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It would be interesting to know what a capable novelist might have done with the material Paul Shaffer has compressed into his memoir, We'll Be Here for the Rest of Our Lives. One imagines a modest attempt to impart at least something of the meaning of the musician's stories and recollections, to stitch an interpretive thread through our hero's endless acquaintanceships with celebrities, his lifelong obsession with television and pop music, his cool quotient, his cheerleading for the war in Iraq, his meticulous reportage of his own bon mots, his intelligence and talent, gifts impeccably unburdened by any compulsion to push his artistic ambition beyond the playing of cover tunes for late-night television, the arrangement of other composers' scores, the performance of television or nightclub shtick.

Shaffer makes it clear at one point (protesting perhaps a trifle too much) that he never wanted to write songs or impart a message, was always happy to present other people's joys or pain or insights, or simply to make the scene, jamming with Dylan, accompanying Carly Simon, arranging for Sammy Davis.

We'll Be Here for the Rest of Our Lives: A Swingin' Showbiz Saga, by Paul Shaffer with David Ritz, Flying Dolphin Press, 322 pages, $32

Gilda Radner called Shaffer “the most showbiz guy I know,” a reference to his love of the spotlight, love of the stage, love of actors and musicians and comedians, of whom he knows dozens upon dozens. Indeed, one could provide a passable review of Shaffer's relentlessly star-embroidered memoir merely by listing the hundreds of celebrities through and around whom he has pieced together a reflected version of himself over the years: Jerry Lewis (fabulous heart), James Brown (fabulous soul), John Belushi (fabulous comedian), Phil Spector (fabulous arranger), David Letterman (fabulous friend), Cher (fabulous chanteuse), Gilda Radner (fabulous comic innovator), Eartha Kitt (fabulous singer and actor) … the fabulous Marty Short … the fabulous Bill Murray … the fabulous Four Seasons and Beach Boys.

As most Canadians know, Shaffer was raised in the fabulous wilderness city of Thunder Bay on the north shore of fabulous Lake Superior, where he is all but deified for his stature in the fabulous world of entertainment and, more personally, his committed care of his parents as they aged.

“ Shaffer is certainly not a textbook Canadian, much less a northerner or outdoorsman ”

The one-time musical director of Saturday Night Live and, currently, of The David Letterman Show came by his obsessions honestly, growing up the only child of a doting and musical mother and a lawyer father whose interests, like his son's, ran obsessively and knowledgably to the world of U.S. entertainment. Pretty much the defining event of young Shaffer's life was a trip to Las Vegas with his parents, in the early 1960s, to see Sarah Vaughan and Juliet Prowse.

In the Shaffer household, television mattered. Vegas mattered. Ed Sullivan mattered. Jazz and rock and roll mattered. If for Paul there was a kind of suspended perspective on the rest of the world, it was the sort of suspension the flip side of which is the manic focus required to make it in the world of, say, high-level sport or entertainment. Such suspension and focus undoubtedly explain why, today, Shaffer can barely write a paragraph without sliding sideways into the world of Hollywood, Vegas, Broadway, of recalled performances, lunch dates with actors and late-night phone calls from musicians and producers.

Shaffer comparing ties with Bob Dylan: He loves musicians, actors, comedians ... anyone and everyone in showbiz.

Shaffer offers faint praise for Thunder Bay, based on a vague sense of its social warmth, as expressed chiefly through the tiny society of the Shaarey Shomayim Synagogue, which he attended as a boy and where he gave his first public concerts, in competition with his archrival, Marvin Slobotsky. But the city as a whole is largely written off as a place where the girls were so unhip as to not realize that rock musicians were supposed to get laid, which Paul apparently never did while playing with any of several local bands from his youth.

Shaffer is certainly not a textbook Canadian, much less a northerner or outdoorsman. In his assessment of the glories of Thunder Bay, he mentions the splendour of a starlit sky on a winter's night and the thrill of witnessing such grandeur, at least for a second or two, after which it is obvious that the only thing left to do is go indoors and watch TV – preferably American TV, given that, for Shaffer, CBC television is about as attractive as hemorrhoids. At another point, in reporting a snowy day in Westchester, he makes reference to the “frozen hell” of his childhood in Canada.

Beyond some juicy and amusing anecdotes, what is heartiest and most compelling about the book is Shaffer's infectious enthusiasm for music, for performance, for shtick, his ironic awareness of, and affection for, show-business clichés, his occasional betrayal of a dark side, say in the hilariously tasteless jokes he reports telling at parties and celebrity roasts.

More engaging yet is Shaffer's profound affection for all things New York City. From the moment of his arrival in Manhattan, he manages to convey an almost palpable excitement over the city's landmarks and nightlife and energy. For nearly 20 years, he lived in a double room in the old Gramercy Park Hotel, where he ate his meals, entertained visitors and generally lived the life of the hip Manhattan musician.

In the end, however, it is difficult not to feel slightly short-changed that this man of talent and intelligence, the one-time leader of the World's Most Dangerous Band, has settled over the years for artistic safety, when one suspects he has something more compelling, even risky, to say about himself and the culture that swallowed him whole. He is a kind of Jonah, calling faintly from the innards of the whale, but not clearly enough that we can make out the message.

Parts of Shaffer's story might be likened to the Borges fiction in which a writer creates for himself an ironic postmodernist validity by copying out the classics of literature – in effect, covering the songs of others – building an identity and opus free not just of risk but of the draining, often catastrophic, toll that can be the result of any significant artistic probing of one's surroundings or self.

“I'm happy to be the guy who backs up the singers, the strippers, the rockers and the rollers,” Shaffer says toward the end of the book. “… I still hear myself telling my mother, just as I told her when I was a kid falling in love with music, ‘Ma, it's rock and roll.'

“It's a party.

“It's a life.

“It's a dream.”

In the hands of an even slightly more aggressive dream interpreter, Shaffer's story would have been a good deal more captivating than it is.

Charles Wilkins lives and writes in Thunder Bay, where he is occasionally seen walking down Paul Shaffer Way.