Emmy winner Ken Levine reflects on childhood in 1960s America

There was once a time when the minimum wage in America was $1.15 an hour, when teenagers’ prime hangout spots were record stores, and they trusted DJs more than their parents, teachers and policemen.

It’s in this 1960s America that Ken Levine grew up in, and he dishes about his adolescence in the tumultuous era in his memoir “The Me Generation… By Me (Growing Up in the ’60s).”

The UCLA alumnus and Emmy award winner has written, directed, and consulted for major television classics like “MASH,” “Cheers” and “Frasier,” and is currently a play-by-play announcer for the Seattle Mariners.

The author, who will have a book reading at the Grove tonight, discussed with the Daily Bruin’s Anneta Konstantinides about the differences of growing up in the 1960s, how the television and radio industry has changed since then, and how some adolescent pains are the same no matter what era you grow up in.

Daily Bruin: What inspired you to write this memoir? Why now?

Ken Levine: I was having lunch with a friend and we were talking about the fact that there were no books about the ’60s that really put you in the era and gave you the sense of what it was actually like to live there. Usually a book about the ’60s is like a history book. First Kennedy got assassinated, then the Beatles, then the hippies, etc. I really enjoyed the era; I didn’t enjoy high school, but I loved the era and the music.

DB: What was your experience like writing it, and what was the best and worst part about the process?

KL: The worst part was reliving all these adolescent traumas! It’s amazing how you revisit something that you’ve repressed for all these years, all those feelings of insecurity, anger and embarrassment come back. Another thing that was hard was I really made it a point to be honest about myself, so I don’t necessarily paint a picture of somebody who is that sparkling individual. I made dumb mistakes and immature mistakes and decided for the sake of the book to just be real, and in a sense it ultimately helped me. I could start to see, as the years unfolded and my choices became a little more mature, I was able to see in retrospect how I had changed and matured. It’s really a journey of self-discovery but at the time I didn’t know it was a journey, it was just life and I was trying to live it and get dates and stuff like that.

DB: You talk about how radio itself has dramatically changed. What do you think about radio today?

KL: Here’s what I miss about it. We got exposed to a large variety of music back in those days. If you would listen to a top 40 station like KSJ you’d get The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, ballads, country songs, new trends, there’d be a whole variety from acid rock to bubble gum to garage bands to British invasion. And if you didn’t particularly like a song you didn’t tune out of the station cause you knew in two minutes there’d be another song. It broadened my music appreciation. I think now people have certain genres and types of music they like so they can focus in on that, and I think you miss the sense of discovery of hearing new bands. I don’t think there’s that opportunity today.

DB: How did your personal experiences growing up in the ’60s influence your writing for “Frasier” and “Cheers” and other shows you’ve worked on?

KL: The thing that I discovered about myself going through the ’60s is that I tried on many different hats to see who I thought I was. The athletics, the hippies, different things like that. What I discovered was that I was more comfortable as an observer, more comfortable watching and commenting on things going on. I think that more than anything helped forge the career that I eventually went into.

DB: Did any of your personal experiences become stories on the show?

KL: From time to time, yes. When you’re in a writing room, you wind up learning more about your fellow writers than you could imagine. You’ll do anything to get a good story. If something really humiliating happened to you, it might make a good story for Sam Malone or Niles Crane, so you share it with the room,and you tell other writers things that you won’t tell your shrink. There’s an incident in the book where I have a crush on a girl, and made the mistake of writing her a note expressing my admiration. Not only did she reject me, but she passed it around to all her friends and I became the laughingstock of the school. It was a mortifying experience. I have used that in a couple of shows in a couple of ways. I developed my sense of humor and my comedy as a way of number one, protecting myself from this kind of embarrassment, and number two, my way of trying to get girls.

DB: In addition to writing comedy for “Cheers” and “Frasier,” you also wrote comedy and drama for “MASH.” What was that transition like?

KL: Comedy is much harder. For drama, you’re trying to get the audience to feel a certain emotion, but you can achieve that by mood. You can achieve that by having a character who’s very sad, walking through the streets at night, and you play an appropriate sad song and it evokes that emotion. With comedy you really have to work to make somebody laugh. You can’t just play an appropriate Frank Sinatra song. To tell a story that has a lot of emotion and still be able to tell it through humor, to me, is more difficult. Not to take anything away from great drama, but it’s hard to tell a story like say in “MASH,” where you’re dealing with a war and you’re dealing with death and the futility of the situation. To tell that story and be true to that story and yet make the audience laugh, to me, is a very difficult feat.

DB: What do you miss most about the ’60s?

KL: That feeling of optimism that we all had. That we really could change the world, that we had our whole lives stretching out before us, that we could be whatever we wanted to be. Whatever career we wanted to enter, there would be a place for us if we really pursued it. And I think that’s kind of missing today. The other thing that I miss is that we were, and still are, the largest generation that world has ever known, so everyone catered to us. When we were kids there were a million kids shows (and) when we were teens there were a million teen dance shows. We were the prettiest girl in town, and that was kind of fun. Now the TV networks don’t give a crap what we want.

Email Konstantinides at [email protected]