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• Interview with Vin Scelsa and Pete Fornatale

John: Do you guys remember the first time you met?

Vin: Peter does, I don't.

Pete: I have a vague memory of it. I was aware of Vin from 'FMU. I was up in the Bronx doing my thing, and I knew that there were other people out here, and I certainly knew that Vinny was one of them. And then, when did you go to 'PLJ?

Vin: '70. My ' FMU experience was very intense and compact. It was from November of '67 to November of '69. So it was two years of the most incredible social change ... and assassinations.

John: Were you in college at the time?

Vin: I was in college, but dropped out. This is at Upsala, at 'FMU. I lost interest in classes and stopped going to class and eventually dropped out to work full time.

John: So, a very intense period?

Vin: We were very, very political. You see, that was our whole thing. We modeled ourselves on WBAI more than on any kind of commercial radio. Our big heroes were Bob Fass, Steve Post, Abbie Hoffman. And so the idea of free-form radio was for us both an artistic statement and a political statement. And there was really very little difference. I mean the mere fact that you were playing certain music on the air, whether it had political content or not, was making a statement. If you were playing Leonard Cohen, or if you were playing the Judy Collins In My Life album with "Marat Sade" on it -- you know, music that had never been heard on popular radio before -- that was a political statement, as well as reporting about the demonstrations, and sending people out to Chicago for the convention, which turned into a riot. And we had people reporting on the phone, in the midst of being gassed and heaving bodies being chased. It was pretty cool. Politics was a big part of it.

Pete: We already have an essential difference here. While you couldn't be on the radio then and not be politically aware, I was not politically active, not to any large degree. And my radio heroes were more traditional. They were the Dan Ingrams, who I felt even in the structure of commercial radio got away with murder and was able to do wonderful things.

John: All over 15-second instrumental post to the vocals.

Vin: Stuff that two minutes later you'd realize what he said.

Pete: To this day [he's] one of the only people who could make me laugh out loud alone in my car with an eight second bullet. But there was something else going on, this incredible explosion of music, you know if you didn't have the three-minute single that was going to be a hit out of town and then ultimately be brought into a WABC or a WMCA when they were rock stations. This stuff was not being broadcast, and certainly not being heard, and as we would find, the Judy Collins album with "Marat Sade" on it and a host of other things or as we would find records with 11-minute tracks that no one was playing -- it just made perfect sense.

Vin: Oh, sure, in those days you could walk into a record store and literally have a grasp of what was in the store. You know, in terms of rock and roll, in terms of rock, blues, not so much classical or jazz unless that was your bet. But in terms of popular music, you could go into Vogel's Record Store on Broad Street and Elizabeth, or whatever the store was here, every week, and sort of thumb through and you'd see the couple of new things that had come in. And you would have read about them someplace, or maybe the cover just looked interesting, and you bought it, it was all on your own. That's what we were doing -- we were discovering the music all on its own. And if I could speak for you, we had this enormous desire to share it with people, because it was great stuff, and as Pete said, it was not being reflected in commercial radio at all. Commercial radio didn't play Dylan until, what, '65, or '66. Whenever "Like a Rolling Stone" came out -- that was '65.

Pete: Of course Peter, Paul, and Mary paved the way by making "Blowing in the Wind" palatable -- Dylan's version, no one would touch. You know, I vividly remember a Time magazine review of Bob Dylan in which they said that his voice sounds like a sound you would hear wafting over the walls of a tuberculosis sanitarium. This was their review of Bob Dylan.

So these two convergents -- you know, we use the word today with Internet and media -- but a convergence was happening back then too. A bunch of wonderful coincidences, if you believe in coincidences, were going on. Technologically, you had the FM explosion, not based on anything other than a government decision that if you had two signals in the same market then you couldn't simulcast the same material on both. So that meant these owners had to scramble for things to do on the FM side, instead of just simulcasting what was on the AM side. Then you had the music of the first generation marked by Elvis. You have to use Elvis as some kind of a demarcation point here, because rock and roll arrived in the '50s and the first generation exposed to that and influenced by that starting making their music in the '60s, and I think that was a large part of what was going on at the time musically. And the third thing is that people like me and Vinny were arriving on college campuses with these FM frequencies and these tabula rasa -- they were blank pages. If you look back to the old programming of WFUV, it was very much in the educational station mold -- "French in the Air" followed by "Perspectives from Israel" followed by "The Yale University Review." But at this school, this station, the only rock or roots R&B, on a show called the "Time Capsule Show" -- which has incarnated now as "Group Harmony Review."

Now, I arrive there in '63, and Kennedy is killed when I'm in a freshman English class in Dealy Hall, and the world stops. I'm still getting my feet wet making station I.D.s at the station. February of '64 , the Beatles... I mean the Beatles! What an atomic bomb that was, for music, for radio, for entertainment. So, now what do I want to do with that blank canvas, what kind of colors do I want to use on it? And it came down to two or three basic elements: one was taking the music seriously, two was exposing album cuts beyond the confines of one or two singles, and finally interviewing artists that were making the music.

Fordham had a rich concert program at the time, and passing through the campus on a regular basis in '65 and '66 and '67 were the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas, and Simon and Garfunkel, all of whom I had access to interview. In those days the faculty dining hall in the campus center was the dressing room for whoever the star of the day was. There was one show that was supposed to be the Byrds, the Buffalo Springfield, and Buffy St. Marie, and the Springfield fell apart on that tour and weren't playing together; Neil had left. So they were replaced by the Chambers Brothers. But it was Buffy opening for the Chambers Brothers for the headliners, the Byrds. Imagine that as a source of material for radio programming -- you not only had the music, but the opportunity to speak to the people making the music. So that's what attracted me like a fly to honey, you know. And my show, "Campus Caravan," started in November of '64.

Vin: Is that your name for it?

Pete: Yeah, yeah. There was a show on 'BAI, I think, called "Campus Sessions," I don't remember who did it. Because it was a college radio station and a college show, I wanted it to reflect that. And I think I even toyed... there's a famous big band (my father was a big band fan, so a lot of our collection at home was big band 78s), and one of the famous guys did a song called "Caravan."

Vin: Yeah, Ellington.

Pete: I even toyed with that as the theme; themes were very important too. I ultimately settled on "Buenos Aires" by Ahmad Jamal. A great opening piece, and it had a natural place to fade down and come in and introduce whatever you were going to be doing. You know, the complete freedom to put this package together, for better or for worse, stamped me then and is still with me today, and it is the thing that I always reacted to most strongly when it was taken away or tampered with. And here too is another difference between Vinny and I; he never put up with it. He would sooner walk out that door (and I saw him do it many a time) than give in an inch to those forces. I, on the other hand, compromised, whenever and wherever necessary. [Ed. note: Please note tongue in cheek.]

Vin: But let's explain this. In addition to these very high ideals for my personal art and what I thought radio should be, I also had a very kind and understanding wife working full time, who was willing to support my idealism, so that I could walk out whenever something displeased me. I didn't have a child until 1980, and I walked out of I guess two radio stations by then. Even when I left WNEW the first time, my daughter was two years old and I remember lying in bed, the three of us, and I kept saying to [my wife] Freddy, "This is ridiculous; I got this good job at 'NEW, how can I just walk out? I have a two-year-old kid." And she said, "Don't worry about it; something will happen." So I always had my wife's support financially, which you and so many others didn't have, so I never had to really face making the compromises, and I owed that to her. It wasn't so much my idealism that allowed me to walk, but the fact that I had some kind of economic security. Because there was nothing else I could do: you probably would tell me that there wasn't anything else you could do at the point. You wanted to be on the radio...

Pete: Yeah, exactly.

Vin: And at 'NEW, Scott [Muni] really fought to have the playlists and the formats kept away from us for just about the longest period of time of any of the stations of that era. My perception of that was that the day he hired you, he let you do what you wanted to do, he rarely really got involved. We were given this enormous amount of freedom there, and it wasn't until the late '70s, early '80s that it was totally taken away. And that was unheard of at most other big, progressive rock stations. We still had the ability to play anything. I remember Richard [Neer] would play classical music. He'd play, like, 15 minutes of something on a Sunday afternoon. So that further added to our being spoiled, the 'NEW experience.

Pete: Yeah, yeah. For me, it was those first six years at 'FUV, '64-'70, and the first ten at 'NEW, '69-'79. We were the pilots, and it was the airplane. We'd go in there and fly around the city for four hours, taking people on whatever journey.

Vin: We were promoted as musicologists, and that's really how the listeners looked at us. We were the guides through all of this. Some of us were a bit more psychedelic, some of use were Alison Steele and we were guiding people in one place, and some us were Pete, guiding in another. But we were the guides; we were the people saying "Look: this is important, that is important."

Pete: Reflected to this day in the emails that I think we're both getting at the station to exactly that effect. The nicest thing about coming back to 'FUV, as I said to Chuck [Singleton, WFUV's Program Director] a few weeks ago, "Thank you for putting me in touch with my people." Because, you don't know this while you're doing it, at least I didn't know it or if I did I took it for granted, while you're doing it, you are creating (because of the nature of mass media) a reservoir of goodwill that doesn't stop reverberating even when you're not there. Even when you're not there doing it, it doesn't mean that the reservoir is dried up, disappeared, or ceased to exist -- far from it. There are people who have attachments to Vinny and me, because of this guide role, that are almost happier about us being where we are and doing what we're doing than we are. It's been fantastic to reconnect, because they've truly missed what was a very important...

Vin: ...more than important, it was a formative period in their lives, which was that 'NEW period that Pete is talking about. And 'NEW was the center. If anybody was going to come to town, they were going to be on 'NEW. Scott had these relationships with all these guys that went back to his Top 40 days. So he had access to John Lennon, he had access to Pete Townsend, and all those guys. And the audience recognized that; this was the place where the information was. I remember Rolling Stones concert tickets going on sale, and we were chosen as the place to announce it, and you had to send in post cards...

Pete: ...the bags!

Vin: The bags -- like, tens of thousands of post cards for this thing. I'm sure there's something comparable to it today with N'SYNC or whatever at Z100, but it was a united kind of culture then, that dissipated at the end of the '80s. And I always point to the night that John Lennon died as being the symbolic night that our kind of radio ended. That night everyone happened to be in town -- it's a legend, everybody knows the story -- and the jocks were all in town for this Christmas concert, so everybody came back, not asked to but they did it, because they just knew. There was no CNN, no 24-hour news channels. If they wanted to know about this, they wanted to be with their friends at ' NEW. We had a wake that night, an old fashioned Irish wake. We told jokes, and symbolically I think that was the high point of what 'NEW represented as a community radio station. And after that everything, just as in society, got diversified, fragmented.

Pete: I want to add two things on to what Vinny said. One is that [this kind of] person we were talking about was shaped and marked indelibly by this kind of radio. With very few exceptions, it isn't there for them today, not only for their own enjoyment but for them to pass on, they can't even explain verbally to their kids what it was all about, but now they can, in a sense: by turning on the radio. Certainly during the week and now on a Saturday, anytime between 4 and midnight, and illustrate to their kids a different way that the radio can be, other than the experience that they've had with it. And I think that's very helpful, because I don't know why it became the endangered species that it did so quickly -- I never expected the parentheses to be put around it. You hear other generations talking about "golden ages" and roll your eyes, but if there was a golden age of this type of FM, it did come and go, and we can now long for it as a package with a beginning, middle and end, and I think what we're doing, that sprit exists, but it exists to different degrees. Sometimes it's a blazing conflagration, sometimes it's just an ember that needs to be hit with the bellows to get the fire going again, and I look upon that as part of what we're doing now. We've got this ember here: let's get it going into little more of a flame.

John: But are people going to assume as you two are here and Dennis Elsas is here, that WFUV is trying to recreate WNEW? Could that be a fair assumption?

Pete: That's not the issue at all. WFUV is trying to recreate an atmosphere of creativity, exploration, and reverence for the music that existed in many more places in the culture than just at that radio station.

Vin: Could never happen, could never be. The world doesn't really need WNEW now, that's why it doesn't exist. There are a lot of other reasons too, mismanagement being one of them, but ... by having us there at 'FUV now, it lends a sense of continuity, of history. So we're the people we never thought we'd be; we're the elders. I mean, Rita [Houston, WFUV Music Director] has always said to me from the day that I met her, she's wanted to be me. The day she met me was at a Black 47 concert in Tarrytown, she was working at WRNW or something, and she shook my hand and said, "I'm the Vin Scelsa of Westchester." I said "Good for you, that's great." So, a lot of those people listened to us, got into radio because of us, and then discovered that there was no place to do it. We were the last ones; the franchise ended with us.

Pete: Speaking about the place of 'NEW in those days, have you seen Almost Famous?

Vin: Yes.

Pete: The scene in the film where Sweetwater comes to New York -- he didn't put it in for whatever reasons, he was more interested in acknowledging print media than audio media -- and they're going up Park Avenue or whatever, they were going to 'NEW. That's a sure thing, and part of the reason that you responded so positively to that movie was because if you knew the subtext, if you lived the subtext... I mean, the Lester Bangs character, both the actor and the dialog that Crowe gave him, which was probably right out of Lester's mouth, was so on target and on the money that that was just a must-see for a certain type.

Vin: All right, so here's an interesting thing that happened. At some point in the '70s, there were these two stations in New York, it was 'NEW and there was 'PLJ. In the very early '70s, after it went through its automated period and stuff like that, 'PLJ became the progressive rock station, it was very radical. It was far more radical than 'NEW. 'NEW was, like, straightforward -- here's the music, we're professionals. And 'PLJ was like, "up against the wall!" Anyone with a political cause could get on the air, and that lasted for like a year, before they brought in whoever the first format guy was, and just got rid of all that. And then, 'PLJ became known for being a very conservative, very commercial, formatted station, and 'NEW got the reputation for being hip -- despite being honest through everything, through every cultural change, through every political phase. Despite being themselves, those jocks incurred in their audience a trust.

'NEW was real. And 'NEW wasn't trying to be anything else than it really was. Scott [Muni] let us be real, he let us talk, he let us tell stories, and he let us pick and program the music, the way we wanted to play it. That's why the idea of, what Pete says, a canvas -- the idea of a canvas -- is a perfect one. I mean, that's what I always feel like I'm doing when I'm doing a free-form show. I'm painting a picture, and I've got all these colors, all these textures. And it's very frustrating when I don't have all of them. You know, like the other night on the air, when I went out to get a certain Springsteen record, and it wasn't there, and it was the record I had to play next. And this then leads to another discussion of the difference between the way Peter and I do radio. And I was like, "Now what am I going to do?" I had to play "Streets of Philadelphia," and it wasn't there. And for a good minute there, I was lost because the perfect color to play, the perfect segue, was "Streets of Philadelphia." Now I gotta go, "Well, what's gonna be second best?" That's because I do the show very spontaneously... always have. And even all these years when I've been doing the show once a week on Sunday nights, I've been the odd man out, the weird guy on the classic rock station, or the weird guy on whatever 'NEW has been in the last few years. The show was always still very spontaneous. That's part of the thing that was bred into me back in the 'FMU days. It was that you went with the flow. Each song -- its the Roscoe thing. Roscoe says, "I don't want to know what's coming next." Somewhere during this record, something will tell me what to play next. And that's playing without a net, and when you go and the record you're looking for isn't there, then you're, like, falling, and you gotta scramble.

John: Do you have the equivalent of the actor's nightmare, when you have the dreams that you're standing in front of what used to be a wall of vinyl albums, and you know you've got thirty seconds left?

Pete: Yeah, I've had that dream. The worst real-life thing that ever happened like in one of the things that Vinny is describing is: I've got two turntables, and one of them is playing the record and I'm trying to get the next one. And I finally get what it should be, and now I gotta go find it from the wall -- the record is ending, I gotta get back and get it cued up. I'm so intent on it that I take the record out of the jacket, with what I think it just enough time to do the segue, and I place it down squarely on the one that is playing on the air, crushing the needle into it, ruining two records and one turntable. That actually happened to me.

Vin: Because you're working so fast, and you literally have seconds to do it.

Pete: I was saying the other night that I am often physically exhausted when I leave there. And people say, "You play records, man!" But mentally it can be so fatiguing. My analogy is that Vinny and I, by some bend in the time warp or whatever, were allowed to become chefs. It's not a canvas anymore, it's a kitchen. We were allowed to go into this kitchen using whatever ingredients were available to us to present the tastiest, most digestible, wonderful dinner or meal that could be provided for the listening audience at that given moment. And that was the thrill of it -- putting the meal together and watching the diners somehow or another enjoy it. And somewhere in the process of what was and what is, people like Vin and me became waiters, and not only waiters, but fast-food waiters. "You want fries and a coke with that?" And I'm sorry, it's an honorable profession, but...

Vin: I couldn't do it.

John: But Pete, you have much more of your show worked out in advance than Vin, right?

Pete: That was Vinny's point, and it is true. I want to know the structure before I go in there. I guess what happened is I must have gotten scared as a child by that terrible feeling of falling and knowing that the net wasn't there, and that I just like to know.

Vin: But I mean, you worked for years at 'NEW just going from one track to another. You would put the planned stuff into special shows, into "Mixed Bag" and the Sunday shows, where you would have themes. I've never been a big fan of that, of doing themes. I'm sort of one for letting the theme reveal itself during the course of the show, rather than come in with it. Sometimes I come in with it, sometimes I come in with a first set -- I know what that's gonna be, but then it goes from there. I've always felt that Peter is more of an academic in his approach, and I'm a little more of an anarchist in my approach. And when we were together at 'NEW, Peter and I were really on opposite sides of whatever the sides were there for a long time -- that's my perception of it. There were sort of the guys who wanted to play all of the punk rock, and it was me and it was Meg [Griffin], and Tom Morerra, and it was Danny Neer. And then there were the guys who had originally started the station which was Scott, and by that time it was Dennis [Elsas] and Pete and Dave Herman. Correct me if my perception if wrong, but if there was an "us and them" -- we were on opposite sides. And yet I remember meetings when we had gotten together at Dave Herman's house to decide on whether or not we were going to go on strike. This sounds absurd now, but it was even as late as 1980, 1981. Peter and discovered as we talked that we had more in common than we ever realized. And that thing we had in common was the desire to control the show, the desire to be the chef, or the painter. His music went one place, mine went another -- yet somehow they came together. Pete was more apt to be Beach Boys and a more commercial sound, and I was more apt to go over here and play the Fugs, or whatever it was. Ultimately, our programming philosophies were exactly the same: Leave us alone. And I remember a meeting that we had where I walked away from it being profoundly moved by you and your reaction to what was going on, and coming home and saying to my wife, "you know what, I have a lot more in common with Pete than I thought I did."

John: Both of you are known as great interviewers. What is the secret of a great interview?

Vin: The secret of a great interview for me is being a fan of the person I'm interviewing. It's going out of my way to invite someone to be part of my show, who I really want to spend time with. Those are really the only guests I have. I never take a forced guest upon me; I never book somebody just because they are available, or because they're hot at the moment. They're people I want to actually talk to. And then I try to immerse myself as much as possible in their work so that if it's an author, they know that I've read the book and probably all the other books as well; and if it's a filmmaker they know I've seen the film and probably have seen all the other films. And the same thing with a musician, that I'm familiar with their work and their influences, all too often I think what they get at radio stations is a ten-minute slot with somebody who has no idea who they are, and hasn't read the book, hasn't heard the record, hasn't seen the movie, and they find that to be so frivolous and unrewarding, when they get to me they find a fan who really wants to talk to them about their work and has the opportunity to spend a limitless amount of time with them.

Another thing that I do that I think is rather unique is that I always work live, I never work tape. And when I work live I will give an enormous amount of time to the interview, meaning more than an hour. And they usually don't get that, and they are thrilled to have it. Now matter what level they're on, they could be Elvis Costello or they could be the Professor & Maryann; [artists at] any level of success are thrilled to have a long period of time to relax and really get deeply into what they're concerned with, and what they want to talk about. So that's one thing, spending a lot of time with someone, doing it live so there is no net, no way to say "We'll fix that in the editing." The interview is for real and it keeps people on their toes and it keeps things electric. It keeps a kind of tension in the room. Not a negative tension, but a positive tension.

I'll give you a couple of examples. One of my favorite stories is, I was having the author Pat Conroy on the show. Pat is the author of Prince of Tides and The Great Santini; he has always been a favorite author of mine. He had put out his last novel, which was called Beach Music; we put in a request for him never thinking we'd get him, and not only did we get him but we got him as the very first appearance on his tour, on a Sunday night. Beach Music, as its title would imply, does have a lot of music in it. It's about a period of time when the characters are growing up along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia and there is a whole beach music scene there. It's somewhat akin to the California beach music, only the music is funkier. The music is more black then white. It's not so much Beach Boys as it is Chairman of the Board. There were maybe a half a dozen songs in the book that were key songs that were playing when very important things happened, or actually instigated certain moments in the book. So I have all these ready for him, and as soon as I played one for him he lit up. He goes "You got the music!" We had a ball with this guy; he spent an hour and a half with us. We talked about everything. He talked about his family, he talked about his father, who was the prototype for The Great Santini, very open, very honest, very Southern, very gentle, but also very kind of digging the fact that that he was having an interview on a rock show. That was a very literary interview. He was having fun with music and everything, but he was also enjoying talking about his writing. It was great and it was one of the high points for me on the show.

About 5 weeks later my producer gets a phone call on her machine, and the call came in the middle of the night from the middle of nowhere, and it's Pat in his Southern accent saying, "You guys ruined my book tour, it's been downhill ever since. You guys were great and I expected everything else to be great and it's all sucked. I just wanted to thank you for that, ruining my tour!" Then he laughed and left some other message. When I heard that I was just so thrilled, to have a guy of Pat Conroy's stature feel that passionate, to even remember that he had done this thing 6 weeks earlier. But I was probably one of the only people that gave him enough time and really related to the music. He called the book Beach Music, the music was real important to him. Even though you didn't necessarily have to pick up on that if you were not a music person. Just impressing somebody with your knowledge of their work and with your appreciation. You don't challenge them, that's not my style. My style is to win somebody over and to let them know right from the start that I'm there as more of a fan than anything else.

John: Pete?

Pete: I agree with a lot of what Vinny said, but I don't mind to prerecord them as long as they are live on tape. Something else he implied, which I agree with, is establishing trust. The idea is that these artists have been burned. They have been through the mill and when they come to you, it's like they have a thorn in their paw. Your job is to get that their thorn out of their paw as quickly and comfortably as possible, and that allows them to relax and open up to you. It is up to you as an ally and as a compatriot and as a friend, not an enemy, not the opposition. There's a funny scene in this movie Almost Famous where whenever the rock band encounters the print journalist they identify him as the enemy. I think that it's part of the process, part of what at times appears to be an adversarial relationship when it shouldn't be, particularly in the cases of people whom I've had on the show. They know I am a big fan and want to show them in a good light, and vice versa. In fact, an interview is a two way street, not a one-way street. You both have a job to do, and it works best when you both are operating in peak efficiency.

John: Can you think of examples of artists who came in particularly skeptical and you end up feeling that something happened in the course of it to make it all work?

Pete: Absolutely. There were two classics for me. One was Paul Simon in '86. I had dealt with him in the past, but always with some distance, always with some perfunctory nature attached to it. Somehow or another in '86, we had been assigned 15 minutes with Paul, and it ended up being an hour and a half. By the end of it he came up to me and said, "You've got things there that no one else has." So I knew that we had broken down all of those barriers that may have existed between subject and media person. And the other one, of course, is Joni Mitchell. She came at a point in her career when she had been ignored or derided [about] the choices that she had made, she was feeling vulnerable, and she wasn't going to perform live, but by the end of our time together we were running over to Manny's to get her a guitar, so she could play. When it was over, she came across the room to embrace me. So I knew we had a total success.

John: And you just attribute that to being able to establish that trust somewhere along the line. And if so, how did you do it?

Pete: I think knowledge was a part of it. I think I knew. It's not even something I had done. There are some artists who you have to do your homework for, where you have to get it from research, from "book learnin'," so to speak. With Joni, I lived it. It was my responsibility to communicate to her as quickly as possible that I had loved it, understood it, appreciated it, and that was an instance where that clearly happened. She just came around and did this retrospective about her life and career that I count as one of the high points of my interviewing experiences.

John: Here's what I'd like to ask of each of you: what do you admire most in the other person's show ... "Mixed Bag" for Pete, "Idiot's Delight" for Vin?

Pete: I've got mine. Vinny has an uninhibitedness that I admire, and envy, and enjoy. I might have had it at some point, but it was probably back in the original 'FUV days. Something along the way -- I don't know if it was for putting my hand out and getting slapped or getting my feet too close to the fire and realizing you're gonna get burned for that -- but something along the way put some sort of structure or constraints on my ability to be uninhibited on the radio. So, yes, I know that I work within a more strictly drawn formula than Vinny does, but its self-drawn. Its not imposed from outside, so that's OK. But I do admire when he is on one of his flights. Its like watching Jonathan Winters, or any of the great improvisers. I'm just thanking God for a talent like that existing in the universe while I happen to be alive.

John: Now, Vin?

Vin: I've never had to stop behaving that way. There are times when I get tired of it, or bored of it, or wonder if the audience cares anymore, so its nice to hear you say that you still find it entertaining after all these years, because sometimes I am -- we both are -- our own worst critic. Sometimes I think, "Oh, God, this is just awful," but then you get the email the next day, "Oh, what a great show that was!" What I admire about Pete is his very sense of continuity. There's the knowledge that if something has to be remembered, honored, paid attention to, noted -- if Pete's on the air, he'll do it. Because once again, that goes back to the academic thing. I've never been comfortable with that -- I've never been able to research, I've never been comfortable with that, I've never enjoyed being in the library back when I was at school. You know, I love to read, but I'm very scattered. If I did make notes, my notes were all over the place so they didn't mean anything. What I admire about Pete is his ability to do all that research, and bring those things together, and keep track of the notes, and keep track of the tapes. So when he does a Beatles thing, he knows where his George Martin interview is. You know, I've got boxes of stuff and I just don't know what's in them. That's the difference between us, and it just points out what we each admire in each other.

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More about: Vin Scelsa | Idiot's Delight
More about: Pete Fornatale | Mixed Bag

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