Paul Shaffer Almost Became George Costanza's Neighbor

Somewhere in the pile of unreturned messages on Paul Shaffer’s desk in the early 1980s was a note that said Jerry Seinfeld is getting a show and he wants you to be his sidekick. Shaffer never called back. ‘I just said, what kind of show for Jerry Seinfeld?’ he told the Cowsills, sounding only mildly rueful about it. The world’s most dangerous band played on. Seinfeld found someone else to live across the hall.

This episode is ostensibly promotional. The Cowsills are pushing a charity event at the Write-Off Room on Ventura Boulevard, a benefit for Shaffer’s daughter Victoria’s dog rescue operation, featuring Shaffer and songwriter Jeff Barry in conversation and song. But the pitch is almost beside the point once Shaffer starts talking, because the man is a one-person card catalog for a specific, irreplaceable era of American pop music, and the Cowsills are exactly the right hosts to pull it out of him.

Jeff Barry, Ron Dante, and the Songs You Still Stand Up For

Jeff Barry, for anyone who needs the credential: he and his late wife Ellie Greenwich wrote ‘Be My Baby,’ ‘Da Doo Ron Ron,’ ‘Then He Kissed Me,’ ‘Leader of the Pack,’ ‘Hanky Panky,’ and ‘I Honestly Love You’ with Peter Allen, which he apparently wrote off as nothing. Shaffer met him in 1974 on a Don Kirschner and Norman Lear TV pilot about rock performers who sold their souls to the devil. The premise sounds like a SCTV sketch. Barry was 85 at the time of this recording and, per Shaffer, just as sharp as ever. Ron Dante, the voice of the Archies on ‘Sugar Sugar,’ was apparently going to show up at the benefit unannounced to sing it. ‘No one’s supposed to know this,’ Shaffer said, immediately telling everyone.

I still stand up when I hear that. That’s the national anthem for me.

He means ‘Be My Baby.’ Which, honestly, is not an overclaim. That Phil Spector production, those drums, that entrance. Shaffer also mentions that he became best friends with Ellie Greenwich and played Phil Spector in her Broadway show ‘Leader of the Pack.’ The man has been inside nearly every important room in American pop for fifty years and he name-drops with the ease of someone reading a grocery list he’s very fond of.

The Artie Fufkin Inquiry

Bob Cowsill brings up Shaffer’s cameo in ‘This Is Spinal Tap’ as Artie Fufkin, the Polymer Records promo man who introduces himself approximately five times upon entering a hotel room. Shaffer explains that Harry Shearer, who was a cast member during Shaffer’s Saturday Night Live tenure, essentially vouched for him to Rob Reiner. No written lines. Just scene outlines. You go in and make it happen. Shaffer says Rob Reiner told him ‘that was good’ after a take and he broke up laughing. ‘That’s okay, you would break up if somebody said that,’ Reiner told him. ‘Let’s go again.’

I became best friends actually with his late wife Ellie Greenwich in New York and I appeared in her show… and I played Phil Spector in it.

Then there is the Letterman question, which the Cowsills have clearly been sitting on for years. The Cowsills were apparently mentioned in a Letterman monologue introduction and made at least one top ten list. They want to know: did Dave like them or was he burying them? Shaffer is diplomatically honest. He never discussed them personally with Letterman. The jokes were probably good-natured. But what he says next is the real answer.

You come in and out of it, you know… you were out of stuff, not hip for a while, but all of a sudden we put on all your records and they not only hold up but they’re terrific. The production, the vocals, the production. They’re just irresistible.

That is, without intending to be, a pretty complete history of how legacy pop acts get treated by late night television and then eventually vindicated by it. The Cowsills were a punchline for a while. Now Paul Shaffer is on their podcast saying their records are irresistible. Don Rickles told Shaffer to have himself committed and Shaffer describes it as an honor. There is a lesson in there about how the people who really understand this music always knew, and everyone else is just catching up.