Tales of… is a podcast built from a writer's own tapes.
Josh Alan Friedman spent the late 1970s and '80s covering pre-Disney Times Square for the men's magazines of the era — the only reporter in a city of 50,000 writers working that beat. He recorded his interviews on cheap cassettes and kept them for forty years.
Season 1, Tales of…Times Square: The Tapes, restores those recordings: the burlesque emcees, hustlers, and Runyon holdovers who populated 42nd Street before it was bulldozed. They're the raw material behind his book Tales of Times Square, first published by Delacorte Press in 1986 and in print ever since. Goodreads
Season 2, Tales of…My Dead Heroes, opens the rest of the archive — unheard conversations with people who shaped Josh's world and are no longer here to be interviewed: Godfather author Mario Puzo, songwriters Doc Pomus and Jerry Leiber, Broadway composer Cy Coleman, publisher Al Goldstein, guitarist Keith Ferguson, producer Joel Dorn, and Tiny Tim.
Josh hosts both seasons. The incidental music is his own.
Season 1
Tales of...Times Square: The Tapes
PEE WEE MARQUETTE WAS THE CAUSTIC M.C. AT HISTORIC JAZZ CLUB, BIRDLAND, DURING THE ’40S AND ’50S. The short-tempered midget…
View Episode DetailsTO HEAR IZZY GROVE IS TO UNDERSTAND DAMON RUNYON. UNNERSTAND? One of the last Guys & Dolls characters to survive…
View Episode DetailsWELCOME TO THE BACK OFFICE OF THE MELODY BURLESK. Frank Sinatra’s boyhood pal and first bodyguard, Bob Anthony, also became…
View Episode DetailsSeason 2
Tales of...My Dead Heroes
THE GREAT BLUESMAN TELLS IT STRAIGHT Doc Pomus no longer had to cater to the teenage rock ’n’ roll market.…
View Episode DetailsTHE EARLY STIGMA OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL After a dormant decade, the great songwriter Doc Pomus was back in business…
View Episode DetailsFROM PARADISE TO THE GUTTER The Great Pornographer went from Upper East Side family man/pornographer-next-door to Bowery bum. The First…
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About the podcast
Writer-guitarist Josh Alan Friedman was born in New York City in 1956. In a town of 50,000 writers, Josh was the only one covering the pre-Disney Times Square beat, for the men’s magazines of the era. He always marched to his own drummer, appearing in National Lampoon, Soho Weekly News, New York and High Times. By 1987, he’d had enough and followed his wife Peggy to Texas, a year after Tales of Times Square—the subject of our first season’s podcast—was published.
This seasons podcast presents Tales of...Josh’s Dead Heroes. Short stories, memories and the voices of Doc Pomus, Jerry Leiber, Cy Coleman, Mario Puzo, Keith Ferguson, Joel Dorn and Tiny Tim.