“The Bear Missed the Train” - Jean Shepherd on a Hot August Night

By the 70’s, Shepherd had lost much of the attention he first received when he broke onto the talk radio scene, yet to me, the things he said that day in 1972 seem eternal.

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Bob Dylan/Jean Shepherd: An “Encounter” in 1963

By summer 1965, Bob Dylan would completely abandon this young, protesting singer persona that Jean Shepherd criticized and embrace new shapes and ways of being. Such is the prerogative of a truly great artist. But though Shepherd and Dylan were critics of the culture around them, only Dylan became the household name. The “young-old man" would provide a model to such a range of similar musicians (many of whom were far less talented than Dylan) that trusting no one under the age of 30 became an acceptable cultural norm. Jean Shepherd, the older critic, was eventually fazed out of radio, ending up for time as a nearly anonymous raconteur on public access TV in the late 70’s. Jean Shepherd’s radio show eventually became a casualty of increasingly corporate pop music radio stations on the AM dials and a dinosaur of sorts in the eyes of youth culture.

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