(April 1994)
By GREGG KIRK
You may know him as Jerry Lehane III – former school bus driver from Newark, DE, who in the mid ’80s, almost single-handedly documented that town’s local music scene by releasing a slew of hand-duplicated compilation cassettes of dubious quality. In the June 1989 issue of our magazine, we not only featured his exploits in a profile, we plastered his face on our cover. At the time, he was a frustrated musician playing in a band of revolving membership called The Moaners, and supposedly “ghostwriting” songs for Tommy Conwell & the Young Rumblers.

Because his dealings with convicted murderer Charles Cohen have brought him back into the news – a photograph Lehane took of Cohen appears in Mike Walsh’s book Fallen Son, which was released last month – and in honor of our April Fool’s issue, we’ve brought him back… and he’s got more to say.

This time, his claims have become more grandiose. He swears he’s responsible for introducing Howard Stern to sidekick Jackie “the Jokeman” Martling as well as having written a good deal of comic material. He says he designed and originated the concept for the TV series “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” and he’s done more ghostwriting – not just for Tommy Conwell, but for the likes of Robert Plant, Roger McGuinn, Tom Petty, the Traveling Wilburys, and Soul Asylum.

Whether you view him to be a delusionary crackpot or a humble ghostwriter who’s sidestepping fame in order to let others profit, he’s undeniably one of a kind and one of the area’s most colorful characters.

This month we invite you once again to … Meet Pumpkinhead.

Big Shout: What have you been up to lately?
Jerry Lehane III: This past year, I’ve been sending tapes to the Howard Stern show. I gave him ideas for his book and his movies – hopefully which will come out next year. It probably won’t even be shot ‘til next year and it will be called Private Parts. It was back in the summer when I got the idea for that. I would just sit down and ramble different ideas onto a tape recorder, and I got the idea and sent it to him. Well, within a week he was calling his book Private Parts. There’s a lag time when you send tapes away like that.

BS: Who do you send the tapes to – the radio station?
JL: Yeah I sent it to the radio station. I’ve sent him a total of about 15 tapes over the past year. They would either be comedy skits, suggestions for the show, or for book material when he was writing his book.

BS: And they would respond?
JL: No. The only response is on the air. That’s one of his policies. He’ll talk about his mail on the air, but he won’t write back or send back anything. The only thing I’ve gotten is things that I’ve bought off of Jackie “the Jokeman” Martling, and he’s my sort of connection. I introduced Jackie to the show back in ’82. I told him about Howard Stern over the CB radio when he (Martling) was in Delaware looking for directions for a comedy club. I talked to him and Fred, and I told them they should hook up with Howard Stern. This was back when he (Stern) was in Washington and they were from Long Island. Jackie was a comedian, and his handle on the radio was “Jackie the Jokeman” and I said, “Wow, I like that handle.”

When I was talking on the CB in ’82, I gave them ideas for the “mini skirts, Jerry.” When you hear “mini skirts, Jerry” or “underpants, Jerry” that’s a reference to me making a stupid joke about Jerry’s Kids or retarded voices. When I was a school bus driver, I would tell the kids to “shut up and sit down… you’re all Jerry’s kids.” They would come back at me and say, “Okay, Jerry (slurred voice)” to just go along with the joke. On the radio, it got even more raucous and we would make obscene comments and things, and out of that came the idea for “equal opportunity offender.” So that if we really pissed somebody off bad, we’d just say, “Well, we like to offend everybody – we’re an equal opportunity offender.”
So they used that quite a bit.
Geez, what else? Oh, when you hear Jackie doing his, “Oh, yeah!” that’s something we came up with, too.”

BS: You’ve written some songs for people?
JL: To start out, I would say I wrote a lot of hit songs in ’86 and ’87, and I recorded them on a four-track at Paul Slivka’s house, who was the bass player for the Young Rumblers. I used to ghostwrite for Tommy Conwell. So he was the first person I wrote for as a ghostwriter, and the songs have gone on to become MTV songs. That was my goal all along – to get my songs on MTV. But most recently, one of the songs won a Grammy and it was the “Runaway Train” song for Soul Asylum. That was written in ’87 in the fall. I gave that to Soul Asylum at the Revival Club in Philly back in ’87 as a gift.
What I do is give my songs away because I mostly write for people that I intend the songs to sound like. So I’ve written many hit songs for major artists that have already made it, except for Tommy Conwell who is not a major star. I helped him make it. I wrote a lot of hits for Tom Petty, the whole first album for the Traveling Wilburys, Robert Plant, an album for Roy Orbison, an album for Patti Smythe, and most of an album for George Harrison. My goal was to be a world-class songwriter – no matter what it took, even if I didn’t get the credit for it, or any money or royalties at all – just to make sure that I knew in my heart that I was capable of writing hit songs.

BS: You say you’ve given suggestions to someone in Hollywood for “Deep Space Nine?”
JL: It was all inspired by the crash of the space shuttle Challenger. The explosion affected me because it coincided with a time where I went to California and almost got stabbed. I lasted in California for a week. I came back into Delaware with my tail between my legs, and at the time (Jan. – Feb. ’86) I had been a school bus driver – that’s where I wrote my best songs, and I came back and had to do that job again. The space station of “Deep Space Nine” is based on the Batman logo and a Mercedes Benz sign. I designed the Ferengi, the Borg, the Bjorins, Cardassians and a bunch of different characters.

BS: How did you get these ideas to the right people?
JL: That’s the hard part. I have to assume they get to the right people. Paul Slivka was the person that got them to the right people. I would give him all my material, all my lyrics, all my drawings, and tell him, “You travel. You go to California. You go to LA. You guys do the road work, and just get these ideas to the right people.” And he came through for me on all accounts. Since I was asking for no money and no royalties, they used the ideas and sucked them up like a sponge.
If you look at the design of the Enterprise – the reason it’s not a disk like the rest of it is – it’s on a pumpkin seed. It’s based on an inside joke. My name’s Pumpkinhead. I figured I’d put these visual jokes in.

BS: What do you say to people who don’t believe you – who say you’re crazy?
JL: That was all part of it. In my lyrics I would put little give-away things, like references to people’s names that I knew. A lot of my lyrics throughout all the bands I was writing for I would use the word “insane” which rhymes with “Lehane.” If you look across the board of the people that I’ve written for – Tommy Conwell, Tom Petty, Roger McGuinn, Soul Asylum – you’ll hear the word “insane” specifically drawn out for a reason so that I could tag it one day and say, “that’s my work.”