Oct. 20, 2014 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:56:15
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| the Joe Rogan experience train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day fresh off the road Sturgill Simpson ladies and gentlemen Thanks for doing this, man. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| You kidding me? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm here. | ||
| You're here. | ||
| You know, I had heard about your music from several people online. | ||
| I don't remember who made me take the plunge and download your shit. | ||
| Like, a bunch of people had recommended you. | ||
| I had Shooter Jennings on, and along those lines, people said, like, hey man, if you really dig Shooter Jennings, you gotta check out Sturgill Simpson. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And so somewhere along the line, I downloaded, I think it was... | ||
| Well, I downloaded two CDs, but the Turtles All The Way Down song, that was the first song I heard. | ||
| I was like, oh shit, this guy's doing something unusual. | ||
| You're doing some psychedelic country music, man. | ||
| You're mixing shit up in a very bizarre way. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I grew up listening to everything. | ||
| But for whatever reason, if I go to write or sing a song, I can only do one of two things. | ||
| That's either Sing Country or Bluegrass is what I primarily grew up on. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| The first record I did was a very traditional country record in terms of thematical and lyrical elements. | ||
| I've said this before, but it's true. | ||
| I reached a point where I'm very happily married. | ||
| I'm sober for the longest period. | ||
| So drinking songs and heartache and all that wasn't something that I was particularly very excited about tackling again. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do you feel like you have to hit certain themes if you're doing country music? | ||
| Because it just sort of falls into that. | ||
| It seems to be somewhat self-restricting in a lot of ways. | ||
| It hasn't evolved very much, even since, you know... | ||
| The 60s or 70s. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| There were periods that are very dated now, like 70s and 80s country. | ||
| You can hear the production values and it just... | ||
| There's nothing... | ||
| Even some of the most timeless singers that ever played the music, the records that they made got subjected to these really bad taste choices. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| It just doesn't stand up. | ||
| So... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Dave, my producer, is a really close friend of mine, Dave Cobb, who actually did Shooter's first couple records. | ||
| Shooter's a buddy. | ||
| He's a good dude. | ||
| Love that dude. | ||
| Yeah, very, very sweet. | ||
| Such a cool guy to hang out with, too. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Dave and I just kind of, you know... | ||
| I came to Nashville about four years ago. | ||
| I'm almost five now, I guess. | ||
| And I just... | ||
| I knew more than anything what I didn't want to do. | ||
|
unidentified
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And... | |
| I met with Dave. | ||
| Shooter actually, I think, told him one night we were all at a Billy Joe Shaver concert. | ||
| I didn't know any of those guys. | ||
| And they were sitting upstairs. | ||
| It was like Shooter and Jamie Johnson, some other cats, and Dave. | ||
| And apparently Shooter was like, hey, man, you see that guy right there? | ||
| And Dave's like, yeah, he's like, he's the best fucking country singer in Nashville. | ||
| So the next day, somehow my manager got an email from Dave, and we had lunch, and I was like, all right, I... He's from Georgia. | ||
| We both loved the same records growing up. | ||
| I just kind of feel like I know this dude. | ||
| I can work with this guy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And there was nobody in there. | ||
| Because I paid for both albums entirely by myself. | ||
| I dug a big, giant hole of debt. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| How much does it cost to put out an album? | ||
| The first one... | ||
| I thought when I was doing it, this may very well be the only time I ever get to do this, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And I wanted something that I could be proud of, and something my family could be proud of for once, you know what I mean? | ||
| I just knew it had to be right, and I couldn't compromise in any way. | ||
| And there was a certain sound we were after, so Dave, he said, well, let's just get the guys that played on those old records. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, let's fucking do that, you know? | ||
| I didn't know how the game worked. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So then I'm looking up, and the next thing I know, I'm in the studio, and there's this guy, like, Pig Robbins, who... | ||
| Pretty much invented country piano. | ||
| I think his first session was with George Jones on White Lightning. | ||
| What a fucking name. | ||
| Yeah, he played on Blonde on Blonde. | ||
| Yeah, he's this old, blind... | ||
| Pig Robbins? | ||
| Hargis Pig Robbins. | ||
| What a great fucking name. | ||
| God, that's an American name. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
|
unidentified
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Actually, it could probably be English, too. | |
| We had a lot of fun. | ||
| Who called a pig? | ||
| I mean, he toured with everybody. | ||
| He played on Patsy Clown Records and Bob Brown Records. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow! | |
| Wow! | ||
| So, you know, and I knew when those sessions ended, I knew that I had absolutely done my best, because I had to. | ||
| You know, these guys would just bust your balls in a second, you know. | ||
| And, uh... | ||
| So I feel like we sort of cleared my throat with that one. | ||
| And then, lo and behold, a year later, I found myself in a position where I was going to get to make another record. | ||
| I was like, alright, well, maybe this one will be a little bit more selfish or self-absorber for me. | ||
| So Dave and I incorporated a lot of other elements of I guess sonic templings you don't normally hear in most country music. | ||
| And that gave me the freedom to kind of go out there with the themes as well. | ||
| So I was doing a lot of reading at the time. | ||
| Always had like weird shit, you know. | ||
| We'll get there, but... | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| It was the most truly inspirational group of songs I feel like I've ever written. | ||
| Because it was just from such a fresh place. | ||
| You know, maybe that's why the record's done. | ||
| It's very unique. | ||
| You know, it's very unique in that it has a lot of country sound to it, but... | ||
| Like that Turtles All The Way Down song. | ||
| I mean, who the fuck is doing songs about mind-expanding, consciousness-expanding drugs in country music? | ||
| I mean, that's just not being done. | ||
| But it's still, like, really good country music. | ||
| Like, I like a lot of country music, you know? | ||
| Even songs that are... | ||
| Even like a song that's sort of a classic song with all those themes that you talked about before, like drinking, a heartache, if it's well done, I still really like it, you know? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| No, I mean, if it's pure and honest and it's great music, I just didn't feel like I had anything to offer there. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The sound, though, is... | ||
| I think people are starting to accept that... | ||
| Not even starting to accept, but sort of... | ||
| For a long time, country got classified amongst a lot of young people as being, like, a dumb kind of music, you know? | ||
| And unfairly so. | ||
| And I think that as some young people started getting into some of the other country, like getting into some Johnny Cash songs, for instance, you know, you start going, oh, this is country, too. | ||
| Okay, well... | ||
| You can't say Johnny Cash songs are dumb. | ||
| You just can't. | ||
| I mean, they were just... | ||
| He had too much crazy shit going on in those songs. | ||
| You know, it's undeniable. | ||
| There was a lot going on in between the lines. | ||
| Oh, there's a lot going on in A Boy Named Sue. | ||
| I mean, just think about that song. | ||
| I mean, he had some great fucking songs. | ||
| And then he did The Highwaymen, and that was an interesting song, too. | ||
| Like, that thing that he did with Willie Nelson and... | ||
| Who else was it? | ||
| Was it... | ||
| Christopherson and Waylon. | ||
| Yeah, and they did this crazy song about reincarnation that to this day, if you never heard it, go find that song, The Highwaymen. | ||
| And it's this really wild song because it's all different verses sung by a different guy. | ||
| Like, Willie will sing one verse. | ||
| And then Johnny comes in. | ||
| I fly a starship. | ||
| Oh my god, that's a good fucking song. | ||
| It's just... | ||
|
unidentified
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Woo! | |
| Well, you know, weirdly... | ||
| And it's funny to me that the country has this really rigid perception by the public. | ||
| I mean, if you look back at any of the really good, great country singers, they were all batshit, man. | ||
| I mean, it was just like some of the most colorful, weird characters to ever walk through American history, you know? | ||
| So, I mean, for me, it's not really much of a stretch. | ||
| I didn't feel like I was really going out there too far. | ||
| You know what it is, man? | ||
| It's Southism. | ||
| It's like racism towards the South. | ||
| It's like thinking that anybody who has a Southern accent's got to be a moron, thinking anybody who's singing country songs, they've got to suck. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| It's an urban form of classism. | ||
| Like, you look at that style of music, and they automatically, some people did for a while. | ||
| But I think guys like Shooter, guys like you, you guys are opening up, and Honey Honey Band does a lot of country-type sound. | ||
| I think a lot of people are opening up people's ideas of what that sound really is, and you hear a great song, it's like, God damn it, that's a great song. | ||
| It doesn't matter if they've got a banjo playing in the background, you can't tell me that song didn't fuck you up. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I think people are starting to realize, like, there's just good, man. | ||
| There's just good. | ||
| There's good disco songs, man. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| You ever hear Kiss, I Was Made For Loving You? | ||
| It's a good goddamn disco song. | ||
| I don't give a fuck what anybody says. | ||
| I'm not a Kiss hater, man. | ||
| I loved the Monkees when I was a kid. | ||
| Dude! | ||
| The Monkees had some good fucking songs. | ||
| I don't care if they were put together in a project. | ||
| Neil Diamond wrote half that shit. | ||
| Did he really? | ||
| Yeah, that's why the songs are so fucking great, man. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| That makes a lot of sense. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| I like Neil Diamond songs. | ||
| I fucking said it. | ||
| I fucking said it. | ||
| I don't care what he's doing with his hair. | ||
| I'd like a goddamn Neil Diamond song. | ||
| Any day. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| The guy was a genius. | ||
| I think when you expand your horizon and sort of open up your ideas of musical appreciation, I've tried really hard with a lot of stuff and it just can't catch. | ||
| Like every few months or so, I try with jazz. | ||
| I'll throw some Coltrane on and I'll be like... | ||
| I'll be in my car and then five minutes in and I fucking snap. | ||
| I just can't take it anymore. | ||
| And I'll throw some Kid Rock on or something just to turn it the other way. | ||
| I just can't do it. | ||
| It's probably the only music I never got into. | ||
| I like hillbilly jazz, but I don't know. | ||
| Charles Mingus and guys like that, maybe I can listen. | ||
| But even in brief doses. | ||
| I just prefer a melody. | ||
| I like a good song. | ||
| I think one thing that it's good for, I like jazz at a bar. | ||
| If you're having a couple drinks and some jazz is playing in the background, it's not a very recognizable song. | ||
| It's just interesting music. | ||
| It's interesting background music. | ||
| But as far as it being my main focal point, you know, not really. | ||
| Maybe I'm wrong. | ||
| Maybe I need to find the right stuff. | ||
| What do you listen to? | ||
| I tried a bunch of different shit. | ||
| Thelonious Monk. | ||
| I've tried some Coltrane. | ||
| Obviously, they're great musicians. | ||
| I mean, there's no denying they have skill. | ||
| But it just doesn't grip me in any way. | ||
| I don't know what it is. | ||
| You ever heard of Bitches Brew by Miles Davis? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| That's a pretty killer live. | ||
| Pretty killer. | ||
| I can get down with that. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's some riffs that I really enjoy for a long, but I can't, like, sit down. | ||
| Like, I can sit and listen to the same Leonard Skinner album maybe, like, three times in a row, you know? | ||
| But it's very hard for me to listen to the same jazz stuff over and over and over again. | ||
| I just, I don't know, whatever it is. | ||
| I'm missing it. | ||
| Woody Allen's got it, and I'm missing it. | ||
| You know? | ||
| There's a saying, you know, you're going to go play jazz until the money runs out. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure. | ||
| Well, we were just in Philadelphia. | ||
| I was in Philly on Friday night, and we passed by the jazz bar, and we thought, man, we should go after this show. | ||
| Go fucking see some jazz. | ||
| Never did it. | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| We thought about it. | ||
| It's one of those things I always say I should do. | ||
| I've never said that. | ||
|
unidentified
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I've never heard of myself. | |
| Let's go hear some jazz. | ||
| So, how did you get into singing country music? | ||
| Was that what you've always sang, or did you fuck around with other forms of music first? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, actually, I didn't really have a choice. | ||
| Both my grandfathers played... | ||
| Well, actually, in eastern Kentucky, where I'm originally from, everybody really plays music, but it's what you do after work, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Yeah, my mom's brother, all his friends, they had this house, and it was these two twin brothers, and both of them never married, so they turned their house into a fucking practice space, and they just had this PA and lights and shit that stayed set up all the time. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow! | |
| So I was a real young kid, and I'd go over there. | ||
| I'd always play guitar, and... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, before I even really knew anything about music or songwriting, I think I was learning how to play in a band just from hanging out with those guys. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But yeah, it was never encouraged. | ||
| You don't think, oh, I can do this for a living. | ||
| If that makes sense. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| You just do it because everybody's doing it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And nobody thinks they're going to leave that situation. | ||
| Or for many other reasons, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It is what it is. | ||
| So yeah, Dad's dad was a big bluegrass guy. | ||
| Played mandolin and just shoved that shit down my throat. | ||
| I mean, repeatedly until I accepted it. | ||
| Mom, my other grandfather, he was like a big Merle Haggard, Marty Robbins guy. | ||
| Had an old Gibson, a very beautiful voice. | ||
| He probably more than anybody. | ||
| We'd watch Hee Haw and shit when I was a kid and TNN and he'd kind of tell me which of the guys were actually playing and the ones that were just holding the guitar as a prop. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Roy Clark and Jerry Reed and guys like that are huge. | ||
| Yeah, I knew by the time I was five, I don't give a fuck about anything else ever. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| I could have dropped out of school in third grade. | ||
| It would have been the same result. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| So you're kind of groomed, at least in the music sense, but not maybe in becoming a professional. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, without knowing it, maybe. | ||
| Because I've never really played many bands. | ||
| But yeah, I had an older cousin, Mike, too. | ||
| He was like six or seven years older than me, so... | ||
| You know, just older teenage neighbors with Chevy Novas and shit listening to Guns N' Roses, you know, when you're in fifth grade. | ||
| But Mike really, I remember very vividly one weekend, we'd go up to visit, they had a farm in Ohio, and I was probably in fourth or fifth grade, and I remember he knew I was really into music, and I was playing guitar already, and he's like, what are you listening to? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, it probably was the Monkees or something. | ||
| He took me to his bedroom and he had one of those tower stereo systems with the glass door and the super headphones. | ||
| And he sent me... | ||
| And CDs had just come out. | ||
| You know, this was like 87, 88, I don't know. | ||
| And he just had this... | ||
| Already had this fucking mountain of CDs. | ||
| And he's like, here... | ||
| It was like Zeppelin box set and Cream and Hendrix and Humble Pie and Traffic and all these bands. | ||
| It was like a fucking bomb just went off in my head. | ||
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unidentified
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Wow. | |
| And that was it. | ||
| I was done. | ||
| My life was ruined. | ||
| I very clearly remember the transition between records and CDs. | ||
| I remember the very first CDs showing up at the record store. | ||
| Because kids today probably don't even appreciate it because of the last ten years of the internet has dominated digital downloads ever since... | ||
| Napster came along, and then iTunes, and everybody knows how to get shit online. | ||
| And there's no record stores anymore. | ||
| Obviously there's a few. | ||
| But I mean, it used to be like a local community spot. | ||
| I lived in Newton, Massachusetts, and we used to go down to this place that was right across the street from a place that I worked at. | ||
| I worked at this... | ||
| Ice cream place called Newport Creamery. | ||
| We made hamburgers or washed dishes and did all that shit. | ||
| And across the street from Newport Creamery was the record store. | ||
| All kids would go there after school. | ||
| It was our own cultural... | ||
| It was the only output to the rock and roll of the world. | ||
| Every week a new record came out. | ||
| And I remember when the CDs came out, everybody was like, what is this? | ||
|
unidentified
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What the fuck? | |
| Look at it. | ||
| It's got a rainbow in it. | ||
| If you wiggle it, it makes rainbows. | ||
| Well, the digital thing, I think, In a lot of ways it's great, but I blame it almost entirely for the downward spiral of, you know, the quality. | ||
| Of music? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, in the 70s, man, if you got a record deal, you had to be bad the fuck ass. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| There was no slop. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Pro Tools and shit to go in and make everybody, you know. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| Actually, as a quote, Pig said this to me, he's like, you know what they used before Pro Tools? | ||
| Fucking pros. | ||
|
unidentified
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You know. | |
| That sounds like something a guy named Pig would say. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Yeah, they used to have to, you know, the sound was a different sound too, right? | ||
| I mean, the people that are real vinyl heads, they'll tell you. | ||
| I don't recognize it. | ||
| I'm not educated. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I'm a pretty... | ||
| I'm kind of an audiophile, fucking super geek about it. | ||
| Yeah, I've never gotten into it. | ||
| I should. | ||
| I should really get a record player. | ||
| I know Marin's really into that shit. | ||
| He keeps stacks of them at home. | ||
| He listens to them. | ||
| They meticulously clean them and put them down. | ||
| You have to have the right earphones. | ||
| I guess it's got, like, what is the sound that's different? | ||
| Because I don't listen to vinyl. | ||
| I think it's just, there's a warmth to it. | ||
| A warmth. | ||
| Everything just sounds really settled and cohesive. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Whereas in digital, I hear the separation, especially in the stereo. | ||
| You can just hear, it's almost like you're sitting at the mixing board, and you just, like some asshole decided that guitar needed to be like a hard two o'clock right there. | ||
| But in a vinyl, it just kind of seems more three-dimensional, like it's coming from around you, I feel like. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So you can sort of hear the different tracks? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| You know, maybe I just don't have a fucking ear for music. | ||
| Maybe that makes sense. | ||
| Some of my choices. | ||
| You gotta know what you're listening for. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You weren't here when we had Russell Peters on. | ||
| Russell Peters is a stand-up comic, a friend of mine, very funny guy. | ||
| He's also a DJ. And we were playing some songs, and he could pick out, it was a rap song, and he could pick out what the samples were from. | ||
| And I was like, what? | ||
| How do you hear that? | ||
| Like, I didn't even hear. | ||
| He's like, yeah, you can hear right here. | ||
| Like, that would be from, you know, 1984. And I was like, I don't know how the fuck you just did that. | ||
| I trust you, but I don't know how the fuck you just did that. | ||
| He's got a separate knowledge base of old music too, to reference from. | ||
| Yeah, his is all old hip-hop stuff. | ||
| He loves old hip-hop stuff. | ||
| So, the thing about the record stores that people loved was that it was sort of like, because we didn't have the internet, you would go there and you would see these, it was on a big piece of paper. | ||
| Like, holy shit, here's, you know, here's the new Bruce Springsteen album. | ||
| Like, it's right there, and you see, oh, wow, it's like, this is what he made. | ||
| This is what he's been doing for the past year. | ||
| Bruce has been, you know, writing all these songs, and bam, here we go, we got it, wow. | ||
| You didn't have fucking YouTube. | ||
| You didn't have, you know, I mean... | ||
| I think that's the worst thing that ever happened is now everything's so accessible and the kids' attention span is so short. | ||
| They'll never know that experience to sit down and listen to an album all the way through and then just fucking obsess about it. | ||
| And then, you know, hold that physical thing, that sleeve in your hand, just like, what the fuck are these guys doing? | ||
| Like, they got a secret laboratory and there's something I don't know about, you know? | ||
| And mystery, I guess, was the most important element of rock. | ||
| And that's just fucking gone. | ||
| Do you remember when The Wall came out? | ||
| No, I was born in 78. I mean, I remember watching it way too young. | ||
| I was in high school when I found out about The Wall, so it was after The Wall had come out. | ||
| But I remember sitting there with my friend, we had the headphone jack thing plugged in so you could have two headphones, both listening to it. | ||
| And how everything ties in together, it seemed so beyond human reach. | ||
| Like that these guys figured out how to do all this. | ||
| They put these amazing songs and they just sort of flow into each other like some wild ride. | ||
| Or like Dark Side of the Moon, very similar. | ||
| You know, like the album they always link up to The Wizard of Oz. | ||
| I mean, that album... | ||
| Everything just flows together in this crazy way. | ||
| It did feel like they were in a lab somewhere. | ||
| Well, Marvin Gaye would do that a lot too. | ||
| Willie Nelson did a lot of concept records. | ||
| They call it Song Cycle, where you don't ever feel like there's an actual pause anywhere in the album. | ||
| It's just this one cohesive work. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| And that does take time. | ||
| We did a little bit of it on Metamodern. | ||
| Pink Floyd and some other albums were definitely referenced while we were cutting that shit towards the end. | ||
| When you first decided that you were going to be a professional country music singer, did you decide slowly and gradually, or did you just fucking dive in? | ||
| I only started my career attempting to have a career about four years ago. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And I never would have done it, to be completely honest. | ||
| It was really my wife's idea. | ||
| She's the one that really kind of encouraged me to go for it. | ||
| Because, you know, there's always something I did as a hobbyist. | ||
| I would write and play, and I'd get a lot of grief from friends, especially in my 20s. | ||
| They're like, why aren't you out? | ||
| You know, man, you should be doing something. | ||
| Because we'd go to shows at clubs, and they'd be like, this is fucking cool. | ||
| We'd rather be at home listening to you play, you know. | ||
| And I just, I don't know why. | ||
| I never thought... | ||
| Was it like the limitations of your environment maybe? | ||
| The people that you were around? | ||
| I moved to Nashville once in 2006. You can play in local bands and if that's what you want out of it, that's great. | ||
| There's a lot of people that do that on a hobbyist level. | ||
| Like I said, it's what you do after work. | ||
| For me, that just never felt rewarding enough. | ||
| I never felt like I was giving everything I could to it. | ||
| It's a very frustrating place, and I ended up putting it down a lot of times because of that. | ||
| I felt like it was bringing me more heartache. | ||
| I took jobs and worked normal jobs, and I was out working a railroad job in Utah for almost four years. | ||
| My wife was out there with me. | ||
| I guess, for whatever reason, from dealing with the stress of that, I didn't realize at the time I wasn't fulfilling my fucking purpose, Joe Rogan. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| She kind of recognized that, and I started writing a lot as a result of dealing with the stress from my job and playing at home. | ||
| She just kind of told me, you know, you don't suck at this, and you're going to wake up at 40 and know you never fucking tried, and then I'm stuck with your miserable ass. | ||
|
unidentified
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Ha ha ha! | |
| We sold everything and literally, man, she and I and our dog in a Ford Bronco drove to Nashville. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That was like four years ago. | ||
| Now I was older. | ||
| I was clean. | ||
| I was focused. | ||
| I had purpose. | ||
| The first year, you kind of got to get the lay of the land. | ||
| It's a hustle. | ||
| It's a total shark tank. | ||
| I just decided I wasn't going to have anything to do with that shit. | ||
| I'm not a social guy. | ||
| I don't go to bars and clubs and things like that. | ||
| So what is it like? | ||
| Man, it's, well there's so many facets to it. | ||
| You know, depending on what, the industry, there's so many sides of the industry that people fall into. | ||
| And most, and I'd say the bulk majority of it is complete and total shameless opportunists. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| But then the musicians come and everybody, you know, the thing about musicians, we're lazy as fuck and nobody really wants to work. | ||
| So you get all these guys, these side players, they're looking for songwriters to get gigs supporting or backing up and they want like half the door of what you get paid for their services because they don't want to wait tables. | ||
| And there's guys that are really good and earn that money. | ||
| And then there's this side of it. | ||
| But it just really feels like, to me, the first time I feel like everybody I've met, it's like literally, hey man, how's it going? | ||
| What can you do for me? | ||
| And while they're talking to you, they're looking over your shoulder to see who else they should probably be talking to. | ||
| It's very Hollywood-like. | ||
| It's getting more and more. | ||
| Is that just because of your money, you think? | ||
| Because there's money in country? | ||
| There's a lot of fucking money in country music. | ||
| That's the only thing still selling CDs. | ||
| That's why the labels are still... | ||
| Still got CD players. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I saw something last night. | |
| There's going to be no platinum albums this year. | ||
| None. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For the first time. | |
| I mean, now if you have a hit record, you drop an album on a major label. | ||
| If you sell 200,000 copies in a week, that's a success. | ||
| Ten years ago, if you sold 200,000 copies your first week, they'd have dropped your ass. | ||
| Isn't that incredible? | ||
| So the whole thing is just... | ||
| It really is the Wild West. | ||
| With the internet and social media. | ||
| It affords guys like me and a lot of other people like me doing what I'm doing. | ||
| The opportunity to reach people without having to go down certain avenues, I guess. | ||
| And country didn't used to be like that. | ||
| Like Nashville used to be like what? | ||
| What was it like? | ||
| It was, you know, gatekeepers and... | ||
| Well, when exactly, do you mean? | ||
| I mean, before it became more Hollywood-esque, the way it is now. | ||
| Has it always had an element of show business to it? | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, they do tacky real well, and that's kind of what Rose invented, man. | ||
| But I wouldn't say Hollywood. | ||
| There's a certain LA element to Nashville that's kind of come on in the last two or three years more or so. | ||
| It's very hip. | ||
| I blame that Hootie and the Blowfish guy. | ||
| When he crossed over. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Darius Rucker. | |
| Yeah, when Darius got in, a black guy who sings good country. | ||
| Charlie Pryor, man. | ||
| I know, but it's been a while. | ||
| Yeah, true. | ||
| Darius snuck right in there and all those white people came running with him. | ||
| That's what happened. | ||
| That's what happened. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He brought him in. | |
| It's a very interesting situation. | ||
| There's a fakeness to it. | ||
| Yeah, it's very studied and effective. | ||
| Yes, studied and effective is the perfect way to describe it. | ||
| Fakeness is me falling short again. | ||
| A lot of journalists have been baited. | ||
| I can't tell you how many times they want me to get pulled into this negative conversation and just bash and talk shit on it. | ||
| And I could do that, but there's so much negativity already. | ||
| Whatever this opportunity is, I don't want to use it for that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Well, you know what? | ||
| Quite honestly, the negative aspects of anything, whether it's show business or entertainment, I don't think there's anything negative about talking about them. | ||
| I think the positive effect of talking about them is that young people recognize that they're not crazy, that they sense something goofy about this, and then it becomes more clearly defined what's goofy about it. | ||
| And it gives them a high standard to not set a trap for themselves. | ||
| I know in comedy, there's a thing that guys do when they first start out, which really fucks you up. | ||
| You're just trying to get laughs. | ||
| You're saying things you don't even believe. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because you're just hoping it'll work. | ||
| Because you're just terrified because you're on stage. | ||
| And I think... | ||
| Similarly in music, you could just start making stuff that you think like, you know, like one of those pros that writes those pop songs, you know, those guys, those weird dudes that just know how to like make something that clicks in, but there's like no feeling to it at all. | ||
| Well, they sit in cubicles in groups of four and five. | ||
| I'm not kidding. | ||
| That's a reality. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Go to work. | ||
| There's a big goddamn difference between that and someone who's writing shit like you're writing. | ||
| Someone who's writing shit that resonates. | ||
| I can tell, no matter what your influences are in this life, musically, or even while you're creating a song, it's all filtering through your unique individual vision. | ||
| And that's entirely missing from all these poppy things. | ||
| And that's something that people connect with. | ||
| I mean, look... | ||
| There's something personal about songs that you know the dude wrote it, you know the guy singing it, like my friends in Honey Honey Band. | ||
| They write all their shit. | ||
| So when they're singing it, and they're sitting here in the studio singing it, or you've seen them on stage, that's their creation. | ||
| It's 100%. | ||
| And there's a uniqueness to that, that your music has, that a lot of music, that it hits a different frequency, as opposed to a poppy frequency. | ||
| And these people that are coming in that are just trying to exploit it and monetize it, they probably, that doesn't register with them. | ||
| Or even if it does, they don't give a shit, because that's not where they're at. | ||
| They're just worried about the quarterly report. | ||
| Very seldom do any of the people running labels actually know anything or give a shit about music. | ||
| It's just really... | ||
| That's really more of a recent development. | ||
| A lot of them are run by very young guys now, like in their 30s, because the old ruse kind of went out, retired, and it kind of turned over. | ||
| A lot of the dudes that were in LA in the 80s making all those awful hair metal band records. | ||
| Those producers and engineers, once that industry dried up, a lot of them moved to Nashville. | ||
| If you turn on the radio today, you'll find that a lot of that shit sounds exactly like a Poison record. | ||
| There's a reason for that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| That formulaic way of creating it. | ||
| Making hits. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I think... | |
| Two or three decades ago, the label still offered up the other. | ||
| You had all these great bands that were making art, because they knew they were going to sell a fuckton of copies and make their money back, so they were willing to take the risk. | ||
| And now there's really no risk takers. | ||
| And I don't know if that's because of it, maybe there's a lack of visionaries. | ||
| Is it just because the money's dried up? | ||
| I think they're all sitting in their corner offices looking out the window wishing it would go back to 1996 and twiddling their thumbs and praying to a dying business model. | ||
| because they're completely dependent on radio for sales and singles and cumulus and clear channels pretty much all but completely lock that out to a very politically selected group of songs which somebody paid probably at least a million dollars just to get it in rotation you know they'll pay a million or two million dollars to make a hit That's so crazy. | ||
| That's sad. | ||
| That's sad to hear. | ||
| It's a business. | ||
| It is a business, but it's sad to hear. | ||
| It's just like flipping real estate or something. | ||
| There's no artist development anymore. | ||
| Luckily, I didn't try to do this at 22 or 26 because now I've worked real jobs and I was able to understand that, the mechanical aspect of it all. | ||
| That's not the only way to do it anymore. | ||
| You can just kind of bypass around that. | ||
| It's a much longer, harder road. | ||
| But then again, it's not. | ||
| Because if you catch fire, it just spreads across the internet. | ||
| It's a much more rewarding road, I can tell you that. | ||
| Oh, fuck yeah. | ||
| It's got to be. | ||
| I can only imagine. | ||
| I mean, I would imagine that being stuck singing some songs that you don't believe in and that are not really good, but everybody is really responding to, and you have something inside you that you wish you could have got out. | ||
| But now you're trapped. | ||
| You know, that's gotta suck. | ||
| I would imagine. | ||
| Do you remember when Garth Brooks came back as a different character? | ||
| Chris Gaines, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Put the wig on. | ||
| There was nobody there to say, hey, maybe you shouldn't do this. | ||
| Like, he was surrounded by yes people. | ||
| You just know. | ||
| Because somebody was like, yeah, that'll be cool. | ||
| Someone didn't say, wait, what, wait, wait, what? | ||
| What, wait, what? | ||
| You're gonna... | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| What are you gonna do? | ||
| You're gonna put a wig on? | ||
| And you're gonna change your name. | ||
| But everybody's gonna know it's you. | ||
| So what are you doing? | ||
| Are you playing a character now? | ||
| You're playing a character. | ||
| It was high art, man. | ||
| Yeah, you're a goddamn superstar. | ||
| Show's deep. | ||
| You're selling some... | ||
| You know, I got friends in low places. | ||
| Sold a lot of fucking copies. | ||
| And what are you gonna do now? | ||
| You're gonna put a fucking... | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| He had hair across his face. | ||
| Remember that shit? | ||
| He grew a soul patch. | ||
| Like, what the fuck was going on there? | ||
| It's his filtered interpretation. | ||
| I think he was going for like a Ryan Adams-y sort of thing. | ||
| I think he just straight went crazy. | ||
| Before he went fucking nuts. | ||
| That's a very distinct possibility. | ||
| He blew a rod right there. | ||
| He's redlining his engine. | ||
| Look at those eyes, man. | ||
| That was blowing a rod in the engine. | ||
| And then from then on, he kind of disappeared. | ||
| You never hear about Garth Brooks anymore. | ||
| Oh, he just came back. | ||
| Well, he's gonna, I mean, he'll still do well. | ||
| He's got a lot of fucking hits, but it's been a long time where Garth Brooks is in the public consciousness. | ||
| But meanwhile, in the 1990s or whatever it was, 80, I guess 90s, like early 90s, when did he, when was he just giganti? | ||
| Like early 90s. | ||
| He just kind of came out of nowhere. | ||
| Giganty! | ||
| Just knocked it right out. | ||
| Really, I think a lot of the stuff going on today is an absolute direct byproduct. | ||
| We're still getting the ripples of all that. | ||
| Because at some point, country music turned into a really shitty Van Halen concert. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Not David Lee Roth. | ||
| No! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sammy Hagar. | |
| Yeah, Van Hagar. | ||
| I knew what you were going to mean. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| You know, it's fascinating. | ||
| His first two are religion. | ||
| Yeah, dude. | ||
| I think that the original Van Halen with David Lee Roths are the greatest bands of all time, without a doubt. | ||
| Running with the Devil to this day. | ||
| It's like if I'm on the treadmill and I throw on Running with the Devil, I'll crank that bitch up an extra couple miles an hour. | ||
| Fuck it. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's just one of those songs, man. | ||
| But they did just as well with Sammy Hagar. | ||
| They really did. | ||
| Might have done better. | ||
| They got more soccer moms. | ||
| Yeah, what happened there? | ||
| Commercially, I think it made them more accessible. | ||
| What the fuck is that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That was my first concert ever. | ||
| My dad took me to see Van Halen in the fifth grade. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fucking Eddie Van Halen for a fifth grader. | ||
| That's amazing, man. | ||
| In the fifth grade. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think mine was the 9th grade when we went to see the J. Giles Band. | ||
| J. Giles Band was huge back then. | ||
| Angels of Centerfold. | ||
| Love Stinks. | ||
| They were giant, man. | ||
| They had a lot of deep cuts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Giant in my high school. | ||
| Giant! | ||
| In 1981 or whatever the hell it was. | ||
| Where are you from? | ||
| Newton. | ||
| Well, that's where I went to high school. | ||
| I was born in New Jersey. | ||
| I grew up kind of all over the country. | ||
| Lived in San Francisco from age 7 to 11. Lived in Florida from 11 to 13. Boston from 13 to probably 23, 24. And then New York for a couple years. | ||
| And California. | ||
| So I'm from California now. | ||
| I'm more California than anything I've ever been in my life. | ||
| But this place is a mess. | ||
| It's a fucking mess. | ||
| It's not the worst place, though. | ||
| It's just there's too many people. | ||
| If you could whittle California, if you could whittle Los Angeles down to, like, one-tenth of its size, as far as, like, population-wise. | ||
| You know, if you ever go to Seattle... | ||
| I bet it was the shit in the 40s and the 50s, man. | ||
| It was the absolute shit. | ||
| It's just a matter of inconvenience and overpopulation. | ||
| I've lived in Seattle for a while. | ||
| Very few people. | ||
| That sound kicked my ass. | ||
| Did it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| What was it? | ||
| The rain? | ||
| Among other things, yeah. | ||
| The rain did get you. | ||
| The rain, I think, is a direct contributor to a lot of the other problems people acquire while they live in Seattle. | ||
| But the rain keeps people from moving there, too. | ||
| There's a good thing about that goddamn rain. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But it's beautiful. | |
| It really is. | ||
| So beautiful. | ||
| Especially the summers. | ||
| I mean, it's really hard to beat Seattle in the summertime. | ||
| It's just that other nine months of the most dismal... | ||
| I mean, I remember hanging my towel up to dry for taking a shower, and you'd come in there two days later, and it'd be like fucking lichen growing on. | ||
| It's just a Petri dish, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So much precipitation that... | ||
| People are jacked up on coffee or heroin all the time. | ||
| But I have friends that live in Seattle that were fucking defended to the death. | ||
| Like right now the voodoo chicken is raising its fists in anger. | ||
| You, wait till I get a hold of you. | ||
| He fucking moved there from Indiana, my friend voodoo chicken. | ||
| That's what his official stage name is. | ||
| And when he did that, man, he liked it way better than Indiana. | ||
| And I'm like, that's good. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| But have you ever lived in Los Angeles? | ||
| Have you ever lived where it just doesn't fucking rain? | ||
| Like we're babies. | ||
| We're used to just soaking in that sun every day. | ||
| Every day. | ||
| We don't have a bad day. | ||
| Like 320 days a year? | ||
| How about 370? | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We have extra days here. | |
| Extra Sundays? | ||
| It doesn't fucking rain. | ||
| It's a total drought. | ||
| I mean, we're stealing water from the Colorado River or some shit. | ||
| I don't know how we keep everything hydrated. | ||
| Until some super genius guy figures out how to suck water out of the ocean. | ||
| You want to get some oceanfront property about 700 yards in because everybody's worried about the sea level rising. | ||
| All you have to do is figure out how to desalinate ocean water. | ||
| We'll drink that shit. | ||
| We'll use that shit in our toilets. | ||
| We'll just start extra golf courses with that fucking ocean. | ||
| That ocean won't be nothing. | ||
| Don't worry about that thing rising. | ||
| Oh, you're worried about... | ||
| There'd be too much water? | ||
| Oh, don't sweat it. | ||
| We got that. | ||
| It doesn't rain, and we're abusive when we find a resource. | ||
| If we could actually tap into the ocean, beachfront people would be fucking pissed. | ||
| Because the beach would be like a couple hundred yards away in a few years. | ||
| A mile and a half to the shoreline. | ||
| We'd suck that bitch dry. | ||
| It may come to that. | ||
| It might. | ||
| It really might. | ||
| It may very well. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You know, man, every time I come to California, it's always like in and out. | ||
| Yeah, quick. | ||
| We were here, we did Conan, and played at the Troubadour a month or two back, and we were here for about four days, and that's the most time I've ever spent consecutively in L.A., but I've never been able to really get the lay of the land. | ||
| I know I like Redondo. | ||
| Yeah, Redondo's nice. | ||
| Very chill, bohemian kind of feel. | ||
| That's where Tommy Buns lives. | ||
| Tom Segura lives in Redondo. | ||
| He fucking loves it. | ||
| It's very chill. | ||
| Like any of those beach communities are very chill. | ||
| LA's great. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| I talk shit about it sometimes, but it's just the amount of people. | ||
| I just don't think people value things that they have in too much abundance. | ||
| I think there's an issue with people when you get over a certain population. | ||
| I think we just naturally get a little more callous or You just don't give a fuck about each other. | ||
| Like, if you go to like a really small town and you go to the store, people say hi to each other. | ||
| Because there's not that many fucking people. | ||
| There's only a few thousand people in the town. | ||
| I mean, yeah, they're going to get some small-minded gossipy bullshit, too. | ||
| But I don't necessarily think that has to be the case in a small town. | ||
| But I think the benefit of being in a smaller population is people are just like a little less... | ||
| Intruded upon by sensory input. | ||
| Everybody's a little less on edge. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| California's just... | ||
| There's 20 million people plus Mexicans in this city. | ||
| I say plus Mexicans. | ||
| With respect. | ||
| Because, I mean, people that have come over here from Mexico, which I think you should just be able to come over. | ||
| I don't believe in... | ||
| I think it's ridiculous that people who want to work, they should be forced to stay in this shitty patch of dirt because they just got a bad roll of the dice and they were born there. | ||
| I think we're just scared. | ||
| The good spots, like here, we're scared it's going to bounce out somehow and they're going to come over and fuck it up. | ||
| We just gotta figure out a way to not have it fuck it up. | ||
| Just gotta figure out a way to not have crime and poverty and all the different issues that we've just completely ignored in poor communities. | ||
| Not have that affect everybody's, like, level of happiness that's living in these big groups. | ||
| But just to imprison someone in a shit country, because they were fucked and they were born there, just seems kind of crazy and inhumane to me. | ||
| Just seems weird, you know? | ||
| It's pretty Eurocentric. | ||
| But I think the illegals, first of all, they're here. | ||
| They're Americans. | ||
| We're all immigrants, you fucks. | ||
| But if you counted them, I don't think they've ever really counted them. | ||
| I don't know how many that is. | ||
| So I say 20 million plus Mexicans because that's what it is. | ||
| It's like the greater LA area, which is a huge area. | ||
| It goes all the way down and wide. | ||
| It's so spread out and sprawled. | ||
| Something around 20 million people, which is just incredible. | ||
| That's just a nutty number. | ||
| I lived in Tokyo for a while. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| When I was younger. | ||
| What were you doing there? | ||
| I was in the military. | ||
| I got stations over there. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And it's like, you know, an island... | ||
| Roughly the size of California with the population in the United States. | ||
| But it was weird. | ||
| Something you said earlier about people being crowded. | ||
| I just went back last year and visited some friends of mine that helped me with a video project. | ||
| And I noticed it even more so now that I'm older. | ||
| But even on a crowded subway train where you're just jammed in like sardines or walking down the street, they're so aware of... | ||
| Well, self-aware and then just their surroundings. | ||
| You know, you could be crammed in this train literally nut to butt, but yet nobody's touching anybody. | ||
| You know, there's just really this awareness. | ||
| And... | ||
| Consideration and mutual respect that I think you don't really encounter in a lot of big cities here. | ||
| It's just this, get the fuck out of my way. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah, I found it incredibly polite. | ||
| I went to Tokyo once, and I was like, everybody's so polite here. | ||
| So friendly. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| You know, that place is 20 times the size of New York City, and you could pass out in the darkest alley with a $100 bill sticking out of each year, and nobody's going to fuck with you. | ||
| But there's a bunch of African dudes that are moving in there from Africa, like straight from Africa, these hustler guys. | ||
| There's mostly Roppongi in some of the nightlife districts. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You walk down the street and they're trying to drag you into some massage joint and there's just a look about them like, oh. | ||
| Some sinister shit, man. | ||
| A wolf got into the chicken coop. | ||
| Well, it does have, there is a very dark underbelly side to Tokyo for sure. | ||
| But it's hard for guys like you and me to really go find that. | ||
| Well, I've had Ensign Inoue on the podcast several times. | ||
| He's an MMA fighter who was originally from Hawaii but lives in Japan now. | ||
| And he's Japanese and he's friends with all these. | ||
| He fought for Pride, which was the biggest MMA organization in the world at one point. | ||
| They were in Japan. | ||
| K2? No, no, that's K-1. | ||
| You're thinking of like kickboxing. | ||
| That's a big event, too. | ||
| They had some MMA events as well. | ||
| But Pride had these enormous shows where they would do like 90,000 seat arenas. | ||
| I mean, it was just gigantic. | ||
| And Ensign was one of their big stars over there, and he's down with the Yakuza, so he had all these crazy Yakuza stories. | ||
| Like... | ||
| You know, I hung out with a couple of Yakuza guys once. | ||
| One of them was a bookie and the other one, I guess he was just like a, you know, you're sitting in bars and you'd be drunk, you know, and they all, especially if they learn you're American or if you speak English, they all want to talk to you and just figure out what you're about. | ||
| And these guys, you know, they were drunk. | ||
| We just ended up kicking it for a couple hours. | ||
| Then I kind of put it together and realized what they did. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And they asked me and a friend of mine that was with me if we wanted to go to another club. | ||
| This guy had this badass baby blue 67 Corvette. | ||
| Really? | ||
| In Japan? | ||
| They were just young guys flashing out. | ||
| They just wanted to impress us. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It was weird because I could tell you they didn't really give a fuck about being friends with us. | ||
| They just wanted to show us what they were all about. | ||
| They were young, probably really lower level guys. | ||
| There's a lot of that. | ||
| They're in one specific part of the city, mostly Shinjuku or all the pachinko parlors. | ||
| and organized gambling takes place and the red light. | ||
| They make it very obvious who they are, you know what I mean? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And it's an accepted part of the culture. | ||
| More and more so. | ||
| They've become less corrupt. | ||
| The government just kind of realized we can try to fight this or we can work with them. | ||
| They do a lot of things for the communities that they're in, strangely enough, you know, to kind of keep order. | ||
| But then at the same time you hear stories about some guy might owe a little too much money and they just literally go and beat him the fuck to death in a train station. | ||
| With baseball bats or whatever in front of people and they don't do shit about it. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| There's a club owner in Roppongi that got murdered a couple years ago and I don't think anything came of that. | ||
| It's just like... | ||
| Just that's what happens. | ||
| That's what happens. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whew. | |
| Whoa. | ||
| They have MMA fights between gang members. | ||
| They have, like, Yakuza MMA fights. | ||
| Yeah, what the fuck? | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| That's a crazy warrior society. | ||
| Which is interesting that they're so kind. | ||
| They adhere to Budo. | ||
| That's their whole trip, is maintaining samurai culture. | ||
| They despise all the westernization that happened post-World War II. It's all about codes and honor and the Budo way. | ||
| Yeah, Ensign Inoue, his nickname is Yamato Damashi. | ||
| Just warrior spirit and this samurai spirit that everything has to be done with Yamato Damashi. | ||
| Like when he would go into a fight, he would write notes to all his friends and his family because he thought he would die. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And write a goodbye note. | ||
| All that big horror and shit. | ||
| Just ready to go to war. | ||
| You know, that guy was... | ||
| And his fights were so fucking exciting because of that. | ||
| Because like he literally never worried about his own safety. | ||
| He would just go in there and just try to test himself and just swing... | ||
| Did you ever read any of Moriya Yoshiba or the guy that founded Aikido? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| He was more of a philosopher, really, than a martial artist? | ||
| Well, he was absolutely a martial artist, but a lot of his writings I always found more interesting, more so than the actual art. | ||
| Well, that was really a strange part of samurai culture. | ||
| I shouldn't say strange, but unexpected. | ||
| When I started investigating it, or reading about it rather, was that they were required to be balanced, and it was encouraged to be a very balanced person. | ||
| Balanced like in your discipline, balanced in your artistic expression. | ||
| Balanced in your understanding of emotions and fears. | ||
| It was very different than what we think of as, like, a warrior. | ||
| We think of, like, Stone Cold Murderer, Conan the Barbarian motherfucker, just... | ||
| I think it was just, at its essence, pure, absolute Buddhism. | ||
| Like, they just live completely in that moment all the time. | ||
| Whatever they do, they're so intensely focused and, you know, in anything. | ||
| Whether it's... | ||
| Trimming a flower or, you know, there's a very certain element to that culture that I've never seen anywhere else in the world. | ||
| Yeah, I wonder how that happens. | ||
| I'd like to talk to someone who's an expert in Japanese culture to explain how one society does fit into this very unusual pattern. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| I wonder how much of it had to do with sword fighting. | ||
| Well, you know, that's what you should talk about, you know, because you can't second guess in a fucking sword fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, in every... | ||
| Most, you know, these samurai movies, that's all bullshit, because a lot of these things were one stroke. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| You know, you had to choose that first stroke, and then... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cutting a man in half. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| And then with any kind of society like that, Ido or Kendo, whatever, there's a lot of mutual respect, I would imagine. | ||
| Back in the day, if a peasant or somebody going to the fucking market, taking their fruit to sell, if they pass the samurai on the street and they didn't bow accordingly or just basically say good morning... | ||
| They cut their fucking head off, man. | ||
| Like, right there. | ||
| Like, no questions. | ||
| You know, imagine if, like, walking down the street on Santa Monica was like that today. | ||
| I mean, people's behavior would be very different towards one another. | ||
| Yeah, it's... | ||
| I don't think it's good to be cutting people's heads off. | ||
| No, I'm not saying that. | ||
| But I do think... | ||
| I know what you're saying. | ||
| saying I do think that when people are scared of other people in that way or when they respect that the other person has that ability to do that to them they're carrying a fucking sword like that well-armed society is a polite society argument I don't necessarily think that's the way to go but I do think there is an element of people that need to know they get punched in their | ||
| Like, there's a bunch of people that say rude shit to people, and they say it Only because they think they can, because they're protected by society, and because of that, they're oftentimes less respectful than someone who would be like a physically dominant person in the conversation. | ||
| Like, I've seen martial artists have conversations with people where, you know, they're way, way... | ||
| Way more kind or way more considerate in the way they've voiced their concerns or opinions about something versus people that have never been in a fight in their life that will get in people's face and scream and yell, and you motherfucker, and it's like, you're only doing that because this guy's not going to punch you. | ||
| You know, you're having this conversation because you're out in public and you know this guy's not just going to pick you up and drop you on your head. | ||
| But if he wanted to, he could. | ||
| Like, he shouldn't talk to people like that. | ||
| There aren't any repercussions for being an asshole. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| The repercussions are only verbal, and they feel like if they keep it on that ground, they can bully the bully, even. | ||
| They can go after them if they keep it completely verbal. | ||
| If they know the guy's not going to do anything, you big fucking stupid piece of shit, and they know he's not going to smash your head like a zit. | ||
| As long as you're protected by society, you can get away with being pretty shitty to some people. | ||
| So I don't think it's good to chop people in half with swords, but I do think it might have something to do with the reason why they're considerate. | ||
| You know, it's weird how cultures develop in these unusual ways when they're just separated. | ||
| Like, Japan is an island. | ||
| You know, they're separated from other people, so they've developed it. | ||
| I mean, there's similarities to other Eastern cultures and their approach to things, but they're different. | ||
| You know, they have their own thing going on. | ||
| I think every place has its own thing going on. | ||
| I was in D.C., I guess, back in April. | ||
| I was trying to catch a train to go to a show. | ||
| I can't remember if it was New York or Boston. | ||
| I was at the Amtrak station in D.C. Something happened where there was a downed power line way up north that had taken out a lot of routes. | ||
| They basically canceled or delayed all the trains going out of the station. | ||
| When they put the announcement up, It just... | ||
| The place fucking erupted. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| I've never witnessed such a self-important display of human behavior in all my life as in Washington, D.C. that day at the Amtrak station. | ||
| There's this line of suited, briefcased... | ||
| You know, they all just got right in the Amtrak employees' faces one at a time, like, trying to explain to them how much more important their life was than everyone else's who had just been inconvenienced, you know, sitting in this place. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And, I mean, it was like, I had to retreat into myself. | ||
| I was just so surrounded by it. | ||
| And I saw a pregnant lady get fucking bumped out of the way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| Some dude, I mean, this is disgusting, man. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You would never see that in Japan. | ||
| Right. | ||
| People would just deal. | ||
| I don't know if you'd ever see that in England, you know? | ||
| I mean, who's to say? | ||
| Is that just the uber-successful, hyper-focused, shithead thing that we have that other countries just don't have? | ||
| Like, they have the discipline, but they don't have this... | ||
| Marauding focus thing that a lot of like American businessmen sort of embody this ideas go get you know it's Wall Street fucking Gordon Gekko greed is good now that kind of shit I was I would say you know Wall Street and DC places like this yeah tend to cultivate a bit more intense version of that I was just there Saturday night I had a great fucking time yeah it's a great party town but uh yeah I don't know what I mean I don't know what happened I just couldn't believe what I was seeing It seems like a weird place. | ||
| It really did. | ||
| It affected me. | ||
| It's a weird place. | ||
| I mean, that's the Death Star. | ||
| It's right there. | ||
| I mean, all the world's wars are all, like, sort of organized in this weird geometrical building there. | ||
| You know? | ||
| This is a thing. | ||
| It's there. | ||
| There's the penthouse, which is just outside of there, and then there's the White House, which is this weird fucking building in a park where the commander-in-chief of the number one conquering army the world has ever known, that's where he sleeps. | ||
| And everybody passes by the castle, some sort of strange formation, a big circle you drive around, everybody points at it. | ||
| It's a weird place to be. | ||
| You've read the history of the layout of the city and why it was laid out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you remember it? | ||
| It's got all sorts of weird... | ||
| It's not Masonic, is it? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Some weird Masonic implications. | ||
| It's all very specific in its geometry. | ||
| This may not be true, but I think I read somewhere that part of it, like why the streets are all one way and why it's so fucking confusing to drive around in D.C. is that in case it was ever invaded, they wanted to make it difficult... | ||
| For whoever was coming to get from the shore into the capital. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| That totally makes sense. | ||
| Why would you like to have it so you could do an easy drive-by? | ||
| Get on the highway and go really fast. | ||
| You want to make it super complicated. | ||
| What is that street? | ||
| Lombard Street in San Francisco? | ||
| That's what they should do. | ||
| Have that shit set up. | ||
| It's a cool city too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's got a lot of weird history to it. | ||
| It's like, if you stop and think about it. | ||
| Yeah, there's a website on the sacred geometry and symbols of Washington, D.C. Oh, interesting. | ||
| And it sort of explains the whole thing. | ||
| Like, what it mimics and the different... | ||
| All the different dimensions. | ||
| It's freaky stuff, man. | ||
| It's freaky because you know that these guys, they really were into ancient cultures. | ||
| They really were into these weird groups that they would form. | ||
| I mean, that skull and bone shit, that's not fake. | ||
| Yeah, that's weird. | ||
| That's real. | ||
| That's fucking weird. | ||
| That's real. | ||
| I mean, they really are a part of all this stuff. | ||
| Were they into pine cones? | ||
| I don't know if they were into pine cones. | ||
| I know that was a big thing in a lot of ancient Catholic art. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Oh, there's giant pine cones outside the Vatican. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, the pine cone supposedly represents the pineal gland, which is the seed of the soul in ancient Egypt, which is where now they've actually proven that DMT is made. | ||
| It's pretty speculative until real recently. | ||
| At least in rodents, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Which, I mean, it's a mammal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Rick Strassman and that group that he's involved with, the Cottonwood Research Foundation, they put it together. | ||
| And just getting in a live rodent, being able to prove that this third eye in the middle of your head actually is producing psychedelic chemicals. | ||
| Pretty fucking crazy. | ||
| The people that knew that, they designed the White House. | ||
| Designed all that shit. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Sort of, probably. | ||
| They were probably copying people who knew it. | ||
| Probably didn't even know why. | ||
| They had buckets of that shit. | ||
| Do you think they had DMT back when they were building the White House? | ||
| I mean, it was here. | ||
| But was it? | ||
| You know, they didn't even find out about ayahuasca. | ||
| When was it first synthesized? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| I think ayahuasca was discovered by Western civilization in the 1850s. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And I think they figured out what was in it when they were isolating the alkaloids in it. | ||
| And they originally wanted to call it telepathine, the alkaloid they isolated. | ||
| But then they found out that it was already isolated as the compound harmine. | ||
| And that's in the plant that is connected to ayahuasca that has the MAO inhibitor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So this is all like the early 1900s, late 1800s, early 1900s. | ||
| How did they figure that shit out? | ||
| How did they know what plants to boil together in order to deactivate the enzyme? | ||
| And how'd they know for thousands of years? | ||
| Yeah, how'd they know? | ||
| Yeah, how'd they figure it out? | ||
| It's not an easy process. | ||
| I mean, how many species of plants can there be in the Amazon? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| They found the right to? | ||
| Well, what's fucked up is that there's hundreds of thousands of different plants. | ||
| They found not just the right two, but they found out how to do it in this weird way where you have to mash up the vines and you add in the leaves and you boil it down. | ||
| It's a very involved process that takes hours to make true ayahuasca. | ||
| But nobody knows how they did it. | ||
| They say that the plants told them how to do it. | ||
| Which is just as good an explanation as anything. | ||
| I accept that. | ||
| If you're high on mushrooms, plants will tell you some shit. | ||
| I've had conversations with Traffic signals, you know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Imagine if everything really was alive, we just couldn't tune into it, you know? | ||
| I mean, if your table really was alive, and your table really had consciousness, it just sits there. | ||
| Its consciousness is very different than ours. | ||
| It's not important for it to move. | ||
| It just is where it is. | ||
| If you chop it up, it doesn't freak it out, but it has some sort of a feel to it. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Obviously it's not provable. | ||
| No. | ||
| But that Rupert Sheldrake guy who was on before... | ||
| Rupert, who was on a couple weeks ago, he thinks that everything has a memory. | ||
| He thinks that objects contain a memory. | ||
| And that's why people don't want to live in a house where someone's been killed. | ||
| Like you walk in, you have a weird feeling. | ||
| I'd say one of the more common side effects of high-dose psilocybin is inanimate objects tend to develop personalities or you kind of perceive them as much more characterized than normally. | ||
| It's all condensed matter, you know, so who fuck knows, man. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, well, who does... | ||
| That's another part of the whole what is a thing, what is an object that really fucks with your head. | ||
| When you start thinking about the fact that most atoms, like it's mostly space. | ||
| Like there's all this... | ||
| Or dark space, yeah. | ||
| There's all this stuff in there where it's undefined. | ||
| Like there's a lot of nothing. | ||
| And it's all just... | ||
| It's sort of somehow or another cohesive and becomes a table. | ||
| It's like energy condensed to a very slow vibration, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the Hicks line. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Here's Tom with the weather. | ||
| All of it sounds bizarre. | ||
| Just the idea that atoms, we're trying to figure out what subatomic particles are, and there's these particles inside atoms. | ||
| Like, we don't know what the fuck is going on with all those things. | ||
| Like, what are all those? | ||
| Have you followed this hydrogen collider thing? | ||
| Which one? | ||
| The Higgs boson. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Just fat. | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| That's the kind of stuff I was tripping out on when the record got written. | ||
| I mean, just like, you know, I don't know. | ||
| I don't pretend to understand it. | ||
| I'm definitely a hobbyist, but I'm fascinated by, like, string theory and the concept of independent, freestanding, dimensional realms of energy that all kind of hold one another together. | ||
| I'm fascinated that someone's mind is not just so tuned in to how the nature of the universe works, but so tuned in that they've taken this theoretical particle and made it the subject of this gigantic science project that involves hundreds of different fucking countries. | ||
| I think it's like 100 different countries, over 10,000 different scientists, something like that. | ||
| The photo gallery of the actual facility is one of the most insane things I've ever seen. | ||
| The amount of time and years it took them to build this thing is just... | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| I don't even want to know what the price tag looked like. | ||
| It's billions. | ||
| Billions of dollars. | ||
| And it's all to collide particles so that they can produce... | ||
| Finally God particles. | ||
| Yeah, this Higgs boson particle. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Point of origin. | ||
| Well, they also found that quark-gluon plasma, I think it is, which is supposedly the heaviest matter that they've ever discovered. | ||
| Let me pull that up. | ||
| It's some insane amount of weight these things have. | ||
| That's something that was figured out. | ||
| Yeah, quark-gluon plasma weight. | ||
| It's just insanely dense. | ||
| The densest matter created ever. | ||
| That they figured this out, that it is actually a real thing when they were doing some of the experiments. | ||
| The exotic material is more than 100,000 times hotter than the inside of the sun and is denser than a neutron star. | ||
| Wrap your fucking head around that. | ||
| It acts like a perfect liquid. | ||
| Can we see it? | ||
| I think they can, but very brief. | ||
| You know, it's like... | ||
| You're seeing it almost in a calculation. | ||
| Dark. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| By triggering hundreds of... | ||
| I think it's so heavy that if you had a piece of it that you could look at, like a marble, it would probably sink through the center of the universe. | ||
| I mean, just go right through your fucking... | ||
| Right through the... | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| Like alien spit. | ||
| It would probably go to the center of the planet. | ||
| And just hang out there. | ||
| Yeah, alien spit. | ||
| Burn through the fucking courtroom. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| Yeah, it's supposed to be unbelievably heavy. | ||
| Like, I could give you the numbers if I could find it, but I think it's one of those things where you can't even imagine. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| And that's something that they figured out is actually real. | ||
| I mean, if they're looking for the point of origin, right? | ||
| Like, they're looking for the god particle or whatever it calls the Big Bang. | ||
| There's this J-Swit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, he wrote a lot of really weird, controversial things, but... | ||
| I think he actually got blackballed by the Vatican in the early 20th century. | ||
| You ever read this book, The Phenomenon of Man, where he talks about the omega point? | ||
| No. | ||
| The origin, like the first point of all complex consciousness, or the source of the universe that emanated everything that we know and that ever has been into existence. | ||
| And he... | ||
| He was basically trying to establish a symbiotic relationship between science and religion and evolution and spirituality, which wasn't a very popular opinion in the Vatican in the 1920s. | ||
| He had this theory that it all emanated from this one point, the omega point, and that eventually consciousness will reach a state of complexity that's so advanced that it will no longer require a physical vessel or a human body or anything to inhabit itself. | ||
| and then it will keep evolving until it returns back to the highest state of complexity which can only be the same place it came from because whatever started it had to be the source of this true divine whatever so once it goes back you know basically you know the reality as we perceive it and this is according to a lot of modern quantum physics | ||
| it's just this manifestation that we sort of project out to convince ourself that we're not actually consciousness experiencing itself I'm not sure. | ||
| If that makes sense. | ||
| Like, you know, we're not little special flowers and individuals. | ||
| We're all literally the same thing. | ||
| People are pulling their car over to the side of the road right now, jumping out and running into the woods. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You just scared the shit out of people. | ||
| If the universe is 14 point whatever billion years old, like they say, I didn't. | ||
| It's not my idea. | ||
| No, it's a great idea. | ||
| What I'm saying is, why wouldn't it be, you know, who knows what? | ||
| It might be fucking 100 billion times older than that. | ||
| It might not have any age. | ||
| It might just be a constant cycle of that happening. | ||
| Down to a compressed, tiny spot, smaller than the head of a pin, the entire universe, and then, boom! | ||
| Big bang, over and over and over again. | ||
| It might just happen. | ||
| It might just compress. | ||
| I mean, just over the course of who knows how many billions of years and just continually do that. | ||
| If it happened once, like, why would we think that it's only, like, it's a one-time sale. | ||
| It's fucking sell, sell, sell. | ||
| The Big Bang is headed your way. | ||
| Well, it's just this one little Big Bang. | ||
| It's just pockets of... | ||
| Infinity stacked upon each other, you know. | ||
| Listen to this shit. | ||
| I found out what the weight of this stuff is. | ||
| This is gonna fuck your head up. | ||
| One cubic centimeter of this quark gluon plasma weighs 40 billion tons. | ||
| What? | ||
| It's pretty dense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What the fuck? | |
| How much is that? | ||
| What is 40 billion tons? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Times 2,000. | |
| Fuck. | ||
| Bullets times a ton is 2,000 pounds, right? | ||
| A billion times 2,000. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Does a skyscraper weigh 40 billion tons? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Does it? | |
| What the fuck weighs 40 billion tons? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Do you think a skyscraper weighs 40 billion tons? | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| And that's a cubic centimeter. | ||
| So if you threw that at somebody, they're not catching it. | ||
| You'd be wrecking house, man. | ||
| Just go right through your hand. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| Right through the center of the earth. | ||
| A fucking cubic centimeter. | ||
| And a centimeter is tiny. | ||
| We don't use those little bitchy-ass little units of measurement in my America, but that's a little tiny fucking thing. | ||
| It's about that big, right? | ||
| It's tiny. | ||
| Cubic centimeter, 40 billion tons. | ||
| If there was a Big Bang, why wouldn't we think that there could be an infinite number of Big Bangs? | ||
| An infinite number of expansions and contractions, and maybe what we are currently, and we like to think of as the highest state of life available, what we are is just this is what exists when you have this state of the universe. | ||
| And there's a type of consciousness that exists when the universe becomes no longer physical. | ||
| And that might be what you're experiencing when you smoke DMT. You might be experiencing these other forms of reality that are there. | ||
| You just don't tune into them while you're in this state. | ||
| and that you can access them through these chemical doorways while you're sleeping, while you're meditating, when you reach these different tunes of mind that people have been exercising and having these disciplined practices to try to reach these frequencies. | ||
| They've been doing it forever. | ||
| They're not doing it because they were, well, I know I'm starving to death, but I want to try to figure out a way to reach some shit that's not even real. | ||
| No, they were doing it because they had had success in it in some way or another. | ||
| Just changing the channel, really. | ||
| Possibly. | ||
| I've never... | ||
| My experience is very limited. | ||
| I've only encountered it twice, and I've never had, I guess, what you'd call a breakthrough. | ||
| What have you had when you've done it? | ||
| It was like... | ||
| Well, the first time, I didn't know what I was doing. | ||
| And the bubbling, it was just weird... | ||
| Everything was just some weird associations that kind of freaked me out. | ||
| And I was like, there's no way this is going to be healthy. | ||
| But then the second time, I got this extreme... | ||
| I don't know how to describe it other than say it was an intense downward shift in what felt like gravity. | ||
| You know that crest at the top of the first hill on a roller coaster where everything just kind of... | ||
| I felt like something was pushing me down. | ||
| And then I'd read so much and researched so much. | ||
| Most of my understanding came from reading and how that tied together with other experiences that I've had or how that related to things that I've always been fascinated with or... | ||
| Subscribe to, maybe, on a personal notion. | ||
| It felt like something putting you almost in a trance. | ||
| But I was still very much aware. | ||
| I don't think I got a very strong dose. | ||
| Were you taking regular DMT or 5-MeO DMT? The NN. So you didn't have any visuals? | ||
| Oh, I did. | ||
| No, I had some visuals, but I wouldn't say that it was probably as intense as the strongest psilocybin trip I've ever had, but I was still very much... | ||
| I never lost cognitive thought. | ||
| I was aware. | ||
| I was in my body. | ||
| I could open my eyes. | ||
| I knew I was in the room. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Almost like these Easter Island head sort of things, sort of just kind of coming out of the void with chasers, and it felt like something, it was like the cusp of something, and it was kind of over. | ||
| The room definitely looked, there was a weird energy, like everything had this crystalline sort of melty effect, but it wasn't overwhelming. | ||
| Certainly not anything like what they've described, like some of the research volunteers talked about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The volunteers are doing it slightly differently because they were doing... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The intravenous is supposed to be a motherfucker. | ||
| Actually, I got to visit with Dr. Strassman about five days ago. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| He answered a lot of questions and went more into detail. | ||
| But yeah, there were like massive doses, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And four in a row before 80 to 120 milligram doses all in one morning back to back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're hitting hard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just... | |
| Yeah, there's no resisting it at that point. | ||
| Yeah, my knowledge is from a purely amateur academia and incorporating that into certain other things. | ||
| How it may or may not resemble elements of Tibetan Buddhism and what people describe, like the bardos and independent realms of energy, where your soul is faced with these entities that test you in ways and how you react to those determine how you might transmigrate or reincarnate into another life. | ||
| I didn't even know about it until a year ago. | ||
| I was visiting a buddy of mine that was in town. | ||
| Which is really strange, because I've listened to your podcast off and on for a while, and I used to listen to a lot of Terrence lectures, and for whatever reason, I never heard about it. | ||
| Or maybe it passed in front of me when I was younger, and I didn't know what it was, and just said no, because it's related, it's like a PCP or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Get that shit away. | ||
| But yeah, I was sitting at a friend of mine's house, and his father, I can't remember if his father had already passed, or if he was just, he'd gotten very ill with terminal cancer, and... | ||
| He was pretty distraught about it, and we were just hanging out, and he was kind of telling me everything he'd been dealing with, and, you know, I didn't know what to really say, or to comfort him, you know, because he's obviously, you know, you find out your dad's dying. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He fucks you up. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And, you know, I just was like, well, you know, man, some people think that there's no such thing as death, and... | ||
| You know, you live to die and we die so we can really live and you know like the Buddhists think that there's this other realm you go to It's just the most pure bliss and like this ocean of love and you and you feel that joy and euphoria and either go on to Nirvana or you go back into another life depending how you live this one and he's like man that sounds a lot like DMT I was like what the fuck is DMT and uh He's like, really, man? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| I didn't have a clue. | ||
| He played an excerpt right there on the porch from one of your podcasts where you kind of got on this rant about it. | ||
| I'm like, alright, I need to dig in here because I'm seeing a lot of similarities and symbiotic Touchstones and I went home. | ||
| Man, I probably spent the next three months just reading everything I could find and scouring forums and then going back and reading metaphysical publications and a lot of theology and bouncing the shit around. | ||
| And then I found out my wife was going to have a child. | ||
| And it just was like my last great existentialistic dilemma, you know what I mean? | ||
| So I was like, I want to write a record about all this shit. | ||
| And record it like it was in outer space. | ||
| And then Dave and I just kind of wanted to tackle it from a standpoint in terms of the mix. | ||
| I wanted it to sound like a lot of my favorite records did that I used to listen to when I was high out of my fucking mind on Mushrooms or Dextromethorphan or anything else, you know. | ||
| And you can do all that with tape, I think. | ||
| Like we were talking about vinyl earlier, it's settled. | ||
| So when you put the headphones on, you want it to kind of just figure eight around your head, you know. | ||
| And you can do that with tape better than you can digitally? | ||
| A lot of people will say no, but I think the end result is a much better texture, for lack of a better term. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's hard to explain. | ||
| But the digital manipulation with computers, what you can do with music now, it's pretty incredible, but it's so easy to overdo it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then you lose that human fingerprint. | ||
| The quality of the actual sound of the instrument itself. | ||
| Everything, I think, to a certain degree has to be understated. | ||
| Isn't there like there's something really cool about hearing the pick moving across the guitar when you know that that's what you're hearing? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It gives you this certain strange connection and then instead if that was like cleaned up and this perfect sound, this perfect synthesized sound, it's still a cool thing, but it's missing out on whatever Whatever makes... | ||
| Whatever that unique feeling that you get from someone's art is. | ||
| You know? | ||
| When you see someone... | ||
| Like, David Cho was here the other day and he had some paintings. | ||
| And just seeing his paintings and knowing him... | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| Yeah, and it's like... | ||
| You're getting his unique art. | ||
| It's very uniquely his. | ||
| And that's what's missing with all this Pro Tools shit, right? | ||
| Well, you get perspective. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, I mean... | ||
| With any real art, I think you just kind of, it's somebody, you know, it's what you do. | ||
| You observe and you assimilate and then you put out your perception of this thing in hopefully a way that everybody can relate to. | ||
| You know, you're kind of putting the unspeakable into a visual, you know what I mean, if that makes sense. | ||
| Sort of. | ||
| And what do you think about people that make, like, electronic music? | ||
| Like, that kind of shit. | ||
| You know what, man? | ||
| I love a lot of that shit. | ||
| I think anything, any good music is soul music. | ||
| And you can put soul into anything. | ||
| Like, somebody really put a lot of time into sequencing all that shit out. | ||
| And there's a lot of crap, just like anything else, you know? | ||
| Just like anything else. | ||
| But I dare anybody to go stand in front of a Skrillex concert and tell me that that's not bad to fuck ass, you know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I can listen and appreciate anything as long as it's done from a... | ||
| And you can tell when it's not. | ||
| I mean, it's like with anything else. | ||
| Isn't that a good thing about today? | ||
| We were talking earlier about how if you had a record deal in the 1970s, you had to be a bad motherfucker. | ||
| You had to be. | ||
| You had to be. | ||
| But isn't it better that it's more accessible today? | ||
| Where you'll get more quantity and you'll get a lot of shitheads, but you're also... | ||
| The quality will slip through too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Do you think? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| I don't think it's a good thing at all because now people have to sift through a lot of mediocre bullshit to find the real stuff. | ||
| But they found you, so if someone finds you, you could get spread pretty quick now. | ||
| Yeah, but it became, at some point, it became this thing where, you know, everybody wants to be in a band at some point. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And whether it's, excuse me, a lot of people now, hey, coffee man, bulletproof. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| music for a living is a right. | ||
| It's just something you can decide to go do. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, oh, I'm going to put a Kickstarter campaign up because we need a new van to tour in. | ||
| So give me some money so I can go tour and play music. | ||
| Fuck you, man. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, get out there and earn it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Even though, I mean, I got a wife that I love and a four-month-old son that I've seen exactly like 12 days of his life, and I spend all the time in a van with three or four stinky other dudes going out and playing to a bunch of drunk strangers, and it's still the greatest fucking job on the planet. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And if it never went anywhere beyond where it is right now for me, I feel like I've just basically clawed my way to the beginning, as it were. | ||
| And if we're playing clubs to 300 or 500 people, I mean, I can make a living at some point doing that. | ||
| And it's... | ||
| I'm not compromising in any way. | ||
| I don't have to wake up and report to anybody. | ||
| I'm not sitting in fucking meetings for a week about what my haircut should look like. | ||
| I just feel like there's a lot of people you used to see back in club dates and you can tell the blatant, blinding narcissism that permeates this industry where people literally almost come to fucking fistfights over who's going to play what set spot at this rinky-dink club that nobody gives a shit about just because they think There's gonna be somebody there that's gonna recognize my genius and that's gonna change everything. | ||
| And I think you get a lot of entitlement because of that. | ||
| And that's, to me, probably the worst aspect of working in the music business is entitled musicians. | ||
| Yeah, well, everybody comes at it from a different place, and everybody, I'm talking about sort of all aspects of show business, and everybody handles their own needs in a different way. | ||
| Some people go in less needy, some people are just completely obsessed with the idea of success, and it just permeates every cell of their body. | ||
| It's the end goal, as opposed to the actual art. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You can hear that shit pretty easy. | ||
| That's why people go crazy when that shit slips through, though, right? | ||
| When that stuff works? | ||
| Well, it's always worked. | ||
| I mean, it's not a new concept. | ||
| Pop music's been around since the very first days of the music business. | ||
| That's what it was all about. | ||
| But there's good pop music too, right? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what's weird about it, right? | ||
| A good song is a good song. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You can go crazy thinking about it, so I try not to do that. | ||
| So is it necessary that you live in Nashville? | ||
| No, it's not at all. | ||
| I thought it would be. | ||
| In the beginning it was because you have to be playing in those clubs, which are some of the most thankless clubs in the entire nation. | ||
| You can't make money playing in Nashville. | ||
| It's where you go to find people that can help you. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And I've been very fortunate in that regard where I was found sort of by maybe the handful of actually trustworthy folks in town. | ||
| I mean, my manager never took a dollar from me for the first three years. | ||
| He was just kind of like a friend that gave me solid advice and told me what not to do because he'd watch guys like me get chewed up and spit out for 20 years, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| He was almost retired, basically, and he just said, I'll help you, and if it turns into a gig, I want the gig. | ||
| He was like, all right, man, you got a deal. | ||
| Just kind of like put this wall up between a lot of that shit that happens to a lot of people and they get taken advantage of and you end up bitter as a result and your creativity suffers. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I just decided, well, if I just don't have anything to do with any of that, then that can't ever happen. | ||
| So now, four years later, you know, I have a great booking agent, I have a manager, and these people that kind of help facilitate us getting out and playing shows on the road. | ||
| I mean, I could start a tour from anywhere. | ||
| So my wife and I talked about that, and I was like, why do we even still live here? | ||
| Because we don't go out, you know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like the Hollywood thing, too, right? | ||
| There's a lot of people that... | ||
| Or comics that are on the road all the time. | ||
| They still live here. | ||
| But you can practice here. | ||
| Do you need a place to practice? | ||
| Or you can practice in a studio, right? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Like rehearsals? | ||
| Yeah, but you don't... | ||
| We never rehearse. | ||
| You never rehearse. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| We got a very small, compact band. | ||
| We've been doing this... | ||
| In the beginning, we rehearsed every day for like six months to get the chemistry there. | ||
| Now the shows are basically... | ||
| I mean, every show is different. | ||
| It's very dynamic and... | ||
| We like to keep it lean because of that. | ||
| It's the freedom. | ||
| You can kind of just go here or there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And everything's just sort of an extension of my acoustic guitar. | ||
| So we never write set lists. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, just kind of fill the audience, fill the room, and try to just maintain focus on dynamics. | ||
| So when you create new songs... | ||
| Do you write them together? | ||
| Do you write them yourself and then bring it to them? | ||
| Yeah, I always write them myself. | ||
| Typically I don't like to play songs I haven't recorded. | ||
| So I get in the studio, formulate it, and then get it down and committed, and then they kind of tend to come to life all on their own over the course of a year and a half. | ||
| You know, you end up at the end of a tour, that song sounds nothing like the one you put down on tape. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| You get bored, so you push things and go to different places and try to just keep it exciting and take risks. | ||
| And it makes you a better musician. | ||
| Obviously, eight months later, from the time you recorded that song, If you've been playing every night for two hours, if you haven't become a better musician by that time, then you're doing this for the wrong reasons. | ||
| So now when you go in to make your next record, ideally, you've trained harder. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So you will change the rhythm? | ||
| Will you add lines to songs? | ||
| Only when I forget the other ones. | ||
| Does that happen? | ||
| All the time. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| But nobody can really understand what the hell I'm saying anyway, so I just fake my way to slur through it, and they're none the wiser. | ||
| Would you ever consider doing like a residency somewhere, like a Vegas type thing, where people always came to you? | ||
| Or would you think that you always have to tour? | ||
| That's the kind of thing you do when your career's over. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Not just getting started, I think. | ||
| I know, but I always wondered, like, man, we were talking when you got here, and you were beat because of traveling. | ||
| And I'm beat because of traveling. | ||
| And I was only traveling for two days. | ||
| You know, just the flying back and forth from Philly to D.C., L.A. to Philly, Philly to D.C., D.C. to L.A. Do that in two days, and you're just like, ugh. | ||
| If you could just stay put, if they could all come to you. | ||
| Is that possible? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Or as part of the gig, like the travel and the stuff that sucks and being away from your family. | ||
| That's where you, you know, musicians play music. | ||
| And that's where you become a musician. | ||
| Rule 10,000s and all that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| It's so... | ||
| Truthfully for me, man, it's really bittersweet, everything that's happening right now, because I've been, like I said, off and on for a lot of different reasons that I've put it down over the years, but I've been doing this a long time at a very thankless capacity, so it's all just been very passion-driven. | ||
| And then now... | ||
| I've got a newborn son and everything's happening and I'm just slammed so much that I'm exhausted a lot of times. | ||
| It's really weird because I'm out here and all this stuff we've worked so hard for has finally happened, but a lot of days I just really want to be at home. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That's the Catch-22, right? | ||
| Yeah, that's the Catch-22. | ||
| That's what I get for starting at 34. That's what you get for being successful, too. | ||
| Now you're busy. | ||
| If you weren't, you'd wish you were busy. | ||
| I'd be sitting on the couch wishing I had a gig. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's damned if you do. | ||
| You're way better off with this damned. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The damned if you do is way better than damned if you don't. | ||
| I just miss my family a lot. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Can you take them on the road with you? | ||
| Ideally, that's the goal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But, you know, certain other things. | ||
| I've got to take care of the band. | ||
| I've got to take care of the crew. | ||
| There's a lot of... | ||
| You don't really make money touring. | ||
| No? | ||
| It's just how you build awareness. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| What a pain in the ass. | ||
| So if you don't make money touring, how do you make money? | ||
| That's a good question, Joe Rogan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Because album sales are a real issue now, right? | ||
| It's so funny, because people back home that I haven't talked to since I was in high school, and all of a sudden you start getting texts from unknown numbers and shit, and people you haven't talked to, and they're like, man, you fucking made it, man. | ||
| It's like, I'm just blowing it up. | ||
| It's like, they think because you get some press... | ||
| In 10 or 12 media outlets that you're just raking in the dough, and that's just not the reality. | ||
| Making records is fucking expensive. | ||
| Packaging records is expensive. | ||
| I wanted to put out vinyl. | ||
| That barely pays for itself. | ||
| Yeah, we never got into how much the first one cost. | ||
| We sort of started it, but we never... | ||
| The first one, because of some of the guys we used on the session. | ||
| Like the pig? | ||
| The pig and the guy named Robbie Turner. | ||
| He used to play steel for Waylon and other guys. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| He used to play steel for Waylon. | ||
| Man. | ||
| Gotta drink whiskey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, there was this dream come true scenario where this investor came into the picture and I was going to help out and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And then at the last minute it all went away due to negotiations. | ||
| So then I got stuck with the bill on this record that I thought I was going to have help making. | ||
| And it was all of a sudden done about $27,000 that I didn't have. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So spent that year on the road playing and then trying to pay that debt off. | ||
| And then about a year later, once we're coming back off tour, we're about five grand in the black. | ||
| And I just spent all this time on the road with this young band I'd put together working out all these songs and just decided, all right, well, let's just go make a record. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And it has to be quick. | ||
| Because we don't have the cash, you know. | ||
| So I paid the guys in the band $1,000. | ||
| And then the other $1,000 went towards paying the engineers. | ||
| And my buddy Dave, the producer, just kind of did it for free on spec to help out. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And so I think the whole thing cost about $4,500. | ||
| And it was just very, very inexpensive to make an album. | ||
| And now this record that sort of started, I guess, what we'll call the beginning of a career... | ||
| If I'd have taken that in and tried to shop it to anybody, you know, any major label or music row entity or even a lot of indie labels and had laid that down, one, it's a country record. | ||
| Two, I'm talking about reptile aliens and fucking turtles and shit, man. | ||
| You know exactly as well as I do how that would have gone. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's the turtle thing? | ||
| That's a jocular expression. | ||
| I got it from a Stephen Hawking book. | ||
| It's like an old comedic reference to the infinite regress problem in cosmology, which, you know... | ||
| Basically all the shit we were talking about earlier and there's a story I guess there was some professor at Oxford or somewhere giving a speech and explaining how the universe works and everything else and some little lady stood up and said you know that's really clever I know you think you're smart but you're wrong and he's like oh yeah well what's the truth and she's like well the earth sits on the back of this giant cosmic turtle and he carries it through space and he said well what's carrying the turtle and she's like oh that's very clever but it's another turtle And | ||
| he's like, well, what's under that? | ||
| She's like, you might as well, you're wasting your time. | ||
| It's turtles all the way down. | ||
| And so Hawking referenced this in Brief History of Time. | ||
| And it's weird because you can look back, um, Hindu cosmology and a lot of, uh, Some Native American tribes, they all held these, like, earthly turtles in high reverence and the symbology of it all. | ||
| And you find that story in different cultures throughout, you know, space, but thousands of years with this weird reference to this cosmic turtle. | ||
| And I know the Indians or the Hindus thought there were these four elephants standing on the back of the turtle and the earth was a flat disc resting on its back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| And it just cruised through space. | ||
| There's a lot of artwork you can find associated with this. | ||
| And I just thought... | ||
| That it was really, the record at its core is about love, you know, being like this one universal truth. | ||
| A lot of people look to religion, a lot of people look to drugs, and I'm not saying you can't get really spiritual experiences from all those things, but I think love at the end of the day is the one thing that really I've ever found forced me to want to wake up and really try to be a better human being every day, you know. | ||
| So that was the main point of the album. | ||
| The Turtles thing was just kind of, it's a way of saying, if you get into an argument with somebody and you realize it's just pointless and you're going back and forth, it's Turtles all the way down. | ||
| Nobody really knows shit. | ||
| And we're all just trying to not kill each other. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| I decided it would make a good country song. | ||
| That's a fascinating theory on her part. | ||
| I mean, what did she mean? | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| There's a picture of the earth with Turtles below it. | ||
| Who did that, Jamie? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hollingsworth? | |
| Stephen? | ||
| What a bizarre idea. | ||
| There's some really, really cool visual... | ||
| What a bizarre idea. | ||
| I mean, why turtles? | ||
| What was she trying to say? | ||
| Turtles are the oldest known living species on the planet. | ||
| Are they really? | ||
| They predate crocodiles and other reptile species. | ||
| And the 13 symmetrical... | ||
| The design of the shells, a lot of ancient Indian tribes thought that that was in connection with the 13 lunar cycles. | ||
| It's just an ancient creature. | ||
| They live a long time. | ||
| They're very independent, self-sufficient. | ||
| They carry their homes on their back. | ||
| So they thought of them as really wise, old. | ||
| Plus the pineal gland, you know, if you cut that shit open, there's a little third eyeball sitting in there. | ||
| Some of them even have a translucent layer to the top of their skull where the pineal gland sits. | ||
| I used to have turtles for pets. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Had to get rid of them when my wife got pregnant. | ||
| Salmonella? | ||
| Well, they're just dangerous. | ||
| They're dirty. | ||
| Stinky little fuckers. | ||
| They will give off some fucking serious poop disease. | ||
| They're very messy. | ||
| And I would feed them goldfish. | ||
| They're not really meant for domestication, but they're sure cool. | ||
| I had piranhas at one point in time, allegedly, since they're illegal. | ||
| Say allegedly. | ||
| And watching piranhas eat is not nearly as cool as watching turtles eat. | ||
| Turtles are a motherfucker, dude. | ||
| Really fucking cool. | ||
| They grab goldfish and just bite them in half. | ||
| Just grab them with their paws. | ||
| It's like watching dinosaurs eat. | ||
| And they swim after the goldfish. | ||
| They're fucking predatory, man. | ||
| Like, I always thought of turtles as being like this sort of slow-moving thing that really didn't fuck with anybody. | ||
| Nope, nope. | ||
| Hungry turtles in a fish tank and some goldfish, and you just have an orgy of slaughter. | ||
| I mean, they're wild to watch, man. | ||
| You can imagine back when they were like, you know, turtles the size of a fucking school bus this morning. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that how big they were? | ||
| I guess. | ||
| I mean, everything else was huge. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Yeah, I've never had that adequately explained to me, why everything was so fucking big. | ||
| And why the species that lasted diminished through evolution. | ||
| Like crocodiles used to be like 70, 80 foot crocodiles, you know? | ||
| Yeah, it was a different species of crocodile, but yeah. | ||
| The ones that are out now, though, they've been around for hundreds of millions of years. | ||
| So that means the ones around now survived the thing that hit the Yucatan. | ||
| Which is like, what? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Sharks did too, right? | ||
| Sharks have been around in this state for more than 100 million years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't get it. | ||
| It's amazing that those things are around, though. | ||
| We get a chance to look at an animal that would have walked freely amongst the dinosaurs. | ||
| When you see a crocodile, you're essentially seeing a prehistoric beast. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Crazy prehistoric thing covered in armor, waddles around, takes gazelles out. | ||
| Just looking for shit to kill. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Disgusting fucking monsters. | ||
| They make a hell of a pair of shoes though. | ||
| Get yourself a couple of nice Croc shoes. | ||
| Ooh, polish them bitches up nice. | ||
| Gators. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alligators are, I mean, at one point in time they were really extinct or on the verge of extinction. | ||
| They were really endangered. | ||
| That's when I lived in Florida. | ||
| We used to feed them. | ||
| We used to throw marshmallows into this place called Lake Alice and they would come up and snatch up the marshmallows and And I never would have thought that they would get so plentiful that they would start hunting them. | ||
| But now, they're trying to kill as many alligators as they can. | ||
| They just can't keep up with them. | ||
| I took one of those fan boat tours down in New Orleans one time. | ||
| Oh, did you? | ||
| Where you go out with, like, some dude with three teeth and jumps on the lily pond and starts smacking these alligators in the head and shit. | ||
| But at the end of it, he had this little baby alligator in a cooler on the boat just torturing the shit out of this poor animal, you know, at a... | ||
| They pass it around. | ||
| And there's like 14 people on this pontoon out touring the swamp. | ||
| And everybody gets a chance to hold this little baby alligator. | ||
| So you imagine, it's probably scared shitless. | ||
| All these weird hormones. | ||
| So I'm the fucking very last person to get this thing, dude. | ||
| And I swear to God, as soon as my wife hands it to me, it just pissed all over me. | ||
| Because you're holding it by the tail, and it's just this fire hydrant of urine. | ||
| Just misting out all over me, man. | ||
| I'm just like, this was not meant to happen. | ||
| No, it was meant to happen. | ||
| You're the chosen one. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It was holding in its pee. | ||
| It's like, I'm gonna get to Sturgill, and I'm gonna let him know what's up. | ||
| I'm gonna anoint him with my... | ||
| I'm gonna anoint him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I'm gonna let him know he's the chosen one. | ||
| It trusted you, because you were probably the only one that wouldn't smash its skull open if it pissed all over him. | ||
| I mean, there was nothing to do. | ||
| I just kind of had to hold it and let him finish. | ||
| Was its mouth taped up? | ||
| Yeah, he had like a big rubber band on it. | ||
| Yeah, we had an alligator on Fear Factor once. | ||
| Had a mouth taped up too. | ||
| Fuck that, man. | ||
| Yeah, this guy, he jumps out on this little grass pond and you just see like eight of them in succession come out of nowhere and start swimming towards him. | ||
| They all jump up. | ||
| You know, he understands the behaviorism and the sight line, but I'm just, and this guy had this massive scar on his bald head and literally three teeth in his head. | ||
| He's like, you know, and then I'm like, I'm going to watch this guy die. | ||
| Well, how'd they get the scar? | ||
| Did an alligator bite him? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| How'd you not ask? | ||
| Man, I wanted to engage as little as possible. | ||
| To be honest... | ||
| I would have had to ask. | ||
| I think. | ||
| Yeah, I would have had to ask. | ||
| This guy fucks with alligators and he's got an alligator-sized bite on his head? | ||
| Well, he might... | ||
| I was afraid he might have been like a veteran. | ||
| It almost had like... | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| It was like a giant scar that went from the back of his neck over his skull. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| So I didn't want to... | ||
| Right. | ||
| Where'd you get the scar, man? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How'd that happen? | ||
| Lost all my friends. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You want to go on a boat ride? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I only have shaky memories of it, but every night in the middle of the night I hear the guns. | |
| I hear the explosions. | ||
| That's fucked up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You ever watch that show Small People where they make a living just killing alligators? | ||
| I know what you're talking about. | ||
| They have hundreds of alligator tags. | ||
| They'll get like a hundred tags. | ||
| And they can kill a hundred alligators in a season. | ||
| That's how many fucking alligators there are. | ||
| They're just selling the skins? | ||
| What are they doing for them? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, they sell the skins. | ||
| And the meat, too. | ||
| The meat is delicious, apparently. | ||
| It's the highest amount of protein. | ||
| It's got more protein per ounce of alligator meat than I think like any animal. | ||
| I've tried it a couple times. | ||
| It was really chewy. | ||
| I think it's how you prepare it. | ||
| I would like to try it fresh. | ||
| I've only tried it deep fried in batter. | ||
| It was forgettable. | ||
| But apparently if you get a fresh alligator and someone's a good chef and they understand how to cook it, it's really delicious. | ||
| But it's one of those things like a lot of wild game gets real tricky because there's no fat. | ||
| I think alligator is probably very similar. | ||
| Have you ever eaten rattlesnake? | ||
| Yeah, I've had rattlesnake before. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's really good. | |
| Yeah, it's weird. | ||
| It gets acquired too. | ||
| I liked it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Flashed it in some butter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, did you cook it yourself? | ||
| No, my uncle cooked it. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He was one of those pilgrim motherfuckers that just... | ||
| That's a chewy meat too. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty chewy. | ||
| But a really distinct flavor. | ||
| Yeah, the wild game tends to be very difficult to cook right. | ||
| If you cook it too much, you fuck it up. | ||
| You have to really be careful. | ||
| I bet alligators are probably similar in that way. | ||
| I worked with a guy in the yard, Corey was a big hunter, and he would bow hunt, and he moved up to Wyoming because he could get like four or six more tags a year than he could in Utah, and he'd drive that hour and a half every day. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| Blizzards to come to this job just so the kid would just eat up with it, man. | ||
| But apparently he set, I think, the longest distance shot in Wyoming at 23, and then he'd hunt moose and elk and everything else with a bow. | ||
| But he would cut in, he'd bring in these venison, like, filet cutlet medallions of elk meat, and we had a grill down at the Swiss Shack, and he'd cook that shit. | ||
| It was the best fucking thing I've ever tasted in my life. | ||
| Elk's delicious. | ||
| It was hard to go back to eating ground beef after tasting that, you know. | ||
| Yeah, elk is so good for you, man. | ||
| You just taste it in the meat that it's good for you. | ||
| Like, whoa. | ||
| Apparently moose is like that, too. | ||
| I never ate moose before. | ||
| But it's supposed to be unbelievably good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, you eat it and you just go, my God. | |
| I'm sort of in awe of those people that want to get 40 feet from a moose with a bow and arrow. | ||
| That's pretty fucking hardcore. | ||
| 40 yards. | ||
| 40 feet is fucking pushing it. | ||
| I mean, you better hit it right. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure it's happened. | ||
| I'm sure someone's been 40 feet, but you know how close 40 feet is? | ||
| I don't have any idea, yeah. | ||
| 40 feet is where the bathroom is. | ||
| That's the pisser, yeah. | ||
| You could do it. | ||
| I mean, it could happen. | ||
| But goddamn, the fact that the moose hasn't run away or charged you or... | ||
| You have to call them in. | ||
| You have to pretend you're pussy. | ||
| Oh, what's up? | ||
| Trying to get some over here. | ||
| And then he comes waddling through all 1,500 pounds of those. | ||
| Sounds like a bull. | ||
| It's a giant animal. | ||
| I've seen them in real life. | ||
| They're mean as shit, right? | ||
| I wouldn't say they're mean. | ||
| They're defensive and aggressive. | ||
| Like a mother and a calf. | ||
| You don't ever want to run into that. | ||
| I was with a mother and a calf on an island. | ||
| We took a boat out to an island. | ||
| Me and Ari and this guy Matt, who's a guide up in Alaska, took us salmon fishing. | ||
| Valley River Shards. | ||
| We pulled up onto this island and there was a moose, a mama moose there with her calf. | ||
| And we were no more than 30 yards away from her. | ||
| It was real touch and go. | ||
| Like, I was looking at this moose and she was looking at us like, oh, for real? | ||
| Like, you motherfuckers are just going to pull up onto this island? | ||
| I'm on the island with my baby. | ||
| It wasn't a big island either. | ||
| But his dad owns the island and he has like a resort, like a camp set up, like for fishermen and hunters on this island. | ||
| And so it has like these cabins and shit there and generators and stuff. | ||
| And the moose is just hanging out there, just keeping a good eye on us. | ||
| But it's such a big fucking animal. | ||
| It's a horse. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a horse. | |
| A horse-sized animal. | ||
| And they're just thinking about, should I stomp this motherfucker? | ||
| They just want to make sure you don't make any weird movements. | ||
| Nothing crazy, nothing predatory. | ||
| But we saw several moose while we were there. | ||
| They're enormous. | ||
| Big, big animals. | ||
| It's intense, man. | ||
| There was this island out in Utah. | ||
| It was a state park. | ||
| Antelope Island. | ||
| It was a buffalo reserve. | ||
| But there were all these hiking trails and shit. | ||
| You could go out there with these buffalo. | ||
| It would and sometimes could be roaming freely. | ||
| And a friend of mine, we'd gone out there to hike this peak. | ||
| And we're coming back down. | ||
| And you can look down. | ||
| We can see like five or six hundred yards down on the trailers these two buffalo just standing. | ||
| So, you know, we think, well, fuck, we'll just keep going. | ||
| By the time we get down there, they'll be gone. | ||
| You can see the herd off in the distance. | ||
| And we come around the bend. | ||
| It's clear of this big rock, and there they're standing. | ||
| And I didn't know, man. | ||
| I grew up, you know, around a lot of farms and cows and shit. | ||
| And you just walk right through them and get out of the way. | ||
| I don't know anything about buffalo. | ||
| And my buddy, he's just like immediately scared shitless. | ||
| Brooke ran and got up on this rock. | ||
| Just kind of not knowing what to do. | ||
| And I'm like, I don't know what I was thinking. | ||
| I just kept walking and I get literally 10 feet away from this thing. | ||
| He's standing sideways, broad across the trail. | ||
| And all of a sudden he just stops eating grass and turns and looks at me. | ||
| And I realize his head is the size of a fucking Volkswagen Beetle. | ||
| And I'm just like, alright, this was not... | ||
| How close were you? | ||
| Oh, like 10-15 feet. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Easy. | |
| And then it dawned on me how incredibly stupid I was. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| And then I'd be like, this thing probably runs 40 miles an hour. | ||
| Like, what am I going to do? | ||
| And I took... | ||
| I didn't know what else to do, so I took one more step towards it. | ||
| And it just, like, kicked up and kind of ran off. | ||
| But the fucking ground shook. | ||
| And I was just like... | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| That would have been so bad. | ||
| No good songs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No good times. | ||
| Brooke's just standing on the rock like... | ||
| You know, laughing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You could have gotten watching trample to death. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Yeah, there's a wild herd of buffalo in Mexico. | ||
| We're supposed to go hunting there sometime this winter for that show Meat Eater. | ||
| We're going to go buffalo hunting. | ||
| We're in Mexico. | ||
| Actually, with the guy, the producer of the show, Meat Eater. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Somewhere in Mexico, there's a giant wild herd of buffalo they brought there in the 1950s. | ||
| Most bison today, when you buy bison steaks, most of it's farm-raised. | ||
| There's very little wild buffalo left in this country. | ||
| A big percentage of it is owned. | ||
| It's property. | ||
| People have these big giant game preserves and they have buffalo on them that you can hunt and they have buffalo in these livestock places where you buy like farm-raised buffalo. | ||
| That's what buffalo has come down to. | ||
| Ted Turner's or... | ||
| Yeah, he's got a bunch of places that sell it, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Isn't it just called Ted's or something like that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think so. | |
| It's got a big Buffalo logo. | ||
| Apparently, there's a guy that I'm going to have on the podcast that Steve Rinella recommended to me that can explain in great detail what actually happened to the Buffalo, but that there's a lot of misconceptions about why the Buffalo population was so high. | ||
| And he says there's a direct correlation between smallpox that when the French and the Spaniards, when they brought over smallpox or whoever brought it, I guess it was the French, it wiped out like 90% of the Native American population. | ||
| And during that time, the buffalo population just exploded. | ||
| Flourished. | ||
| So when we came along and started slaughtering These buffalo in mass, when I say we, white people, obviously it wasn't you and me, it was a long time ago. | ||
| But those big piles of buffalo bones. | ||
| Yeah, we still have the gilts. | ||
| Yeah, we do. | ||
| White gilts strong. | ||
| The reason why those guys were able to find these animals in such giant numbers was because the Native Americans had experienced this massive loss of casualty. | ||
| I mean, massive 90% casualty rate because of smallpox. | ||
| Because they were apparently, at least in this guy's book, he's going to come on the podcast soon, we're working out the dates, they were on the verge of, I guess extirpation is what they call it, when it's local extinction, because the Native Americans had figured out horseback riding. | ||
| And once they figured out horseback riding, over the course of a couple hundred years, whatever it was, they had almost completely abandoned agriculture, and they were just chasing down the bison and killing them like fucking crazy. | ||
| Evolved hunters. | ||
| Yeah, so the idea was that they were on the verge of killing off the buffalo even before those crazy assholes came in and did it later on, hundreds of years later. | ||
| It's just the smallpox got them and then just... | ||
| Well, it would have been inevitable. | ||
| Even if we hadn't have showed up, they would have continued procreating. | ||
| There would have been more Indians and, you know... | ||
| Probably, right? | ||
| Native Americans. | ||
| Native Americans. | ||
| It is kind of crazy we still call them Indians. | ||
| One fuck up. | ||
| Christopher Columbus, his dumb ass reciprocated down to me sitting here on your podcast and I just perpetuated it. | ||
| 500 plus years ago, he thought he was in India. | ||
| He thought he was in India. | ||
| Good enough, Chris. | ||
| Good enough for Chris. | ||
| Good enough for me. | ||
| Them fucking Indians. | ||
| Look what I did. | ||
| Yeah, they were some brutal bastards, man. | ||
| Like, running around cracking babies' heads on rocks and shit. | ||
| And just, you know, serial killers, basically. | ||
| Well, the accounts of the missionaries that talked about what Columbus' people did, they're horrific. | ||
| And we never heard that shit when they had Columbus Day. | ||
| Like, I don't know why... | ||
| We still celebrate that idiot. | ||
| Yeah, it's very strange. | ||
| Very strange we celebrate that guy. | ||
| Seems like there's a bunch of people we've missed. | ||
| You know, how come there's no Gandhi Day? | ||
| Ha ha! | ||
| We celebrate Columbus. | ||
| We don't celebrate Gandhi Day. | ||
| I mean, I would settle for a Jimmy Carter Day. | ||
| Yeah, right? | ||
| Or a Christopher Columbus Day. | ||
| Carter's a good man. | ||
| He deserves a day. | ||
| Jimmy Carter should have a day. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| And still to this day, he's a very good man. | ||
| Very moral and ethical and just very different than what you perceive to be a guy who would be the President of the United States. | ||
| Hunter Thompson wrote a really great piece about Carter. | ||
| I can't remember which book it was in, but it just kind of summed that he was probably like the last real great politician. | ||
| He witnessed some speech somewhere, I can't remember now the details, that just... | ||
| It's like he felt for the first time like he actually heard a politician be a human being. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it's really tall from his heart, and I think it left a pretty heavy impression with him. | ||
| I keep wondering if that's possible again. | ||
| If somewhere in the future, because of the transparency that we're experiencing now with social media, with the internet, with the access to information that we have today, I wonder if eventually the bullshit artists will all be exposed to the point where they won't be viable anymore. | ||
| It's not a viable business model. | ||
| The accountability of the corporations that are financing these politicians will all be exposed. | ||
| Those find more bullshit artists. | ||
| I wonder if there's going to come a point in time where we'll start to see an emergence of people that are talking in a real sense. | ||
| Like you're talking about real music. | ||
| Well, there's got to be real politicians, too, that aren't hacks. | ||
| There's a bunch of shitty pop-singing politicians that get pretty far. | ||
| But we recognize them. | ||
| We know they're bullshit artists. | ||
| We hear speeches, these canned fucking hooey, rah-rah, Sarah Palin-style speeches, and we go, that's a pop star. | ||
| That's a shitty one at that. | ||
| There's got to be some real leader out there. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Someone who's not following a mold but speaking from the heart. | ||
| Someone who truly doesn't give a fuck. | ||
| They must exist. | ||
| And if they don't, it's possible they're gonna. | ||
| Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 72. That's the book. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a great fucking book. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I read part of it. | ||
| Shark Hunt was a good one. | ||
| Yeah, his documentary explains the creation of all this stuff, like how he became an embedded reporter. | ||
| It was so fascinating that he was like one guy out of all these guys that had nothing to lose because he knew he'd never do this again. | ||
| So he just was fucking going bonkers on them. | ||
| P.T. Barnard them all, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He talked football and got his way into Nixon's car. | ||
| Yeah, isn't that crazy? | ||
| Sitting with Nixon on the ride to the airport. | ||
| Hunter Thompson talking football. | ||
| They made sure, you're only going to talk football now. | ||
| None of this Vietnam stuff. | ||
| And they just talked football. | ||
| That would be bizarre as fuck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Be sitting there with Nixon. | |
| With, I mean, just the biggest hidden agenda ever, you know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just snowballing the president of the fucking United States knowing you're going to rip his asshole a lot apart in a book. | ||
| Yeah, right? | ||
| Complete and total character study. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, he was one of the most incredibly bizarre former presidents. | ||
| He's a very odd guy. | ||
| Did you see that book that was written out that they believed he was gay? | ||
| And that this guy that he was with all the time was his boyfriend. | ||
| Said the same thing about Lincoln, though. | ||
| Did they? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But didn't he, like, sleep with men to stay warm? | ||
| His bodyguard. | ||
| What's up with his bodyguard? | ||
| Yeah, a secret service agent. | ||
| They shared a bed, and now it's speculated they had a relationship due to some journal memoirs they found or some shit. | ||
| Holla! | ||
| He can justify just about anything. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| Who gives a fuck? | ||
| You know, we could do well with a gay president. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Maybe even better. | ||
| Could be. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There'd be some empathy there. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Maybe not. | ||
| You know, Julius Caesar was gay. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Alexander the Great was gay. | ||
| A lot of fucking gay warriors. | ||
| That's what people like to sleep on. | ||
| Gay people will fuck you up, too. | ||
| I wouldn't fight a gay dude. | ||
| Whoop your ass, man. | ||
| Fucking mean as shit. | ||
| Nixon's darkest secrets. | ||
| New biography. | ||
| Digs up rumors. | ||
| Richard Nixon's gay affair with mafia banker. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| That's a guy. | ||
| Yep, they're gay. | ||
| I'm just going to say yes. | ||
| I'm looking at the two of them together for sure. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Maybe Nixon didn't like to fuck anybody but America. | ||
| It was one of those things. | ||
| He didn't have a gender sexual. | ||
| He was nation sexual. | ||
| He just wanted to fuck America. | ||
| It's like a kin doll. | ||
| He just didn't have any... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was nothing. | ||
| Just evil thoughts. | ||
| Well, he was a different breed back then. | ||
| A different breed of politician. | ||
| And post... | ||
| I mean, he's coming along post-Kennedy's assassination and... | ||
| Bizarre, dark time in America that was. | ||
| Well, that's when they kind of locked it all down. | ||
| That's when all the Schedule 1 lists started popping up. | ||
| Everything kind of... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Again, that's a valley, you know? | ||
| I mean, there was a Great Hill. | ||
| The Great Hill was like the 1960s, and then the 70s came along, and that was the big valley. | ||
| And that's where disco came from. | ||
| That's what happened. | ||
| Nobody had acid. | ||
| Nobody had mushrooms. | ||
| It's just cocaine, man. | ||
| Just dancing. | ||
| Feeling all that bad judgment. | ||
| Just like 80s country. | ||
| Bad judgment, but some good fucking music. | ||
| If it wasn't for disco, you wouldn't have Kool and the Gang, right? | ||
| And that's where it came from. | ||
| That's all dancing music. | ||
| Fucking BGs, man. | ||
| Yeah, there you go, dude. | ||
| They had some good jams. | ||
| Seriously good jams. | ||
| They do, right? | ||
| People don't want to admit that. | ||
| More than a woman? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| It's a good goddamn song. | ||
| Jamie's gonna disagree. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was singing it. | |
| It's a shame. | ||
| Those guys are gone. | ||
| Yeah, there was some... | ||
| I mean, even the Stones stuck their foot in the disco water. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| There was some funk to a lot of their songs that didn't exist in the earlier music they were creating. | ||
| Product of the times, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's today's time? | ||
| I mean, when you see this new door opening up for you, you know, when you see, like, all of a sudden your career, like you said, you've clawed your way to the beginning, you're obviously, there's some shit going on, man. | ||
| I mean, I told you my friend Justin told me about you right when I, like, he goes, man, he goes, there's this dude, Sturgill Simpson. | ||
| And as soon as he said that, I go, dude, I've been listening to nothing but him for two fucking weeks. | ||
| And we were laughing and joking around. | ||
| There's something going on, man. | ||
| When my friend Justin finds out about shit, I always pay attention because he's got fantastic taste in music, but I had already found out. | ||
| Like, there's something going on. | ||
| You've hit this sort of frequency where people are checking out your shit. | ||
| It could be over tomorrow, man. | ||
| Yeah, but it's not going to be. | ||
| Let's be honest. | ||
| This shit's going to ride. | ||
| Just hang in there, fella. | ||
| Well, I've got a very clear plan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you? | |
| No matter what, I'm going to adhere to it, so... | ||
| You want to tell us the plan? | ||
| Or is it secret shit? | ||
| It's not really a secret. | ||
| No, I'm going to make a total of five records and then... | ||
| That's it? | ||
| ...be done. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Why? | ||
| I feel like, well, there's a certain methodology to the entire thing, but I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what else I would have to say beyond that. | ||
| And each one successfully kind of incorporate other elements of music that I love and get more progressively opened up. | ||
| And so you've got this mapped up in a formal way? | ||
| Roughly, yeah. | ||
| Do you have it written down somewhere? | ||
| In various forms, voice memos and notes and things. | ||
| But yeah, just the layout and then the sonic execution. | ||
| But then beyond that... | ||
| A lot of artists keep recording in order to maintain some sense of relevancy or just because, well, it's been a year's time to make a record. | ||
| I just don't ever want to find myself in that position where I'm... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think I'd rather keep it more concise and focused and just try to know that I absolutely did my best every time. | ||
| And then I think after five albums, I don't know, I'll probably... | ||
| I already feel somewhat limited in terms of songwriting and how much freedom there is to really get out what you want to say. | ||
| So I might try something else at some point. | ||
| Like just writing outright. | ||
| Like writing a book? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So just looking at it as another form of expression. | ||
| But I think it's weird that you think that you're going to run dry. | ||
| Like what makes you think you're going to run dry? | ||
| It's not an issue of running dry. | ||
| I just... | ||
| Certain things that I want to say or, you know, make a statement with. | ||
| And use the opportunity to hopefully make it other than something just about me. | ||
| You know, try to promote a bigger message, I guess. | ||
| And at some point you just end up repeating yourself. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| That's fascinating. | ||
| I hope that's wrong. | ||
| I hope you just keep banging them out and having a good time. | ||
| But you're the only one who knows what's going on in your head. | ||
| You're the only one who's ever going to know your vision. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the real job is just keeping myself out of a situation where I have to compromise that. | ||
| That's fascinating though that you've done that, that you have this idea of these stages that you're going to put out. | ||
| So you're only going to put out three more albums or five more? | ||
| Three more. | ||
| That's it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But you've been doing music for how many years now? | ||
| My whole life. | ||
| But I mean professionally? | ||
| For the two albums? | ||
| Well professionally really just like the last two years. | ||
| I put my first record out in 2013. Okay, so two years for two albums. | ||
| So it's almost an album a year. | ||
| So you've only got three more years to go. | ||
| And then what are you going to do? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| Oh, come on, man. | ||
| Just keep making music. | ||
| Study Ponentuken in the jungle or something. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Do you plan on doing that? | ||
| Like expanding your horizons in some sort of great and unforeseen way? | ||
| I mean, by not doing this when I was younger, I was out doing a lot of other things that kind of culminated into whoever the hell I think I'm trying to be today. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So incorporating those experiences and a lot of those stories and people I've known and characters I've met, and then maybe even embellishing upon that in a somewhat autobiographical sense, but still telling these stories in a way that other people say, yeah, I feel that way too. | ||
| You know, you don't want to just say, hey, this is what the world looks like. | ||
| It's just, this is what it looks like to me, and hopefully other people can resonate with that. | ||
| But it's an interesting... | ||
| There's a line you have to really kind of straddle between commercial viability and... | ||
| Making art. | ||
| Is this a rigid idea that you have, or do you think that it's possible that you can get to that three albums from now and then go, you know what, I'm enjoying the fucking shit out of this. | ||
| I'm not gonna stop. | ||
| I'm just gonna figure out a new concept. | ||
| I'm gonna go Chris Gaines. | ||
| No, I'm just kidding. | ||
| Is that his name, Chris Gaines? | ||
| Chris Gaines, man. | ||
| The Garth Brooks character. | ||
| Maybe that's what he was doing. | ||
| Well, I mean, outside of that, I think... | ||
| Well, I say that just because I have those albums pretty clearly in my head, and I do what they'll sound like and what they'll be about. | ||
| And, you know, someday you're dead, and everybody that ever knew you is dead, and it's like you were never here. | ||
| But that little thing, I don't know what else I would really have to say about... | ||
| My version of the human experience past a certain point unless I go turn it off and do another 30 or 40 years of living and then make five more albums. | ||
| Any real artist, their best work is always in their pinnacle peak and then right before they die. | ||
| And then you get this ocean of mediocrity of just kind of fumbling through existence there. | ||
| It's a very repeated element. | ||
| That's an interesting perspective, because you really think that when a guy puts out an album, or these parallels to authors, to a lot of different art forms, you spend your entire life thinking, and then you express yourself like the culmination of this life. | ||
| Well, there's a really interesting thing of somebody, I think my buddy Jason Isbell put up there and retweeted, talks about it takes 20 years to write your first record, you get a year to write your second record. | ||
| And it really doesn't matter what you do, because music's the devil's work, and you're fucked anyway. | ||
| But yeah, it's like, you know, you squeeze all this... | ||
| I had a good 30 years of fucking up and mistakes and lessons and, you know, a lot of personal... | ||
| You know, development and certain experiences that I had that led me to kind of recognize and look at things that caused me to live that way. | ||
| And then to come out of the other side of that, like, really supported and understood by someone that met me at my absolute worst and then helped me to get right here. | ||
| It's just like I have all this clarity now. | ||
| And, you know, I think the only way... | ||
| To ever really grab that... | ||
| I mean, I probably could have made some great records in my 20s because I was so fucked up. | ||
| I'll never know. | ||
| So I'm just trying to reference those feelings as I remember them the best I can. | ||
| And people think, oh, I made this record. | ||
| This guy's just sitting around fucking smoking DMT and he's on drugs. | ||
| There were no drugs involved making this record. | ||
| It's been, you know, I really don't even smoke dope that much anymore, especially with the sun. | ||
| Certainly not when I'm at home, usually on the road, and it's only then anymore to cure boredom. | ||
| So it's just really weird to find myself, but I still had to tell that part of my life through story. | ||
| When you were in your 20s, you were partying a lot? | ||
| I wouldn't even say partying. | ||
| It was always more exploratory for me. | ||
| I never had an addictive personality, but I never... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just read a lot of the wrong books way too young and had this weird... | ||
| Romantic. | ||
| Romantic vision. | ||
| That everything was encapsulated under the umbrella of experience, and I wanted to experience everything. | ||
| And some things you just shouldn't experience. | ||
| Like what? | ||
| I mean, whatever, man. | ||
| I mean, whatever's in front of me, whatever I could find. | ||
| I just never... | ||
| I always just wanted to know. | ||
| When I got out of the Navy, living in Seattle, those were some darker days. | ||
| You were saying that earlier about Seattle not just being the weather, but what the weather does to people. | ||
| Yeah, at some point I just became very disenchanted, disillusioned with the military, so I got out and stuck around there for like a year. | ||
| So there's that disenchantment, disillusionment, and then there's living in Seattle where you're dealing with the dreariness at the same time. | ||
| Yeah, amid a really kind of... | ||
| You know, I was excited, this young relationship, and I was going to all these parties and meeting people and exposed to things I probably never would have been otherwise, and just kind of, you know, took it at face value for experience and jumped in, and then there was a lot of, you know, there was a lot of hard narcotics in that area, and I realized that those weren't very well for me, and Like heroin? | ||
| Heroin, methamphetamine, anything you're looking for. | ||
| Whatever you can grab or afford. | ||
| I wasn't 21. I couldn't go out and drink. | ||
| So there was all these other methods of escapism that I kind of fell into. | ||
| I got really bad off for a while. | ||
| Actually, as a result, I ended up missing my grandfather's funeral. | ||
| I knew if I came home, my family would come. | ||
| My dad used to be an undercover narcotics officer. | ||
| There was some weird... | ||
| A lot of shame there after that, you know what I mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So I eventually ended up back in Kentucky and got away from that, and then it was just really just... | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I never really was a very ambitious guy. | ||
| Just sort of drifted and existed a lot, and I don't know. | ||
| If something... | ||
| It was more exploratory just because I knew there was something else beyond whatever this is. | ||
| Maybe that's what I was trying to find, but... | ||
| Now, how did you get involved with Rick Strassman? | ||
| How did you find out about him and how did you meet him? | ||
| Well, like I said, my buddy played when we were talking on the porch last year and then he played your little excerpt. | ||
| I went home that night and just kind of started scouring the internet on the subject and a lot of things related to it and I found Dr. Strassman's book. | ||
| Downloaded it and read it probably three times and it just absolutely blew my mind. | ||
| All the correlating aspects of that conversation. | ||
| And I think what might have ultimately led him to it or what he was looking for in terms of its relation to... | ||
| I don't... | ||
| You should have him on someday. | ||
| Oh, he's going to be on soon. | ||
| Oh, is he? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Yeah, he's going to be on soon to promote the new book. | ||
| What date, Jamie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The 12th, I think. | |
| 12th. | ||
| Yeah, we had a great conversation in his kitchen about five days ago. | ||
| I mean, he was very gracious enough to invite me out. | ||
| He's a very, very nice guy. | ||
| Oh, extremely... | ||
| I mean... | ||
| He's a cool dude. | ||
| He's so sweet. | ||
| He probably would never think that himself, but he's like, in so many ways, it was... | ||
| I'm really glad I went. | ||
| And it answered a lot of questions and even questions I didn't even know I had. | ||
| But it was interesting to find out why he approached it and what he got. | ||
| He probably knows more than anybody else on the subject at this point, but he's like a musician that has been touring a record for a year. | ||
| He's so tired of talking about it. | ||
| This was all 25 years ago. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He's moved on, but... | ||
| People are still finding out about it, though. | ||
| It's still fairly obscure. | ||
| Although, for his day-to-day existence, it's sort of overwhelmed his day-to-day existence for the past 20-plus years. | ||
| But for a lot of folks, they're just starting to read his work. | ||
| He emails every day. | ||
| He's like, Yeah. | ||
| So yeah, once I finished the record and had it mixed and mastered, I'm sort of like looking back through everything that sort of led to this happening. | ||
| And I knew... | ||
| I went into it before we put the album on. | ||
| I really did think, okay, well this is going to be the end of my career. | ||
| People are going to think this guy's nuts or what the hell. | ||
| But the work that... | ||
| That Dr. Strassman did, and I guess the bravery it took on his part to open that conversation back up in a field, especially in the professional medical world, was so stigmatized. | ||
| I can't imagine the balls that must have taken after spending years of your life following this profession and all the school you underwent. | ||
| So I wrote him an email. | ||
| I got his contact off Cottonwood. | ||
| I just wrote him basically saying, hey, thank you. | ||
| I wrote, you know, I shared the record with him through a file. | ||
| I was just like, I just want to thanks for your work and the inspiration that I got from the book and along with some other things. | ||
| And he wrote back and it sort of, you know, email buddies sort of thing. | ||
| And then I was going out to Phoenix and so I just stopped by and have a cup of coffee. | ||
| It's like anybody else, you know. | ||
| Yeah, he's just a regular guy. | ||
| But he's got some really fascinating stories of his explorations in this realm, not just physically, but just dealing with the red tape that was required to do a real FDA study. | ||
| Two years of bureaucratic nightmare, man. | ||
| Yeah, to do one of the first psychedelic studies that, you know, have a real scholar involved in testing people on some serious Schedule I hallucinogens. | ||
| The Army Research Lab, they were aware of that shit in the 60s. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| That's how McKenna found out about it. | ||
| Terrence McKenna got a hold of DMT through a friend who was a chemist at the Army Research Lab, and apparently this guy had a barrel of it. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Which, if you know about the effective dose of DMT, a pinky nail is a lot. | ||
| Like if you had a pinky nail sized piece of DMT or pile. | ||
| You might as well have a football stadium of weed. | ||
| You're getting blasted. | ||
| I mean, you're going to the center of the fucking universe with a pinky size. | ||
| So imagine these guys had barrels or stuff. | ||
| And McKenna's story. | ||
| I found out about McKenna because of Hicks. | ||
| Hicks mentioned McKenna in one of his bits. | ||
| He would talk about taping mushrooms under the chair of everybody in the room. | ||
| He would say something and then he would drag them into this. | ||
| I've taped mushrooms under all your chairs. | ||
| Reach down. | ||
| It's what Terrence McKenna would call a heroic dose. | ||
| Five dried grams. | ||
| And I was like, who's this McKenna guy? | ||
| And so I started looking into McKenna and reading some of the things that I could find about him online and then listening to some audio recordings. | ||
| But he was already dead by the time I had found out about him, unfortunately. | ||
| But his, you know, his discovery of DMT and the way he described it in one of his audio recordings was just one of the most amazing things I've ever heard. | ||
| Because this is a guy who had already done like LSD and Morning Glory Seeds and he had experienced psilocybin and he thought he had really traveled. | ||
| He kind of knew what was available and out there. | ||
| Well, he did. | ||
| I mean, in dentists they did a lot of traveling, I guess, but Man, like the iboga and, like I said, DMT, I don't really have any experience to speak of firsthand, so I try not to talk about it. | ||
| We've got to change that. | ||
| We've got to hook that up. | ||
| Hey, man. | ||
| Allegedly. | ||
| Well, you know, Dr. Strassman said that, and I'm inclined to agree, although at this point, like, I should have a fucking PhD in this shit. | ||
| I've read about it, and I don't even know what the firsthand aspect is, but... | ||
| He said at this point in my life now that all these things are formulating and my career is budding and I have a newborn son that there's a high potential it could make for a pretty unsettling experience because it's all this stuff that's finally happening in my life that's so positive. | ||
| Like the idea of thinking you're dying and having to let go of that could make for an unsettling experience. | ||
| You'll be fine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I believe you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You'll be fine. | ||
| I mean, I've had some... | ||
| I wouldn't say heroic. | ||
| I'd say foolish dosage. | ||
| You know, the first time you ever buy a mushroom is nobody's there to tell you, hey, well, this is how much it takes, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So I think I bought like a quarter and just ate the whole bag, man. | ||
| And that was my first... | ||
| I mean... | ||
| What is that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Seven grams. | |
| It's like seven or eight grams. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| How was that? | ||
| That was a great time, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, I never got the freak outs. | ||
| Well, that's good. | ||
| You have a good soul. | ||
| LSD, the few times I tried LSD, though, I didn't really enjoy it because every time it seemed like on the tail end of the trip, it takes this turn and there's almost a sinister underlying energy about it. | ||
| I don't know that I've never experienced with psilocybin. | ||
| Psilocybin is very giggly. | ||
| It's the starting gate for psychedelics and to that I say go eat 12 or 15 grams and tell me that you're Yeah, the starting gate is only if you have a small... | ||
| It's overwhelming. | ||
| It's completely overwhelming. | ||
| And also very, very visionary. | ||
| Like you see, I remember just seeing... | ||
| Stan Hope and I did mushrooms the day the war started. | ||
| The day the Iraq war started. | ||
| The first one? | ||
| The first one. | ||
| Not in the 80s. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, right. | |
| You know, the one after 9-11. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Gotcha. | |
| And we were blitzed. | ||
| As they were announcing on television the war was starting, and I'll never forget, Stan was like, oh my god, they've got a kickoff. | ||
| They're like, war coverage begins at 5. He's like, the war has a kickoff. | ||
| And we just fell to the ground. | ||
| We're howling, laughing. | ||
| And the walls around us were all made of these honeycomb geometric patterns. | ||
| Everything was basically gone. | ||
| I was trying to still have conversations with him, but he was just this... | ||
| Sea of patterns, you know, that like blurrily represented what his physical form was, but it was all just like really tiny flower of loves, you know, that little flower of life thing. | ||
| I mean, his entire body was made out of those, as was all the walls around us. | ||
| I mean, it's almost identical to dimethyltryptamine, the molecular footprint, right? | ||
| It's pretty close. | ||
| Take a high dose. | ||
| 4-fox-4-aloxy-NN-dimethyltryptamine is how it's been explained. | ||
| I think what happens is... | ||
| Extra oxygen... | ||
| We're obviously not chemists, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Yeah, we are not fucking studying the periodic table. | ||
| If you read Strassman's accounts of it, where they talk about how it's synthesized in the body, it's very similar. | ||
| It's got a lot of the same elements as real natural human neurotransmitters, so it's very easily accepted into the mind. | ||
| The blood-brain barrier accepts it apparently. | ||
| Craves it, apparently. | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean, demethyltryptamine, for sure, we know that. | ||
| We know that it's created in the liver, it's created in the lungs, it's not just created in the pineal gland, it's created in other parts of your body. | ||
| They also know that it's in like, you know, who knows how many fucking plants, like a shitload of plants. | ||
| It's just out there. | ||
| It's all over the place. | ||
| You know, I think it's cool that guys like him are out there. | ||
| It's so important. | ||
| I know I've had some unbelievably profound introspective healing experiences, especially from mushrooms on the high doses. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it really forces you to look at a lot of things maybe you don't want to or you're unable to and just kind of pulls apart the defense mechanism, you know. | ||
| Yeah, destroying the ego. | ||
| The one thing that allows people to push forward in spite of You know, or because of everything that they've learned their whole life. | ||
| The built-up defense mechanisms, the built-up definitions of yourself. | ||
| And then, you know, you're pushing forward with all this stuff attached to you like it's like an armor. | ||
| But really, you find out that that's really the shit that's kind of holding your perspective back. | ||
| And if you release all that armor and just look around and release this idea of you and then just experience it. | ||
| It's a very different world you're living in. | ||
| That different world is rarely tapped into in regular life, but that different world resets your entire perspective of your existence. | ||
| And if that's not good for you, what the fuck is everybody doing meditating? | ||
| Why is everybody going to church? | ||
| Why is everybody going to workshops? | ||
| We're trying to get better. | ||
| Everyone's trying to get better. | ||
| I've never seen a single thing in life that has the same effects that psychedelic drugs do. | ||
| And yet they're illegal. | ||
| It's one of the weirdest aspects of our time, that these things have these unbelievably profound effects. | ||
| But they're illegal. | ||
| Whereas there's, you know, X number of sanctioned drugs that don't have these effects, that are deadly. | ||
| Make an asshole bleed and everything else. | ||
| Yeah, all sorts of things. | ||
| I'll just sell that shit all day. | ||
| Well, I mean, they're trying to crack down now on the prescriptions, on pain medication prescriptions, because there are so many people that are addicted to them, and they've realized, look, we've made a nation of junkies. | ||
| I mean, I'll tell you, the part of the country you're from, man, I mean, that is fucking, that is prescription drug central, right? | ||
| Hillbilly heroin, man. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| It's right. | ||
| I mean, the town that I'm originally from is called Jackson. | ||
| It's like right in the middle of southeast Kentucky, like hard Appalachia. | ||
| And I remember as a small child, it was very much a wonderful community. | ||
| There was small business. | ||
| Main Street was thriving. | ||
| Everybody knew everybody. | ||
| And then, but all the major industry was based on coal, which slowly evolved from strip mining, or from deep mining, I'm sorry, into strip mining once they figured out they could get the coal with less bodies. | ||
| And so that just kind of leveled the topography. | ||
| But then even when that industry sort of dried up and they moved on, well, the coal pulled out and then Walmart and Oxycontin moved in. | ||
| And it, I mean, within a matter of years, it just completely changed the entire face of the region. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And now it's just, you know, people say poor. | ||
| You don't even know what fucking poor is, man. | ||
| It's sad because there's no... | ||
| There's not even the idea of the possibility of opportunity coming to that region. | ||
| No industry is going to come in there and start building car manufacturing plants because then they have to train the shit out of there. | ||
| it's just not logistically very sound for any type of industry other than growing dope and making meth you know like unless they really push the hemp legislation through and they can put a lot of money and food on people's tables down there but that would be incredible and we're doing that would suck either they're really finally pushing toward I never thought I'd say this but there's a guy named Mitch McConnell who for once did something I agree with and He's really trying to get that. | ||
| Kentucky was at one time the nation's leading hemp manufacturing point. | ||
| The Hemp Museum is in a little town called Versailles. | ||
| They're doing a lot of interesting things in Kentucky. | ||
| Kentucky reintroduced elk. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they have giant successful herds of elk. | ||
| I mean, they're hunting them now. | ||
| They've reintroduced them. | ||
| They've done it over a period of a few decades. | ||
| They used to have elk all across the country. | ||
| It was illegal for a long time to hunt elk in Kentucky, because they were getting the population to kind of grow back out. | ||
| Well, there was none. | ||
| There were none. | ||
| Yeah, so the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation brought elk in, and they sort of seeded the area, and now it's become very successful. | ||
| Now they have hunts. | ||
| Well, there used to be a lot of elk. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Back in the Daniel Boone days. | ||
| Davy Crockett days. | ||
| He hunted the shit out of them. | ||
| He hunted the shit out of them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| But it's interesting that Kentucky is on the ball with hemp as well. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, the tobacco industry took a big hit, and that really hurt the state economy. | ||
| They have to do something. | ||
| I hope hemp does... | ||
| I hope really that's what becomes the next savior. | ||
| And it will change the consciousness, too. | ||
| You know how that's going to go when DuPont and all the petroleum industries and everybody else start throwing more money and making it not happen. | ||
| That's why it was illegal. | ||
| I wonder if they're going to be. | ||
| Yeah, that is why it was made illegal in the first place. | ||
| But I wonder if they're going to be able to do that. | ||
| Because I feel like even they don't have enough resources to stop that kind of truth forever. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's already kind of out there. | ||
| And what you're seeing with what's going on in Colorado is even Warren Buffett's companies are getting in on it. | ||
| Warren Buffett has a company that leases giant warehouses specifically to weed growers. | ||
| They have commercials where they're showing how they have these tiered systems. | ||
| Where there's like second floor and first floor. | ||
| You could fit in more weed plants than a single floor warehouse. | ||
| This is Warren motherfucking Buffett. | ||
| And his company is involved in actively pursuing marijuana growers to lease their warehouses. | ||
| To grow marijuana. | ||
| Because it's legal there. | ||
| So it becomes a part of... | ||
| Yeah, is it going to be big corporations that are profiting on it? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| But guess what? | ||
| It's not hard to grow. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, it's not hard. | ||
| I mean, this is not creating OxyContin's in some sort of fucking laboratory where you have to wear a space suit. | ||
| You know, you're talking about a plant that grows like that. | ||
| You don't even have to do anything to it. | ||
| Just stick it in the ground and come back in a month. | ||
| You get some shit growing there. | ||
| It's super easy. | ||
| I mean, it is a hardy... | ||
| It's kind of hard to fuck up, really. | ||
| It's hard to fuck up. | ||
| I mean, you can do it better. | ||
| You can make the kind of weed that these botanist motherfuckers in California and Colorado and Washington State are making. | ||
| You know, like everything else, at some point it is going to go mainstream, and then they're going to commodify the hell out of it and commercialize it, and everywhere you go is going to look like a 14-year-old's bedroom. | ||
| This is Warren Buffett's company. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| What is this called? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cubic Designs. | |
| Scroll so we can see it, so we can see the name of the company, Cubic Designs. | ||
| So this is like, see how he's got these tiered systems that is entirely for fucking growing weed. | ||
| Well, we're gonna go tour a big girl off in Washington State when we play it. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I think it's amazing. | ||
| I think the corporations are gonna get in on it, but I don't think they're gonna be able to control it. | ||
| I just think something like weed is too easy to grow. | ||
| They're definitely gonna make a lot of money. | ||
| They could definitely get exclusive deals with certain providers and stores. | ||
| Maybe they could make it difficult to have a license to own a store where you could sell a shitload of it. | ||
| But if it's legal, people are going to grow it. | ||
| They're going to grow their own. | ||
| They're going to grow neighborhood growing weed operations. | ||
| And if they do allow small businesses to grow it, I think The law as it stated today is that you have to grow the marijuana and then sell it. | ||
| You couldn't grow it and then sell it to me and then I buy it and sell it. | ||
| I couldn't do that. | ||
| I would have to grow my own and sell my own. | ||
| So you have to be a grower as well as a dealer. | ||
| Which is fine. | ||
| A small group of people could cultivate a large amount of marijuana and make a shitload of money. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| I saw this really not too long episode of Vice where they were looking at the industry. | ||
| I guess they're not allowed to use banks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In Colorado, they're showing these... | ||
| Starting to change. | ||
| Blackwater guys escorting payouts every day and shit. | ||
| I was just like, holy... | ||
| You don't even consider that aspect. | ||
| How much money they probably took out of the cartel's hands the first few years. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Fuck yeah. | ||
| It'll be interesting to see what this all really turns into. | ||
| I wonder if people have been threatened. | ||
| Well, it's too much money, right? | ||
| It's too much money. | ||
| Yeah, it's a curious thing because it's extremely profitable and it's current. | ||
| And people are aware of the profitability of it. | ||
| People are aware of the... | ||
| Not only that, they're aware that traffic incidents of pulling people over for DUIs is at an all-time low. | ||
| Murder is dropped. | ||
| Everything's dropped. | ||
| Violent crime dropped. | ||
| I mean, you're showing a huge increase in the amount of money that's being generated as far as for state revenue. | ||
| More than $100 million in taxes this year. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And then you're showing these drops in crime, drops in DUIs, drops in murder. | ||
| Like, there's nothing you can say other than, let's try this somewhere else. | ||
| Any state that's struggling, any state that doesn't have some sort of a massive resource pool, like natural oil or gas or something like that that it's relying on, if they are in need of an industry, boy, that's a fucking pretty easy one. | ||
| It's right there for you. | ||
| Dive on in, bitches. | ||
| You can make some money. | ||
| Three months from now, just going to make you some more money all over again. | ||
| I wonder what's going to happen. | ||
| I wonder how many states are going to adopt at this next upcoming election. | ||
| I would imagine it's going to be another couple, at least. | ||
| I would like to see five or six more just jump in and start just wildly... | ||
| You know what would be the shit? | ||
| If Texas jumped in. | ||
| Utah's talking about it. | ||
| Are they really? | ||
| You know, because the Mormons figured out, well, if we can make a fuck ton of money off this, too. | ||
| So, I mean, if Utah's talking about it, then... | ||
| I think the South will still be the last part of the country where it ever materializes. | ||
| There's a lot of fucking stoners in Utah, man. | ||
| There's a lot of stoners in Utah. | ||
| I was in Utah. | ||
| I did Salt Lake City. | ||
| Salt Lake City is a really liberal town, weirdly enough. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is. | |
| It's weird. | ||
| I think they all kind of moved out to the outskirts, so now you've got this little hotbed of rebellion right there in the middle of it all, you know? | ||
| Wise Guys Comedy Club, that place is the shit. | ||
| And it's right in Salt Lake, and all my friends who work there, they all come back and go, Dude, have you been to Salt Lake? | ||
| It's the best kept secret in the United States. | ||
| Oh, it's fucking banging! | ||
| They're nice people too, man. | ||
| That is a nice town. | ||
| And a lot. | ||
| If they grow it too, they're going to start seeing massive amounts of profit, and they're going to see a shift in consciousness. | ||
| That's the big thing, the shift in consciousness. | ||
| It might take a few more years to recognize that and the effects of that, but people are just going to be nicer. | ||
| It's just going to happen. | ||
| You can't smoke a ton of weed and keep the entire population with the same anger level. | ||
| It's going to change. | ||
| It'll change the way people interact with each other, and that will, in turn, change the entire culture. | ||
| It's the genie's out of the bottle. | ||
| You don't really see fights breaking down in coffee shops in Amsterdam. | ||
| It's very rare. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very rare. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| But, oddly enough, a lot of jiu-jitsu guys like to smoke weed. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And then go do jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Bruce was a big pothead, wasn't he? | ||
| Yeah, he used to eat hash. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I thought that that killed him. | ||
| I remember when I was a teenager. | ||
| Is that bullshit? | ||
| They said his brain swelled from the hash or something like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah, he apparently had a head injury. | ||
| This is aneurysm. | ||
| Yeah, I think he also had some sort of a reaction to the drugs he was taking for it. | ||
| I should probably Google that. | ||
| I think you're right. | ||
| I think Linda gave him something for his... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Anyway. | ||
| Yeah, he used to get stoned as hell and work out all day, right? | ||
| Yeah, he loved hash, apparently. | ||
| Apparently he was really into it, man. | ||
| But if you've ever eaten hash, you would kind of get it. | ||
| The eating of marijuana is one of the least respected but most ass-kicking of all the psychedelic experiences. | ||
| I prefer edibles. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| The shit that they're throwing around today. | ||
| There's this dude called Los Hermanos de Gumi. | ||
| Is that the name of them? | ||
| The Gumi brothers? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| These motherfuckers. | ||
| My friend Ari had this Comedy Central taping and these guys showed up with these gummy bears. | ||
| And then I go, I'm looking at the gummy bear. | ||
| It's a bear. | ||
| I go, how much did I eat? | ||
| The guy goes, no more than the head. | ||
| I'm like, well, why are you making it so big? | ||
| What do you mean no more than the head? | ||
| What happens if I eat more than the head? | ||
| He's like, don't do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm like, why? | |
| You made it! | ||
| You made it! | ||
| Joey Diaz eats the whole fucking thing. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| He's a hero. | ||
| He's a hero. | ||
| He's a man amongst men. | ||
| We were out here months ago for this, played with Greg Allman down at the Annenberg Center, and some guy came, or somebody gave us these little, man, they were tiny. | ||
| They were like these little, tiny little cupcakes with like a peace sign on the top of it. | ||
| No bigger than a nickel. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And, um... | |
| It just absolutely destroyed me. | ||
| I had to somehow find my way back to my hotel room just to lay down. | ||
| There was nothing fun about it. | ||
| I was completely non-functional. | ||
| It was a Saturday night at 8 p.m. | ||
| and I was just done. | ||
| Yeah, they're saying that Bruce Lee's brain had been swollen when they checked his autopsy. | ||
| They said there was no visible external injury. | ||
| However, according to autopsy reports, his brain had swollen considerably from 1,400 to 1,575 grams, which is a 13% increase, which is pretty big. | ||
| He was only 32. The only substance found during his autopsy was equagesic. | ||
| I don't know what that is. | ||
| I'll Google it. | ||
| Okay, the only substance... | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The doctor said in an interview that he died from an allergic reaction to the muscle relaxant in equagesic, whatever it is, which is described as a common ingredient in painkillers. | ||
| Doctors announced Lee's death officially. | ||
| It was ruled death by misadventure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| Wow. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| But I guarantee he had some head injuries. | ||
| Because he was sparring. | ||
| You know, if you're doing the kind of shit that he was doing, he was experimenting a lot with various martial arts and had a, most likely, he got hit. | ||
| I mean, that's just a part of the game. | ||
| And if he was doing really experimental, wild stuff like I know he was, I mean, he's involved in a lot of different, sort of assimilating a lot of different martial arts styles. | ||
| I'm sure Don Inosanto got a shot or two in there somewhere, you know, I mean, come on. | ||
| Yeah, all of them. | ||
| There's some recently released video of him sparring at some karate tournament thing. | ||
| He has his headgear on, his full body armor on, and him and his dude are going at it. | ||
| If he was involved in stuff like that, most likely he was getting hit in the head. | ||
| It's just the way it is. | ||
| He worked with a lot of boxers. | ||
| I know he worked with Gene LaBelle. | ||
| He did some judo with Gene. | ||
| It's just the nature of martial arts, especially when you're involved in striking sports. | ||
| So who knows what it was that caused his head to bleed. | ||
| But it wasn't eaten hash. | ||
| No. | ||
| That's a shame. | ||
| Have you gotten a hold of some of the LA edibles while you're here? | ||
| This trip, no. | ||
| Yes, you have. | ||
| You just don't know it yet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Man, the last experience kind of put me off, dude. | ||
| I'm not kidding. | ||
| Don't be scared on me. | ||
| All three of us ate that fucking cupcake and all three of us were done. | ||
| I mean, they gotta put a dosage list on that shit. | ||
| They do now. | ||
| They put dosage numbers on. | ||
| It was not cool, man. | ||
| I mean, it was just not... | ||
| My night was over. | ||
| Well, they have these things called chibichus, and some of them I think will go up to 250 milligrams, which is just insane. | ||
| An effective dose is like 20 or 30. That's insane. | ||
| Like 20 is not bad for like a mellow, easygoing, body high. | ||
| 30, you're pushing the boundaries of paranoia. | ||
| 40, 50, you're in a cold sweat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
250. Joey Diaz ate two of them. | |
| There's a chocolate bar at a place I go to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's 40 doses. | |
| Game over. | ||
| 40 doses in one chocolate bar? | ||
| And a small bar, too. | ||
| What the fuck, man? | ||
| How big is small? | ||
| Not a big bar, you know, where it's like five pieces. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like a little... | |
| Like how many inches wide? | ||
|
unidentified
|
A snicker size. | |
| A snicker size. | ||
| 40 doses. | ||
| 40 people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| I mean, why? | ||
| Imagine if you ate it by yourself, though. | ||
| Like you said, one or two hits, and it's like... | ||
| Because you want to see Buddha. | ||
| Right, you do. | ||
| There's only one way to see him. | ||
| You've got to see Buddha. | ||
| You've got to close your eyes, shut the lights out, and watch the dance. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| At some point, I realized, I almost felt like I was getting anxiety from smoking it. | ||
| And definitely the carcinogen, and as a singer now, I've really got to be cautious about it. | ||
| So I just kind of quit smoking. | ||
| And then the edibles, you're right, it's an entirely different feeling. | ||
| It's more of an anti-anxiety, almost like an overall body high. | ||
| Whereas if you try to go out on stage, I can't smoke and perform because you get so internalized, I feel like I can't connect with the crowd at all. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I just learned a long time ago not to do that. | ||
| But with the edibles, man, it almost just... | ||
| Opens you up. | ||
| Opens you up. | ||
| And it's much more expressive, I think. | ||
| Do you know about the conversion in your body? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| The 11-hydroxymetabolite? | ||
| People who have heard this on the podcast, please bear with me. | ||
| I know you've heard this. | ||
| When you eat marijuana, it produces something called 11-hydroxymetabolitis. | ||
| It passes through your liver. | ||
| And apparently, it's four to five times more psychoactive than THC. Oh, absolutely. | ||
| That's why it's such an intensely different experience. | ||
| It's because it's a totally different drug when you eat it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, in the sensory deprivation tank, it's very psychedelic when you eat it because you're in that experience which is so bizarre as it is. | ||
| Yeah, you don't even really need drugs in those things, do you? | ||
| No, you don't need anything. | ||
| What's that like? | ||
| You have one? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| You want to do it? | ||
| How long are you here for? | ||
| I fly out tomorrow at noon. | ||
| We'll see what we can do. | ||
| You should try it, though. | ||
| At some point in your life, for sure. | ||
| I don't know if they have one in Nashville, but they're popping up all over the country. | ||
| They had one in D.C. when I was in D.C. People from the show in Philly, they have one in Philly. | ||
| They're showing up all over the country. | ||
| People are starting to open up these tank centers. | ||
| This is another thing that didn't... | ||
| It didn't exist. | ||
| In most cities, it was really hard to find one. | ||
| If you have your own, you've got to maintain the pH levels. | ||
| Mine has a full filter. | ||
| I have a commercial level one. | ||
| Float Nashville. | ||
| Float Nashville. | ||
| Bam, son! | ||
| You're in! | ||
| I work on buying a car first. | ||
| It's not expensive. | ||
| You don't have to have one. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You go and rent one out. | ||
| Just go and set an appointment. | ||
| I would love to try it. | ||
| You should definitely try it. | ||
| It's one of the most profound feelings of relaxation you'll ever feel in your life. | ||
| So you have a complete and total disassociation experience? | ||
| You lose feeling of your body, right? | ||
| Yeah, you don't think you're there anymore. | ||
| You think your mind has been released from your body and your mind's flying through space, completely untethered from the body. | ||
| You don't feel the water. | ||
| The only time I've ever experienced that, even on... | ||
| I never had any type of complete disassociation experiences, even on really high doses of psilocybin. | ||
| The one time I ever... | ||
| I think what I would classify as the most psychedelic experience I've ever had was from a drug that's not even normally associated with the psychedelic family, which is dextromethorphan. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| DXM. It's... | ||
| A lot of kids, like... | ||
| Pound bottles of Robitussin. | ||
| By the time you consume enough DXM that's in the Robitussin, you're doing so much horrible shit to your body. | ||
| I only encountered it one time. | ||
| We were at this festival in Charlotte, North Carolina. | ||
| A friend of mine had somehow gotten hold of this pure medical grade dextromethorphan. | ||
| We had a digital scale with gel caps weighing it out. | ||
| It was about 400 milligrams. | ||
| It's just the most amazing, completely inexplicable experience I've ever had. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| My buddy Brian, he's like, you know, Sturgill, you need to hear music on this. | ||
| He's like, it's as good as it fucking gets. | ||
| So, first off, the weirdest part of the whole experience is we're out in this KOA campground in North Carolina, and we're just surrounded by hippies, and there's tanks going off and shit, and that ain't my thing. | ||
| Tanks? | ||
| Yeah, nitrous tanks. | ||
| They'll come at these hippie festivals. | ||
| I thought you meant like... | ||
| No. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| Hippies have tanks? | ||
| We had to make it back down to the parking lot where his truck was parked through this trail. | ||
| You couldn't see shit, man. | ||
| It was like the most complete flutter vision ever. | ||
| And I'm just stumbling, not walking into trees. | ||
| And Brian was like, oh man, just close your eyes. | ||
| I'm like, what are you talking about? | ||
| What? | ||
| He's like, just close your eyes, trust me. | ||
| And I closed my eyes, and I swear as I'm sitting here, it was all of a sudden, like, I could see the trail, plainest day, directly in front of me, and almost like the entire canopy had this moon lamp just turned on and flooded it with light, and everything was so clear. | ||
| And we walked all the way back down to his truck. | ||
| With your eyes closed? | ||
| With our eyes closed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What?! | |
| I swear to you, man. | ||
| I'll never... | ||
| To this day, I'm not even, you know... | ||
| It was insane. | ||
| Did you only do it once? | ||
| One time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What the fuck? | |
| I've never even met anybody that's even heard of it or knew where to find it since, but Brian used to get tons of this shit, and he'd just lay with his headphones on for like eight hours in his living room and listen to music, and you're completely... | ||
| Is it illegal? | ||
| Well, I mean, to possess it in that kind of quantity, I wouldn't have... | ||
| You have to have permits and things like that to... | ||
| But we got to the truck, and he had a Toyota Tacoma, you know, with the bucket seats, and a really nice stereo, like a booming-ass stereo. | ||
| I mean, he's putting, like, Band of Gypsies or something. | ||
| And I laid that bucket seat back, man, and closed my eyes. | ||
| And within a matter of a second, I mean, half a minute or a minute, I wasn't in that truck anymore. | ||
| I wasn't in this bucket seat. | ||
| I felt like you never floated down a river on an inner tube. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's the same feeling, except instead of an inner two, I was laying in my own little personal cloud. | ||
| Just as I'm sitting here talking to you, I was in this cloud, cruising through this golden, sienna, purple sunrise sky, just like the most booming... | ||
| It's the most blissful euphoria I've ever felt listening to Jimi Hendrix. | ||
| And this lasted like six hours, man. | ||
| You're just like cruising through the sky. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I've never had that from any of what people commonly associate as hallucinogens or... | ||
| That stuff sounds intense. | ||
| Yeah, I talked to Dr. Strassman about it and he said there's never really been any studies. | ||
| There's not a lot known. | ||
| You're a guinea pig. | ||
| Sturgill Simpson, human guinea pig. | ||
| Well, this was all years and years ago, man. | ||
| I don't know that I'm... | ||
| You should do a trip report on Arrowhead. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, the forum. | ||
| I know what you're talking about. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's one of the most important resources Arrowhead is for people understanding what they're getting into. | ||
| There's a lot of really educated, very well-thought-out reviews of the various compounds and different... | ||
| Different effects they have in people's trip reports. | ||
| I didn't know anything about it until then, and I've never seen it since, but I do remember the guy saying that the difference in three or four or two hundred milligrams is, you know, a thousand times stronger trip. | ||
| So, you know, nobody's ever really documented the ladder, so to speak. | ||
| A thousand times stronger trip? | ||
| Four or five hundred milligrams, you know, you can... | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Is there any negative downside? | ||
| The only thing I remember is I might have had a slight allergic reaction, because I remember feeling like I had sun poisoning, and I was really scratching my back, kind of tripping out on this for a second. | ||
| This was on the early onset, and the guys were like, what are you doing? | ||
| I was like, man, I think I got... | ||
| Too much sun today, my back's really itching, and Chad was like, no, it's not. | ||
| You're fine. | ||
| And as soon as he said that, the whole sensation went away. | ||
| But there was nothing negative about the experience. | ||
| And when it's over, the comedown just goes away? | ||
| You go back to baseline and it just kind of wears off. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's so weird. | ||
| You always wonder if it was easy for people to do research on psychedelics and it was respected and it was something that people pursued as opposed to being like, you know, if you do research on certain things, you could be thought of as a pariah. | ||
| It could fuck with you. | ||
| You know, you could be ostracized. | ||
| People could say, oh, this guy just wants to get high. | ||
| He's just trying to get people high. | ||
| He's just doing experimental drugs. | ||
| He's not doing serious research. | ||
| Or they think there's some hidden agenda or zealotry behind it, right? | ||
| Yeah, it could be. | ||
| There's a massive hospital in Lexington, Kentucky that was called the Narcotics Farm. | ||
| And it was a criminal... | ||
| uh you know william burroughs was there for a while and they did a lot of like highly barbaric experimental addiction treatments there back in like the 40s and 50s and just unspeakable things like you know like dropping people's genitals and ice water or something like that's not unspeakable right i can speak of this | ||
| Well, like, kind of ridiculous approaches to dealing with heroin and methadone addiction, and I know they did some psychedelic studies, I'm sure, back there, but, you know, the hospital still stands there, and it's just the most ominous, creepy building. | ||
| Methadone is a weird one, isn't it? | ||
| Oh, that's horrible shit, man. | ||
| They use it to get people off heroin, but yet it's worse for you than heroin. | ||
| The withdrawals are way worse, yeah. | ||
| It just makes them well, too, right? | ||
| It doesn't get them high? | ||
| Is that the deal? | ||
| Whatever the genetical attachment... | ||
| Heroin is one of those drugs that actually modifies your body's biochemistry in a way that you become physically dependent on it. | ||
| So they're kind of facilitating whatever it is that causes the sickness when you withdraw. | ||
| But it's way worse for you. | ||
| And it doesn't get you high. | ||
| Nobody talks about really good methadone music. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| People did heroin and made some fucking incredible music. | ||
| Nobody did methadone and made some awesome shit. | ||
| There was these guys that used to come to the pool hall that used to hang out in white plains, and they were called the methadoneans. | ||
| That's what we would call them. | ||
| They were these dudes that came over from the methadone clinic, and they'd come over and play pool, and they were just zombified, just dead in the eyes. | ||
| Yeah, what's his deal? | ||
| He's one of those methadoneans. | ||
| These poor guys come over from the methadone clinic. | ||
| What do you guys do around here when you gotta take a massively, intensely painful piss? | ||
| Oh, you gotta do it right now? | ||
| Go run! | ||
| Go take a piss. | ||
| We're almost done anyway. | ||
| You run and I'll tell everybody how to get to your website. | ||
| Sturgill Simpson as he takes his little girl's bladder to the bathroom. | ||
| Not everyone can deal with bulletproof coffee and all that stuff. | ||
| Water. | ||
| Just sitting there. | ||
| I have that. | ||
| You have it? | ||
| I said you'll have that sometimes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not you. | |
| Yeah, occasionally. | ||
| You in a third person sense. | ||
| But I get it occasionally too, man. | ||
| It definitely does happen. | ||
| Sturgill's website. | ||
| His Twitter is Sturgill Simpson. | ||
| And if you go to it, it's actually that image. | ||
| The image of the earth sands the turtles underneath it. | ||
| Similar image. | ||
| But Sturgill's... | ||
| The CDs that I have... | ||
| Like I said, I'm a big fucking fan. | ||
| He's got several songs that I'm really into that I'm listening to right now on iTunes. | ||
| But the CDs... | ||
| Let me find them on my playlist here. | ||
| Metamodern Sounds and Country... | ||
| That's the name of one. | ||
| That's the latest one. | ||
| That's the one that's the most psychedelic. | ||
| And then the other one is High Top Mountain, which is fucking fantastic. | ||
| I really, really dig it. | ||
| They're very different, but both of them are equally unique and kick-ass. | ||
| I love all of it. | ||
| I'm sure he's got a website, too. | ||
| Must be like SturgillSimpson.com, right? | ||
| Whoa, check this out. | ||
| His website? | ||
| No, well, sort of. | ||
| Colorado health officials want to ban almost all recreational edibles. | ||
| Ha ha, pussies. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, HuffPo. | |
| Wow, SturgillSimpson.com is his website. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| We're just reading something on Huffington Post that the health officials in Colorado want to ban all edibles. | ||
| Because kids are getting into them and shit. | ||
| They're just nerfing the world. | ||
| That's all they're doing. | ||
| They're just nerfing the world. | ||
| I saw a really sensationalist piece about this on some national news program the other night because children were getting a hold of them and having overdoses. | ||
| There's no... | ||
| It's really scary. | ||
| So you're gonna outlaw Clorox too? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because your kids get under the fucking sink? | ||
| You're a bad parent? | ||
| Clorox is way worse, first of all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Because the kids that are having the overdose on pot, they're not dying. | ||
| They might freak out, but they're not gonna die. | ||
| It's not toxic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's like anything that can fuck your kids up. | ||
| Just don't let them get to it, you know? | ||
| Yeah, don't let your kid play with hammers. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Shouldn't fucking go to Home Depot and shut it down. | ||
| It's stupid. | ||
| Take away spoons. | ||
| Yeah, the idea that adults, a grown adult, should not be able to buy an edible that has a clearly marked label. | ||
| All these experiences that we're talking about, like you ate this little thing that was the size of a nickel, you got fucked up. | ||
| You learn. | ||
| You learn. | ||
| You're here. | ||
| Everyone's fine. | ||
| It's like the lowest worry version of overdose ever. | ||
| Because the overdose is just, ah! | ||
| Well, when I say overdose, all it means is I'm going to go lay in bed and have a really good time instead of walking around and having a really good time. | ||
| But there's no ill effects. | ||
| No ill effects. | ||
| Your body doesn't break. | ||
| Your mind doesn't melt. | ||
| You're going to be fine. | ||
| At the end of the day, you might just get a really great night's sleep. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm not really recommending you give it to your kids, but if your kids get a hold of it, just stay with them. | ||
| Stay in the room with them. | ||
| Everybody's going to be okay. | ||
| They linked two deaths to them. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| One somebody ate one and fell off of a hotel. | ||
| Another guy, it says, Richard Kirk may have been on pain meds in a pot edible when he killed his wife. | ||
| Well, pain meds. | ||
| I guarantee you I'd go with that. | ||
| The pot edible would have probably... | ||
| Pot edible was probably wrestling with the pain meds as he was grabbing hold of the trigger. | ||
| Fuck all that, man. | ||
| You can't blame a guy falling off a roof on pot. | ||
| What are you doing on the roof, stupid? | ||
| Pot didn't tell you to get up on that roof. | ||
| Why'd you fall off that roof? | ||
| You know, he probably just fell off that roof no matter what he was on. | ||
| You can't fuck around on roofs, dummy. | ||
| Especially when you're blitzed. | ||
| That's a silly idea. | ||
| Who knows what he was doing, but to blame that on Pot is fucking stupid. | ||
| Instead of blaming that on Pot, how about you think about how many fucking people don't jump off the roof when they're on Pot? | ||
| It's like a lot more. | ||
| It also says that the cookie he ate didn't give him the recommended immediate effect that he wanted, so then he ate six times the recommended dose. | ||
| Silly bitch. | ||
| You can die for a cigarette standing on the fucking corner, you know? | ||
| Rest in peace, silly bitch. | ||
| You know, people make mistakes, man. | ||
| You can't blame the substance. | ||
| I mean, it's like, what are we going to do? | ||
| Are we going to outlaw cars because people get in accidents? | ||
| Are we going to outlaw knives because people stab people? | ||
| The idea that adults can't make their own decisions has been the folly of man since civilization was created. | ||
| We have to figure out what decisions are the right ones, educate each other, and then move forward from there. | ||
| But to tell someone that they can't handle it, because Jim over here jumped off the fucking roof. | ||
| Everybody, all those positive experiences they had eating pot, we're going to flush those down the toilet. | ||
| Because we lost Jim. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Jim is a wild man. | ||
| Jim is fucking crazy. | ||
| Yeah, Jim used to work a tightrope and he used to do fucking backflips off the garage. | ||
| But whatever. | ||
| We loved him and he's gone, so no more pot for everybody. | ||
| Like, what are you talking about? | ||
| I mean, are we going to outlaw guns every time someone commits suicide? | ||
| What are we going to do? | ||
| What kind of a goofy world are we going to create? | ||
| Because if you just make everything illegal, everything that kills you is going to be illegal. | ||
| You're going to have nothing. | ||
| You're going to have no electricity. | ||
| There'll be no water because people could fucking drown. | ||
| There'll be no food because sometimes food goes bad and people die of food poisoning. | ||
| There'll be everything. | ||
| You're going to take away everything. | ||
| You literally, if you want to take away things that kill people, you literally have to remove life itself. | ||
| No more dogs, because dogs bite people. | ||
| No more spiders, because spiders can poison you. | ||
| We're going to have to poison all the spiders, because they can poison people. | ||
| But we can't have spider poisoning, because that kills babies if they get added under the sink. | ||
| So, we'll have no life. | ||
| There will be no life. | ||
| It's just preposterous. | ||
| And the idea that Colorado is going to step in and legislate that. | ||
| What we need to do is get all those fucking people high. | ||
| Where is that coming from? | ||
| I mean, what? | ||
| Some dummies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What's the issue? | ||
| I didn't... | ||
| They're worried about people freaking out on edibles. | ||
| That's all it is. | ||
| Is it so strong? | ||
| Yeah, but so what? | ||
| Don't eat as much. | ||
| Lower the dose. | ||
| You know what's really strong? | ||
| Alcohol. | ||
| It's everywhere. | ||
| Go to a fucking store, drink a bottle of Jack Daniels, you're dead. | ||
| You're dead in three hours. | ||
| Or whatever it takes. | ||
| Maybe you've got a better tolerance than me, but if you drink a gallon jug of Jack Daniels, most likely you're a goner. | ||
| There's some truth there. | ||
| I used to... | ||
| I don't really drink at all anymore. | ||
| I think most of that is probably related to my job. | ||
| Because you spend night after night looking out at rooms full of people that are very drunk. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it gives you a certain... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Plus, looking back on my life, all the dumbest shit I ever did, alcohol was pretty much directly related. | ||
| All of it. | ||
| The worst decisions I ever made. | ||
| It wasn't because I was on hard drugs. | ||
| Go figure. | ||
| No, it's the number one sanctioned drug. | ||
| I mean, it's what everybody does to have a good time. | ||
| After work, let's go have a drink. | ||
| I'm not opposed to having a drink. | ||
| I like having a drink. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I like drinking. | ||
| I don't drink too much. | ||
| I don't get fucked up. | ||
| But I've been fucked up, and I've had a great time. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah, it's bad for you, but so is a lot of... | ||
| There's really nothing worse than a drunk. | ||
| Very few things. | ||
| Very few things worse than an obnoxious drunk. | ||
| Yeah, especially a violent, obnoxious drunk. | ||
| It's the worst. | ||
| The worst is you ever been on a date with a girl and you're sober and she's drunk? | ||
| That's disastrous. | ||
| Really drunk girls are the worst. | ||
| Really drunk guys. | ||
| That's the worst. | ||
| They're the worst. | ||
| I think really drunk guys are the worst because they're more violent than the really drunk girls. | ||
| You know, it's sad that the shows, they're the only ones that ever want to talk to me. | ||
| Like, the other guys in the band are young, and they get hit on by the girls. | ||
| The girls never want to talk to Sturgill, man. | ||
| It's always, like, the really big, like, large, drunk guy. | ||
| And they all, like, give me the bear hug, and I get the whaling thing. | ||
| And then they're just, like, hugging me, and I'm levitating off the ground, and they're giving me, like, this thing, like, fucking man, you're the shit, dude. | ||
| Yeah, like, one song, man, damn, dude. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those are the only people that want to talk to me. | ||
| The really huge, wildebeest, drunk, really redneck guys. | ||
| That's my curse. | ||
| Yeah, they're fun to talk to, man. | ||
| They're fucking great. | ||
| I have a good time talking to a lot of those dudes. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I think there's a certain romance and fun involved in alcohol consumption that I embrace. | ||
| It's not the end-all, be-all, but it's not bad. | ||
| There's some fun to alcohol. | ||
| You know, it's an irresponsible, oftentimes reckless, stupid, impulsive feeling and state of mind. | ||
| But, with the right people, that shit works. | ||
| It's bad for your health. | ||
| That's the number one issue. | ||
| I know a lot of people that shouldn't smoke pot. | ||
| Fuck yeah. | ||
| Everything hits people differently. | ||
| Yeah, I know a lot of people that shouldn't drink, though. | ||
| A lot more people that shouldn't drink than shouldn't do anything else. | ||
| I have friends that smoke pot but can't drink. | ||
| They're alcoholics, but they'll still smoke pot. | ||
| So they don't drink. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's not even so, but they can. | ||
| They can smoke pot and they're fine. | ||
| But if they drink, they're off the rails. | ||
| The gene. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That weird... | ||
| A lot of Irishmen. | ||
| A lot of that weird gene. | ||
| It just hits them like a truck. | ||
| They can't do it. | ||
| They can't regulate it. | ||
| It takes over. | ||
| Woo-woo! | ||
| I mean, we were in Ireland a couple weeks ago. | ||
| You talk about some fucking great people, though, man. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just... | |
| If all the places in Great Britain or Europe that we've played, it feels the most like the States. | ||
| Because they're just like, you know... | ||
| And a lot of the British and the Scottish audiences are so intensely attentive and appreciative that it's almost disconcertingly quiet. | ||
| When you get to Ireland, they're just like, Fuck! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| You're like, yep, okay, done this before. | ||
| They like American country music? | ||
| They fucking love it, man. | ||
| Wow, that's awesome. | ||
| Scottish and the Irish especially. | ||
| It all came from there. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, all country, bluegrass, anything, it's all just a derivative of Scotch-Irish folk music that came over with the settlers. | ||
| We just kind of... | ||
| No shit! | ||
| Drink whiskey and sit on a porch for a hundred years and it just got faster and faster. | ||
| No shit! | ||
| But yeah, traditional Irish music and a lot of Scottish fiddle tunes, like the mandolins tune in D, just like a bagpipe, because when the pipes got outlawed, they started playing a lot of those songs on stringed instruments. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| Why did the pipes get outlawed? | ||
| For being annoying? | ||
| No, for basically it was their... | ||
| For sucking? | ||
| There's the British equivalent of the law against inciting a riot. | ||
| You know, like somebody pulled out some fucking bagpipes back in the day, like some shit was going to go down, man. | ||
| Wow, they made a law against bagpipes. | ||
| Yeah, they outlawed them for a long time. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| How long? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Like years? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jamie will find out. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| All of that tradition kind of came over. | ||
| It's where a lot of country music, the melodies and the themes and the elements, they're very similar. | ||
| Is that why I like that Lord of the Dance shit? | ||
| Like when they were step dancing, a little bit like line dancing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, well... | |
| Isn't it? | ||
| That's a little questionable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| We'll go... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What, Michael? | ||
| What the fuck was his name? | ||
| The Lord of the Dance? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Flat... | |
| Flatly. | ||
| Flatly. | ||
| That was short-lived. | ||
| People are like, yeah, let's go Irish dancing. | ||
| No. | ||
| Let's not. | ||
| No. | ||
| He did it for a little while. | ||
| I think he still... | ||
| Actually, I think I saw a fucking billboard for it when I was over there. | ||
| There's a few suckers left in town. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, man. | |
| Most people got hip to that and went, wait, wait, wait, wait. | ||
| What the fuck are we watching? | ||
| What is that dude doing up there, man? | ||
| That was weird. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But yeah, it's all interconnected. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I didn't know that. | |
| They really do. | ||
| I mean, man, especially in Glasgow and Dublin, we feel like we've almost been adopted at this point. | ||
| Really? | ||
| They're so appreciative. | ||
| How often do you play over there? | ||
| I've been over... | ||
| Five or six times this year. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No shit! | |
| Yeah, actually, we haven't really started our US tour on the album. | ||
| The album came back in May, but I've spent the majority of the year in Europe. | ||
| Wow, why is that? | ||
| It's just, it's important. | ||
| It was always important to me, like, to go there and play for those people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| I don't know. | ||
| Just free travel, really, man. | ||
| And plus, you get to fucking play music every night and see Europe. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think... | ||
| Honestly, well here, careers can be such... | ||
| It has the potential to be a little bit more flash in the pan base over here. | ||
| People get bored quicker. | ||
| But I've just had a lot of friends that are musicians that said if you make the effort and you go over and they see you taking the trouble and the time to come over, they're loyal, they're just fans for life. | ||
| I'll probably still be touring over there long after any career I have here has dried up. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| What about, is that England as well, or just Ireland? | ||
| England, not so much. | ||
| I mean, there's a market, but it appears to be sincerely and genuinely appreciated in the Celtic areas. | ||
| Dublin and Belfast and Glasgow and Edinburgh and, you know, these are really very musical cities at their core. | ||
| But they just, you know, anything poetry-related or, you know, storytelling, they just really love it. | ||
| How upset were they that YouTube put their songs on every iPhone? | ||
| Were they bummed out? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Was Dublin pissed? | ||
| They've gone soft. | ||
| I go out of my way to stay as much the fuck out of their business as possible when I'm there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Just show up and do my job. | ||
| Because it's always, you know... | ||
| Do you know the story about U2 putting their... | ||
| No. | ||
| U2 put their new album on every iPhone. | ||
| The other day I'm in my car and my phone starts playing random. | ||
| And all of a sudden I got some U2 song. | ||
| Oops, I'm sorry. | ||
| Bono apologizes for U2 album being automatically added to Apple, iTunes libraries. | ||
| Now that you say that, man, I was backstage yesterday syncing my phone up to a new laptop. | ||
| I got on the road and I was getting all the cloud shit and I looked down and there's a fucking U2 album. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I was wondering, why is this here? | ||
| Yeah, why is that there? | ||
| I don't want that. | ||
| I don't want that. | ||
| I'm in my car the other day, and I have my car plugged in. | ||
| I got the thing, you know, that plugs into the stereo system. | ||
| It's playing random. | ||
| I just do that sometimes. | ||
| So they monopolized iTunes, basically. | ||
| Well, they figured out a way to launch their album on iTunes, but the problem is a lot of people that buy an iPhone aren't U2 fans. | ||
| That's a fucking very presumptuous thing, and you're dealing with billions of these fucking things being sold. | ||
| So, how many of them have U2 songs on them? | ||
| All of them! | ||
| I mean, how many are they selling? | ||
| I mean, they might sell 100 million iPhones, right? | ||
| That's all with a U2 album on it. | ||
| That's stupid. | ||
| That's not how many U2 would sell. | ||
| U2's a very popular band. | ||
| I'm sure a lot of people would be super happy to get U2's song for free with a new iPhone. | ||
| But a lot of people wouldn't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They just sold them with them. | |
| They pushed them onto their existing phones. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I had a 5S. Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Just showed up. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| So when you update the operating system? | ||
| Not even that. | ||
| No? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just showed up. | |
| What? | ||
| Just through iTunes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Yeah, just showed up. | ||
| That's dirty. | ||
| Oh, that's even dirtier. | ||
| Like you already purchased it and you just didn't download it yet. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| That's actually disgusting. | ||
| That's a disaster. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's why he said sorry. | |
| Why did he let that go? | ||
| I read the other day where he also said that he's been wearing those fucking glasses for 20 years because he's got glaucoma. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you buy that? | ||
| You look a little incredulous. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| The jury's out. | ||
| Jury's out. | ||
| I wonder. | ||
| Yeah, he's probably got called on it. | ||
| You know, people are like, hey, man. | ||
| Why is it just now coming up, though? | ||
| I mean, people have been wondering what the... | ||
| I mean, remember they had, like, the fly, these big black ones back in the day. | ||
| Everybody just let that shit slide. | ||
| Like, nobody was like, hey, man, what the fuck? | ||
| I wonder if he smokes weed. | ||
| Because if you have glaucoma, you're allowed to. | ||
| It reduces interocular pressure. | ||
| It's one of the legit reasons to get a medical marijuana prescription. | ||
| My grandfather has really bad glaucoma now, but he's never, I would never, I don't even know how I would approach that conversation. | ||
| To give him weed? | ||
| Yeah, he's such an old school, like, just a hillbilly, you know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Just never, never, you know. | ||
| I don't even know how I would convince him that this actually will make you feel better. | ||
| Just sit them down. | ||
| You know. | ||
| Sit them down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Get them drunk first. | ||
| Yeah, he's a pretty stoic guy, man. | ||
| Well, then just sit him down. | ||
| Maybe I just don't tell him. | ||
| Just give him the brownies. | ||
| I might freak out and have a heart attack and die. | ||
| Well, that would be very bad. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sit him down. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Sit him down. | ||
| You're a grown man now. | ||
| He might listen to you. | ||
| I get a time off to go home and actually see him. | ||
| I might do that sometime. | ||
| Listen, man. | ||
| We're out of time. | ||
| We just ran through three hours. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Crazy, right? | ||
| That's nuts. | ||
| Time flies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It all just slips away. | ||
| Tell people, your website, SturgillSimpson.com, your two albums, you can get them on iTunes, and I listed them off while you were taking a leak. | ||
| If anybody's interested, you gotta, I mean, my favorite songs, there's a bunch of them. | ||
| You Can Have the Crown, I fucking love that. | ||
| Off your first one, that's a great fucking... | ||
| Why are you laughing? | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| It's nothing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nothing. | |
| What? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's that song. | |
| Everybody's got that song they wish they never wrote. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's your song? | |
| That's my song, man. | ||
| Dude, that song's great! | ||
| I fucking love that song. | ||
| It was a lot of fun, and I wrote it in about 20 minutes at like 7.30 in the morning, and we ended up recording it that day. | ||
| We just happened to go into a studio, actually Waylon's old studio in Nashville, Hillbilly Central. | ||
| We got the opportunity to record in there, and Dave was like, what do you got that's new? | ||
| And I'd written that song and another song literally that morning before I knew we were going to be in there. | ||
| And so I played it for him and the rest of the guys. | ||
| Of course, they're just laughing their ass off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And they're like, we've got to cut that. | ||
| So we cut it. | ||
| And then at the end of the day, I heard the playback. | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| I'm going to be singing that fucking thing when I'm 60 years old. | ||
| That's going to be the one. | ||
| And sure as shit, man, every show, every fucking show, it never fails. | ||
| There's that one guy, and in between every song, King turd, motherfucker! | ||
| You know, just like, planet turd! | ||
| You know, he follows us. | ||
| It has to be the same guy. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Well, when you start off a song saying, I've been spending all my money on weed and pills, that's how it launches. | ||
| You've got to get both albums, folks. | ||
| They're both very different, which I thought was really fascinating, too, before I got to meet you and understand what it's from, what caused it. | ||
| And then the other one, Metamodern... | ||
| Meta-modern sounds and country music. | ||
| I love that, too, man. | ||
| Thank you, man. | ||
| Dude, you're the shit. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thanks for being you. | ||
| Thanks for being on here. | ||
| And please, reconsider your five-album thing. | ||
| Thanks, Shooter. | ||
| Who else for telling you about it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's the internet, man. | ||
| The internet knows all. | ||
| It's fucking scary. | ||
| All right, you dirty bitches. | ||
| We'll see you soon, this week. | ||
| A lot of podcasts, including that lady, Sue, from Life Below Zero. | ||
| I'm very excited to talk to her. | ||
| Cameron Haynes is here on Friday, too. |
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