Legendary musician, band leader, actor and comedian Paul Shaffer joined host Kenneth Womack to talk about whether he would have passed on The Beatles as a “guitar group” and much more on our eighth season premiere of “Everything Fab Four,” a podcast co-produced by me and Womack (a music scholar who also writes about pop music for Salon) and distributed by Salon.
Shaffer, the longtime musical director and sidekick of David Letterman, said that although he watched The Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show” (and shows Womack his excellent impression of Sullivan’s famous introduction of the band) in February of 1964, he “didn’t quite understand them yet.” Growing up in Canada, Shaffer had been enamored with the musical style of American acts such as the Four Seasons and Jackie Wilson, and when The Beatles came on the scene, he says, “they were all guitars. On ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ John Lennon’s rhythm guitar work kills me now – I just wasn’t hip enough to understand these things at the time.”
