Tag Archives: David Letterman

So long, Dave

Leave a reply

david letterman

It was almost like a sickness.

For a few years in the 1980s, I stayed up every night and watched “Late Night with David Letterman” on NBC. But I didn’t just watch it. I also videotaped it.

And cut out the commercials.

That’s right. I was making my own commercial-free David Letterman video library.

I watched the show from its start just after 12:30 – following the Johnny Carson “Tonight Show” – until it went off an hour later. And, obviously, I loved the show enough to want to preserve it in that manner.

Letterman. Paul. Larry “Bud” Melman. All the rest.

The Alka-Seltzer suit. Dropping things off the tops of buildings. Interrupting other shows, like the bullhorn assault on the “Today” show.

My god, what fun.

Letterman, a fellow Hoosier who I remembered from his time on Indianapolis TV and – kinda – his time on my local radio station, had a masterful grasp of ironic comedy long before others followed. He was funny and absurd and disrespectful and everything anyone would want in a late-night talk show host.

I haven’t watched Dave in a while. The draw of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” was too great. Well, that and having to get up at 6 a.m. to deal with the demands of real life.

I’ve seen a little more of his show lately, since Dave’s departure was imminent. I wouldn’t have missed Bill Murray last night. And I’ll probably be watching tonight, for the final show.

Dave was ahead of his time and of his time. He was the late-night talk show host we deserved and needed. He ranked right up there with Carson in my book and always will.

So thanks, Dave, and so long.

The late, great late night

Leave a reply

colbert-letterman

Yes, back in the 1980s, I was a huge fan of David Letterman. Yes, I stayed up for his 12:30 NBC show – after Carson’s “Tonight Show” – every night. Yes, I videotaped Letterman as I was watching. Yes, I excised commercials.

Yes, in a hall closet that’s been the repository of most of my VHS tapes over the decades – a closet that should be devoted to some more productive use, as I’m sure my wife is thinking as she reads this – are those tapes, buried along with videos recorded over the air of “The X-Files” and “Lois and Clark.”

Yes, I acknowledge it’s strange that I sat up and taped those Letterman shows.

I regret nothing. (Even though I haven’t watched the tapes in years.)

That’s because, back in those days, Letterman was the cutting edge of late-night comedy.

As I’ve noted here before, I was watching Carson from my late childhood or at least early adolescence. Carson was and will ever be the king of late-night. Nobody did it better.

Letterman – another Indiana guy, who spent time here in Muncie, working at the radio station I always listened to and going to college where I later went – was innovative and funny and awkward in all the right moments.

I haven’t watched a lot of Letterman in recent years and maybe it’s ironic that Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” have taken over my late-night viewing – when I can stay awake that late: The days of staying up until the 1:30 a.m. sign-off of Letterman’s old show are long gone.

So I was pretty pleased at this week’s news that Stephen Colbert was going to take over for the retiring Letterman on “The Late Show” next year. Colbert is sharp and funny and heartfelt and he’ll make a great host. I’ll probably check out at least the start of his show after Stewart’s sign-off.

I’m curious if Colbert’s right-wing ass character will “appear” at all on his new show. I’m curious how Comedy Central will replace “Colbert Report.”

You can bet I’ll be checking out Dave’s victory lap in this final year.

Heck, I might even break out some of those 30-year-old tapes and relive Dave’s glory days.

I can always watch those at 7 p.m., when I’m not too sleepy.

Classic TV: Paul Dixon and his show

Leave a reply

Here’s one from the wayback machine for us Midwesterners: Cincinnati-based broadcaster Paul Dixon was the toast of the airwaves in the tri-state area in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Dixon’s show – which aired each morning on Channel 13 in Indianapolis – was a truly goofy local talk and variety show that revolved around Dixon, a self-styled dirty old man, and regulars like singers Bonnie Lou and Colleen Sharp.

One of the things that most appealed to me, as a kid and young adolescent, was just how naughty the Dixon show seemed.

As juvenile and silly as it was – and you can’t get much sillier than a wedding for rubber chickens or a middle-aged man parading around dressed like a baby – the show had a decidedly off-color edge.

Dixon would compliment his nearly-always-exclusively-female audience on their looks, following that up with checking out the miniskirt-wearing front row with a pair of binoculars and declaring himself the “mayor of Kneesville.”

He would then choose a “winner” – usually a  young Cincy housewife – and slip a garter onto her thigh, followed by a “knee tickler,” some faux jewel bauble that would hang below the hem of her skirt. Thus, tickling her knee.

The whole process involved as much good-natured groping of the audience member as was probably allowed on TV at the time.

Not to be forgotten: The T-shirt giveaway that entailed “Paul Baby” helping a woman into a tight shirt, donned over her clothes, that ended up looking like standing-up groping.

For a lot of us kids, watching on sick days or during the summer, it all seemed like forbidden stuff. It sure as heck wasn’t run-of-the-mill daytime TV.

Dixon’s show aired on WLW-TV in Cincinnati from 1955 until shortly following his death in December 1974.

While other local shows might have emulated Dixon’s oddball charm, it’s hard to imagine they duplicated it.

And Dixon’s shadow was long. David Letterman, who has traditionally been as gracious as can be about the type of pioneering Midwestern broadcasters who came before him, like Johnny Carson, spoke to the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1997 and cited Dixon’s influences on his offbeat comedic choices, repeatedly maintaining that Dixon was funnier than he was.

That’s not really the case. But Dixon was truly an original.

 

The romance of radio

2 Replies

The radio was my best friend growing up.

That’s only a mild exaggeration. As a kid growing up on a farm, I didn’t have neighbor kids my age close by. So I spent a lot of time exploring the fringes of my family’s 20-acre farm, the nooks and crannies of our hundred-year-old barn, the nuances of 1960s comic books and the inside of my head.

And the wonderful words and music that came pouring out of my radio.

The other day I was explaining to someone how world-changing a shift the change from AM to FM radio was. I had grown up listening to a local AM radio station, WERK, that featured such personalities as Bill Shirk, David Letterman, Bruce Munson, Tom Cochrun and Gary Demaree. The WERK station and transmitter were not far from where I grew up — along the banks of Buck Creek in southern Delaware County — so it felt like my radio station in a way.

WERK was on the radio on the school bus, if we were lucky and the driver was in a good mood. I still remember one morning when a group of us on the bus were terrified and tantalized when a WERK announcer reported, in mock seriousness, that a Loch Ness-style sea serpent had been spotted in Buck Creek.

Not that I didn’t love the allure, the romance, of far-away stations.

As I drifted off to sleep each night, Chicago’s WLS was my lullaby. I loved imagining the studio of the big-city station, where giants like Larry Lujack worked. I thrilled to imagine the booth where records were spun and the spot where the jocks broadcast and announcers recorded commercials.

Magic.

I’m not alone in being fascinated with the allure — mysterious and personal at the same time — of radio. Remember that scene in the 1973 George Lucas movie “American Graffiti” when a character seeks out real-life DJ Wolfman Jack, finding him holed up in a little building in the California desert, sending his voice out into the night?

There’s not as much magic in radio these days. Maybe it’s because I know how radio, like other businesses, works now. It’s a little like learning how movies are made, or how small TV studios are.

And nothing could hope to equal the memory of lying in bed, small radio on the bedside table, listening to the hypnotic words of a DJ. The guy spinning records was hundreds of miles away — or maybe just a little further south along the banks of Buck Creek — and thousands of people were hearing his voice.

But he was talking to me.