by Ric Teller
Happy holidays to all of my fellow 695 members, families, guests, and other assorted readers. I hope each of you will find joyful things to celebrate, especially family. Of all the holidays, my favorite is Thanksgiving, but today as I write this, it is Labor Day. It’s our day. Since 1894, when President Grover Cleveland signed the bill making Labor Day a national legal holiday (more than half the states were already officially celebrating it). The day has been popular for parades, picnics, and exuberant rallies. It always falls on the first Monday of September, a couple of months after July 4th, and a couple of months before Thanksgiving. Growing up in Hastings, Nebraska, by the end of August, Little League baseball games were finished, the Adams County Fair had presented all its blue ribbons, Wayne Huntley had taken the checkered flag at the fairgrounds quarter-mile dirt track in the final stock car race of the season, and Dad closed the drive-in theater until spring. When I started playing in popular bands around the Midwest, that holiday weekend was our last chance to play a three-er (one more than a two-er), before moving on to homecoming dances. In the background of whatever Labor Day weekend chazerai was trying to attract my attention, the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon was always on our television. Many of Jerry’s films played in Dad’s theaters (IATSE projectionists, of course). I turned 9 years old in 1961, the perfect demographic for those wonderful, ground-breaking comedies. Jerry Lewis taught a lot of us about funny. Under his tutelage, we attempted a pratfall, or a double take, or mimicked dialogue from one of his wonderful movies like these lines from Scared Stiff with Dean Martin.
Jerry: I can’t go in there and fight that whole mob. They got guns.
Dean: You can get a gun.
Jerry: They got blackjacks.
Dean: You can get a blackjack.
Jerry: They got big strong muscles.
Dean: You can get a blackjack.
That picture was filmed in my birth year, actually around my birthday (a union holiday). It features the last movie appearance of Carmen Miranda, the first Hollywood writing credit for Norman Lear, and a role played by George Dolenz, whose son became a Monkee. As a small-town kid in the ’50s and ’60s, my access to this humor came from the wealth of films, both first-run and matinee double features (including a cartoon and a Three Stooges comedy). And of course, once a year, we were treated to Jerry running amok on live television, as the host of the Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon. When I was young and trying to perfect my spit-take, I couldn’t have imagined that someday I would enjoy the privilege of working on that amazing show. In trade for giving him the autonomy to make pictures his way, Jerry provided Paramount with a lot of revenue. Over the years, my Labor Days have been celebrated by working in Dad’s theaters, playing gigs, and eventually, joining the crew on Jerry Lewis’s Telethon.
We did local MDA Telethon cut-ins while I was at KTLA, but in 1990, I received a call from the much admired Packy Brown of Las Vegas, asking me to work on the national show, which would take place that year at the Aquarius Theatre in Los Angeles. I did the show and became a regular part of the crew for more than twenty years. The Telethon moved to The Sahara in Las Vegas the next year, where for the price of a beer or two, I could sit in the lounge with Joe Kendall and listen to Sam Butera and the Witnesses. For years, Sam played tenor sax with the legendary Louis Prima. In 1995, the show went to CBS Television City. Fortunately, I was left off the crew list.
Wait. What? By that time, I considered myself to be a regular member of the Telethon crew, but when the call came for another show and I hadn’t heard from the MDA folks, I agreed to go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opening concert at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. The show, thirty years ago as I write this, went on for about seven hours. We flew to Cleveland on Wednesday. From the time we arrived on site at 7:30 the next morning, until we traveled home, we were on continuous call. Thursday 7:30am-2:30am, Friday 7:30am-2:30am, and Saturday 7:30am-5:30am. We got out of there just in time to shower and head to the airport. I started listening to rock and roll in Jim Casteel’s garage, probably 1956. He played an Elvis record for my lifelong friend, Dennis, and me. We were hooked. The first 45 I owned was “Hound Dog,” flip side “Don’t Be Cruel.” Highlights of that opening Hall of Fame concert? Too many to single out. So, here ya go.
SET LIST FOR 1995 CONCERT FOR THE HALL OF FAME
Chuck Berry with Springsteen/E Street Band “Johnny B. Goode”
John Mellencamp “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.”
John Mellencamp and Martha Reeves
“Wild Night”
Bon Jovi “With a Little Help From My Friends”
Eric Burdon with Bon Jovi “It’s My Life,”
“We Gotta Get Out of This Place”
Melissa Etheridge “Be My Baby,” “Love Child,” “Leader of the Pack”
Dr. John “Blueberry Hill,” “What’d I Say”
Al Green “Tired of Being Alone,”
“A Change Is Gonna Come”
The Pretenders “My City Was Gone,”
“The Needle and the Damage Done”
Johnny Cash “Folsom Prison Blues”
Johnny Cash with John Mellencamp “Ring of Fire”
Jackson Browne “Redemption Song,” “Tracks of My Tears”
Jackson Browne and Melissa Etheridge
“Wake Up Little Susie”
Aretha Franklin “I Can’t Turn You Loose,”
“(You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Woman”
Aretha Franklin with Al Green “Freeway of Love”
John Fogerty “Born on the Bayou,” “Fortunate Son”
Soul Asylum and Iggy Pop “Back Door Man”
Lou Reed with Soul Asylum “Sweet Jane”
Gin Blossoms “Wait,” “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better”
Sheryl Crow “Let It Bleed,” “Get Off of My Cloud”
George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars
“Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),”
“I Want to Take You Higher”
The Kinks “All Day and All of the Night,” “Lola”
Heart “Battle of Evermore,” “Love Hurts”
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
“Shake, Rattle and Roll,” “Bo Diddley,” “She’s the One”
Jerry Lee Lewis with Springsteen/E Street Band “Great Balls of Fire,” “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band “Darkness on the Edge of Town”
Natalie Merchant “I Know How to Do It”
Robbie Robertson “The Weight”
Bruce Hornsby “I Know You Rider,” “Scarlet Begonias”
Bob Dylan “All Along the Watchtower,”
“Just Like a Woman,” “Highway 61 Revisited”
Bob Dylan with Springsteen/E Street Band “Forever Young”
Booker T. and the MGs “Green Onions”
Sam Moore “When Something Is Wrong With My Baby,” “Hold On I’m Comin’”
The Allman Brothers Band “Blue Sky,”
“One Way Out”
The Allman Brothers Band with Sheryl Crow “Midnight Rider”
Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora “Imagine,”
“Give Peace a Chance”
Slash and Boz Scaggs “Red House”
James Brown “Cold Sweat,”
“It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” “I Feel Good”
Martha and the Vandellas “Dancing in the Street”
Little Richard “Good Golly Miss Molly,” “Tutti Frutti”
John Fogerty and Sam Moore
“In the Midnight Hour”
Chuck Berry, Bruce Springsteen, and
Melissa Etheridge “Rock and Roll Music”
The next year, thanks to Paul Sandweiss, who mixed the Telethon for thirty years, I was invited back and worked on all the rest, including Jerry’s last, in 2010. Memories of these shows are still fresh. We were on the air for twenty-one hours … that’s about seven Grammys. Sometimes it was chaos. Bands showed up late, surprise guests showed up early, you gotta love live television. We even found time to help fill the boot. Iconic comedians entertained us, like Don Rickles, Norm Crosby, Shecky Greene, Henny Youngman, and Red Buttons, who never got a dinner. The terrific orchestra provided constant musical highlights, especially accompanying singers like the wonderful Jack Jones, who often arrived in his motorhome and stayed the weekend. Sunday morning, before the show, was reserved for Jerry’s music rehearsal. It was joyful. He loved singing with this talented group and loved even more making them laugh. Sal Lozano, Rick Baptist, and Gene Cipriano (Yo, Cip!) were frequent participants in the fun. Each year, Jerry would point to players calling out musical notes, resulting in chords that would make Varèse proud.
The twenty-some years that I spent Labor Day weekend in the company of Jerry and the wonderful staff and crew are some of the most treasured of my time in television. The Telethon week always had one dark day built into the schedule. Depending on the weather (was it hot or damn hot?), the crew would take advantage of that day by going to the pool at the hotel, visiting Lake Mead, or in one particular case, hiking on Mount Charleston. I used United frequent flyer miles to rent a shiny red Cadillac El Dorado for the day. At the appointed time, three of us headed up the mountain, Joe Kendall riding shotgun, Murray Siegel, A2 Emeritus, in the back. Jeffrey Fecteau and Bart Chiate met us at the trailhead, and we hiked up, enjoying the cooler weather and beautiful views until it was almost time for lunch. At that point, we hiked back down to The Lodge at Mount Charleston, our dining destination. Paul Sandweiss, who enjoyed a busy morning mixing the orchestra pre-records, met us there. As we sat and ordered lunch, it was apparent that our table had become a point of interest for the staff. Finally, someone came over and asked if that was Kenny G? No, we assured them, in spite of the physical resemblance, this was Murray, not Kenny. We enjoyed our lunch, settled the tab, and as we headed out the door, we heard a cacophony from our table. Joe had left a note, drawn on a placemat, thanking the staff for their wonderful food and service, complete with a drawing of a saxophone and signed, Kenny G. As the staff gathered at the doorway to look, they had a good view of Joe and me driving away in the brand-new Cadillac with “Kenny” in the back seat. That was a good day. It was my honor to take part in that unforgettable show for so many years; I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Thanks to Packy, Paul, and so many others who made those Labor Day weekends a special part of my career. It always seemed like we would go to the Telethon in the summer, but when we came back, football season had started, and kids were in school. It was fall.