The Celebrity with Cooties

When it comes to interviewing the stars, I started pretty much at the top. In college, I stood at the door of one of the practice rooms in the Conservatory of Music, cassette recorder in hand, timidly knocked, and the door opened on the legendary jazz pianist George Shearing…with his pants down. Literally. The blind pianist had a dresser who was helping him on with his trousers as I entered. Nonplussed, Shearing was good-humored throughout our short conversation, taking the lead as I stumbled through ad-libbed questions. He was the consummate pro, and I was awkwardly conducting my first celebrity interview for a closed-circuit, carrier current radio station that only a handful of students listened to.

A few years later, I had an hour-long Sunday night radio special that was broadcast on a top-rated rock station in a medium-sized market, and I knew interviews with well-known musicians would help build an audience. I’ve already mentioned interviewing the great Curtis Mayfield, the fast-rising and then quickly disappearing Joe South (“The Games People Play”), and Jesse Colin Young. There were to be others later in the long run of “Celebration Rock,” including Seals and Crofts, Harry Chapin, Kenny Loggins, and two members of Lynyrd Skynyrd. There were also the interviews that didn’t happen, and I’ll have more to say about those later. But here is the story of my 1975 meeting in a motel room with a singer who named herself after a train, a woman who confessed to me that she had “cooties.”

Jackson Browne was doing a show at the Mosque Theater in Richmond, a cavernous venue with a proscenium second only to that of Radio City Music Hall. On the bill with Browne that night was a young singer who had the number four best-selling record in the U.S., a song called “Poetry Man.” There are two things I’ve forgotten about that night. One was why I didn’t get to interview Browne. The other is how I got connected with the singer Phoebe Snow. Here is what I do remember:

As was the case with many of my interviews, I didn’t actually see the musicians at their concerts. Sad to say, I just couldn’t afford the tickets, and I wasn’t exactly a prominent local personality to rate “comps.” So, I had to talk my way into theaters for backstage interviews, or hope that a record promoter would set up an appointment for me. The latter was the case when I got the word that I should go to the Holiday Inn and interview Phoebe Snow after she had opened for Jackson Browne. She would be leaving the theater during the intermission and go back to her room and meet us there. (Us? I invited my friend Jim Bond to go with me, assuming he would be thrilled to see how I mixed with the stars…and also because I needed some support.)

She greeted us at the door, invited us in, and we looked around the standard Holiday Inn room (not an upscale suite) and saw utter disarray, mostly food trays filled with empty dishes and various glassware. Phoebe herself was a little on the plump side, and I assumed from the mess that she had over-eaten her way to the theater that night. Of course, looking back on it now, I realize she had probably shared the trays with band members or some small entourage. Have a seat, she invited us. We sat on a bed since the chairs were full of stuff. I told her about my program; I was upfront about the Presbyterian connection, but soft-pedaled the religious format so she wouldn’t feel the need to tell me what she thought I wanted to hear.

Her song “Poetry Man” was her first hit, and I didn’t know much more about her than that. So my first questions were straightforward and conventional: what’s it like, where are you from, and how’s the tour going? I didn’t have to ask her about her name. I had ridden the Erie-Lackawanna train, the “Phoebe Snow,” from my hometown to college in the early 60’s, so I knew she had adopted it as a stage name. The conversation was easy, her answers were unguarded, her love of making music was exuberant. She told of a recording session where the great jazz pianist Teddy Wilson happened by and played on a few tracks. “Imagine! Teddy Wilson playing for me!”

When I told her that my program was aimed at a young audience, she opened up about her own experiences in high school. She wanted to get a message across to my listeners, she told me. Having played the interview not only on the air but several times for various youth retreats and conferences, I can almost quote her verbatim. “When I was in high school, I was, well look at me. I had thick glasses, my hair was frizzy, and putting on a dress…well, I was shaped like a pear! And whenever I walked down the hallways in school, they treated me like…remember ‘cooties’? Well, I had the cooties!“

And then she told Jim and me how she would run to the girls’ room between classes and hide in a stall so that she wouldn’t have to cope with the humiliating put-downs of her classmates. Just before the class bell rang, she would rush from the restroom and go to class. Phoebe paused in the story at this point to be sure we were getting this all on tape. And she said, “Here’s what I want all those kids who have poor self-images to learn from this: I now have the #4 hit record in the country, and on this tour, I’m going back to New Jersey to do a concert in my hometown, and the same people who made such fun of me back in high school are going to pay big bucks to sit up front to see me perform and hope that I’m going to recognize ‘em. Well,” she said with emphasis, “I’m going to recognize them all right!” For what they were, what they did, what they had said.

Looking back on her words, I still believe that she didn’t have a sense of retribution in her heart, but a sense of justice. Maybe ironic justice. The main thing was that she wanted my young listeners, both the popular ones and the pear-shaped cootie-laden ones, to know that one day, things do change, and that (my words here, not hers…and actually not even mine, but Jesus’) “the first shall be last and the last first.”

Before we left that night, she signed my Phoebe Snow album, writing on it, “Thanks for the interview. It was my best one yet.”

So who needed Jackson Browne?