About The Jean Shepherd Project

The Jean Shepherd Project

Collecting, Trading and Sharing Jean Shepherd Recordings Since 1972

(formerly the Fatheadcentral Shep Traders Group)

About The Jean Shepherd Project

From homemade reel to reel tape recorders to digitized Shep-

A History of the JSP

Jeff Beauchamp, founding member and current spokesperson for the JSP, was introduced to the storytelling genius of Jean Shepherd one late night in the mid 1960’s while in the family car, as the family was returning home to Staten Island, NY from a Thanksgiving Day celebration with relatives in New Jersey. Over the objections of Jeff’s Mom who thought Shep used “bad language” and was unsuitable for children, Jeff’s Old Man, who was a long-time “Fathead” (Shep fan), tuned the car radio to WOR anyway. The next 45 minutes changed Jeff’s life forever. When a newer more reliable radio was purchased for the shelf over the kitchen sink, Jeff was given the old General Electric table model radio (with scotch tape holding the plastic casing together and a bad hum that was built in at the factory). At first he tried to secretly listen to Shep by turning out the lights in his bedroom and by putting the radio close to his bed, keeping the radio’s volume down low so that his parents wouldn’t find out that he was staying up way past lights out. Unfortunately the plan didn’t work for very long and his Mom threatened severe punishment if he was caught again. Facing a choice between going without Shep and punishment for parental disobedience, he came up with Plan B: a small loudspeaker was scavenged from a friend’s broken walkie-talkie and wire leads were soldered onto it. By pulling the wires off the radio’s internal speaker and connecting them to the leads of the tiny speaker, Shep could be heard by hiding the new speaker under the pillow without fear of recrimination. Plan B was successful for quite some time until one day when Jeff got up late for school and in his haste to get to school on time (another near-capital offensive) forgot to disconnect and hide his clandestine listening device. Severe parental retribution ensued and the trusty GE radio was never seen again, opening the door for Plan C. Through nefarious means a small transistor radio was acquired, and his only worries became maintaining a supply of 9-volt batteries and laughing too loud at Shep’s stories.

By high school age (1969) parental interference was no longer a factor, and Jeff turned his attention to his next goal: capturing Shep’s performances off the airwaves and preserving them for the future. Coming from a lower-middle class background there was no money for the purchase of a tape recorder, so Jeff determined that he was going to have to build one. Many attempts failed, and no working model was ready when Shep did his annual “Ludlow Kissel” reading from his book “In God We Trust All Others Pay Cash” on July Fourth 1972, but a friend of Jeff’s older brother was kind enough to lend him his cassette deck to record the show. It was the second step down a long road.

Later that summer Jeff got his Frankenstein’s Monster of a tape machine working, and had also scraped together enough money from working a summer job to buy a cheap cassette recorder. By the time school resumed that September, Jeff not only had the ability to record Shep off the air, but could also copy these tapes. Jeff’s Fathead friends had also gotten cassette decks of their own and a network of Shep collectors, tapers and traders had formed: the small beginnings of what was to become the Jean Shepherd Project.

After high school graduation in 1973 the co-op went their separate ways as people at that stage in life often do. Jeff continued to make Shep recordings and would swap them or give away (but never sell) copies to other Fatheads whenever he encountered them; a tradition he carries on today through the JSP.

In the fall of 1974 he met and fell in love with the woman who ten years later would be his ex-wife, and much of his attention was temporarily diverted away from the pursuit of all things Shepherd. Then, in the spring of 1977 Jean Shepherd made his last WOR broadcast. An era had come to an end and Jeff’s tape collection took on a new importance.

Jeff continued to collect and swap Shep tapes with anybody else who had them but the pickings were few and far between among his circle of friends and co-workers. Then came the advent of the Personal Computer, the Internet, and most significantly, Napster. Encouraged by his new wife to do something with all the Shep recordings he had accumulated, Jeff set about transferring his old reel to reel, 8-track cartridge and cassette tapes to Compact Discs and then converted those shows to mp3 files which he swapped with others via Napster over the internet. New friends and contacts were made and the Shepherd trading network began a new life, and for the first time acquired a name, suggested by Jeff’s wife. Upon seeing a huge box of Shep reel to reel tapes that had arrived at their house by mail, she commented “If this keeps up, you’re going to be Fathead Central!” Slightly modified, the name stuck and we became the “Fatheadcentral Shep Traders Group”.

Since swapping large mp3 files using a dial-up internet connection proved to be cumbersome and ultimately unworkable, we decided that it would be much easier to burn our mp3 files to CD-ROM’s and share them via snail mail. Even though Napster wasn’t a viable sharing alternative for us, it was still useful for making new friends and contacts, and the FSTG Shep archive began to grow.

Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court closed Napster (as we had known it) down and we were stuck for a way to get the word out about our non-profit enterprise. To the rescue came Jim Clavin who gave us some space on his premier Shep website www.flicklives.com for our “crummy commercial”. He even created a link to those FSTG pages from his home page and the response was both fantastic and at times overwhelming. Fatheads generously shared their collections with us, both large and small, so that we could in turn share them with the public at large, and the archive grew tremendously.

During this time we began to encounter a strange problem that was occurring when Shep fans mistakenly went looking for our website based on the email address we were using, Fatheadcentral@aol.com, and found their way to a totally unrelated site with a similar name which featured – well, how can we phrase this so that those of you who have your web-browsing filters set to “puritanical” will be able to see this…….? Lets just say that the type of content it featured rhymes with the word “corn”. To end the confusion we reluctantly changed the name of our organization to “the Jean Shepherd Project” and our email address to “shepmp3@aol.com”.

And then we were fortunate to form a partnership with Charles Hayden who created and runs the Jean Shepherd Archive website, a place where one can download the JSP Shep mp3’s for free. Charles has had many difficulties over the years with webhosts who have objected to the amount of bandwidth his site has been using, but somehow he has managed to persevere for which the JSP and all Fatheads who use his service are very grateful for.

In more recent times, others have joined in the effort, like Tom Higgin’s Jean Shepherd Podcast, where a Fathead can download Shep mp3’s to be enjoyed on their ipod or similar device at their leisure. We are also greatly indebted to Tom for offering this free service.

The latest development in the growth of the JSP is the creation of the website you are visiting now. We are eternally grateful to Jim for giving us our first presence on the web, and are now happy to relieve him of the burden of having to update the pages on his site for us. We have big plans for the website including pages where fans can post their photos of Shep and accounts of their meetings with him.

We’d like to extend a great big thank you to those who have supported us in all of our endeavors over the years; we could never have done it without you.

The JSP Philosophy

Over the years many people have asked us why we continue to do what we do the hard way. They surmise that it would be much easier if we would just put a fixed price on our CD-ROM’s to make sure that all of our out of pocket expenses are covered – and maybe even make a little bit extra cash as well. After all, these old Jean Shepherd recordings seem to be rather scarce, and anything that’s this hard to come by could be extremely valuable and could turn a decent profit. They point out the headaches and uncertainties associated with giving people something for nothing and then relying on the honor system to keep the project going. Why should we put ourselves through all that? Not to mention the sacrificing of our spare time and all the hard work that goes into what we do; don’t we feel that we should be compensated for that?

At first glance it may seem that these are valid reasons to turn an all volunteer effort into a commercial enterprise. The people who pose these questions are probably right when they say that it would be easier and cause less headaches if we went the commercial route, but there are also some down sides that might not make it such a good idea after all.

If the driving force behind the work of the JSP was to earn an income from it then we would have started selling Shep recordings long ago and probably would have a decent pile of cash to show for it by now. We also would have lost our respect for it as well.

The trouble is, that’s not what the JSP is about. The mission of the JSP is to help others to reconnect with the work of a man who was a great influence in our lives, to introduce the genius that was Jean Shepherd to a new audience, and to preserve what little remains of that work for the future. Turning that work into a commodity to be bought and sold only works against progress toward those goals. If the intention is to facilitate the dissemination of the work to as many people as possible, then ability to pay should not be a deciding factor as to who gets it and who doesn’t. Also, the more copies that are in the hands of more people, the greater the chances are for the survival of Shep’s art.

As for the suggestion that we’re entitled to be compensated in dollars for putting so much time and effort into a project like ours, at the JSP our rewards are measured in stacks of thank you notes rather than stacks of treasury notes.

Back To The JSP Home Page