Comedy: Bestcast: Julie Klausner of How Was Your Week picks her favorite episodes

Bestcast asks podcasters to discuss the three most memorable episodes of their podcast. Note: Ties are allowed/encouraged.

The podcaster: Writer, author, performer, cat-owner, and redhead Julie Klausner was a mainstay of the New York comedy scene well before the 2010 release of her well-received memoir, I Don’t Care About Your Band, which chronicled with wry, self-deprecating humor the romantic travails of her 20s. In early 2011, Klausner launched her kibbitzy, addictive podcast How Was Your Week, a venture that combines interviews, intimate monologues, and plenty of dish. Think of it as coffee talk with your wittiest, most delightful girlfriend. 

Episode #5: “The One With Joan Rivers” 
Julie Klausner: Joan Rivers is someone that I had written for a couple of times in the past, someone who is so completely generous and kind and comfortable when you first meet her. You really do say, “Oh my God, there is this living legend,” which I’m sure she hates being called because it implies age. In her documentary, she says something like, “Don’t say ‘legend’ or ‘icon’ or anything that insinuates that you might be on your way out.” When I first met her, I remember just being obviously impressed with the fact that you’re in the same room with someone who is so wildly important and famous. And those two things are so very different, but she’s both. Beyond that, I just remember my job at the time was to write for her, and I had to get over that as quickly as possible.

The A.V. Club: What kind of writing did you do for her?

JK: I was to, like, throw her jokes, on the set of her reality show. She likes to have a writer there to kind of toss her lines, even though she usually does all that herself. Most of the time you’re just there to stand by. Then you’ll throw her something, and she’ll say, “Oh, that’s very funny,” and she’ll use it. That was on one of her reality shows, and then I wrote for her on another occasion. I think I did two of her reality shows, one for Joan And Melissa and one for How’d You Get So Rich? And then she took me with her to her Letterman appearance. I was in a limo with her. It was her first Letterman appearance after years, too. I just remember her being really honest after the interview about how David didn’t like her, and everyone around her said, “Oh, no, he liked you, he liked you.” And I was the only one who said, “Yeah, I could see that.” [Laughs.] She’s nobody’s fool. No one is resistant to flattery, but at the same time she’s been doing this for long enough you don’t need to mince words.

I think Joan Rivers is such an untapped legend that people just don’t appreciate, because they grew up with her on QVC, or they grew up with her on E!, or they grew up watching her do the things that in their minds the more prestigious comics wouldn’t have taken or done. It’s so unfair, because the longevity, the span, and the range of her career is so impressive, and she is so good at what she does that I admire her to no end. 

So I had that relationship with her. Also, she’s a big fan of my friend Billy Eichner. She’s a big supporter of Billy. In fact, I remember when I was in the room she did her pre-show interview on Letterman, and she didn’t end the phone call without saying, “There’s this kid named Billy Eichner, and I’m going to bring his DVD.” And the producer’s like, “Yeah, right, great, thanks.”

But she was willing to do an interview with me. I sent her assistant the questions in advance, and I went up to her house and she met me in her living room. She had just finished exercising; she had just come off the treadmill. She only had eye makeup on, and she had her sneakers and her black workout clothes. So great, honestly. I have nothing snarky to say about Joan Rivers’ appearance. We should all be that happy with how we look on camera, frankly.

She just sat with me. She gave me a half-hour of her time, I asked her the questions, and she was completely honest and funny and a combination of the two. I felt kind of like Terry Gross. She really does go back and forth between, like, “Oh here’s a shticky answer, and here’s the real answer.” She’s really generous with both. She’s not going to bore anybody, but at the same time she is going to be honest. So, yeah, it was just another one of the generous things that she’s done for me, to sit down with me and talk on my podcast.

AVC: What was it like to be in a limousine with Joan Rivers headed to The Late Show With David Letterman? 

JK: I felt so lucky that I was in the catbird seat for what I had acknowledged at the time was a real comedy milestone, her return to late night. She’d brought some of Edgar’s [her late husband’s] ashes with her in a compact. She smeared [them] under [Letterman’s] desk as soon as we got there and said “Edgar, we’re back.” She made a couple of jokes about how she was banned. And he was like, “You weren’t banned,” and she said, “I wasn’t asked. You didn’t call me. You didn’t ask me to come.” She talked about Johnny [Carson].

After, when we were done with the appearance, I asked, “What was it like being back here?” and she said something like, “Oh, you mean at the Ed Sullivan Theater? Oh, I was on Sullivan.” Oh, fuck, that’s right. Letterman Schmetterman. She did stand-up when the Ed Sullivan Theater actually had The Ed Sullivan Show. When you think about the span of her career, she’s seen everybody come and go, and she wouldn’t still be standing if she weren’t really good. Because everything she has against her, being female blah, blah, blah, she’s still here despite all the odds and she’s sharper, smarter, more with it than people I know who are a fraction of her age. Age has nothing to do with it.

AVC: She’s seen so much tragedy. Louis C.K. pointed out that in her documentary, whenever she faces a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, she doesn’t despair, she just says, “That was really difficult.”

JK: Also, she used it. I mean she made a Lifetime movie with her daughter about her husband’s suicide. That’s not what most people do. But thank God she did. Thank God there’s somebody that uses film and television to go through what she’s going through publicly. There’s an honesty to that. There’s an honesty to the advertising work that she does, to her commerce, to her taking every job because you never know when the next one is going to come. You can look at that as desperation or you could look at that as the pragmatic way to exist as a minority in this business. She’s absolutely remarkable, and I do hope people give her more respect. 

Episode #56: “Jam Ghetto”: Sharon Needles, Whitney Jefferson
JK: Oh, Sharon Needles. As soon as we saw the première episode of that season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, which I think has been the best season to date, she popped out as being this star in a way that you had never seen on TV in a mainstream way. Her drag really was the new drag. She talked to me about growing up with Marilyn Manson. And that was really interesting to me, because I’m about 10 years older than her—oh, who the hell knows how old the drag queen really is?—I’m about 10 years older than she claims to be. I met Sharon after someone at Logo approached me and said, “I love your show, and if you ever want to interview one of the queens, just ask.” And I’m like, “Oh my God, absolutely. I would love to talk to Sharon.” And so they had me come to a photo shoot that she was doing, and I spoke to her in between takes. She got very real very quickly, which was something I did not anticipate. She was really quite… I want to say “earnest,” but she was comfortable being honest.

I asked her about her fame, and I was a little reluctant to do so because fame is such a slippery, subjective thing. But she interrupted me, and she was like, “I’m really famous.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, I guess you’re right.” [Laughs.] She talked about how fame isn’t an emotion, which Patton [Oswalt] later said, “That was really profound. I wouldn’t normally listen to a Sharon Needles interview, but I thought that was really interesting that she identified that.”

AVC: What does that mean? That fame is not an emotion?

JK: Well, just that once you reach it, it doesn’t control how you feel. I think it was interesting that Patton came to that, because he’s famous and I’m not.

AVC: You’re not un-famous.

JK: Well, thank you. I’m going to high-five my cat. Pardon me. [Pause.] Aaaand, I’m back. I imagine that what that means is once you reach a certain level of success and you’re known, it doesn’t fix everything. There’s not a direct route to your feelings once you’ve reached that level, I suppose.

Then she started crying, and I thought she was doing a bit at first. She talked about how so many kids come up to her and say, “You mean a lot to me.” She began to talk about it in the context of being overwhelmed by it, but she ended up being really touched by it and then the next thing you know she was drying her eyes. I remember thinking she was joking at first and realizing she wasn’t. Then [I was] just sort of staying with her and listening to her and hearing her and waiting for that moment to lead to another. But I was really moved that she let me in as much as she did.

AVC: On the show it seems like you’re attracted to these larger-than-life, self-constructed figures, and with Sharon Needles, her whole persona is completely constructed. She’s totally self-created.

JK: Yeah, I’m fascinated by that. That’s incredibly appealing to me. Whatever that says about my own aspirations, femininity-wise, I’ll leave to the completion, sentence-wise, of anybody listening. But I do think that there are over-the-top types that are attractive to me, and to be able to connect with them the way that you’d ideally want to be able to connect to any person once they stop performing for you, or if they actually express a desire to be there in the moment instead of asking, “What’s this for? Let’s get this over with,” is something I definitely aspire to. Let’s find the humanity behind the performance. [Those are] my favorite celebrities. Frances McDormand is my favorite actor. I don’t know if that’s relevant. [Laughs.] But she’s a person who plays people. In other words, not everything has to be an over-the-top Broadway musical to get my attention, but it certainly helps.

Special Minisode: David Rakoff
JK: I miss David every day. I was blessed with the dumb luck to have known him briefly and to have worked with him. He was one of my dear friends, but I can’t imagine that I was one of his, because he has so many friends and so much love in his heart. He was just able to be close to many people. I don’t want to invoke The Giving Tree because I think that’s so sappy and nobody wants to be the stump. And he wasn’t. He stood alone, but he never tired of being generous. He never said no. He would read your screenplay and give you feedback. He would meet you any time for food. He would always pick up the phone. It was a friendship that is patently irreplaceable. 

I went to a wedding a couple of weekends ago, and this really remarkable man married two of my friends, and I remember thinking, “God, the only person I would ever entrust to marry me, to impart wisdom in front of a crowd, would be David.” He was near rabbinical in his wisdom and heart. And he was just funny. A lot of people say, “It’s so rare to find someone as kind as they are smart.” I know a couple of people like that, but none of them are even a fraction as funny as David.

[For the podcast episode], David had me over to his apartment after he had gotten his surgery, and his arm was not working. He would never complain. He would just sort of work around it, and he and I just had a conversation on the couch. It was almost like that would be what we would do if there were no microphones, but, actually, that’s not true. It wouldn’t be what we would do if the mics weren’t on, because he would have asked about me. It wouldn’t have been a one-sided conversation about his book.

But, it was a good opportunity for me to talk to him in depth about his book—his most recent book, not the novel I have yet to read, and I kind of don’t want to read it for another year, because then that means that he’s gone, you know? But Half Empty was, I thought, not only the greatest book that he had written, but just the most incredible book that I had read in a really long time. And I was able to talk to him about it because it had just come out in paperback. I was just really lucky to have that opportunity.

AVC: Putting out the episode was a way of capturing a part of him for posterity.

JK: I hope so. It was just a fraction. It’s so imperfect. I wish that he hadn’t been cut short. He had so much more to say. He was just getting started. I published the entirety of it just to make it seem like we still had more time left, but we don’t. I miss him every day. I really, really loved him, and I never met anybody like him. And I think… To avoid being overly sappy, I think God wanted him back for some reason that we don’t understand. He just needed him for something beyond our grasp.

He was also the only person who made me understand the old Beatles lyric, “The love you take is equal to the love you make,” because that guy had as much love as he gave. I just have never, ever seen another instance of that.

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Music: I Made You A Mixtape: Numero Group’s Ken Shipley picks his favorite Eccentric Soul tracks

In I Made You A Mixtape, we ask our favorite musicians, actors, writers, directors, or whatevers to strut their musical savvy: We pick a theme, they make us a mix.

The mixer: Ken Shipley co-founded reissue label The Numero Group in 2003, and it’s since evolved into a multi-format, multi-genre music company. It’s discovered and resurrected long-lost soul acts, punk bands, and avant-garde films. One of Numero’s most important roles is as a curator of what’s now called the Eccentric Soul universe, which seeks to document what the label dubs “lovingly mishandled soul labels” like Columbus, Ohio’s Capsoul and Miami’s Deep City. The label’s latest and greatest project is its Eccentric Soul box set, Eccentric Soul: Omnibus, which includes 45 different 45s from different long-forgotten artists, plus a 108-page book documenting the scene from which each act came. Given that—especially after this project—Shipley knows so much about the world of forgotten soul cuts, The A.V. Club asked him to make a mixtape of his favorite Eccentric Soul tracks the label’s ever reissued.

The A.V. Club: How do you define Eccentric Soul? 

Ken Shipley: Eccentric Soul is hardly my concept. It’s a concept built by one of my partners, Rob Sevier, and it started out as a mix CD that he made for me that was all off-the-wall, left-of-center soul stuff—out-of-key singers, weird instrumentation, kid groups—things that never really had a shot at being on the radio. 

Once I heard the CD, I really loved the name and we began piecing together a project that ultimately failed because it wasn’t a very good idea. [Laughs.] But from there sprung a great idea, which is to compile these really small and obscure labels and scenes and producers into one cohesive package, as a way to preserve some of the history and great music that we thought was in danger of falling through the cracks.

As far as the musical content is concerned, the parameters have expanded over the years. The first one where we realized we weren’t really making true eccentric soul anymore was Twinight [Eccentric Soul: Twinight’s Lunar Rotation]. These are hits—well, they really weren’t hits. They had a tremendous pedigree: great session players, great musicians, and great singers. But for the most part, Eccentric Soul before that was real left-of-center, underground, mixed-up, sometimes amateurish soul music, and we’ve expanded the parameters from there. For Omnibus, we went back to our original roots, which was to look at really cool one-off records and find unique opportunities for them. Things that we really wanted to do something with, but there was just no project that they ever fit into. 

Theron And Darrell, “I Was Made To Love Her”

Smart’s Palace is a record that came together very unexpectedly. It was one of those things where Dante Carfagna and Josh Davis said, “You guys should look into this stuff,” and we said, “We’ll get to it, we’ll get to it.” Finally we were on this trip that was getting us near Wichita, and I said, “Let’s try to go to Wichita.” As soon as we sat down with Dick Smart—Darrell came over that same day and John Smart and all these Wichita cats came out—we realized that there was a great record here. They drove us around Wichita and showed us where their original club was, the original record store, and the studio and all these great little places. The record emerged out of the experience of going to Wichita and living there for a little while. 

Summits, “Sleepwalking”

KS: Summits… even their name is great because it’s the name of the bus stop that was at the end of the line. That record, Red, Black, And Green Productions, came together because we’d used a song by The Promise on Home Schooled: The ABCs Of Kid Soul, and the producer, R. Hosea Williams, was someone who for years I had tried to convince to do more than just license us this one song. I said, “Look, we’ve paid you thousands of dollars over the years on just one song. Think of what we could do with 20.” And he finally relented. 

We went to his house in Maryland, and he took us out to his garage and was like, “This is everything I still have,” and it ended up being so much tremendous material. Summits were just one of five or six groups that we discovered in that garage. There was this brilliant Father’s Children LP that really makes me want to go harder and faster in some ways, as far as discovery is concerned, because you realize how many things are just rotting away in a garage. They’re a year away from being put in the trash.

Family Connection, “This Time”

Pat Stallworth, “Questions”

KS: Two very different groups. Pat Stallworth had been a dream for years. Since we got into the Boddie Recording Company archives three years ago, we’d been calling Bill Jacocks saying, “Hey, we’ve got this tape of yours that we’ve found in here,” and he’d keep rebuffing us. He was the first black news anchor in Cleveland, a longtime sort of minor celebrity, and really didn’t rank Numero as a company that could do anything for him. He tried to do it by himself for a while. Finally, I really sort of raked him. [Laughs.] “Hey, you keep talking about how you’re going to do this, and then nothing ever happens. Why don’t we actually do something?” After months and months of negotiation, I think we went to 10 or 15 drafts on that deal to get it done.

As far as the Family Connection is concerned, that was a record that I had fallen in love with half a decade ago and always wanted to do something with, but seemingly there was no way to really thread them into anything larger. They’re from Middlebury, Connecticut, and there’s not a lot of soul music that came out of Middlebury, Connecticut, much less all of Connecticut. So there was just never any opportunity to do anything with it, but I reached out to the group and we found the master tapes, we found these business cards, we found all these little details and elements that convinced us it was a song that had to be done. 

Family Connection really is the epitome of eccentric soul. It’s a group that wasn’t in the major soul scene, even though they participated in Boston and New York and as far South as D.C., but they’re off the path, they’re not working in the same sort of circles as in Philly or Chicago or L.A. They never had the opportunities that a group stationed in a major city would. Even though they were so close to New York, they never were able to break free in the way they probably should have. 

Bob & Fred, “I’ll Be On My Way”

KS: Two guys that we know so very little about still. We made The Big Mack Label in 2006, but we still know so little about label owner Ed McCoy. The first time we met him, he insisted on meeting in a restaurant. The second time we met him, he insisted on meeting in a radio station. The guy’s not necessarily trustworthy of people who want to come in from the outside world. 

In the early ’90s, all these British people were looking for Bob & Fred and The Grand Prixx, and they were coming to him and buying those records for five dollars. He later found out they were selling for thousands of dollars. He felt burned by the business; he was just so untrusting that it took us years to get him to be interested in working with us. Finally he was. 

Kool Blues, “I’m Gonna Keep On Loving You”

KS: This is from Capsoul [Eccentric Soul: The Capsoul Label], where it all really began. Me, Tom [Lunt], and Rob going down to Columbus, Ohio and sitting in this guy’s living room and trying to pitch him on the idea that we were the guys to resurrect his legacy and preserve it. I remember we had this little white MacBook, which probably seemed really chic in 2003. We had this little PowerPoint presentation we put together that was like, “This is what we want to do. This is how we envision doing it. This is where we think the consumer is and the marketplace is going.” It was this very professional thing, and it actually worked. Now we would probably never do anything like that. We do this much more loose kind of thing where we go in and say, “These are successes that we’ve had before.” There’s not as much speculation when we make a record in 2012 as there was when we made one in 2003. 

But [Capsoul label owner] Bill Moss is such a trooper. He really made Numero able to be a company because without doing that record, we would never have been able to make any of the records that came after it. It set the tone for the entire label.

AVC: Do you get nervous about going into people’s homes and trying to convince them to work with you? You guys were recently the subject of a Spin feature that made the process sound a little hairy.

KS: I don’t really get nervous going into bad neighborhoods or going into people’s houses anymore. I get more nervous that we’re not going to be able to get something done in time more than anything. I’m always concerned that I didn’t do a good enough job of selling the concept of, “Hey, your legacy should be preserved, and even if we’re not the right people to do it, somebody should do it or you should do it. Someone should take on the idea that your music is in order and your photographs are in order, so if people in the future want to come back and say, ‘Who were the Soul Emotions?’, somebody can say, ‘The Soul Emotions were these three girls from New Orleans. They made two records.’” 

Those are important things that I think are just on the cusp of being lost. And my disappointment only really comes from not being able to get something done that I really feel should be done. Really, otherwise, the worst thing that can happen is that you get shot. 

AVC: That’s no big deal.

KS: That’s a story. “Guy from reissue label goes to dangerous neighborhood, gets shot, emerges victorious with master tapes.” [Laughs.] There’s almost something poetic to it. 

Them Two, “Am I A Good Man”

KS: That song was the reason I knew we had to make the Deep City record, because it was so haunting and so beautiful. The world has sort of proved us right. It’s been sampled by Ghostface Killah, 50 Cent, and a bunch of other rappers. It’s been in a bunch of television shows like Luck and Hung, two funny four-letter shows. It’s an infectious groove from a very infectious label. 

All the stuff that came out of Florida at the time was being ruled by these two schoolteachers who were selling blood to make records. They were funneling every dollar they had into trying to make records, trying to make hit records. They ended up succeeding, just not at Deep City. Willie Clark went on to produce Betty Wright’s big hits, won a couple Grammys, and then when the money train ran out, went back to teaching. That’s a classic Eccentric Soul story: the guy that, despite the fact that he’s got gold records on the wall, lives in a two-bedroom condo. [Laughs.]

The Commands, “Hey It’s Love”

The Webs, “Little Girl Blue”

AVC: These are from a new compilation about the Dynamic label you have coming out.

KS: It’s a preview of some things that we have coming out. 

Abie Epstein was a guy that ruled San Antonio in the ’60s. He had more labels than I could probably name right now, and he did Tex-Mex, he did soul, he did garage, he did country, he did rockabilly, he did everything. But Dynamic was primarily a soul label that he ran, and The Commands were the top band that he’d ever produced.

They had a pretty large hit in “No Time For You.” They were four guys who were all stationed at the nearby Lackland Air Force Base, and that Air Force base had a circuit where you could go and perform, and that circuit was called Command. So they were The Commands. They produced five records for the label; one of them ended up being kind of a largish hit, and the rest didn’t do anything. The group disbanded as they got drafted to Vietnam, and they never lived up to their potential because they never got the opportunity to. 

The Webs were a group that later cut an incredible song called “It’s So Hard To Break A Habit.” That was probably their most widely known song, but before that they were just some guys managed by a guy named Walter Whisenhunt. I think they were from Houston, and they ended up getting in touch with this wild character in San Antonio who had a studio and access to some money and the ability to make a go of it. 

Dynamic closed in early 1969 with hardly a bang; it was more of a dull whimper. Epstein moved on to become a massive real-estate magnate in San Antonio. He basically built San Antonio. 

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