Les Crane, Talk-Show Host, Dies at 74

[kskiska]

Les Crane, a provocative talk-show host who was the first to challenge the primacy of Johnny Carson on late-night television — and lose — died Sunday in Greenbrae, Calif., north of San Francisco. He was 74 and lived in Belvedere, Calif.

(snip)

Personable, cocky and well-attuned to the tenor of the times, Mr. Crane predated Howard Stern as a “king of all media”; his multifaceted career began in radio, moved to television and ended in computer software, with a stop in between as a Grammy-winning recording artist, though even he would have shuddered at calling his recording art.

An early, and by later standards, tame incarnation of a shock jock, Mr. Crane was a radio star in San Francisco in the early 1960s. From a studio in the hungry i, a nightclub that was a launching pad for performers like Mort Sahl, Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand and Lenny Bruce, he took listeners’ calls from all over the West Coast, fielding their questions, sometimes with a celebrity guest, and often dismissing callers’ comments on current events and culture with brusque wit or outright disdain, simply hanging up on some in what was then a startling breach of accepted etiquette.

(snip)

…The week featured interviews with Richard Burton, Shelley Winters, Melvin Belli and Marguerite Frances Claverie, the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald

“We’re sitting here in the studio of a major broadcasting company in America and we are talking to the mother of a man it is alleged assassinated our President,” he said on the air, adding: “It’s pretty wonderful, isn’t it? Pretty exciting.”

The tryout was successful, but the show was not. On Nov. 9, 1964, Mr. Crane, just 30 years old, went up against Carson, who had taken over NBC’s “Tonight” show from Jack Paar two years earlier. The Crane show was canceled just a few months later, in spite of Mr. Crane’s interview with Bob Dylan, during which Mr. Crane asked Mr. Dylan, then 23, about the songwriters who influenced him and about the overall message of his songs. Hank Williams and Cole Porter were the answers to the first question. To the second, Mr. Dylan said: “Eat?” Mr. Crane returned to the show in June but lasted only until November.

more…
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/arts/television/15crane.html

What I remember about his show is that he performed in the round and aimed a shotgun-like microphone at questioners in the audience.

[Fed_Up_Grammy]

1. Too young to die---(I'm older than he was) Everything is relative.

[madrchsod]

2. i remember watching him.....

man he was something else!

[ColbertWatcher]

3. He was once married to "Ginger" (Tina Louise). n/t