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(Jean Shepherd - Occupation: Cheerful Chaos Merchant)

Living on the West Coast, I didn't have the opportunity of experiencing Jean Shepherd as so many in New York did. I got it by way of rumor, his album on Elektra and his syndicated radio show that periodically ran on KPFK. I heard he was good friends with a lot of the Beat Generation poets, and growing up with a well-thumbed copy of "A Coney Island Of The Mind" in my high school notebook, anyone who was anywhere near that scene had to be a hero of mine.

Years later, I ran across a collection of tapes which featured his live shows and a bunch of his studio shows from the early 60's, which this is one.

Shepherd is pretty much known today as the guy who wrote "A Christmas Story". And even though it's achieved a kind of "classic Americana" status - it doesn't really explain who Shepherd was and why he was so loved by everyone who heard him. His was a skewed vision of the world, often darkly humorous and completely iconoclastic.

To a 16 year old mind, he was just what the doctor ordered.

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(Jack Kerouac - the endless quest for something resembling truth)

The Beat Generation (a label some people cringe hearing) has become something of a quaint artifact of late, mostly caricatured and marginalized, relegated to stereotypes of an approximated past.

In the 1950's and early 60's it didn't fare that much better. Mainstream media wasn't sure what to make of it. Entire talk shows were devoted to asking the question "what is it these people want?". Discussions went on endlessly over the anthropological importance of "the beats" and magazines bent over backwards with articles posing the question "where did we go wrong?"

Truth was, it was all part of the great upheaval in society as we once knew it. One that wouldn't really blossom until the 60's, but whose groundwork was solidly laid down in the 50's, when questioning the status quo brought perplexed stares and hostile reactions. Cold War fear and a general unease were putting cracks in the facade. And maybe that split-level bungalow ranch-style just wasn't that important in the bigger scheme of things.

And so on April 5, 1960 CBS Radio, as part of their "Hidden Revolution" series narrated by Howard K. Smith, sought to bring to light the real issues behind the discontent by way of a documentary on The Cool Rebellion.

Some of the interviews are awkward, self-conscious and self-serving. But the basic gist is, something was going on - people were changing their ideas about the world and their place in it.

Like all great movements in society, it starts with being misunderstood.