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.
WELCOME TO THE BOWELS OF 42ND STREET. It’s 1983. Charles Rubinstein has run the penny arcade at 8th Avenue and 42nd Street since 1939. “This is the dumping grounds of 42nd Street. But I’m not a-scared of any individuals that tries to threaten me. You have to use that nightstick, and I say let ’em…
View Episode DetailsFROM HELLS ANGELS TO BURLESQUE. A Columbia Presbyterian nurse, then a drug counselor in the California prison system, Raven de la Croix busted loose as a burlesque star at the age of 32. She’d also spent eight years with the Hells Angels and starred in several Russ Meyer films. Here in the headliner’s dressing room…
View Episode DetailsWELCOME TO THE BACK OFFICE OF THE MELODY BURLESK. Frank Sinatra’s boyhood pal and first bodyguard, Bob Anthony, also became a big band singer. Tougher than Frank, but devoid of hit records, he went on to found the Melody Burlesk in Times Square. Like the Heimlich maneuver, you might assume a lap dance occurred somewhere…
View Episode DetailsTO HEAR IZZY GROVE IS TO UNDERSTAND DAMON RUNYON. UNNERSTAND? One of the last Guys & Dolls characters to survive into the porn era, Grove was a welterweight fighter known as The Ghetto Avenger in the 1920s. In 1983, he is being thrown out of his office. Hustling in Times Square for 60 years, he…
View Episode DetailsPEE WEE MARQUETTE WAS THE CAUSTIC M.C. AT HISTORIC JAZZ CLUB, BIRDLAND, DURING THE ’40S AND ’50S. The short-tempered midget spent the last 25 years of his life as doorman-greeter for Hawaii Kai, a schlock tourist restaurant next door to the Winter Garden Theatre in Times Square. Come bend your ear to another voice of…
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