The multi-talented Canadian was the loyal sidekick to US TV's the Late Show host David Letterman, a trusted leader of Belushi and Aykroyd's iconic movie band, and amazingly turned down a big role in Seinfeld!
Grammy winner Paul Shaffer will feel like a long-lost friend to older British and Irish readers who grew up at a time when there was only a handful of TV stations on air in the 1980s-1990s.
The Canadian musician was one of the most recognisable faces on our TV screens back then as a result of being beamed into our sitting rooms every weekday night on Sky TV as the musical director [MD], bandleader and sidekick of TV icon David Letterman.
He appeared for the entire run of both Late Night With David Letterman [1982-1993] and the Late Show with David Letterman [1993- 2015], even hosting the show himself on a few occasions.
“You were a few days behind – but so were we!” Paul quipped during our chat on Zoom. But there is so much more to his stellar CV. Paul co-wrote the dance anthem It’s Raining Men and was the actual guy who put together the band for The Blues Brothers.
He also was in a group with Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant, even recording an EP together. While Paul was a big part of the Saturday Night Live [SNL] team in its heyday. He was the pianist in Bill Murray’s popular Nick The Lounge Singer routine and, even more famously, was the first person to utter an expletive live on SNL.
And – get this – Paul was even asked to take on a starring role in Seinfeld! He was “considered for the role of George Costanza”, according to Wikipedia.
“The story has expanded to being about a certain part,” Paul explained, happy to clear it all up once and for all. “But what actually happened was, I got a call at work: ‘Jerry Seinfeld is getting his own show, he wants you to be his sidekick’.
“I don’t know whether they had the four people they were going to have. They said, ‘We want you to be on the show, too’. It didn’t seem like I had to audition. I could’ve just done it.
“And – this is embarrassing – but I was overwhelmed at the time: Letterman was just getting huge and I didn’t even return the call... for the most beloved show in the history of television!”
But, as Jerry Seinfeld once said, “Sometimes the road less travelled is less travelled for a reason.”
“I wouldn’t have wanted to leave the Letterman show,” Paul said. “I had some experience doing a sitcom in 1977 and – even though it was supposed to be a musical sitcom – I wasn’t happy without really playing all the time.”
There were movie appearances along the way too. He was in This Is Spinal Tap, Blues Brothers 2000, Look Who’s Talking Too, Disney’s Hercules and Scrooged – in a scene with the Birth of Cool himself, Miles Davis.
But the 75-year-old, who was also the MD for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies and did the closing ceremony of the ’96 Olympics, grew up almost a million miles away from showbiz in a “rugged” and “isolated” place called Thunder Bay in Canada.
“I didn’t quite fit in – you’ve got to be rugged and love the outdoors. That’s what it’s all about there. People love to camp and fishing. I don’t know if you’ve seen my physique but I’m not exactly...” his voiced trailed off with laughter.
“Luckily there was the radio at that time – your readers probably don’t remember that! I could somehow receive American radio stations after dark and this was like a lifeline for me – not only to American music but also America as a whole.”
There was a great love of music in his family home – his parents even took him as a 12-year-old to Vegas to see Nat King Cole perform, which he described as “life-changing”.
“My mother’s attitude was, ‘That kid is going to be a piano player if it’s the last thing he does’.”
Paul hit the ground running when he finally got to New York as a young man. He ended up going down the MD route when he landed his first gigs there, first on Broadway for Oscar-winning composer Stephen Schwartz and then on TV.
“I always thought I would join a rock band. Yet I was not a writer myself exactly – I wrote a couple of the right things, but otherwise, I was just a player,” Paul admitted.
“It’s not like I had material to present as an artist. I wanted to be a pianist. I didn’t know exactly how. Rock ‘n’ roll seemed to be the way to go but then I just gravitated towards theatre. Then I was on a television show. These things just sort of happened.”
But he did go on to later release two solo albums, with legends such as Tony Bennet, Joan Jett, George Clinton, Phil Spector and even Mike Myers appearing on the second one.
After working with Schwartz, he joined the SNL family in 1974 as part of the house band, alongside Howard Shore, the Oscar-winning composer of The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Paul might not have any Irish heritage himself, but he agreed: “I sure did have the luck of the Irish.”
He soon became a familiar face on the iconic SNL show when he started to regularly “sneak into sketches”.
As I briefly mentioned earlier, Paul’s famously known for being the first person to ever utter the f-word expletive on SNL when he appeared in a live sketch, alongside John Belushi in 1980.
“Why must you bring up things that I try so hard to forget!” Paul quipped. “I’m just kidding you.”
Paul insisted the f-word just slipped out as part of a parody poking fun at The Troggs Tapes bootleg. The tape was this famous 12-minute swear feast recorded in the studio by the English group as they desperately tried to write a follow-up to their worldwide hit Wild Thing.
Incidentally, largely thanks to the notoriety of this bootleg tape that was circulated in showbiz circles, The Troggs would later record an album with three members of REM in 1992.
“Obviously it’s not a proud moment – but it’s an honest moment. I didn’t say the f-word on purpose,” Paul maintained.
The SNL sketch was based around a band rehearsing to play for their king in medieval times. “But you were saying the words of The Troggs and, of course, we couldn’t say the f-word over and over again like they did,” he explained. “So we made up our own word – flog. I was saying ‘flogging’ in a bad British accent.”
He then did the infamous sketch for me in a decent enough English accent, it has to be said. “You had the flogging beat before. What happened? You were playing the flogging thing and now you’ve lost the flogging thing...’”
Paul continued: “I just got carried away and I didn’t say flogging one time – I said the actual word. And then I just blanched out because I realised what I had done. I hadn’t been trying to pull a fast one just to get some publicity.”
At the end of it the actress Laraine Newman said, ‘Thanks for making television history’. Paul added, “Then the boss came over and said, ‘You just broke down the last barrier’. “I felt terrible. But I didn’t get into trouble.”
Paul, who is happily married to his wife of 30-odd years, jokingly agreed that people “of course” sometimes come to the wrong conclusion about his sexuality – all thanks to It’s Raining Men being such an iconic anthem in the LGBT community.
“And people thought I was gay for all different types of reasons. I mean, just coming on television in a colourful outfit and behaving a little bit over the top would make people jump to that conclusion,” he said.
The Blues Brothers “certainly was” a big highlight of his career – even if his Wikipedia entry inaccurately states Belushi “dropped him” from the project shortly before the iconic movie was made.
“Belushi and Dan Aykroyd hired me as their band leader, but we didn’t have a band yet,” he recalled. “We put it together one man at a time – with the knowledge that we could hire almost anybody.
“These two guys were so hot that when the word got around that they were doing this recording project everybody wanted to play for them – including legitimate guys. We hired one musician at a time, sort of like the way it is in that Blues Brothers movie: they go to them and they hire one guy at a time.”
Unfortunately, Paul then found himself with his own Sophie’s Choice: it was either the movie or a big Broadway production with his “dear friend” Gilda Radner of SNL fame, who appeared in three movies with her husband Gene Wilder.
He had originally hoped that the Gilda project would be finished before the cameras started rolling for the movie, but it wasn’t to be. “I pulled out of The Blues Brothers’ movie at the last second. I said, ‘John [Belushi], I’m sorry, I can’t do it.” And I had a big feud with Belushi over this,” he recalled.
“Certain advisors said, ‘You’ve gotta do it, maybe you can do both somehow’. Maybe you can shuffle back and forth’. I called back and they said, ‘We’ve already replaced you!’ I felt just terrible when that movie came out. Belushi and I had a big reconciliation just before the movie came out, because we, after all, were old friends.”
He continued: “I just thought of this story the other day. It was emotional. I was in Los Angeles and ran into Aykroyd who said, ‘We’re having a big barbecue’ and invited me. And then said, Belushi’s going to be there’.
“But that’s not only where we had a big reconciliation, but then they said, ‘We want to play you the songs and do the choreography for you’. It was bittersweet for me. I was proud too, because I had put this band together.
“But what a moment to remember: they lip-synced to the tracks from the movie and did all the dance steps for me. And then I was back in the band. I rejoined for the big tour that we did in support of the movie. I was a Blues Brother once again.
“After Belushi died, Aykroyd got a sequel made and he made sure that I was in that one: supervising the music, working with Aretha [Franklin] and James Brown, and all the things I didn’t get to do the first time.
“So God bless Danny Aykroyd – even though maybe only four people got to see this film and they were all members of my own family! Nonetheless, it was wonderful of Danny.”
The list of icons he’s worked with is almost endless: Brian Wilson, Yoko Ono, Cher, Donald Fagen, Diana Ross, Barry Manilow, Eric Clapton, Ronnie Wood...
But once a Blues Brother, always a Blues Brother.
© Jason O’Toole
