**** Coyle and Sharpe

ON THE LOOSE

(2.13.61 Records)

In the mid '60s, Jim Coyle and Mal Sharpe took the art of the man-on-the-street interview to a whole new level on radio station KGO in San Francisco, where they were (briefly) a local sensation. They didn't just talk to innocent bystanders, they talked them into things, thus prefiguring David Letterman's (and, by extension, Jay Leno's) whole shtick by a quarter-century or so. They deliver their wildly inventive and implausible riffs with such deadpan lack of panache (fortunately they're not comics but pranksters) that they're able to con people into seriously considering courses of action that make absolutely no sense.

In a typical encounter, they describe a method of inserting a coin in a man's brain and adding a special powder that reproduces the coin endlessly; then they ask a guy to let them cut his head open, on the spot, in their station wagon, in return for a percentage of the total number of coins replicated. In a month, they claim, you could end up with as much as $43 from one dime. Henry Rollins discovered the duo's two Warner Bros. albums and compiled this new one from their old radio shows. (Call 800-992-1361, or write 2.13.61 Records at Box 1910, Los Angeles, California 90078.)

-- Peter Travis