OTHER TECH

Paul Shaffer has spent pretty much his whole career standing just off to one side of center stage. Everybody knows him from his 26 years as David Letterman's bandleader and sidekick. And chances are you remember him from the early days of Saturday Night Live, where he not only played keyboards in the house band but also did a spot-on Don Kirshner impression, accompanied Bill Murray's talent-challenged lounge singer, and backed up the Blues Brothers. There's that famous Spinal Tap cameo as hapless record rep Artie Fufkin. And you might have seen him leading the legendary jam sessions at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies.

Perusing Shaffer's career, you suddenly realize that his sheer sidekickiness - his ability to provide the perfect setting, play the perfect foil, for whoever he accompanies - is the whole magnificent point. Shaffer has gone from being a kid learning how to play keyboards by listening to rock & roll radio way up north in his Ontario hometown of Thunder Bay to somebody who's performed with more famous musicians than anybody ever. If that's what comes with being a second banana, we should all be so lucky.

S&V recently visited with Shaffer at his house in NYC's northern suburbs to talk about his new DVD (see "England Swings") and to check out his 2-channel audio system, which features such high-end gear as EgglestonWorks speakers, a VPI turntable, a Sony SACD player, and Pass Labs monoblock amplifiers. Given that Shaffer's whole shtick springs from his wild energy and wilder outbursts - whether it's tearing off a tasty lick on his Hammond organ or lobbing some hipster non-sequitur into the middle of one of Letterman's ruminations - it's a little surprising to find that he's pretty low-key, even introspective, in day-to-day life.

But that doesn't mean he doesn't keep his famous sense of humor at the ready, even when he's puttering around the house. As he shows us his listening room/practice space, its walls lined with pictures of just some of the hundreds of musicians he's played with, Shaffer lifts the lid of a 3-foot-long antique music box so it can play a tune. Listening to the quiet little melody, the onetime leader of the World's Most Dangerous Band says wryly, "When I get my own show, that will be the theme song."

Tell me about your system.

Several years back, [Beatles and Rolling Stones manager] Allen Klein invited me to a listening party in honor of the fact that he had taken the early Rolling Stones masters and had Bob Ludwig remaster them for SACD. Well, when I heard those records, they sounded incredible. Like the cowbell at the beginning of "Honky Tonk Women" - you've never heard it sound like that before. And I just said, "I want that system." Everybody gave me their card that night - the Sony guy for the SACD player, and the guy from I think Tennessee, where these speakers are made.