I have been a relatively loyal listener of The Best Show for about 3 years. I got into it because I got into podcasts because I got into a line of work that was extremely boring and tedious and called for mental distraction and amusement. I'd heard rumblings about it. I knew a box set of "greatest hits" from the show had been released to glowing reviews, and is now very hard/extremely expensive to obtain. 11 years ago (nearly to the day!), I took a girl I happened to be dating at the time (one of the very few!) to a free Superchunk set at a street festival in Chicago. The show was incredible and afterward my date messaged Jon Wurster on Twitter and told him she was about to shout something (some reference from the show that I can't recall because I wasn't yet familiar) to him and he wrote back, "You should have!" But yeah she was super cool so I had a positive impression of The Best Show and its audience for many years.
So 3 years ago I actually started listening, and I didn't know what to make of it. For one, it was very long-- three hours, sometimes even more. There were longer stretches of dead air than anything I had been used to. The subject matter was generally obtuse and a bit outre--there are a lot of inside jokes--but Scharpling and his co-hosts and guests all had good taste and it grew increasingly hilarious to me. After calling in, I signed up for the Patreon so I could get two stickers from them.
I called in for the Top 50 Weirdos. Now there are many weirdos, but Scharpling was looking for something very distinct--it had to be his type of weirdo. So I called--and it was busy the first few times I called, until it rang, and the voice I recognized as AP Mike asked what I wanted to talk about on the air and then said "okay" and put me on hold, for an hour or so--until Tom picked up my call and proceeded to make me feel extremely vulnerable and embarrassed.
This is just my general tendency towards feeling that I have nothing of value to say, that I am completely unoriginal, that everything I say has been said before, that I am not very funny, that I do not have a good voice for radio, etc. I really wanted to be one of the good callers and I doubted myself, feeling that I lacked the poise and understanding necessary to amuse him.
So I offered my suggestions--J.D. Salinger and Mark E. Smith--for the Top 50 Weirdos list. Neither made it. He had nothing to say about J.D. (an eccentric recluse, but not a weirdo, I presume) and he said Mark E. Smith was a maniac, not a weirdo. Somehow from the there situation devolved into my talking about "the first punk song" and I was droning on about it maybe being "Helter Skelter" or something by the Kinks or Sonics - and he said no, the first punk song was "Shaving Cream" by Benny Goodman, and he proceeded to play a snippet of it on the air. Not a bad call until he asked if I had anything else, and I said I wanted to wax his car a bit.
Now I have gotten blowback for this phrase from at least a couple people and all I can say is that I know it sounds weird but I once heard Paul Thomas Anderson use the phrase on a commentary track of the Boogie Nights DVD, in relation to himself (i.e. "I'm gonna wax my own car a bit," or "Sorry but I'm gonna wax my own car again"). Maybe it only works if you say "wax my own car," but I digress.
So I told him that I appreciated what he did, yada, yada, and I could tell he was getting impatient, wasting our time on the air with sycophantry, so I told him I was going to see "F'd Up" (no swearing on the air) that week at the Metro (date of call was April 24, 2019) and told him I saw the video of him singing "Precision Auto" with Damian Abraham of Fucked Up while Superchunk played it. I asked what song by Fucked Up would he cover, and he said, characteristically, "Oh, probably "Year of the Ox." Immediately after he hung up, he kind of mocked me for the "wax your car" thing, but whatever--this is still one of the highlights of my life and that is sort of sad, but maybe one day I will reach out further...
***
I pre-ordered this book a month or so ago, and after hearing one or two of the little promo interviews he did on WTF, I felt that I should use my status as a book critic-hobbyist to get an earlier start because I wanted to read it ASAP. Even before it arrived, I created the post below, because I was pretty sure that it was going to make the list, and this is not just me being a fanboy. Of course, Girl in a Band and Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl and The Rise, The Fall and the Rise did not make it, and all three were excellent. I am not going to compare apples to oranges here (they are all memoirs by women in bands; this is a memoir by a man who might have played bass in similar bands, but whose deeper passion was for comedy). Trouble Boys did make the list, and I probably would not have checked it out had Bob Mehr not been a guest on the show. Just from hearing enough on the air about it, and knowing Scharpling's standards, I had faith that it would make the list, and of course it does.
This is a unique memoir for a couple reasons. For one, it is by a person that is far from a household name, but really should be, and I would not be surprised if more people started paying attention to him as a result of this publication. I was surprised to read that The Best Show had reached some 200,000 listeners, because it is so unusual and will test the patience of most people (like myself, an "acquired taste"), and I don't know if Patti Smith (whose memoir did make the Best Books list) is aware but I really hope she finds it and sends him a nice message, absolving him of the shame he felt after sharing an elevator with her and asking her an awkward question:
"I stood there in the wake of my blunder and pressed the button that returned me to the lobby. I stepped out like the human manifestation of the blood pouring from the elevator in The Shining and sat back down with Jon." (8)
This was the first of several times that I laughed at loud, and the second was also a Kubrick reference:
"Billy Joel is like a shitty version of the monolith in the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but instead of teaching monkeys to beat each other to death it coaches a sea of dunces to scream 'AND CAPTAIN JACK WILL GET YOU HIGH TONIGHT!' on command." (20)
This is a difficult book to review because I am wary of spoiling too much. There are many mysteries to Tom, and this book truly does pull back the curtain (though I am wary of referencing, even vaguely, a film he has no love for, but also sets up one of the "qualified triumphs" of this book) and I think it may bisect his life--before and after this book--because it is a great work of emotional honesty, empathy and inspiration. I do not think it will win the Pulitzer Prize but I do think it deserves an honorable mention, at the very least. There is ultimately a fair share of silliness in it, as would be expected, and while it certainly detracts nothing for me, and while there are plenty of explanatory paragraphs to contextualize everything, it is probably too nonsensical for the Pulitzer Board, though I could see David Remnick and Nancy Barnes supporting it (for hipster cred and NPR/WFMU enmity, respectively). Bob Dylan did win the Nobel Prize and strange things happen all the time and who knows what the future holds.
***
It Never Ends charts Scharpling's life in such a way that it feels inappropriate to summarize. There are his memories, and lack of them. There are things that he had only told a handful of people, until now. This is a memoir, as opposed to an autobiography. Scharpling wanted to write his story; nobody commissioned him to do it. Or that is at least how it seems. This is a confessional, and in a way similar to Michael Jordan's Hall of Fame speech. It exposes his humble origins, his rise through adversity, and his ultimate domination of "a not-inconsiderable portion of the axis between alternative comedy and independent music." (255) It also calls out certain individuals for past indignities suffered. In fact, there a few pages about stand-up comedy that should speak to anyone that has sat in the front row of the Boston Comedy Club or The Comedy Store:
"This was also the show where a comedian named Nick Di Paolo decided to make fun of me for sitting in the audience with a heavy winter jacket. 'Look at that coat,' he said derisively. Stupid me, wearing a coat in February! I guess I should've opted for the cheap leather jacket he was sporting, as if he was on his way back from an audition for a Lords of Flatbush reboot." (130)
Shortly thereafter, Marc Maron makes a joke onstage, trying "to convey the gulf between one person he considered legitimate and another he marked as a no-talent fraud. To this day I still cannot believe it, but Marc literally said, 'The difference between these two guys is like the difference between working at MTV and working at a music store.' The audience laughed. I just shrunk into my seat like the loser I was. At that point, Marc had no idea that I was drawing air on the planet, so it wasn't aimed at me specifically, but somehow he summed up my existence with one offhand joke. If he had been hired and coached to write a joke that would reduce me to a pile of defeated goo, he would've fallen short of this bullseye." (131) At the time of this show, Scharpling worked at a sheet music store, and his friend with him at the show worked at MTV. As a person who has, at times, operated under the mental delusion that total strangers are speaking to his innermost paranoid thoughts, I could relate. Unfortunately no such incident has lit a similar fire under me, as it gave Scharpling a driving determination to become a full-time writer. Shortly thereafter, he quits his job in service of that.
Ultimately, this is an inspirational and life-affirming book about believing in yourself and finding your passion. So often we are told do what we love for work, because then all work is play. This is a nice idea in theory, yet it is incredibly difficult to achieve. For every Tom Scharpling, there are ten million (or more) would-be comedians living quiet lives of desperation, seeking out in vain a proper profession that makes actual money and doesn't make them want to kill themselves. Or the untold millions moving to L.A. with dreams of "making it" in Hollywood. Breaking into showbiz, as a writer for television without connections, can be incredibly difficult if not impossible, and Scharpling explains exactly how it happened to him. The chapters on Monk and "the art of pitching" should be instructive for any readers harboring such ambitions.
The personal highlight, for me, is Chapter 15, "My Life as a Player," which is twenty-two pages long and feels much longer. There are other chapters like this one--the three "Unqualified Triumphs" and "An Afternoon with Papa Roach"--and they are my favorite parts of the book because they blend confessional storytelling with the ridiculous observations that make The Best Show such a unique and meaningful platform.
It is in this chapter that Scharpling explains how his mother instilled him with a deeply competitive spirit. Earlier on there is a section about a specific Sex in the City slot machine, which foreshadows this chapter in which he essentially comes out as a gambling addict, albeit a mild one. He has not lost tens of thousands of dollars to this addiction, but he has spent a great deal of time pursuing pyrrhic victories. I might say "wasted a great deal of time," but that could never be true when it results in gems like this chapter, which details his obsession with a pinball machine, and a certain Wizard of Oz "coin pusher" game:
"Well, let me tell you, dear reader. Coin pushers are an arcade 'game of chance' with two horizontal coin-covered levels (called 'brooms') that rhythmically heave forward and backward like the ocean itself. These tiers are covered in valueless coins, with a sprinkling of poker-type chips and game cards scattered throughout. The chips and the cards are the prizes, not the coins. The coins are nothing more than the means to move the game forward. The player manipulates a trigger that spits out more coins, and the goal is to get these coins to land in spots that force everything to tumble downward when the broom recedes. Which in turn hopefully causes the coins on the lower level to fall down into the chute, taking some chips and cards with them. There is definitely some skill required in the coin pusher racket. You need timing to strategically maneuver the coins to sweep the cards and chips down into the chute. After playing you take the cards and chips to the arcade counter, where they can be redeemed for prizes that cost a fraction of what you spent on the game. And there you have it, the most boring paragraph ever written! You broke the spine on the book, too late to return it!" (214)
If I ever happen to make it to the Jersey Shore boardwalk, I will be seeking out this machine. And this idea itself is a theme of the book: life is meaningless, and we are expected to earn our keep, and we can spend our leisure days trying to cultivate our souls and reach for a higher purpose, or we can make fun of ourselves for our most foolish endeavors and provide amusement for others. We can aim for profundity, or we can acknowledge that what we are doing is incredibly dumb, but we do it anyways, because it's good to have goals and make people laugh (both at us and with us). It would be impossible not to learn at least one new thing from this book. There is at least one lesson for everyone.
The best literature both informs and entertains the reader. They should learn something about the world, or themselves, and they should enjoy the process of that discovery. It Never Ends is constructed out of truisms, and though Scharpling has had his share of unimaginable experiences (see 11/8/16), each of our lives are filled with such moments. Cycles repeat themselves. People can change, but they are unmistakably themselves. Failure is an inevitability in life, and feared too often. Hard work and persistence pays off (a cliche, but a running theme here). It's important to set goals. "Ideas are cheap" and action is necessary. There is much to learn in this world, and it is important that we are able to laugh as our mortality looms and the world burns around us. We can all do better and be better, and after reading this, one may learn how to begin that quest for a higher self.
Grade: A
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