Paul Shaffer\u2019s Life With Letterman<\/h1>\n
Like an increasing number of baby-boomers, Paul Shaffer will be 65 and out of a job next year. Actually, it\u2019s much more than a mere job; it\u2019s his life-long vocation (granted, really half his life), the beating heart of his self-identity, and his dependable sanctuary of fellowship and fun\u2014the sudden absence of which might be compared to the death of a treasured friend.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, how can you grieve when you\u2019ve had such a long run?\u201d Shaffer asks me over dinner at Remi, one of his favorite haunts a block from The Ed Sullivan Theater, where he has led the CBS Orchestra for the\u00a0Late Show With David Letterman<\/a><\/i>\u00a0for the past two decades.<\/p>\n Before that, he spent a decade on Letterman\u2019s 12:30 a.m. NBC show, conducting \u201cThe World\u2019s Most Dangerous Band\u201d from his rock\u2019n\u2019roll keyboard. \u201cIt\u2019ll be 33 years by the time we\u2019re done. It\u2019s been fantastic. It\u2019s been absolutely wonderful. Anybody who would be complaining about that should be put away.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps Shaffer isn\u2019t in denial\u2014the first of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross\u2019s \u201cFive Stages of Grief\u201d\u2014yet members of Letterman\u2019s staff were openly crying in April when Dave, now 66, announced on the\u00a0air<\/a>\u00a0that next season will be his last. \u201cYou have some weepers back there,\u201d that night\u2019s guest, Johnny Depp, told the late-night comic, while Shaffer quipped: \u201cDo I have a minute to call my accountant?\u201d<\/p>\n Chewing on a breadstick at Remi, having just taped Monday\u2019s installment featuring actor Michael Cera and frisky dogs broad-jumping into a 20,000-gallon pool of water out on West 53rd Street, Shaffer says: \u201cOf course we\u2019re\u2014or at least I am\u2014enjoying every show much more now, knowing that there are a finite number left.\u201d<\/p>\n These days naked-pated and a teensy bit stouter than when he started out as Dave\u2019s musical director and comic sidekick (a tonsorial and corporeal\u00a0evolution<\/a>\u00a0that is unsparingly documented on\u00a0YouTube<\/u><\/a>), Shaffer talks in the smooth, reedy, dulcet tones that are known to millions of viewers\u2014a less cartoonish version of the voice he uses to send up slick showbiz insincerity.<\/p>\n Who can forget Shaffer\u2019s scene-stealing\u00a0cameo in<\/a>\u00a0the classic 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap\u2014as Polymer records executive Artie Fufkin? His voice is occasionally punctuated by that famous laugh\u2014Shaffer\u2019s trademark rasping honk\u2014and that endearing, mole-like squint.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were young when we started,\u201d Shaffer says, acknowledging that the last days\u2014before Comedy Central\u2019s Stephen Colbert takes over the time slot in September 2015\u2014will be poignant and possibly emotionally draining. \u201cYes, absolutely. It\u2019s been so long that I can\u2019t remember a time when I didn\u2019t do this show,\u201d he says. \u201cThere are upsides to it [the final curtain], of course. There\u2019s the freedom to do lots of other things\u2014to travel somewhere. I want to do all kinds of things. I want to keep doing music primarily, of course. I\u2019d like to act, too. But it has really has been our whole life for all of us on the show, day in and day out.\u201d<\/p>\n Years ago, however, Shaffer had believed that he might not be long for the job after getting visibly angry at his boss on the air\u2014a remarkable departure from the bandleader\u2019s normally genial if ironic onstage persona.<\/p>\n \u201cI really lost my temper,\u201d he recalls, recounting how he vented at Letterman when frequent musical guest Todd Rundgren showed up at the studio too late to rehearse, and Dave (perhaps needling Paul) kept announcing that the band would play a string of completely unprepared Rundgren hits.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, I couldn\u2019t play all his songs because we hadn\u2019t had a chance to rehearse, but Dave kept coming back to it,\u201d Shaffer recalls. \u201cHe just kept firing it in, and I lost it and I started yelling at him on the air. I said, \u2018Listen, anything you want, I give you! You want a song by the Gin Blossoms, you got it!\u2019 Then I felt terrible afterwards. What have I done? The man pays my salary.\u201d<\/p>\n After the show, Shaffer phoned Letterman in his office to apologize, \u201cand he was laughing. He said, \u2018That was hilarious. Feel free to do as much as you want whenever you want to do it. You can come over and sit on my head if you want.\u2019 \u201d Shaffer adds: \u201cI thought he was pretty damn nice, because I thought I was gonna get fired.\u201d<\/p>\n Not a chance. The Canadian-born Shaffer\u2014who grew up in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where he started watching Johnny Carson in the early 1960s via the NBC affiliate in Duluth, Minn.\u2014sees his role with Dave as an updated composite of Carson\u2019s bandleader Doc Severinson and sidekick Ed McMahon. \u201cDoc and Ed\u2014D\u2019ed,\u201d Shaffer says.<\/p>\n \u201cIt can take a certain amount of adjustment for a musician, whether jazz or rock, to get his head around the job of providing cues for comedic situations,\u201d says Shaffer, who parsimoniously punctuates Letterman\u2019s monologue jokes and celebrity interviews with the odd comic chord, or otherwise chimes in with a comment, question, or a simple \u201cuh-huh\u201d or \u201coh yeah,\u201d as needed. \u201cSometimes, rather than speak to the camera, Dave will turn and speak to me,\u201d Shaffer says, \u201cand I got to realize he needed sort of a bed of sound.\u201d<\/p>\n In one memorable moment, prodded by Letterman, Shaffer asked Julia Roberts, who had recently broken up with a boyfriend, \u201cYou getting laid these days?\u201d\u00a0Hilarity ensued.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cNot everybody wants to do it\u201d\u2014that is, cue up the laughs\u2014\u201cor understands that it could possibly be important to do. But it was always my favorite thing to do,\u201d Shaffer says, adding that \u201cless is more.\u201d Regarding a rival talk show, no longer on the air, he says: \u201cI remember the Leno band and what their punctuations would sound like\u2014a certain disjointed timing sometimes.\u201d<\/p>\n The fierce and often bitter competition with Jay Leno, who took NBC\u2019s\u00a0Tonight Show<\/i>, the prize Dave was denied, and came from behind after Dave\u2019s 1993 CBS debut to consistently beat him, had the all trappings of a late-night cold war.<\/p>\n \u201cYes, of course,\u201d Shaffer says. \u201cWhat can be said? Dave was the best that ever did it. He would say Johnny Carson was, but I\u2019ve worked for Dave every night and he\u2019s just the smartest and most on-top-of-it, the quickest. It\u2019s the most spontaneous show on television. Maybe Jay was more commercial, or more universal. I don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n Shaffer acknowledges that with the march of time\u2014through Letterman\u2019s quintuple bypass surgery and a harrowing blackmail\u00a0incident<\/a>\u00a0(during which the host admitted on the air that he\u2019d \u201chorribly hurt\u201d\u00a0his wife<\/a>\u00a0by sleeping with female members of the staff), the program\u2019s anti-showbiz sensibility has softened considerably.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think we can deny that we became the establishment,\u201d Shaffer says. \u201cWe were making fun of the format\u2014and then we became it. You have to kind of admit that. And I think Dave wants to be age-appropriate.\u201d<\/p>\n But also real, unscripted, and sometimes painfully honest, as when Dave owned\u00a0up<\/a>\u00a0to his extramarital misbehavior. \u201cThe show, to him, has always been something like a forum,\u201d Shaffer says. \u201cHis attitude, I think, is if we can talk about it, how bad can it be? When he does that kind of thing, I think it becomes more than just a show. It is the real reality show. I think the Kardashians may set up a few of these situations.\u201d<\/p>\n Shaffer, who was a something of a musical prodigy, studied classical piano and played in a high school rock band, and then a progressive jazz band at the University of Toronto, where he also DJ\u2019ed on the campus radio station. (His attendance at John Lennon and Yoko Ono\u2019s December 1969 press conference touting a peace festival is memorialized in a CBC\u00a0documentary<\/a>\u00a0at around the 34-minute mark. Shaffer, who recalls that he was too intimated to ask a question, is the skinny kid with shoulder-length hair and a Fu Manchu mustache.)<\/p>\n He was named musical director of a full-dress production of\u00a0Godspell\u00a0<\/i>at the tender age of 22, when he became fast friends with cast members (and future stars) Gilda Radner, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Dave Thomas and Victor Garber. By the mid-1970s he was a member of the house band and an occasional performer on Saturday Night Live, where he was the piano player for Bill Murray\u2019s oleaginous lounge-singer act.<\/p>\n He left the show in 1977 to star in a short-lived sitcom flop, in which one of his fellow cast members was Mickey Rooney, and returned to SNL after the cancellation.<\/p>\n Shaffer says he hit it off immediately with Letterman in 1982 when he was summoned to a meeting at 30 Rock, where Dave was looking for a bandleader for his soon-to-launch program. Their musical tastes were in synch, and Letterman was deeply knowledgeable, Shaffer says.<\/p>\n When he told Letterman that he wanted to play instrumentals of Motown hits and soul music, the former standup comic\u2019s face lit up. \u201cWell that sounds great,\u201d he recalls Letterman saying. \u201cI\u2019ve always considered myself the Wayne Cochran of comedy anyway,\u201d Letterman added, referring to the over-the-top soul singer-turned-Christian minister who favored extravagant outfits and a towering white pompadour.<\/p>\n Shaffer is among a happy crew of Letterman loyalists\u2014including producers Maria Pope, Barbara Gaines and Jude Brennan, and bass guitarists Will Lee and Sid McGinnis, and drummer Anton Fig\u2014who were present at the creation in the early 1980s and 1990s, when Dave launched and developed his groundbreaking, showbiz-satirizing\u00a0Late Night<\/i>\u00a0program that aired after the more traditional\u00a0Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson<\/i>.<\/p>\n When NBC declined to make Letterman Carson\u2019s successor\u2014as chronicled in a best-selling book and an HBO movie\u2014he took much of his staff to CBS and there\u2019s been astonishingly little turnover since the\u00a0Late Show<\/i>\u2019s debut in 1993.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s a very loyal employer\u2014loyalty is big one for Dave,\u201d Shaffer says. \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s any secret that he\u2019s not comfortable around a lot of people. He\u2019s not a social guy. So his core team are people among whom he does feel comfortable, and he will socialize with them for that reason.\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, Shaffer is not simply an employee, he\u2019s a close-enough friend to have been invited repeatedly with his family to Letterman\u2019s Montana ranch, where he and his two kids\u2014a 21-year-old daughter and a 15-year-old son\u2014spent quality time with Dave, horseback-riding and such, during the recent two-week August hiatus. \u201cMy wife didn\u2019t come because she had a broken foot,\u201d Shaffer says, referring to former\u00a0Good Morning America<\/i>\u00a0booker Cathy Vasapoli.<\/p>\n And now, the show, the life, the camaraderie, is slowly but surely slipping away. \u201cWe\u2019ll have to have a reunion,\u201d Shaffer says of the Letterman-less future. \u201cWe have to, and I think we will\u201d\u2014even if Shaffer must organize it. \u201cI\u2019ll do whatever I have to do.\u201d<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/staging.eyesofageneration.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/Paul-Shaffer\u2019s-Life-With-Letterman.jpg\" "\\"Paul")
<\/a><\/p>\n