Get Off My Lawn Podcast #75 | Can You Guys Stop Ruining Art, Please?
Austin is banning bands and ruining their careers for not following the rules. I don’t want artists to follow the rules. I don’t even want them to know what the rules are. Same with movies. I don’t want to know how actors feel about climate change and the latest tax cuts. I want to pretend they are being chased by CIA operatives through Budapest. We keep ruining art by dissecting it and exposing every intimate detail. That’s like watching a chick get ready to go out. It ruins the surprise.
You know, when I was a boy, I would listen to the Butthole Surfers, and I had no idea where they stood on the political spectrum.
I didn't know where Gibby Haynes, his stance on health care plans, or how he felt about this new tax bill.
The Butthole Surfers would play shows with a homeless stripper on stage, with her breasts basically at her waist.
And in the background behind them they would play circumcision videos.
We stole that idea actually from my band, Anal Chinook.
And what we'd do is we'd go to the library and rent a projector, which is nothing, and we'd get, it doesn't matter what the movie is, it's just cool that there's a movie playing behind your band.
So I think we had Stompin' Tom Connors or something, a documentary about him, you know, all this Canadian funded art.
At the library and then we just broadcast that behind us.
It looks really cool on stage when there's a video being projected on the band.
And I stole that from the Butthole Surfers and their circumcision videos.
But I was just talking to Ty Richards in Austin.
He's persona non grata now because I tweeted one of his songs.
No, I'm not exaggerating.
I never, he never said whether he likes me or doesn't like me.
He just did a song called Western Chauvinist and I tweeted it out.
Tons of people said he's making fun of you dude.
To which I responded with a sad gif.
And now he's being banned.
Like there's a hashtag, banned in Austin.
And they're pushing to have him basically extradited.
And this happened to the band Dream Machine.
Another Austin band where one of the women in the band is an immigrant from Denmark or something.
And she said, I'm glad they're deporting illegals.
Especially this MS-13 dudes.
And they banned that band.
They banned the band.
That'd be cool if the band, you know the band, the band?
That'd be cool if they were banned.
And then you could say, they banned the band, the band?
And she literally had to go back where she came from.
But anyway, listen to this jam by the Butthole Surfers.
It's called 22 Going On 23.
And it made me kind of melancholy.
You know, for, I don't know, art, when I was a young man.
Well, we're glad you could try.
Thank you.
Um, I have this problem last July.
I was assaulted sexually, and ever since then, I cannot sleep.
I've been having trouble sleeping.
Eight years.
I'm 22.
Going on 23.
Don't you just want to sort of flop around in front of the band on the dance floor?
Just sort of like have your head bowed forward and your arms flopping by your side?
So she's calling into some self-help show or something and she says she's 22 going on 23.
That's the name of the song.
It's from Locust Abortion Technician.
Jeez, what the hell is this?
Hello?
What is this?
Did somebody hit the messenger audio on accident?
That was like 15 people on some weird thing I've never seen before, like Facebook message audio.
And the only thing funnier than that is the phrase, on accident.
When did we stop speaking English?
Have you noticed that recently?
Like Ryan, Ketsu Rivera, comes over to the house and he's got a dress shirt on.
I go, what the hell?
Why are you dressed like that?
And he goes, oh, it was for the solemnness as to the situation.
This is after I was banned from Twitter forever.
As to the situation, you sound like a rapper trying to sound like a law professor.
Why are you trying to talk like that?
Are you going to say, if you will, next?
You're gonna throw some hooms in the mix?
Just say, I'm dressing solemn.
I feel like it's a sad occasion.
I'm trying to be sort of stoic.
Maybe even morbid.
On accident.
Do you wait online too?
Are you on Long Island?
It's by accident, alright?
Person who butt-dialed me on Facebook with 15 other people?
It's also not misogynistic.
It's misogynist.
Misogynist is an adjective and a noun.
So if you're going to insult me, make sure you call me a misogynist.
I hate the word misogynistic.
I also hate terroristic threats.
Terrorist is a noun and an adjective too.
You are making terrorist threats.
What's next?
Communistic?
God, I hate those terms.
Anyway, yeah, the Butthole Surfers.
You know, I used to, I had a job once in Montreal, and my job was picking up records from the border for cargo records.
So it was much cheaper to ship to America from America.
Right, so they would ship to the place, Montreal's only an hour from the border, so they'd ship to the closest they could get to the border, a big warehouse, and then I would drive a truck down, a big van actually, and fill it up with CDs, and then cross the border, and they'd save like thousands of dollars, and then they'd ship the CDs throughout Canada, to various record stores.
That reminded me of a funny story there.
I'm going to tell it.
So anyway, before I get to the funny story, we'd get to the border and it was now my job to defend all these because I'm the one transporting them.
Which seems kind of weird.
Do truckers have to do that?
So I'd be there and they'd open up a box of CDs and it would be a band called Anal Cunt.
And I would have to explain what this band is about.
And then I remember they opened up one of the boxes and it was the Butthole Surfers.
And they said, what does this mean?
And I go, I don't know.
I'm just the guy carrying the box.
I can't be responsible for every CD.
And they go, no, that's not how it works, young man.
You are responsible for what you transport across the border.
Now tell me what this means.
And I go, it's a band.
They're like this.
And he goes, do they surf on buttholes?
Is that what they're saying?
Or are they saying they're surfers who are buttholes?
And I go, shit, I never thought of that before.
I don't think anyone would talk about someone surfing on a butthole.
There's no water there.
Even if you were a quarter of an inch tall and you had a tiny piece of rice as a surfboard and someone put you on an anus, you can't really do much there.
You could maybe do an ollie kickflip on the anal lips.
You're going to get sort of caught in one of the grooves, but you can't really party all around an anus.
Gaze, no offense.
So it must mean the sort of Jerk.
Idiot.
Surfers.
Like the butthole surfers.
And he said, okay.
He put it back in.
I came to know Gibby Haynes, uh, in my old age.
That's kind of one cool thing about, about sticking around for a long time, like say pop culture and music is eventually you get to meet your idols.
Like every book that I like, I've met the guy.
I met Pat Buchanan and I really liked Coloring the News.
I got to meet Bill McGowan.
Um, and then with bands, I've basically met them all.
I go to Crass's.
Crass were my favorite band when I was a teenager.
I go to their house in the summer, uh, every year.
Although they canceled the party this year and maybe that's because of me.
They X'd me.
Penny Rimbow did say, you're much nicer in person than you are on TV.
That could be the end for Crass.
But anyway, Gibby, he, uh, he wanted to get into comedy, so we got along.
And he did one of the meanest, funniest things ever.
Do you know that later on, I don't really like late butthole surfers, but they did have some good jams and one of them was this one where it sounds almost like ministry and it starts out with, I'm flying!
I'm flying!
And then it's like... Like sort of a fuzzy guitar... kind of a guitar.
And so I was at a party that Gibby was at, and there was a helium balloon there.
So I broke it open, and I inhaled tons and tons of helium.
And then I said, I tapped him on the shoulder, and I go, I'm flying, I'm flying.
And he was chugging a Guinness and he goes, and he finishes it and he goes, I'm drinking your beer!
And it was my beer.
As I was doing my joke, he polished off my beer.
I heard they would do that on tour.
That was their thing.
They would go into the other band's catering and eat all their food while the other band was on stage.
See, that's a cool artist.
That's a person you don't know about.
You don't want to know about those things.
But wait a minute, I promised you the cargo records bit.
So, we would also ship out the CDs.
Actually, that's why Vice went national.
There was this Japanese guy there, like Kuri Sakamoto, and Kevin Kasamoto, I think his name was.
Anyway, he said to Shane and I, he goes, I'm going to make you guys a national magazine, not just Montreal, across the country.
Dude, that's awesome.
How?
I'm going to put your magazines in, when I ship out CDs to various stores, I'm going to put your fucking magazine in there.
Thanks dude!
So then we got all these advertisers.
Calgary, and Vancouver, and Winnipeg, and Newfoundland, Halifax.
Everyone's in there!
And now we don't have to just go to the local Montreal retailers.
We're a national magazine now.
This is like 1997.
Six.
And then, maybe like five days before, he goes, yeah guys, can't do it.
Pardonnez-moi?
Sorry, it actually adds to the weight of the box, and then it makes it really expensive.
Yeah, Kev, I kind of assumed that you knew that, and you were saying you would take the hit.
I thought it was kind of weird that you offered, but...
I assumed you had done your research, because everyone knows intuitively that to add a bunch of magazines to a box makes it heavier.
It's called gravity, dude.
Look it up!
So we had to scramble.
We stayed up all night for two days just calling and calling and calling and eventually found, like say Calgary for example, found a record store and said look guys we'll give you a free ad if you distribute these magazines and we'll ship them to you via a Greyhound bus.
Then we'd go to the Barrie bus terminal In Montreal, and load up an entire Greyhound bus.
Basically, 50- Because these Greyhound buses, they don't need all that cargo room.
So half of it is a suitcase, and then the other half is open.
So we would fill them up.
And we would ship them to these various towns.
All because of fucking cargo records lying.
But anyway, that's, so that's 90s, but in the, in the, in the like, very early 90s, like 1990.
Maybe even 89.
I work there and I was the driver guy, but we also ship stuff out and we came up with this great scam where you're sending a box somewhere, right?
Like say, Ottawa, Toronto.
So you have to send them 10 CDs.
You put it in a big box and you put their order, their 10 CDs, then you just go shopping.
And you just go get yourself the Butthole Surfers and Crass and have every album you want.
Go get it.
Grab a Stones box set while you're at it.
What do you like?
You want some rap?
You like Paris?
You like EPMD?
You like Boogie Down Productions?
Throw it in the mix, buddy!
And so we would fill up this box with CDs we wanted.
And then I would drive it to the bus terminal.
Now you gotta be careful to not put the label on the seam.
So you put the label off the seam.
Then in the truck, I would open it up, take out my CDs, and replace the space with crumpled up newspaper, and then reseal it.
Now, the only flaw is the record store gets their 10 CDs in a giant box, but that happens all the time.
You go over to stuff from Amazon and it's a huge box with a little thing in it.
No one really cares.
Anyway, time went by, but eventually we all got fired, probably because they weren't making any money, because we got so greedy with it, that not only would we buy stuff for ourselves, steal stuff for ourselves, and I had a massive CD collection after that scam, because I did it a hundred times.
I'm not proud of this, by the way.
This is immoral, what we did.
Um, but uh, they probably started losing money because we would, eventually we would just pack the thing with stuff and then go sell it at a used CD store.
They were getting brand new releases and paying $4 for them.
So we all got fired and I thought it was weird because the owner of the cargo records was Shake Records and that was the guy that I used to take the bus to go see to buy records from when I was a little kid when it was $14.99 for punk imports and you'd sit on the bus for an hour, buy a record you couldn't listen to at first and take it home and then you wouldn't find out it sucked until, you know, you put it on the turntable back at home and you had to wait another week to have enough money to go back to the store.
Anyway, here's this guy that I used to religiously go give all my gas station earnings to, and there he was firing me.
And I go, well, this is weird, isn't it, Dan?
Come full circle.
And I go, you're a piece of shit.
I don't know why I said that.
He was just firing me.
And he never caught me stealing, but you'd think a thief would be a little less arrogant about being fired.
You'd think he'd... I got off easy.
I could've been prosecuted.
Shit, I was stealing hundreds and hundreds of dollars.
I could've done time.
I'm only realizing this right now.
I think it would have been fair if society put me in a jail for a month.
I think that would be fair and then maybe like have to pay the place back over, you know, the course of a year through some sort of payment plan.
I don't, if I was a judge, I would have sentenced me to a month and $10,000.
That would have been fair.
Anyway, I'm being a snotty punk brat after I get fired and saying, I used to give you all my money, man.
No, you... He sold me records for a slight markup that paid his rent.
But, um...
I heard my buddy Steve after he got fired too.
It was actually kind of a shitty thing.
It was kind of a bad thing about capitalism actually.
I'm embarrassed to admit.
But what they would do is they keep giving people raises and there was this guy Sylvain who was a bassist for a band called Bliss and he worked there forever.
And his salary was about four times minimum wage.
He'd earned it.
And so they would just fire everyone and then start from scratch and everyone was minimum wage again.
And the minimum wage in 1990 in Montreal was like five dollars.
But I heard my buddy Steve, when he was fired, he started to cry in the office and said, this is all I have.
And you got to understand, this is Montreal, where if you're an English speaker, you're screwed.
It's like apartheid there.
I'm not exaggerating.
You're a second class citizen if you're English.
If you speak French, even with an accent, you're not considered bilingual.
You can't get a job.
So there's a few areas where you might be able to work, and this record label that did distribution for all of Canada, you could be English there.
So getting fired was actually kind of a big deal.
The only other job around was bike messenger, which you can imagine in Montreal.
It fucking blows.
Like it literally blows.
The wind blows.
You get up in the dark at five in the morning and you start pedaling.
You're on the road at six, whatever, and you start pedaling around the corner in the darkness and that Montreal wind.
I mean, Montreal means Montreal, means Mount Royal.
So you're on a mountain.
You're on top of a mountain, on a mountain bike.
That was the worst job I ever did.
Holy crap, did it suck.
And my girlfriend was French-Canadian, and French-Canadians are very lazy.
They're spoiled brats.
Imagine a bunch of whiny social justice warriors who got everything they wanted.
So since the FLQ, the Front en Libération du Québec, where they blew up a building and killed a guy, the country's reaction to that act of terrorism in 1970 was total and utter capitulation.
They said, we are the niggers of Canada!
And they went, oh, okay, instead of saying, how dare you?
Or what the hell are you talking about?
They went, oh, okay, how can we help you?
So now the whole country's bilingual.
And if you're on a flight in Vancouver, you have to hear like, you know, fasten your seatbelt for your seatbelt.
Even though no one on the plane speaks French, no one in the province speaks French.
We're on the West Coast, it's Portland.
So he was crying and I heard that he begged the dude for his job back.
I'm so sorry.
Please just let me stay here.
I'll work for free.
This is my entire identity.
He begged to work for free.
By the way, it was a child of divorce who grew up with his mom.
That's what happens when you get no dad.
You are a fucking sad pussy.
But anyway, yeah, I was talking to Ty and we were talking about the banned Dream Machine.
I think he's doing a live feed or he did a live feed on YouTube where they talked about being banned.
And I just thought, I hate that we know so much about artists.
When I was a lad, Glenn Danzig was the singer of The Misfits and he probably eats kittens.
I was talking to a British dude who was about 12 in 1977 and he said, uh, The Clash were a band.
I mean, everyone liked The Clash, but the thing about the Sex Pistols were People were actually scared of them.
I mean, I was 12 years old and we thought Johnny Rotten was going to come out from under our bed.
He was, he was the boogeyman.
I mean, people were actually petrified of Sid Vicious.
It wasn't like, oh, there's a silly geezer with spiky hair.
That was those, those guys are evil.
I mean, they're satanic.
And that was true of, remember there was like Rod Stewart, we'd heard that he sucked off 10 sheep and he had to have his stomach pumped.
I had a Rod Stewart poster on my wall where he's all Scottish and he's got his tartan flag and my neighbor goes, you know that he sucked off 12 sheep, right?
And they had to pump his stomach because he had so much cum in his stomach.
And as a kid, you just go, all right, well, that poster's coming down.
And you just sort of roll it up and put it under the bed.
Like, you don't go, uh, what?
That must have taken about 12 hours.
And wouldn't you throw up before you have to go to the hospital and have your stomach pumped?
Stomach pumps are for when you eat poison.
As far as over drinking something, like if you ate, if you drank like 10 liters of eggnog, you just barf.
But no, we believed it.
Oh, Richard Gere took a hamster up his ass?
Yep, okay.
Now that's a thing.
That happens.
We're so fucking gullible.
You know what that was, by the way?
Richard Gere had a makeup artist and he was a dick to him or fired him or something and the gay dude goes, uh, I'm gonna ruin you.
I'm gonna make up a rumor that you put a gerbil up your ass.
And not only did everyone believe it, but they believed that gerbil up the ass is a thing.
I think many people still do.
You cannot put a rodent up your ass.
There's no room in there.
It will die.
Poo can barely survive being in your ass.
It gets all mushed up.
And it was designed to be in there.
You can't get a gerbil in there.
Oh no, what they do is they declaw them.
Oh yeah?
Oh, okay.
That's reasonable.
I remember there was a story in my high school, this chick Sandy, and the story was that she was fed Spanish flies, and we know how horny that makes the ladies, and so she used the gear shtick.
Gear shtick.
This is a gear shtick.
They were doing, she mounted the gear stick of a manual car, and she had to put out the fire because she was so incredibly horny.
And you know what our takeaway was as 13 year olds when we heard that rumor?
We went, holy shit man, she must have been really horny.
Like, no one questioned it!
We just went, oh, so those things make a woman so horny she has to mount a gear shaft, huh?
Hmm.
Oh, that is a horny horny pill.
Wow.
How fucking insane is that?
Could we have been less curious, please?
I actually contacted her.
I don't know, like five years ago.
And I said, Hey, Sandy.
She's got like six kids now.
She's probably a grandma.
I'm old.
I'm 48.
I go, I don't know if you remember this, but, uh, and I told her the story and she goes, yeah, I fucking remember that.
That was some asshole that I didn't put out for.
And so he started that rumor for revenge.
She goes, if my husband ever sees him, he's a dead man.
That ruined my entire high school career.
It ruined my high school experience.
How fucked is that?
That one idiotic rumor, that it couldn't be less true, ruins entire careers.
But!
I do like that kind of mythology when it comes to art.
I don't want to know what Gibby Haynes thinks about Hillary Clinton.
Please, don't tell me.
I don't want to know, I don't want to see Danzig at the store.
That's another problem with social media.
Have you seen that picture of James Hetfield shopping on 6th Avenue in New York?
And he has on cargo shorts and fucking flip flops.
And about 7 bags of Macy's and Gucci and some dumb pants that he bought that are really nice He probably went to Old Navy too and stocked up on some nice tees Some v-neck tees, some orange v-neck tees from Old Navy Or Hollister.
He got some Hollister sweatshorts.
I don't want to know that about Metallica.
So why does everyone want to know that?
Like, Ty Richards is banned and his career may be over because I liked one of his songs.
He never said, this song is for the G-Dog and I totally promote it.
I'm popular when I walk down the street, by the way.
I mean, I get high fives.
Not literal high fives, but you know what I mean.
Everywhere I go.
And the kids are happy to see that, because they know their dad's not evil.
But as far as the creative class goes, I'm a fucking pariah.
And as far as media and social media goes, people get in trouble.
Like, my wife will have a friend over, and she'll post it on Instagram, and then her friends will attack that woman.
For going to Gavin's wife's house.
Gavin's wife's a liberal who voted for Hillary.
She's a fucking vegan.
But she sleeps with an evil Nazi.
So don't go to that house.
You'll get Nazi AIDS.
That's not the point I want to make.
The point I want to make is that art needs mystery.
And we're just... There's just too much exposure now.
I remember... What's his name?
Justin Theroux was talking about this.
He said that...
I don't want to see Tom Hanks do an interview.
I see him talking about his dog and then you watch Castaway and you're trying to imagine this person is stranded on an island but you go, but it's Tom Hanks.
So there's always that nagging elephant in the room going, oh, that's a guy pretending to be a guy.
You're pretending to be a dude.
Who's a dude?
Who's another dude?
I just fucked up that Tropic Thunder reference, which was written by Justin Theroux.
There we go, loop-de-doo.
I don't understand why there are celebrities at all.
Let me lead you into this.
Here's an easier version.
Why do celebrities voice children's cartoons, CGI cartoons?
Like Monsters, Inc.
Why do you need Billy Crystal and John Goodman to be the two monsters?
They're just cartoons, so just get any Shakespearean dude.
The kids don't know who Billy Crystal is.
Is it for the parents?
I don't give a fuck.
I don't like kids movies.
I'm going there to amuse my children.
I wish I could be on my phone the whole time, but I'll just wait it out.
It doesn't have to be good or bad.
You think I liked Toy Story?
The fact that adults go to Toy Story blows my mind.
You shouldn't like children's movies as an adult.
It's bizarre.
But in New York, it's totally common.
One time I went to Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and the theater was empty, and I sat near the middle, and I was right in front of a guy.
And as I sit down, I hear him go, and I go, is there a problem here?
And he goes, well, of all the places to sit in the theater, you had to sit right in front of me, huh?
And I go, oh, I'm sorry!
Me and my children ruined your children's movie!
If you're not an animator, you shouldn't even be here!
And that's not the only time it happened.
When I went to see Tin Tin, as they say in Europe, Tin Tin here in America, I showed up with a bunch of kids.
It was like me and another dad and I had my three and he had his two and so we were rolling deep.
Five kids.
And we walk in, let's fucking do this, boys.
Got our popcorn, large cokes, ready to rock and roll!
And we were there kind of early, and there was an old lady there.
And she sees me and the five kids I'm with.
And then there was another family coincidentally walking in.
They also had a bunch of kids.
And as we walked in, I saw her.
She was probably about 59 years old.
Kind of classy broad.
Looked a little bit like Cruella DeVille.
That's a hard name to say.
Cruella DeVille.
And I saw her go, oh shit!
And grab her coat and storm out of the theater.
Probably went and got her money back.
I apologize, madam.
I'm sorry to bring children to a fucking cartoon!
A cartoon.
It's a cartoon, you bitch.
Jesus Christ.
Anyway, I don't think celebrities should be the voice of these cartoons.
It's a total waste of money.
They'll get paid like $3,000,000.
You paid Billy Crystal $3,000,000 to sit in a room?
Let me tell you something about kids' movies.
Families go to 100% of them.
They don't put out enough of them.
There's a new one out about every month.
By the way, Hollywood, could you be dragging your feet anymore?
You put out like 10 movies a year.
Maybe 10 kids movies and 10 major movies.
Your whole fucking city is 100% designed for movies.
I made How to Be a Man in about a month.
With half a million bucks.
Boom.
That's one crew.
Skeleton crew, scout crew, as we said in the movie Million in the Morning, which I also made in five days.
How can- why does it take you so long to make these things, you lazy pieces of shit?
You top-heavy pedophiles?
So, okay, so you got the cartoon thing.
That makes sense, right?
That's pretty inarguable.
And actually, I fought with Justin Theroux about this, which is weird, because he's the one who got me started with the Tom Hanks thing.
And then I go, well, why are you guys in cartoons?
And he goes, no, actually, so he went back on what he said, and he goes, actually, it's good for publicity.
You know, you'll have Billy Crystal on all the talk shows, and he'll be promoting Monsters, Inc.
And I go, But it doesn't need promotion.
I just told you they put out 10 movies a year.
Parents are dying for each one because it's basically three hours off the clock where you can just sit and relax and your kids are amusing.
You don't feel bad because it's not like they're home watching TV.
So it's three hours off the clock.
We don't care.
It could be...
It could be narrated by John Wayne Gacy.
As long as there's no dead kids in it, it's none of my beeswax who you hire.
It's just a fucking voice.
And acting is not a talent.
Acting is easy as shit.
It is the most overrated sport since advertising.
I've never seen more people, more untalented people make more money Than when I was in advertising.
It's amazing.
They have one grain of sand for an idea and then about 80 people make $50,000.
Shocking.
You know the guy Don Draper?
You know who Don Draper is based on?
I forget his name, but all he's really done is come up with a BMW built for driving.
He's fuckin' rich as shit.
That's all he ever did.
They based Mad Men on him.
Another guy's rich as shit for, um, uh, Where's the Beef?
That Wendy's campaign?
Rich as shit.
That's all he ever did.
That's called a tweet, dude.
You had a reasonable tweet.
But back in the boomer days, you could just fart sideways and you were a millionaire.
Anyway, acting, you just say the line that's on the script.
We gotta get out of here.
And then if you suck and you say, we gotta get out of here, the director will go, what are you doing?
No, it's, we gotta get out of here.
And he'll say it to you verbatim, how you're supposed to say it.
And then you go, we gotta get out of here.
All right, that's a wrap.
Great work.
Here's a million bucks.
So people are clamoring for these jobs, yet we give, who's that chick?
The chick from The Office, who was Pam in The Office, she's in every fucking movie in the world.
She keeps yanking me out of it.
I go, there's Pam.
Or the other dude from The Office.
Now he's John Wick.
He's some action dude.
Sorry, you're still the dude from The Office to me.
Can't we get an action guy?
Why do we have to keep recycling these?
And France is even worse.
France has about five people they recycle for every fucking movie.
So you're looking at a bad guy, and he was the bad guy in your last movie.
Like Beatrice Dahl for a while, who I was obsessed with, by the way, that's my type.
Beatrice Dahl, when she was in her heyday, which I guess would be the early 90s, she was just the protagonist of every single fucking movie without exception.
Um, that's dumb.
Anyway, to get back to music, I want there to be sort of like, with Black Sabbath, with Ozzy, we were scared of him.
We thought he was insane.
Like when he said, going off the rails on a crazy train, we went, oh, that guy's going off the rails on some sort of a crazy train.
Everything was literal.
We thought Rush were magic.
On that, is it 2112, where there's a big pentagram on fire?
We went, oh, okay, they are, we believed like Motley Crue had magical powers and they were, we'd hear, all you had to do was meet with Anton LaVey once.
And we went, holy shit, those guys are friends with Satan, man.
You should not, you shouldn't even listen to that.
If you listen, and it felt dangerous too, because you'd have your orange puffy headphones and your Sony Walkman, and you'd slide in the cassette, close it up, hit play, make sure you have two fresh AA batteries in there so it didn't slow down, and you would go, I am doing some sinful shit.
I'm listening to satanic music.
I could be killed.
I could probably kill you!
And now it's like, I don't want to listen to that song.
The guy thinks that climate change is a myth, so I can't do it anymore.
And then it's the same with movies.
These actors say dumb crap like, Don Cheadle was calling me a Nazi the other day.
Now, obviously, you don't go through that.
Don Cheadle is never going to call you a Nazi.
It's not that common.
Now I know that Don Cheadle's a moron, and so does everyone who read that tweet, or at least everyone, you know, reasonable.
So that's Don Cheadle down the drain.
Some guys are smart about it, like Adam Sandler.
His only thing is that he wants you to be pro-Israel, which no, I mean, actually I was gonna say no Jew is anti-Israel, but that's not true at all.
Plenty of Jews hate Israel.
But I was going to say, it's not surprising that a Jew says, I want you to be pro-Israel.
It's like Rich Voss.
If you want to talk to him about politics, he just goes, are you pro-Israel?
And you say yes, and he goes, okay, well done.
That's all he cares about.
But outside of that, Adam Sandler doesn't get into it.
And it doesn't wreck him.
Or Will Smith.
Will Smith, um, uh, doesn't get political.
By the way, if you can guess what I just did, what that bonk was, I'll pay you a million dollars.
No?
Okay, you give up.
Alright.
I bent a coat hanger into a long sort of a pole type shape and then I bent the the top part into a right angle so I now have a long stick with a sharp point right angle and then I bonked it on the box of a MacBook Pro and made a little hole.
If you really knew sound, if you were a sound engineer and you really knew what you were doing, you would have been able to suss that out.
New York's calling.
Goodbye.
Okay, I'll end this with the Will Ferrell story.
I went to see the Yankees with Will Ferrell once and I'm famous now this was before I was famous and I gotta tell you folks being famous blows chunks it fucking sucks and if you want to know what it's like take a sharpie and draw your nose this only works if you're white draw your nose black if you're a black person you're listening to this which I doubt take liquid paper take white out and make your nose white And now walk down the street and that way people stop and stare.
Actually, that would be better because they just stop and stare.
I have to pose for a fucking selfie all the time.
Can I get a picture with you?
God, why?
Anyway, I always knew being famous sucks because I was in a band when I was 18 and in a very small scale you could get a taste of what it is and it's just a lot of boring conversations that are very short with strangers.
And they tend to be losers if they're coming up to you, you know?
It's like Andy, what's his name, Andy Rooney at the end of 60 Minutes, he goes, The kind of person that would sit down and write me a letter is probably not the kind of person I want to hang out with.
That's what he said of his fans.
But, um, we go to the Yankees game, and I'm with, uh, what's his name?
Jimmy Miller.
Dennis Miller's brother.
Dennis Miller's right wing.
Jimmy Miller's not at all.
In fact, Jimmy Miller stopped talking to me when he found out I was right wing.
He'd actually just introduced me to the founder of Vox, and we met for lunch at Le Cirque, and it was stupid because the guy is the founder of Vox.
I ended up saying I'll pay him $2,000 if he reads an Ann Coulter book, which to a rich guy means nothing, so he never did.
But he said, I go, why do you hate Ann Coulter so much?
I can't remember how it came out, but he goes, I think she needs to be burned alive.
Really?
Seems a little harsh.
That's how they talk, especially women.
I notice liberals talk about conservative women.
It's always shockingly graphic.
I had lunch with Anthony Bourdain when I was doing a pilot for travel and we were doing the up-fronts.
You can find it online.
It's called America on $0 a day.
Didn't get picked up.
But I was having lunch with him and I go, He was talking with Sarah Palin and he goes, you know what I would like to do to her?
And everything else he said was rational and funny and interesting, so he's a normal human being.
And then he goes, uh, I would like to take razor blades and just draw long lines on her body and then slowly peel off her skin by rolling it into little cylindrical, like, uh, Twinkies.
I go, really?
I hate Rachel Maddow.
I don't even want to slap her in the face.
I don't want to hang out with her, but I don't want to cut her or cuss her.
I don't even want to spank her bum.
I don't even want to put a cigarette out on her, the eye of the fish she's eating.
I feel no animosity, like I feel no violent animosity to her.
Where do they have this vitriol?
It's so deep-seated.
But anyway, so uh, I go to the game and Jimmy says I want you to meet Will.
Great!
I'd love to meet him.
He's a famous guy and he's super funny and he's in awesome movies.
Like Step Brothers.
It always cracks me up.
I love Step Brothers.
Remember in Step Brothers where the parents allow them to make bunk beds?
And they do and they do a shitty job and then the top bunk falls on the bottom bunk and he runs back in there and says that whatever his name is, Dennis is dead.
I showed that to the kids and I didn't realize that it says motherfucker and fuck and cunt and slut about every second word, so that was a mistake.
You gotta really read that parental IMDB before you show your kids a movie.
Um, I almost showed them Animal House until I read it and realized, oh yeah, every second joke is about fucking.
So, I'm just throwing this in at the end as dessert, because I can't base a whole podcast on the simple premise that artists should be more mysterious.
You can get that in two minutes, so I gotta add a truffle at the end.
And I'm out of sponsors, too.
I don't got Purple Mattress and I don't have We The People holsters anymore.
I'm losing all my sponsors, yo.
This is before the Twitter ban, nothing to do with that.
So, we go to the Yankees game, and of course the seats are insane.
They're right behind home plate.
I wasn't really into baseball back then.
This was probably, uh... 2009.
I don't know.
Holy shit, that was ten years ago.
And he does Funny or Die, and I had a great video on Funny or Die.
I have a bunch of good videos on Funny or Die, like Our Woman is Horny as Man, and another great one was Sophie Can Walk, about my daughter being born unable to walk, and the doctor said she wouldn't walk for at least a year.
That was my running joke when my daughter was born.
And it's amazing how many people took it seriously and went, can I help?
And I go, let me say it again slower.
My daughter was born, she can't walk, and the doctors say she won't be able to walk for at least a year.
Do you want to write that down and just read it to yourself?
Anthony Civarelli from Gorilla Biscuits offered me money for it.
He's actually in the video.
I run up to an SUV with a flyer.
That's Civ.
That's Anthony Civarelli, who did my back tattoo.
Anyway, Jesus Christ, what a silly tangent.
So we go to the game.
And it's awesome seats.
I don't quite sit right next to him.
It's like Jimmy, me, his assistant, and him.
And he said, oh, you did that Sophie Can Walk.
It was really funny.
I go, yeah, it was fucking funny.
It was hilarious.
And then he laughed at that, so I got him to laugh.
Great.
And we go down there, and he's constantly being hassled.
People are coming up, they're buying him beers, which is nice!
Don't get me wrong, that's a nice gesture, but you gotta know, did someone spit in this or something?
And also, when you're at a game, you don't want more than one beer.
What do I do?
Just... It's like a Glaswegian pub, where everyone gets... You alright, pal?
You alright?
You need a pint?
No, I do not need a pint.
Oh, I'll get you a pint.
He comes back with a McCune's lager.
Dude, I have three pints in front of me.
You're not helping.
Alright, that's it, guys.
Closing time.
It's 11pm.
Oh, no problem.
I'll just drink these six pints.
What is this?
A fucking hot dog eating contest?
Is this sponsored by Nathan's?
So you're sitting there just chugging pints.
Anyway, he had a Glaswegian amount of pints at his feet.
And then the head of Yankee Stadium, like, marketing comes over and goes, it was when he had that movie out, Lost Planet or whatever, where they are, you know, with the dinosaurs.
They go back in time or whatever.
You know, the remake of that popular 70s show.
And let's say it's called Lost Planet.
She goes, hey, we're wondering if we could put the camera to you with a microphone, you could say a little bit, like say, welcome to Yankee Stadium.
And he goes, no, I'm all right, thanks.
Like, no, I don't want to give you a free ad.
I get paid a lot of money for those things.
He's not saying that part.
He just said the first part.
I'm saying the second part.
And then she starts getting kind of pissy.
And she goes, well, we're promoting Lost Planet on the Jumbotron, so I thought it would be kind of suitable for you to say something.
He goes, yeah, I'm good.
I'm good, actually.
And then, you know, Jimmy Miller has to tell her to sort of, alright lady, let's move it aside.
That's that guy's life.
Like, Justin Theroux can't- I was with him at his house in Beverly Hills when he lived with Jennifer Aniston, here I am name-dropping, and I said, um, can we just go to a bar and have a beer?
And he goes, are you crazy?
I can't fucking do that.
And I thought, so, you're basically Pablo Escobar.
You're in a beautiful prison.
That's what it's like to be famous.
Like, how does Tom Cruise go and get dinner?
Yeah, but he's fucking rich.
Shut the fuck up.
After your home is paid for, and your medical bills are fine, and you've got a car, you're basically a billionaire.
I mean, what does Howard Stern do that's different?
He makes $90 million a year.
Is his day really that different from yours?
He has a limousine that takes him to work.
Okay.
That's a bit better than driving.
A little bit.
No, actually, it's not as fun.
You can't sort of, like, change the radio.
I guess you have to run to the limo driver.
So, no, I'm not buying the fun part.
Yeah, but they're famous.
Yeah, how is that good?
All you do is ruin movies when you're famous by me recognizing you.
So, your job sucks.
It's easy.
You're not necessarily very good at it.
It's not like Robert De Niro.
Robert De Niro's so good in Raging Bull.
Or even Daniel Day-Lewis, the best guy ever.
Yes, he did a good Bill the Butcher accent.
All right.
Should I blow him now?
How is that a talent?
You do that all the- What do you think?
It's like Halloween.
You just dress up like Frankenstein and go... Do you deserve an Academy Award for that?
Anyway...
The moral of the story here is that artists are overrated and I'd like to keep it that way.
Can you stop ruining them by making them human beings?
Let's keep art hypothetical.
Let's keep sex hypothetical.
Let's keep all these things out in the ethereal cosmos where they're not pinned down and ripped apart like a fucking frog in biology class.
I don't want to know The history of my art.
I don't want you to remove the nuance and tell me what each beat means and what they were going for.
I don't want the writer of the book to do interviews.
I want my own interpretation of it.
And you guys, with all your rules and regulations and politically correct this and this has to be like that and all these artists on Twitter and actors fucking ruining all their shit.
You're taking all the mystery out of life.
You know, if a woman's going to wear lingerie, I want her just to go to the other room, put it on, and then... You don't want to see her, like, getting her toes in the fishnets, and having to get the heel of the stocking right, and then putting the clips on, and... Oh, shit, my gut.
I gotta put my gut in my corset here, and tie it up.
