Fans appreciate band making its music assessable to them.
Kansas City Star
By Joel Francis
Jam band.
The words evoke images of tie dyed clothing, long hair, VW vans and the aroma of perspiration and smoke.
Yet despite its improvisational and organic nature, the genre is diverse and its fans are committed.
Take Moe, the upstate New York quintet.
“One thing I’ve discovered is that people don’t come to our shows by accident,” guitarist Al Schnier said. “If you show up, you’ve meant to be there. Either you’re a fan, or a friend goaded you into coming, or you heard our music.”
Some of those conscientious first-timers are likely to be surprised by what they hear. The twin-guitar attack of Schnier and Chuck Garvey owes just as much to Eddie Van Halen as it does Duane Allman.
“The thing about the jam band scene is that there’s a wide spectrum of music,” Schnier said. “The Yonder Mountain String Band are essentially a bluegrass band, but they put on a long show that stretches out and is definitely not the traditional bluegrass structure. Then there’s the Disco Biscuits, who incorporate progressive rock, classical and electronica into their shows and music. And yet both are jam bands.”
Keeping fans in the fold is vital to a band that tours hard and makes records sparingly. Moe hasn’t yet released a follow-up to 2003’s “Wormwood.”
“Going into the studio is still something we struggle with,” Schnier said. “I’m not sure it makes sense financially. After 15 years, we’ll get some … radio play, but I don’t expect us to cross over into the mainstream. We can’t afford to pay radio enough to play our records.”
So on its Web site, the band states that “audience taping is highly recommended at all times.” Those live recordings give fans some new material to listen to, but even Schnier admits: “My favorite things to listen to are not live albums but studio recordings: ‘OK Computer’ or Abbey Road’.”
Moe returned to the studio not once, but twice this year. Early recording sessions resulted in “vague, lifeless versions” of songs the band first presented long ago in concert. So the band returned, “deconstructed the songs and exploited the studio,” Schnier said.
With one studio album in the can and a live DVD planned for fall release, new songs are floating around.
“We’re geared up to do a studio album of new material, which we can take out and premier live like a traditional band does,” Schnier said,. “We constantly have material. It’s a matter of scheduling it in. The other side of being in a jam band is that you’re always on tour.”
Fans will support what the radio won’t, provided they always have an outlet to tap into.
“You have to hit as many markets as possible with frequency,” Schnier said. “Make shows as reasonably close together as possible so people can come two nights in a row if they want.”
But if fans are encouraged to follow the band, they need variety.
“The same show every night doesn’t work. People won’t come,” Schnier said. “So you have to be willing to take chances onstage. And it follows suit that you’d better have a semi-decent grasp on an instrument to pull it off.”
Just as important is the relationship between band and fans, he said. Before there was Myspace or even the Internet, Moe gave away its music.
“If people came with a blank tape, we would give them a copy of a prerecorded show,” Schnier said. “The (record) industry doesn’t get it. If you make yourselves available, fans will build a lifelong relationship.”
Anybody can do a reunion tour these days.
Dead or unwilling bandmates are no longer an obstacle; just ask the Doors, INXS, Queen or the New Cars.
Two years ago the Pixies destroyed expectations by burying the hatchet and reuniting. Now Dinosaur Jr has gone one further: Not only is the band’s founding lineup touring together for the first time since the ’80s, but they also are recording new material.
“We’re not really rushing ourselves or pushing hard,” bass player Lou Barlow said of his work with guitarist and songwriter J Mascis and drummer Murph. “We’re not working long days, but slowly it’s kind of taking shape. It reminds me of the Fog stuff J’s done.”
Recording the new Dinosaur Jr material at J’s house has been a homecoming on more than one level, Barlow said.
“When we’re done working there, I go back and stay with my parents because all this is out in Massachusetts, and I live in California,” Barlow said. “We’re doing things that are familiar but much mellower. It’s like going home. It’s unique and it’s Dinosaur but without the drama.”
Drama was one of the hallmarks of the initial tours, where tensions often ran high.
“We were never at each other’s throats,” Barlow said. “There was nothing outward; it was all very repressed. Any warfare was done covertly. It was a war of attrition. Everyone would consciously or unconsciously try to wear each other down. It wasn’t fun.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same — sort of.
“It’s like that now but way softer,” Barlow said with a laugh. “There’s a sense we can enjoy ourselves now.”
From 1984 to 1989, Dinosaur Jr single-handedly brought the guitar solo back to post-punk underground rock, helping pave the way for Nirvana and the ’90s grunge movement.
“It was stunning to realize how loud he plays guitar,” Barlow said. “After I was kicked out I never played in a band as loud as Dinosaur Jr.”
In the interceding years, Barlow sued his former band over royalties and wrote angry songs about Mascis. But in the last few years their paths began to cross onstage again.
“J and I played onstage a couple of times,” he said. “There was a Stooges thing with the Asheton brothers and Mike Watt where I did a guest vocal. Then we did a benefit show in western Massachusetts where J played a solo with Sebadoh.”
Those shows planted the seed that resulted in a reunion show at last year’s Lollapalooza in Chicago. From there a larger tour was booked.
“The agenda is clear: J wants to make a ton of money, and Murph and I were hired to help him do that,” Barlow said. “But we’ve all been enjoying the shows.”
So far the material has drawn from the only three albums Dinosaur Jr recorded as a trio, “Dinosaur,” “You’re Living All Over Me” and “Bug,” and the song “The Wagon.”
“ ‘The Wagon’ is the first thing they recorded after kicking me out,” Barlow said. “I remember I bought the single, listened to it and liked it. Me playing on a Dinosaur Jr song is like me claiming it because my style is so different. Stylistically this is a pretty close fit to me.”
Barlow was fired shortly after “Bug” was completed. Murph lasted a few more albums but had much less of a presence in the studio. By the early ’90s Dinosaur Jr was basically a glorified J Mascis solo outfit.
“I’m glad I was kicked out because the path I took couldn’t have happened otherwise,” said Barlow, whose post-Dinosaur bands include Sebadoh and Folk Implosion. “Maybe someway by touring we’re reclaiming the influence we did have, and I’m reclaiming what I gave to the band Dinosaur that went on to big things after I was gone.”
Until then Dinosaur Jr is accomplishing something it rarely achieved in the ’80s: fun.
“Every night there’s a moment where we’ll be playing a song, and I’ll think, ‘Maybe this is the best I’ve ever played this song,’ ” Barlow said. “That’s cool.”
After a 20-year estrangement, Stanley Dural Jr. is returning to his first love: the Hammond B-3 organ.
But fans of the man otherwise known as Buckwheat Zydeco needn’t worry. He has found a way to reconcile the differences between his main squeeze, the accordion, and the B3.
“When I was playing the accordion originally I had the organ onstage with me,” Dural said. “I had the tendency to run from the accordion to the organ, but it was cutting into my time with the accordion, so I took it off the stage.”
Dural will bring a road-size version of the B3 with him at Knucklehead’s Saloon on Wednesday, continuing a reunion that began when he used it on some tracks for his first studio album in eight years, “Jackpot!”
“If I was going to use it in the studio, it wouldn’t be fair to if people didn’t hear it on stage,” Dural said. “I’ve always had a keyboard but it was a simple one. I couldn’t fully express myself on it. Now I Can, and the fans are loving it.”
Dural’s B3 playing is featured on the album’s 18-minute trilogy, “Encore: Featuring Organic Buckwheat,” which includes a slow blues and a jazz tribute to Jimmy Smith. This might seem like a stretch from zydeco’s traditional territory, but from a man who has stretched the genre to include country, gospel, children’s music and rock, it’s just bringing it back home.
“I’m taking it to another level,” said Dural, who counts Eric Clapton, Mavis Staples, Willie Nelson and members of Los Lobos among his recorded collaborators. “I love rasta and Bob Marley so there’s a song called ‘Love and Happiness’ that’s all about unity that has a Jamaican reggae feel.”
Listeners may have to wait awhile to hear that song at home, though – it’s one of dozens of Dural’s new tracks that didn’t make it on the album.
“We cut near 30 songs, and I caught the blues trying to figure out what to put on and what to leave off (the album),” Dural said. “It was my worst nightmare.”
No one will have to wait 8 years for the next Buckwheat Zydeco studio album, though.
“I’m going to give this one a chance,” Dural said, “but please believe me there’s another one coming right behind it.”
Dural’s re-embrace of the B3 is a sort of homecoming. It’s the instrument he played as the founder of Buckwheat and the Hitchhikers, a 15-piece funk band that backed artists like Joe Tex, Solomon Burke and Bobby Bland in the early ‘70s and also precipitated his friendship with Eric Clapton in the mid-‘80s.
A jam session broke out after Buckwheat Zydeco’s set at the 25th anniversary party ofr Island Records, Dural’s label at the time. Spying a vacant B3, Dural’s manager asked if he wanted to play.
“I said not ‘yeah,’ but ‘hell yeah,’” Dural said. “There was an army of guitars and Eric was at the front of the stage, but somehow we got to trading licks. We kept going back and forth, and when we got done he walked to the back of the stage, put out his hand and said, ‘I’m Eric, who are you?’ I took his hand and said, ‘I’m Buckwheat.’ We hit it off.”
Clapton played the guitar solo on Buckwheat Zydeco’s 1987 remake of “Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad” and invited the band to open his 12-night stand at Royal Albert Hall in 1988.
“That was like a dream come true,” Dural said. “It was frightening, but it went over big time.”
If the concept of a zydeco band opening for a rock legend in one of London’s most hallowed music halls seems incongruous, consider Buckwheat Zydeco opening for U2 around the same time.
“If you think about U2 and Buckwheat, they don’t match. That’s a different audience,” Dural said. “But it worked.”
The major-label shakeups 10 years ago led Dural to start his own label, Tomorrow Recordings, which also handles younger talents. If he misses rubbing shoulders with other legends and playing large venues, Dural isn’t letting on.
“I feel like I’m in a place now where I’m opening a lot of doors,” Dural said. “It doesn’t matter where I perform as long as I see a smile on people’s faces.”
A smile beams from Rusty Tucker’s face. Conversation has just shifted to jazz, his favorite topic and lifelong passion. Tucker can’t disguise his delight. In fact, he can’t get more than a couple sentences without breaking into laughter or pausing to effuse happiness.
“I met all the people who are great now, when they were just starting out, Little Richard, Ray Charles,” Tucker said. “When I met Ray he was singin’ like Nat King Cole.”
When one of Charles’ musicians was sick, Tucker filled in for a one-night stand in Wichita, Kan.
“He (Ray) always said he was going to drive the first 100 miles,” Tucker said with a laugh. “Several years later when I saw him and went backstage to say hello he told me, ‘I knew I’d seen you before.'”
If stories were touchdown passes, Tucker would be Joe Montana.
“One of the biggest pleasures I had was playing with Dizzy (Gillespie),” Tucker said. “Teddy Stewart, my drummer, used to play with Diz and when Dizzy learned that, he couldn’t believe it. He said, why don’t we do a number together with both bands. So we did ‘A Night In Tunisia.’ The house went wild and I had to play a solo in front of Diz. The people just went crazy.”
Don’t worry, there’s more.
Tucker and Myra Taylor share a laugh at a 2006 jazz symposium at the University of Kansas.
“One night we were at Tootie Mayfair’s club on U.S. 40. Bird (Charlie Parker) was playing on 18th Street, then he was going to meet up with us. We’d had no rehearsal or nothing, and about midnight Bird walks in,” Tucker said. “He said we’ll do things everybody knows like blues, ‘How High the Moon,’ ‘What is This Thing Called Love,’ and ‘Perdido.’
“The blues went all right, but when we did ‘What Is This Thing Called Love,’ our piano player was an accordion player learning piano, see,” said Tucker, interrupting himself.
The apprentice pianist botched a couple chords, drawing Parker’s ire.
“Bird called us together and said it ain’t no sin not to know a tune, but to say you know a tune and not know, you (messed up) those chords,” Parker yelled at the pianist.
Bird sent word out to bring in a new keyboard player, but none were to be found at 1 a.m.
“They got in a big argument and finally Bird just told the piano player, ‘you just lay out.’ ”
Tucker grew up in Birmingham, Ala. where he took trumpet lessons from W.C. Handy Jr. It wasn’t unusual to see the elder Handy, a veteran bluesman and writer of many songs including “St. Louis Blues,” wandering the halls of and speaking to his son’s music school.
“He would always give lectures,” Tucker said. “He told us how to write tunes and get them copyrighted. He said he was getting $30,000 a year off that one tune (“St. Louis Blues”) so to always copyright your tunes.”
One day the Punch Miller Band came to town and announced they were auditioning trumpet players. Tucker tried out and got a job to play with them at the state fair.
“He (Punch) looked like Louis (Armstrong) and played like Louis and said ‘That’s why I can’t make any money,’ ” Tucker said. “I played with them at the state fair then for four or five weeks we’d go around. Then they told me they wanted me to go on the road with them. I was 18 and ran away from home to go with them. They called me ‘school boy.’ ”
He was in love with both the music and several of the dancers.
“I fell in love and ran away. My parents didn’t know where I was,” Tucker said. “I fell in love with a lot of the dancers. That was my problem; that’s why I’ve been married three times.”
Tucker toured with Punch for three years.
“We played the state fair in Sedalia and my first wife got sick,” Tucker said. “She lived in Kansas and her folks were going to come and take her back. I was supposed to meet the show in New Orleans and during the time I was here (in Kansas City) I met The Scamps and other musicians. At that time they were starting shows at the Orchid Room down at 12th and Vine and needed a trumpet player.”
Tucker decided to stay in town and take the Orchid Room gig. That was 1947 or ’48, he can’t remember the exact year, and Tucker has been here ever since. These days he plays most Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights at the Phoenix Club as a member of either Tim Whitmer’s KC Express or The Scamps, which he joined 25 years ago.
“Sometimes the Scamps play from 4 to 8 Saturday, then I play 9 to 1 with Tim. It’s long but I got used to it,” Tucker said. “The Scamps usually play for an older crowd. We do the Ink Spots and Mills Brothers. Tim does more jazz tunes. When I was on the carnivals with Punch we used to play all day so I’m used to playing long hours.”
Tucker may be a veteran of the KC jazz scene, but he still performs like he has something to prove, said Rudy Massingale, pianist and only original member of the Scamps still performing with the group.
“I think Mr. Tucker is still reaching for his goal,” Massingale said. “It seems like he’s just starting out and has to make a big impression.”
Independence has been Tucker’s home for 30 years now. He lives just off Noland Road with his wife, Diane. His children, daughters DuJuan and Carla, and son Lynn, live in Kansas City.
“It’s quiet and I don’t get any noise,” Tucker said. “Everything is so convenient. We were looking at a place in Vegas but the stores were so far away and there are so many people it’s crowded out there.”
By stretching his talent, Tucker today counts drums and piano among the instruments he can play.
“He’s a good showman,” Massingale said. “The main thing is getting the crowd’s emotions into it and he has that gift.”
The King of Rock and Roll is alive and well, according to local psychiatrist Don Hinton.
Hinton, who works at Independence Regional Health Center, says he has been treating Elvis Presley for the past five years.
“What I’ve seen him mostly for is chronic pain,” said Hinton, who says he travels ‘somewhere in the South’ to treat Elvis. “He has severe arthritis, but I’ve also been there as a friend.”
Hinton is earnest but recognizes there will be skeptics and critics.
“There are people who wouldn’t accept it no matter what I would say or do unless he were here eye-to-eye, and then they would want a blood test or DNA test,” Hinton said.
“I’m a young doctor. This is my family, my career. I would not be doing this if it weren’t the truth.”
Becoming Elvis’ physician is no easy task. Hinton was a member of group of people who knew of Elvis’ existence for more than five years before he was finally able to speak to the King over the telephone.
“By the time I was in his presence it had been proven to me beyond the shadow of a doubt,” Hinton said. “I was allowed to meet him because I was a physician and trusted. Friends had known me for 10 years.”
Hinton said he and Elvis became such good friends that the King asked him to help with his book, “The Truth About Elvis Aron Presley, In His Own Words.”
“When I first started there was no talk of a book, and I had to promise not to tell a soul,” Hinton said. “In early ’98 he started talking about wanting to do a book.”
Shrewd Elvis fans may recognize that Elvis’ middle name is spelled “Aaron” on his gravestone at Graceland. However, in a letter on the book’s official Web site, http://www.thetruthaboutelvisjesse.com, Elvis himself explains that “I was the one who allowed the ‘A’ on my stone. … The extra ‘A’ was the first letter of the word ‘alive.’ ”
According to the book, Elvis staged his death in 1977 and assumed the identity of his twin brother Jesse who was born dead.
“This plan began back in 1976 and it was down to the last detail,” Hinton said. “In his mind what happened in 1977 was not a lie because it was necessary.”
Elvis, who became famous for songs like “Love Me Tender” and “Hound Dog,” and movies like “Jailhouse Rock” and “Viva Las Vegas,” died on Aug. 16, 1977, from an drug overdose. But now, Hinton says, Jesse, nee Elvis, is ready to reclaim the limelight.
“There is part of him that wants his fans to know the truth,” Hinton said. “He has to start talking about his life as Jesse and letting the fans know.”
And the book is just the beginning.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg of what’s coming,” Hinton said. “Beginning next month after his birthday there will be a TV special where celebrities who are his friends who know this is true will come forward. All of this will roll into the 25th anniversary in August.”
But Hinton is certainly not alone. Also among the inner circle of Elvis confidants is Linda Johnson, a neighbor and former co-worker of Hinton’s.
“My uncle was at one time his (Elvis’) dentist,” Johnson said. “That got me in through my relationship and honesty, just like Don. Really Don and I are the only ones in the same state.”
The Elvis book was not released by a major publishing house, Johnson said, because the King wanted to keep his book affordable for fans.
“We shopped around,” Johnson said. “We did our work.”
Larger publishers wouldn’t have accepted the work unless they saw the author typing it.
“He didn’t want to make it sensational or trashy,” Johnson said. “It wanted it to be inexpensive for fans. Most big publishers wanted him sitting in front of them writing.”
Today, Hinton and Johnson said, Elvis is a changed man.
“He’s a very spiritual man. I wouldn’t say he’s a monk, but it’s a completely different world for him,” Hinton said. “He’s turned off by money and show business.”
One thing important to Elvis, er Jesse, these days is privacy.
“He’s more protected than the president but still cannot trust people around him,” Hinton said. “This whole thing was his wish. If he didn’t want it to come out, I would have taken it to my grave.”
Hinton even kept it a secret from his wife, Heather, when they were dating.
“The phone would ring and he would just go into another room and shut the door and come out later,” Heather Hinton said. “He finally told me so I wouldn’t be frustrated or upset.”
Heather Hinton admitted she was skeptical at first.
“When he started explaining what was going on and when I saw things I believed,” Heather Hinton said. “He (Don Hinton) showed me pictures and different things that had been sent to him.”
Color Heather Hinton among the believers.
“I just went with whatever he said as long as it didn’t hurt the family,” Heather Hinton said. “I just thought he wouldn’t do something unless he was pretty sure.”
Don Hinton broke the news to his co-workers shortly before the book came out. He said the news hasn’t hurt his practice. Hinton’s co-workers at Independence Regional Health Center declined to be interviewed.
“It’s affected my practice just because of all the stress,” Don Hinton said. “I hear from people all over the world and 98 or 99 percent of it is positive.”
A 5-year-old boy stands on top of the soda counter at the corner store belting out a version of “Born Free.” The customers pause from their shopping to look up and smile appreciatively. A burst of applause greets the boy when he is finished.
The store owner gives the boy a treat and he hops down off the counter.
“I knew all the words and he’d give me candy,” Vernon Quinzy said. “Ever since then I knew I wanted to sing and act.”
This was the start of Quinzy’s show business career. Thirty-four years later he has returned to his hometown of Independence to regroup, spend time with his family and refocus.
“I’d gotten out of the acting end of things,” Quinzy said. “That, combined with my sister and her two boys.”
Since returning to the area, Quinzy appeared in “Little House on the Prairie” at the Coterie Theater and is currently starring in “Kansas City Cabaret” at the Quality Hill Playhouse, 303 W. 10th St., Kansas City.
“I think the theater work has stretched me,” Quinzy said. “It has allowed me to grow as a performer. In KC Cabaret, every song is about an artist or composer who spent time in the area, so I get to both act and sing.”
If Quinzy has enjoyed “Kansas City Cabaret,” the cast has enjoyed him more.
“He’s about the sweetest human being you’d ever want to meet,” said Cabaret co-star Teri Wilder. “I love his voice Ð he could sing to me anytime.”
Director J. Kent Barnhart agreed.
“He’s the easiest guy to work with. He’s very hard working and very kind,” Barnhart said. “It’s always interesting to see new people in this place because it is so small, but he’s taken very well to working with a smaller cast and theater.”
Ask Quinzy about his accomplishments and he’ll talk about them in a shy way where he isn’t really talking about them. But the truth is that he palled around with Prince in the ’80s, and Luther Vandross called him last week to make sure Quinzy could attend his concert.
“Do you remember the Morris Day and the Time video ‘The Oak Tree?’ ” Quinzy asked. “I’m the person cutting down the oak tree at the very first of the video. I also did videos with Vanity, Appelonia, the whole group of Prince artists.”
So how was working with the purple one?
“He’s really shy,” Quinzy said. “He’d give you directions, but never look at you directly Ð he’d look at your shoes. It seems like he saves it all, I guess for the performance, but one-on-one he’s completely different.”
After graduating from Fort Osage High School in 1980, Quinzy attended the University of Missouri-Kansas City and transferred after two years to the American Academy of the Arts in New York. He spent the better part of the 1980s modeling, singing and acting and maintaining apartments in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York.
“I would usually spend a few months in each place,” Quinzy said. “I would mainly do acting in L.A., in Chicago I would do print work (modeling) and some jingles and then in New York for singing. This is when I was the busiest.”
Quinzy’s acting work got him spots in Luther Vandross, Prince and other music videos and a role as a hospital intern in “Days of Our Lives.” It seemed he would break into stardom with Morgan Fairchild’s evening soap “Paper Dolls,” but the show was canned after one season.
“I really enjoyed getting the role on ‘Paper Dolls’ and how it happened,” Quinzy said. “I was brought on as someone with five lines, but the casting director at MGM was very interested in me. Had the show gone on the role would have been expanded.”
In New York Quinzy would sing commercial jingles for advertisements.
“I have a short attention span so it all worked great for me, but it brought me to a point where I decided I needed a focus,” Quinzy said.
Work at the jingle houses were slowing down and Quinzy missed his family. So he decided to go back to his roots.
“He’s very close to my boys,” said Joyce Fowler, Quinzy’s sister. “They love going to see any kind of musical or show he’s in.”
As a single mom, Fowler said she can see Quinzy’s impact.
“He’s made a difference in their lives as far as personality,” Fowler said. “He’s been a positive male role model for them.”
Quinzy may have relocated, but the work hasn’t slowed. He is still very much in demand, just won’t show it.
“He gets lots of offers to go places, but they all want him to go someplace for a year,” Fowler said. “But he doesn’t want to relocate.”
Church has played a major role in keeping Quinzy grounded, he said. He is an experienced Sunday School teacher, most recently teaching the junior class at Village Heights Community of Christ.
“It gives me a foundation and balance in my life,” Quinzy said. “I think without the church it would be easier to get caught up in the heady side of the business.”
And the children thought it was great their teacher was popular.
“When I was teaching Sunday School in Los Angeles I was doing modeling and they’d see me doing underwear ads and they’d cut them out and put it up on the church bulletin board,” Quinzy said.
Ask Barbara Wiley about Quinzy and her voice will light up. She watched him grow from a teen-age actor in church and school plays and recruited him to teach when he returned to his home congregation.
“The kids love him,” said Wiley, a member of the pastorate team at Village Heights. “He makes class interesting for them. He’s a dream of a church school teacher because he cares about the kids and he’s interested in them and they know it.”
Quinzy has enjoyed his time back home, but may be leaving soon. He has been offered a job to host a PBS series on 18th and Vine, the old Kansas City jazz district. The job will take him to Los Angeles.
“They have allowed us to do the pilot and it just kind of fell into place,” Quinzy said. “I’m sure I’m not going to be here for a lot longer.”
But for now, Quinzy is content.
“I’m working and I’m happy and I enjoy all the people I’m working with,” Quinzy said. “I’m living my dream because I’m working , but I’m sure work will take be back to New York and L.A.”
(Above: Bill Shapiro appeared on television in Kansas City in 2008 to celebrate 30 years of his radio show, “Cypress Avenue.”)
By Joel Francis
The Examiner
Late at night, the house is silent.
Everyone is asleep, or so it seems. In a bedroom, a dim light shines through the blankets peaked around a small figure sitting up under the covers. The sound of tinny music can barely be heard.
The boy beneath the sheets is still, but his heart is racing. His hands tremble as he fine-tunes the radio under the covers with him. He thought it was lost forever, but he has found it: the jazz radio station carrying the songs of Dave Brubeck and Shorty Rogers. It was only late at night he could pick up the phantom AM signals from stations in exotic places like New Orleans. Forget sleep, he had found something far more important.
Fast-forward 50 years.
Today, the city – Kansas City – is alive. Cars zoom past on the interstate, clearly visible from the law office’s window on the 20th floor near Crown Center. Visitors scurry in and out of the renovated Union Station.
A train blows by in the distance. The stress of daily life is lost in this picturesque, birds-eye view.
The scene is quite different, but the boy, now 62 years old, has not changed. The passion for discovering new music still burns within.
Today Bill Shapiro doesn’t hid his love of music; on the contrary, he broadcasts it. Shapiro has hosted the weekly radio show “Cyprus Avenue” for more than 20 years on KUCR 89.3 FM, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, National Public Radio affiliate.
Taking the show’s title from a song on Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” album, “Cyprus Avenue” has become one of KCUR’s highest-rated local shows.
Shapiro has found freedom on the airwaves. Unrestricted by playlists generated by demographic studies and corporate interests, Shapiro plays the music that excites him in hopes of engaging his audience.
“He has a lot more information and insight into groups that commercial radio doesn’t know about,” says Robert Moore, KCUR and “Cyprus Avenue” producer and music director. “A show like his would never happen on commercial radio because they don’t break down artists. They just play one format.”
While commercial radio serves a bevy of Bachman-Turner Overdrive and saccharine teen pop, Shapiro slips his sophisticated audience the Velvet Underground, Stevie Wonder and Uncle Tupelo, all linked by a common theme for a given show.
When Beck’s “Midnite Vultures” was released in 1999, no Kansas City radio stations would pick it up, despite heavy play from MTV and VH1. “Cyprus Avenue” not only spotlighted the album, but buttressed it with Prince’s “Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic,” forming a fitting tribute to both.
Shapiro sprinkles his shows with information from box sets, liner notes and magazine interviews, but for the most part he lets the music do the talking.
His inspiration may come from a television special or an album passed onto him by a friend.
More often than not, Corky Carrol, co-owner of Village Records in Overland Park, Kan., points Shapiro to a quality release. The two usually talk once a week about scheduled new releases.
“It’s strange to think that this is the only place to hear Elvis Costello or Nick Drake on the radio,” Carrol says. “You know at least for two hours you are going to get a solid effort, not a couple of good songs then Celine Dion.”
Says Moore, “He turns the public on to new groups they won’t hear anywhere else. Unfortunately, it won’t have any impact on commercial radio because it is run by corporations. It’s expected that this is what non-commercial radio does.”
“Cyprus Avenue” may be popular, but Shapiro has yet to reach the notoriety of Murray the K. Sure, he gets calls at the office from fans and fan mail isn’t unexpected, but for the most part Shapiro is anonymous. That’s fine by him.
“Other than family I don’t think I could tell you a specific person who might claim to be my biggest fan or a longtime listener,” Shapiro says.
Carrol has supplied Shapiro with music for more than 25 years and is a regular “Cyprus Avenue” listener. Carrol says he has bought “thousands and thousands” of albums for Shapiro.
“It’s hard to get one past him, but there are a few records he’s missed,” Carrol says. “His purchases are all over the board. I think the only thing I haven’t sold him is a classical record.”
A hit all over the country
The diverse playlists on “Cyprus Avenue” have made the show successful not only in Kansas City, but all over the country. During much of the 1980s, “Cyprus Avenue” was distributed on NPR’s satellite uplink system.
“In those days you could buy an hour of stereo time for $40,” Shapiro says. “I thought it was worth a shot and was willing to invest a couple thousand dollars.”
Several stations picked up “Cyprus Avenue” and it became a hit in Minneapolis and a dozen other smaller markets, but when satellite costs rose, Shapiro pulled his show.
“I knew it wasn’t going to grow because it didn’t fit the NPR format,” Shapiro says. “People think public radio should be country and jazz or folk for the adventurous.”
But Shapiro wasn’t content with confining the show to his hometown. He decided to give the satellite one more try, this time with a national sponsor. “Cyprus Avenue” proved to be popular, running in more than 40 markets, including Detroit, San Francisco and Jacksonville, Fla. Unable to find a sponsor, expenses were mounting and Shapiro was faced with a decision.
“I decided I could either earn a living as an attorney, or I could get in my car and drive across the country and build ‘Cyprus Avenue’ into a radio show,” Shapiro says.
For the second time, “Cyprus Avenue” was pulled from the uplink
“We just weren’t penetrating the major markets,” Shapiro says. “Today radio is a secondary medium. People don’t care about shows, they care about stations and that’s why radio is as homogenous as it is. Advertisers just want a demographic to sell their product to. I don’t fit that mold. I knew I’d never get the audience I wanted.”
Compromising the show to build a bigger audience would be counteractive to everything Shapiro was trying to do – share the music he loves with his friends. And if his only contact with these friends is through the radio, so be it.
“A lot of people use the TV as a companion. My stereo is my companion,” Shaprio says. “I alwasy have 30 to 50 unopened CDs at home. They come to me faster than I can listen to them. There is always part of my head saying, ‘Is this something you want to take further and put on the radio?’”
When Shapiro listens to music at home, he makes sure it gets the audio treatment it deserves. At age 12, Shapiro built his own Hi-Fi system from a Heath kit. That system has been upgraded and replaced many times since.
“I’m a sound freak,” Shapiro says. “I have more money tied up in sound equipment than most people have in a home. I wasn’t to hear it as well as I can hear it. I buy all the gold CDs and audiophile stuff.
“To me, music is as important as oxygen and food,” Shapiro continues. “When I’m home, I have music on 24 hours a day. In the car, music is on the whole time.”
Hooked by a phonograph
Shapiro got hooked on music in 1942 when an uncle gave him a phonograph player for his fifth birthday. A family friend in the jukebox business kept Shapiro supplied with records once they were too scratched for commercial play. At age 12, he discovered Brubeck, Paul Desmond and West Coast jazz.
Shapiro tried music lessons – he tackled the piano, vibraphone and banjo – but his musical aptitude was mental, not physical. He spent his time amassing records and building playback systems.
“Whatever money I made went into getting more records and improving what I had,” Shapiro says.
Shapiro migrated across Missouri and graduated pre-med from Washington University in St. Louis in 1958 with the intent of becoming a doctor.
Still an avid jazz fan, Shapiro would often get together with friends and play records. Then he saw Elvis Presley’s first appearance on the Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey show. Shapiro was hooked on rock and roll and spreading the gospel of Elvis.
“I didn’t know who or what it was, but it had the same impact on me as hearing JFK was shot,” Shapiro says. “I can still visualize that room and the TV set and here we are 50 years later.”
To a generation of buzz-cut, starched-collar squares, Elvis represented the rebellious, darker side of 1950s adolescence.
“Presley was a lightning rod from my generation, a button-down generation,” Shapiro says. “There was a whole side of our lives – smoking cigarettes, sipping beers, getting lad – that was never talked about, and here it was in our living room. I immediately became a hard-core rock and roll fan.”
By the time Shapiro graduated, he had abandoned the idea of being a doctor. He headed north to the University of Michigan and enrolled in law school. With his law degree in hand in 1961, Shapiro decided he wanted to be a tax attorney. He heard that New York University had a graduate tax law program, so he went to the Big Apple. One show on Manhattan Public Radio planted the germ that would become “Cyprus Avenue.”
“It was a thematic program,” Shapiro says. “They’d take someone like big-band arranger Fletcher Henderson and play arrangements done by different bands. They might play a combo version next to a big band version. I listened to that show religiously. In later years, I got thinking that there was so much richness and social impact in pop music as in jazz and I could do the same thing.”
Shapiro had finally found his calling, but after three universities and seven years of higher education, a career shift was not going to happen.
“By this time my family and I had spent a lot on higher education,” Shapiro says. “If I’d know then what I knew no, I would have been in the music business. It just wasn’t in the cards.”
The jump from disc jockey to tax law may seem extreme, but Shapiro says his work is extremely satisfying.
“Tax law is not what most people think it is,” Shapiro says. “It is the most creative part of the law, because what we do is planning. You might want to buy your partner out. If you do it one way, Uncle Sam takes a hunk. If you do it differently, you save money.”
Shapiro left New York in 1962 and returned to Kansas City to work and start a family. As his family grew and Shapiro flourished professionally, he became involved with broadcasting, but it was television that proved to be Shapiro’s stepping-stone to radio.
Deeply involved with public television’s early on-air auctions and fund-rasiers, Shapiro’s good deeds did not go unnoticed. A high school friend working at KCUR called Shapiro and asked if she could take him to lunch and discuss fund-raising methods. At the end of the meal, she asked if there was anything she could do for him. Shapiro asked for an audition to do a public radio rock show.
The dream was starting to materialize. Shapiro arrived at the studio with a stack of records for the show and hoped that the manager liked it.
“My first show was called ‘Ballads by Rockers.’ It was all ballad material done by people thought of as screamers,” Shapiro says. “He (the manager) says, if you can do that every week, you’re on.”
Sonic spelunking
As Cyprus Avenue entered its second decade on the air, Shapiro realized new music and artists – particularly rap and alternative – were not striking the same chord with him.
“I’ve known for a long time I’m the generation these people want to rebel against,” Shapiro says. “I respect the fact that the music says this to the previous generation,” he says, emphatically holding up his middle finger. “There is a need to shake up the status quo.”
Shapiro doesn’t mind the envelope pushing done by newer artists, he just doesn’t get it musically. The Talking Heads and Beck are about as modern as Shapiro gets with “Cypuss Avenue.”
But Shapiro’s show doesn’t need Moby and Soundgarden to be effective. “Cyprus Avenue” is a discovery process – for both Shapiro and for listeners – of influential artists and the impact they’ve had on music.
By showing listeners the roots of music, Shapiro leaves the listener naturally curious of the modern amplification and integration of this process.
“Cyprus Avenue” isn’t a forum for Shapiro to amaze everyone with his knowledge. It’s a platform for him to share his love of music and enlighten listeners who don’t fit commercial radio demographics.
Jackie Nixon, NPR director of strategic planning and audience research, says that shows like “Cyprus Avenue” are what NPR is all about.
“We treat our listeners with respect and intelligence and try to produce programming that makes people think as well as entertain,” Nixon says.
For Shapiro, those sleepless nights in the early 1940s were a discovery process.
“It was like going into a cave with a flashlight and all of a sudden – bang, something is shining back at you,” he says.
Shapiro has not forgotten that feeling and tries to instill the same feeling of excitement in his listeners.
“I think I broaden the awareness of the intelligence and importance of popular music,” Shapiro says. “I lift it out of the aural wallpaper and let people know it can be a powerful element. That it shapes opinions and tells a lot about where we are and where we are going.”
When Beck’s “Midnite Vultures” was released in 1999, no Kansas City radio stations would pick it up, despite heavy play from MTV and VH1. “Cyprus Avenue” not only spotlighted the album, but buttressed it with Prince’s “Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic,” forming a fitting tribute to both.
records. Then he saw Elvis Presley’s first appearance on the Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey show. Shapiro was hooked on rock and roll and spreading the gospel of Elvis.
Shapiro gets with “Cypuss Avenue.”
joelfrancis.com 