Radio and PodcastLive Radio & PodcastsOpening Radio and Podcast...
Radio and PodcastLive Radio & PodcastsFetching podcast shows and categories...
Radio and PodcastLive Radio & PodcastsFetching podcast episodes...
TALES OF. . . MY DEAD HEROES is the second season of podcasts from Josh Alan Friedman. But DEAD is a politically incorrect term. Their songs and books and records resonate everywhere, and if...
THE GREAT BLUESMAN TELLS IT STRAIGHT Doc Pomus no longer had to cater to the teenage rock ’n’ roll market. He wrote sophisticated songs for...
THE EARLY STIGMA OF ROCK 'N' ROLL After a dormant decade, the great songwriter Doc Pomus was back in business by the late 1970s. I became hi...
FROM PARADISE TO THE GUTTER The Great Pornographer went from Upper East Side family man/pornographer-next-door to Bowery bum. The First Amen...
THE GREAT PORNOGRAPHER GETS SCREWED With the creation of Screw and Midnight Blue, Al Goldstein liberated sex from the shadows of shame and i...
AN EDITOR’S EDITOR A legend among his peers at the old men’s adventure magazines, Mel Shestack made people believe the impossible. And anyon...
A BASS PLAYER PREPARES Jack Bruce reinvented the bass guitar and wrote spectacular songs. Cream lasted a mere three years. But he remained a...
A COMPOSER PREPARES Cy Coleman wrote the scores to a dozen legendary Broadway musicals. But he was a jazz pianist first, and virtually inven...
WHEN ADVENTURE MAGAZINES BEGAT MOVIES My father hired Mario Puzo as associate editor at Magazine Management at 655 Madison Avenue in 1960. W...
A HUSTLER WITH EXQUISITE TASTE Joel Dorn was one of the last record producers standing from the old music biz. When the new industry pushed...
UGLY PEOPLE GOT NO REASON TO LIVE As a new, 22-year-old writer for The SoHo News in 1978, I was sent out to interview Lou Reed. He gave the...
A DIVINE MADMAN Tiny Tim lived in his own bubble with angelic girls dancing in the clouds, while 1920’s Broadway lullabies played on harps....
THE BRUTE PIMP OF WHITECHAPEL The 19th century life model for anti-Semitic caricatures was quite a guy. Except I made him up. And he now joi...
PACHUCO BLUES Ferguson avoids the Vietnam draft, plays Houston lesbian clubs with young Johnny Winter, and joins the Thunderbirds. Like an o...
AUSTIN'S GREATEST FALLEN MUSIC HERO In a town known for its fallen musical heroes, Fabulous Thunderbirds bassist Keith Ferguson was a tour d...
IS THAT ALL THERE IS? Writing songs with Jerry was, for me, like having a catch with Willie Mays or Joe DiMaggio—when they were old. But his...
THE IRVING BERLIN OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL We worked on a book in which he would tell off the world, to be called Kiss My Big Black Ass. It remained...
BUT ALMOST DOESN'T COUNT When Josh auditioned for Beatlemania in 1977, he was just one hopeful in the callbacks for George. Thousands of Bea...
Josh's dead heroes. Interviews, memories and short stories. First up, A 20-year-old Josh auditions for Beatlemania in 1977. Coming September...
So long, Sucker Old Times Square was at the brink of extinction and my job was done. The finale of this series. [gallery columns="2" size="l...
OLD FLESH AGENTS Irv Charnoff and Jess Mack were the last remaining vaudeville/burlesque booking agents in 1984. They mourned the decline of...
FREEING THE NIPPLE FROM SALES TAX Al Kronish, one of the Melody Burlesk’s owners, was the first CPA to do tax returns for porn stars. Under...
TIMES SQUARE CLEANS UP FOR PORN REBORN No sooner than the neighborhood rid itself of filth, pimps and whores came dancing back into the hear...
A SAFE SPACE FOR SISTERS OF THE NIGHT. Girls from all over the country gravitated to NY to make more money in street prostitution than anywh...
Caruso tipped her $5. Fanny Gold ran her family’s 42 nd Street newsstand as an eight-year-old girl in 1915. Living in poverty one block away...
FROM CAGNEY TO KUNG FU. Martin Levine, president of Brandt Theaters, booked most of the movies across 42 nd Street for 50 years. His office...
INNOCENT VICTIMS OF ADVERSITY. That’s how Uncle Lou, a geologist turned chauffeur, saw many of the girls in Times Square, who affectionately...
COPPING A FEEL IN TIMES SQUARE. Show girls, moonlighting nurses, pickpockets and members of a fake marriage ring. Live Nude Girls 25¢ was th...
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH VS. TIMES SQUARE. Three priests of Holy Cross Church witnessed the rise and fall of Times Square. Father Robert Rappleye...
THE TOAST OF BROADWAY. A lightweight contender in the 1920s, Manny Rosen worked in the kitchen of the Stage Delicatessen for 32 years—in cha...
LIVE NUDE GIRLS 25¢. Peep Shows were a phenomenon as common to Times Square as slot machines to Las Vegas. Live Nude Girls became the neon c...
WELCOME TO THE BOWELS OF 42ND STREET. It's 1983. Charles Rubinstein has run the penny arcade at 8 th Avenue and 42 nd Street since 1939. “Th...
FROM HELLS ANGELS TO BURLESQUE. A Columbia Presbyterian nurse, then a drug counselor in the California prison system, Raven de la Croix bust...
WELCOME TO THE BACK OFFICE OF THE MELODY BURLESK. Frank Sinatra’s boyhood pal and first bodyguard, Bob Anthony, also became a big band singe...
TO HEAR IZZY GROVE IS TO UNDERSTAND DAMON RUNYON. UNNERSTAND? One of the last Guys & Dolls characters to survive into the porn era, Grove wa...
PEE WEE MARQUETTE WAS THE CAUSTIC M.C. AT HISTORIC JAZZ CLUB, BIRDLAND, DURING THE '40S AND '50S. The short-tempered midget spent the last 2...