Johnny Carson, a Mini-Memoir

I played the Tonight Show twice back in the day when Johnny Carson was host. No, I didn’t meet him, nor was I on camera; that’s not what this is about.

This was sometime in the early 80’s. I was playing with Michael Martin Murphey, he of “Wildfire” fame and some later country hits.

Now ... please know that my memory was terrible even in my late twenties, so all I can offer up are a few little anecdotes as I talk to myself. I sit here looking at a photo of three of us musicians standing in a parking space reserved for “Mr. Carson” and hoping for more memories, but my mind follows my lack of interest in my own past by discarding much of its contents, like a fighter jet will drop its spent fuel tanks. Only mine are full. I tell myself that I do this to make room for the future, but really, I don’t care much about most of my journey, and to add to that, I just can’t remember shit.

I’m proud to count this poorly recalled experience among so many others from my unusual life because Johnny Carson is an icon of American entertainment, the host of a show I had watched since the days of Jack Paar and Steve Allen, Johnny’s precursors. I also watched Joe Pyne, Bill O’Reilly’s precursor. (I don’t know what I was doing up so late at that age, perhaps Rage Refinement.) Although from all reports Carson was an intensely private man, his was a job that allowed him to hide only so much about himself, and the self-effacing wit he engaged in, as well as the obvious good will tended to him by his guests, led most viewers to see him as the kind of guy you’d be happy to have as a neighbor. And again, from all reports, this was true.

The scene back then was this: Michael was to be front and center, alone, and we were to play off-camera from the chairs of various Tonight Show Band members. It was unknown at that time if Johnny would invite Michael to sit and chat; that part of the show was unscripted and largely determined by how much time was spent with previous guests. But when time permitted, Johnny made careers with this gesture, and it advanced other careers already healthy. He didn’t invite Michael to chat on that occasion, and I don’t remember if he did on the second.

At the early afternoon rehearsal, our drummer sat behind Ed Shaughnesy’s kit while I took the guitarist’s chair, and so on. I was to sing backup, so they swung over a microphone on a huge boom stand that was used for part of the horn section. With one hand on my guitar, I grabbed it with the other. It shocked me.

“Yeow, shit!” I said eloquently. “This damn thing shocked me!” I wanted some sympathy.

Doc Severinsen looked up from his music stand at the hippie guitar player, the noted dandy dressed at this time of day in slacks and a gray sweatshirt with a large hole in it, smiled and said slowly, “That’s just ... our way ... of saying ... hello.”

Okay. Don’t touch the son-of-bitch again. I get it. This is some serious low-tech, I thought, although the term hadn’t yet entered circulation. (It had to wait for hi-tech.)

Rehearsal done, we hung out and listened to the big band run through a song. They were just vicious; they could sight read flyshit and they swung like well-hung angels.

Hungry for lunch, we found the commissary, and lo, the food was ordinary. The place was full of working folk who had seen it all, so we were properly ignored, just a bunch of musicians for some longhair who had a hit song. No one cared who we were, and indeed we were nobody. But we felt like somebody – we were going to be on The Johnny Carson Show. (None of us called it The Tonight Show. Today it’s The Tonight Show with Jay Leno; then, it was popularly called The Carson Show.)

We took the photo that I have. I’m skinny as a rail; my hair was black.

The famous Green Room was was just a green room with a couch; maybe there were some plastic flowers. Randy Erhlic, our drummer, and I walked around backstage while the audience filed in and the big band guys took their seats. We were nervous. I recalled stories about guests getting drunk before they went on; I remembered Ed McMahon’s reputation as a man who liked a drink. There’s alcohol around here somewhere, I thought as the band thundered through Johnny’s theme. Maybe a bartender. This is the big time. A drink would calm my nerves.

“A drink will calm our nerves, Randy.”

“Yeah? Okay. Where?”

We walked around. We passed the bar several times before we noticed it. It was a round 10-foot tall cabinet standing in the middle of the backstage floor. A few lonely bottles of booze sat on the shelves. Cheap booze. Popov vodka, for Chrissakes. We found ice in a bucket, a few glasses, maybe some tonic water or orange juice, and started making ourselves a drink.

An old guy was standing behind us.

“What you fellas think you’re doing?” he said menacingly.

“Um,” I said, turning around. “We’re playing on the show. We’re ... we’re guests.” The old guy had a gun in his hand, a revolver with a very long barrel. He wasn’t pointing it at us, but he had a very large gun in his hand.

“We thought it would be okay to have a drink,” Randy said. “It is, isn’t it? We’re nervous.”

“You’re not gonna get drunk, are you?” He talked to us as if we were children.

“No, just a drink,” I said. “Really.”

“Okay. Just don’t get drunk.” He walked off.

“Excuse me,” I said to his back. He turned around. “Who are you?”

“I’m the prop man,” he said, and walked away.

We were to go on late, so we watched the show. I remember that the actress Teri Garr was a guest, and I watched a monitor from backstage with some crew folk; there were no chairs. The monitor was an old Motorola console television that would have taken four men to lift; it was old then. Backstage was funky and definitely low-tech. I wanted to see the show live, so I found a place in the wings to the right of the guests. Teri Garr was funny, sexy in a yellow sundress and covered with freckles. Johnny and the audience loved her. They were all having fun.

On the first commercial break, Johnny and Ed stood out front and took questions from the audience. They were both hilarious, and it all seemed spontaneous even though they had surely answered the same questions again and again through the years, and I thought, They don’t have to do this. They can go grab a smoke or a drink and the audience would be just as happy to be here having their wide time in a Los Angeles television moment, hoping to get on camera and wave to Mom and Dad – and looking forward to talking about it for years to come like I’m doing now. But Ed and Johnny waived their break, stood there and gave. And every person in room, including the crew, was having fun. I noticed that the crew laughed as if they’d never heard the jokes before.

The show went on. I don’t remember the other guests. I don’t remember our performance, so it must have been okay – but I remember standing next to the guitarist, waiting to take his seat, while the band spat thunder and lightning all around me. Being in the middle of a band that big and that good is psycho-sexual-cerebral. You could get a taste of it if you would go out to the railroad tracks with someone you’ve always wanted to sleep with and stand perhaps two feet away from a train moving either slowly or at a good clip. The music will be cacophony instead of an orderly chart, but aside from that there won’t be any difference.

I remember that part very well. Then we played. I don’t remember it at all.

I don’t remember the second time we did the Carson Show – I may be stringing two memories together – and I sorely wish I could. At this moment, it pains me that I can’t.

I just found my copy of the contract from AFTRA, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. It’s dated June 17th, 1983. There’s a Carson Productions, Inc. letterhead, an NBC Burbank address, and a compensation of $192.42 for that performance as well as a promise of same for each successive replay. I was noted as one of the “off camera singers” and “back ups for Michael Murphey.” I could have joined AFTRA after those shows – that’s one way you can get in – and had great medical and dental benefits for as long I as remained a member, but the dues schedule on the second sheet of the contract was related to income, and the income level chart started at 20k. I was in my late forties before I made more than 18k. (Ah, but the memories ... nobody becomes a musician for the money. Anyone who does is a fool.)

I really loved Johnny Carson. He was a skit man from the old school, a young Vaudevillian, and he was one hell of an improviser. When he quit it was the end of an era, and it’s not coming back. I can’t explain just what the era was, but it started in black and white, finished in color, was good and now it’s gone. Great music, humor, and interesting conversation from great minds and unique oddballs like Jonathan Winters, Robin Williams’ hero. Johnny once played drums along with the band on an upside-down bucket, and he had a groove. He dove from high ladders onto mattresses; exotic animals crawled up his arm and shat on his desk. He ogled beautiful women like Dolly Parton from that desk, and scantily-clad ones in the skits, and no one thought it was anything other than funny – it wasn’t anything else. When he mentioned to Dolly that he would give up a year’s salary to look under her blouse, my mother probably thought, of course he wants to look under there, she understood that, but saying so was funny. My mother didn’t think he was handsome, nobody did, and still it’s hard to describe how little it mattered. He gave to his guests, never trying to upstage them. He gave to the audience. He had a great band, one of the best. He drove himself to work and back, alone. And people all over America made love while he talked. Babies were conceived, and lots of them grew up and watched Johnny. He made them laugh, too.