Michael Braun details his 33-year partnership with Tony Ackerman, evolving from a Goodwill sewing machine theft to crafting 20 monthly psychedelic outfits for Jimi Hendrix using rayon velvet and "sticky type buttons." He contrasts Hendrix's shy nature with Macho Man Randy Savage's chaotic disregard for design costs, noting how Savage wore disliked purple chain ensembles that Vince McMahon loved. Braun reflects on the impersonal reality of fame, treating even controversial clients like "Pimp Joe" Sanders with neutrality while transitioning from physical garments to digital art in 1996, ultimately framing creative work as a straightforward business transaction rather than a romanticized pursuit. [Automatically generated summary]
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Making Clothes for Rock Stars00:04:09
Hello, world.
Michael Braun is a legendary fashion designer, best known for making flamboyant stage clothing for pop culture icons such as Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Hulk Hogan, and Macho Man Randy Savage, and the list goes on and on.
If you've ever seen a wrestling video of the Macho Man wearing a crazy outfit, it was made by Michael Braun.
On this episode, Michael details his very close relationship with Jimi Hendrix and the psyche of Jimmy and the way he thought and the way he communicated.
He even shows these handwritten letters that Jimmy would write to him all the time.
This episode is a gripping look into the creative mind and business mind of someone whose day job was making wearable art for the world's most prominent superstar performers.
Without further ado, please welcome the marvelous Michael Braun.
Brother.
One, two, three.
One, two, three.
Hi, Michael.
Hello, hello.
How are you doing, sir?
The Danny.
It's awesome to meet you.
Good to meet you, too, sir.
What an amazing life you've had.
It is, from your point of view, amazing.
It's just the same old thing to me.
And the thing I would say at this point is that people sometimes freak out over this.
You met this one, you made clothes for that one, you made art for this one, whatever.
And what I would say to you is that it's just.
destiny, karma working out, whatever.
I'd like to tell you how wonderful I am.
It's BS.
This is just fell in my lap.
I was born a certain way with minimal talent, just art, and all the rest of the stuff in life, other than putting out the garbage, which I'm good at, I like to brag about, and I really may not be that good at garbage, but I think I'm good at garbage, is making art.
For 33 years, I made clothes for rock and rollers and wrestlers.
But it just fell into my lap, meaning I was racing ocean racing sailboats and small sailboats, dinghies that they race in the Olympics, since I'm a little kid.
Long story short, I bring an ocean racing sailboat to Florida in 1966 to race, meaning I'm just working on the boat.
as a laborer kind of person.
And I dislocate my shoulder.
The doctor says, don't go near a boat for a year.
I'm in St. Petersburg at the yacht club, living on the boat, cleaning the boat, getting it ready for the Southern Circuit.
I'm now living with, I meet a topless dancer.
She says, oh, you can come live with me.
So I'm living now with four topless dancers in St. Petersburg, just off 49th Street.
You left this part out of the documentary.
Oh.
Okay.
Where did you meet the topless dancers?
There was a topless club in St. Pete.
And at the time, this was considered like, how dare they have such a thing?
You know, women walking around without tops on.
This is like, you know, the newspapers went crazy with it.
But anyway, it was a topless club.
You know, regular bands are playing pop music.
It's the places filled up with men and women and then there's two girls Without their shirts on dancing to each song one of them took a liking to me.
She said I needed a place to live because I couldn't live on the boat anymore and In the process I meet a lady in the club We start going out her name is Tony.
Topless Club Memories00:07:21
She's my business partner for 33 years making clothes and very talented with clothes and very talented at running business, which i'm not so um, meaning all the paperwork stuff and and the ideas behind it.
Meaning she came up with an idea.
This is 1966.
You're making clothes get half down, so i'm making you a hundred dollar pair of pants.
You're giving me fifty dollars.
Now you're invested in it.
Um, And Macho Man, towards the end of us making clothes for him, had a $10,000 deposit with us, meaning we're making huge amounts of clothes.
You know, I'm making an outfit a week.
You know how many weeks there are in a year from 800 to $2,500 a piece You know, and he's wearing them, you know sometimes some of them outfits.
There's no pictures of I never saw a picture hundreds of them.
There's pictures of but you, and this is year after year after year, but back to the beginning, Tony.
My business partner had a babysitter and a three-year-old son and Whatever the babysitter heard you say he would go steal it.
So we once, because we were poor, we heard he heard us say the word flank steak or just the word steak, I don't know what he heard.
He's working in a restaurant.
There's a big, huge flank steak.
He wraps it up, throws it in the garbage, goes back after the place closed, comes back to the house with the steak in his hand, you know.
And he goes, you know, like look, I got the thing, you know.
And he heard us say sewing machine, Meaning I had done some sewing before altering my own clothes and making some things from scratch a bit.
Just starting.
Because I didn't have money always for the cool clothes that were available in Greenwich Village in New York.
So, long story short, we're playing this game.
He hears the word sewing machine.
He's working now at Goodwill.
He steals, even if you can put this in a sentence.
The word steal and goodwill together.
He steals from Goodwill.
A sewing machine brings it back.
We start altering clothes and making clothes and fooling around, and now we're going out each night.
We're walking to a club that was on 34th street and Fifth Avenue, or between fourth and fifth Avenue North, and the people freaked out.
So this is 1968.
There's no, there's only pinstraight clothes, Brooks Brothers kind of clothes.
People see this stuff.
They lost their minds, totally lost their minds.
Now I end up making five Nehru shirts, so button up with the collar and all that stuff, for a local band that's playing in this club called the Blue Room.
I sold five shirts for $18.
I showed the money to Tony.
I said, look, we're rich.
Look at my hands.
We're rich.
This is almost $100.
We're rich.
You know, think about it.
So we were just led into that.
Now, some months after that, moron male ego.
Okay, you got that?
I say to Tony, clean the house.
I'm going to bring back the Vanilla Fudge, who had a huge hit, You Keep Me Hanging On, which was a Supreme song, and they did it in a psychedelic way.
I said, I'm going to bring back the fudge.
They're playing on, I think it's 38th Avenue South.
There's a place what's it called, Susan?
Where the military kind of place, building.
Like a VFW or something?
Something like that.
Anyway, we're military, you know, it's just a big room.
Yeah.
So I go there.
I follow the drummer, Carmine Apice, who was in the movie that you saw.
I follow him into the bathroom.
I say, I'm Michael Braun, stage clothes.
And I make the mistake of saying, where do you get your clothes?
And he said, Haight, Ashbury, Carnaby Street, and The Village.
And I say, well, this is what we're making.
What I have is way better than what he's wearing.
I mean, way.
I said, you want to come to our house after the gig?
Fine.
Three of the four guys came.
They bought everything that remotely fit them and that we could alter for them.
And then they wear it on Ed Sullivan, which is the show live Sunday night, 8 to 9.
Big deal.
All kind of rock and roll people played that gig.
Anyway, now the public, you know, freaks out over the vanilla fudge.
The clothes are cool.
Unbeknownst to me, they're on the road with a new guitar player who's come from England named Jimi Hendrix.
Okay?
I mean, he's from Seattle, but he was in England.
Now he comes to America.
He's on the road with them.
This is before he explodes.
Jimmy says to Carmine, where'd you get the clothes?
This is one sentence.
Carmine says, our friends in Florida.
I didn't know we were friends, meaning we made clothes for them, you know, but we're not hanging out.
Not that I wouldn't, but I'm just saying.
He says, our friends in Florida.
I go to see a record producer on First Avenue South.
almost to 66th Street, a guy named Phil Gernhardt, who produced Abraham, Martin, and John, Snoopy versus the Red Baron, and Stay by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs.
These are three huge records.
I take all the clothes.
I go to his office, small office, whatever, and I show him the clothes, and he says to me, Listen, I'll tell Jimmy about you, but I'm not going to push you on to Jimmy.
I don't want to upset him before the gig.
He's an emotional guy.
You know, it's nothing to me.
I'm not getting anything out of this, so you call me Sunday afternoon, 4 o'clock.
Sunday afternoon comes.
It's 4 o'clock.
I dial his number.
He picks up the phone.
He says, Michael, you're not going to believe this.
Jimmy gets off the plane and says, where are the clothes, people?
Destiny and Karma at Play00:14:54
Okay, so all I'm saying to you is that you could say, you know, in the language of our time, they'd say, oh, you were in the right place at the right time, or, you know, this is just luck or whatever.
This is destiny working out.
This is just insanity, crazy.
Now we end up making clothes for Jimmy, and back to the beginning of what I was trying to say, and that is that, so you have this person that has a little bit of, creative talent for clothes, for art, for two-dimensional art.
But that's where his brain is.
If you say to him, listen, I need you to be my lawyer.
I committed this murder.
Here's a million dollars in cash.
Yes, I'm going to take your money.
They're going to hang you.
I got no ability to argue whatsoever.
You know, I mean, none.
So all I'm saying to you, I'm accepting how the game is going.
Because I'm forced into it.
So you designing and making clothing, is this more of a thing that you're doing just to make money and survive?
Or is this more of like a passion?
Both.
Both.
The survive thing, we're all carry some kind of a survival mentality with us as humans.
And me hearing that my people were killed a lot in Europe and that my grandmother walked a year and a half before 1910, like around 1905, Trying to get to America so that she could be free of the hate vibe.
Whatever the hate vibe was, whatever I mean I don't know the blow by blow because these people didn't talk about it but a man that lived across the street from me for a while in Tampa, right near the stadium, shows me a picture of a raft and in the raft is his wife, his parents, his two kids and a dog and a little motor.
I mean, this is not.
This raft is maybe twice as big as this table, maybe.
And I'm telling you, I'm a sailor.
I wouldn't go across a pool that's 10 feet long that's six inches deep in this thing.
And he comes from Cuba to America because he's looking to save the lives of his family and make them better, meaning he's driven by this.
So I want to eat lunch and dinner at least.
So I'm working.
I need to make money.
But I have a natural ability to make crazy stuff that people love.
So I put those two things together.
I mean, it's how I'm born, meaning I'm built that way.
This is not, I wasn't like killing myself to like get my head into it.
My head was into it.
And the, thing of making the clothes takes up your whole brain, meaning you're having to learn about how to make patterns, how to buy cloth, how cloth drapes, how cloth sews.
Now you're into sewing machines, now you're into buttonhole machines and embroidery machines and serging machines, and how to keep them running and where to buy them.
And this, each one of these things, is a thing unto itself that could really fill up your brain.
You know, and now, at 78 years old, and I didn't make clothes, I stopped making clothes in 2001, I walk into a room, I look at somebody, and I could tell you what the pattern looks like.
I could draw the pattern for whatever it is they're wearing, I don't care what it is, man, woman, dog, then man, or I could draw it.
I could tell you what machines were used.
I could tell you why this fabric, the dye didn't stay in it, the way it was washed, all that crap.
It's meaningless, meaning why I'm even thinking about it.
You know, I could tell you how brassiers are made, panties are made.
You know, stuff that you're going, Mike, you got some other place to put your mind?
You know, meaning this is just craziness, but it's the mechanics of doing that thing.
The same with computers.
I'm painting art in a computer and I'm making small pieces and huge pieces, and none of it looks like anything that you know, meaning I'm not drawing palm trees.
Abstract stuff.
It's abstract.
And people die over it and say, How did you get this?
And they say, How did you go from making clothes to doing this abstract art?
You know, and I'm saying it's the same thing.
I'm painting a human on a stage with patterns, fabrics, sewing machine, whatever.
It's what I'm doing.
This is the exact same thing, except no one's saying to me, I got Madison Square Garden in a week and a half, and it's got to be blue, and it can't be more than $2,000 or $1,000 or whatever.
Or Jimmy is saying to me in a letter, anything you come across, don't be hesitant to make something anything.
To your fancy, as long as it's specially made as art, period.
That's in the middle of the letter.
Especially made as art.
What did he mean by that?
Talk to him.
You know, what he's talking to, this is two humans communicating in English, but he's got his version of English, how he calls things.
I made a shirt for him, it's in Life magazine, where I use three squares of Velcro.
In the letter, he says, try to match the color of the sticky type buttons.
To the color of the shirt or as close as possible.
In the meantime, Velcro just came out.
He never heard the word Velcro, for sure.
It just came out then.
They only made it in white, but he called it sticky type buttons.
What you and I have on our heads, he calls them ear goggles.
That's just how he talks.
You understand what I'm saying?
Do they really call them ear goggles?
Really?
Wow.
Could I make this up?
I guess not.
That's pretty fucking amazing.
So, what I'm saying to you is that he knew.
By seeing the clothes that we showed him in the beginning, then we made him clothes.
Now we're making clothes for him every three to four months.
I'm sending him a whole wardrobe shirts, pants, jackets, scarves, armbands.
Now he's writing me letters to this letter to say, I need more of this, I need one of them, and more unusual sleeves.
So at one point.
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He shows me, we're in the Sheridan Hotel downtown Tampa.
It's towards the beginning.
And he shows me a sleeve that instead of being small, it's maybe this big.
You know Mike, he's not playing with a full deck, the poor thing.
So how does he cut it?
Are you talking about yourself?
Yes.
How does he cut it?
He cuts it from the armpit to way out here, way this much.
You'll see hundreds of pictures on the net of this.
And then six-inch ruffles along the edge.
He's buying this fabric.
This is silk chiffon and then all other kinds of silks and stuff.
But he's buying this fabric in St. Petersburg and in Tampa in the fancy ladies fabric store.
He's walking in with hair out to his shoulders into a thing that only women go into.
Men aren't going to buy fabric to take the fabric to their seamstress to make a gown for their whatever party that they're going to to show off.
So all I'm saying to you is that Jimmy, He knew without any words that I got what he was doing.
I'm starting to make clothes for him.
He's freaking out.
He loves it.
But what does Jimmy always want?
More.
Money means nothing to him.
He doesn't even know what you're talking about.
Never heard of money, means nothing.
You know, it's past money, way past money.
So you guys never discussed money?
Never.
Not once.
Never.
Are you kidding me?
No.
He would just say, go to them and get the check or, you know, whatever.
How did you figure out how much to charge him?
Ah, now you're into Tony Ackerman.
So Tony, in the early days we would come up with a price here's, you know, crushed velvet pants.
They didn't have crushed velvet in those days, so we'd crush it ourselves.
And we're doing fabric covered buttons and he's wearing these pants at Woodstock.
Okay, aqua front seam pants.
So the pants are tight to the knee and then if you look from the side that it's coming down like this, then it gets wider as it comes to your foot, so it's going out to the toe of your shoe and then to your heel.
Um, he sees what we're doing.
He just wants more.
Um he's, he knows these people, he knows Tony, he knows Michael.
They're just about making clothes that are cool.
That's the.
There's no thing, you know, I don't need.
You know whatever autographs or mean nothing to me.
And Jimmy Just as an aside, says to my little Italian business partner, this is maybe 1968 or 9.
Talking about Tony.
Talking about Tony.
Women are having sex with me just to say they had sex with Jimi Hendrix, meaning I wasn't in the room when he told her this story.
He's talking to her because he can talk to her as a human.
And he's getting something off his chest, which is a hurt.
And he says to her, women are having sex with me just to say they had sex with Jimi Hendrix.
I'm 26 and a moron.
So my reaction is, well, if there's a problem, me and the boys can help fill in the blanks.
We don't want anyone's feelings to be hurt.
Meaning it's just stupidity.
Then I figured it out afterwards in the years that went by and women's libs started to happen that this is insulting to Jimi.
Very insulting.
Meaning they just want a piece of him.
They were stealing the clothes.
When he says to me in this letter, dear couple, I need clothes espresso.
Send whatever you have immediately.
And I'm thinking, dude, who the hell do you think you're talking to?
This is Mike.
I just sent you a whole wardrobe.
You know, what the hell's wrong with you?
Then Mike figures out what's going on.
What's going on is that the girls are stealing the clothes.
That's number one.
Number two, he's splitting the clothes.
I'm using silk and rayon.
Rayon.
Velvet that I'm talking about, meaning this, is rayon velvet.
So.
Rayon?
Rayon.
How do you spell that?
R-A-Y-O-N.
Okay.
You're asking the wrong person about spelling anything, but that one I knew.
That's nice.
Trying to touch it.
Yes, yes, yes.
So, rayon velvet, when it, I'm making tight pants for a rock and roll guy who drops his ass down to the ground holding the guitar in front of him.
This rayon velvet, this is meant for a proper lady's gown.
End of story.
This is not rock and roll.
There's nothing rock and roll.
And.
But now we're back to the thing about that we were talking about, knowing the specifications of all these different fabrics.
So rayon, different colors run different ways.
That's number one.
From perspiration, from washing.
You know, you give someone a rayon shirt that's red, you know, and it's a drummer, his body's going to be red at the end of the this one's not rayon.
That's cotton.
Anyway, all I'm saying to you is that Rayon, at the end of its life, as you start to stretch it to the end of its life, it'll just split.
It'll just split.
You'll have a foot long split in the thing.
He was splitting the pants.
I never knew this.
He never says it to me ever.
He just says in the letter, try to double stitch the pants.
Right?
That's what he's saying.
Right.
Now, just as an aside, maybe four or five years after Jimmy dies, Robin Trower, who we're making clothes for, really known guitar player, is playing in Lakeland.
I go there.
Split Pants and Guitar Heroes00:08:13
This is a proper English guy, not into drugs, you know, whatever.
Very proper and cool.
We go there.
He plays.
We delivered some clothes.
Anyway, he now, he and I and a couple of the roadies, Go out for dinner after the gig.
One of the guys is a guy named Jerry Stickles.
This is Jimmy's roadie from the beginning.
The beginning.
And what I'm saying to you about roadie is that this guy will do whatever it takes to save whatever the situation is that's going on with whoever he's working for.
This is the no fool around kind of thing.
This is not just someone setting up the microphones.
This is his whole life devoted to.
Let's save Jimmy, who just got in a car accident or did this or got caught with that, you know, whatever the thing is.
He's the parachute when shit goes wrong.
Okay, that's a way of saying it.
Parachute says it all.
So Jerry's there with us, and he says that, or he tells this story that Jimmy, I forgot where I was.
Wait a second.
You were meeting them at dinner or something?
Yeah, so Jerry Stickles is there and he tells this story that Jimmy is playing a gig in Seattle.
That's his home.
It's a revolving stage.
Jimmy drops his ass down to the ground with his guitar in front of him, splits the pants.
They throw him an English Union Jack flag.
Okay?
He ties it on him like a diaper, two knots on his hip, is the way I understand it.
I never saw a picture of it.
And the gig goes on.
All I'm saying to you is that that's why Jimmy is saying to me, try to double stitch the pants.
You know, as the years went on, I learned, well, you can't use this fabric on that human being because he can split it.
He doesn't wear underwear, right?
That's the legend.
No underwear, baby.
No underwear.
Oh, Jesus.
Could you imagine?
Can you imagine?
Seeing that happen?
Can you imagine?
And this is, no one's going to believe you.
I'm going to tell you this thing and you're going to go, eh, Mike, you don't know what he's talking about.
They say, well, what was he like?
This is quiet, shy, introvert, very well-mannered.
I believe it.
You know, but everybody else says, I don't believe it.
That's not what I'm seeing in the music.
That's not what I'm hearing.
All I'm saying to you is that his art, as it came out of him, is what you're seeing.
The poetry part of it.
I'm just going to talk about poetry, which I know nothing about.
I walk into a room.
He's there.
He says to me, Oh, you got to read this great poetry book, some known poetry book.
I'm thinking, Hey, dude, this is Mike over here.
What are you talking about?
Poetry.
I'm into, you know, being masculine.
You know, me and I'm being silly.
But I'm going, What the hell are you even talking about?
Poetry?
Who the hell are you thinking?
What?
Poetry, but he was way into that and what Bob Dylan was writing was heavy heavy, heavy poetry.
What Jimmy's writing, when he's talking about Wind Cries, Mary or you know all those kind of songs where you know he's talking about you can see happiness staggering on down the street, footprints dressed in red.
He's telling a story from his point of view.
In his mind He's talking about this and he knows that this is like very shocking to the society.
Meaning I'm on the phone with him once.
I'm calling him from New York.
I mean, I'm in New York with him.
I'm calling Tony and I'm saying, what about this?
What about that?
We do our business that we had to do at that moment.
And I say, Tony sends her regards or her love or whatever.
And Jimmy says, Tell her I'll meet her in the next world and don't be late.
Meaning, this is Jimmy.
This is his song, but he's living in another place that you and I can't imagine.
You get a clue of it by his music.
And you say, oh, this is some cool place.
But back to sort of the beginning.
Yeah, talking about his personality, personally, some of the most talented people that I know I've ever met have been very socially awkward and introverted like that.
I wouldn't say he's socially awkward.
I would just say.
Introverted, quiet, shy, very well-mannered, and he knows how to get through a situation, whatever it is.
Meaning, you know, in his hotel room in downtown Tampa in the Sheridan, there's a paper bag on the, you know, little table there.
I didn't think anything of it.
You know, we're doing the clothes and we're taking the order and this and that.
And this is at the first time we're meeting them and I say, oh, let's figure out your size.
Try these pants on.
Meaning, I could just look at him in one second.
I could tell you what size he is.
I give him the pants.
He walks over towards the bathroom.
There's one of those thin tables by the bathroom.
And he takes off the scarves that are tied around his waist, which this is like a two-minute job, meaning he's got knots of scarves going around his waist and around his waist.
Just what he's doing at the time.
Is this what he's wearing?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Over his pants.
Okay.
He's wearing scarves and he's tying the scarves around his knees and, you know, all that stuff that you see.
Anyway.
He takes it off, lays it on this table, takes the pants, goes into the bathroom.
Two minutes later, he comes back out with his original pants on.
And he's got the pants that I gave him to try on.
He says, Make them all like this.
Meaning he's saying, Don't measure me, don't touch me, whatever.
Make them all like this.
Fine.
Meaning he's shy.
And those pants.
fit them, but these are tight pants and they're tight partially because they're seamed down the front and back and I can get away with it, meaning we're getting known for this look of these pants with the buttons down the side and all that.
But all I'm saying to you is that he could get through a situation later on in that day after he played.
Now myself, you know, a few other guys and girls or whatever are back at his room after the gig, you know, the reefers being rolled.
We're smoking it.
You know, half an hour goes by and everyone's looking around.
They're hungry.
You know, someone takes out a piece of paper and tries to take an order.
You want a burger from the whatever downstairs or fries.
The first person tries to do it.
They can't write.
They can't even spell their own name, meaning they're too high.
Second person, too high.
Third person, too high.
Finally, Jimmy says, Give me the pad.
Hungry Crew in Morrison's Cafeteria00:02:20
He takes it.
He asks, Do you want a burger?
You want it medium?
You want fries?
You want this?
You want a Coke?
You want.
He had to have been a waiter at some point in his life or he knew about this stuff.
He wasn't ashamed of it or anything like that.
This is what it took to do the job.
He says, give me the paper.
And he writes, gets the whole thing written out.
They went and got the food.
We ate the food.
That was the end of that.
But all I'm saying to you is that this is a very natural person.
And that's what's coming across when he's telling me, don't be hesitant to take.
And make something, anything to your fancy, as long as it's specially made as art.
He's telling me, Mike, go for it.
Just go and enjoy it.
Just go and make it.
Don't worry about the money.
Don't worry about the time.
Don't worry about Jimi Hendrix.
Don't worry about anything.
Just go make some art and then send it to me and make a lot.
So all I'm saying to you is that this is a lesson in life of.
This is just another person.
With all the things that you have, he may have a different set of talents and a different way of operating a little bit.
And obviously a very different destiny so far in your life anyway.
But all I'm saying to you is that he knew how to communicate on a record.
He knew how to communicate with some fool that's making his clothes in Tampa or St. Petersburg at the time.
So there's a beauty to just being natural.
That's really what he was, you know, where a lot of us feel as though, you know, I can't be natural.
I'm not, I got to play this part.
That's what the culture is telling me is proper or cool or, you know, whatever.
Right.
You know, and what he's saying, just go for it, Mike.
Yeah.
You know, do what you do.
Right.
That's why he chose you.
So going back to, you were shipping all of these outfits to him wherever he was.
How many outfits were you making for him in a month?
Embracing Natural Simplicity00:05:13
Like 50?
You know, no.
I would say maybe 20.
20?
Yeah.
And some of these women were just stealing them from him and he had no idea?
No, no, he had an idea.
He knew they were stealing them.
But the women would queue up to be with him.
Right.
They would, you know, let's say we're in the hotel, we're doing clothes, or we're hanging out afterwards.
People are coming to the door, knocking on the door.
I want an autograph.
I want to meet Jimmy, whatever.
You know, and I got to say, listen, we're working.
You know, you do what you got to do, but you only got five minutes.
Get it done.
And some of the girls you let in, particularly one girl that we let in that Susan knew, the next morning, she was there for five minutes and left, whatever.
The next morning, she's there when we come, meaning she had spent the night.
She came after we left late, and then she was there in the morning.
Is this in Tampa?
This is in Tampa.
And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this girl.
I'm just saying to you.
That this is, you, if I say to you, well, here's 500 girls, they all want to sleep with you.
You go, that's a little overwhelming.
Can I have two or three?
Right, right.
You know, right.
I mean, can we stretch this out over a week?
How long do I have?
Yeah, yeah, long.
But I mean, and I'm saying to you, and you can hear him say it in between songs where he's saying, This is dedicated to the girl in the seventh row with the red underwear.
This is the girl with the chrome knee pads.
You know, you'll hear it in between the songs.
He's talking.
He's just thanking people or talking to people or saying whatever's on his mind at the moment.
I like to thank you for the last three years.
He said three things to me about the end.
One of which is, I don't know how much longer I'm going to be doing what I'm doing.
I'm going, this sounds like what is the context of this?
Like, are you guys this is out of nothing.
You guys are hanging out, eating dinner, you're traveling with me?
We're walking.
I think we were walking somewhere.
He said, I don't know how much longer I'm going to be doing what I'm doing.
I'm going, first of all, I don't like this.
Second of all, I don't know what it really means.
Third of all, I'll do what Mike does.
And Mike's not very smart.
He just shoves it under the carpet.
Let's forget it.
Just blow it off.
Then he says I don't know how much longer I'm going to be needing clothes.
I'm going, what are we talking about here?
What's going on?
The third thing, I forgot what it is.
I forgot five or ten years ago what it was.
He knew the end was coming, okay?
And he was saying it to me.
And he was here in St. Pete for maybe four days just before he died.
Really?
Yeah, yeah, just before, two weeks before he died.
Or weeks before he died, let's say.
He had played the High Life Fronton in Miami.
We went there.
We brought him back.
He stayed at this place, I'm telling you, the Blue Room, which was a motel that they've just recently torn down on 34th Street.
But my point is that he knew what was coming.
And even though he's trying to say it to me, I'm not listening to anything he says.
And he's very human.
He's a very human person, whatever that means.
He's staying in this hotel.
He's getting up at 4 o'clock in the afternoon.
That's the wake-up time.
Okay, so getting up at 4 o'clock and we're going to eat right next to this place called the Blue Room in those days was a place where you just line up to get the food.
What do you call it, Susan?
Morrison's Cafeteria.
Proper people in St. Petersburg.
This is 1970, 1969, probably 1970.
So you go out, and this is a proper place to go with the family, with your wife, Morrison's cafeteria.
And you line up and you say, I want that, I want that.
You're pointing to it.
And the people have got the spoons and they put it on your plate.
They put it on your plate.
And now Jimmy's first in line.
I'm second.
Tony's there, and I think Elena.
The people that are spooning the food say to me with their mouths but not their voices, is that Jimi Hendrix?
Line Dancing with Jimmy00:04:49
You know, they're pointing and they go, is that Jimi Hendrix?
Like, this is Jimi Hendrix.
He's in Morrison's cafeteria at 5 o'clock.
Like, what the hell are you even talking about?
This is impossible.
I mean, he's very famous at this point.
So all I'm saying to you is that we go to Morrison's, we eat, you know.
Or if you go to any club, anywhere with him, they always invite him to play.
He'll always play.
Always.
Always.
You know, he may say, I need this kind of guitar or turn the amp around.
I want it to be louder.
You know, you don't know what he'll say, but he's looking to play.
This is where he's living in his head, in his heart.
Or Jimmy, myself, Tony, and a few other people are watching a movie on television.
And it's a movie about wolves that raise a baby.
Okay?
It's an old, old movie.
And we're watching it, and the wolves are raising the baby, doing this, whatever they're doing.
There might be foxes.
I don't even know.
And so we're watching it just properly.
And we see, we glance over to Jimmy.
Jimmy's playing an air guitar.
In his head, he's playing along with the music in this.
thing in this movie.
This is where his head is at.
He's playing.
You know, then he realizes we see what he's doing, you know, and then he starts tuning his elbow.
You know, I mean, he makes it into a joke.
But all I'm saying to you is that all of these people, musician types, Macho Man, same thing, these people are totally taken up with whatever game they're playing.
It's 100% of their being.
100.
I mean, Macho Man, Miss Elizabeth complained about this.
Gorgeous George complained about it.
They're there getting clothes in our shop.
And this is like a huge house on South Bayshore Boulevard on the water, 6,000 square feet, and two acres of land, 150 feet from the center line of Bayshore, is now servants' quarters, six-car garage and servants' quarters.
You're going, servants' quarters?
What are you even talking about?
I never even heard of this.
This is 1927.
That's what you did.
You had servants, and you had a place for them to live.
So we're using this as our shop.
This is a concrete floor, you know, 30 foot by 30 foot room.
Upstairs is an apartment to rent and there's long rooms on either side.
One room is just a cutting room, you know, is a huge table, very long, that we're cutting fabric into garments on.
And all I'm saying to you is that the the playing the game with Randy, all the girls complained.
My way of saying it, he's never off, ever.
No.
He's working all the time, day and night.
This wears people out because they're used to having off time.
He never heard of off time.
He doesn't even know what you mean by off time.
This is a very hardworking person.
And.
The other funny thing about him and making clothes for him is that he has no visual sense whatsoever.
So I'm not saying it as an insult or a compliment or anything.
It's just here's a statement of fact.
He doesn't have this.
You say to Michael, can you spell?
Michael says, no.
He's not born with that.
And can he write down a telephone number twice?
Probably not.
He's got to really look at it very, very carefully, and hopefully it's an 813 area code or 727, so he's got the first three numbers.
But this is not his thing.
He's not born with this.
He has to really work at it to spell something.
I mean, Susan is tortured, I have to say.
How do you spell gone?
And so it's G-O-N-E, but it looks wrong to me.
You know, this is just something in your head.
Learning to Spell and Write00:02:41
You got something great over here.
You got nothing over here.
So you're doing the best you can with the parts you got.
So Randy comes to me.
I get a call.
First of all, I'm not watching wrestling.
I don't know about wrestling.
I know it's on television.
Let's pause for a second.
How far after your relationship with Jimmy, like obviously he passed away and you stopped working for him.
What was it like?
Well, first of all, what was it like when you found out Jimmy first passed away?
Where were you and how?
I was sleeping.
They came and woke me up and they said, Jimmy's dead.
So I'm new at this game.
I'm going, what are you talking about?
He was just here.
I mean, he was here like four days.
We had picked him up in Miami, brought him back, took him here, took him there.
I mean, I'm not getting it.
I'm saying, what do you mean?
He was just here.
You know, what are you telling me Jimmy's dead?
I couldn't get it.
And then they said he's in England, he died, he overdosed, or whatever they think it was, or, you know, he's dead.
Then I had to try to absorb this, but I had lost my birth mother at maybe four.
So I was forced into learning, A, people die.
People in your family can die.
This is how life goes.
Deal with it, dude.
And from there to this day, I have maybe five mothers.
Meaning, in my mind, I think they're mothers to me.
You know, my father married after my first mother died, a lady from Canada, beautiful, raised me and all that stuff.
In my heart, she's my mother.
But we had a beautiful, phenomenal maid, is what they called them in those days, named Arlene, black lady from Brooklyn, Brooklyn Dodgers fan.
You know so I could only love the Dodgers.
I loved Arlene.
This is my mother, meaning she took care of me.
I'm a little kid, end of story.
You know right, I love Arlene.
There's nothing to even say here.
Words don't do it, and the beauty of that is that you're learning how life goes, but you're getting what's meant for you.
This is a lesson you got to learn in life.
Loving the Brooklyn Dodgers Maid00:14:01
People can die.
You can love anybody.
If you want to love them special, we're going to tell them or they're going to play the part of being your mother.
And then you get triple love or quadruple love, you know, whatever the thing is.
I mean, and there's a lady that I know to this day that lives in Texas that's my mother.
She's younger than me.
You're going, Michael, what the hell is wrong with you?
Somebody says, this is your mother.
They said it to me, you know, maybe 40 years ago.
I treated her that way.
She's married to a friend of mine.
You know, but in my mind, she's my mother.
If she tells me drink echinacea tea, then I'm going, oh, I got to drink echinacea tea because my mother told me to.
You know, this is, I'm just telling you, this is how the mind works.
This is a wild thing.
And about Randy, he calls me on the phone.
I had made for Hulk Hogan, made close for him.
He was a bass player in a local band in Tampa called Ruckus.
And this is, how long is this after Jimmy passes away?
I'm not going to answer because I'm really bad on time.
Okay.
But I don't know what to say, but probably not terribly long.
And are these guys, are these stars, like people like Hulk Hogan, are they reaching out to you because?
No, no, no.
This is just, this is what's going on.
This is what we're doing for a living.
There's, let's say, in the eastern United States or the middle to the eastern United States, there's.
let's say there's 200 bands that is made up of people from 18 to 35 years old that go around and play two weeks in this club, two weeks in that club, two weeks in that club, anywhere from Indiana and Illinois and all those kind of places all through Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida.
So they come and play two weeks.
They hear, oh, there's some crazy people that make wild clothes that made Jimi Hendrix's clothes if you're into name dropping.
Oh, they make clothes for you know, whoever.
I mean, they'd go through the whole thing, share.
And so they'd come for clothes, we'd make them clothes, and they needed sometimes matching clothes and what fit their music, whatever they were doing.
So we're making clothes for them, and just this band comes that's from Tampa called Ruckus.
There's a real tall guy in the band.
I don't think anything of him.
We just make the clothes, end of story.
He's the bass player.
Then he becomes a famous wrestler, unbeknownst to me.
He started in Tampa.
They were rough on him physically.
He went to Japan.
They made him, they paired him with a Japanese wrestler and put his name or the name of whatever they were on the lunch boxes for the little kids in Japan.
He was a big star in Japan.
Now he comes back to America.
And this is at the time Vince McMahon, who owns the WWE.
Now it's a WWE, but WWF at the time.
He's now taking all these individual sections of the country and making one television show that does, you know, it's not.
Before him, it was Ted Turner, right?
I don't know who it was.
Before the WWE, before Vince McMahon took over.
Vince McMahon Sr.
First of all, Vince McMahon that you know now is.
Is the third generation.
His father did wrestling and boxing promoting in New England area, so New York Connecticut, New Hampshire, whatever that.
Um he, with the help of Hulk, supposedly put this thing together where they did all that, brought all the wrestlers together and started to do shows on television.
Right, I don't know about this I, I just know that I could, that I have a remote and I go around I see sometimes there's people doing the wrestling thing.
I got no interest in this thing.
But I hear he calls me on the phone one day and says, listen, I'm going to be on Johnny Carson.
I need clothes.
Can you make me some clothes?
I said, well, we sew every day, you know.
Can I make you clothes?
Yeah.
You know, meaning he lived in South Tampa where we lived with his parents.
And he, we made the clothes for Johnny Carson and then ended up making, you know, more clothes for him.
What was the outfit he made for Johnny Carson?
No idea.
You don't remember?
No, I have no idea.
Um, A shirt and a pair of pants, but I don't know what it was.
Wasn't it all denim?
Aiden, can you look up Hulk Hogan, Johnny Carson, find a picture of it or a video of it?
I don't know.
I don't think so.
I would doubt that it's denim, but God knows.
He may have been on Johnny Carson with a denim outfit.
Oh, it might have been a different time.
Yeah, maybe it's a different time.
But in any event, now I get a call from somebody I don't know who this is.
This is Macho Man.
I don't know who this is.
And I get the call.
I pick up my phone.
And Macho Man says, hey, the hulkster told me you can make me some clothes.
I'm holding the phone out.
I'm like, who in the hell is this?
The hulkster told me.
The hulkster told me you can make me.
You know, in his heavy voice.
I have no idea who this person is.
I said, well, we sew every day.
Come on.
Come tomorrow.
You know, we're here noon to six.
Give him the address, whatever.
Next day he comes with Elizabeth.
And he's got little shorts that have three stars across the front and then maybe two inch letterings across his tush says macho man.
You know, I said, dude, I'm not making shorts and I need real estate.
I need it from the ground to past your head, but I'm not making shorts.
This is not me.
I need, you know, you're asking me to make clothes.
I'll make you some clothes, but this is not it.
Anyway, he couldn't get to that.
He says, well, I made a lot of money with this and this and that, and he wants capes.
I said, dude, I'm not a cape guy.
You come to me and you say, listen, I need a I need a gown for my daughter that's getting married.
It's $20,000.
I'll pay you.
And then we got the bridesmaids.
They're $15,000.
Am I going to take your money?
You know I'm going to take your money.
Yes.
B, Roman numeral 2.
Michael, he doesn't wear dresses.
He doesn't think about dresses.
He doesn't think about weddings.
He got no idea what you're talking about.
This whole women's wedding.
What the hell are you even.
I got nothing.
Nobody home.
But.
I can go buy Modern Bride.
I can just look at a picture.
I can go draw the thing.
I'll make the first one and the sewers will make the ones after that.
End of story.
Here's your $20,000 gown.
But you're not getting the best from Mike because Mike has no idea what you're talking about.
I mean, none.
So Randy, I make him a few outfits to just get him started.
Now he comes to the shop again, puts his head down.
He says, you can make anything you want.
This is the kiss of death to say to someone creative, do whatever you want and not even put a price on it or a time, anything, something.
You can do whatever you want.
I make him five outfits.
And this is him telling me the story.
I make him the five outfits.
And he tells me he wears the one that he really likes.
He never told me he didn't like anything, ever.
Which he had to have not liked something or didn't get something or didn't realize something was as cool.
You know, that I thought it was cool, and it turned out that the public thought it was cool.
He didn't think it was cool, but then he got into it, that they liked it.
So now he tells this story that he's got the five outfits.
He wore his favorite outfit on Monday Night Raw.
Now it's the second week, third week.
Now we're up to the fifth week.
He doesn't say he wore the outfit that he didn't like, but it's the fifth week.
It's the purple outfit with the chains.
I said, okay.
I'm listening to the story, and he's trying to paint a picture for me.
Purple outfit with the chains.
He says, I put on the outfit in a separate dressing room.
I walk out of the dressing room.
Now I'm in the main room where all the boys are.
These are like old ladies who play marjon, these wrestlers, meaning you can only lift weights, you can only travel, and you can only lift weights, travel, and wrestle so much, then the rest you just gossip.
You know, so-and-so did this.
You know, you got 20 guys sitting around a room with nothing to do.
They gossip, and this is before cell phones.
So they just gossip.
He walks out of the room.
They all turn.
They go, wow, where'd you get that?
That's great.
He's going, this is the one I didn't like.
I thought this is nothing.
They freaked out.
Now he's walking down the aisle, down the corridor, he tells me.
Vince McMahon's coming the other way.
Vince stops him and says, what the hell is that?
That's great.
Wow, where'd you get it?
Now he's going, Wow, now I'm really in trouble.
Now Vince loves it.
Now he tells me he's standing in the opening to walk out to the ring.
He walks through the opening.
They put the spotlight on him.
He said, and it really pops.
This is his word.
Really pops.
And he really gets over, meaning he does well.
Right.
Connecting to the audience that night.
Really got over, brother.
Exactly.
And all I'm saying to you is that he was telling me he has no idea what the hell I'm doing, but go for it.
And another time, and another time, meaning I'm making probably 45 outfits a year at $800 to $2,500 a piece.
And everyone in the documentary on A&E said that Randy was really cheap and he wouldn't buy a cup of coffee and this and that.
He never mentioned money.
I just told him, you know, Tony came up with, you know, get a deposit.
So we got the $4,000 deposit to begin with.
You know, and that worked for a while.
And then she said, You got to go up to 10 grand, Mike, get another six.
You know, whatever she'd tell me, I would do.
Meaning she could see this thing from an outsider's point of view, from just strictly business.
And you said, How do you know the price?
When we first started to talk, she and I made a list.
How much fabric is in it?
How long did it take to buy the fabric?
How long did it take to design it?
How long did it take to make the pattern?
How long did it take to cut it?
What was Vera's price to put the thing together?
How much time to paint it?
How much time to make the pattern for the painting?
Macho Man, Macho Man, Macho Man.
How much for the glitter?
How much for the paint?
You know, on and on and on.
And so we'd go through that long list of stuff.
And this is when we first started to fool around with computers.
That's Susan's fault, totally.
So you're talking about 1996.
And so I made this piece of paper that.
You would write in, took an hour and a half to cut it.
It took this much to buy the fabric.
This is what the fabric cost.
Here's Vera.
Here's whatever.
Anyway, as we're doing it, we're figuring out that this is what's going on.
But then we also said, Tony would sometimes say, does it look like it's $2,500 or $2,000 or $1,000?
I'd say, it comes out to $1,500, but it looks like it's really $12,000.
Or it comes out to 12, but we should charge 1,800.
You understand what I'm saying.
But it all meant nothing to him except to say, he says to me in the shop, we're alone.
It's a 30-foot by 30-foot room, concrete floor, as I said, this thread everywhere, fabric everywhere, clothes being made, patterns hanging, fabric on rolls, under this table, under that table, hanging on this shelf and that shelf and whatever.
I mean, just, there's nothing fancy about this.
Business and his point of view on this game is that we're doing the best that we can.
He sees that we're making a huge effort.
He says to me just out of nowhere, i'm small, i'm a big mouth, as you see, and i'm looking around like what the hell do?
How do I answer this question?
His arm is bigger than both of my thighs together.
Small Mouth, Big Arm Challenge00:14:47
Right.
What do I say?
Did he mean that he was short?
You figured it out.
See, I didn't figure it out.
I didn't even get this.
I think, what the hell is he talking about?
I don't know what he's talking about.
I'll just leave it alone.
I say nothing.
Then, like a week later, WWF comes to wrestle at the University in Tampa.
I go there.
I go up into the balcony.
And I look.
What are they seeing?
Meaning, I'm trying to see what is the audience seeing.
And I'm taking pictures of every outfit we make of Randy's.
I tell them, go outside.
I take a few pictures from the front, from the side, from the back.
Meaning, I want to say ink on paper.
What does it look like?
What does this outfit actually look like?
Wow.
So.
It's so absurd.
You said the right thing, brother.
I mean, it's amazing the amount of just.
Creativity that you put into this.
Where are you coming up with these ideas?
Hold your thought one second.
So, continuing.
Continuing.
So, what I'm saying to you is that we're going to come back to this thing, but where was I?
Tricks.
Pause one second.
I'm going to turn the AC back on.
Okay.
It popped off.
Okay.
Aiden Noble up to find that picture, huh?
I looked myself and all I found was something there.
I didn't know he was with Rocky.
All I have was the pictures that we're going to talk about Slim Jim a little bit.
Yeah, so when you're hold these up next to your microphone.
That way they'll be in focus and we can see them on the camera.
When you're referring to them, at least.
Okay.
All I'm saying to you is that I'm trying to see what the audience is seeing with a virgin eye.
Meaning, I'm just 18 years old.
You know, my friend says, I got free tickets to go to wrestling.
Let's go see it.
Or let's sit down and watch this thing.
You know, I walked, I saw it on TV.
You know, what is it?
What I'm saying back to you is that I'm trying to get to the place that is in the beginning.
You just see this thing.
You don't know who made the clothes.
You don't know who the wrestler is.
You don't know what's going on.
You're just going around the channels and you want to see, does this stand out compared to whatever the show is that you're watching, whatever the car commercial is that you're watching?
What do you get out of this?
So you're getting, this is some crazy, Wrestler wearing some cool clothes.
This is really cool.
What the hell is this?
Where did it come from?
Who thought of this?
How did this even come about?
But all I'm saying to you is that the world just gets wow, this is cool.
This is unbelievable.
What is this?
Is this like most of these looks that he's wearing?
He's got the hat.
He's always got the iconic hat shape and he's always got the long tassels hanging off the arms.
It's like a cowboy pimp, right?
Okay, no.
So let's go back.
You got to remember about where we were, but I'll do this part now.
Okay.
He's wearing glasses.
I say, oh, let's put some crap on the glasses and make them crazy that the macho man would wear.
So I start putting all the stuff on the glasses, and I'm working on glasses.
Then he says to me, listen, they made me the macho king, and I got to wear a crown, and he doesn't like it.
I said, okay.
He says, I need something else for my head, but I don't want to wear this crown anymore that they gave me.
I said, fine.
We go to Ybor City.
There's a proper men's hat store with every kind of hat you could think of.
English bowler, you know, just all kind of things through history.
Every different kind of hat you could imagine.
And there's cowboy hats there, too.
I say, oh, the shape of the cowboy hat's good on them.
Let's see this.
So we try this, try that.
Now we end up with straw hats.
You know, I'm buying them by the dozen.
In his size, and I'm painting them.
And I'm having covered with fabric.
I'm doing all kinds of crazy stuff.
Or I'm painting them, and then I'm making a band that goes around them.
But what I'm saying to you is that the other wrestlers, let's say Jake the Snake, he's got one snake, one costume.
That's the deal.
You know, you see it next year, it's the same thing.
Randy, you're seeing some crazy-ass outfit every year.
Single week and the outfits fit this character.
You can't say why I can't give you the words, but it fits this character and I'm making the clothes and he's getting over with the clothes when he's saying to me, I'm small.
What I'm saying to you is when he came out of that dressing room now he's with the boys if the boys are standing up, He's just what you said, short compared to the big show, Andre The Giant, whatever, Hulk.
They're all taller than him.
But his personality is much stronger than theirs.
His macho mania craze thing, where he's living in that place.
This is not, you know, he's living there.
And his mother, his proper Jewish mother, who comes with him sometimes, the mother and father come.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
How old was he when you guys were doing this?
I don't know.
I'm bad on time.
I'd have to sit and think about it.
You're wasting your time asking me about this.
I mean, I got no thing on yours.
Right.
But the mother comes and brings the dog and the father's there, whatever.
You know, he's having to come like every two, three weeks.
You know, and they want to see what he's doing, or whatever.
The mother's, the one who's came up with the name Macho Man, oh really yeah, oh really.
Um, it's a proper Jewish lady and she says to me that he, as a high school kid, would get up really early in the morning, go practice, whether it's baseball or football or soccer or what you know, I don't.
I don't know what they're playing, but And then he'd come back home, clean up, go to school.
But he was like so intensely into this and didn't fool around with the girls.
He was working the whole time.
Now and again, a little bit with the girls.
But he was working hard, hard, hard.
And I'm saying to you that Miss Elizabeth and Gorgeous George both complained.
No day off, no.
Meaning he's out of balance.
He's working hard, hard, hard.
And you'll hear this at times from people who are very accomplished at what they do.
Daryl Hall, I heard him say it.
You know, you could say, well, there's 50 great songwriters here, 50 great singers, 50 great guitar players, or you know, arrangers or whatever.
Why has this guy got 30 songs that the whole world knows, and this guy's got two?
This one works harder.
That's what Daryl is saying.
Meaning, and it's his nature to work hard.
He learned it from his parents.
The same Macho Man learned it from his parents.
Go and break your ass, work hard.
This is life.
This is what we're telling you to do.
And he did it.
You're saying, where do these things come from?
I'm saying back to you.
In my shop, pull it back a little farther.
There you go, right there.
I'm in my shop.
I get a telephone call.
Hi, this is such and such advertising agency in Connecticut, Stanford, Connecticut.
You know, no one calls me like this.
What do you do?
Who?
We're going to have Macho Man push our product Slim Jim.
Like I know what a Slim Jim is.
I'm a vegetarian since 1970.
Are you really?
Yeah, and I saw Slim Jim in the store, but I don't know what it is.
I don't know that it's dried meat.
It's a fine piece of meat.
I don't know anything about it.
So they say, well, this is Slim Jim.
We want you to make clothes for Randy for Slim Jim commercials and this and that.
And I say, okay.
And they say there's 12 of us or nine of us sitting around this table.
We can all hear you.
And I say, okay.
I said, tell me what colors you want it to be and what do you want it to be.
They're drawing a blank.
I said, okay, let me start talking.
How about we do three outfits using the three colors that are in your product?
Black, red, and yellow.
Okay, we got that.
So they'll be predominantly black and, you know, this one's more yellow, this one's more black, but this one's more red.
They'll all go with each other.
Okay.
I said, the next thing I need, I said, I need only one person to call me on the telephone and communicate with me.
I'm not talking to a group of people later.
Just give me one person to talk to.
I said, send me 10 grand or 5 grand.
I don't know what I said to get started.
And now, again, I got a free ride to make Macho Man Crazy, but with these colors to be used in a commercial for Slim Jim.
What you try to say is, how the hell did you come up with this?
Or how did you come up with this?
You know, I just have some idea.
At some part in my head, who knows?
Let's try this.
You know, we'll change the lettering or we'll do this this way, or I'll start raggeding the.
But you weren't worried about, like, what if this idea isn't good enough?
Because he, you just were constantly making him new things.
This is a great point you're bringing up.
The point is, is that.
Like, what if he doesn't want to pay for this outfit?
Like, you were never worried about that.
You had an infinite.
This is paid for.
This is.
Yeah.
Forget that.
Yeah.
So now we're talking about freedom.
To be creative.
And the freedom is that you're making clothes for the macho man.
The work is how many outfits can you come up with in a year that are cool?
Not, mightn't he, he never told me he didn't like something in his life, ever, ever.
Didn't even hint at it like it.
This is not up to the, you know, and he would put on outfits.
We had a mirror leaning up against the wall.
He'd put on the outfits.
There's a junk chair, comfortable foam next to the mirror.
Elizabeth would sit in it.
He'd come out of the dressing area, come over, look at himself in the mirror.
He says, Oh, I'm going to wear this to WrestleMania.
You know.
Now he'd go, Now we're on the third outfit.
He says, Wow, this is cool.
I'm going to wear this to WrestleMania.
You know, Elizabeth would just roll her eyes.
I'd roll my eyes.
You know, there's nothing you could say.
It's his way of just saying he thinks it's cool.
But what I'm saying back to you is that from the beginning, I said to you, He has no visual sense whatsoever.
So he's wearing the wrong pants, wrong shirt, wrong jacket, wrong glasses, wrong hat.
You're going, dude, what the hell?
What are you doing?
Oh, he's not pairing the shit up properly.
Exactly.
And I'm saying to her or Gorgeous George, only put in his thing the stuff that matches.
You can't do this with him because he doesn't know.
He's not thinking he's making a mistake.
He's just thinking, oh, this is Mike's crazy clothes.
Let's put them on and go.
You know, and then he'll throw the glasses into the audience.
He'll throw the glasses on the ground.
I made an outfit once.
They were wrestling in downtown St. Pete, right by the water.
And he went, they threw him in the water.
Brand new clothes I just made with boots, cowboy boots, all hand painted, salt water.
I'm a sailor, baby.
You're ruining my clothes.
And then I got to go, Mike, they're not your clothes.
You made them.
You sold them.
They're somebody else's clothes.
He can do whatever he wants with them.
But all I'm saying to you is that.
Where was my mind on this?
My mind was, let's go buy fabric that we can make a cool outfit for Macho Man.
I start to spend time with my wife, Susan, 1996, and I'm painting on his hat, on his shirt, on the back of his jacket, on the left and right leg of the pants, Macho Man.
over and over again.
I don't know what the word font is.
I know there's all different kind of lettering, and I didn't realize they're called fonts, but okay, they're called fonts.
I learned that.
Stretching Lettering on Fonts00:05:06
And she says to me, listen, I'm going to lend you a computer for the Christmas vacation, 1996, and you can learn how to change the lettering around.
You could stretch the lettering.
That's all she told me.
Right.
You know?
So she gives me the computer.
You know, I learned how to do it, to stretch the lettering, and I start to make art on it, which I'm still doing to this day.
I do outdoor shows, maybe a dozen shows in the state of Florida, and you can see the art on my website, michaelbraunart.com.
And that's B R A U N, his last name.
So, here we are.
She gives me the computer.
I learn how to stretch the lettering and do the whole deal with it, and I'm making the patterns, and I'm Then I'm hand painting Macho Man, Macho Man, Macho Man, all these different ways.
I don't know anything about a computer.
If the computer, I think it breaks or something, I just put my hands up and I start yelling, it's broken, it's broken, fix the game.
You know, I didn't know you had to marry tech support, but you do.
I'm just warning anybody out there, you want good tech support, you got to marry it.
But my point is that, again, I would just led to this.
This woman gives me a computer that can do this, all this crazy stuff.
Yeah.
Is that how you made these?
Were these, uh, what are these?
I'll hold them up.
Were these helped out by the computer?
Can I try them on?
No, no, yes, you can try them on.
Okay, by all means.
No, no, I'm just hand painting them.
This is not a computer thing.
So, explain to me was it his decision to paint the sunglasses, or was it your decision?
Is it his decision, dude?
We did, dude.
Oh, yeah, go put them on.
Try these, try these.
So, this is what this is double face tape that I learned about double face tape from sales, or put together with double face tape and then sewn.
And this is holographic glitter.
That's hand painted.
That's just eyeball.
There's no computer to anything.
That's just an eyeball.
And this was complimentary to an outfit that looked just like these.
That went with it, yeah.
Madness.
Okay.
Yeah.
And you'll see it on the net.
This is not rocket science here.
Go ahead.
These are really cool.
I think I've seen pictures of him wearing these.
Oh, yeah.
There's no problem seeing through these.
You would think it'd be hard to see through them because of all the paint.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And your eye to your brain, your brain fills in what you can't see.
Your eye just fills it in.
It's just unbelievable.
Because everyone says, well, if those glasses, I couldn't walk across the street.
And I'm saying, you know.
You could write a letter in these glasses.
Oh yeah, totally.
Oh yeah, totally.
Oh, yeah.
I could drive down I 4 wearing these things.
That's exactly right.
You could also wrestle.
Anyway, so you're seeing now if you're looking at.
God, these ones are sick.
Sick?
I beg your pardon.
Sick isn't good.
I understand.
You'd have to explain sick to me.
So what?
This is just tape, right?
This is tape.
Yep.
So this is a film.
That I'm buying that has a backing.
It's stuck to the backing.
And if you go to the store that makes the signs, they have a machine that cuts out the letters.
Johnny's Burgers, okay?
Now it cuts it out, and there's a tape that they put on top of it where you can pull it off and put this.
Lettering Johnny's Burgers on the window and rub it down, then you got it.
You know, so I'm using their technology.
I figured out how to do it.
Some of it I did in the computer, but a lot of it is just eyeballed.
But what I'm saying to you here is that I wanted to have the same print of this zebra looking mush that's on his belt, this black jacket, black pants, this fringe, all kind of stuff.
with that exact pattern on it, meaning there's at least three different color combinations of outfits made for Slim Jim.
Zebra Prints and Rhinestones00:15:05
And then this spare pieces, I got this idea for a hat or that idea, meaning they all go with each other.
Some look better against this background or that background or fit this newness that they're doing or this idea that they're trying to, you know, come across.
All I'm saying to you is that I'm just playing.
I'm just, you know.
Are you constantly trying to?
Is it difficult for you or are you thinking about trying to outdo yourself for the next one?
Like this outfit was great.
He loved it.
The audience loved it.
Now, are you worried or concerned about trying to up the level of outright or make the next costume even more outrageous or flamboyant?
Here's the answer it's in two parts.
And the two parts are, A, you're making so many outfits, you don't have that much time to think.
So think, worry, criticize yourself, whatever.
You're going to buy fabric.
You're cutting up the fabric.
You're trying this with it, trying that with it.
You're telling Vera, put it, do it this way, do it that way.
You know, Vera sometimes, she doesn't get, I'm writing a note, do this, this, and this on this.
She doesn't sometimes understand Michael what the hell he wanted.
She does something else.
Maybe it's cooler.
Maybe it's cooler.
But in general, there's no time to do it.
You're just trying to make cool clothes.
Each week, each month, you're trying to use all the parts.
So we're talking about holographic glitter on, you know, these here.
Or you're talking about, here's.
These are painted, then some of the stuff is painted, and then the glitter is put on top of the paint.
I don't know if any of it's here.
These are rhinestones that are glued on there.
Here's rhinestones that have been banged off, you know, as rough as he is, you know, with the outfit.
So I'm just saying to you that there's no time for it.
There's just a time to do what you're doing.
Go buy the fabric, chop it up, give it to Vera, talk with Tony, see what she's going to say about this or that.
And if you're into romance, so I start to go out with Susan.
It's 1996.
She lends me the computer.
Now, I have her come over to the house Monday night to see the clothes that we made.
She saw me making the clothes.
She knows Macho Man because she's there when he's coming at certain times.
She's teaching at a school right near where we are, a middle school.
And she sees this game.
Here's what's going on.
You know, you can't really explain it, but this is the romantic Monday Night Raw thing.
You know, you got to go over to Mike's house and, oh man, Monday.
And he delivered the clothes on Friday.
And you were there when the clothes were delivered.
Now we're going to see them on TV.
And, oh, this is a thing.
All I'm saying to you is you're just doing the best you can.
Was that satisfying to watch Monday Night Raw and watch everyone wear your clothes or watch Macho Man wear your outfits?
It was kind of like a sense of satisfaction.
People often ask this, and I'm going to say the answer has to be yes, but it's really not from this point of view.
In the early days, I'm telling you that the Vanilla Fudge are on Ed Sullivan.
I tell my mother, my proper Canadian, my mother, number two or three, depending on how you want to count.
And I tell her, watch this group, the Vanilla Fudge are on Ed Sullivan tomorrow night, you know, with clothes that we made, you know, because they had sent me to military school in the eighth grade.
Because they were hoping for, you know, doctor or lawyer.
Then they realized, hmm, I think we might get post office picture on this.
I don't know.
With this guy here, you know, meaning I'm not fitting in.
And this is a very rich neighborhood.
This is old time money, huge houses, huge boats.
Your parents were pretty wealthy?
Yeah, they were wealthy.
And, but everyone around us was wealthy.
So I was raised with these people and I raised sailboats with them.
So I got.
Where that headspace was.
And all I'm saying to you is that.
So I tell her, watch the show.
You know, it's the fudge, you know, doing, you keep me hanging on.
And they got lace shirts on, proper women's lace, you know, and I'm making a shirt for the drummer out of it, you know, because it's obviously not hot.
Anyway, long story short, I call my mother the next day.
I said, Mom, did you watch the show?
She says, Yeah, meaning they're living in New York, and obviously I'm in Florida.
She says, Yeah.
I said, What'd you think?
She said, Well, we like the clothes, but they're goons.
She tells me they're goons.
I said, Mom, they're from Far Rockaway.
This is just an act.
This is show business.
She couldn't get it.
She could not get it, meaning she's believing what she's seeing.
Right.
This is an act.
This is an act.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, people back then didn't understand that it was all set up.
It was planned.
And didn't like.
The modern music at all, not even a little bit, this is like some horrific thing.
I couldn't even tell you that.
From 50s music, 60s music, early rock and roll, Chuck Berry, whatever.
Were your parents, when you were young, were they supportive of your creative endeavors?
Were they telling you just to do whatever you want, do what makes you happy?
No, no, they're selling me to military school.
Then they see my sister gets me out of that.
That's three years of that.
Then the last two years of high school, I'm in a very proper boys prep school in Connecticut, you know, and.
You know, one of the teachers that I had, it was a real bright guy, English teacher.
He said, you should get a job as a barber.
He knew I cut hair, meaning I see someone cut hair and I see that I could cut hair.
You just see, let me see you do it once.
I know I could do it, you know.
So I'm cutting hair to make money, you know, spare money.
He says, you should get a job.
You should have a trade is what he's saying to me, meaning.
You're a moron, dude.
You know, get a trade and go do that.
And he's not saying it in an insulting way.
You could take it in an insulting way, but once I sort of found my way, is that I had an ability to make something that was artistic andor cool for stages.
You know, end of story.
There's nothing you could say.
You know, did I kill myself?
To learn how to do it, to how to make patterns, to all exotic sewing machines, buying sewing machines, buying fabric.
You know, there's an art to that.
I mean, and so I worked hard at it, but it just doesn't fit into the normal, you know.
And he grew up and he became a lawyer and he defended whatever kind of people, you know, speeding tickets or, you know, whatever it is.
You know, it's beyond me.
Ah, my father sees that he can't do much with this kid.
And even my sister before me, the same thing.
In a different way, but the same deal.
My father arranges for his son that he can't get to do well in school or listen to him.
He sends him to the Midwest, Wisconsin, to be in a training program.
He invents this, a training program in Hamilton Beach because he's making stuff for them.
He knows the guy that's the president of it.
So he says to the guy, Listen, have my son be around there for a few months, and then we'll send him to your advertising agency.
Let him stay there for a month, and let him go with the PR people for a month.
You know, that are taking care of the chef that just left the White House or whatever.
So he knows what the game is to be making electric carving knives.
How does a big business work?
How does an advertising company work?
How does a PR company work?
How does this go?
So the guy does it because he's no way can get out of it.
You know, you got Mikey's a pain in the ass, but he doesn't talk much, thank God.
So, you know, we'll put up with him.
And So I learned, okay, this is what the advertising business is about.
This is what PR is about.
This is what manufacturing is about.
I'm going to all the business meetings with the boys that are supposed to know what they're doing and all that stuff.
All I'm saying to you is it just let me know I don't like this at all.
The military school told me, you don't want to be involved.
This is not a fun thing, Mike.
Later.
You got to look under a lot of skirts.
A lot of people have said it that way.
You got to see, a lot of people don't understand what it's like to be in those different worlds.
And I was backstage as a child at maybe six years old.
Maybe seven, my mother, who preferred dogs to humans, and my father would bring home people to do business in this big fancy house and the proper people and all that stuff.
And my mother, in the first 15 minutes, she would say, I prefer dogs to humans.
You know, I mean, she just dropped a bomb like, I'm not into you.
Great icebreaker.
Exactly.
Great icebreaker.
And she.
Had in my house my whole childhood between six and ten dogs in pairs, show dogs.
So from tiny dogs to big dogs, but in pairs.
And so I'd be around all these dogs all the time.
And I'm just telling you, she's into show dogs.
End of story.
So the guy that's showing her dogs, the handler is what they're called.
He works at Radio City Musical.
He is the stage manager for Radio City Musical.
So my mother gets me in there.
She says, okay, go backstage, go with him.
And, you know, now we're standing and the Rockettes, the girls that kick their legs up in the air, beautiful girls.
So they're there hooking up and then, you know, one gets on to the next one.
They're holding each other's shoulders and they're kicking their legs up and there's maybe 30 of them or I don't know.
There's a lot of girls.
Now, maybe I'm seven, eight years old.
I'm going, I never saw anything like this before.
I was never backstage before.
There's something sort of cool about whatever these beings are that are kicking their legs in the air.
I'm going, something cool with this.
What's happening here?
Why does this make me feel funny?
Yeah, this is good.
What is this?
And I also went some connection to my, to my, Birth mother's family had something to do with TV in Miami and they were doing the Howdy Doody show.
I'm a little teeny kid.
I went there.
I sat in the peanut gallery.
So I'm seeing what this is.
So this is meaning I'm backstage and then I'm in the front of the stage.
I'm seeing what's going on.
So this is like just a part of life two meets.
This is no big deal.
For me to go to talk to Carmine, you know, he's playing in, you know, some.
Military kind of place, you know, I thought nothing of it.
And so I was used to being able to communicate with these people.
We make clothes.
This is how we do it.
Here's, you could choose this, you could choose that, whatever.
Randy, you know, you say, well, are you concerned about, did he like it or he didn't like it?
He got over in it is what it was.
And it helped him to compete in his head against the people that were bigger than him.
Meaning he was making a bigger, stronger statement than they were.
Visually, with his personality, how he talked, how he acted, how he wrestled.
But in this documentary they just did on him, he had some very big match in WrestleMania 3, and whoever he was wrestling with, Randy tortured this guy.
Two, they had a pad of paper, like a legal-sized pad.
Every line is a move.
And they're rehearsing in these moves.
This is three pages of run here, do that, flip me over here, flip me out there, you know, slap my face, step on my foot, flip me in.
And guy says, how hard Randy worked on this.
He's working for Randy, meaning he's just trying for this to be great.
And they say this is his best match ever.
All I'm saying to you is that this is hard work.
And I see him at times tear shirts that I've made for him, throw the glasses away, you know, do all kind of crazy stuff.
Seeking Deeper Connections00:04:28
This is him.
I'm making clothes for that person to do what they want.
But it's the same with Jimmy.
Jimmy gets what I'm doing for him, it's working for him.
He likes it.
It's good that he can contact this fool in Tampa and say, I need more of this or more of that, or you got something for me?
I got Madison Square Garden in two weeks.
Can you come?
You know, would you come?
You and Tony, can you come?
So Tony and I and Elena go to Madison Square Garden.
You think he's calling me up to invite, because he wants Tony and Michael and Elena to come.
He just wants new clothes, what he wants.
He'll take Michael and Tony.
Yes, we'll sit in the front row.
Yes.
We have a tape of him dedicating a song to us.
You know, where it says, this is dedicated to Michael and Tony and Elena.
You know, but all I'm saying to you is that if you take all the emotion out of it, this is just business.
This is just he's making a product that's working for these people.
You can say he's working hard.
You can say he's talented.
You could say he's not talented.
You could say anything you want about it.
It's just business.
And I was taught that because That was one of the lessons in life for me to learn.
Like, you know, everyone freaks out and they say, you know, when we started to do the outdoor art shows, Susan writes a bio, born here, went to school there, made clothes for, and then it's, you know, 50 names or whatever, big name drop.
Did you ever meet Cher?
Did you meet Jimi Hendrix?
I said, oh, no, no, we did it through the internet.
You know, they didn't even have an internet then.
They couldn't believe that we ever met him, you know, and then I said, yeah.
Macho Man, what was he like?
All I'm saying to you is that people put these entertainers on some pedestal, some special place.
These are humans, and they're not treated like humans.
The more the fame is, the less anyone could be one-on-one with them.
Back to, women are having sex with me just to say they had sex with Jimi Hendrix.
You never thought of this in your life.
I never thought of it in my life.
But once it goes down, I'm going, You mean these 13 girls that are lined up here, they just want to have sex with me because they heard I made clothes for Jimmy?
This is why?
Well, I'll try a few.
I'll try a few.
You understand the silliness of it.
But it's a sad part of humanity that I was forced to see.
Meaning I'm just a human like everybody else.
You know, and I got my favorite actor or actresses or singer or whatever, you know, that if you, you know, I got to go make clothes for whoever the thing is.
I mean, why did that make him sad though?
Why would that make you sad?
Just because it's.
Isn't that just the nature of humans or the nature of sexual beings?
They attract to the dominant alpha, the number one, the person who's going to protect them, the person who can.
Okay.
The answer is yes to what you're saying, but he was hoping they'd like him for who he was, just Jimmy.
Not because he sold 10 billion records or not because he was the best guitar player in the world.
You know, none of that.
Or that he wrote phenomenal, phenomenal songs.
He wanted them to like just Jimmy.
I mean, and I'm not saying this doesn't go on, that this is not a need based situation.
It is a need based situation.
But he was hoping for a higher need, meaning you really were.
You loved his personality.
You loved his humor.
You loved his way of being.
You loved his love.
You know, whatever.
But not just because his name is Jimmy.
Maybe he wanted a deeper connection.
Maybe he wanted.
Yeah, deeper says it in a simple way.
He wanted.
You know, did he ever have a long term girlfriend or anything like that?
Beyond Billion Dollar Records00:15:48
I don't know.
An assortment.
Yeah.
An assortment.
Never someone that he could settle down with and have children with, and maybe that's what he was looking for.
And he found something much more shallower with all these young teeny boppers bouncing through his hotel room every night.
Exactly.
Hmm.
I wish I could empathize with his problem, but I can't imagine putting myself in his shoes.
So, I don't know.
But.
If their 15 were lined up each day after a year or two, you got to select one or two or three, you know.
And they're here because they hear you're a billionaire.
You're a billionaire.
He's a rich guy.
Oh, we'll take some time with him.
Or he's rich and he does this or that, whatever the thing is.
You know, after a while you go, well, I like the sex, but.
If you're in that line just because I'm a billionaire, you're almost disqualifying yourself, you know what I mean?
For something serious.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Wow.
So how did you transition into doing what you're doing now?
Susan lent me a computer, as I said, in 1996 so I could change the fonts around and stretch the fonts and make the patterns and all that stuff for lettering.
That I was doing by eye and by hand.
And in the process, I bought a program called Painter, got 400 virtual brushes in the computer, and I started to paint.
Now, a year goes by.
I show it to you.
I say, What do you think?
You know, we're old friends.
You're supposed to tell me you like it.
You know, you look me in the eye and say, Yo, Mike, keep your day job.
Meaning it wasn't bad, but it was nothing to die over.
And then in time, it just evolved into I'll show you five pieces.
We'll take a break and I'll show you five pieces.
Is it on your website?
Yeah.
What's your website called?
Michael Braun.
MichaelBraunArt.com.
One word.
Aiden, pull it up.
Aiden, pull it up, dude, man.
Yeah, I can't imagine, I mean, jumping from doing what you're doing, creating these extraordinary outfits, outfit designs for people into, like, did you just one day just quit or did it?
No, no, no, no.
I'm playing with the computer and after a year it starts to get cool.
And people are going, wow, I want that.
You know, can you make me one of those?
We get into art galleries.
Susan gets me into an art gallery.
You know, people, they're selling the art.
Then she says, we need to do outdoor art shows.
And I give her the old man, oh, this sounds like a schlep.
Schlep.
Schlep.
What are you talking about?
But she.
I don't want to deal with all these schlemeals.
Schlemeals.
So she.
Gets me into the outdoor art show, which is correct, meaning you're getting to see the people respond to the artwork.
They don't care about you.
They just care about is this something I want to give this guy money for?
They don't care if they don't like my flip flops or my jeans or whatever.
They just care if it's going to look good in their living room.
Exactly.
Exactly right.
And so we're making art and it's selling.
But to me, it's the same thing.
It's just the creative process.
And the beauty of making art in a computer is that there's no first of all, there's no one saying, I got Madison Square Garden in two weeks and I got to have some great outfit or I got WrestleMania in 10 days or whatever.
So that pressure is gone.
Or don't spend, you know, it can't be more than $1,000 or $2,000, whatever the thing is.
The other thing is this, is that as I'm painting yeah, that's interesting.
The biggest difference is your clothing work was all commissioned.
And this is the opposite of that.
This is the opposite of that.
Not to say that some of this is commissioned, that they say, I want that piece, but I need it six feet tall, and it's got to be red.
People say that to me, and I'll do it.
I'm not saying it always works.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
But my point to you is that I'm free to make the art.
Back to Jimmy.
You know, whatever takes you there.
You know, don't be hesitant to.
Take and make something, anything to your fancy, as long as it's specially made as art.
Here, I'm saving the file at 50%, 70%, 90%.
You know, and there's what I call the Stephen Stills effect.
Meaning, the day you make the thing, Stephen Stills wrote this song, Love the One You're With.
You think it's wonderful.
You know, a week later, you're going, wow, I didn't see that it was too blue or the lower right corner is just not doing it.
I don't know why, but it's not.
So, With the computer, I can then change this into let's fix the lower right corner, or let's make this blue thing that the person wants in red, let's do that.
So the freedom of trying this or trying that or changing the proportions.
This was fairly square.
Now we got a long, thin horizontal piece or a long, thin vertical piece.
I mean, it's just wild.
And the people you get to see what's going on in an art show, they don't care about Mike at all.
They just walk and they look, they look, they look at the back of the tent to sides, inside this and that.
They're looking, they look, and they just say, I want that one.
They don't care.
Where did you go to school?
What was your idea?
What was your inspiration?
How the hell did you ever get to this?
They just go, Wow, I want that.
That's all.
End of story.
You don't have to talk, Mike.
You can shut up.
We don't want to listen to your crap anymore.
And how does that make you feel?
Oh, it's fine.
It's great.
You don't have any sort of emotional attachment to your art, to the stuff that you produce.
All of it.
All of it disclosed because I did it so many hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times.
You say, Well, now you see this thing on an album cover, you see this thing on television.
You see this thing on the Macho Man documentary.
You see this art piece that these people wanted at 90 inches wide.
You know, I tell them, well, just go put your tape on the wall and tell me how wide you want it.
The guy emails me back, 96 by, you know, 30 or something.
You're just some huge thing, you know.
You know, meaning he's not thinking it's huge.
He's thinking, I put the tape on my wall.
That's what Mike told me to do.
I saw the sample of what he was talking about.
He emailed it to me.
I saw his work.
I just loved it.
I want this piece.
He made it a little greener or he just stretched it for me.
And now it's this size.
It's fine.
What I'm saying to you is that there's a percentage of people in an art show or selling clothes or wrestlers that love it.
Some people got no idea what you're doing.
Some people says, what is that crap?
And they're entitled to it.
It's just part of life.
And so I'm just making clothes.
Some of them sell.
I'm just making art.
Some of it sells.
Some of them, they're looking at me like the hell.
Are you thinking, Mike?
You know meaning.
I do things mostly where it's a series.
I might have five of these, I might have 20 of these.
You know, i'm trying this, i'm trying that let's make it green or blue, or let's change the format of it.
Let's do this, let's do that.
As i'm doing it, i'm not thinking of, i'm thinking, well, maybe this will be better.
Sometimes I got to be away from it a day, a week, a month or whatever, or I spent all this time.
I spent two months on this series and did it all different kinds of ways and colors and shapes and formats and whatever.
You know, I like it.
Susan, she says, Yeah, it's all right.
Nobody else.
It's nobody.
Or some guy that worked for Rush Limbaugh.
He and I liked it, and that was in the world.
It's two people.
You know, it's a funny deal.
But that's just part of the game.
So, back to your thing about making the clothes, you're just making them.
All the time, and you've been beaten into the fact that some of these clothes they'll think is wonderful, some they're not going to like, some they're going to tear, they're going to rip, they're going to go into the salt water in, you know, some he's going to throw the glasses.
You know, it's just part of the game.
It's, you know, it's different than what you think it's going to be if you don't know anything about it.
But as soon as Mike tells you, here's the game, here's how it goes, you're going to paint 10 pictures, you know, three are going to sell, and seven, they're going to just walk by like they're looking to go with the baby in the stroller, or they're looking to buy jewelry, or they're looking to buy, you know, plants for their backyard.
You don't know what's happening here.
You know, you're just doing the best you can with the parts in front of you, but it's not personal.
They don't care about you.
If someone came to you and wanted some sort of special suit, some crazy design suit, would you do it for him?
I'm not sewing anymore.
I stopped.
Not so anymore.
No, I stopped in 2001, thank god.
So no more.
No more put that behind you.
That chapter of your life is closed.
Um, I did it.
I would say I did it and i'm very glad to do art on a computer.
It's a very clean thing to do.
I'm not involved with any people.
I can change the thing, you know, if it's not so good, I enjoy it.
Um, and the other thing i'd say that's sort of strange.
There's something really unique, and there's something about a piece of art you can buy that you can wear wherever you go.
There's something about that that's different.
For sure.
And people got exactly what you're talking about, meaning they're not educated in this at all, and they.
We're very happy to get one of a kind pieces because they're asking for it to be a certain way.
I'm making pants, jeans with buttons down the side, and button fly, and you know, denim lined and top stitched, and lacing, and this and that.
You know, they're glad to get it, and they're talking about it to this day.
They bought this in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s.
They're still talking about it.
I got this outfit from me, I still have it.
You know, we got over big time with it, you know, anyway.
Oh, Mindy?
There was a couple named Lance Abair, and his wife lived in St. Petersburg, a sax player in a band, keyboard player, songwriter, had a daughter, had a baby, whatever, in the 70s.
And she became a sax player that's known.
Mindy Abair.
A-B-A-I-R.
I think I'm spelling it right anyway.
She.
calls me on the phone.
She says, listen, I live in L.A.
I mean, and I obviously remember her, and I know the parents for a thousand years.
I live in L.A.
The guy that makes my clothes, I showed him a pair of pants that you made from my father in the 70s.
And I needed them to be altered to fit me.
He told me he wouldn't touch them.
He never saw anything like this in his life.
It's the mechanics of it, the whole thing.
This is in another place.
So I said, when you come to Florida, come, I'll do them.
So we took the pants apart, put them back together where they would fit her and all that.
And she wore them on American Idol and all that and took all kind of pictures in them.
But all I'm saying to you is that, do I know how to sew?
Yes.
Am I glad to do a job like that for her for no money?
Yeah, of course.
But my point is that This whole emotional thing about seeing it on television or an album cover, it's not there.
It may just be me.
It may just be me.
I don't know what to tell you.
It may be how I needed to see this whole thing in order to get through it.
If I was spending time, you know, that this Jimi Hendrix outfit, I didn't like the way it looked or Jimmy ripped it or the audience didn't like it or they didn't use it for the album cover or, you know, whatever.
It's a different place I would be, and maybe, you know.
I mean, it's also the most tremendous, incredible marketing you could have had for yourself.
It's you potentially would not have been as successful if you were if Jimi Hendrix wasn't an international superstar rock and roll musician.
You know what I mean?
My story is I say, well, if you're making clothes for God in those days, you know, you're just saying, well, I'm making God's clothes, you know, so.
You know, that's, you know, no one can say anything.
You know, they say you're into name dropping, you know, and you understand what name dropping is.
And, you know, some Nashville musician, I can't think of who it is, he says, Yeah, Paul McCartney told me I shouldn't name drop, you know, or some kind of thing like that.
He was making the joke, meaning this is a big deal, but you're saying you made clothes for Jimi Hendrix, or this guy that I'm taking you to made clothes for Jimi Hendrix.
But on the other side of that thing is that.
Everybody with eyes saw that we were making clothes that was around Tampa.
They saw it.
So the pimps started to come.
In the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, they started to come.
We're making clothes for them.
In this area?
In this area.
The pimps.
So we're making clothes for them.
Well, I don't know about pimps.
I never met a pimp before this, but I got an education and it was beautiful.
Meaning.
These are guys doing what my grandmother was doing.
She's trying to survive.
They're trying to survive.
So, the story was, I'm making clothes for a guy named Joe.
Education from Pimp Joe00:08:17
I call him Pimp Joe.
We make him lots of clothes, and it's all good.
When Joe brings someone to the shop, another pimp, he says, as he introduces that person to Michael, he says, he's all right.
What he's saying is he's all right with what we're doing.
He's all right with our skin color.
He's all right with whatever.
He's not making any judgment.
He's making clothes is what he's doing.
You want clothes?
He's your guy.
But he's not unhappy about your shoe size.
He doesn't care what kind of shoes you have.
He doesn't care what kind of haircut you have.
He just makes clothes.
End of story.
And in the process, Joe tells me he picked cotton.
In Georgia, I think it's Georgia, could be Carolina, but he picked cotton.
And when he was 19, he went to New Orleans.
A prostitute saw him and says, Come on, I'm going to teach you how to be a pimp.
You're going to be my pimp.
What?
Exactly what?
Exactly what?
Meaning she knew the game.
She knew this guy looked the part and could act the part.
It taught him how to be a pimp.
He comes with the Cadillac, Eldorado, and all that stuff.
Anyway.
So we're making clothes for him.
We're friends.
We're laughing.
We're having fun.
Now, I don't see Joe for a few years.
I don't think anything of it because they move around.
They go up north.
They do this, that, whatever.
I don't see Joe.
Now, a car pulls up to our shop behind our house on Bayshore Boulevard, South Tampa.
Two guys get out with suits.
I'm just telling you, nobody ever came to that shop with a suit on.
What are you talking?
Dude, you know, what are you doing with a suit?
It's just there's no reason.
It's not that it's against the law.
There's just not a reason.
You know, these are music people.
These are wrestlers.
Suits, no.
So they come in.
He said, hi, we're with the FBI.
I said, oh, let me see the thing.
Let me see the sticker and the badge and all that.
I never saw this.
Meaning, here's Mike.
Mike's not doing anything to break the law.
Not because he agrees with the law or disagrees with the law or anything or that he wants to break.
The law.
He just into peace of mind.
He doesn't want to be worried.
They're gonna come and arrest me because I was speeding over here, or they think I robbed a bank, or they you think i'm this or that.
It make no difference, I don't care, I did nothing, you know you're gonna.
You want to listen to all my phone conversations and see all of whatever wrote on the computer.
You'll die of boredom.
End of story.
That's i'm warning you.
So so they come in.
I get them to show me the badges.
Oh, this was so cool.
I wish I had pictures, but I don't.
So they show me the big.
They say, do you know Joe Lee Sanders?
I said no They take out the mug book big fat mug book and they open and go and go and you know, we're on page 20 or whatever I said oh, yeah, it's Joe pimp Joe.
I know him When did you see him last?
I don't know.
I'm really bad on time, but maybe a year and a half maybe two years.
I don't know Why he was stealing mail He went to jail for stealing men.
They're looking for him again for something.
I don't know.
For the same thing.
I don't even know what.
They leave.
Now another year goes back by maybe two.
I mean again, I got no idea on time Now Joe comes I said Joe what's happening the FBI came here and all that it was great.
I mean I got to see the badge and everything and he says He said it was a white boy crime.
They taught me white boys taught me how to do steal mail on the beginning of the month for some kind of thing.
You know people get checks in the mail and that you just sign them and you cash them and whatever.
I mean, I have no idea what i'm talking about, but I mean that's what he said.
Something like you get some kind of checks at the end of the month or the beginning of the month and he goes to jail for this thing.
Um, but all i'm saying to you is that this is just a regular guy trying to survive, meaning that's why he's doing this.
Right, i'm not saying anything about legal illegal, and what it taught me was he's no different than Jimmy, he's no different than Macho Man, everyone's doing whatever they do, as best as they can, whatever their destiny is, however the thing works out.
And it's nothing to criticize them about, and it's nothing to say it's wonderful about.
It's nothing.
It's just, this is Joe, this is Jimmy, this is Macho Man, this is Miss Elizabeth.
These are just people.
To you, they're all people.
To you, they're all people that walked in your shop that you wanted to create.
They wanted you to create something for them.
Yeah.
I mean, and.
Above my shop, where we made the clothes, is an apartment.
So it's rented to a couple that we know.
The lady is a singer.
The man is her manager and is connected with all the R&B groups.
He knows about this.
He brings two guys with him, and he just shows them, this is what Mike is doing, meaning these people aren't interested in these kind of clothes.
But he brings them in the shop, and the radio's on.
And whatever's on the radio, they can sing harmony with whatever.
I don't care what it is.
They could sing harmony with it this fast.
As it's going by, they can sing.
Who is it?
It's two of the pips Gladys Knight and the pips, Rainy Night in Georgia.
Oh, wow.
This is them.
Exactly.
Oh, wow.
Meaning, I'm going, wow, these guys can really sing.
This is a wild thing.
I mean, and I know nothing about it.
I'm not a musician.
I don't know about that part of it, but I know that these guys were there in the happy place.
With singing background music and these were the pips you know, meaning uh exactly, it's wild exactly um, but I think the other thing about you saying about all the clothes for Jimmy or macho man is that I see him so much on the internet and on movies and things and album covers that it just, it's just a part of life.
It's just, you know, it's something that you did exactly, something that uh exactly.
I think I find it so interesting that How you were able just to treat it like a job, just to treat it as I almost didn't have time for and that was the destiny, to show me that these are standard issue, human beings everyone right, everyone.
Don't judge anybody.
Be kind to all of them, be a human being, you know, this is you know, that's why Joe is saying he's all right, you know, he's saying that we're I mean nothing Jimmy knows that I'm concerned about the clothes.
I'm working here.
I'm trying to make some cool clothes for him.
That's what he wants.
Not because he's Jimi Hendrix, because this is what I do and this is who he is.
Meaning, I told the story in this documentary that went by recently on A&E, documentary on Macho Man Randy Savage, but that as I'm making the clothes for Macho Man, in that shop is glasses being made.
I mean, I got pictures of maybe 15 or 20 pair of glasses on a board being made at the same time.
Making Cool Clothes for Macho Man00:03:04
where I'm painting the edges of the glasses or I'm putting the glitter on them or I'm painting this.
But there's all these, they're lined up in rows and rows.
I'm painting lots of glasses.
But my point is that in doing this, I'm seeing that the business of trying to do it as well as I can is made worse.
By the distraction of, well, this is going to be on television, this is macho man, this is, this is just another guy, meaning i'm just trying to do the best that I can with the parts again, that are in front of me.
And what do you mean?
It's made worse, it's distracted.
I'm my creative or my work ethic is distracted oh, by by the attention, by the loss of breath because of who this person is.
Okay, There's lots of ways to say it.
Okay, I see what you're saying.
I'm just, they're expecting something.
I'm expecting something.
Tony is expecting me to make clothes.
That's what I do.
End of story.
There's no more to it.
There's no romance to it.
It's business, you know.
And so then I could see, oh, I got to go fix that buttonhole machine.
These buttonholes aren't right.
Or I need, you know, a thousand pearl buttons.
Where am I going to get them from?
I got to fly to New York and then go to New Jersey.
and find someone that's making, you know, one-inch pearl buttons, and I'll buy seconds and shift through and not use the bad ones or whatever.
So there's just so much of time that is eaten up with the actual work of the thing that you get away from the side ideas of, well, this person's famous on account of, or this person went to jail for whatever, or you know, meaning these are all just humans.
I learned this as a little kid.
So I got this kind of mother.
I lost that one.
I got this kind of mother.
I lost that one.
I got Arlene.
Arlene's a Brooklyn Dodger fan.
Oh, man.
I mean, and now the game is on television.
Television was just starting then.
Now, Arlene's vacuuming for hours the foyer where the television is so she can watch it because she's a devoted fan.
You understand what I'm saying?
But.
I'm saying to you that I love this one.
I love that one.
I mean, I'm on my fifth mother.
Do I love them all?
Yeah.
Do I listen to them?
Yes.
You know, I'm telling you, this mother that I have now that's younger than me, she tells me to do this or that, you know, or buys me echinacea tea that I got to, you know, I got to take it.
It's just insanity.
Whittling Wood and Quiet Moments00:05:53
It's just ridiculous.
And the poetry thing that I talked about, You know where I'm thinking well, well I'm not into poetry.
What are you talking about?
Then I realized what Jimmy's doing is poetry and that he's doing it in a phenomenal way, or Dylan's doing it in a phenomenal way.
It's just.
Did you ever save any of the letters he wrote you?
Oh, I'll email them to you.
You can put it on with this.
You still have them?
I have a letter.
I'm going to send it to you.
Okay.
Oh, he's going to put it on.
Are they on your website?
Maybe it is.
What she's doing, she's gotten up.
She knows the game.
That's incredible, man.
She knows the game.
So this is written on.
Telephone memo pad.
So it's a pink pad, and it says on the top, and this is obviously from the very old days it says, So and so called at such and such date on such and such a time.
Here's the subject.
They want you to call them back with this information, and they're available at this time or that time, whatever.
And the other side of it is just blank.
So that's where he's writing Dear couple, do this, do that, more shirts with odd sleeves, double stitch the pants.
Okay, she's working on it.
She's working on it.
So, all I'm saying to you is that.
Oh, there you go.
It's lower right hand corner is it.
Okay.
Maybe you can punch in on it, zoom in on it, Aiden.
I'll send it to you.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Send it to me.
That's really cool.
Now, you did stuff for Bob Dylan.
We met Bob Dylan at what's called Curtis Hickson Hall.
Now it's just a park.
They took down the building.
We had a girl that was around in the day calls me and says, listen, I'm at the Clearwater, whatever it is, I don't even know, some hotel on a huge piece of property, very old building, wood building.
I'm with Bob Dylan, you know, come show them clothes, whatever.
The Jack Tarr Hotel?
The Scientology building?
No, This is wood.
It's on a big piece of property.
It's the oldest.
It's the largest or oldest wooden structure anywhere in this part of the world or some kind of thing.
You'll find it.
You'll find it.
No big deal.
And so we go there.
And he's just finished painting a four.
This is my guess.
Four by eight sheet of plywood.
He painted it.
It's a painting.
He's laying on the floor, laying on his back in the sun, looking at the thing.
Very quiet.
He now starts to, the band is rehearsing in this huge dance hall kind of place, but big, wood.
And there's nobody in the audience, just myself, the guy that was with me, I think Randy Edwards was with me, and one of the guitar players for the Rolling Stones who died soon after that.
I forgot his name.
I can't think of his name.
Anyway, we're standing there.
They're playing.
They're practicing.
Bob is outside.
Now I'm outside, and there's a porch, or not a porch, but the thing that goes around the edge of a building, you know, an eight foot wide, whatever it's called.
Bob is sitting on the floor of this, leaning up against the building, and he's whittling.
He's got a knife and a piece of wood.
He's whittling.
And I'm going, what the hell? Is going on here.
And nobody talks to him except they walk over, they lean over from the waist, they say whatever they got to say, and then they walk away.
No one, he's not talking to anybody.
I'm just telling you what's going on.
Now he goes over to the stage and he starts to play with them.
They got a very young violin player girl that's supposed to be phenomenal.
And they're playing.
And he says, Stop.
And he says, You don't know this part, or this goes like this.
And they try it again.
He says, Okay, forget that one.
Blow it off.
Meaning they're not doing that song because she's not playing it right.
Whatever.
I mean, and they're just playing off the top of their heads.
There's no sheet music or anything like that.
Now.
He I show him a denim Coat like to your knees.
This is used denim from goodwill carefully cut up ironed padded shoulders lined in velvet coat with ribbons on it And we did a lot of ribbon clothes in those days He sees it thinks it's cool And I forget exactly how the thing goes.
He takes it, and I think then it gets given back to me later on.
He doesn't have it.
And I think he just buys some scarves and stuff.
But this is a quiet person, our experience with him at that time.
I mean, and there's maybe 50 people in all those bands that are playing with him.
The Rolling Thunder Review was the name of it.
Thank You Michael Braun00:02:09
So, I'm with a girl that worked with us, Dawn Jordan, and she's so blown away by this.
This is Bob Dylan.
She couldn't even stand next to me.
She had to walk back.
As he walked to me and we're talking, she couldn't handle it.
This is more than she could deal with.
This is Bob Dylan.
Again, this is like God to her or some kind of, you know, whatever.
This is crazy.
So, All I'm saying to you is that the expectation of that person is, let's do business.
You've got some clothes.
You've got some art.
You've got some whatever the thing is.
Right.
Let's do that.
You know, I don't need to come around you to you tell me I'm the most wonderful guitar player, songwriter, art maker, whatever that there is in the world or, you know, whatever.
You're just doing business.
Exactly.
Well, thank you so much for your time, Michael.
This has been.
Extraordinary.
Just some of your stories are fascinating, where sorry, what were you gonna say?
You, first of all, you're most welcome.
Second of all, if any of your boys and girls listening got any questions, they could email them to you and I'll try to answer them for you.
Yeah, how can people listening and or watching this find you and get a hold or get a hold of you?
And so there's a website.
There's a website that is called Michael Brawn, ART CALM, and it's got the art on it.
It's got I think Jimmy's letter is on it, but maybe Susan tried to bring it up and it's not on it.
But there's all kind of things like that.
But you could just, my email address is on there.
You got a question or you got a thing or whatever you want to know about, you know, this piece of art.
Can I get it in green?
Can I get it bigger or, you know, whatever.
Oh, there's your business card with your phone number on it and everything.
Yeah.
Call Mike.
Call Mike.
Call Michael.
Thank you so much for having us.
Michael, it's been a pleasure.
I very much enjoyed this past two and a half hours, and I'll see you in the next world.