Tag Archives: radio

Pointless Nostalgia

The Snark, Hunted

You may recall that a while back, I wrote a post about a failed attempt to do a “dramatic reading” of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem, “The Hunting of the Snark.” Nevermind; you don’t recall that. Nor should you.

Regardless, the reason I made that failed attempt is because Jean Shepherd used to read this poem on his radio show, and his recitations of it were one of my dad’s favorite things. He would attempt to recreate the effect by repeating certain lines in his best Shepherdian low. For the snark was a boojum, you see…

I could only guess at what Shepherd’s own version sounded like, because even though he reportedly read the poem on the air many times, there were no examples readily available. I scanned the darkest depths of the interwebs for months until I decided that alas, all of Shep’s readings were lost to the mists of time.

And then this morning, a man named David Director emailed me. He had a college roommate who taped many Shep shows in the early 1960s, as Shep fans often did back in the day. He had the foresight to make copies of some of his roommate’s tapes, including a series of shows from January 29-31, 1963, during which Shepherd read “The Hunting of the Snark” in its entirety.

David was kind enough to send me an mp3 of Shep reading the introduction to the poem (“Fit the First”) and to also give permission to share it here. So now, thanks to David (and his erstwhile roommate, David Singer), I present to you Jean Shepherd reading the opening to “The Hunting of the Snark.” Enjoy.

[audio:http://scratchbomb.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/shep_snark_Fit_the_First.mp3]
Pointless Nostalgia

Jean Shepherd: Strange Tales of New York

shep2I have often waxed at great length about my love of Jean Shepherd’s radio show, here and elsewhere. I’ve written about and shared many kinds of programs of his over the years: nostalgic, anti-nostalgic, childhood tales, army tales, philosophical meanderings, and various combinations of the above.

Another thing he did well on his shows—something I haven’t really touched on before—is his ability to convey a mood of eeriness, of creeping, unnameable terror. Around Halloween, he loved to dedicate shows to stories about the Jersey Devil (and occasionally its lesser known cousin, the Kentucky Devil). He did many other shows about the pull of the supernatural and the fear of ghosts. But more often, he would talk about the terror of the everyday, the weird, creepy things happening right under our noses.

For no good reason at all, I want to share one such show, which aired on April 14, 1970. It starts with Shep sharing a bone-chilling news story from New Orleans, where creepy things tend to happen with some regularity. But then he shifts into a tale from the days when he first moved to New York, and his somewhat desperate attempts to find friendship in a city that can make newcomers feel crushingly alone. The story starts out amusing, involving wild parties, random encounters, and lapsed drunken monks (really), but it quickly deteriorates into a sad and chilling arena. Shep closes out the show with another story, this one about helping a friend investigate an apartment he’s interested in renting. Finding a place to live in New York is terrifying enough, but this story goes beyond even the usual level of terror and into a special, weird place.

Though Shep’s stories in this show refer to things that happened in the 1950s and 1960s, there’s something eternally New York about these stories, a very New York brand of loneliness and sadness and squalor that few people wrote about then and even fewer write about now. I found it genuinely unnerving to listen to because it all felt so real to me, and I find it amazing he was able to convey this feeling with only his voice (although a creepy Stockhausen composition helped, I suppose).

Enjoy (if that’s the word). Just don’t listen to it with the lights off.

[audio:http://scratchbomb.com/media/1970-04-14-Strange-Tales-of-NY.mp3]
Tuneage

This Is Your 6:30 AM Wake Up Shriek

I don’t get a lot of sleep. Between parenting, various external and internal obligations, and my own Night Owl inclinations, it’s rare that I get a solid eight hours. Or seven. And even six is kinda pushing it.

As a result, I stay in bed as long as humanly possible each morning. More often than not, I don’t roll out of bed earlier than one second before I have to. But there is one thing that can get me leaping out of bed: radio ads for Broadway shows.

I’m not a Broadway Person. Not saying that to make myself seem superior to Broadway People; if that’s your thing, good for you. I’m simply saying it’s not for me. And the fact that it’s not for me is reinforced each time I hear a commercial for a musical at the crack of dawn.

Our alarm is set to WCBS News Radio. Apart from criminal amounts of John Sterling soundbites during baseball season, WCBS also airs tons of spots for Broadway musicals. Considering the average shelf life of a Broadway musical (i.e., not very long), these ads are run with an insane amount of saturation. If a show is about to debut, you are virtually guaranteed to hear an ad for it once or twice each commercial break.

Since these spots air incessantly first thing in the morning when I’m half awake and the human brain is at its most vulnerable, they’re imprinted on my brain. Even if a certain show didn’t run for very long, an ad for it probably ran in such heavy rotation I can recite it word for word (or warble for warble). I still distinctly remember an ad for a revival of Thoroughly Modern Millie, which ended with the titular character belting out MIL-LIEEEEEE! And there’s a commercial for Wicked that’s aired for years, in which the Wicked Witch (I think) sings about being so happy she could melt, in that ear-punishing Broadway fashion that makes me want to melt. My own brains. With a glock.

These are all simply annoying, the kinds of sounds I don’t want to hear first thing in the morning. But I’ve recently heard a Broadway ad that slips out of the surly bounds of annoying and attains the status of Maddening. As in, it could actually drive you crazy. I’m pretty sure it was engineered in a CIA lab for the purposes of psychic warfare.

It comes from the musical adaptation of Pedro Almodovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. I have not seen this musical and almost certainly will not see it. I haven’t even seen the movie, though I know it’s considered a classic. So I can not comment on the quality of the production or its source material. What I can say is that, if this is the first thing you hear when you wake up, after 5+ hours of fitful sleep, there is a 50 percent chance you will go insane.

Here’s the audio, although I only suggest playing it if you’re running low on nightmare fuel or you enjoy acid flashbacks. Enjoy! (Click here if that player down there don’t work for ya.)

[audio:http://66.147.244.95/~scratci7/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/wotvoanb1.mp3|titles=Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown]