I first learned of the world of Tom Scharpling and Jon Wurster AKA “Scharpling & Wurster” around 1999 or 2000, not too long after they first started collaborating together on Scharpling’s weekly call-in radio show on WFMU in New Jersey, “The Best Show on WFMU”. Like many fans, my first introduction was a CD of the first phone call Wurster made to Scharpling’s show, “Rock, Rot & Rule” which they released on their own Stereolaffs label. If you haven’t heard it, the best thing to do is listen for yourself. Essentially, Wurster calls into the show as a fictional character who’s written a “definitive” book ranking hundreds of bands/musicians and insists that he has researched the subject so thoroughly that the contents of the book are 100% based on fact and therefore not up for debate. It is, as he calls it, “The Ultimate Argument Settler.” One point he makes to a caller to prove that the book is definitive is that it is “being published.” The callers to the show (who are clearly not in on the joke) get more and more angry as Wurster makes unfounded claim after claim regarding the history of music, and that’s where the magic lies. Wurster’s unwavering confidence in his untruths makes him the worst type of debate foe: he’s too stupid to realize when he’s wrong, and even if he did realize he was wrong, he seems incapable of learning from his mistakes or humbly admitting so. I’m fairly certain that the legendary story of Orson Welles terrifying radio listeners in 1938 by claiming aliens had landed on earth maybe didn’t create quite the panic history will have us believe, but I’m 100% certain that the callers on “Rock, Rot & Rule” are as angry as they sound. A few very calm and seemingly confused listeners even call in to give Wurster a chance to admit that perhaps he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but he just doubles down before the callers just sigh and give up. It’s a brilliant performance and the perfect beginning to a series of hundreds of calls over the years. While the calls are only a small part of the universe Scharpling created with The Best Show (which now streams from their own studio and is available as a weekly podcast), they remain an entry point for many fans around the world.
To say the Best Show, and especially the calls with Wurster, has been an influence on me would be an understatement. Listening to pretty much anything every single week for almost two decades will have an effect on anyone. Being a record collector/music nerd one thing I’ve always admired about Wurster is his mind-bogglingly encyclopedic knowledge of music, be it jazz, punk, classic rock, heavy metal, power pop, hip-hop etc. As the saying goes: He’s probably forgotten more than I will ever know. Except he doesn’t seem to have forgotten anything, ever. His calls to the Best Show are often based around or at least reference random music trivia, which is what initially drew me in to the show itself. One such call from 1999 (archived here), Wurster calls in as Bernie Taupin, the lyricist and long-time collaborator of Elton John. If I knew nothing more about Taupin than what is in that call, by the end I would have a pretty good idea of who he is and what he’s famous for. The call begins with Taupin and Scharpling discussing the history of Washington D.C. musician Ian MacKaye (“Embrace”,”Skewbald”, “Egg Hunt”) before Taupin identifies himself and asks Scharpling, “Hey, would you play something from ‘Taupin’?”, “My first solo album..”. Scharpling admit he’s unfamiliar with the record so Wurster describes it; “The first side’s kind of a poem-cycle about my childhood. Yeah, it’s basically me reciting poetry over sitars and tablas. Yeah. It’s awesome.” From there, like most Wurster calls, the conversation proceeds to get stranger and more off the rails as Taupin describes his hidden disdain for Elton John, as well as his current musical projects that involve eneryone from disgraced former NBA basketball players, former members of bands like Motley Crue, Uriah Heep and Dire Straits, and Hulk Hogan’s son Nick. It’s one of my favorite Scharpling & Wurster calls and I’ve listened to it dozens of times since it first aired, laughing just as hard every time.
To anyone who’s a fan of Scharpling & Wurster, the characters and subject matters of their conversations don’t sound as strange as they might to someone listening for the first time. If anything, the utter obscurity of Wurster’s references, especially when music is being discussed, is often what makes the calls so funny. He’s full of such random tidbits of knowledge that virtually nothing he mentions ends up being that surprising to even casual listeners. He often uses obscure true facts as building blocks to create a narrative that blurs the lines between fact and fiction. In the cas eof the Taupin call, I was absolutely floored one day this past year when I was flipping though records in a shop and found an actual copy of “Taupin”, the record discussed in the call. How had I never known that this was an actual release? I turned it over and sure enough, just as Wurster described, the first side is titled “Child” and it is indeed a side-long track broken up into a series of short, roughly two-minute “poems”. In case a fan considering purchasing the record brand new in 1971 was concerned they wouldn’t be able to keep up, the label printed “POEMS ENCLOSED” on the back cover. Sure enough, inside is a fold out insert with photos of the artist and the lyrics to every poem. Holding the record in my hand I was somehow still in doubt that it was real. Like it was somehow an elaborate continuation of this ONE joke from over a decade prior. Needless to say I bought it and I can confirm it is as pretentious and masturbatory as Wurster made it sound. Taupin wasn’t the first musician to parlay his success into a less-than-listenable vanity project. I did more research online and was just as shocked to find that the follow up solo albums Wurster mentioned, “He Who Rode the Tiger” and “Tribe” were also real releases, and in reality Taupin actually did blame the lack of commercial success of his solo records on his label who he claimed never gave him enough “creative control.”
Now, the discovery that something I once thought was an elaborate, absurd fantasy from the minds of Scharpling & Wurster is actually real and as insane as they made it sound doesn’t really phase me at all. If anything, it’s made me reconsider other claims made by various characters in their calls over the years. Maybe there really was a young man who made a fortune inventing internet “pop-ups” who was now looking to invest in a chain of Las Vegas-style theme restaurants called “Planet GG” that celebrate the life and career of GG Allin. Perhaps members of Australian band The Church really did once grow out of the paisley button down shirts they normally wore on stage after deciding as a band to endorse a performance enhancing dietary supplement administered in “fog form” called PerformaFog that left them with physiques of bodybuilders. Listening back to some calls, I’m more and more convinced that “Quad P” AKA Power Pop Pop-Pop, the despotic self-proclaimed “President of Power Pop” is not only a real guy, I think he scowled at me after I bumped into him at a Protex show at Bowery Electric a few years ago.
Huge archive of Scharpling & Wurster calls from the WFMU days is available for free stream and download here
The Best Show’s current site is here. Start listening if you haven’t already and please support Tom and the gang on Patreon here.
Jon Wurster has one of the best Instagram accounts in the world. Check it out here.
Finally, an oldie but a goodie: Bernie Taupin introducing William Shatner’s performance of his lyrics to “Rocket Man” at the 1978 Science Fiction Film Awards. (I think this is what Anton Newcombe from Brian Jonestown Massacre modeled his fake British accent after)
