Black Cracker Presents: Tales of...Season 2
Tales of...My Dead Heroes
Josh's dead heroes. Interviews, memories and short stories. First up, A 21-year-old Josh auditions for Beatlemania in 1977.
By Josh Alan Friedman
Season 2: Tales of…My Dead Heroes
Unreleased interviews with the writers, songwriters and characters Josh Alan Friedman knew, admired, and outlived.
Over four decades of journalism, Friedman recorded conversations that never fully made it into print. This season releases them, with his own short stories and recollections woven around the tape.
Voices in Season 2 include Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather; Doc Pomus, the blues singer turned songwriter behind "Save the Last Dance for Me," in a two-part episode on his return to writing after a dormant decade; Jerry Leiber of Leiber and Stoller; Broadway composer Cy Coleman; Texas blues bassist Keith Ferguson; record producer Joel Dorn; Tiny Tim; and Al Goldstein, the Screw publisher and First Amendment litigant whose fall from Upper East Side family man to homelessness Friedman documents across two episodes.
Friedman worked for Goldstein at Screw in the late 1970s, and later co-wrote his memoir, I, Goldstein: My Screwed Life.
FREEING 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 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 DetailsA 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 DetailsThe Princess of 42nd Street
Fanny Gold ran her family’s 42nd Street newsstand as an eight-year-old girl in 1915. Living in poverty one block away, she was enchanted by Times Square’s aristocratic era. And was mugged six times there as an old lady.
The Man Who Booked the Movies From Cagney to Kung Fu.
Martin Levine, president of Brandt Theaters, booked most of the movies across 42nd Street for 50 years. His office reflects the faded glamour of a once mighty theater empire now reduced to kung-fu, grindhouse and porn flicks.
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