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Don Gavin is a stand-up comedian and actor. His album "Don Gavin: Live with a Manhattan" will be available for the first time to stream on January 24.
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There was a thing about you guys though. It was for us young guys coming up, you guys were like Peter Pan's. You were living this life as... Boston's a very blue collar place, very hard working place, all of New England. And we stumbled in as amateurs, as open mikers, to this environment where you guys were the kings. And you guys were fucking wild men. We heard those stories, Nick's with pay and coke, and everybody was drinking all the time. And everyone was laughing and yelling. And I was like, how is this possible? How do these men get to live this life? And when I was doing my first study, I was a high school teacher. Yeah. I was teaching and doing this, getting out of the clubs at 3 or 4 in the morning, and then attempting to be a teacher about 3 or 4 hours later. When did you quit? I got out of teaching in 84, I think. So I maybe crossed over the two together. And that was a rough patch there, because I knew something had to give. Yeah. And I tell the story that I was coming home from teaching, not from the clubs at night, but teaching. And I fell asleep at the wheel, and this was on the highway, and I was hitting the stanchions on the side of the highway, bang, bang, bang, bang. And eventually, as I'm going down this gully, are they passing in front of me? No. What passed in front of me was, how am I going to make it to the show tonight? And my head went through the windshield, the whole deal. I came up, climbed up out of the gully. I'm trying to thumb to get home. I've got blood running down his face. I had no idea how bad it was. Then I had to go to the hospital. So I go, my friend, we go back, I was going to get the car out of the gully. The car was total. I mean, beyond total. And there's hair and blood on the wheelchair. And I said, oh. I better pick one job with the other. So the comedy won out. Did they have open mic nights in 79? Sure. Oh, no. In 79? No. When you first started, what was it like? Well, the first time there was only one place in existence, and that was the comedy connection. The little one? The one on Washington Street. Yeah, probably 150 seats at two. And two guys ran that. I think Sean Morey was the guy that had been on the Tonight Show. So in our days, that was like, oh my god. So he ran a comedy class. And two guys took the class, Billy Downs and Paul Barkley. And they decided that maybe we'll do this comedy thing. But again, people didn't know what a comedy club was. You mentioned that when Jay Leno was way before us, there was no comedy clubs. He worked maybe strip joints or at an auto place or this or that. There was no place to go. And even people would say, what's a comedian? Other than watching TV, you didn't know really what stand-up comedy was even. So the beginning of it started off slow. And I remember my first paycheck. Once I got paid $8. That was your first? $8, yeah. And I still have that. I have a copy of the checks. Do you really? No, a copy of it. I actually cast it. I needed the $8. Of course. So that was what Billy Downs and Barkley did there. And in those days, you auditioned instead of an open mic neck. So it was just the two of them. And I had to go in front of them. And I looked at the two of them. I said, I don't really like this. Because I said, no, at least one of the you two are not going to understand what I'm doing because you really don't look like a brain trust yet. And I got hired. And I immediately was really good. And the next show I did was really good. I'm doing the same 10 minutes because I was a bartender and had some patter. And the third one, they called me like a night before and said, somebody fell out. Can you come in? And what I had done, I had written 15 minutes of comedy that day. Sure I have. But in my mind, that's what I thought. And it was the worst death of the world. I got about two minutes in. And people always say, what happens when you bomb? Well, you don't really bomb after you've been doing this for a while. But that two or three minutes seems like an eternity. It seemed like hours. And then I just went back into some of the old stuff. And I get out. And I actually got into a fistfight with Lenny Clark about it. He kept on saying to me, do you work in New York? I said, I've never been on a stage before in my life. And so we weren't our friends at all at the beginning. And we got into a little to go over that. And you guys said, fistfight? Well, he said, yeah. He said, oh, that was a great set. He was shitting on me. And his friend saw up with witness to the fight and broke it up. And he says to Lenny, he goes, what's all about this? He said, you just said he had a good show. He sucked. He knows it. And you're being an asshole to call him out. And maybe he came fast friends after that.