The "Harvey In The Morning" Interview - Part 2

This is the second of a two part series in which former Philadelphia radio personality "Harvey in the Morning" generously gave to Bloggerhythms. 
In this final installment you'll find more about Harvey's radio career and his time working for Nickelodeon. You'll also learn his thoughts on some of the celebrities he met along the way and what music he listens to. Finally, he discusses both of his current gigs: the rewards of running his own handyman business and his work as a record producer at his home studio. 
To fully appreciate the Philadelphia legend's story you may want to read part 1 first.    
CR:  Who are the favorite celebrities you've met during your career?
Harvey:  Another interesting topic. I know in the early days of my IOQ show from 1977 on, my heroes were all musicians, and as I met them I was pretty universally disappointed and bummed out afterward. They were all kinds of self-absorbed, entitled assholes who thought they were “the shit” and looked right through me because I couldn’t really do them much good and they didn’t need me so why bother extending any generosity my way? So that was depressing! But then I refocused the show on entertainment and not music and my world became populated by actors and comedians and regular “real” people who also happened to be quirky or entertaining, and I enjoyed a lot of these folks.
Meeting Lily Tomlin was thrilling and she came in at 7:30 in the morning after working her live touring Broadway show here in Philly the night before until late. She showed up happy and actually “worked” for me. She didn’t coast or just go through the motions, she put real effort into this “nothing” appearance on a radio show with a guy she’d never heard of and that said a lot to me about her integrity and I was forever grateful.
When Helen Leicht got Johnny Carson to call me and congratulate me for my 10th anniversary on IOQ that was thrilling and paralyzing!  I sounded so incredibly star struck and stupid, and I was both.
Another proud moment was while I was interviewing Letterman backstage at the Bijou Café after a stand up show…this was early 80s(?) after his morning show had been cancelled but before he got the late night NBC show. In the course of the interview I made him laugh. I freaking made David Letterman laugh…it wasn’t a belly laugh but it was a chuckle and not just a “trying to be polite” chuckle, but a real chuckle so I count that as one of my most cherished memories.
I interviewed Ashley Judd in the 90’s for what might have been her first big movie role, and I did a lengthy interview for the MGK show. I cut it down a lot but aired a good portion of it because I found her interesting.  She sent me a note from a hotel in Texas somewhere a few days later telling me how much she enjoyed the interview and that it was one of the best interviews that she had ever done. I remember that quite fondly.
I was a big fan of Jane Seymour, mostly at the time from that old movie Somewhere In Time that she did with Christopher Reeve. She came to the grand opening of Universal Studios in Orlando and I was there as part of Double Dare and the Nickelodeon “celebs.” This was June 1990. She was sitting in the audience during one of the events, and I walked up to her and told her what a fan I was and recounted a moment in that movie that made the hairs on my neck stand up (in a good way!)  She looked at me and said, in her adorable English accent, “my daughters love your program.”  Her twin daughters were with her at the event. Jane Seymour knew who I was and paid me a compliment in return… come on now… that’s just ridiculous, right?
While I’m trashing all the musicians in the world I should mention that there are 2 exceptions that come to mind.  (I'm sure there are many more but I probably never met them). James Taylor, although I didn’t meet him while he was in the throes of his drug addiction battle - these days he is one of the nicest and most genuine of people who is very generous with his time.  At one show in the early 2000’s I saw him wave off the stage manager telling him it was time to end the intermission “meet and greet” he was doing with kids who were cancer survivors and start the 2nd part of the show…he stayed and didn’t go back to the show until he had spent time talking to every single kid at the lip of the stage who had come down to see him. The backup band had started playing a long, long intro to the first song of the 2nd set but he stayed until he had talked to and made contact with every kid. And, I did a show with Harry Chapin once and he had big hits already and was riding high, and he was as nice as could be.  Which reminds me of one more celeb…Jay Leno. I hosted comedy shows with Jay Leno over the course of 8 or 10 years. At the beginning he was headlining the show because he was billed as “from” New York City and had maybe done a Tonight Show or a David Letterman appearance one time. Not really well known yet at all. By the time of the last live show I hosted with him, he was the heir apparent…he was named to take over the Tonight Show from Johnny Carson and be the most important host in America on the most important show in America…and he was just as nice to me then as the first time 10 years earlier. He pretended to remember me, invited me in to his dressing room and offered me fruit or anything I wanted to eat, and asked me if I wanted to do “some time” up there before I introduced him and how much time did I want to do. I was impressed with that experience.
CR:  Do you keep up with today's music, and if so what artists do you favor?
Harvey:  You know when I was still working in radio I didn’t keep up with “today’s music” and I’m kind of still like that. I do find some bands that I like every once in a while. I haven’t listened to music on the radio since the 1970’s…honestly. I got so sick of hearing the same 500 songs played over and over that I just tuned out. I have tried so many times to listen to XPN and god bless ‘em they are the only ones breaking any new artists, but they are just too much work for me to listen to. If I listen intensely for a week or two I kind of get oriented and begin to recognize a song when it comes around again…but then if I don’t listen for even a week or two, when I come back nothing is familiar and it all feels strange. So, yes I AM the world’s biggest hypocrite simultaneously belly aching that I hate radio because they play the same songs over and over and their rotations are TOO TIGHT and I hate XPN because they play too much variety and unfamiliar stuff and their rotations are TOO LOOSE! I just think somehow there’s a better way to do what XPN does, and a fairly high proportion of what they do choose to play seems to me to fail the sniff test of being well written, well sung, and thoughtfully crafted with a story to share. I don’t often hear really good writing from current bands.
I’m generally a fan of alt country or things that were once called country. I cannot stand whatever gets played on country radio and stadium country is clichéd and pathetic and I probably hate 94% of everything that ever is on a country awards TV show. BUT, having said that…. I have some favorites that were at one time considered country…..I LOVE LOVE LOVE: 
Mary Chapin Carpenter, Shawn Colvin, Rodney Crowell, Vince Gill, Brad Paisley, Leanne Womack, Trisha Yearwood, Allison Kraus, The Dixie Chicks, Emmy Lou Harris, Kasey Chambers, Kim Richey, Lucinda Williams, Nanci Griffith, Patty Loveless ….and veering out of country of course, Derek Trucks, Sonny Landreth, Mark Knopfler, Fountains of Wayne, Green Day, Sheryl Crow, Wallflowers, Will Hoge, John Prine, Del Amitri, Bonnie Raitt of course, and I’ve remained a pretty big Springsteen fan. I have no idea how I find new stuff.
CR:  How did you end up as the announcer for Double Dare, Finders Keepers, and History IQ after leaving Philadelphia radio? Did you find this work as rewarding as your popular AM drive radio shows?
Harvey:  I think I accidentally covered a lot of this question but as to how I got that first job….I had just been fired from IOQ, and if you remember, my firing generated a lot of press and I received a ton of attention and support from the Philadelphia community and press. A couple months after I was fired from IOQ Nickelodeon was coming into Philadelphia to begin shooting this brand new kids’ game show and they chose WHYY studios as the location to shoot - the reason being it’s a whole lot cheaper to shoot 65 episodes of a TV show here rather than in NYC where Nick was based. One of the production assistants was a listener/fan and she found out they were looking for an announcer. They could skip paying for a hotel room if they cast a local so she contacted me about the gig. I did some sort of audition on a cassette tape and they offered me the job. At first I was just an off-camera announcer, never seen, but halfway through the first season or so they somehow picked up on the fact that I had a whole entertainment career before I got to them and they threw me a little bit to do on-camera. I guess I didn’t suck too badly and then they threw me another little bit and a few more and by the time we were renewed for a 2nd season I had kind of wormed my way into becoming the “sidekick” to Marc Summers….his Ed McMahon. It gave me the chance to have a presence on the show that never would have happened if I were just the off-camera announcer like every other game show. It turned into a wonderful thing and my confirmation was that Mad Magazine piece. When I heard that Mad was doing Double Dare, I kept thinking.. "oh please god…just have them draw me once.,..please just draw me once…that’s all I need…just one time" because as a sidekick it’s pretty easy to be overshadowed by the star and become invisible. So, when the magazine came out and I was in more than half of the comic panels I was so happy! It meant that the writer and the artist sat down to watch the show and their conclusion was…"hey this bald guy is actually part of the show” and that was very gratifying.  
Because of the success of Double Dare, Nickelodeon then tried to replicate it with a bunch of new game shows and Finders Keepers was their first show after Double Dare and they asked me to do the same role on that. I did it for 1 or 2 seasons only and then I bailed. We were still shooting 65 episodes of Double Dare several times a year…I was doing the MGK morning show and now Finders Keepers!  It was too much and I bowed out of FK. History IQ was many years later and the producers were some of the same folks that worked on Double Dare so with Marc as host they asked me to be the announcer.  That was pretty straight announcer / off-camera, so not as much fun but still I enjoyed being around the gang again for a few weeks at a time, living and working in New York City.
When Double Dare moved to Universal Studios in Orlando for the last 3 years of production I didn’t want to give up either the radio or TV gig and MGK made it possible for me to do the radio show remotely from Florida for 3 of the 4 weeks of production each time.  So my day would start at 4 am with the drive to a radio studio somewhere in Orlando, and do the show live up to Philadelphia until 9am. Then I’d hop in my rental car and drive over to the Universal Studios lot where the guard at the gate would wave me in and say “good morning Harvey!” Then I’d drive onto the lot and park in a space that had my name on it…and then I would walk in to my dressing room which had my name on it…on a sound stage that was solely for shooting television shows. Pretty much the dream without having to move to LA to get it. Again…how lucky is this kid? Then we’d work shooting 5 episodes of Double Dare until 5 or 6 pm, then go over notes for the next day, go out to dinner, crash at my rented apartment where I would live for a month during production and sleep until 4 am and then get up and do it all over again for 3 or 4 weeks at a time.  It was exhausting but about as good as it gets honestly.
I loved Double Dare but it wasn’t mine…I was the second banana and it wasn’t my show so the radio show is different and singular for that reason.  That was all me and gave me such satisfaction as a creative exercise. So, they were both tons of fun and both very different experiences.
CR:  Whatever happened to your old friend and producer Julie Roberts?
Harvey:  Julie Roberts also never worked in radio again after our show at MGK. She ended up working in television as a producer. I worked at Banyan Productions at the end of my broadcast career having crossed over from what they call “talent” to the production side. I thought it would be a soul destroying, mind numbing experience and I couldn’t have been more wrong! I loved my work again for almost 7 years, working on various shows for Banyan, most of them Trading Spaces or the spinoffs. I rose thru the ranks and at the very end I wound up being the boss…what they call the show runner or executive producer of the kid version of Trading Spaces: Boys vs Girls. I tried to bring Julie in to the Banyan world if I heard about a show staffing up that I thought she would be right for. And she finally came on board and got up to speed pretty quickly and became a very skilled television producer. She’s semi-retired at the moment, but we’re still in touch and remain close friends, but it’s never as close as when you work together every single day. 

CR:  Finally, tell readers a little (or a lot) about your current handyman business and how this came to be?

Harvey:  Around 2006, Discovery yanked the production contract for Trading Spaces from Banyan Productions and gave it to an LA production company. There was nothing else at Banyan I was dying to work on. After Banyan, I spent 8 months working for a company called Shooters that was a post-production house that did commercials, especially political spots, and edited and color corrected film and tv shows. A huge company at that point and it was a bit of a culture shock, and I could not handle the amount of chaos every day. Believe me, Trading Spaces had a ton of chaos with 3 shows in production at the same time, but the world at Shooters was just beyond my ability to stay ahead of and I went in to quit, the day before they were going to fire me…"you can’t fire me, I quit…you can’t quit, we’re gonna fire you”…you know like that. So, I took a few months off, trying to figure out what to do next but I knew that after almost 35 years of broadcast work I was pretty much finished. Again…the bucket list…I had done absolutely EVERYTHING I had ever dreamed about doing in TV and radio. There wasn’t a single thing left that I felt I wanted to accomplish so it was astonishingly easy to just walk away and say, "OK, I’m done with that…let the 'kids' have their turn!" It shocked me how easy it was. After a few months off, a friend said as a kind of joke, “You should be a handyman.”

I’m a self taught carpenter and I had done lots of projects for myself over the years including that 4 year period building and then finishing my “dream house” that we restored. But, I had never done any work for somebody else. I did a couple projects for friends at first, and then I thought, “nobody is gonna trust a guy who shows up in a Subaru Forester with a bunch of Home Depot buckets full of tools, so I bought a truck, designed a logo, made signs, built a website and started the business. The first 5 or 6 years I didn’t break even, but in the last 8 to 10 years I’ve sort of made the nut. Didn’t accumulate anything to save, but didn’t go into the hole either, and I discovered that I loved a lot of things about it. It’s incredibly creative and satisfying. It serves a huge need for people and I’m building something that doesn’t disappear the second after I say it on the air. You get to design creative solutions for somebody’s problem in the house that they’re stumped by.  Being my own boss!  Going to work when I feel like it around 10:30 in the morning most times and my customers love it that some clown isn’t breaking into their house at 7 in the morning and making a bunch of noise. After the first 2 years when I figured out there is a real demand for this kind of service I became very picky about who I would work for.

I’ve learned a lot along the way doing the kinds of jobs I never thought I would do or had never done before , and I love that it forces me to be physically active and demanding of my 71 year old body.  I still can carry drywall up 2 or 3 flights of stairs and it’s good for me. These days I’ve slowed the business down…not retired but seriously slowed down. I stopped taking on new customers about a year ago and I work for my loyal core of repeat customers only, and because I’m so selective, I work for wonderful people who are happy to see me, are willing to wait up to a year for me to show up, happy to pay what it costs, and my days have been free of stress for 12 to 15 years. I’ve been really stressed maybe 5 or 6 times in 15 years. I used to be stressed 5 or 6 times before lunch every day in television!  So it’s been an ideal way to sort of make a living. 

John Flynn on stage with Harvey

And the other artistic and immensely satisfying activity that has been my focus for the past 12 years is my home studio, Barndance Productions. I’ve been working with the enormously talented singer/songwriter John Flynn who writes from the heart about many important issues but never in a dour or lecturing way. John writes and sings all the songs, and I serve as his producer as well as recording and mixing engineer. I also play almost all of the other instruments on the albums because using the occasional guest artist after the pandemic began made that impossible. We have recorded and released 6 albums in this time period, one of which was a duo project of cover songs done during the first hard lockdown period of late spring, early summer 2020. John recorded remotely at his home in Delaware with a Pro Tools setup I loaned him. I would then download the files to my studio and begin work. I wrote and sang most of the harmonies and recorded all the instruments making up the backing track. That was under the fake band name, Hondo Jenkins and the album was titled Take Cover. See how incredibly clever that is???  An album of cover songs….a plague where we all have to stay home???  Take Cover???  I mean, we are just too clever by half, aren’t we???  Working with John has been the most rewarding activity of my long experience in music, going back to the aforementioned 8th grade band. We’re already several songs in to another album’s worth of material, so even though at John’s age of 64 there’s very little danger of him being “discovered” as the next big thing, he is writing more and better than ever (IMHO). He’s made his living as a musician for over 40 years and it’s very, very enjoyable and satisfying to have found a collaborative relationship in music at this point in our lives.

ADDENDUM:  Below is a  song and video that Harvey and John Flynn produced together as a tribute to recently retired Philadelphia DJ Helen Leicht who worked at WXPN for 25 years and earlier with Harvey at WIOQ.

Harvey:  So that’s my scoop. I’ve been happy for about 22 years. I got divorced, lost a performing career, found a producing career in television, left show-biz altogether to do something completely different, re-connected with who would turn out to be the love of my life at my 35th high school reunion and we’ve been together now for 16 years - and my son, Caleb, is gonna be 30 this year and lives and works about 2 miles away from me. We see him all the time.  

So, with the possible exception of half the country being insane, having a narcissistic, emotionally and mentally stunted lunatic running the country for 4 years, having a plague loosed upon the earth, and a land war in Europe for the first time since WWII…except for all that, life is good.  Believe me, I’m the luckiest boy I know and I try to never let a day go by without noticing the gratitude I have for my incredibly lucky existence.   

Thanks for asking me! I told you, brevity is not my weapon of choice. I figure I’ve now written about half of my memoir so you did me a favor!

THE END