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In Reply to: Coyle & Sharpe ...they were the best posted by LWR on September 13, 2006 at 19:04:52:

RADIO WAVES
- Ben Fong-Torres
Sunday, September 10, 2006
SHARPER IMAGES: Hard to imagine, but there was a time when KGO had, on its roster of personalities, a pair of radio pranksters, early versions of today's punkers. Coyle and Sharpe -- Jim Coyle and Mal Sharpe -- specialized in encountering San Franciscans in the streets and elsewhere and putting them on. Doing their work (if you can call it that) in the early to mid-'60s, they were predecessors to generations of DJs who pull stunts on people on the phone (locally, I can think of Terry McGovern, Don Bleu, Lamont & Tonelli, Mark & Brian and Mancow).
But while some of today's jokers on radio and TV can be mean-spirited, even vicious, Coyle and Sharpe were as cerebral as they were audacious and outrageous. Sharpe, who has just issued a three-CD, one-DVD set ("Coyle & Sharpe: These 2 Men Are Impostors"), names the "Druggist" track as a classic.
The pair had a hidden microphone with them when they entered a drugstore in Daly City and asked a pharmacist for something to sterilize some surgical instruments. Coyle explained that his buddy, Sharpe, had chest pains and couldn't afford a hospital visit, so he planned to operate on him in a station wagon parked across the street. The pharmacist was horrified, but Coyle assured him that, although he had only a high school education, he'd read several medical books. How did they know that Sharpe's ailment even required surgery, the pharmacist asked.
"It's a stab in the dark," Sharpe said, "but I'm willing to take it."
Other times, the pair almost succeed in persuading a sailor to rob a bank, they talk a grocer into selling partially eaten food and they persuade a mechanic to help them wage a military assault on someone Coyle and Sharpe are mad at. In the Financial District, they ask a woman named Julia what she thinks about people "trying to evoke music from an animal." She is appalled at the cruelty involved. Sharpe asks her to imagine a "violin section ... composed of weasels," and Coyle wonders, if she created beautiful music by playing a bow over the back of a coyote and would "actually benefit both professionally and materially," would she tour the world?
"I suppose if I got any money out of it, I would," Julia replies.
"What is it you would do?" Coyle prompts.
"I'd tour the world, playing on a coyote."
Where did this madness originate? The two met at a boardinghouse in Pacific Heights in 1959 (Sharpe came from Boston, looking to check out the beatniks) and found that they shared what Sharpe calls a "sick" sense of humor. Sharpe, who was 23, had studied broadcasting, could play trombone and got a gig in North Beach. Coyle, then 27, was a semipro baseball player who described himself as a "con man" -- he'd used his wiles to score (and lose) about 120 jobs by the time he met Sharpe.
They began concocting and executing what they called "terrorizations" on unsuspecting people, with a vague notion that they could compile a comedy album.
Ultimately, they did just that, issuing "The Absurd Impostors" in 1963. The album didn't sell much, but radio DJs liked programming bits from it. One of them was Jim Dunbar, then in Chicago and headed to San Francisco to revamp KGO. He hired the guys to fill three hours a night, for which they had to work up a couple of dozen bits a day. Their tapes would then be edited (by, among others, future KSFO DJ Pete Scott) and aired.
The gig ended in 1965 with the arrival of a new, disapproving executive, and Sharpe moved to Los Angeles. After they failed to sell a television version of their act (the pilot makes up the DVD of Sharpe's new release), Coyle drifted off to England.
Sharpe found work in commercials, tried another TV show and in 1979 returned to the Bay Area, where he was hired to do his thing for KMEL, then a rock station.
"That was my best gig ever," he says, recalling such assignments as the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. His question for everyone he encountered was, "What's your favorite fish?"
In recent years, Sharpe, 70, has come full circle. He has a show, "Back on Basin Street," on jazz station KCSM (91.1 FM) from 9 to 11 p.m. Sundays. This, he believes, makes him the dean of Bay Area radio personalities, since he began in 1963. (Any challengers out there?) And, back on the trombone he learned as a teenager in Boston, he and his Big Money in Jazz band play regularly at Enrico's, the No Name Bar in Sausalito and Saturday afternoons at Savoy Tivoli.
Now the CD/DVD set is out (get it at CoyleandSharpe.com, Amazon and CDBaby). It includes the 1995 collection "Coyle and Sharpe on the Loose," co-produced by his daughter, Jennifer Sharpe, and rocker Henry Rollins, who was a big fan as a kid.
Sharpe was also a fan -- of Coyle's.
"His spiel was so convincing," he says.
They joked to the end. Coyle died of diabetes at age 61 in 1993. But when The Chronicle called Sharpe for obituary information, he couldn't play it straight.
"Jim would've killed me if I did," he says, "so I said that he died in a parachuting accident."
Actually, the obituary read: "Mr. Coyle moved to Europe in the 1970s and, according to Sharpe, opened a skydiving school in Cambridge."
Sharpe chuckled.
"The reporter knew me," he says. "That's why he put 'according to Sharpe.' "
In the liner notes to the new collection, Coyle is said to have died "while burrowing under the city of Barcelona."
According to Sharpe.

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Topic - Coyle & Sharpe ...they were the best - LWR 19:04:52 09/13/06 (1)

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