“From an artificial coral reef made of decommissioned subway cars...”
It is Episode 6,005
April 17, 2015
“And now . . . with a personality derived totally from caffeine . . . David Letterman.” Dave comes out to another extended ovation. The monologue touches on proms, the Country Music Awards, and the Iowa Caucus.
The Top Ten List is “Other Courses Offered by the Vatican.” After the list Dave asks Paul what the last show should be. Paul isn’t sure. Dave says, “If we knew what to do with the last show, you think the previous 6,000 would look the way they looked?” He plays a best-of montage that compiles Paul Shaffer’s comic moments from skits. The clip package plays to “It’s Raining Men,” which Paul co-wrote. The video shows the times Paul has taken hits from cars, sandbags, food, and baseball bats. All of the clips appear to be from the CBS era.
Lee Ellenberg: We stopped doing Mailbag in 2004, and we didn’t do as many pretapes. There wasn’t a ton of pretape stuff with Paul for us to use. A lot of the stuff from Mailbag was from years ago.
Bill Scheft: Paul was underrated comedically, and I think he is no longer underrated comedically. Supervising producer Kathy Mavrikakis put the montage together. She used the database that Rick Scheckman and her maintained that documented every event in every episode.
Kathy Mavrikakis: In the eighties, we decided that we needed to have a database of what we had done so that we could always refer back to it. I was one of the people with Rick that developed the database and kept it. I never gave that job up. I would look at what happened on the show and then type it all in, so that we would be able to say, “Paul did this, Paul did that,” and find the clip.
Rick Scheckman: Kathy and I built the original database from the old show. Kathy then built a new database from the new show that had the monologue, the topics, and all that stuff. So she was one of the go-to people for that information, along with Walter Kim and Jay Johnson, people who had been around a long time.
Kathy Mavrikakis: When it came time to do the Paul montage, I searched the database and found the pieces I wanted and built it. Paul didn’t see it beforehand. I didn’t work with him on that one at all. It was sort of our tribute to him, so it wasn’t something that we wanted to share ahead of time. Barbara Gaines, Jude Brennen, Matt Roberts [all executive producers] saw it. I think Dave may have seen it. I am not 100 percent sure.
Dave’s first guest is Alec Baldwin. He comes out and shakes Paul’s hand before walking over to see Dave. They talk about Baldwin’s podcast (Here’s the Thing), discuss being older dads, Baldwin’s latest run-in with the media, and Tony Bennett.
At the end of the interview he gives Dave two presents for his retirement: a bag of alarm clocks and a loofah glove. Dave shoots back, “You’ve been spending time in the dollar store.” He throws one of the alarm clocks through the “glass” windows behind him. This is the last glass-break sound of the series. The baseball card picture of Baldwin is from November 17, 1982.
Mike Buczkiewicz (Segment Producer): When Dave announced his retirement he said, “What I don’t want is retirement gifts because we won’t be able to talk about things.” I think it was Baldwin who emailed me after the pre-interview and said, “I got an idea. I am gonna bring a gift.” How do you tell him no, but at the same time, I have to go upstairs and tell Dave he has a gift for you. It worked out fine in the end. Alec was a great friend to the show and Dave. Dave loves Alec.
Jay Johnson: There were certain guests that Dave just seemed to have a natural bond with. I think that Alec Baldwin is one of them. They had an easy way of communication with each other. Anyone who knows Dave knows that wasn’t always the case with every guest. Alec is a great storyteller. He was always willing to play along.
Musical Guest
“This is going to be special” is how Dave starts off his next introduction. He pauses for just a moment before saying “special.” He truly means it. What viewers are treated to for the next eight minutes and fifty-six seconds is a highlight of not just the week, but of the thirty-three years of Letterman hosting a television show.
Dave continues, “He is doing us a huge favor. We asked him, ‘Would you be interested in performing this song?’ He said, ‘Well, I got to get in some road work. I got to get in shape. It’s kind of a beast, but I’ll give it a shot.’ He is going to do it for us tonight. Ladies and gentleman, performing, along with Paul and the kids in the band, ‘American Pie,’ here’s John Mayer.”
Following the Chapman performance by one day, this tour de force appearance is the second in a musical one-two punch in which the norms of the musical guest on a talk show are shattered. CBS devotes nine minutes to a musical performance of a rock ‘n’ roll classic from 1971. This isn’t what talk shows do. John Mayer doesn’t even perform the song on any of his albums. The song isn’t posted on iTunes moments after the show airs to try to bilk another $1.29 from every viewer. This song is being performed for one reason: because David Letterman wants to hear it. He wants to remind us about the day the music died.
Everyone rises to this momentous occasion: Mayer by owning this iconic song, Paul and the band with their perfect accompaniment, the staff by making sure there is enough time on the show for it, the network for changing its normal commercial pattern. Typically the back end of an episode is heavy on commercials; that isn’t possible when you are presenting a nine-minute song. Jerry Foley’s direction is magnificent. He changes shots continually, framing each shot differently, keeping the visual from growing stale. Amazingly, in the final seconds of this performance he finds a shot that he hadn’t used at all in the entire song. At one point he has it framed so that viewers can see Mayer’s back (he wore a Late Night jacket), with the band, the studio audience, and Mayer’s face on the monitor mounted over the audience. It is a perfectly captured shot from a master director.
With the final chords still lingering, the audience leaps to its feet, clapping and cheering. Dave asks Mayer, “Do you need to sit down?” The audience, now fully lighted, is screaming and smiling. Mayer looks like a tennis player who just broke a legend’s serve at Wimbledon. Dave is absolutely beaming. “Thank you. Paul, thank you. Everybody . . . really, really very nice of you. God bless you, sir. That was fun. It’s John Mayer.” Honestly, I could talk about this performance all day. What I learned was, so could the staff. Almost everyone singled this performance out as a favorite musical moment of the final six weeks. Only one other guest would get more praise than Mayer for his “American Pie” segment (stayed tuned to find out who). This performance meant the world to the staff—even if they didn’t understand it at first.
Brian Teta: I thought it was the dumbest idea I had ever heard. Dave wanted to hear “American Pie.” Really? “American Pie”? And I was WRONG.
Sheryl Zelikson: I was a little perplexed at the time, I was like, “Oh, OK . . . that’s an interesting choice.” But I think with the songs he choose, Letterman was trying to tell people a feeling.
Randi Grossack: I think some of us at the theater thought it was such a long song, but when John did it, it was brilliant.
Bill Scheft: I can just hear people before they saw it thinking, “It’s a forty-year-old song,” but it was an ideal choice.
Sheila Rogers: Dave requested the song, but I think it was Sheryl Zelikson’s idea to have John Mayer do it.
Sheryl Zelikson: You start to write a list of who can sing that song. At the top of that list is John Mayer. I remember calling his publicist and saying, “Hey, Dave wants to hear this song. Will John be willing to do it? He wants to hear all nine minutes.”
Randi Grossack: John did our Thanksgiving show a couple times. He had been very generous to the show. I think he wanted to be on the final shows and Dave asked specifically for him to play that song.
Sheryl Zelikson: It didn’t take too long for John to say he’d love to. “Can he sing it in this key?” And that was the end of it. It was an instant yes, and he just did it. And I remember reiterating, “He knows it’s the full song?” They responded, “Not a problem.” John Mayer is an amazing talent, and he did a bang-up job. I don’t think he overthought it.
Jerry Foley: John Mayer isn’t doing a gig at the state fair. He knows that these are historical shows winding down to the conclusion. He also has been requested, not by someone shouting out in the audience but by David Letterman, to cover “American Pie.” Now John Mayer is invested in ways he might not be in a typical way. Paul Shaffer is invested because anyone playing in front of his band was of paramount importance to Paul. He took pride in his musicianship and his band’s ability to cover any song ever written. Then the song, as John will tell you, is a real challenge for a vocalist who is also playing guitar. John was concerned and wanted to rehearse and get it right. I guess you could say that when all those elements come together, everybody is bringing to it the best that they can possibly come up with.
Sheryl Zelikson: I can’t remember if we gave him a little bit of extra rehearsal time. But I’m sure Paul and John worked out a lot of it on the phone. We ran a very tight ship at Letterman, and rehearsal times are set and we rarely go beyond them if we can avoid it. It really does change the whole working schedule. John and Paul had worked together before, so they were familiar with each other.
Bill Scheft: After rehearsal between shows, a friend of mine’s mother-in-law said to John, “It has too many stanzas!”
Brian Teta: The whole staff was watching that in rehearsal. Those were special performances. Whenever Darlene Love was on, you’d look in the audience and it would be all the staff sitting there at 2:00 in the afternoon. We were all doing that for Mayer. I loved that he wore the Late Night jacket. That was fantastic.
Randi Grossack: I watched it recently on YouTube and I thought, “This guy did it better than Don McLean.” The way Jerry Foley shot it was spectacular.
Jerry Foley: What I have told people over the years is that the most compelling moments behind the camera are usually driven by compelling elements in front of the camera. So rather than being in a conversation about my authorship of these moments, I am the recipient of these moments. You have a TV icon closing out his CBS career. He has this tremendous wealth of respect and goodwill within the creative community, which draws in a guy like John Mayer. Dave asked for it and he, as you will find, engineered this almost inexplicable devotion among the people who worked for him and knew him. All these factors come together. John Mayer is up there on the stage; the lighting and camera people are caught up in this moment knowing we are not gonna get to do this again.
Bill Scheft: I think that Jerry is humble in the sense that—the best definition of humility I ever heard was the ability to be inconvenienced. Being a director on that show, all that happened in the last minute, it was nothing but inconveniences, and he just rolled with it.
Kathy Mavrikakis: It was beautiful. Jerry had a bunch of things up his sleeve that I think he thought Dave might not have the tolerance for at a normal time. He was like, “Hell, what’s the worst that can happen? I am not gonna get fired.” So he might as well try every trick he always wanted to try. His creative touches were amazing.
Jerry Foley: If you are shooting something for nine minutes, the picture would have grown stale if he is center stage. But if you shot him so you could see John, the audience, the TV screen, Paul, you had options.
Rick Scheckman: Jerry was integral to all of the final months. He is incredibly great at directing music. That is what he has been doing lately. He did that Tony Bennett at ninety special at Radio City Music Hall.
Bill Scheft: Mayer said he didn’t realize the effect it would have on people. He couldn’t believe it. The fact that he wore his Late Night jacket was great. Jerry loved shooting music, and you can tell. To Hal Gurnee [the previous director], it was just another act.
Director Jerry Foley staged John Mayer’s “American Pie” where viewers could see the audience, the screen, and John. Drawing by Wayne Barnes.
Jerry Foley: I think that when you spend as much time in the theater as I did, you were constantly in search of a different angle, presentation, approach to complement whatever was in front of you. For John Mayer to stand up and sing an American anthem, which is inclusive of the entire stage, show, and history, and have a song that familiar to so many people of a particular generation, that is a bigger moment and doesn’t belong center stage. John wasn’t the only one playing. That orchestra was adding to the song, so they are as much a part of the story as anything else. I hate to attach any kind of false importance to it, but instinctively you know there are plenty of people in the audience that have their own personal history with that song. It would be a crime to not get those faces as a part of the story. There’s a practical situation. He is going on for an extended period of time. You need to spread it around, you need to include as many elements as you can. That theater is a very special place to showcase as much of it as you can, and to make it as beautiful as you can is an obligation and opportunity. All those things kind of factor in. I didn’t write it down on a page and say, “These are the areas I want to address.” It is all instinctual and comes together without a lot of discussion.
Sheryl Zelikson: That’s a pretty in-depth song, but it went off, like, beyond expectation. Yes, Letterman could see things that other people can’t. Everyone kind of knows the song. They’ve heard it on radio, but Letterman knows how special that song is. He wanted everyone to hear all of it. I thought that was kind of brilliant.
Bill Scheft: John Mayer has no idea what he did. It is not an easy song to survive and an impossible song to make your own. Man, did they get the right guy.
Jill Goodwin: I thought the John Mayer performance was great. He really showed up for Dave. Just the fact that he did that, and nailed it, and wanted to do a good job for Dave. I guess it was asking a lot. It seemed really hard. I felt the pressure for him.
Worldwide Pants Tag: “Are you still up?”