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Season 1
Tales of...Times Square: The Tapes
A SAFE SPACE FOR SISTERS OF THE NIGHT. Girls from all over the country gravitated to NY to make more money in street prostitution than anywhere else. Missionary Arlene Carmen ran a mobile van that gave them a respite from the cops, the tricks and their pimps.
View Episode DetailsTIMES SQUARE CLEANS UP FOR PORN REBORN. No sooner than the neighborhood rid itself of filth, pimps and whores came dancing back into the hearts of Broadway. Composer Cy Coleman and writer David Newman discuss their hit musical in 1997.
View Episode DetailsFREEING THE NIPPLE FROM SALES TAX. Al Kronish, one of the Melody Burlesk’s owners, was the first CPA to do tax returns for porn stars. Under constant legal harassment from the city, he kept Times Square’s last bastion of old burlesque open and spread-eagled.
View Episode DetailsSeason 2
Tales of...My Dead Heroes
THE GREAT BLUESMAN TELLS IT STRAIGHTDoc Pomus no longer had to cater to the teenage rock ’n’ roll market. He…
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.