In Step With CONAN O'BRIEN
By James Brady -- Parade Magazine -- October 27, 1996 -- Pg. 22
When he was a small boy, Conan O'Brien already had the idea that he might want to become a performer, and each Saturday he took tap lessons from Stanley Brown, a prot g of the great Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. "Later when I entered Harvard," Conan told me, "I thought I'd probably end up going to law school, I thought of politics. I like talking to people, and I'm Irish and from Boston."
When he graduated in 1985, he'd twice been president of the Harvard Lampoon and had majored in history and literature in America. "And look what I've done with it," Conan said, laughing a little at himself and his job.
It's some job . Three years ago, when David Letterman announced he was quitting NBC, O'Brien -- who was then a writer and producer at The Simpsons -- was the surprise replacement. And an instant disaster. He got off to such a deplorable start, a critic compared his show to "roadkill," and it was suggested that O'Brien do the honorable thing and jump off a cliff.
Today, O'Brien is unarguably a star and may be the role model for a new breed of talk-show host -- without Jay Leno's hard edge or the neurotic tics of Letterman. I went up to studio 6A at Rockefeller Center recently to watch Conan tape his show (they do it around 5:30 in the afternoon before a live audience of about 200 mostly young adults). The guest list was fairly routine: Carol Channing, Jon Cryer, Boyd Matson, a chimpanzee.
But Conan and his merry men, a great band called The Max Weinberg Seven (Weinberg was Bruce Springsteen's drummer) and a sidekick named Andy Richter, were anything but routine. The music is "extremely important," Conan said, "The band plays a Gershwin number, then a really fast-driving number." By then, Conan was halfway up the steep, narrow isle and had picked out maybe the only 50-year-old woman in the place and was dancing wildly with her while the band, abandoning most of its instruments, was up in the audience, also dancing. Grips wandered around and the powder puff lady came out. And Conan was shouting, "Now everyone take your clothes off!" Just what is going on here?
But wait -- this was just the warm-up. No one will see this extraordinary, driving energy beyond the small studio. I asked Conan afterward: Why not broadcast that great, wacky opening as well?
"The stuff that happens before the show is crucial," he said. "It makes people in the audience realize this is not like any other TV show. It snaps people to attention. It makes people think I'm an affable, fun guy. It also serves a purpose for me. After you do all that, how can you be inhibited?"
"After I wake up the audience," O'Brien continues, "I just come out and talk. When the camera is that close and you're filling the screen at 12:30 at night, [that warm-up frenzy] is too much. I didn't know all this three years ago. There's unfortunately no school for this. We needed to learn our job on the air. Most of the raw elements of the show were there from the beginning, but the biggest difference is me. I've gotten comfortable. I'm more comfortable now doing the show than eating out in a restaurant."
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copyright: 1996, Parade Publications.