A.K.A. GENE SHAY
by
Mike DelVecchia
Gene Shay is 68. The name on his driver’s license is ‘Ivan Shaner’.
When Mr. Shaner wakes up in the morning, he likes to have eggs and
sausage and a cup of coffee and chat with his wife Gloria and perhaps
read the newspaper. He leaves his home in Wynnewood jumps on Route 76
and drives through West Philadelphia and the UPenn campus to reach his
broadcasting chair. But if it is a “non-broadcasting” day, he might
see his grandson and granddaughter or chat on the phone with his two
daughters Rachel and Elana, or gab with a retail chain about improving
their broadcasting copy.
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photo,
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Or then again, he may go to 88.5 WXPN and interview Janis Ian, Ani
DeFranco or Tom Paxton.
Born in the Nicetown section of North Philadelphia, Ivan's
grandfather changed the family's Russian name to its derivation, "Shaner."
They opened a women's lingerie store on Germantown Avenue.
"Bra's and panties, of all things," said Mr. Shay.
"And the store is long gone."
Mr. Shay's first musical love was musical comedy. He became
especially fond of Rodgers and Hart/Hammerstein and Gilbert and
Sullivan, putting on productions while he was a dramatic counselor at
summer camp, portraying Luther Billis, in "South Pacific."
"Bloody Mary, is the girl I love," he sings and reminisces
about organizing "Pirates of Penzance" and
"Oklahoma." He says he never misses the latter whenever it
comes to Philadelphia, arguing that today's Andrew Lloyd Weber-type
musicals are nothing like the "Carousel's of yesterday, when an
opening show used to put, "six or seven songs into the top
ten."
"It's possible I was attracted to these shows because of the
'American Standard' aspect of the songs, which are pretty folky and much
about tradition and Americana--- things I've always loved," said
Mr. Shay.
"But I never got into folk with any depth until the 60's, after
hosting Armed Forces Radio, in Germany, playing jazz and pop," said
Mr. Shay.
A graduate of Temple with a degree in Mass Communications and having
worked professionally while a civilian, he asked his superiors to
transfer him to the Armed Forces Network. Here, he found himself working
as News and Music Programmer and Broadcaster at a thirteenth century
castle overlooking the Main River in the little town of Heochst, outside
Frankfurt.
"If you ask the army to put you in 'radio', they will think you
want to run wires through the trees, so I had to be clear that I was
interested in broadcasting," said Mr. Shay.
A civilian once more, his name "again" changed. While at
WRTI at Temple, he was still Ivan Shaner, the derivation from the
original Russian, which felt still sounded ethnic.
"When I auditioned for Director Charlie O'Donnell at WHAT, he
told me that I had passed and could start in two weeks, but asked what I
wanted to call myself," said Mr. Shay.
Mr. O'Donnell, famous as the announcer of TV's "Wheel of
Fortune," has never changed his name but has sometimes been
credited as 'Charlie Tuna'.
"In those days, ethnic names had to be changed. I soon found
myself getting into anglo-American folk music, Scottish ballads, etc.
and found I liked traditions," explained Mr. Shay.
One day, folk singer Tossi Aaron telephoned Mr. Shay's radio station,
suggesting that he might like to hear the Blind Boy Fuller original of a
jazz tune he played on his, "Mostly the Blues" program on
WHAT-FM.
"I soon met one of the most creative and imaginative persons
I've ever known," Mrs. Aaron said.
During one of the Philadelphia Folk Festivals, Mrs. Aaron hung her
banjo on the lobby notice board of the Schwenksville motel housing the
talent. She hung thin, curled, red ribbons from the neck of the
instrument to emulate broken strings, attaching cards to the ends of the
tentacles, upon which she wrote the names of each performer. She drew a
smiling face upon a circular piece of paper, which she placed over the
face of the banjo.
"Ivan saw this image and then had his agency base the
Philadelphia Folk Song Society logo upon my design," Mrs. Aaron
explains.
Mr. Shay ended up taking guitar lessons from Mrs. Aaron who
introduced him to the members of the Philadelphia Folk Society.
"First, Tossi taught me the hammer-on riff opening of Joan Baez'
'Silver Dagger' and I was overjoyed," recalls Mr. Shay.
As Mr. Shay puts it, his life "suddenly changed." He ended
up managing Mrs. Aaron, writing album liner notes for folklorist Ken
Goldstein, meeting people like Sonny Terry, going to parties with Lonnie
Johnson, and then suddenly "somebody came up with the idea of
starting a folk festival."
One needs to think twice while listening to Mr. Shay describe club
life in Philadelphia, to realize that he is vividly describing a scene
that all but died out with clubs like Manny "Money" Rubin's
Second Fret on Sansom Street, or Ed and Esther Halpern's Gilded Cage on
21st Street or the Main Point in Bryn Mawr, the latter of which is still
going strong.
Joni Mitchell, he says, sometimes worked one weekend at the Point and
the next at the Fret. After performing, Ms. Mitchell would be too tired
to drive home to Manhattan and would sometimes crash at the apartment of
Fret manager, Joy Schrieber who lived in downtown Philly with her
husband, Mr. Rubin. Ms. Schrieber's maiden name, back in the day, was
Flebbins.
"One Sunday, Joni left Joy's place and debuted 'Both Sides Now'
on my show. She had written the song at Joy's apartment."
He describes visiting Ms. Mitchell at a vacant Fret one day with a
friend, climbing the spiral staircase and approaching the front room,
seeing the relatively unknown Ms. Mitchell practicing guitar by herself.
"Most of those clubs were open Thursday through Sunday and would
be dark from Monday through Wednesday," he recalls.
"She struck me with her talent, beauty and her great loneliness,
her image set against the fake stained glass windows which Manny had
assembled from theatrical gels and duct tape."
Or later at Mr. Rubin's rock emporium the Trauma--- a harder,
short-lived club whose founder quickly found couldn't compete against
Larry Magid's and Allen Spivak's harder-rocking, newer Electric Factory
and the infant Spectrum.
"One night I ran into Joni at The Trauma and she was wearing a
US Marine Corps dress blue jacket," said Mr. Shay, who recognized
her star rising with invention and flair.
It was always Ms. Mitchell's way, he remembers, to variegate her
wardrobe with perhaps a Mandarin type of collar offsetting the epaulets
and the ever-present blue jeans denoting her folksong backbone. During
the 'uniform period', everybody from Duke Ellington to the Beatles was
donning military or costume motifs.
"Gary Puckett and the Union Gap were playing the Trauma that
night and Joni just came in with her latest boyfriend. She was not
working that night. She was a folkie and the Trauma was for Rock and
Roll bands."
It was clear that Ms. Mitchell had a yen for Philadelphia.
"So she would stay the whole week with Joy Schrieber who lived
in downtown Philly. I used to bump into Joni in Rittenhouse Square
occasionally where she would be shopping for antique clothes and
jewelry.
"This was somebody brilliant and special," he insists.
Mr. Shay recalls Ms. Mitchell describing her original mythology
during radio interviews. "These were stories which Joni would
write, paralleling J.R.R. Tolkein, having characters whose names were
acronyms. The name of her publishing company for instance, says Mr.
Shay, 'Siquomb', stands for 'sad is the queen of mind and beauty'."
One day, Ms. Mitchell relaxed between shows at the Fret, commanding
Pentels and onion paper. "She would cut and repositioned the paper
at angles," Mr. Shay said, "filling-in outlines with color to
produce a picture plane which when held up to a light source became
really stunning and totally original."
On January 30, Mr. Shay's longtime protégé and friend, WMGK DJ Ed
Sciaky died. Forty years earlier, Mr. Sciaky--- who would always refer
to Gene as his mentor, had been hired to play half-hour gospel tapes on
WHAT AM on Sunday night, the same time that Shay was doing his show.
*****
"Ed was almost a son to me," said Mr. Shay.
The idea to record Ms. Mitchell's and other artists' performances and
interviews did not belong to the "mentor." Mr. Sciaky had
convinced Mr. Shay to bring a tape recorder to the Fret to record Ms.
Mitchell's show. Mr. Sciaky made many priceless recording of Fret
performances for WRTI while a student at Temple.
Archiving is a philanthropic endeavor. Ingrid Croce has recently
requested recordings of interviews and a festival performance by her
late husband and former singing partner, South Philadelphia native, Jim
Croce. Mr. Shay intends to meet Mrs. Croce at her San Diego restaurant,
Croce's, to deliver the tapes.
"One day in his teens, Ed came to me and asked if he could help
me with my radio show. He started off emulating my announcing style
which he thought was very natural," said Mr. Shay, who then took a
long, emotive breath.
Most of the top-40 DJ's back then were engaging the "Puking
Style." Mr. Shay describes this to be the aggressive, bubbly,
frenetic manner in which these DJ's "vomited their words."
"I watched Ed grow as a person and personality and found that we
had a lot in common," said Mr. Shay.
He did not realize until attending a memorial get-together that Mr.
Sciaky had, like himself, possessed a musical comedy background and had
died on the streets of New York while returning from "Gypsy."
"And my mentor was Ken Goldstein," Mr. Shay said.
Mrs. Aaron explained that she had introduced the pair. She was one of
the Philadelphia acts whom Mr. Goldstein signed to Prestige Records. Her
albums, "Jewish Folk Songs for the Second Generation" and
"Tossi Sings American Folk Songs and Ballads," evince an
original Philadelphia folk sound--- although she has usually been
described as an interpreter. Mrs. Aaron is still a guitar teacher with
small, private student base, specializing in the Orf system of guitar.
"Ivan has always been a joy to be around. People are magnetized
to him because he is both fun, yet very serious and masterful when it
comes to the folk industry, altogether qualities which Ken realized were
special," she said.
"Mrs. Aaron is an interpreter of traditional, Celtic and Yiddish
songs and has an excellent singing voice," said Mr. Shay. "We
are talking about a cultural treasure."
Mr. Shay's sense of humor is also renowned. One day, many years ago,
Ms. Tossi explains, during a wedding reception, Mr. Shay, an usher,
entered the bridal suite of his close friend, the groom.
"Ivan filled their bathtub with forty boxes of colored gelatin,
turned on the hot water and created a bathtub gelatin mold," said
Mrs. Aaron.
Mr. Goldstein joined UPenn's folklore department in 1959 where he
shared his massive library of folk records, transcriptions, tablature,
books and articles. He was publishing countless, otherwise overlooked
songs and acting as producer for a voluminous number recordings.
"Ken put Philadelphia on the map as a folk city," performer
Tom Gala said.
Mr. Goldstein became a magnet for acts seeking guidance in
traditional music and acted as advisor for the Philadelphia Folk
Festival, which began in 1962, co-founded by Mr. Shay. The number of
Philadelphia-based acts back then was usually few.
"Kenny, like me, realized that one doesn't find traditional
musicians in Philadelphia, where instead, one finds interpreters.
Traditionalists or interpreters who stayed pretty close to tradition
found Kenny's library to be remarkable," Mr. Shay said.
Bonnie Dobson, the first person to record, "The First Time (Ever
I Saw Your Face)," first heard the song in the basement of Mr.
Goldstein's home in Hatboro. She performed the song at the first
festival.
"And because Ken the archivist, collector, folklorist was busy
producing such acts as Peggy Seager, Ewan MacColl and the early Odetta
albums, he had a backlog of tapes and transcriptions of music that
hadn't been recorded.
Remembering Mr. Goldstein's library, Mr. Goldstein sounds like an
eyewitness describing the Coney Island of yesterday.
People would come to his home, stare at awe or then poke around and
find something that interested them."
Mr. Shay once went down to the basement wanting to see what a
broadside ballad looked like. He found one from the 1700's regarding a
public hanging.
"Tonight's my last night, my love, tomorrow I will be dead, I
bid my love goodbye," he recalls with a laugh. He described another
broadside about a woman who killed her newborn, produced on a Guttenberg
press and sold near the execution for a penny, "in Scotland or
Ireland, which was where Ken would do much of his collecting."
"Ken used to befriend locals during his journeys, and say, 'I'll
bet there was a song you used to sing while growing up', and then switch
on his tape recorder," recalls Mr. Shay who likens this activity to
the work of folklorist Alan Lomax.
"There's never a man who will take my maidenhead and it will
never be thee," sings Mr. Shay, conglomerating "The Gypsy
Laddie" and "Get Away Old Man," songs whose Goidelic
cognates Mr. Goldstein had once helped him to decipher.
Mr. Shay and his wife Gloria are responsible for bringing Bob Dylan
to Philadelphia, organizing his first show at the 300-seat auditorium
Philadelphia Ethical Society in Rittenhouse Square.
"He received $150 for this gig and he was such a sweet
person," Mr. Shay recalls, recounting how he picked up Mr. Dylan at
the 30th Street Station on Friday, May 2, 1963, the day before the show.
"I'm a man of constant sorrow," Mr. Shay now sings,
explaining how he loves the single-note harmonica solo of this
traditional piece of the first album.
"Bob's manager Albert Grossman had told us what train Bob would
be coming on. Then there was Bob standing with his girlfriend Suze
Rotolo (the woman pictured on the 'Freewheelin' Bob Dylan' album) on the
platform, while I carried over a copy of the letter we had sent to
Grossman."
Mr. Shay drove Mr. Dylan and Ms. Rotolo to Mrs. Aaron's house in
Cheltenham Village where the couple lodged.
Mrs. Aaron, laughing, continues, "On Saturday night, the 8:30pm
show time came, but Mr. Dylan refused to go on without a microphone,
delaying the show forty-five minutes."
"When we got there, the sound system they promised us was locked
up and there was no janitor and Dylan didn't want to go on," Mr.
Shay remembers, mentioning that there were only about forty-five people
in the audience. Few people then knew who Mr. Dylan was, he insists.
Tickets were priced at $1.75 for Folk Society Members and $1.50 for the
general public
"Finally," Mr. Shay concluded, "Dylan said, 'oh fuck
it' and went on with the show."
After the performance, Mr. Dylan and Ms. Rotolo went to Mrs. Aaron's
house in Cheltenham
"Now, Tossi, she has a nice house with a superb folk library and
she's a great cook, so Bob and Suze end up staying over through
Tuesday," said Mr. Shay.
"Following breakfast on the porch, Bob, Suze and my daughters,
Ellen and Rachel played ball in our little backyard on Saturday
morning," Mrs. Aaron rejoined. "They were having such a great
time that they drew attention from all the neighbors."
Mrs. Aaron who was recently teaching at Germantown Friends, and at
Cheltenham Adult School, assures that Mr. Dylan truly was famous in
Philadelphia by this time.
"Cheltenham neighbors peering through hedges!" she stated
with a chuckle.
Today, radio has withdrawn the "pukers" and the naturalists
alike. Most DJ's are permitted to select a limited number of
"wildcards" per half hour. These are supposed to be songs
chosen by the disc jockey. Actually, they are selections from a
secondary, wider pool of numbers, tracks typically spun more seldom,
which producers allow DJ's to air "outside" of the play list.
"Even WXPN distributes wildcards, but still the host must then
pick from a larger list of approved selections falling outside the daily
list," mentioned Mr. Shay. "However, I have been lucky for the
most part not to have been futzed with."
Whenever the ratings drop, the program directors request that he play
the Lucy Kaplansky's and the John Gorka's, whereon he considers helping
out.
"Figuring out how to integrate the up-tempo, more contemporary
requests with Celtic ballads and Mississippi John Hurt singing 'Coffee
Blues' is a challenge whereby I'll try to suck my directors in on
preceding a Taj Mahal piece with something with which they are more
familiar by Tom Rush or Bruce Coburn or Gorka," explains Mr. Shay,
who boasts, that if the managers are listening, by the second time I've
played my tune, they'll be more familiar with the tune, not just the
sugar coating."
Of course, Mr. Shay would never contend that programming directors
are an ingenious lot. "After listening to advice from their
consultants, WHYY decided to concentrate on talk radio, and get rid of
their jazz, opera and folk shows simultaneously, which was a terrible
mistake for them."
On the side, Mr. Shay has always worked in advertising. Presently, he
is writing copy for old movies coming out on DVD. In the last couple of
years, Mr. Shay has written copy for car dealerships, home furnishings
and old movies whose first DVD premieres will display his liner notes
(look for "White Gorilla," 1945, several Victor McLaughlin
features and "Peck's Bad Boy with the Circus," 1938, starring
George 'Spanky' McFarland). Mr. Shay still visits his eccentric pals,
such as the "Flids" in the makeshift, camping communities at
the folk festival, whom he says are always good for a laugh when they
dress up as baby or some other theme. Mr. Shay is not working on a book,
but says that he ought to write down his memoirs before he forgets them.
Mrs. Aaron is now living in Elkins Park with her husband Lee and is
still a member of the society, for whose website she writes a monthly
column. Mrs. Tossi's daughters temporarily took over teaching Mrs.
Tossi's classes after she retired. Ellen is now temping as a bookkeeper
and is also a Scottish dancer. Rachel, who received her masters in
management, is now living in California. The groom whom Mr. Shay pranked
with gelatin is now a pharmacist.
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