COMMENTARY
Jeff Simon: Paul Shaffer’s saga has its own uh-ohs
Page 264 brought me up short: “Donna [then] takes me to the trailer park run by her Dad, who turns out to be rock and roll royalty. He was the saxman for the Rockin’ Rebels. Suddenly we all break into a video-style romp, doing the Rebels’ 1962 smash ‘Wild Weekend’ and everyone in the trailer park is dancing up a storm.”
No, that’s not supposed to be reality, it’s a scene from the intentionally “Fellini- esque” 1986 Cinemax special “Viva Shaf Vegas” as described by Paul Shaffer in his wildly entertaining “We’ll Be Here for the Rest of Our Lives: A Swinging Showbiz Saga” (Flying Dolphin/Doubleday, 323 Pages, $26.)
Buffalo pop music scholars and/or early ’60s teens will recognize what might merrily be called the “local angle”—that “Wild Weekend” was, in fact, the subsequent singles version of the radio theme song of WKBW radio’s Tommy Shannon. Who else but a musical boy from Thunder Bay, Ont., (well within WKBW’s monster signal) and then Toronto would describe a member of the Rockin’ Rebels as “rock and roll royalty?”
And there you have a specimen part of the rollicking pleasure of Paul Shaffer’s book, which is riotously entertaining but not in any way you might guess. Anyone expecting tales out of school and dripping blood from his regular job—David Letterman’s band-leader and deeply conflicted showbiz-parodying sidekick—is out of luck.
Recent events have guaranteed that in the next couple of years, real writers —journalists and otherwise—will have a go at Letterman backstage books.
For now, Shaffer is in “Are you nuts? I’m keeping my job” mode. Even so, this book is full of all manner of accidental stickiness in the current climate, which may account for its failing to be widely appreciated as the hugely entertaining professional musician’s scramble that it is.
It is a fact of cultural life that professional musicians of the Shaffer ilk and itinerary are commonly great storytellers, especially if, like Shaffer, the other half of his professional life has been spent among people like Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, Martin Short, Eugene Levy and Richard Belzer.
Even so, the book is jammed with moments that are pure “uh-oh” in the current climate. For instance:
• Many pages of stories about his “pal” and idol Phil Spector. “I regret all the tragedy that has surrounded Phil in recent years,” which is a perversely loyal kind of way of referring to the fact that Spector is now serving time for murdering C-movie actress Lana Clarkson. (That will happen when you’re spotted right afterward holding a smoking gun and saying, “I think I just killed someone.”)
• A long sketch of Mackenzie Phillips —who reveals a decade of incest with father John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas in her current tell-all—not being able to go anywhere in Hollywood without hearing “horror stories” about her old man. Tossed off at the same time is this about Shaffer’s “fun dates” with Valerie Bertinelli when “she was sixteen, I was twenty-seven, but as
R. Kelly would say, who’s counting?” (A joke that was, no doubt, a lot funnier before Switzerland decided to help L. A. collect the legal debt on Roman Polanski’s rape of a 13-year-old and his own boss’ relationships with staff, reportedly including interns, became a headline caravan in New York tabloids.)
But so help me the music stories— the lion’s share of the book—are priceless. And so is Shaffer’s pilgrim’s progress from Yonge Street strip joints in Toronto to being the kind of guy who was just too busy to say yes to playing the part of George on “Seinfeld.”
With a co-writer— DavidRitz— who is almost his EXACT literary counterpart, the book is soulless, ultra-professional, more than a little corrupt and as entertaining as all hell.
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