The Craig Ferguson Fancy Rascal Stand Up Tour continues throughout twenty twenty four. For a full list of dates and tickets, go to the Craig Ferguson show dot com slash tour. See you out there, the Greig Ferguson show dot com slash Tour. My name is Craig Ferguson. The name of this podcast is Joy. I talk to interest in people about what brings them happiness. Here's Shadow Stevens. He was
the announcer on my old late night show. But he's been the announcer on so many different shows, and he's done so many things, and to be honest, so many drugs. Listen to this and enjoy. All right, So America knows you as Shadow Stevens. I know you is Shadow Stevens. I also, by the way, let me just apologize if you're watching this as opposed to listening to it, it feels like we're in a dental of his waiting room a little bit pretty much. Yeah, I'm sorry, but that
we have a plant here. And I don't know if you remember magazines. Remember magazines, it was like a blog but papery. Sure, right, Well they used to have magazines and old magazines in the dental office. Life, Life, What was the other people magazine? People? People like us Weekly? Yeah, the stars, they're just like us. Yeah. Look, American always used shadows Stevens, I know, used Shadow Stevens. That's not
how you started out. No, like you were Terry instead Terry Proud Norwegian name, right, So your people are from Norway, yes, but you grew up in Jamestown, North Dakota.
The cattle and the wheat and the folks that can't be beat and also the Gota North Dakota. Yeah, that was a song when I was growing up. They had a contest for people to come up with the North Dakota song, and the one that won and was you ought to go Hotel North Dakota. See the cattle and the wheat, the folks that can't be beat. Even as a child, I thought that's.
You know what's interesting. I heard that song and I felt a little bit like I should become a serial killer just hearing that. It's because it is it's a dark place. Well it can be certainly in the winter. Well that's what I always think it's about, Like Scotland and like people forget. It just gets dark in the wintertime all the time, and it makes you crazy. Yeah, there's no sun, no sun, and just and grace. Guys that go on for.
Back there are tough. Yeah, they're tough, way tougher than me. I have two brothers that still live there, and you're tougher than me.
Nope, they do it. You have people fat farmers. No. No.
And I grew up in really Norman Rockwell.
I had an amazing childhood, in fact, so amazing that I was embarrassed to talk about it for a long time because people talk about how tragic their childhood was and how they were beaten. And my parents didn't drink or smoke or use drugs or curse or fight in front of the kids.
My parents own toy stores, clothing stores.
Yeah, I mean that's say in the bar too high.
Yeah. My dad was a basketball star called the Hooker. He could make hook shots from center court and he was a North Dakota legend. And then he went into business and he started Tiny Town, which was a little tiny store with children's clothes. Then he moved into clothing, and then he moved into toys. Then he moved into go kart tracks, and then he we had firework stands on the Fourth of July and of the five kids,
each child would run a different fireworks stand. We had the fireworks displays on our street, with the leftover fireworks from the firework stands we would bring down to our house.
So I always thought that your childhood was very rural. But doesn't sound that rural.
It sounds like a fifteen thousand people, right.
Okay, all my friends were pretty much farmers and you know or we worked on farms.
Oh you walked on farms. I did.
I did, and I came to the meaning of life. I should tell you about the when I worked for the aliens.
Okay, yeah, you should definitely tell me about that.
My friends and I one summer worked for these aliens in spirit Wood, North Dakota. Now automatically you think, hmm, it sounds like a twilight zone.
Is a spirit Wood?
Yeah, Well, in an area there's Spiritwood Lake and then there is spirit with the town, which was, you know, a granary and.
A couple of shops or something. Okay.
And he had a big farm and they were a little family of little they looked like what people called grays. They had skulls that mushroomed and.
All of them. So they were aliens.
Well at the time, we just thought they were unusual, right, We didn't really think about that. And we went out and we would work on and hauling bales of day all day long, and you'd grab them with two hooks and lift them up into the truck from five in the morning until eight at night. And we would go back to the house and have Thanksgiving every day, and it was turkey and it was roast beef, and it was pies and everything, and all my friends every day
and all my friends were there. Was really hard work, you know, out in the sun, and we would sit and we would joke, and the alien father would sit and he was very quiet man, and he would go and we would say, like, the punchline is so he said, Zenith, and everybody was like and he would go, and then every few minutes for the next five or ten minutes, he would go and see it.
I've been doing that my whole life. So now where are they from? These is okay, I'm gonna tell you. Okay.
For years, I remembered them as having a very rape Bradbury Twilight Zone name, and I couldn't remember, and no one that I talked to could remember people I talked to in the town. And five years ago, finally I realize I have to talk to my friend Ray Bookley, who worked on the farm with me, And I called him in Missouri and I said, Ray, you remember the aliens we worked for, the guys with the mushroom heads, And he goes, yeah, and he said, I've been trying
to think of their name. And I put it in my book and my contact lists so that I would never forget. Because what he said was, oh, you mean Virgie Shock, Virgie.
Shogi Shock got the name of the Shock he worked for the show.
And Virgie like Virgie on the verge of Shock, and it sounds like a name an alien would make it.
Yeah, Virgie Virgie should probably show for Verga.
No one knows whatever happened to them. Nobody knows about him in town. They're not around anymore. Nobody remembers them.
I think they may have erased there. Oh you think it's like a man in black thing? Maybe, Okay, can't be sure. So so what why did they have Thanksgiving dinner every day? I'm kind of like, I'm sorry to be Larry King about this, but.
Because it's very hard work, and this is all high school students who need to eat a lot, apparently, but it literally was. It was turkey, and it was roast beef, and it was pies and corn and potatoes and everything, and we would eat and eat and eat.
Well. But I get that, But do you think that they came to our planet because they really liked Thanksgiving dinner? That was?
We may be being groomed, I'm not sure.
Okay, Right, So you work in there and they obviously they want hay or something like that, and you're working for the aliens? How how do you get from this idyllic Norman Rockwell style childhood and you start, you know, you're you start looking towards California and Hollywood and the time of life as what's the ear, what's the day? What's going on with you?
At the beginning, Well, the very first thing that happened when I was two years old, my mother taught me how to play records on a record player, and I was obsessed apparently from the very beginning. Put a record on, play it home, man, It's the greatest, started over again.
And then she taught me to do you can get a residency in Las Vegas. Now, just doing that I unbelievable.
Yeah, that didn't work for me. I was that age, so I was obsessed with all this. And I discovered my dad's tape recorder when I was eight years old, and I started recording stories on the tape recorder and everybody was fascinated by it.
And they were probably terrible, but I was.
Hooked and I would edit them together by pausing the tape recorder and add another piece and be able to tell a story. And then my uncle, who owned radio stations, discovered that I loved this, and he sent me a kit that would allow me to broadcast into another room. And this was magic to me. What did you when this is radio show? I was ten years old and I soldered this thing together and I and then.
I went to you had a ten years old?
Yeah, I got a soldering iron and then I put it all together, and I went to the local TV shop and I said, how do I soup this up?
They go, well, you can't answer, and you have to put up a big antenna.
So I crawled to the top of our three story home with a wire in my teeth and a hammer in my pocket and crawling.
Right now, I'm beginning to think it is a normal rubble childhood, because you get a ten year old kid climbing up an antenna hanging upside down. Nobody's hammer. Yeah.
Put the antenna to the top of the of a tree in the backyard so I could broadcast a mile in every direction. And as a result, and I did this every day, I played, you know, I had my radio station. And they interviewed me on the Man on the street and uh, a local radio station, and they said, well, what are you interested in? Well, art and right radio really yeah, And I tell them about my pirate radio station, and they got really interested. You said you should come
down here, mabe, we'll put you on the air. So then at eleven they put me on the air and put it in the paper as the world's youngest dis Jackie to have my picture with my stack of forty five's and a big smile and a microphone just like this, you know, an inch away.
And that was like the beginning of it beginning.
And I did that for a couple of years and then work part time and then went to the University of North Dakota to study art.
Art it was an art major for three years. Yeah, because I know, I know that you still pain and you still yeah, well, I do more multimedia.
But I'm kind of captured by putting the ideas together that you know don't necessarily go together.
Well. See, now, the thing is that I know about you that maybe some people don't know about you, is how diverse and wildly creative you're out who is because you would come to you go through being the world's youngest desk joky. Then you you end up in Hollywood to do what to do radio? Here?
Well, well, I'll make it real quick.
I went to the University of Arizona for two years and then I majored in drama and journalism. So I learned to perform and to write. And then I got a job, and.
Then you could report on your act.
Yeah both, I'm covering my bases, write your own reviews.
And then I was hired in Boston and got real, real successful in Boston, and thirty three percent of all people listening to radio were listening and you're playing rock and roll ricks top forty station. And I started doing television there as well. Okay, and then a year later I was brought out to Los Angeles, and I've been here ever since. I came to the biggest radio station in the country.
KHJ, So this is what like seventies, This is like sixty nine, okay.
And then the guy who had put me on television in Boston was now the producer of the Steve Allen Show, and so he hired me to be Steve Allen's sidekick on camera announcer, talk things over, yeah.
All that kind of stuff.
I was way out of my element. I sweated like like Albert Brooks. And what was that movie? Broadcast News? Broadcast News? It was me, said the makeup artist, who come over here, you really perspire. You have no idea, it's silked underneath.
So what happens? But you've become very successful at this point. Now I also know about you that you have not only do you have a great deal of poisonive energy, you have a great deal of negative energy, right, so you you have you have a self destructive mechanism in there as well? Is that beginning to kick in at this point as well?
It was starting. It was when I went to the University of Arizona. I discovered a wonderful drug called despute. I haven't even heard of that. Yeah, it was a brilliantly subtle combination of methamphetamine and barbiturate, so it would give you the energy and take off the edge. And you could get a bottle of two hundred and fifty in a prescription.
So I got a lot done. I felt good about it.
While I felt good about it, it was good for a while, it was highly abused and then discontinued.
I feel like I missed out a little bit. I never go at desput all. It sounds like a like a prescription speedball that would like right.
And as you did more, of course, there is a learning curve and then things get dark. But then a guy says, you know, you got to try some weed. It's like it's like some plant. It doesn't lead to heroin. So I do it, and I smoke this hookah and I no, I'm in the ceiling, moving with the music, and I understand that this is like trying to explain the color blue to a blind.
Man, experiential.
And I bought announced that night, and within a month I bought a pound.
And then I moved to.
What kind of what kind of weed are we talking about? Like just like I don't know what it was, right, It's not like hashish or Anathan.
No, it was just grass in a big four foot tall hookah with multiple tubes and black light posters.
And it's interesting you talk about because people that do weed and and everybody does weed. Now everyone it's like America reeks of marijuana. Like you're going in the city, everything everywhere smells like marijuana. People who take marijuana always say it's organic, like, so it's not dangerous. I've seen so many I don't know if you've seen this, but I've seen a lot of people ruin their lives with marijuana.
But it's so subtle that they don't know that. Like I heard someone say it's like being nibbled to death by rabbits. It's like, because if you're an alcoholic or you take coker heroin, it's pretty obvious they're destroying yourself, right, But with my I want to you just destroy yourself with smug justification. It seems like over and over it telling people's justification. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There is a certain aloof condescension about the higher state of awareness that you're suddenly in.
I also I also get angry. People do a lot of bit, I'm like, do it proper. It's an adolescent drug. Do it grown up drug, like coke, coker, heroine, this adolescent crap. I can hear the music. Better shut up, shut up, get get fucked up properly for God's sake. Yeah. Yeah, So you get a weed and you're and you're like hearing.
Well, you know it was, you know, colorful at the beginning, and then by the time I got to Boston, the guy says, you're going to try some acid.
Well, what's acid?
Was like grasps, more intense, last longer. So I did that, and then the first experience I always tell it the same way. I'm double parked on Beacon Hill and I'm the driver and my friends get out to get donuts, and it comes on and my hands are on the steering wheel. My friends are skipping down the street slow motion. You're going Hi, get in the car. What the what is the now? You would think that anybody that had any sense would never do that again? Yeah, I know, but no, by the time I got to l A
a year later, we did it every weekend. Now I'm smoking dope every day. Then I get a prescription.
But you're being very successful at the same.
Time, very motivated. I show up and I get things done and mostly high.
You're working eye all the time, Oh yeah, okay, yeah, and you're so you're playing. Are you doing America's Top forty or anything like that?
No, no, no, that was a long time. There's a long way to get to that. But you're doing a lot of drugs. You're doing acid, you're doing you're doing the debut. All things gone right, Well that was gone, but now it was. It was replaced by a prescription doctor, a guy that worked for me. Now I went from KHJ and I was I quit because they didn't know because I was doing television and they didn't promote me.
So I said, I'm familiar with that situation. It's like, we don't know whether you want to be in radio or television. They promote each other. You don't get that. And they wouldn't even put it in the contract that the next full time or the bigger position that became available I would get. So I quit and then I was hired by their competition, and within a couple of
months they made me program director. Okay, and now I'm going to Art Center school part time and I'm happy and all of a sudden, he gives me this because I said we should be playing better music, and he liked the research I did, followed the program director and made me program director.
So you're the boss of the radio station and you're getting twisted on all sorts of what you can.
It's starting to amp up right now. One of the guys that worked for me, this isn't in la right. And one armed man who worked for me said, you know he've got all her responsibilities. You should see my doctor, Doctor Lax. Sounds like a marble marble villain, doesn't it.
Yeah, he's out by the airport. Doctor.
Actually he was at He was at Wilshire and Losianega, and he was the prescription doctors to the stars, and he weighed three hundred and fifty pounds and wrote his prescriptions on his stomach. And he would go, well you at Dexter Dream last month, how about black beauties?
Okay, you know, doctor las things are going really well. I'm being a lot done.
Sometimes they have to stay in the studio through the night and I've got a lot of people I'm responsible for, and i have a little trouble sleeping, and be goes, well, you had queludes last month, how about two and on? Yeah, that would be good. And he would sell me poppers from behind the desk for cash. Oh, things are nitrate nitrate. You can't don't know about that anymore. I don't think it's out there anymore. It's very bad.
Yeah, but who knew?
I was doing what seemed like a reasonable thing to do at the time.
I'm kind of these types of drugs. I mean, look, I'm no stranger drugs and alcohol, but well I'm not. But then, you know, but why I never go into those kind of like the quayludy type things. I've heard people talk about quailuds like kind of like buffers. They made you relax and feel really good. I thought they just like you if you had the cocaine or if you had the you know, speed, you know, you have the energy with the chill, it's not getting the way of your life at this point.
Well, and then there's the acid every weekend, or a psilocybin or pot or you know, little mushrooms that came from the Amazon that looked like aliens and you'd eat them in your nervous system would turn into rainbows.
Wow, good time. Yeah, so so at this point, I'm guessing the stable family life and relationship isn't something that's happening for you.
It's starting to come on glued. I was married to my childhood sweetheart and we had a son, and I'm busy, you know. But this radio station is very, very successful, and it beat the station I came out to work for. And then I went to k I started k ROCK and I was hired. And that's a whole story. We could go on for an hour by k Rock. It's a stunning story.
It's an institution in this time.
It is, and at the time it was the brainchild of a guy that put together thirteen partners and I ran through money like crazy, and.
This is always big idea craziness.
Then all that stuff is going on, right Well he yeah, well, I mean pretty much everybody did. And he offered me a job from Krola, which which was at the Huntington Sheridan Hotel and state of the art studios with engineers, to this funky little place in Burbank that he had put together. But he said, you know, I'm getting this FM station and I want you to do something original like you did for kr OLA on FM.
And what kind of car. Are you like porsia? Got it? What color? Wow? Sorr.
He gives me this forture and I'm making money and going over there and waiting for the FM.
Are you doing coke at this point? Then there's coke coming.
Out, not very often, all right, it was mostly you know, speed and weed.
The Craig Ferguson Fancy Rascal Stand Up Tour continues throughout the United States in twenty twenty four. For a full list of dates and tickets, go to the Craig Ferguson show dot Com slash tour. See you out there. So you're you're just speeding weed, but I want to try and figure out how you get from that to stuff like the Tracks movie and the Bay kind of mainstream stuff.
Let's fast forward, right, Okay, So there's you know, your America's Sweetheart in Hollywood Squares and you're doing America's Top four. You know that? Did How did you get from like drug fueled, crazy alien mushrooms to be in more mainstream? What's what's the what's the bridge?
Well, you know, I went through radio, had big success, quit in rages, and started my own production company. I ended up doing you know, commercials I did the Blues Brothers movies and Fast Time at Bridgemont High in forty eight hours.
You're doing commercials for these movies, doing commercials.
I did the whole advertising campaign, right, And then I did this Federated where I sold them this idea of a fast talking dan Ackroyd basmatic pitchman. We talked a mile a minute, and then at the end it was my original idea was we just say we smash prices. And I smashed the TV with a circus hammer, and he goes, well, that's fun. Well let's do that. And I said, well, if I do it and it's successful,
will you give me creative control? Because I never don't want to do the same thing twice if people want.
To kill me.
And he rolled his eyes, went fine, and then business went up five hundred percent the first weekend, and I was off and running and I ended up doing eleven hundred commercials for them. We would do four to eight commercials a week for the next seven years.
These commercials are from movies, right, These are for the Federated Group. They were like a best buy Oh okay, right right, right, right right.
And they're they're they're all like done with me and five guys. And during this time, at the beginning of it, my drug use got worse and worse, a lot more cocaine.
And so this is none of the eighties where everyone's in the eighties.
Yeah, and then I basically, you know, got I was living in Malibu Canyon and going home and going to the bathroom for a couple of hours and coming out and hearing whisper outside the window, and.
I would say, anybody else the window? I don't know.
So I put sheets over the windows and the doors, and then I put quilts over the sheets, and then I put nails at one inch intervals around the quilts. And then I took my twelve gage short barrel and I walked and I stalked outside to wait confront my destiny.
What do you are? You armed at this point twelve gage short barrel, double lot buck.
You don't have to aim, you just point and pull.
I'm familiar.
So I squatted down beneath the bedroom window, and I heard a rustle in the bush and I jumped up, screaming, now you die, motherfuck, and I chased him through the bush, but they got away. Yeah, So went back to the bathroom to celebrate and locked the door.
Yeah you gotta celebrate by having more cocaine, because yeah, well.
You lock the door, you put you know, a towel under the door, and then run the bath so they can't hear you. Now I can have another hit. And then I went into convulsions and my head would crack on the floor, crack, crack them So.
You're a foot blown psychosis. At this point, I am way into psychosis. And yet you you're still working and making money.
It's starting to fall apart. Oh, I have video proof of it. Some of those commercials got tragic. They were funny in a really dark and getting darker way, and I knew it was falling through my fingers and I couldn't And I gained fifty pounds because they didn't stop eating. I didn't stop eating. I didn't stop drinking. Now I'm drinking a court a Canadian club at day and covasier and tequila and anything anybody put in front of me every day.
So I have to ask you a personal question at this point, why aren't you dead?
I don't know, you know, I think about that all the time because it got really scary. Most of the time I was terrified. I thought people were trying to kill me. I was looking, you know, behind me. I was like, you know, trying to lose people in the car, or somebody threw a cigarette out in the car in front of me.
I thought it might be a bomb.
I didn't know what was real, and I was literally did not know what was real. I didn't know if they were really were people that I could hear. It's like outside the window and I'm peeking out there, and it was terrifying. So my doctor said, if you're lucky, you're going to die. You're probably going to have a stroke or heart attack. You're really out of control. And I said, I know, and he said, you got to you got to stop.
I know.
But I was so embarrassed that I grew up in this beautiful childhood. Parents didn't drink or smoke or do anything. Did not it take asper.
So your family are still back at home in Northagola, and they.
They have a feeling that things are odd, but they don't really know. And finally, I had an overdose in my studio and my friends found me at four in the morning, and they got afraid and they talked to my family and they ganged up on me and talked me into going into rehab.
So you got it was an intervention.
Then they did, and my mother said, you know you've got to get help, you know, you maybe Betty Ford or something.
So I went to Betty Ford and they said.
Was still around and would come to your house well for me.
But they found me a room in scripts in La Jolla, and I went there and I thought I'd give it a day. And then my roommate that they gave me made me laugh, and that's what it took. It took laughing my way forward. And so I'll give it a day. Well, I'll give it another day. And we would write poetry and we would draw and cover the walls, and we sit and smoke cigarettes by the window and laugh till three in the morning, and then get up at seven and start again.
And you're still in touch with this person.
I am, And unfortunately he is diminished in his He went out a bunch of times.
So they didn't stay cleans over then.
He didn't, and entirely he has been for years.
But then he started having a bunch of seizures and so he lives a really quiet, slow life now and is not the guy that was going one hundred miles an hour and making me laugh all the time. But he was really the reason that I got sober. And then the counselor came in about two weeks in and he said, you know, you've got a lot of anger issues. Maybe you should get a sense of humor. You don't have a sense of humor about who you are and where you've been, what you've done, and where you're going.
You're in for a rough ride. Life gets tricky. And a bell went off in my head and I woke up the next morning and started meditating.
I'd learned to meditate back with the Beatles. And you meditated with the Beatles.
Well, I learned because of them, all right, okay, and they it you medicated near the Beatles.
Yeah, yeah.
And I started meditating and then I haven't stopped for thirty eight years. Meditate every day every day. I learned deeper kinds of meditation. I meditated last night from three thirty until five fifteen in the morning.
What does that look like like? The you chant? Do you have? No?
It's it is a focused kind of meditation. And I have an ultra that I had built twenty years ago by a Chinese artist post Sun, and it's made from wood from all over the world, from the Amazon and from Africa and the Himalayas, and it's really beautiful. And it's like a jigsaw puzzle with a secret ways to open the doors and secret compartments and things, and nobody sees the inside, but me has things that I find empowering. And I do a focused meditation.
I ended up.
It's a kind of a combination between vedanta that I learned in the seventies and then self realization crea yoga, and it's a highly focused kind of meditation that takes you into a breathless state. So you get to a place where your body gets so quiet that your fingers are numb, and your body feels like it's the skin of a soap bubble, you know, maybe a foot away.
Sounds like that thing you were getting in Arizona that was desputal. Yeah.
Yeah, it's everything I ever wanted in drugs, but with no downside.
So this is then, so when your life, when you get clean and over, this is when the mid deities.
Yeah, now that's when everything changed, right and it literally did. I when I got when I came back to La I got into martial arts, I started doing yoga, I meditated every day, I went to meetings. I was being of service. I was happy being alone and not in a marriage where I was fighting all the time. I didn't want to ever have another relationship. And nine months into my sobriety, a guy that worked for me met a beautiful model at the bank and brought her over to the studio.
They're doing. Now I have to say, I mean, you know, I'm very fond of you, Shadow, but the best part of you is Beverly. There's no question. Yeah, yeah, I get it. My wife is just a work of hers a spectacular human being. She really tacular human being. Now, for people that don't know Beverly, let's talk because she I think a law of the joy of your life is your is your I mean, when I observe you, the joy of your life is your wife and kid.
You know that it seems to be you. You give the most wholesome Christmas cards every year, you and the kids all wearing outfits, and I mean it's spectacular. And now the grand kids as well, and everyone is very beautiful. They are so talk to me about because Beverly is not just beautiful. He's a very unusual person. Beverly. I kind of halfway think maybe she should be a guest here because she could easily be. Yeah, because she has
this JOI de vive this joy of life. So what happens when you when you meet what's it like?
You know what it's I walk in the room and I'm happy being alone, remember, and I say, hey, so hi, Yeah, and I'm trying to be cool because the most beautiful person I've ever seen in my life, and she's African American, never occurred to me to date. I just didn't. I grew up in North Dakota. There weren't any black people in North Dakota. I have no frame of reference at all. And I'm looking at this out of the side of my eye. So why do you play her?
Oh?
Yeah, you should play the assumptions. And she leaves and I say who was that? And he says, that's this international model. I met her at the bank. Does she sing?
Yeah?
Get her back? So she came back.
And at the time, I had sold a project that I wrote called Shadow Vision, which is crazy. It's sort of like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on speed and we were doing this jingle in it. The first thing we ever did together was to sing oh you perspire, Yeah, you perspire, oh and she go, I.
Go okay, So we did that about it was so funny. We've been together ever since, so that I mean, you just get together and magic just now. Is this when your career starts to go in a little more of a mainstream to action then, because.
Yeah, well, well like right away, because I Federator was so popular all over the West Coast. It was the most the big the most successful advertising campaign regional advertising campaign in US history. And because you couldn't watch television without seeing these commercials, and they changed every ten days, so there was something new, something new, and they were all funny. And as a result of that, I got a three picture deal with Dino de la Rentis famous.
So he gives you, he gives you a three picture deal as an actor.
Yes, okay, And I'm going off to do this movie Tracks, which was really exciting.
And the tracks is are real. I mean that that's a it's a real find for people. Tracks is very insane. The tracks is t R A x X. Can you give us a brief rundown of the synopsis?
That okay.
Tracks is was a mercenary who is tired of the mercenary business and he just wants to be the next famous Amos. He wants to bake cookies, so he takes his savings and goes off to a cabin in Texas somewhere and starts baking sushi cookies and puppy swirls. And he just thinks these are really creative. They're terrible, and he runs out of money and he's brought into town. He goes into town as a town tamer, a town overrun by crime in the mafia, and he goes in to whip things together.
Ah right, what's his name? Mike Tracks? No, just Tracks. There's a whole bunch of things are really wrong with this movie. He didn't even give like a name like Bomb Tracks or something like this track Okay, and he bakes cookies, but he's a meericinary and he's coming to clean up the time. Yeah, so far, I think this is a great movie.
It's pretty funny, and I met a lot of people who say it's one of their favorite movies of all time. Quentin Tarantino at your show, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, I said, I want to introduce myself. The only guy ever introduced myself at your show, And I said, I'm just really here.
I know you shadows Stevens tracks. Well, yeah, that's funny. No, it's a great movie.
It's hilarious, and went, well, you just made my whole life.
Yeah, well it is a thing people should know about that movie, because I haven't seen all of tracks, because I can't fight all of tracks. Yeah, I did it.
I cut it down because it had the worst soundtrack in the history of movies, and I couldn't deal with it. It was really badly put together, and it was a really funny script, and it was made to be funny. Oh really yeah, absolutely funny and scathingly funny, and it would never get made today ever, right, So I cut out all the parts that didn't work and just made a more contemporary soundtrack and put it up on YouTube.
Well you're the director of the no. No.
In fact, I went out the first day of shooting I had I was all excited. I went out in this beautiful set of this town and went, wow, this is great. And then I see that they have three electric chairs in the town square and the villains were in three different like those childhood pajamas with the footsies.
Yeah, and red, white and blue. And I'm horrified, and I.
Go to the to the producer and I say, I've got a really good sense of humor.
What is this? Yeah, people can love this, just that's so funny. And I wrote in my journal that night, We're doomed. This is never going to work. Out there going out and drinking every night and rewriting the script and putting in stupid stuff that you can't make this fun, so help you, No, it's not.
And know in fact what happened is that Delorettas the company went bankrupt as it was being finalized, and Jay Leno had done a movie at the same time, and they were all like thrown together.
And I think I remember that what was that bought them?
What was Leno's movie? Do you remember? I don't remember. I think I then know you're talking about the way he was like he was also a kind of detectivey, Yeah, I think that was the thing. Then, yeah, yeah, So it got bought.
By HBO and they showed it a few times and it was deeply disappointed. But at the same time, Hollywood squares coming along. Now the guy that put me on the Steve Allen Show comes back with Hollywood Squares and he's going to produce a new Hollywood Squares. And he goes, I've got John Davidson and I got Joan Rivers, and I want you to do the voice of the show. And I did and it was the biggest hit of
the year. It's so I was like number one. And he said, we want you to do the show and I went, no, I have a shot at acting and I really want to try, you know, And if I just do another announcing thing, and he goes, well, and so I turned it down and then comes back again. I turned it down again, and then he came back a third time. He said, how about with this, I'll put you in the square and we'll make it part
of the show. And if you have to leave to go do like the movie and you come back, would you just be, you know, out for a while and then come back and tell us what And I went okay. And then Hollywood Squares turned into the biggest show in the world. It was like the number one show in America,
and none of us saw that coming. So the combination of tracks, the disappointment, but then all of a sudden, there's Hollywood Squares and then on the top of Hollywood Squares comes American Top forty And because you're.
The voice of American rock and roll at this point, then the announcer of American rock and roll.
Right, yeah, Well, and it was and it grew into one hundred and ten countries and for the next seven years they flew me around the world to promote the show. So I was in Oslo, Norway, and Bali and Tokyo and everywhere, and it were and South Africa, and it was a really big deal, very exciting and a lot of fun.
Did you have a lot of influence on music at that point then? Did you? Were you able to you know, pay can choose? You know.
The thing about doing American Top forty two is because my entire career has been tongue in cheek, funny, satire, parody everything, every radio station, everything I'd ever written, all my commercials, everything had always been funny. Now I'm stepping into the shoes of the most earnest man in the history of mankind. Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars.
It's Casey case yeah, right, and the nicest guy in the world, and we were friends, had been friends for probably a decade.
But here I am doing it and everybody's paranoid. And then they go like, well, I can't do that. So the first show that we recorded, the four hour show, took eighteen hours to record. We had the rewrite every sentence that I did because I couldn't do is that. I just it sounded awful talking like that, not like I was trying to mimic his voice, but just trying
to find my own and humor. Okay, So where he would say keep your feet on the ground to keep reaching, so I would say, and remember, if the world is your oyster and you can't find your parole, you can always have lunch.
Bye bye out there.
But I also I used to say, your friend and the void the shadow when they said void.
What the hell? Yeah, No, I like that your friend of avoid the shadow. Can you tell me why Shadow Stevens by the way, because if you're Terry, Terry Engside seems like a perfectly serviceable name to me.
Yeah, it's not exactly a catchy radio name. No, that didn't work for me. And and at the beginning I named myself Jefferson Ka. I always thought, no, that would be like, you know, kind of soulful. And the first, the first big radio show I did in Fargo, they put me on and I did all R and B, which was all My favorite music was always black music, so I was like the black DJ Jefferson K on KQ W B and Fargo, and then I kept it when I went to Arizona. I went to the University
of Arizona and I was working. I'm still Jefferson K.
Now.
I get the job in Boston. I'm heading across the desert in my white Corvette and I stop in Alama, go to New Mexico and I get out and I go to a phone booth and it says Atomic Testing Range, do not enter right across the street. It's like Pivotal And I call, I say I'm on my way, and they go, yeah, look, we're not gonna You're not gonna be able to use that name. There's a Jess Cain and the JJ Jeffries, and believe it or not, there was a Jefferson K here some years ago. So we
gonna change your name. We're thinking of calling you shadow Man, shadow Lane or something, and went, that's the worst name I ever heard in my life. I was humiliated. Drive across country at one hundred miles an hour going Randy Road, Johnny Lane. I mean, I'm looking for names and billboards and signs and trying to think of now the time I get into Boston, I've got I've got a list
of names that I could live with. And I hear on the radio and starting Monday Shadows Stevens sixty eight wrko No, I mean hell, oh no. And I was humiliated and was like, oh God, this is a dumb name. And then they would say that's not your real name, is it. So what I did is I came up with a backstory that I could live with. And the backstory was, well, you know, it's Native American. Really, yeah, do you know what tribe? I go, Well, I'm from North Dakota, So I suspect it's Mandan, could be Sue,
I'm not sure. Oh really, So do you know what it means? Yes, it means he who walks with the light. No kidding, This is all a pack of lies, right, Yeah, I made it up, but it's true.
And then it made me. It gave me my sense of humor.
It gave me a whole way of looking at life, and I became it.
So it was given to me by God. So you identify as you think of yourself as Shadow, stevensent You're not Terry.
Oh for since probably nineteen eighty.
Yeah, for a while, I kept both names, and then I was Fred raided, and then it was Terry and Fred and I go to the bank and they go, who are you? And I went, I just can't go on. And I felt like who I decided to become. So I just changed it, you know, legally about nineteen seventy nine, I think.
Okay, so now you're clean and sob. You're in Hollywood, you and Beverly together, You've had your children, and the greatest moment of your life rives you get the call from me to be the announcer. So true, so true.
It was pivotal, And actually it came after a number of spectacular failures.
I had, you know, done.
Here, I am doing the biggest radio show in the world, and they decide to cancel it, to just go into distribution and made it so that I couldn't do another one.
And the I'm in.
Top ten sitcom Dave's World on CBS, and that went on for four years, and it was great fun.
And that ended, and that's all right, pull camera sitcom. It's the best. Oh wow, it's like a couple of days a week, roll in we're a little bit, get paid a ton of money there and make people laugh.
Oh it's great, greatest. So they all ended.
And then my agent, who is Howard Stearn's agent, Don Buckwold.
He you know what I interviewed with him when I first came to Hollywood. Well, yeah, he said I could. I was like, great, was the same agent as hows that? And then then I never heard from him again. There was a guy who worked in his office. Maybe I thought, now.
I might have it worse than that, because I went with them and they never did anything. And then they asked me after everything fell apart, they asked me to find another agent. And then, of course by that time, everything's fallen apart, and I don't like what I'm doing, So I started a thing called Rhythm Radio based on my travels around the world finding all this music and other cultures.
That was really fabulous.
So for the next number of years I created Rhythm Radio and we built it up into being on the air in thirty countries and on the internet. In seven languages, and we sold it a year title sponsorship to ne SCFA and then the dot com crash happened and they said, you know, the internet's a fluke.
Yeah. I thought it was going to be like CB Radio the internet, like people would kind of come and got. I think it might be here now for a little while.
I think it's going to probably do well.
So you when you and I are working together, then I quit and then leave you high and try again. And that is this when you start what you're doing now, which is Mantle Radio, which I did a couple of things.
One of the things I did is I started a radio station for Sammy Hagar called Cabo Wabbo Radio and I designed studios for Cabo Cantina and they had studio radio that it was. It was actually really fabulous. Yeah, I didn't give good support from Sammy. We went to there was a service called Live Live three sixty five that broadcast radio shows and they had our stations and they had ten thousand, and we rose to number one in just a couple of months.
You know.
The title I came up with was Hot Rock Smuggled across.
The Border from Mexico.
And it was all up, all rock, all party, all the time, and it was you know, rock with all kinds of new rock and old classic but it was all fun and party music. And I had a guy to sell it. And I went to Sammy and I said, you know, I got a guy will sell it. And he said, I'm not going to pay anybody to sell. So I go back to the guy who had sold all over the world and sold to the Sultan of Dubai and to Steve Wynn in Las Vegas, and I said, well, he won't pay you, and he goes, fine, I'll do
it for free for thirty percent. So I go back to sam and he say, you'll do it for three for thirty percent. Thirty percent.
Fuck him, that's what he said. And I went there swore yes he did, and he you can't believe in anything anymore. I'm I'm sorry.
It was like Santa Claus turning on yeah, and I realized it wasn't going anywhere, so you know, I had to let that one go, and then I started early mental radio was more like guests and things.
Right, so tell me a little bit. We're going to play a little of metal radio because I know it's quite hard to understand, but can you give me a kind of idea of what mental radio is? Okay.
Metal Radio was started at the beginning of the virus, when we were all shut down. It was March of twenty twenty, and I realized everybody's freaking out, and I was a little edgy myself. And I've got this big studio and I thought, I've got to create something funny and uplifting, and I don't know what it'll be, but I'm going to start writing. And I started writing, and I started recording, and then I started like looking for music.
And I called the guy that was my director and federated and he became a really world class music composer, and he said, I've got all this music I own. You can have anything you want, and he opened up
the library. Now I have cinematic music. And I attracted a writing partner, Joshua Weinstein, who is a scriptwriter, and I said, here's how you write, here's how I taught him how to do it, and we hit it off, and now it's become twenty four episodes, eleven hours of stories and adventures and cereals with cliffhanger endings and parodies and it's quite funny. And if you listen with earphones, sounds come from behind you and characters move around in
your head. It's deeply immersive. And I'll play you this. This is Melibu Beach Romance Biff Brando, known as Doctor Coatee Grapple on Loving Tomorrow, the number one soap on television, Lives with Piper, A star is so big.
She only has one name.
But Biff has a FLINGX Yes, but Biff has a fling with a barista and a coffee bean and tea leaf and tarzana, and she's named Coco poefs and things take a dark turn, very much like fatal attraction.
Hey, this fitchen house catch and rays.
And there she was Coco. He quickly flecks to six pack and smiled back. How could he forget the barista from coffee bean and tea leaf and tarzana and need flingn in the restroom beneath the hot breath of the hand dryer.
Yeah, I knew I'd find you. Loved the Billo bon board shorts. He looks so hot.
Take a walk, he gazed at her.
Cadie Moui, Jim Pooh, Kenne Kenny shades ample bosom and blonde hair wafting in the wind and flinched. He looked back at the house. Lucky that Piper, the love of his life, always slept late. He had to get cocoa out of here. He jumped off the deck.
Dude, a sack rab move.
He looks so good.
Yeah, yeah, thanks, So what's up?
I knew you and me were inevitable, biff when you ordered that triple shot low fat latte hint of vanilla one splendor, and it added up to six sixty six.
I freaked.
But when I did the life Path and Destiny on it, I realized that the root number was sex plus six plus six or eighteen and one plus eight is nine.
Look, you're a beautiful woman, but I have a girlfriend.
I did the eye chain on us. It's at nine in the second place means perseverance brings good fortune. So I will persevere all over you, FIV.
Yeah that's that. So it's kind of it's a little bit old school radio as well, right, Yeah.
I tried to bring you know, radio theater into the twenty first century, right and make it and I call it genetically altered humor. The whole conceit of it. The mythology behind it is that everything comes from a former Masonic temple somewhere in Hollywood, and I greet you there as the voice of reason in the middle of the madness. And there are theaters and labs and laboratories and the outlook chamber at the top, and it's all kind of
an allegory for the brain. And we go in and we see these stories, these adventures in the theater or in the opera house, and they all have messes.
So there are episodes.
Called doubt and fear and gloom and faith and space and time and on and on, and each story is something like that.
I'll just play you one other one real quick. It's a shorter one.
Dixon taekwonder Roga is a writer looking for trouble and he finds himself in Atrocity, kind of a town like the Bronx before it got nice. And he goes to Whalen's Kitten Kaboodle and meets a pile of muscles with a T shirt named Buddy Malone. Last time he saw Buddy was at the Alley cat Bull and food and puff and the virus that he had and got a jar and Dixon dropped it and the virus got out. But now he's meeting buddy again. So what do you
got going? You heard about the giant lizards and ghosts? Yeah, taking over city. I got a blood hornet size of a bet and got him down in Argentina doing a little ransom the size of a bet.
He got it here. Yeah, it's out in the truck.
I followed him outside Whalen's hitting Kaboodle, past the dumpsters to Malone's Indigo Blue custom lowered nineteen fifty Chevy three fifty fuel injected pickup with flames on the hood and just the right amount of pinstripes, And there it was, on the real camel colored leather seats. A bell jar is so big it took two hands to pick it up. Fins, teeth and stingers, stingers like more than one, three rows of teeth looking air, and lots of stingers.
He dropped the jar.
I looked on at the hornet shark with its bat wings flapping and saliva coming out of three sets of teeth, and it opened its jaws and flew at my face. And suddenly I left my body and I could see what was happening.
In slow motion.
I could see it for what it was without being afraid, and I thought, wait a minute, it's not like it's a rhinoceros.
They're big and they run.
I could see it coming at me and it wasn't a shark, and it wasn't a bee. It was a freak and it was the size of a bat. Joy scratched it with my fist and it was stunned, stopped in the air, confused, and then it fell to the ground for the thunder and I stumped it with my foot.
And I felt good. Wow. So where where do you get this? Where do we find it?
Well, it's at mental Radio dot net, okay, And there's a free app that is for Apple or for Google Play, and you can just download it and put on your phones or you don't have to listen with your phones. But it's deeply it's a whole different experience. When you listen to their.
Phonic experience, it sounds a little bit like it's influenced by the noises that you heard outside window window in Malibu when you're Psychosis Shadow Stevens, you have been and will always remain a joy to me. Thank you for coming to me. Thank you I appreciate being here. It is not all before,