Slate is running a great piece today called The Man Who Told A Christmas Story: What I Learned From Jean Shepherd.

I didn’t realize that the article was written by Donald Fagan (Steely Dan) until near the end, so I was pleasantly surprised to be reading an article about a great modern storyteller (Shepherd) written by a great modern musician (Fagan).

Fagan is as articulate as any professional writer, and the article is not only a nostalgic reminiscence but it’s a touching microcosm of A Christmas Story.

Fagan talks with childlike glee about Shep’s ‘brutal sabotage’ of radio commercials, his on-air hoaxes, and the time that his hero read aloud a news clip that he’d submitted to the show. However, in the way that A Christmas Story‘s Ralphie discovers Little Orphan Annie to be a fraud, a young Donald Fagan realizes the same about Shepherd—when he discovers the Shepherd’s personality—not only his wit—is biting and acerbic.

What I saw that night…wasn’t pretty. In the studio, [Shepherd’s] occasional abuse of the lone engineer on the other side of the glass could be seen as the petulance of an artist trying to make things work on the fly. But, incandescent under the gaze of all those kids, his self-indulgences looked more like straight-up narcissism and his “hipness” was revealed as something closer to contempt. By the end of the show, he’d crossed the line between artist and showman and then some. No longer wanting to meet the great man, I left before the reception, scraped the ice off my windshield, and drove home. Anyway, the cool early ’60s were over and the boiling, psychedelic late ’60s had begun. Shepherd was no longer part of my world.

…He didn’t drink himself to death like his pal Jack Kerouac or OD like Lenny Bruce but gradually succumbed to that very real disease of self-loathing and its accompanying defenses. Disappointed in the way the world had treated him, he retired to Florida’s west coast and died in 1999.

Fagan ends the article on a high note, as he describes the ‘trip’ he’s gotten out of listening to old broadcasts online.

Not long ago, in the absence of any books, films, music, etc., that seemed to give off any light, I started looking back at some of the things that used to inspire me as a kid, including some of Shep’s old shows, now available on the Internet…Despite the tendencies I’ve already mentioned (plus the gaffes one might expect from a wild man like Shep ad-libbing before the age of political correctness), much of the stuff is simply amazing: The guy is a dynamo, brimming with curiosity and ideas and fun. Working from a few written notes at most, Shepherd is intense, manic, alive, the first and only true practitioner of spontaneous word jazz.

[Slate]