Vin Scelsa, Fare Thee Well Concert: Writers' Words

Longtime listeners of "Idiot's Delight"® know that literature is as important to Vin Scelsa as music. So writers, as well as musicians, were an intrinsic and vital part of the "Vin Scelsa, Fare Thee Well" concert on June 8 at City Winery, with the spoken word musings of Paul Auster, Rick Moody, Rolling Stone senior writer David Fricke, Vin's daughter Kate Scelsa and others reading their work. Here are partial transcripts of some of their beautiful words:

David Fricke, Rolling Stone
(David's text for the "Fare Thee Well" concert program)

The scene still operates according to three essential commandments: "Respect the elders; embrace the new; encourage the impractical and improbable, without bias."

I wrote that in March, 1993, in a report for Rolling Stone about that year's South By Southwest festival and conference. I remember jotting it in my notebook – an attempt to sum up that weekend in Austin, Texas and the city's unique, rock & roll electricity. Later, when I saw those words in print, I thought I caught something good: the way I hear, treasure and pursue great music every day, in my life and work. Then I moved on to my next assignments. That was yesterday's story.

I did not know that Vin Scelsa—a passionate and independent voice on New York-area radio since 1967, and in my listening since I moved to the city in 1978—had found something more in there. I learned, many months later, that Vin was reciting that line, slightly amended— "There are three essential commandments . . . "— every Sunday night at the start of his free-form outpost "Idiot's Delight," then on WXRK. When Vin moved the show to WNEW-FM and eventually WFUV, he took the commandments with him, pressing his case in a deep, warm but inarguable tone across the saxophone call to joy that opens John Coltrane's epic 1964 prayer, A Love Supreme. It was a stunning, unexpected compliment – one of the greatest a writer can get – from someone I had never met. The Coltrane touch was a breathtaking bonus.

I also quickly realized this: Vin started owning that sentence too, as soon as he saw his own reflection and purpose in it. He was listening and broadcasting according to those ideals —quitting and getting fired from stations as well—long before I articulated them in my notebook. Vin transformed what I wrote in the moment, as personal revelation, into a signature declaration of committment and community. I am very proud of those words. But Vin gave them a life I could never have imagined – in the music he played, his support for the artists he admired and loved and the listeners he turned into family.

Tonight, we celebrate that voice, empathy and mission – and the work he's left for the rest of us as he leaves the air. So raise a glass, cue the Coltrane and remember: "There are three essential commandments . . . " This is—and will always be—"Idiot's Delight.

Rick Moody
(author of The Ice Storm, Garden State, The Diviners, The Four Fingers of Death and the forthcoming Hotels of North America)
 

There are a lot of fully fledged adults on tonight’s bill, people who were able to hear Vin Scelsa in the early part of his career and remain, while in a state of admiration, relatively unscathed by his particular genius. They were adults! But I am not one of those people.

When I was first listening to Vin, on WPLJ and then on WNEW-FM, in the seventies, I was in my middle teens. And as would be the case for a teenager, bearing witness as Vin morphed from talkative album rock deejay into Renaissance man and performance artist on "Idiot’s Delight," was not a value neutral event for me. It was transformative. It was a powerful lesson in what radio could be, and also in how to use an artistic medium creatively, and, perhaps most of all, it was a lesson on what human consciousness can sound like.

Vin, that is, was about the human. The music he liked, the books he liked, the life story he unfolded over years, was about how to talk about the contemporary struggle to be human. That this happened, in the later decades, in the context of a medium dominated by a transnational right-leaning entertainment provider that made a bunch of its money by selling billboard space, is remarkable, and revolutionary, and powerfully individual, in that old-fashioned American literature kind of way.

And it’s because this story is shapely in a literary sense that Vin Scelsa influenced what I did and what I do as a writer. That I then got to be on the show, to be a guest, both as a novelist and as a singer, on this program that was so influential for me, was one of the truly great experiences of my artistic life. So Vin, as a sign of my gratitude, here’s a little prose poem of the human variety, from my novel The Four Fingers of Death. Thanks for keeping me honest.

Kate Scelsa
(author of Fans of the Impossible Life)
 

Dad, do you remember when I told you that you weren’t allowed to talk about me on the radio anymore? I’m guessing it was 1995, so it was a Sunday night, you were on WNEW-FM, and my friend was listening to your show, and you had said something about a fight that we had had, and my friend called me and said, “why are you so mean to your Dad?” I don’t remember what you and I had fought about, and I didn’t hear what you said about it on the radio. I’m sure it was just, “I can’t believe I have to deal with this moody fifteen year old.” But that day I drew a line in the sand. No. More. Talking. About. Me. On. The Radio.

Now there are people in this room who remember the day that I was born, who remember you signing off with Jackson Browne’s “Hold On, Hold Out” and rushing to the hospital because Mom had gone into labor. There may even be die hards around who remember my childhood movie reviews, when I would call in on a Sunday night to give my informed opinion on "The Little Mermaid." There are people who would come say hi to me at the Bottom Line where I would spend your “In Their Own Words” songwriter shows savoring the famous Bottom Line brownies. There are people who know me from the Newport Folk Festival, from hanging out with you at Crazy Rhythms in Montclair, from Summerstage, from tagging along at the station when you would interview someone I adored. Like Dar Williams. Like Counting Crows. Like the cast of Hedwig.

It is only now that I can see what a horrifying cliché it was for me, at fifteen, to say, “Don’t talk about me anymore! I am my own person!”

These days, if people recognize the name “Scelsa,” if someone says to me when I first introduce myself, “any relation to Vin?” you know immediately that that person grew up in New York, and that they are very, very cool. This is the right kind of famous, to have each of these people think that you are their secret. To be cool to the cool people. And almost twenty years after I so boldly declared my independence from you, I am willing to admit that being Vin Scelsa’s daughter feels pretty cool too.