Beethoven
Airdate:
Thursday - December 7, 1972 (Airdate Confirmed)
WOR Show Original Airing
(NOTE ABOUT TIME REFERENCES: Since there are many different copies of shows out there from different sources, all time references are from the beginning of one single recorded copy, since various copies, depending on when the recordee started recording, had news at the beginning or shortened themes. The times would vary from copy to copy.)
First Spoken Line After Theme Ends
They're doing a salute to Julie Andrews. . .
Show Description
Scratches are the dandruff of the stereo world?
[ Courtesy: GROK Summary - - ]
Opening / New York as sensory erosion
Shepherd half-apologizes for being rough on sensitive listeners and points them toward a Julie Andrews salute. He then treats a typical New York day as something that doesn’t excite the senses so much as grind them down. Canyon-dwellers (New Yorkers) barely see the sun, so they become sun-worshippers and fall for Jamaica commercials—then get rain and 40-degree weather. What you worship is what you can’t have. Smell is the prime example: dogs, musk shops in the Village, ambergris jokes. Senses end up like eroded mountains—pitted, cracked, no longer peaks.
Beethoven and technology
A scratchy Beethoven record becomes the night’s running joke (“scratches are the dandruff of the stereo world”). He imagines Beethoven at the piano, eating cheese, paying rent, writing while deaf. One theory: if he’d been able to hear the mediocre music around him, he’d have written ordinary stuff; deafness let him produce the Fifth. Van Cliburn-level pianists and 12,000-year harp lineage all collapse onto a piece of wax that skips. He tosses in a mock-profound Sophocles line (“What boots this cruise that I carry?”) for use at the luncheonette.
Ads and the Philadelphia bit
House of Chan (52nd & 7th) and Gramercy Park Clothes (64 W. 23rd) get the usual Shep commercial treatment. Then the “important announcement”: Saturday noon at Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia he’ll sign *The Ferrari in the Bedroom* and write in the obscenities the post office wouldn’t allow. Long riff on Philadelphia as the ancestral home of the boo-bird—Independence Hall, kickoff, every sport everywhere.
Mailing lists, Watergate, and the nudist-camp heist
Living in the canyon makes people hard and insensitive (Archie Bunker is a New York product, not Ames, Iowa). Joining clubs puts you on lists that get sold; he compares a Jersey nudist-camp file theft (armed men posing as FBI) to Watergate—probably someone after another mailing list.
The cab-driver story (the heart of the show)
In Times Square traffic a big, crew-cut cabbie named Herman turns out to be a nudist since 1943 and a recurring “star” of nudist magazines—the comic-relief type (hairy watermelon with feet on a swing, getting suntan oil by the pool). He hands over dog-eared magazines, points to page 42 and page 64, and invites Shepherd to a Thursday meeting on W. 23rd. Shepherd realizes he’s riding with a celebrity of a very specialized world.
Minor-celebrity coda
That leads to neighborhood fame: the Tenth Street barbershop regular whose claim to glory is that Henny Youngman once sat at his Copa table and told him to call him Henny; the barber who once watched Rocky Graziano put mustard on a pastrami sandwich. A listener writes that his sister went to school two blocks from Johnny Carson’s school, so of course he knows show business. Unsung famous men are everywhere. If Herman is listening: you looked great on that swing.
Closes with the station ID and a handoff to Les Smith and the news. Classic Shepherd: one long, looping monologue that starts with Beethoven and eroded senses and ends with a Times Square cabbie who is a nudist-magazine Falstaff.
News Articles Read by Shep During Show
Shep would often read articles he recently read or were sent in by fans
This Show
