Long John I think went off the air in about '79 or something, so there was a hiatus. That's why I think Art Bell thought there was a spot to be filled. He was doing exactly the same thing.
Paul LaffoleyStephen Hawking won [Babson Institute competition ] one year with his black hole stuff. It's keeping an open mind on whether gravity exists or not. I think my father believed this because ... when the wind blew on him, he'd get angry, because it was something he couldn't control.
Paul LaffoleyLong John would sometimes hold his interviews in the Carnegie Delicatessen, which is the most famous delicatessen in New York up by Carnegie. Let's see, 57th Street, you're down to like 50th Street and 7th Avenue... You'd go in there and everybody would be eating a heart attack on a plate, pastrami, malts, that kind of stuff. But it literally was the place where Woody Allen would go.
Paul LaffoleyIt was on Long John's show that I heard Orfeo Angelucci being interviewed. In other words, the whole thing about the green globes on the top of a car bumper and the voice coming out, you know, and then this beautiful lady.... So he went through the whole number, what you read in his book, that kind of stuff. A whole raft of things.
Paul LaffoleyIn other words, [ H.P. Lovecraft] was areligious, asexual, neurasthenic, he just didn't want to react to the world. Like Virginia Woolf, who considered religion the ultimate obscenity.
Paul LaffoleyThe whole thing that Dante [Alighieri] did was summed up in the medieval world. It's like St. Thomas Aquinas, the Summa Theologica. He didn't invent it, he just put it all in one package. You get twelve fat books there sitting in any library. Whereas... I think if Joshi thinks [H.P.] Lovecraft was doing anything like that, just throwing together all this stuff to form a kind of anti-mythology, that's where I would disagree with him.
Paul Laffoley