closer I Get to You.”
Politicians could be especially sensitive. When we chose “Soul Man” to play Bob Dole on—only because it rhymed with “Dole Man”—Senator Dole was surprisingly pleased, so much so that he used the song for the remainder of his presidential campaign, much to the dismay of its composers.
When Al Gore came on, I ran into one of his Secret Service guys backstage. “Hey, Paul,” the armed gentleman said, “whatever you do, please don’t play ‘You Can Call Me Al.’ It’s way too obvious.”
“Oh,” I said. “What would you suggest?”
“‘Tennessee’ by Arrested Development.”
Wow. A hipster in the Secret Service.
Chapter 41
Bad Taste
Taste in comedy is a tricky issue. I leave it to the metaphysicians to clarify that thin line between wildly funny and wildly inappropriate. The problem is that wildly inappropriate often equals wildly funny. Sometimes the most hysterical joke is the most tasteless. The very absence of taste is what makes a lot of stuff funny.
Case in point: A Chevy Chase roast I was asked to emcee.
This happened years after Chevy was the biggest comedy star in the country.
I was fond of kidding Chevy, just as Chevy was fond of kidding everyone else. It’s what we did.
When the Friars Club wanted to roast Chevy, it would be for the second time. Chevy was reluctant, and for good reason. There are three prerequisites for making a good roast:
First, roast the star when the star’s on top. When a star’s up, it’s okay to knock him down. But when he’s down, knocking him furth
er down isn’t necessarily funny.
Second, recruit friends of the star. Make sure that the roasting is done by people who love the star so genuinely that their vitriol is born of affection, not real rancor.
Third, don’t televise. TV kills the intimacy and murderous fellowship that are the hallmarks of a memorable roast.
Unfortunately, Chevy’s second roast failed on all three counts. Chevy only accepted because the sponsor offered to donate $100,000 to his wife’s charity. He may have also accepted because he had fond memories of his first roast. That’s when Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and a slew of studio heads flew in to sit on the dais. This was different, however. De Niro and Pacino were nowhere in sight, and, in fact, the only people on the dais who actually knew Chevy were myself, Laraine Newman, Beverly D’Angelo, and Al Franken. Al, by the way, may not have loved Chevy like the rest of us did.
The dais was so bereft of A-list celebs that I began the roast with a song called “We Couldn’t Get Anybody Good.” The lyrics went like this:
Tonight is Chevy’s big night
We called his friends to invite them all to join us
And roast him
But nobody would.
[Chorus girl one]: Does he have a career? [Chorus girl two]: I think he died last year. [All]: We couldn’t get anybody good.
Toward the end of the song, I was handed a fedora and a raincoat that I threw over my shoulder. In Sinatra style, I sang, “How sad the dais! You call this a show? How can you roast a man when no one will go and sit on the dais? Jack shit for a dais. How sad the dais! It blows!”
My monologue was pretty rough and, naturally, in bad taste. At the same time, I realized that some taste was required. That’s why I decided not to use this line: “I don’t really recognize anyone on the dais. Well, that looks like John McEnroe over there. But if you’re here, John, who’s beating up Tatum O’Neal?” Horrible taste.
