Photo by Jim Herrington.
 
Joe Franklin died on Saturday. He was 88. The cause was prostate cancer. The world has lost one of TV’s weirdest and most wonderful wizards of the airwaves.
 
Joe Franklin was to late night cable TV in New York City what Papaya King was to hot dogs: Manhattan through and through. I watched his show religiously during the late 70’s/early 80’s. After a few shots of Jack Daniels and half a dozen lines of Peruvian flake, there was nothing more mesmerizing than the loopy surrealism of Joe Franklin. His stream of consciousness raps, fractured and deliriously deft, coupled with his vast knowledge of TV, music and movie trivia, was like listening to the Akashic Record of 20th century pop culture being transmitted through an Elf on meth. Franklin was a character in a David Lynch movie before David Lynch had even made a movie. He was a trip. And most of us punk rockers and downtown artists loved him.

My show was often like a zoo,” Franklin said in 2002. “I’d mix Margaret Mead with the man who whistled through his nose, or Richard Nixon with the tap-dancing dentist.

Here’s a wonderful clip from 1988 of Joey and Marky Ramone on The Joe Franklin Show. As you will see, Joey is somewhat in awe of the genius of Joe. And they respected him too much to correct his pronunciation of their name as The Raaaymones.

I gotta give props to Joe’s sidekick, bug-eyed deejay Paul Cavalconte, for being ultra-hip, despite The Smiths question.

Joe Franklin in his office.
 
When it came to contemporary pop culture, New York’s king of nostalgia Joe Franklin was clueless. So whenever he had a guest on that created art after the 1950s, Franklin pretty much had to wing it, which resulted in some funny and awkward interviews. Watch as a graceful Dario Argento attempts to respond to a series of mostly irrelevant and outright goofy questions from the perpetually grinning Lucky Buddha of late night Manhattan TV.

Aired in August of 1985.
 

 
New York garage-psych band The Druids Of Stonehenge on the Joe Franklin Show 1968.

Vocalist Dave Budge, guitarists Carl Hauser and Bill Tracy, bassist Tom Workman and drummer Steve Tindall came together in 1965 as r&b ravers The Druids. In 1968 they went psychedelic and changed their name to The Druids Of Stonehenge. This clip of the band on the Joe Franklin Show has to be one of the weirdest of the 1000s of weird moments on Franklin’s loveably nutty TV program. Franklin, who knew alot about music and film pre-dating the sixties, was comically clueless when it came to rock and roll, as evidenced by his inept attempt to be “with it’ in this wonderfully warped video.

The Druids Of Stonehenge had a good rep for their live performances at New York nightclubs like Ondine’s and Cheetah, but this performance on the Franklin Show is pretty dreadful. Their take on Billy Holiday’s ‘God Bless The Child’ borders on the sacrilegious, but the arrangement, a total rip of ‘Paint It Black’, is the kind of wackiness that makes rock and roll the unruly mess I love.