Biography
Les Crane first earned widespread notice through his spoken-word recording of “Desiderata,” a 1971 hit that topped charts and earned a Grammy. Born Lester Stein in San Francisco in 1935, he initially built a following as a rock-and-roll disc jockey at Bay Area outlet KKYA. He later joined KKGO, where program director Don Curran assigned him the on-air name Crane and placed him in charge of a late-night interview program. That broadcast quickly attracted listeners, its popularity further boosted by Crane’s marriage to actress Tina Louise. ABC recruited him in 1964 to front Nightlife, one of several network efforts to challenge NBC’s The Tonight Show. The Les Crane Show came next; the Rolling Stones delivered their first American television performance on the series on June 2, 1964. Two years afterward Crane appeared on screen for the first time in the little-seen feature An American Dream. The single “Desiderata” originated from a poster containing Max Ehrmann’s well-known poem; Crane’s recitation climbed into the Top Ten during fall 1971 and captured a Grammy. No further chart successes arrived, prompting a later shift into computer software. The album Desiderata received its initial compact-disc release on Warner Bros. in 1999, though the edition remained available only briefly, before Collectables reissued it in 2003.
Albums