Feb. 28, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:55:20
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Four, three, two, one. | ||
| And we're live, Mr. Roth. | ||
| As live as live we'll ever possibly get on the Intergrid International. | ||
| Good to see you, man. | ||
| You really do look great. | ||
| You look healthy. | ||
| You look vibrant. | ||
| You look surprised. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| Don't look so surprised. | ||
| I haven't been to sleep since the late 80s. | ||
| I didn't miss a thing, but... | ||
| I'm a little groggy, but I'm good to go. | ||
| In my job, you expect dissipation and illness, right? | ||
| It kind of goes along with, you expect a disintegration in my kind of job. | ||
| Lemmy from Motorhead style. | ||
| Do you know the term wabasabi? | ||
| Do you know what that is? | ||
| No. | ||
| Wabasabi is a Japanese term that succinctly put means that which is perfect because it's a little fucked up. | ||
| Ah, right. | ||
| Your favorite jeans, very wabasabi. | ||
| Yeah, it's like a patina on an old car. | ||
| The guitar player in the Rolling Stones, very wabasabi. | ||
| Yes, yes, he's very wabasabi. | ||
| Yeah, and in New York City, for example, the old that starts to fall apart right next to the new, that's part of the beauty there. | ||
| Your favorite leather jacket is that. | ||
| And you expect that to increase. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| I'm not really an athlete. | ||
| I don't really train. | ||
| I'm kind of a singer who always traded a celebrity to, you know, hey, show me how you do that. | ||
| And how many times should I lift this? | ||
| And what happens if I fall off of this going this fast? | ||
| But you used to train, right? | ||
| Didn't you train with Benny Orquidez? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I went through martial arts the first time. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Let me go back. | ||
| I lived in student housing up until I was just about a teenager. | ||
| And it was a time when you bought one paintbrush at a time. | ||
| And most of my values come from that. | ||
| Public library, I learned to swim, and a public swimming pool. | ||
| And my dad finished medical school. | ||
| I happened. | ||
| I wasn't planned. | ||
| In the 50s, that happened a lot. | ||
| And so we had a lot, a lot of patients who were kind of on the periphery of Pasadena, California, which is where we came. | ||
| I was born in Indiana, lived in Massachusetts. | ||
| He was a resident. | ||
| Grew up around the hospitals. | ||
| Dinner meant going to the hospital, meet dad, you know. | ||
| And when we came out to LA, the Japanese were kind of peripheral. | ||
| Spanish-speaking people, curiously enough, you know, the running story was that there were six Spanish-speaking people at UCLA and three of them were in gardening. | ||
| No, really. | ||
| Back in the 60s, that was the case. | ||
| Today, easily, you know, massive amounts of percentages. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| It's not the second language. | ||
| It's kind of the first and a half now. | ||
| Things have really changed. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I grew up in those neighborhoods. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So I can gang sign the whole alphabet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can you really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I have two low riders. | ||
| Do you really? | ||
| I've got a 51 Mercury that's chopped, dropped, low and slow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you drive it? | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I got a 66 V-Dub Bug with a Chevy engine, a 383 up in the front. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Orale! | |
| And I can roll my R's. | ||
| You got to roll your R's. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Orale! | |
| Orale! | ||
| What do you drive those things? | ||
| Well, we drive them all around. | ||
| Southern California, of course, is different. | ||
| A lot of you are listening in with five layers and going, hey, I'm not driving anywhere for the next three days according to the weather map. | ||
| But here, for example, it's t-shirt weather. | ||
| So the great outdoors means... | ||
| How's that sound over the headphones? | ||
| Good. | ||
| Sounds like an engine. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| But the first time we were just playing with a sword there, and that's not a summarized sword. | ||
| That's like calling a 9mm a police gun. | ||
| Yeah, it kind of is, because they use, but that's a katana, huh? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And we were playing with that a little bit. | ||
| First time somebody handed me those, we were at the Buddhist temple in Pasadena. | ||
| You bet I remember, 1965. And there was a demonstration of the Japanese culture. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And a fella came out and demonstrated aito and, you know, the sword arts and stuff. | ||
| And then he said, I'm going to take somebody from the audience. | ||
| And my dad pushed me. | ||
| And I walked out in the middle of that floor and held it. | ||
| Here, hold that sword. | ||
| Just like you said. | ||
| Wow, what is that? | ||
| A hundred-year-old sword? | ||
| It's from the 1500s. | ||
| Wham-o! | ||
| Muramachi or something like this. | ||
| First time I held that sword, it was like out of a graphic novel. | ||
| Lightning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Inazuma. | |
| It's Japanese for lightning. | ||
| Careful what you show your kids, Joe. | ||
| Well, you went and lived in, like, last time I talked to you, you were living in Japan. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| And you were doing kendo over there. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, you pitch a ball someday, I'm going to play for the Yankees, Joe. | ||
| I loves to wrestle and grapple, and someday I'm going to get in the middle of a ring, and Joe Rogan's going to say my name. | ||
| And I'm working my way up through Ed Parker's American Kempo System, and someday I'm going to J-Pan. | ||
| And I'm going to learn from the guys who invented this stuff. | ||
| Now I'm putting on a pork barrel accent to make it entertaining, but I did. | ||
| And I started exactly like I did in Barham Boulevard, making rock and roll with the Mighty V, Mighty Van Halen in the late 70s, at the Oakwood Garden Apartments. | ||
| In midtown Tokyo, I did not know a single person. | ||
| I didn't know a syllable of Japanese. | ||
| I had no idea where I was. | ||
| And no, I can't drive on the left side of the street. | ||
| I barely carry a cell phone. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| And I expected a lifetime of adventure. | ||
| You do all the traveling. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Come on. | |
| Artist to artist. | ||
| You're home everywhere now, aren't you? | ||
| Yeah, in a lot of ways. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You are the comfortable one in the room. | |
| Especially if there's conflict. | ||
| Which there always is, and that's what's the most unsettling to the tourists. | ||
| Travelers, you're at home. | ||
| When you first start learning Japanese, it comes in three stages. | ||
| First, you watch kids' shows on television because they pronounce everything and nobody interrupts. | ||
| Then you watch the news. | ||
| Everybody speaks with a perfect accent, bigger words, nobody interrupts. | ||
| And then you start going with me to the movies in the middle of the day on Tuesday in Tokyo at Ginza, and you're the only pale face in the room. | ||
| It's all in Japanese, and it's the movies. | ||
| Everybody's interrupting, everybody's shooting, screaming sirens, airplanes going by, and if you can begin to decipher even one character. | ||
| Then you'll develop yours, maybe. | ||
| Do you know how to write it? | ||
| Well, you practice that, certainly. | ||
| And think of it as cross-training. | ||
| There are a lot of schools, for example, Hebrew school. | ||
| You always hear about Hebrew school before you go to Bar Mitzvah class. | ||
| It's an ancient way of, wait a minute, you've got to develop the side of your brain by correlating designs with language, with meaning that may not actually be in English. | ||
| Nobody's walking around speaking Hebrew after only four summers of whack. | ||
| But you develop that side of your brain to where you start to have a capacity to learn in an accelerated way. | ||
| So all your best musicians speak a couple languages. | ||
| All your best politicians speak a couple. | ||
| All your best artists, architects. | ||
| All your best design folks and stuff. | ||
| Speak a couple of languages. | ||
| It's no secret that you develop that side of your brain. | ||
| If your kids don't speak Spanish, get after it. | ||
| I've got to learn a language. | ||
| And it's never too late. | ||
| You'll see the difference. | ||
| I did every single day. | ||
| I called it Roth University in Tokyo. | ||
| Every morning, two hours, Japanese class, speaking the language. | ||
| I can get things done for you, but I'm not conversant. | ||
| You follow? | ||
| The end result is that it's cross-training. | ||
| Long-term memory, my short-term memory... | ||
| It's a little too short. | ||
| It gets shorter. | ||
| But you'll see the difference in your ability to remember what you read. | ||
| You'll start remembering everything you see. | ||
| Sometimes that's dangerous. | ||
| Because of the fact that you're learning this new thing. | ||
| So you're activating this part of your brain. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You'll start it off with little kids in art class, for example, where you take a pencil and you go, this is just a pencil. | ||
| But what else could it be? | ||
| Well, in this environment, it's a stick shift. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No, it's not. | ||
| It's a Kubotan. | ||
| He's got Joe's wrist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, and the little girls go, it's a bow, Dad. | |
| Me, I'm a hero. | ||
| I'll save the day. | ||
| And you can start to think in those terms using actual language. | ||
| Movement's the same thing. | ||
| At this point in your career with jiu-jitsu and grappling, you have a vocabulary that starts to expand, expand by having to learn and challenge and challenge. | ||
| People marvel at Anthony Bourdain. | ||
| God bless him. | ||
| One of his biggest talent was to be at home everywhere. | ||
| No matter what somebody might say or posture or present, he was able to... | ||
| Let it go by. | ||
| Win later. | ||
| Or no, we'll duke it out right here. | ||
| And he had the capacity to stay cool in the middle of all of it. | ||
| So maybe it's stay cool school. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Well, he just had a fascinating mind for travel and food and culture. | ||
| And he just wanted to know everything about how these people thought about the world and saw things differently. | ||
| I kind of feel bad now for people that don't travel. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I feel like you're missing so much of what a human being is. | ||
| Travel is a little bit perhaps like music or looking at art on the wall. | ||
| You kind of have to have somebody teach you how to do it a little bit. | ||
| It's like the fight game. | ||
| Yo, you know, somebody could sit with you and get really bored with technical boxing. | ||
| It might be the best you've ever seen, and it's not a slugfest or a pro, and you have to explain, well, see, some jazz... | ||
| Some jazz. | ||
| That's Bitch's Brew! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Conor McGregor's Bitch's Brew, arguably one of the most several. | ||
| It's all over the place. | ||
| And some is very contained, like the disc jockey's voice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Some people are very mechanized. | ||
| The jazz thing is a really good analogy. | ||
| Because you're either into jazz or you're not into jazz. | ||
| I like it as background music, but I have a good friend. | ||
| My friend Alonzo Bowden is a jazz aficionado. | ||
| He hosts jazz tours and stuff. | ||
| He's a stand-up comic, so he'll do comedy on these things. | ||
| He just loves it. | ||
| He lives for it. | ||
| Well, I see the look on your face. | ||
| It's because nobody taught you how to taste beer. | ||
| Beer works in three parts, and like it says in the Pickwick papers, you don't taste it with a sip. | ||
| What do you taste it with? | ||
| You got a gulp. | ||
| You got a coif. | ||
| You got something. | ||
| And when you describe, well, there's the finish to the taste of a Cuban cigar. | ||
| You mean when it's finished in the air? | ||
| No. | ||
| The finish. | ||
| Okay, somebody explain these things to me. | ||
| What's the difference between Scotch whiskey and Tennessee bourbon? | ||
| Well, there's an E in the word. | ||
| In bourbon whiskey, there's an E, and there is no E in the word. | ||
| In whiskey for Scotch, okay. | ||
| That simple sort of starts it. | ||
| Jazz music. | ||
| Somebody explains it to you in very simple, digestible, not lofty, necktie terms. | ||
| You begin to understand a little bit of what's going on. | ||
| How do you explain it to someone? | ||
| How would you explain jazz to me? | ||
| I'll really tighten up for you. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| At least I got my health going for me. | ||
| We'll do it in the Beatles style. | ||
| Here's the best way to go for somebody new and interested. | ||
| The McCartney note and the Lennon note. | ||
| The McCartney note is always kind of happy. | ||
| I've actually bumped into Sir Paul over at Henson Studios, and he's really happy. | ||
| And his note will go... | ||
| Hear how pretty that sounds? | ||
| It sounds pretty. | ||
| I'll do it again. | ||
| Lennon, he's the salt and the caramel, baby. | ||
| There's a darkness. | ||
| There's an edge. | ||
| There's a shadow. | ||
| Listen to the last three notes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The drop-off. | |
| And there's a little darkness. | ||
| Those last three notes is where you get that little bit of pepper and the chocolate. | ||
| and it's a little wistful it's a little melancholy and ain't life like that And when you put them together, it doesn't sound like they do, but if I could, I'd sing both parts and it goes together, and you go, wow, bittersweet. | ||
| Like my fucking career. | ||
| Like my last three, and here we go. | ||
| So you kind of have to listen to jazz like you would taste wine. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The best for this, Thelonious Monk. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Same thing. | ||
| The right hand is Paul, left hand is John, and he's working these things. | ||
| You can't tell if it's happy or sad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| How was dinner last night? | ||
| Same. | ||
| It is indicative if that's what's around you, because it's not just happy. | ||
| That's Disney. | ||
| It's not just sad. | ||
| Think of somebody who's always tuning his guitar to sad. | ||
| There are some folks who tune that. | ||
| Leonard Cohen, who has since passed as well. | ||
| That sounded more like Bowie. | ||
| I know what you mean. | ||
| Got any tattoos? | ||
| Yeah, two sleeves. | ||
| Yeah, both my arms. | ||
| Same here. | ||
| I rarely show. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, maybe that's a baby boomer thing. | ||
| Do you have them from the elbow up? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is all Japanese style, right? | ||
| Traditional tap style? | ||
| Did you get that done? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| All my colors were tapped in and in front is Horiyoshi. | ||
| I have the tuxedo. | ||
| Damn, you do? | ||
| Yeah, the whole... | ||
| Butt cheeks and everything? | ||
| Yeah, the whole thing. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Interpreter had to sit on me and hold me down. | ||
| I'm not going to kid you. | ||
| It was a trial. | ||
| Yeah, I would imagine. | ||
| Is it much more painful to do it that way? | ||
| No. | ||
| Overall, I think what happens is tattoo, when you get something that stings, you can take it for a while. | ||
| It's the distance that counts. | ||
| You can take the cold for 30 seconds. | ||
| You can take a measurable cold. | ||
| Are you doing the cryo dunk? | ||
| Yeah, I do that stuff. | ||
| Okay, boom. | ||
| You can take anything for 30 seconds. | ||
| You're in showbiz. | ||
| But man, try holding that out in front of you for 15 seconds kind of a thing. | ||
| Is that your suit? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow, look at that. | ||
| So there's some photos of it up. | ||
| Yeah, because you never really do show your tattoos anywhere. | ||
| No, it's not part of the show. | ||
| It's not part of, but behind the scenes, my mom, who was an art teacher, The healing, happy side of my family came from my dad. | ||
| I learned to box from mom. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Bad Dave, like my sisters call it, comes from Sybil Roth. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And if you competed for the Magnet, For the refrigerator. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| And mom would be doing something and you'd come up with your new drawing and she'd say, should I go get the magnet? | ||
| And not look at it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And you would look and go, you're right. | ||
| Stay here. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I'm not kidding. | ||
| Harsh. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then before you would look at it, go just clean up your paint box. | ||
| Let me see your brushes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Discipline in the Roth family. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And when I got my tuxedo, first thing Mom said was, I really like the colors. | ||
| What do you do when you're outdoors playing ball? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And that's part of what compels what we're doing here. | ||
| I invented ink. | ||
| The original, okay? | ||
| And this is a whole series of things that didn't exist before. | ||
| So, products to protect your tattoo. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You know, I just, whenever I go anywhere outside, I spray down with sunscreen. | ||
| And people are like, why are you doing that? | ||
| And I was like, because I don't want my tattoos to fade away. | ||
| I have artwork on my body. | ||
| You have a Rembrandt on your body. | ||
| It's probably more expensive than the paint job on your car. | ||
| Driving a Ranger series? | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm serious. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And you won't think twice about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Okay? | ||
| Because it's forever. | ||
| All right? | ||
| It's forever. | ||
| I'm 64. The doctor says 64 is the new 90 for me. | ||
| Believe it. | ||
| Take my word for it. | ||
| I'm a little farther down range than a lot of you. | ||
| I can tell you what I see from here. | ||
| You look great. | ||
| If you wait until you're 55 to start hitting the weight stack, you will look like a 55-year-old who trains three times a week. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| If you start when you're two digits old... | ||
| You'll fool them. | ||
| You'll fool them. | ||
| And that's kind of the fun. | ||
| You just got to keep moving. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| You start way early. | ||
| When did you start the tattoos? | ||
| I got my first one in 1977. Came back from a delirious trip to the West Indies and a handful of folks that were camping out on the beach. | ||
| I'm a combat hippie. | ||
| Peace, love, and heavy weapons. | ||
| In case they want to feel the love. | ||
| And camping commune style somewhere in the... | ||
| It was in Martinique, the West Indies. | ||
| And we all came back and got a seahorse on the ankle. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| How feminine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then, from there, I waited. | ||
| Today, what's popular, for example, Hispanic style, you use a badge as placas. | ||
| You document something. | ||
| Here's a name. | ||
| Here's something we got when we went on spring break. | ||
| Here's something when we got married. | ||
| You build like a mural. | ||
| And I waited to do the whole thing in one sweep, you know, thinking in terms of planning. | ||
| So I waited until, you know, I was well past that. | ||
| I was celebrating my 60th birthday, but I got about 300 hours. | ||
| Ian on it. | ||
| And I'm still outdoors. | ||
| I'm still bouncing around. | ||
| And there's nothing out there. | ||
| I've been climbing. | ||
| I started off at Joshua Tree and climbing out at Tockett's in the 70s. | ||
| Wasn't Alex Honnold just on the show here? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Same circuit from Camp 4 to Studio 54. I was in both. | ||
| I was flavor of the week the first time when Studio 54 was the happeningest. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| At the same time, I had just bought a Winnebago that looked like something from Breaking Bad. | ||
| It's the same Winnebago. | ||
| I saw it. | ||
| I used to own that. | ||
| That was for nothing but going to Yosemite. | ||
| Really? | ||
| You know how Al in the documentary is living in his van? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Part of me always looks back at that. | ||
| It's, wow, sleeping in the back of Bobby Hatch's pickup truck parked out in the middle of nowhere in Joshua Tree, 1973. And you would be climbing even back then? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| What kind of equipment did you guys use back then? | ||
| The same stuff they use today? | ||
| No, nothing like it. | ||
| We used webbing for our harnessing, and you used 11 millimeter kern mantle or manila rope, all right? | ||
| And I remember the first time, it was in 1972, you'll see his name, John Ball, pioneering a lot of the routes in Joshua Tree. | ||
| First time we watched him as seniors in high school go flagging, you know, where you pressure with, can you see this on the screen there, where you pull with your hands and push with your feet, go flagging all the way up the corner of a handball court at Muir High School in Pasadena, all the way up to the top, and then stood on the top and looked down, showing incredible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Well, nine incredible talents. | ||
| We'd never seen such a thing. | ||
| And from that point, You know, we just floored it because living up in Yosemite in the various parts was something new. | ||
| Traveling to Joshua Tree, Tockets, down to the beaches and such. | ||
| That was a constant for me. | ||
| I've always tried to follow something as opposed to thinking of it as training. | ||
| Even the word training tastes like homework. | ||
| So I've always tried to... | ||
| I was running. | ||
| For a long period of time. | ||
| It was about seven years when I jogged and ran and I decided on the road I'll run across every bridge in America that we tour through. | ||
| So probably 15, 20 different bridges. | ||
| Golden Gate, Brooklyn. | ||
| That's where I ran. | ||
| Now I did smoke a joint and run the New York City Marathon. | ||
| And I came in right behind the wheelchairs in the back. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, some folks need the ribbon and they need to see the clock and everybody clapping. | ||
| And then there's some folks, you know, who just, you know, you dig okay. | ||
| And they had took down the clock, but the line was still there on the cement in Central Park. | ||
| Hopped over the line, got the picture, airborne. | ||
| Went home, took a nap, and that night I went out and got drunk on tequila. | ||
| How long did it take you to finish the marathon? | ||
| About five and a half hours. | ||
| That's not bad. | ||
| That's very good. | ||
| It's better than Burt Kreischer. | ||
| No, come on. | ||
| Let's be complimentary. | ||
| It's the worst! | ||
| It's definitely not the worst. | ||
| Yes, that's about the absolute worst. | ||
| What's the winner due at hour 20? | ||
| I think they get it in around two hours. | ||
| Yeah, like two hours and seven seconds or so. | ||
| I think they're trying to break two hours. | ||
| Isn't that what's going on? | ||
| Yeah, someone's trying to break two hours. | ||
| But that's what I did for a period of time. | ||
| Kayaking. | ||
| So you've just always been involved in physical activities that were fun. | ||
| In the early 90s, kayaking was illegal in Manhattan. | ||
| Because it was dirty water and people would get trundled all over under the ferry boats. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| So what we did is we cut a hole in the fence next to the 14th Street Sanitation Department over by the... | ||
| West Side Highway. | ||
| You all know what I'm talking about if you're from there. | ||
| And we did it exactly like movie style, like Great Escape, where we fitted the fence back with duct tape, and we would drag our kayaks from Union Square West all the way down 14th Street. | ||
| And you pick up your provisions for it. | ||
| You've got to get your bagels. | ||
| You've got to get something to drink. | ||
| Get some Gatorade. | ||
| Not to drink the Gatorade, so you have something to whiz in. | ||
| Serious. | ||
| And... | ||
| We'd get the girlfriends, okay, to wait up. | ||
| It's in the meatpacking district right there. | ||
| It's dead silent. | ||
| It was a ghost town then. | ||
| It was not hip-hop. | ||
| It was not going, which is what it's doing now. | ||
| You know, you go to shopping with your old lady at Stella McCartney down there. | ||
| Now it's a ghost town then. | ||
| It was great, scary, dangerous. | ||
| And one girlfriend, I've got to be careful of names. | ||
| They're all married now. | ||
| How'd you manage to duck it? | ||
| Karen would always go north and wait around because if the cops come, they would step out. | ||
| We would see them or whatever. | ||
| And we would sneak our boats through the hole in the fence into the river, right where Sully landed his plane. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And then girls would come in, jump in a boat, and we would take off. | ||
| More than two or three times, local PD would show up going, hey, what are you going to touch that water? | ||
| Back then, no. | ||
| That was death. | ||
| Inky black horror death. | ||
| Did you ever dunk in it? | ||
| Accidentally? | ||
| No, not in that river in particular. | ||
| But we started a number of the trips today. | ||
| There's probably six different kayak clubs that you can do. | ||
| Manhattan Kayak Club, Brooklyn, many, many. | ||
| Now the boomers with senses of humor figured it all out. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And we would go, geez, we started trips, we'd go at midnight under the Verrazano Bridge in the winter, all right? | ||
| And you wear dry suits, something, you know, Long John's inside of a dry suit like this. | ||
| And don't get me wrong, I would be the DJ. I have a tape player, and I would bungee the tape player like this, and everybody would have... | ||
| This is primitive times. | ||
| You know, it's early 90s. | ||
| And we would have the little microphones and the earpieces that you use on motorcycles back then. | ||
| So you have communications from boat to boat. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| And I would put mine on the tape player, and I'd be the DJ. Oh, yeah. | ||
| And we'd listen to the ballgame late at night sometimes, and you'd hear laughing. | ||
| Oh, you couldn't see anybody in the swells. | ||
| And we'd go under the same bridge that John Travolta sits and looks at with the girlfriend in Saturday Night Fever. | ||
| Same bridge, you know, that Woody Allen in Manhattan looks at. | ||
| You know, you ever wonder what's on the other side? | ||
| It's a terrible imitation of either of them. | ||
| And we'd float under there, full moon, midnight, February, snow drifting, like this. | ||
| And since it was illegal to do it, we had a buddy who owned a plumbing company in Brooklyn. | ||
| And he would bring his truck and park it right off of Coney Island near Stilwell Avenue where the Ferris wheel is. | ||
| And he would blink his lights, Allied Forces style. | ||
| Blink, blink. | ||
| Like that. | ||
| And we'd be about a quarter mile off, having come from under the Verrazano Bridge. | ||
| No wonder we'd see those lights blink, nowhere to turn left. | ||
| Do you even want to hear this? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| And, okay, we'd have to make the left, and we'd wait for the swells. | ||
| He'd give us another blink when all was clear. | ||
| And just beat ass! | ||
| All that quarter mile of row, row, row, catch the wave, get out of the boat, you know, silently drag it all the way up the beach, okay, like you see in every war movie. | ||
| Otherwise, it's about a $200 fine or something like this. | ||
| And we would put the boats, big two-person kayaks, into the back of the plumbing truck and out of the top of it. | ||
| Drive it back to the coffee shop on Union Square West. | ||
| It's very well known like that. | ||
| And get drunk with pretty girls and tell them about adventure stories. | ||
| And all this was going on while you were, you were air quotes, David Lee Roth. | ||
| I mean, this is the 90s. | ||
| You were fucking huge. | ||
| You're still a rock star. | ||
| And you're going through polluted water in a fucking kayak, hiding from the cops. | ||
| With a tape player and some sort of jury-rigged microphone system. | ||
| Some of the best places that I went rock climbing were on walls of hotels in Europe. | ||
| We'd toss a rope out the third floor of a bed and breakfast in San Sebastian, Spain, that's covered from flagstone with flagstone from the 1400s like that, and then yo-yo. | ||
| You know, one guy would stay up, watch TV, and work the belay, and you'd climb up the outside, you know. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Hardcore jollies. | ||
| And you were doing this all around the same time? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I take my bicycles with me. | ||
| Outdoors is in the blood, you know. | ||
| It's part of growing up without any real things. | ||
| My dad was a student. | ||
| So, take this stick. | ||
| For you, it'll be a bow. | ||
| And for me, it'll be a baton. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| When did you start working as an EMT? That was around the same time, wasn't it? | ||
| EMT was about 12 summers ago for me. | ||
| I was turning 50. And I started going back to school for outdoor med response, camping, climbing. | ||
| What is it like when you go to one of those classes and they realize who you are? | ||
| How weird does it get? | ||
| Sometimes it can get a little bit uptight because I'm the oldest guy in the room. | ||
| And I want to clarify something, Joe. | ||
| When I became an EMT... Shield number 327-466, 47th Precinct. | ||
| Big shout out to all of you who taught me and tolerated me. | ||
| Until I became an EMT and put on that uniform, I wasn't somebody. | ||
| Somebody clean the fucking truck up! | ||
| Until I put on that uniform, Joe, after training for how many months? | ||
| It's almost a year for me like this. | ||
| I wasn't someone. | ||
| Someone clean up the truck! | ||
| And that was my job, starting right off. | ||
| But I was also the somebody who dragged the oxygen box, all 13 floors up in the Edenwald projects, artist to artist. | ||
| How many times have you driven past something, whether it's a huge building or a teepee? | ||
| I wonder what's in there. | ||
| And then you go, I wonder what's in the refrigerator. | ||
| I wonder what they listen to in there. | ||
| And I wonder who the they are. | ||
| I have a fascination for that. | ||
| My pop had a big sprawling empathy for people. | ||
| You know, when the fellas started getting AIDS in the early 80s, he started treating them. | ||
| He's an eye surgeon. | ||
| And everybody, my sisters and stuff, started saying, but this is a time when you think you can catch that shit from breathing it, popping, whatever. | ||
| And he turned to me. | ||
| I'll never forget. | ||
| He said, I don't get to choose my patients. | ||
| Well, I don't get to choose my audience. | ||
| So what was the motivation to start doing that, though? | ||
| Let's go see what's in their refrigerator, Joe. | ||
| And you'll walk in first, because you're way stronger than me, in case there's trouble. | ||
| And you'll go, ambulance! | ||
| And in case somebody comes at us, you handle it. | ||
| Oh, I had a mentor named Keisha who had to pile her dreadlocks up so high that it was as long as from her shoulders to the top of her head, her haircut. | ||
| It was like she put her hat up on top and Keisha walked in that door first, homie. | ||
| Domestic disputes. | ||
| She dealt with the guys. | ||
| You had to be there for domestic disputes? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Those are the scariest, right? | ||
| Very. | ||
| And you get an eye on your audience, stops being audience. | ||
| Starts being the neighborhood. | ||
| And pretty soon you live in the neighborhood. | ||
| I was under the train once in the Fulton Street station talking to a homeless fella. | ||
| Quick briefing. | ||
| Act like nothing's wrong. | ||
| See if you can get him to come out. | ||
| You hungry? | ||
| Train breathes, okay? | ||
| Subway train breathes. | ||
| It doesn't just sit there silently. | ||
| It does this! | ||
| And you gotta go, grilled cheese? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mmm. | |
| I'm laughing now, but that's a nervous laugh. | ||
| And now every one of those folks is in my voice when I sing. | ||
| Ooh, I like that. | ||
| I like that thought process. | ||
| When you decided to do this, was this a conscious effort to try to just enrich your experiences? | ||
| Cross-training. | ||
| Cross-training. | ||
| I'll give it the quick rationale. | ||
| And I also know it's going to change me. | ||
| Don't know how, but you got to get in it. | ||
| And after a certain point in your life, maybe... | ||
| Go where there is no shallow end. | ||
| Challenge yourself. | ||
| Just as I move somewhere that's a foreign language, you can't even read the street signs. | ||
| In Japan, for example. | ||
| But, you know, you start off on the bunny slopes. | ||
| You don't surf 40 footers right away. | ||
| At first, you've got to move to New York and go through that whole thing of what have I done. | ||
| So what's the thought process when you're like, I'm going to be an EMT. I'm going to study for a year. | ||
| I'm going to train. | ||
| I'm going to go out there and I'm going to actually do it. | ||
| I... Okay, sometimes when I go for a walk in the city, my plan is to just follow where the sun is beaming. | ||
| I get to an intersection, the sun is on that far corner. | ||
| I'll cross over to that, and then I'll look down the block and see where the sun is, and I'll walk down the block and get into that part of the sun. | ||
| And you do a lot of this by yourself. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I did the same thing with EMT training. | ||
| I... Jeez, my dad was a doctor. | ||
| The first merit badge I got as a Boy Scout was first aid. | ||
| I was that guy. | ||
| And I learned that for a skinny guy like me, real power probably came from being cool when everybody else is going, ah, my... | ||
| Because my dad had to do that. | ||
| I assisted him in surgeries at a very early age. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did you really? | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And, you know, when stuff that made everybody else like this pop, I have a good ambulance voice. | ||
| You want to hear it? | ||
| Let me do that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You're going to be just fine. | ||
| Can you imagine, though, being in an ambulance and you look up and it's motherfucking David Lee Roth telling you you're going to be okay? | ||
| You'd be like, oh, I'm dead. | ||
| I must be dead. | ||
| Only twice has that actually happened because I only worked in the hood. | ||
| I only worked around at night. | ||
| I only worked, you know, you would never expect to see me. | ||
| Once was after OzFest, a local football stadium. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, Jesus. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Some poor kid was, you know, drank too much or whatever, and he was out of sorts. | ||
| You know, sitting on a corner, somebody phoned him in from the local liquor store. | ||
| And you could see that this belief in his face, you know, when I leaned over and said to him, you're going to be just fine. | ||
| Like the lyrics of an Aussie song come to life. | ||
| I am Iron Man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But beyond that, No. | |
| Nobody ever really did. | ||
| And, you know, Jesus, I weighed 15 more pounds. | ||
| I was doing the Arnold routine at the weight stack because I was somebody. | ||
| Well, somebody help me lift this. | ||
| My forte. | ||
| I'm not... | ||
| Pretentious about what my fortes were. | ||
| So you bulked up for the job? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And I weighed 15 more pounds. | ||
| And I lifted, man. | ||
| I lifted people out of bathtubs. | ||
| I lifted them out of the ocean. | ||
| I lifted them out of the projects. | ||
| I lifted them out of the truck. | ||
| I lifted them into the other truck because the first truck just broke down in the snow. | ||
| How long did you do this for? | ||
| Sorry? | ||
| How long did you do this for? | ||
| I reserted once about four and a half summers, four and a half years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Okay? | ||
| And I, you know, in between playing and whatever. | ||
| And again, a big shout out to all my teachers and mentors. | ||
| Not a day goes by, I don't think about it, and not a day goes by that I don't use some skill, including that You know, that'll level your head a little bit. | ||
| Somebody go make some coffee, Joe. | ||
| So you feel like for a guy like you, who is such a gigantic superstar, and you're just touring these huge arenas, and people are freaking out every time they see you, for you, it was maybe a good way to balance things out, too, because you're seeing people in a life or death situation, in dire straits, when they're unhealthy, and they need help, and you're out there in the down and dirty, in the nitty gritty, like, Like you said, trucks breaking down, picking people up out of the bathtubs. | ||
| Well, a lot of what you just described is the first response team. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We always describe our patients, our friends and clients, okay? | ||
|
unidentified
|
But the struggle for our... | |
| I'll call it the uniform. | ||
| Starts with military, police, fire, first response. | ||
| I'll throw in nursing, emergency room, and those of us with bells and whistles. | ||
| What you call the ambulance? | ||
| Et cetera. | ||
| You see that from the inside out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that really will sharpen your vision. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| For example... | ||
| Right off the bat, I pay 52% in taxes. | ||
| Just tear my dollar in half. | ||
| Half for many, many years. | ||
| I'm all for tripling. | ||
| Police, fire, medical, paramedic, emergency nursing, etc. | ||
| Like that. | ||
| Starting pay should be about $2,500 a week. | ||
| And on up. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| I would pay more tax happily. | ||
| I would too. | ||
| If that case would be. | ||
| And we would take what is a very set of very refined sciences and art forms. | ||
| Everything I just described. | ||
| I call it the uniform. | ||
| Because we put on a uniform when we go to work in there like that. | ||
| It's time to go digital. | ||
| And you can start making real demands in terms of just the preparation. | ||
| You follow? | ||
| Today, being on the beat... | ||
| Taking care of people, whether you're in first response medical or answering fire calls is on par. | ||
| These days you have to make the decisions of a SEAL teamer. | ||
| Where's the same training? | ||
| Where's the same gear? | ||
| I was out in Palm Springs at the International School for Tactical Medicine out there. | ||
| And the fellas, we had game wardens from Alaska. | ||
| We had heavy rescue from Cleveland. | ||
| We had all manner of folks. | ||
| And they all discuss, well, sometimes we have to share one helmet. | ||
| What? | ||
| Sometimes we don't have enough guys to do this and that, so we just park the car and let them think there's something. | ||
| These kinds of stories. | ||
| And you start paying people what they're worth. | ||
| And start paying people according to what your expectations, then a lot of things, I don't go political, they're nonsense like Charlottesville and what's happening in a lot of areas around these states. | ||
| We'll go by the wayside. | ||
| You move from no qualifications necessary to... | ||
| Hey man, you guys work just as hard and you endanger yourselves way more than a trial attorney. | ||
| I personally got out of jury duty recently by saying I didn't want to get out of jury duty. | ||
| In fact, I raised my hand when the judge says, anybody here think they can do jury duty? | ||
| You're all trying to get out of it. | ||
| And I raised my hand. | ||
| And she said, why? | ||
| I said, because I now can see that there are neighborhoods where everybody is I know of neighborhoods where everybody's a liar, a cheat, a cripple, and if they're not, they're covering for somebody. | ||
| And she said, what neighborhood is that? | ||
| I said, the legal community in Beverly Hills. | ||
| The bailiff almost dropped his gun. | ||
| Everybody was laughing. | ||
| They dismissed me. | ||
| Too opinionated. | ||
| Mr. Roth, you've had too much life experience. | ||
| Don't let the door hit in the ass on the way out. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Have you ever done jury duty? | ||
| No, I have not. | ||
| If I did get in there, I'd probably just tell them I think everyone's guilty. | ||
| Well, you have cop's eyes. | ||
| It's when you walk into the room and you know everybody's lying. | ||
| Not really. | ||
| I mean, I probably should do it soon. | ||
| Probably a good experience for me. | ||
| Do they ask you to do it? | ||
| I'm sure it's happened. | ||
| I keep showing up. | ||
| The last time I actually showed up, a fella, I think it was a driver, it was two guys who were being accused of shooting somebody. | ||
| Walks up, he's, I don't know, he looks faintly Slavic. | ||
| If you grew up with James Bond movies, everybody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We know who you are. | |
| You are very popular in Francesco. | ||
| Out of a thing. | ||
| Where are you playing next? | ||
| You're in Pasadena at the Ice House. | ||
| I'm always there. | ||
| Yeah, to the Ice House all the time. | ||
| Yeah, constantly there. | ||
| Do you have a vibe about the Ice House? | ||
| Is there a mojo to it? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Please explain. | ||
| That's the oldest comedy club in the known universe. | ||
| That place has been in operation since the 1960s. | ||
| It was originally an actual ice house where, back before there was refrigeration, they would bring in ice and people would go to buy ice. | ||
| They'd have a gigantic, you know, freezer-type room that was insulated so it would keep the ice for a long time. | ||
| Then it became like a variety-type place. | ||
| And then somewhere in the 60s, it became a comedy club. | ||
| And it is now the oldest, longest-running comedy club in the world. | ||
| 1973... | ||
| I was working as a janitor slash tech in surgery at a hospital in Pasadena. | ||
| This was a night shift. | ||
| In the early 70s, we did everything. | ||
| It was the stepping stone to going to medical school. | ||
| And I was playing acoustic guitar. | ||
| I still take lessons playing acoustic guitar. | ||
| And on Sunday nights, audition night, You would sign up for audition at the Ice House. | ||
| At 6.30, they'd open the window, and you would sign up. | ||
| So I'd take my dinner break and drive my Opal Cadet station wagon up to the Ice House, get there at about 6.15, wait, they'd pop the window, sign up so that I would be one of the first three to audition after the last act on Sunday night, which would happen right around 10 o'clock. | ||
| If you weren't one of the first three during audition night, nobody was there and they shut it down. | ||
| And I would sign up and go back to work. | ||
| And then come, you know, drive myself back, change out of my hospital stuff, you know, put on the right clothes, put on my jeans or whatever. | ||
| And I auditioned there probably 15 times. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Bob Stain, who owned and ran the place... | ||
| It was just a voice over the intercom. | ||
| It was unforgiving. | ||
| Bob was a famous non-smiler. | ||
| What's funny is there's a Bob that owns it now. | ||
| Bob Fisher. | ||
| Couldn't be more different. | ||
| Nicest guy on the planet Earth. | ||
| Always smiling. | ||
| Hugging everybody. | ||
| Super sweetheart of a guy. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, Bob Stain was a voice over the intercom. | ||
| He was hardcore, you know. | ||
| You go, well, here's a little song. | ||
| And the voice would say, hopefully it's littler than the one preceding it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you worked your chops, according to Bob. | ||
| He was your... | ||
| He was your Ike Turner. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Yeah, he was unforgiving. | ||
| And you learned quick about timing in between, transition, segue. | ||
| You were allowed to do three songs. | ||
| And if he felt your song was too long or your riff in between, oh, he called you out. | ||
| If you didn't like your shoes, he talked about it. | ||
| You never saw him. | ||
| You heard it over the PA. Oh, wow. | ||
| He was in the back. | ||
| It was quite a ritual. | ||
| And I learned a tremendous amount about How do you communicate with a crowd? | ||
| How do you talk to people as one? | ||
| How do you make eye contact? | ||
| What, in fact, are the wrong shoes? | ||
| What are the wrong shoes? | ||
| Platforms. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah, back in the day they were platforms. | |
| That's right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Okay, David Lee Bowie will be singing us hopefully a shorter song than the last one he sang last Sunday. | ||
| Are you the same David Lee Bowie? | ||
| You would hear this over the PA system. | ||
| When KISS performs today, do they still wear platforms? | ||
| I think it's in the contract, Joe. | ||
| It's part of the outfit. | ||
| McEnroe has to yell, you gotta be fucking kidding! | ||
| For Kiss, I never thought of that. | ||
| They might be the last band that's wearing platforms. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Everybody likes to make fun of platforms, bell-bottoms, sideburns. | ||
| Until they come back around. | ||
| Oh, there was something there, Sarge. | ||
| I don't know about platforms on guys, but on the right girl... | ||
| Yeah, on the right girl it works. | ||
| Oh, look how you left the head! | ||
| Yeah, I'm fine with high heels. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Girls in platforms, you know, in the right... | ||
| Oh, wow, that suggests different time frames, right? | ||
| That's the 20s, that's the 30s, that could be the 70s, you know? | ||
| There's something about those Kiss ones, though, that was, like, they're inexorable, right? | ||
| They're a part of the gig, like, with Gene Simmons. | ||
| He's got demon boots. | ||
| Look at that! | ||
| They're still rocking them! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at that. | |
| Oh, wait. | ||
| Those are new and improved costumes, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Those are digital. | ||
| They're definitely new and improved. | ||
| I like the boots. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| Man, that has got to be fucking hell on your knees, though. | ||
| That's got to be hell on your lower back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Everything. | |
| Yeah, all of the above. | ||
| I'm going to leap ahead. | ||
| But look, Stanley's still in shape. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, he looks great. | ||
| He was here a couple years ago. | ||
| You know, this is where I failed. | ||
| I should have gone Kiss Blue Man Group years ago. | ||
| To those of you who are my age, Lassie. | ||
| There should be four of me. | ||
| Oh, that's the move, right? | ||
| Because, yeah. | ||
| Right, no one can tell. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| You could replace a lot of those guys. | ||
| And if you didn't tell anybody... | ||
| Have you ever heard the Japanese gentleman that does a Steve Perry impression? | ||
| He's the new lead singer for Journey. | ||
| Oh, I think he's from Philippines. | ||
| Oh, is he? | ||
| He's from Philippines. | ||
| Either way. | ||
| Fucking phenomenal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The guy sounds exactly like Steve Perry. | ||
| Alright, well this solicits an interesting subject perhaps, compels it. | ||
| Are some bands like West Side Story, where you can continually revitalize the production. | ||
| Right, with different actors. | ||
| With different actors, okay? | ||
| A whole lot of Shakespeare going on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay. | ||
| But you have to kind of replicate the initial sound, or do you? | ||
| Because I'm sure all of Beethoven's early orchestras are dead. | ||
| Let me speak to this, because I don't think you can say this, because this was a part of my youth. | ||
| Van Halen was a part of my youth. | ||
| I mean, we used to do the Van Halen logo on our notebooks in high school, along with the Rolling Stones, like the mouth and, you know, all the Kiss logo. | ||
| When it switched over to Sammy Hagar, it became a different thing. | ||
| It was a different thing. | ||
| It's a whole different pivot. | ||
| I mean, it wasn't a bad thing. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| It was a different thing. | ||
| All of Sam's lyrics contain love. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Why can't this be love? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I ain't talking about love. | |
| We'll be right back with more fighting after this. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Who do I jog with? | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I run. | ||
| Who's my running partner? | ||
| Yeah, running with the devil. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Okay, you want to keep going? | ||
| Yeah, keep going. | ||
| Okay, should I jump? | ||
| Should I jump? | ||
| Jump. | ||
| Might as well jump. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
See ya. | |
| Yeah, I mean, come on. | ||
| Questions and love are a great, classically, that's Sinatra. | ||
| But I'm not well adjusted. | ||
| Nobody in my job ever was, much less kept it this long. | ||
| And I faced it, embraced it. | ||
| Like Brazilian Storm. | ||
| Put a choke to it. | ||
| No, it's all right there in the lyrics. | ||
| Even using what are considered classic music parlor tricks, taking a very sad lyric and positioning it against a very happy piece of music. | ||
| The music is romping. | ||
| It's heavy metal rumba. | ||
| And the lyric is, she's crying. | ||
| Yeah, Jamie's crying. | ||
| You didn't notice that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| There's a sense of larceny. | ||
| There's chaos to it. | ||
| In the lyric. | ||
| There's a sense of it's music for after midnight when we're all guilty, Joe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whereas, again, nothing wrong with the Sammy Hagar thing, but it moved into a mall crowd. | ||
| It was a different sort of a vibe. | ||
| It was a good vibe for a lot of folks, but it was a different vibe. | ||
| I mean, I don't have anything against Sammy Hagar. | ||
| I think he's wonderful. | ||
| I always loved that song, Can't Drive 55. He's got some great shit. | ||
| But I never listened to the Van Halen with Van Hagar. | ||
| I just didn't listen to it. | ||
| To me, it was the end of an era for me. | ||
| It's two different folks. | ||
| I wanted to be the art project, not just wear one. | ||
| So by placing everything we've discussed, if you think of it as cross-training, that's a great rationale. | ||
| Why'd you do that? | ||
| And then you did this. | ||
| Why? | ||
| It's cross-training. | ||
| It's going to re-inform your sound. | ||
| It's going to re-inform the way you, your stagecraft. | ||
| How you even walk out on stage. | ||
| Your choice of what to wear. | ||
| And your sense of humor, especially. | ||
| Well, that's a great way to look at what you were talking about with the West Side Story analogy, because it kind of went on, but it kind of didn't. | ||
| It's like if you took West Side Story and then you changed the story. | ||
| You can't change the story, but you can change the voices. | ||
| Yeah, but it would be a different story. | ||
| Like, the Van Halen story became a different story. | ||
| Alright, here I'll venture this. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| One of my favorite freeze-dried bands in history is Toto. | ||
| Why freeze-dried? | ||
| Well, all freeze-dried coffee looks the same. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| And it's great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I've been camping, and man, there's nothing better than just a cup of fresh freeze dried in the wrongest places. | ||
| That's fun. | ||
| Some context, it's the best thing you could ever have. | ||
| That Africa song is a good song. | ||
| It's an amazing song. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's an amazing song. | |
| No, that's Smithsonian level. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Song. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Okay, Rosanna and so forth. | ||
| Oh, yeah, Rosanna. | ||
| Toto's amazing. | ||
| Any of the fellas could walk up to me, and I wouldn't recognize them. | ||
| No. | ||
| You know what I said? | ||
| I would not recognize them. | ||
| You know what I would say is the greatest genius in all of music in that regard? | ||
| Steve Miller. | ||
| Nobody knows who the fuck Steve Miller is. | ||
| Steve Miller could go anywhere. | ||
| Yeah, but I mean, he had some jamming songs. | ||
| Everybody knows those songs. | ||
| If you even start to play... | ||
| Do-do-do-do-do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do-do-do-do-do. | ||
| And everybody goes, getting ready to sing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jungle Love. | ||
| I mean, god damn, he had some jams. | ||
| And that guy could go anywhere. | ||
| And then there are artists... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Stuart. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Arguably one of the best vocals in history of any genre. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| All together. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| That's a no-weight division thing. | ||
| And yeah, one of the all-time greats. | ||
| The Ali is probably Rod Stewart. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| His songs, you can have other people sing them, but it becomes something other. | ||
| Now, Journey, I would recognize the guitar player, but that's just because I listen to that part of the band. | ||
| My favorite part of the orchestra is the gong. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just want to clarify that. | |
| But Steve Perry, who sang for Journey, was not so much a personality as an eloquent sound. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So it's a universal sound, and if you even get close to it, It is part of every prom, every wedding, every going in and coming out party, okay? | ||
| If you're going into the army, that's the last song the band's going to play. | ||
| You're coming out of jail. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Your girlfriend's going to play it well. | |
| Throw your bag to the side and run. | ||
| You've seen the movie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Even Tony Soprano. | ||
| We're not sure what happened, but it happened to Journey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| True. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's very significant. | ||
| You can't play a David Lee Roth song. | ||
| And still worry about Tony Soprano. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Half of your mind is going to go, wait a minute, the Lone Ranger just walked into the same diner that Tony is in. | ||
| It's why I have no acting career. | ||
| I'm already a character. | ||
| Lone Ranger sits down next to you and says, Joe, there's a forest. | ||
| It's a dark forest. | ||
| You're not getting lost in any story. | ||
| You're sitting here like, that's the fucking Lone Ranger. | ||
|
unidentified
|
LAUGHTER Right, right, right. | |
| Right. | ||
| A good actor will sit down and go, a dark forest. | ||
| And you're going, I'm fucking scared. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Some people can become that other person. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And then some people are stuck being David Lee Roth forever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| You know, Denzel walks out in a space suit. | ||
| He goes, wow, that's an astronaut. | ||
| He could be anything. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Even though you know he's Denzel Washington. | ||
| Think of that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Dave Roth comes in and goes, what's Dave doing in a space suit? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're not buying it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm already kind of a cultural whatever. | ||
| Yeah, you're already a thing. | ||
| You're already a thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's really interesting. | ||
| How there's all these great bands with great sounds and great vibes and they're all different. | ||
| Well, if you think in terms of the personality, let's think of a band. | ||
| Oh, I just saw John Mayer. | ||
| Great show, all right? | ||
| And when you think of John... | ||
| You think of who that is in the neighborhood and the vibe and the mood before perhaps you even think of a specific song. | ||
| As soon as, you know, well, I know his hits, I know his songs, but it was the same thing that the fellas in The Grateful Dead who said, they're identifying that vibe. | ||
| It's what's more important, the jokes or the person? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mmm. | |
| What's more important, you or specific jokes? | ||
| Because some of your jokes are bound to go flat. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| It's Joe. | ||
| Yeah, but some of the jokes, the only way they, some of them, the only way they work is with you. | ||
| Like, there's some people, like Mitch Hedberg is a perfect example. | ||
| Like, you couldn't separate Mitch Hedberg from the jokes because he was the jokes. | ||
| He was part of what made it funny. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| I ran into Jeffrey Ross the other day, okay? | ||
| And he did Mike Bumson and Tellin'. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Who's managing them? | ||
| That's a movie happening. | ||
| Those two, right? | ||
| That's Math Al Lemon, Fortune Cookie. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay, that's only a billion dollar fucking franchise. | ||
| Is Bernie Brillstein still alive? | ||
| Get after this. | ||
| I don't think Bernie's alive anymore. | ||
| You guys need an agent? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, they do. | |
| It's stellar! | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| They were walking around in the park doing warm-up for their routine, you know, and the Netflix special, and I'm going, uh, uh... | ||
| I expect a clapboard and Woody Allen to walk out and go, I think that's a take. | ||
| I think, though, that with guys like that, especially those two guys, the best product is them on stage. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| And them fucking around. | ||
| You really don't want to make a movie. | ||
| You just want to keep doing what they're doing with Netflix. | ||
| Well, this is the vibe. | ||
| You have them be... | ||
| There are some folks like Jason Stratham. | ||
| He's always the same. | ||
| He's always the same haircut. | ||
| He's always Jason. | ||
| You put Jason in a different time period. | ||
| Jason in a fast car. | ||
| Jason on a horse. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He's always that. | ||
| And this is what compels me. | ||
| Some folks are very joke dependent. | ||
| Now take my wife, please. | ||
| That kind of thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yourself. | |
| Is the audience that you see when it's like at the Comedy Club? | ||
| I've seen you at the Comedy Club. | ||
| Is the same audience as Fight Night? | ||
| Sometimes, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's real similar in a weird way. | ||
| How's weird? | ||
| I see George Michael eyebrows. | ||
| Because I'm always trying to figure it out. | ||
| Yeah, they're real similar, you know? | ||
| It's a weird crossover. | ||
| But what makes it weird? | ||
| Well, it's weird that I do cage-fighting commentary and stand-up comedy in the first place. | ||
| It's weird that those two things work together. | ||
| Oh, that doesn't... | ||
| No, that makes perfect sense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For you. | |
| No, but you're a weirdo. | ||
| I just shared with somebody, I'm funny, not happy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| You're funny. | ||
| You ain't happy. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| There's a big difference. | ||
| And the more unhappy you are, the better the funny. | ||
| Really? | ||
| You think so? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Really? | ||
| If you know how to channel it. | ||
| Well, that's certainly the case in some situations. | ||
| I'm open to all possibilities when it comes to comedy. | ||
| I know people that are really happy and really funny, and I know people that are really dark and also really funny. | ||
| Like, I don't know. | ||
| It's just, it's different. | ||
| It's different with different people, just like music is different with different bands and different singers. | ||
| It's just, it either works or it doesn't. | ||
| It really depends upon how much time and effort you take working on yourself, your act, your perspective, the way you deliver it. | ||
| We always had to win. | ||
| In Van Halen, we had no choice. | ||
| We had to win the battle of the bands. | ||
| It was competitive. | ||
| We had to win over the club owner. | ||
| This was before there were dance systems. | ||
| Sirwin Vega hadn't figured out those bass bins yet, and you had to have a live band. | ||
| Five 45-minute sets a night, please. | ||
| What was your motherfucker closer song where you knew a band couldn't go on after you? | ||
| LaGrange. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| We were pretty good at anything. | ||
| We had no development phase. | ||
| I have tapes of us at the Hilton Hotel in Pasadena in 1973. If I didn't tell you... | ||
| You know, you would think it was three years ago kind of a sound. | ||
| There's virtually no development. | ||
| How'd that happen? | ||
| How did it work that way? | ||
| We had classical training, right? | ||
| And this kind of speaks to what we were discussing earlier in that a lot of my colleagues are having a great time making music and they celebrate and it's the word fun. | ||
| Comes into it. | ||
| And we grew up in classical music backgrounds where you had to challenge for first chair saxophone. | ||
| Every six, eight months, you got to go to the conductor and say, I want first chair. | ||
| And if you're first chair and he thinks I have a show, he's going to come over and rejoice as Roth's talking about you. | ||
| Ooh. | ||
| You both, you both going to play this piece in front of the orchestra next Wednesday. | ||
| You best practice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah. | |
| Okay? | ||
| And we'll both get up and we'll both play 18 bars of the same piece. | ||
| You dig? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And there just may be a switch in front of 120 people, all of them colleagues, all right? | ||
| We learned from in music school, you know, the racy stuff was big band, all right? | ||
| If you're, in terms of, you know, we played rock and roll in parallel with But Big Band, it's got a square vibe to it because it wound up in elevators and restaurants and whatever. | ||
| But they had cutting contests, and there was nothing more cutting than Benny Goodman versus Chick Web Big Band at Roseland Ballroom. | ||
| That shit is on. | ||
| People would bet on it. | ||
| They would play the same four songs. | ||
| You play your version of it, and we'll play ours. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
| Wow! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| A throwdown. | ||
| A big band throwdown. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And it was furious shit, too. | ||
| You know, it wasn't like friendly. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They were serious. | |
| And the dancers would stand in the middle of those sparks, and that's where you get that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| These postures. | ||
| That stuff. | ||
| Like this. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| And the dancers were competing. | ||
| The Lindy Hoppers competing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
| Frankie and all these guys throwing. | ||
| So it was competitive. | ||
| And we learned that's how you do it. | ||
| My two mentors in music were first and second chair clarinet and the L.A. Philharmonic. | ||
| And it comes from that. | ||
| Also, you know, you have a whole different vibe that I'll take a grateful debt approach, which is the complete opposite of that. | ||
| Competition, man, leave that at home, bro. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, whoa, we're here to celebrate and so, and I completely understand. | ||
| That's where I'll go after work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Take my vest off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Put my guns down. | ||
| They took a totally different turn, right? | ||
| They said, go ahead, tape all of our shows. | ||
| Sell food in the parking lot, man. | ||
| We had to win. | ||
| Or we didn't eat. | ||
| Boxing for money is different than boxing for fun. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Learned that very early. | ||
| And we learned it through music. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, some of the folks learned it in the ring. | ||
| Other folks learn it in their first few days in a law firm and they join a team. | ||
| It's interesting the way you describe it with music because I try to explain that to comedians. | ||
| I say think about how much time a musician has to spend practicing and how little we spend practicing. | ||
| Our practice is in front of the audience for the most part. | ||
| It's a simplified version of the How many hours rule is the 10,000 hour rule? | ||
| You've heard about this. | ||
| That's a very simplified version. | ||
| Okay, that's digestible. | ||
| 10,000 hours, I don't know, you break that down, it'd take six years, maybe, something like this. | ||
| The true Asian paradigm is 10 hours a day, every single day for 10 years. | ||
| If you have a little kid and he's got to have heart surgery... | ||
| You want that guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's right around 30,000 hours. | ||
| If you're going to go flying in a helicopter over New York City, you want Captain Pauly Trimontata. | ||
| It's about 40,000 hours. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| My dentist, Dr. Glassman, who teaches, is a 40,000 hour man. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So if you ever crash or get pelted, give me a call. | ||
| I will hook you up. | ||
| It's about 30,000 hours. | ||
| And that's 10 hours a day, every single day, for 10 years. | ||
| And that's what creates a jet pilot, a great surgeon, a great writer. | ||
| Anything in the arts and lives. | ||
| That's the architect. | ||
| Unless you're a prodigy, and if you bungle that in typing, it's tragedy very easily. | ||
| Yeah, prodigies and tragedies often go hand in hand. | ||
| There's something about people that get things very easily that for whatever reason it slips through their fingers more quickly as well. | ||
| When my sister, my dad was an eye surgeon, did well, and when my sisters wanted to go to college, he said, I think that's a great idea and made her pay for it. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She wouldn't value it if she didn't pay for it herself. | ||
| That's probably right. | ||
| I signed my first contract when I was 13. $150 stereo and three records. | ||
| I worked all summer shoveling shit at the local horse stable. | ||
| That's where I learned Spanish. | ||
| I don't know that you got to do that. | ||
| You learn the same thing from sports, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Your kids do sports? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which ones? | ||
| Martial arts, and one of them's really into gymnastics. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are they competitive in it, or do they enjoy themselves? | ||
| Are they on team, like they're on tournaments? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And is that something that... | ||
| I'll back up. | ||
| I'm leading up to something. | ||
| Can you guess? | ||
| Yeah, I can. | ||
| I think you always are. | ||
| Folks are starting to recognize certain traits in me. | ||
| As in, I really like the getting ready more than the actual show. | ||
| Really? | ||
| The actual show. | ||
| I'm making fun here. | ||
| I'm being poetic. | ||
| The monitor blows. | ||
| The guitar player's pissed. | ||
| The spotlight's on the wrong guy. | ||
| I have a cold. | ||
| But that six weeks leading up to it, huh? | ||
| Remember the rehearsal we did of this thing? | ||
| And when we recorded the track over there, remember when we got measured for the shoes? | ||
| That fucking, oh, it was great! | ||
| And it's, where did we eat after that? | ||
| I gotta go back there. | ||
| And, and, and, and, and. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I always sought to make those rehearsals and whatever as memorable as possible because you can do a whole lot more at getting ready than you are throwing the punch. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Ask anybody on one of your shows. | ||
| Yes, yeah. | ||
| You have such a great insight for that, though. | ||
| You know, some people, even if they're aware of it, they're not consciously aware of it. | ||
| They're not focusing on all these details. | ||
| The getting ready is as much of a... | ||
| If the band says they don't like rehearsing, you're doing it wrong. | ||
| Hey, man, it's like... | ||
| If you're sitting on your laurels, you're wearing them on the wrong part of your body. | ||
| First off, where are you rehearsing? | ||
| As in Miami? | ||
| No. | ||
| Where are you training? | ||
| Hawaii? | ||
| Cleveland. | ||
| Okay, let's talk. | ||
| Because even in Cleveland, you can turn it into your place. | ||
| Do you follow? | ||
| What is your routine? | ||
| What music did you listen to? | ||
| Do you dig? | ||
| How did you warm up? | ||
| Simple, simple things. | ||
| You know, most people are feared, terrified of singing when they go into singing. | ||
| I don't care who it is. | ||
| The first verse is always a little tight and the second verse is a little better. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because they didn't warm up. | ||
| Right. | ||
| All right? | ||
| And the idea of, well, go in and sing along with a dozen of your favorite songs. | ||
| Put your headgear on. | ||
| Get the reverb to sound. | ||
| Now, for me, that starts with Motown. | ||
| I'm a soul growler. | ||
| I'm closer to Wilson Pickett than the guy in the Rolling Stones. | ||
| I don't know what that sounds like on the headphones. | ||
| I'm going to put the headphones on here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Love, love, babe! | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| I started sounding like that when I was 12. I started practicing that when I was 12. I started imitating the persuasions. | ||
| Jerry Butler, the singer, when I was 13, much to the cantor's chagrin in Hebrew school. | ||
| Okay, again, parallel existences, you know. | ||
| I'm Jewish, but we always walked around with little buttons back then that said never again. | ||
| I'm a combat hippie. | ||
| Peace, love, and heavy weapons. | ||
| Some people don't believe. | ||
| Sometimes you got to get insistent. | ||
| Did you ever realize while you were in the middle of this, especially in the beginning, the early days, That this was... | ||
| I mean, you guys had, especially with Van Halen in the early days, you guys had a massive impact on culture. | ||
| Were you guys aware of that? | ||
| Like, while it was happening? | ||
| I mean, when I was in high school, I graduated in 1985, and you guys were the shit. | ||
| My sister's, rather, boyfriend's license plate was Van Halen. | ||
| I am the soundtrack to your... | ||
| Okay, I get this now. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, what was that? | ||
| It was intentional, Joe. | ||
| It was intentional. | ||
| I can tell you now. | ||
| The Van Halens knew it, but can't articulate it. | ||
| All right, they're instrumentalists. | ||
| Here comes the funny joke. | ||
| Words am my thing. | ||
| If you understood them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Words am my thing. | ||
| So you realized it while it was happening? | ||
| Well. | ||
| Your endgame depends on how you started. | ||
| It's like chess. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And we began very early on identifying that there's a whole lot of different neighborhoods in Southern California. | ||
| I knew this from being with my dad. | ||
| All of his patients was like a Benetton ad. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| You know, that's part of the beauty of Pasadena. | ||
| You got everybody, okay? | ||
| And... | ||
| Okay, what you play at the birthday party in the Spanish-speaking neighborhood. | ||
| Orale, Santana. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You got to change your evil ways. | |
| Broken. | ||
| Yeah, it's different than what we're going to play for the surfers out at Venice Beach. | ||
| That's Aerosmith stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Right. | ||
| And then you have the working man, okay, out in San Bernardino, and that's ZZ Top. | ||
| Subtle but important. | ||
| Genius is in the details. | ||
| And how you interact with that crowd in between. | ||
| We would play out in Pomona at a biker bar. | ||
| The guy got killed right in front of us, and we finished the song. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| A couple of bike gangs went at it, and there was a scrap, and when everybody cleared out, there was a fella right in the middle of the floor. | ||
| Next night, we came back. | ||
| Vengeance had been sworn. | ||
| There were police everywhere. | ||
| We pulled the amps out from the wall so we could hide behind the amps and catch them. | ||
| Seventies. | ||
| It was a mighty time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And we played on the Queen Elizabeth for really fancy. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| I remember sitting in that ballroom at four in the morning in the days when we carried our own equipment and stuff and thinking of all the people who'd been in there and everybody who'd performed there and so forth and dozens and dozens of places, you know, that were all a little bit different. | ||
| And our thing was that we could play anywhere. | ||
| We had to. | ||
| Otherwise, we had to feed ourselves, all right? | ||
| And that meant five 45-minute sets a night, five, six nights if you could get it. | ||
| And we would ping-pong all over the Southland. | ||
| Anywhere we could drive for two hours. | ||
| Two hours north, south, or east is how we would do. | ||
| And every neighborhood was a little different. | ||
| And that shows up in the music. | ||
| Now you can take a look at something like Dance the Night Away or Jamie's Crying. | ||
| There's a Latino influence in that. | ||
| That's Ricky Ricardo. | ||
| People say, what's your favorite Cuban expecting me to name a cigar? | ||
| I say, Ricky Ricardo. | ||
| It's rumba. | ||
| Rumba. | ||
| Now you're thinking about it, you go, yeah, you ain't kidding. | ||
| And if you listen to Dance the Night Away, the middle break is all cha-cha, tchotchke and stuff like that. | ||
| Because here... | ||
| This is, you know, you're surrounded by Hispanic culture here. | ||
| And we had heavy metal influences, okay? | ||
| We had super wealthy stuff. | ||
| So you have to be able to move to acoustic. | ||
| You got to be able to ease up if you get hired for a wedding. | ||
| And more importantly, perhaps, you know, artist to artist. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Is Springsteen better during the song or in between? | ||
| Careful. | ||
| We're going to the Broadway show. | ||
| That's about a $12,000 ticket now. | ||
| And I'm guessing, before T-shirt, and I'm guessing that I haven't seen the whole show. | ||
| I saw some of it on Netflix. | ||
| And the very pivot of it is the in-between songs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The songs are almost secondary. | ||
| They're almost peripheral to his narration and his descriptions and his poetry. | ||
| Well, he's such a deep guy. | ||
| You have to hear the in-between stuff. | ||
| You want to hear him brood. | ||
| You want to hear him talk. | ||
| You want to hear him think about things. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And where do you learn that? | ||
| Where do you learn that? | ||
| Get ready. | ||
| I'm going to count to 30,000, Joe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Hours and hours and hours. | ||
| And when we're done, you'll be able to, you know, Joe, that's not a good Springsteen. | ||
| You're a good man, Joe. | ||
| What I was trying to get at was, does it ever freak you out? | ||
| Like, when you're ever alone and you think about what you guys did and what you've done in your career, does it ever freak you out? | ||
| The impact that you've had. | ||
| If you looked at the amount of human beings that have had the kind of impact that you've had, it's the tiniest, tiniest fraction of a percent, like the amount of human beings that can relate to your personal life experiences. | ||
| I'll paraphrase the James Brown movie. | ||
| There's two of them. | ||
| Both of them were helpfully produced by Jagger, okay? | ||
| And he does an interview. | ||
| He goes, there's a little bit of me. | ||
| In every record you hear. | ||
| He's in the DNA. There's a little bit of David Lee Roth. | ||
| In there. | ||
| You dig? | ||
| There's a little bit, whenever you see videos today, doesn't matter if it's hip-hop, doesn't matter if it's rock and roll, doesn't matter if it's classic or pit-ball. | ||
| You dig? | ||
| There's a little bit, you can trace it back, you follow. | ||
| And it's not, I don't think of it as impact. | ||
| That's a result. | ||
| What's the verb? | ||
| Contribution. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| At family reunions, whatever, we go around, everybody picks a word. | ||
| And my favorite word ever was contribution. | ||
| Did you try? | ||
| Go, climb the tree. | ||
| Here's my favorite poem. | ||
| I saw it inscribed on a rock by an anonymous poet at the base, just sort of base camp on Everest. | ||
| Go, climb the treasure mountain. | ||
| Do not return empty-handed. | ||
| Where are you now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mmm. | |
| Ooh. | ||
| Ooh. | ||
| Ooh, yeah, that's some GPS shit. | ||
| What's interesting about music that's different than anything else, too, is it brings you back to the moment where you heard it or when it was significant to you or where, you know, like if I hear Dance the Night Away, if I'm in my car and Dance the Night Away comes on, it's just like, God, you get goosebumps. | ||
| You just have this feeling. | ||
| You feel like I'm back in Newton, Massachusetts in high school. | ||
| My favorite audience... | ||
| Is disbelieving non-believers, non-smilers. | ||
| Give me a room of North Koreans who hate everything about the trip, starting with the airport. | ||
| Get this, like this. | ||
| They hate rock and roll. | ||
| You give me two choruses. | ||
| First, we're going to drive away the evil spirits. | ||
| We might use a little volume to do that, Joe. | ||
| We might use a little of this. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Drive away the evil spirits, and then I'm going to make you feel young and skinny! | ||
| How much is that worth? | ||
| It's worth a lot. | ||
| Inestimable. | ||
| Inestimable. | ||
| Yeah, that's the thing about music that's different than anything else. | ||
| It really does change your mood. | ||
| It elevates you. | ||
| Well, it can do that. | ||
| It gives you juice. | ||
| It's also, we have like a big glass bowl of you. | ||
| Your whole history. | ||
| And movies don't do that. | ||
| Books will, if you used a paperback and you open it up and the pages are still dried from the vacation sun. | ||
| You know, you were reading it at the beach and the salt there made the pages kind of old and dry and crackly and some sand comes out and you get the memory. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Music will take you right back there. | ||
| Right back. | ||
| Right back. | ||
| The women will feel desirable. | ||
| You will feel invulnerable. | ||
| When you guys are making songs, like saying, running with the devil, something like that, how do you know when you're done? | ||
| No, it's not when you're done. | ||
| It's how'd you get there. | ||
| That informs the whole thing. | ||
| Somebody asked me once, how long did it take you to write Running with the Devil? | ||
| And that's an astute question. | ||
| I said, well, the true answer is if you watch a thousand movies, Many of them multiple times. | ||
| If you've played thousands and thousands of hours in clubs and bars. | ||
| If you've read, I don't know, 500 books. | ||
| Tried to memorize all the good parts. | ||
| Take about 18 minutes. | ||
| Write the song. | ||
| You guys wrote Running with the Devil in 18 minutes? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Bethesda's Rhapsody in blue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Took 22 minutes to come up with the basic theme and the rest of it's improvisation. | ||
| How would you guys write? | ||
| How would you guys get together and do it? | ||
| See, the whole point is not the 18 minutes. | ||
| It's the whole lifetime before it. | ||
| It's everything that led up to that. | ||
| Now, Vane Halen, we never took a demo tape around because we didn't get lost in the stack. | ||
| We said if we're as good as we think we are, they'll come find us. | ||
| And if they don't, we're not. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's unforgiving. | ||
| Instead of the requisite two and a half, three years it takes for most acts, we spent five and a half years working the clubs and the bars and everything like that. | ||
| So, you know, we came in with scars and stars. | ||
| We'd done the state fair circuit like that. | ||
| I wasn't exactly new. | ||
| Same thing for Springsteen. | ||
| He'd done ten years in the clubs and bars before Springsteen. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, Thunder Road and whatnot. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you'll see this routinely. | ||
| I think the Beatles did four or five years of working in the Red Light District, Reaper Bond and all the club shows and stuff like that. | ||
| And they're adding up. | ||
| They're getting that $10,000 and then ultimately that $30,000 an hour mark. | ||
| Yeah, the Beatles, I think it's Malcolm Gladwell's book where he's talking about the Beatles and when they came up, when they were performing in Germany and they were doing these shows where they were doing multiple sets a night every night of the week and that this is really what made them so good is this constant performing and that they were doing it so much and so often that they just became this smoothly oiled machine. | ||
| If you have a team that you're working together Again, this is another kind of thing I learned along the way. | ||
| 40 hours a week is about your minimum if there's a team, like we're a rugby team or a SWAT team or an emergency room, kind of a C-block, kind of, you know, intensive, like that, inner-city intensive. | ||
| We call it Vietnam sometimes, like that. | ||
| 40 hours a week is about your minimum that you need to train together in order to be going without looking at each other. | ||
| When the lights go out, you don't lose velocity, so to speak. | ||
| Ultimately, you'll start to look like each other. | ||
| This is the nature of things. | ||
| The Beatles looked like each other. | ||
| Van Halen, we looked like each other. | ||
| We all had the same haircut. | ||
| We wore the same leather jackets, the same as we became a team. | ||
| It's the golden times. | ||
| These are the golden years that most people look back on before. | ||
| The friction of time implicates itself. | ||
| You get married. | ||
| You have kids. | ||
| You bump your elbow. | ||
| Now I've got to get my elbow work done. | ||
| It's the friction of time. | ||
| The rent expands, contracts, etc. | ||
| People routinely look back on that as the golden years. | ||
| Your gang. | ||
| Everybody had one. | ||
| Look back in graphic arts. | ||
| You know, the Picassos and the Dalis and everybody wandered around in gangs. | ||
| The great writers in New York all hung out together. | ||
| And they didn't get along. | ||
| You're always competing with each other. | ||
| You're pretending to love each other. | ||
| I just read in New York Magazine some advice from the art critic, Jerry Saltzman. | ||
| It says, create gangs. | ||
| And remember, always treat the weakest one as your best friend because there's somebody else in the gang who thinks you're the weakest one. | ||
| And that's what you learn, you know, as you go. | ||
| What are you going to learn from working the clubs and the bars and stuff? | ||
| Well, my string just broke. | ||
| My nose is running. | ||
| I'm angry. | ||
| My girlfriend just ran off with two, not one guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Should I keep going? | ||
| I'm underpaid, non-respected, late. | ||
| And now I'm starting to sound like double Dutch bus. | ||
| To top it off, I'm late to work. | ||
| I got bad feet and my corns hurt. | ||
| And you're going to play. | ||
| You will perform. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Just as you will expect that surgeon at four in the morning. | ||
| This is my little baby girl. | ||
| That unforgiving. | ||
| Apply that to your heart. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ooh. | |
| Sage words. | ||
| Sage words of advice. | ||
| You have expectations. | ||
| You may not have used them yet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you guys wrote songs, how did you put the lyrics to the music? | ||
| What was the process? | ||
| How did you guys sort that out? | ||
| Would you come to them with an idea? | ||
| Would they come to you with a riff? | ||
| How would it work? | ||
| It'll work... | ||
| A number of ways, but a mistake that a lot of young writers in my department, the lyrics, make is that they think of it as secondary. | ||
| They wait for the music or the track first, and then you'll walk into a studio and hope that the hand of God will descend and grace you with amazing epiphanies. | ||
| I can't even spell amazing. | ||
| All right? | ||
| And called upon to do it right away, you know, you'll work out a beat and go, Dave, you got some lyrics. | ||
| If I go walk into that room and try to create it right there, nine times out of ten, it's going to be moon in June. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Moon in June. | ||
| Really? | ||
| When? | ||
| Sometime soon. | ||
| What time of day? | ||
| I'm thinking noon. | ||
| Literally. | ||
| I'm going to put my hands in the air. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Well, because I just don't care. | ||
| You wind up there unless you're banking. | ||
| making. | ||
| Think like debate. | ||
| If you're going to debate somebody, you're banking your ideas. | ||
| And whatever the subject is, You don't even have to have a subject. | ||
| It's, okay, I like what he just said. | ||
| I might even write that phrase, I like what you just said. | ||
| It could be a Drake lyric. | ||
| Any expressions, ideas, slogans, anything that comes from other tunes in terms of their lyric. | ||
| And is everybody contributing? | ||
| No, that's just me. | ||
| I have volumes of those kinds of ideas, ideas for songs, storylines, etc. | ||
| You would never go into a fight without doing that. | ||
| Collecting moves from every other film of every other fighter that you possibly can. | ||
| So that when somebody goes like this, you go, oh, I know what to do. | ||
| So-and-so from Zunders, and then I'm going to visit like this. | ||
| And somebody says, it's a song about, they play a song, I go, wow, it sounds kind of like cowboy music. | ||
| Let's write about cowboys. | ||
| Going through the banking. | ||
| Giddy up. | ||
| That's a cool title. | ||
| I heard a cowboy say it on the TV set. | ||
| And I wrote it down. | ||
| Literally. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| And you start... | ||
| I see the lights coming. | ||
| And you start banking. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Somebody says something. | ||
| You dig? | ||
| I heard somebody, a waitress named Pepper, with an unlit Pall Mall cigarette. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Tell me. | ||
| Oh, honey, nothing could have stopped us back then anyway. | ||
| That's a title. | ||
| That is a title. | ||
| I wrote a song to it. | ||
| Did you? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Where was this waitress? | ||
| On the road. | ||
| Well, she also had something else to say. | ||
| She'd lean over. | ||
| She'd show that cleavage a little bit, and she'd go, keep your fork, honey. | ||
| There's pie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Excuse me. | |
| I got to stand double. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I got to make it. | |
| I got to make it. | ||
| And you write it down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Banking. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I like the term they use in debate. | ||
| You're banking. | ||
| Banking your ideas. | ||
| So when you would go on the road and someone would say something like that, you would physically write it down? | ||
| Go home and write it down today. | ||
| Today. | ||
| All the time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Banking. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And it goes into the books. | ||
| And then when it's time to deal with a given, since you listen to music, if the music came first, and you're... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Remind you of something. | ||
| Oh, that sounds like kung fu. | ||
| That sounds like country. | ||
| That sounds like engines are coming. | ||
| And on and on. | ||
| You might suggest an idea. | ||
| Do you write things down physically or do you type them? | ||
| I print. | ||
| Print. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I paint and draw routinely. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's part of the martial arts. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Miyamoto Musashi. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| But when I was in Japan, two and three nights a week, we call it training, I did sumi-e with sumi-e teachers. | ||
| What is sumi-e? | ||
| It's like calligraphy, pen and ink. | ||
| In the world of the digital future, I spent two years practicing four shades of gray and two shades of black. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You want to see my lesson? | ||
| Can you focus a camera if I stand up? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Can you focus? | ||
| Here's my lesson. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I'm going to walk from here to here. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm here painting. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm the only guy in the room. | ||
| Ready? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. No. No. No. No. No. No. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| After six months, I heard better. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| After almost 10 months, I sit down, he goes, Mr. Roth, I think you are my best student. | ||
| I said, not my painting. | ||
| He said, no, no, not your painting. | ||
| He said, you are most determined. | ||
| You are most sincere. | ||
| You really enjoy malls like this. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| He said, I wish to invite you to director's meeting of Sumie Society. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| I made the same face. | ||
| I said, whoa. | ||
| He said, when is that? | ||
| He said, right now. | ||
| He pulled out a bottle of sake and two little cups. | ||
| Became one of my best friends in Tokyo. | ||
| Shit, first six months, I might have got seven words. | ||
| Well, for a guy like that, in this day and age, it must be insanely difficult to get someone to have that sort of appreciation for commitment. | ||
| Well, it's a national thing, okay? | ||
| You learn that stuff in grade school, and it's sort of like music lessons, okay? | ||
| Painting and calligraphy is as well known as perhaps piano lessons. | ||
| What were you thinking while you were doing all this, while you're learning this and spending months and months? | ||
| I focus on specifically that, knowing that at the end of the term, I'm going to be a little, I don't know, I'm sharpening things a little bit, and when I'm called upon, even to have a discussion like this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I can bring a little contribution to it. | ||
| It can be more entertaining for all of you listening to this. | ||
| That's an amazing recognition that you have, though, that you realized while you were doing this that even though consciously all you're doing is doing calligraphy, you're working on other parts of your mind. | ||
| Oh, I knew I was never going to paint for shit. | ||
| Fifty shades a day of... | ||
| But you were still focusing 100% of your energy on doing it while you were doing it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there's something to that. | ||
| It's the preparation. | ||
| What are you doing now that's weird? | ||
| Well, I went corporate. | ||
| You went corporate? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I got 34 employees. | ||
| You do? | ||
| I have offices at One Park Avenue in New York. | ||
| You seem like the type of guy who might go off the grid and be very difficult to find. | ||
| I got offices at the beach in my company. | ||
| Geez, we're about $8 million into it here. | ||
| And running that kind of a team and dealing with the people, because it's art-centric. | ||
| What is this team? | ||
| What's it about? | ||
| This is the tattoo stuff? | ||
| It's the original. | ||
| This is my stuff. | ||
| And I didn't just hire a bunch of people to pass things in front of me. | ||
| I designed what that logo looks like. | ||
| I put together what the general, everything. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| And then I hired the architects and said, build this. | ||
| Create this. | ||
| So, it's virtually everything that you know how to do as an artist. | ||
| Because you have to keep everybody entertained. | ||
| You have to be creative on levels, everything from Adobe Photoshop to social engineering and platforming, dealing with marketing, publishing, all the way that publishing is changing, magazines. | ||
| Now make you digital. | ||
| Are you approaching this the same way you approach calligraphy? | ||
| Oh, you bet. | ||
| Art-centric. | ||
| Singing and dancing paid every penny for the company. | ||
| And this is what I bring to it. | ||
| Mostly when you have a celeb get involved in something like, I don't know, J-Lo does fashion. | ||
| She's not really taking a pen and ink and drawing out the words and drawing out the clothes. | ||
| Somebody passes things in front of her and she makes sounds, I'm assuming. | ||
| It goes like this. | ||
| I'm the guy who has to interpret those sounds, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And, and, and, and. | ||
| Because there's got to be a sense of humor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| The name of my company is Laugh to Win. | ||
| And it doesn't have anything to do with mirth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All the best pirates laugh, especially if it's the last one. | |
| Oof. | ||
| Few of these are going to detonate on the freeway home. | ||
| No, I'm sure. | ||
| When you're creating this company, how much of your time is involved in this? | ||
| A significant amount of time. | ||
| We're back and forth. | ||
| So you're like a real professional now. | ||
| Like a professional corporate dude. | ||
| You're doing the 50 hour work week thing. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It's art-centric. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| It starts with, what was the need? | ||
| What was the need? | ||
| Well, the need is like when Al Honnold goes climbing, he's going to put on some sunblock and he doesn't want to touch that shit for another four hours. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I built it for him. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I cracked my two molars and walked around for three years with no molars on this side of my head when I caught dengue fever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Because the sunblock and the stuff that had the mosquito shit in it washed off when I got out of the ocean. | ||
| So I solved it. | ||
| And we are stripper friendly, but we are not strippers. | ||
| So I don't want shiny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So it's like a sunblock? | ||
| I want satin glow. | ||
| I don't want shiny. | ||
| There's room for shiny. | ||
| Like, you know, Friday nights. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Throw a little glitter on it. | ||
| And as far as fragrances, thank you, no. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It took three years and more than you want to quote to solve that. | ||
| Because every time you go and you smell something, you crack the jar of anything. | ||
| Somebody has played with that, probably in New Jersey. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Think like this. | ||
| I'm already doing the pitch. | ||
| You like ice cream? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| If you don't, your kids do. | ||
| Gelato, even better. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Suppose you want to make coconut vanilla. | ||
| Well, if you're buying most products, you've got to just go to one factory in New Jersey. | ||
| True story. | ||
| The L'Oreal's, the Neutrogena's and so forth. | ||
| And they're going to take the smell of coconut and the smell of vanilla and mix and so forth. | ||
| This kind of a thing. | ||
| The fact is, the cow lives in a very different place than the coconut lady who grows coconuts. | ||
| And the guy who's going to sell you your vanilla lives in a whole other country. | ||
| The reason that ice cream tastes so good is somebody got their ass on an airplane and flew to all three places. | ||
| And that's what my staff does. | ||
| Our staff is artisanal. | ||
| It's like craft scotch. | ||
| From the Carolinas, put your Pendleton on. | ||
| We're going to Portland. | ||
| Really. | ||
| And then we're going to go to Seattle because that's just one product. | ||
| It's my artisanal art thing that I do there. | ||
| And it came from a need behind the scenes. | ||
| Started years ago when we'd be climbing and stuff would get all over our hands and all over our ropes. | ||
| We'd be kayaking and somebody would keep dropping the oars because something was slippery. | ||
| You follow? | ||
| So, okay, someday I'm going to solve this. | ||
| Someday I'm going to solve this. | ||
| When you're in your 20s, there's an aha moment. | ||
| When you're my age, there's more than one. | ||
| And that's when we went, aha, again, third time today, and began to expand. | ||
| Laugh to Win makes ink, the original, and we have 60 other products coming up. | ||
| All of it developed for people who live in vans like Alex Arnold, folks who live in transit at hotels, people who live urban camping is what we do, especially me and my tour bus. | ||
| Everything I do is in the disco submarine. | ||
| We travel, and you've got to be familiar everywhere. | ||
| Even Canada? | ||
| Even Canada. | ||
| And, and, and. | ||
| Today, we travel the entire world with impunity. | ||
| You go to South America, you go to Europe, and something as simple when you go to Japan, you're really going to go find dental floss on your own? | ||
| No, you're not pale-faced. | ||
| You've got to take me, because otherwise you're doing pantomime. | ||
| Yeah, wait until you get a bad stomach and you've got to pantomime that to the little lady. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| All of these things... | ||
| Okay, I've got to stabilize. | ||
| I've got to fit in my backpack. | ||
| Every container has to be able to be sat on in a third-world airport. | ||
| You've got to be able to Stevie Wonder it in your backpack. | ||
| It's an insensitive illusion analogy, but every one of our containers is such that you can stick your hand in the bag while you're driving and find it. | ||
| I'm safety conscious. | ||
| What do you have kids in the car? | ||
| So this is done by design. | ||
| The shape of the package is done by design so you can find it in the bag. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| What does it look like? | ||
| Pull it up, Jamie. | ||
| You can read our logos from across the Atlantic Ocean. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Having worked and played... | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Suppose your granddaddy doesn't speak English. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Okay. | ||
| All of our products have this kind of logo in here. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So translate this to granddad into Cambodian. | ||
| Granddad, you're going to water exercise. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Everybody there is going to have their own gear. | ||
| Take yours. | ||
| Make sure grandma puts this one on. | ||
| And that works in 82 languages. | ||
| I like the logo. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's a cool looking bottle of sunscreen. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| You got hand grip in case you're wearing gloves at work. | ||
| And a lot of times when we're waiting in the projects, okay, in the rainstorms, you're wearing two gloves. | ||
| You got your rubber gloves and you got your duty gloves on. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You still got the no slip grip on the side. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| And you got a daughter, right? | ||
| She's going to grow up to be somebody, right? | ||
| And hanging around with guys and controlling guys. | ||
| My dad worked in the prison system the last 20 years of his life. | ||
| He did eye surgeries up in Folsom, San Quentin, Norco, Pelican Bay, etc. | ||
| Little skinny Jewish doctor, how do you control level 4 violent lifers? | ||
| Theater. | ||
| You're going to tell your daughter, don't pull anything pink out of your purse if you're sitting with a bunch of guys. | ||
| Pull that stuff out. | ||
| It's the right color. | ||
| If you're at a legal briefing, You gotta be a boss. | ||
| Don't pull any cerulean blue. | ||
| Especially if it's shiny vinyl out of your purse. | ||
| You can't have a purple laptop. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pull that. | |
| Pull that. | ||
| It says boss. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In 22 languages. | ||
| What's in it? | ||
| Like, what's in it that makes it work well? | ||
| Like, that makes it waterproof and... | ||
| It's 100% in the brightener, for example. | ||
| It's organics, okay? | ||
| What's a brightener? | ||
| Well... | ||
| Like it makes your tattoo shiny? | ||
| You bet. | ||
| And it stays on just short of forever. | ||
| It stays on when you go swimming, so forth, okay? | ||
| And what do you always do when somebody goes, hey, what's that new P symbol? | ||
| You lick your finger... | ||
| And you rub it. | ||
| And you show it before it dries out again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| Okay. | ||
| I'm going to deal with the vanities. | ||
| As guys, you never want to say you give a shit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I would teach my kid to say that if I had one. | ||
| Hey, your tattoo's looking a little rusty. | ||
| I don't give a shit. | ||
| Learn how to say that in a few languages. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But you know, you give a shit. | ||
| Otherwise, you wouldn't have gotten the paint job. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you want the girls to know you got a P symbol anyways, because you look kind of mean, like me. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Put your finger away, will you? | ||
| We've got to clean up. | ||
| It's a bacterial thing. | ||
| So what's in that stuff? | ||
| You're going to make all the mistakes, too. | ||
| You're going to go out, and you're going to try and find cheap shit moisturizers that you're going to put on there, and you're going to smear it all over yourself, and it's going to look like that scene from something about Mary when she puts that shit around. | ||
| And everybody's going to think, what's that shit all over Bobby's arm? | ||
| Like this. | ||
| And it's going to get all over your t-shirt. | ||
| And your wife has a $600 t-shirt, doesn't she, Joe? | ||
| So you've got to consider all of this. | ||
| I saw a nice car out there. | ||
| I'm guessing there's nice upholstery in it. | ||
| I took that into consideration. | ||
| I got you covered. | ||
| On and on. | ||
| And it's the smell of victory. | ||
| There it goes. | ||
| Contains vitamin C, shea butter, and coconut oil not tested on animals. | ||
| Dermatologist reviewed. | ||
| Paraben free. | ||
| Petroleum free. | ||
| The full list of ingredients. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Oh, what is all this jazz? | ||
| We are one of the few products here that is reef-safe allowable in Hawaii. | ||
| The limits of what's going into the oceans now and the tourist areas of the world. | ||
| In Hawaii, you can count on one hand the products they're allowing to be used on the beaches and even in the swimming pools and stuff now. | ||
| So that comes... | ||
| So this is 100% organic stuff. | ||
| It's all waxes and butters. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| When people talk about miracle ingredients... | ||
| I think in terms of there's water and then there's Fiji. | ||
| Butter, eggs, sugar, flour. | ||
| That's all that there is in the bakery. | ||
| All right? | ||
| We invented the cronut. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| You take the best of this and the best of that and the considerations, again, come from life experience. | ||
| I didn't just look at myself and go, wow. | ||
| Here's an idea to make money. | ||
| My fortune's been made. | ||
| What we did is find what we can use when we're living out of backpacks. | ||
| What we can use when we go dancing. | ||
| I still go dancing, and I don't leave that floor for four hours. | ||
| Where do you go dancing? | ||
| I'm not telling you. | ||
| Go beach, beach, beach. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Routine. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Oh, you bet. | ||
| Where are you going to show that ink? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You follow? | ||
| Today, I know in New York City, for example, Mr. Chin lives right next to Mr. Gomez. | ||
| They both live over Mr. Katzenberg. | ||
| Mr. Radakovich owns the building. | ||
| None of them can speak to each other. | ||
| They all speak a different language. | ||
| They're all different religions, etc. | ||
| So there's two ways we communicate. | ||
| First is swearing. | ||
| You know how to do that, right? | ||
| You learn seven, eight words in swearing. | ||
| You can describe anything. | ||
| This show is the shit. | ||
| Show you the shit. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| What kind of shit are you doing lately? | ||
| That last fight? | ||
| That was the shit. | ||
| And we're having a conversation. | ||
| Okay, like so. | ||
| And the next is Ink. | ||
| I see you got a chicken on one arm and a cleaver you butcher. | ||
| And the girl down there's got cupcakes with funny noses. | ||
| Let me guess. | ||
| He's got musical notes. | ||
| Can I guess more? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And, and, and. | ||
| In an Esperanto, you walk out in front of Columbia University at lunchtime? | ||
| It's the future. | ||
| You would not know that it's United States. | ||
| It is a complete, composite, international, just the smell of all the food trucks. | ||
| The last thing you smell is salami and yellow cheese on white bread. | ||
| Thank God. | ||
| Say thank God in a few other languages. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So it's a communication process. | ||
| And that's part of my fascination with it. | ||
| It's a constantly evolving Esperanto art form. | ||
| I've visited tribes in New Guinea who can't dance. | ||
| They don't dance. | ||
| But they did have tattooing. | ||
| They did have scarification. | ||
| We know that Iceman they found under the glacier. | ||
| That guy, you know, they found his body. | ||
| I forget what they call him. | ||
| I forget what his name is. | ||
| But he had tattoos on him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, he's thousands of years old. | |
| That was Fabio. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's a different guy. | |
| Doesn't he go to your gym? | ||
| Fabio goes to Jamie's gym. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I see him all the time. | |
| He still looks like Fabio. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, he's very recognizable. | |
| Fabio is like sideburns and flares and easy listening. | ||
| We always make fun, but there's one of them in your past. | ||
| That guy banked on his hair. | ||
| I mean, if that guy went bald like me, he'd be fucked. | ||
| It still is the exact same. | ||
| Fabulous, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Amazing genetics. | ||
| You got a lucky break. | ||
| He's one of the characters. | ||
| Who are other characters like that? | ||
| Oh, David Hasselhoff. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Now has Hasselbook. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Well, he has his own Facebook thing and he's met so many. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, hell of a fucking shit. | |
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| I got the disdain look from Joe. | ||
| Oh my God, Hasselbook. | ||
| Talk about a non-smiler. | ||
| Oh my God, Hasselbook. | ||
| Jesus is fucking cold in here. | ||
| Are you guys cold? | ||
| Hasslebook, holy shit. | ||
| Who was Anna Nicole Smith? | ||
| Yeah, she had a look. | ||
| There's three phases. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| First phase, pretty good. | ||
| The guest jeans ad phase. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Right, and then there's married to the old dude. | ||
| Well, I'm a little kinky. | ||
| I kind of like the last one, too. | ||
| The rich, right before she dies. | ||
| Elvis had three phases. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| But there are folks also that don't have phases. | ||
| Springsteen never had a phase. | ||
| He was always Springsteen, right? | ||
| There he is. | ||
| Looking good, Fabio. | ||
| He's about 85 years old. | ||
| Still jacked? | ||
| Is that current? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't see him working out a lot, but he's there. | ||
| What does he do if he's at the gym? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Talking to women and... | ||
| Oh, damn. | ||
| Still scoring. | ||
| No, but in turn... | ||
| That's so... | ||
| You want to think about it, but you don't. | ||
| But you do. | ||
| You do, but you don't. | ||
| Yeah, you want to think about the gal that wants to bang Fabio. | ||
| Super pumped about it. | ||
| He's coming over in five minutes. | ||
| I gotta get ready. | ||
| What are you watching on TV? Do you have television? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And what are you watching regularly? | ||
| Because I don't have television. | ||
| I listen to Sirius XM routinely. | ||
| I listen to like six different channels over and over again. | ||
| Lately, I'm watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which is an Amazon show. | ||
| It's an Amazon original show about a stand-up comedian in the 1950s, a woman stand-up comedian who hangs out with Lenny Bruce. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Really good show. | ||
| Women stand-up comedians. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's a great subject. | ||
| Sarah Silverman. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hooray. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Spectacular, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She has a real hurdle, because one of the things that she does best is play the part of the character she's lampooning. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| She plays the part, beautifully, of a witless... | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Racist whatever... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| And her hurdle is that a large segment of the audience doesn't realize that it's an act. | ||
| Well, now, now that's the hurdle. | ||
| Especially now, if you go back and look at some of her older bits, and especially if you looked at it written down as opposed to her saying it, we're in such an overwhelmingly sensitive time when it comes to subject matter that, yeah, that would be a big hurdle for her now. | ||
| But it's the best work ever. | ||
| It made such an impact the first time I ever saw her do it. | ||
| And this is a tradition that goes all the way back. | ||
| Back during Lincoln, there was a fellow who wrote the NASB letters where he pretended to be a Southern racist and making fun of Southern racism. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| By pretending to be, Lincoln kept the articles clipped from the newspaper in his drawer so he could read them occasionally and laugh during the Civil War. | ||
| You know, this is a tradition of acting out the character that you are about to execute. | ||
| Unfortunately, there's a lot. | ||
| What is the chemistry that folks don't understand that you are pretending? | ||
| They don't care. | ||
| It's a dishonest approach. | ||
| They don't care whether or not you're pretending. | ||
| They see you have said something or there's something written that shows that you said something that they feel is in violation and so they want to go after it. | ||
| and it doesn't make any sense yes it's literal and it's also it's disingenuous because they know it could be parody and they don't care there's so much of that today it's really interesting it's really interesting because there's so many people that are they're just looking for things to be upset about it's recreational outrage and i think it's probably because things are going so well in this world i mean I mean, some people say it's not going that well. | ||
| You know, there's a lot of things to be fixed, for sure. | ||
| But it's the safest time to be alive ever. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| This is undeniably the safest time to be alive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll agree with that. | |
| And I think people are more open-minded than ever, more kind than ever. | ||
| There's less violence than ever. | ||
| If you look at Pinker's work... | ||
| All these things are trending in a very, very clear and obvious direction. | ||
| And I think when you have coddled minds and you have more safety, people start running around looking for things to be upset at. | ||
| And also a lot of young people that are very idealistic think they're going to change the world. | ||
| And one of the ways they're going to change the world is by policing language and policing the way people talk about things and discuss things. | ||
| And so stand-up comedy, which is, you know, you say a lot of things you don't really mean because they're funny. | ||
| You know, that's the whole point behind it. | ||
| And so it's ripe as far as a target for that kind of recreational outrage. | ||
| The musical equivalent, perhaps, is really shitty songs written about important subjects. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Really shitty songs written about important subjects are offensive. | ||
| Right? | ||
| They are, right? | ||
| It's like the melody sound reminds you of overdue dentist appointments. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The singing sounds like hot water being thrown on a sick cat, but it's about starving children. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| What's a good example? | ||
| No, don't go there. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We don't need to do that. | ||
| We don't need to do that. | ||
| But we all know the songs. | ||
| But we're all thinking. | ||
| Yeah, we all know. | ||
| And if you criticize the song, even if you say it's just musically, that sounds like we shall overcome. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa! | |
| That's about pets! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I love pets. | ||
| Well, there's movies like that too, right? | ||
| There's movies about really important subjects that are terrible movies. | ||
| Like how many awful war movies? | ||
| You cause me to think that if it's a really, really important subject, it probably is a terrible movie. | ||
| Yeah, most likely. | ||
| Why do I think that? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, there's no way to really get an important subject and boil it down to two hours. | ||
| Oh, I didn't think of that. | ||
| Give me two hours. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| An important subject. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, especially, like, one thing that drives me crazy is when they take liberties with someone's biography. | ||
| Like, if they do a biography on someone's life and they change things around or add things to it for theatrical flair. | ||
| Did you see the Queen movie? | ||
| No, I did not see it yet. | ||
| I haven't seen it either. | ||
| I heard it's very good, though. | ||
| You heard it's very good. | ||
| Did you ask the person who told you that why it's good? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| And what did they share? | ||
| They said, first of all, the guy who plays Freddie Mercury apparently is brilliant in it. | ||
| Had they seen Freddie live? | ||
| No, not live. | ||
| I saw Freddie live at the Forum. | ||
| I was in the maybe 20th row. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Six in when Bohemian Rhapsody had just come out. | ||
| Oh my goodness. | ||
| Yeah, I saw him at his major, major prime there. | ||
| So I'm very curious as to, well, stagecraft is one thing, but what Freddie was and what he brought was way more than what you saw on stage. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| What was he bringing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, his sensibilities in terms of music weren't just three chords and an attitude. | ||
| And don't fall for that shit either. | ||
| If Keith ever sits here and tries that shit, it's all right, Rogan. | ||
| He just made three chords and an attitude. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you need to know the inversions of each one, all seven modal... | ||
| Fuck you, Keith. | ||
| What I need is... | ||
| Because he does know all those and the trick tunings and whatever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Freddie... | ||
| Brought a whole wealth of listening to different kinds of music, whether it was orchestral, big band, bistro. | ||
| That's bistro, what do you call it, musette? | ||
| Small, something you might hear in a coffee shop in France. | ||
| Well, his music was so different. | ||
| His singing was so different than anything else from his era. | ||
| When you listen to We Are the Champions... | ||
| He didn't try to sing Black. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| He sang Freddie Mercury. | ||
| He sang European... | ||
| Non-black. | ||
| What we're very used to, even in country. | ||
| I had a very famous black producer, African American producer, say to me, David Lee, do you know what it means to be a black man in the United States today? | ||
| Every time I step up to the mic. | ||
| I try. | ||
| That's what I grew up with. | ||
| Trying to sound like Motown. | ||
| Trying to sound like Wilson Pickett. | ||
| Trying to sound like... | ||
| And on and on. | ||
| That voter block had such an impact on music, much less the overall culture. | ||
| And comedy as well. | ||
| I mean, if I had to vote for one greatest all-time comedian, it would be Pryor. | ||
| The greatest of all time. | ||
| I would have to say he's in the running. | ||
| I mean, if it's not him, I don't know who it is. | ||
| I'll agree with that. | ||
| And there's so many. | ||
| When you look at African American stand-up comedians and the contribution in terms of like... | ||
| The overall numbers, the top ten, a giant chunk of them were black. | ||
| A giant chunk. | ||
| Chappelle, Chris Rock, definitely Pryor. | ||
| A lot of guys forget about Bernie Mac. | ||
| Bernie Mac was a goddamn genius. | ||
| A lot of people don't know about Robin Harris. | ||
| Robin Harris was a huge influence to people in the 90s. | ||
| The 80s and the 90s. | ||
| When he died, he died, I think, in the early 90s. | ||
| You're illuminating for the audience, but here you're preaching to the already convinced judge. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Well, I think it's because of the... | ||
| I grew up with comedy records. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Red Fox. | ||
| Red Fox. | ||
| And you can still hear Red doing on the classic comedy channel on Sirius XM, and his shit is still funny. | ||
| Still good. | ||
| Let's revisit. | ||
| Is it the delivery system? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's everything. | ||
| Or the thing because... | ||
| You can't separate them. | ||
| I started imitating Red Fox when I was probably 12 years old. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I still do it! | |
| And you know, Bill Cosby was obviously a horrible person, in retrospect, but his art form, his artwork, was amazing. | ||
| Comedy records, you memorized word for word. | ||
| You memorized Richard Pryor. | ||
| You memorized Red Fox. | ||
| You memorized Bill Cosby. | ||
| And you memorized Rodney Dangerfield. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Okay, those are the four horsemen. | ||
| And when you run out of conversation at a beer-soaked frat party, high school, whatever, which is in about two sentences, you either quote your favorite movies. | ||
| That's how you would converse as guys. | ||
| Hey, you know that scene where he fucking blows them away? | ||
| Fucking A, fucking A, dude! | ||
| And you express ourselves, or you go, you know, I can't get no respect. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And doctor told me I have to run... | ||
| I even try this with the staff. | ||
| I say, David, how you doing? | ||
| I say, yeah, man. | ||
| Doctor told me I had to run a mile a day and then call him 10 days later. | ||
| And? | ||
| Well, I'm calling you. | ||
| I'm 10 miles away. | ||
| Rodney Dangerfield. | ||
| You learned comedy records. | ||
| And you sat around the record player... | ||
| And learned it. | ||
| I don't think people do that anymore. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| That was a thing, man. | ||
| When I was a kid, we used to listen to Cheech and Chong. | ||
| Big Bamboo would all sit around and listen to the record. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| And that was a different one, too, because they weren't even doing stand-up. | ||
| That was a completely unique thing. | ||
| They were doing sketch comedy on a record. | ||
| It's interesting that... | ||
| Pot culture, which is international now, okay, started with an Asian and a Hispanic. | ||
| Yeah, they fucking were the kings of it. | ||
| And you can, again, sideburns. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And when it was illegal. | ||
| Bell bottoms, we make fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But everybody on earth knows Cheech and Chong. | ||
| How many decades later? | ||
| How many decades later? | ||
| I went rock climbing. | ||
| As far away as humanly possible from anything ever, made by God, man, or others, a place called Arapoles. | ||
| It's about four hours north of Melbourne, out in the middle of nowhere. | ||
| Big sand-drip castles. | ||
| You can dial it up and find Arapoles. | ||
| And we had a couple of campers, like trucks, that we parked and we put up a tarp in the middle and campfire and whatever. | ||
| And I had a little television screen, and we plugged that into the car battery, okay? | ||
| And I went to the other campsites, because we'd fucked up, not brought enough whatever it was, water food or whatever. | ||
| That's Arapolis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And I went to the different campsites and invited everybody, you know, hey man, can I borrow a little of this? | ||
| Do you guys got any oatmeal or anything like this? | ||
| Yeah, we're going to be watching Cheech and Chong. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Over on the far edge over there, you'll see us. | ||
| Come on over and join us. | ||
| From all over the world, you got guys from Thailand, you got girls from England. | ||
| Everybody knew Cheech and Chong. | ||
| It was the great leveler. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And we sat there in sub-zero temperatures, swaddled in sleeping bags, laughing in seven languages. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And Cheech and Chong. | ||
| Damn, look at them. | ||
| You don't even need subtitles. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You don't need to read the movie. | ||
| They're back together doing it again, which is amazing. | ||
| I gotta get those guys in here. | ||
| As long as they're talking to each other. | ||
| They'll make sure. | ||
| You never know. | ||
| Are they actually talking to each other? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think they're actually touring. | |
| Or has this gone Eddie and Dave? | ||
| It went Eddie and Dave for a while. | ||
| It definitely went Eddie and Dave for a while. | ||
| But they're back. | ||
| Yeah, they're back together. | ||
| They were touring quite a bit. | ||
| I think success brought them back together again. | ||
| They realized everybody wants to see Cheech and Chong. | ||
| Everybody doesn't really want to see Chong or Cheech. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| I mean, not that everybody doesn't want to see them, but that the numbers are so different. | ||
| The numbers of people that, I mean, Tommy Chong is a very beloved guy, but together, they're exponentially more powerful. | ||
| It's the Everly Brothers. | ||
| Yes, yes, yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But the culture changed. | ||
| A man of his times, sometimes the times changes, and look how the times now represent that which they, you know, pre-whatever. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, those guys were doing something that was illegal. | ||
| This was illegal comedy. | ||
| There was illegal subject matter. | ||
| Today in Studio City, you could spend a 10-day vacation. | ||
| If you came from somewhere and just worked from the sushi bar to the dispensary, On Studio C, there's a space that's about two miles long. | ||
| You could spend ten days. | ||
| Come visit us from Japan. | ||
| Stay at the Marriott all the way near whatever at Universal, and you can just work from sushi bar to dispensary, from sushi bar to dispensary. | ||
| They're touring. | ||
| Look at that up on the screen. | ||
| There's a whole schedule. | ||
| And where are they working? | ||
| I can't read it. | ||
| It says they're in Richmond, B.C., at the River Rock Casino, in Vancouver, at the Hard Rock, South Lake Tahoe. | ||
| There's a bunch of places. | ||
| San Juan, Puerto Rico in the house. | ||
| What's the average age of comics today? | ||
| The best ones are in their 40s and 50s, it seems like, right now. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, between Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle... | ||
| Oh, you're right. | ||
| Okay, I'm buying that. | ||
| Yeah, all the best guys. | ||
| Joey Diaz, all the best guys are in their 50s. | ||
| Because it does change when you think like... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There's a lot of gangster movies on Netflix, right? | ||
| And when it's that, then the fellas are older. | ||
| They're wearing tuxedos. | ||
| They're in nightclubs like Cyril's kind of the 21 Club. | ||
| And then that changed to Comedy Cellar and something like that. | ||
| Today it's also about productivity. | ||
| You have to be able to put out material. | ||
| Because most of us are doing Netflix specials now, and most of us seem to be on a schedule of doing one every couple of years. | ||
| So you have to be able to turn over an hour every couple of years, and then take that hour and hammer that motherfucker down to a samurai sword. | ||
| Excuse me, a katana. | ||
| Polish that blade. | ||
| Hammer it down. | ||
| Polish that blade. | ||
| You have to have it, and then you have to know when to release it, which is one of the things that I ask, like, how do you know when you're writing a song like Running with the Devil? | ||
| How do you know when it's done? | ||
| Because with a bit, you kind of don't know because you do it differently all the time. | ||
| You fuck around with it on stage, and, you know, I'm a... | ||
| How long does it take to do an hour? | ||
| This is fascinating. | ||
| It changes. | ||
| It changes. | ||
| There's no real one thing. | ||
| Sometimes I've come up with a new hour in like four or five months, and sometimes it's taken me a whole year. | ||
| It's really different every time, depending upon how much effort I put into it, and also depending upon how lucky I get with subjects. | ||
| Sometimes there's a subject that's just rich, almost like you hit a gold mine. | ||
| I follow that. | ||
| You hit that mine, and you're like, There's so much here, and there's so many also branching off little rivers from this mine, this one initial mine. | ||
| So there's that. | ||
| You never know. | ||
| You never know. | ||
| It's hard to tell. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| You mess around with it. | ||
| It moves and changes. | ||
| I do it differently all the time. | ||
| You know, I'm a giant fan of Leonard Skinner. | ||
| And one of the things that I always thought was crazy about Skinner was their riffs. | ||
| When they would do guitar riffs, it was the same riff. | ||
| When they would do a solo, their solos were, like, orchestrated. | ||
| Like, they don't get enough credit for bringing... | ||
| Dynamic musical artists as well as these southern dudes that were just drinking and singing about whiskey and getting away from women like they're fat ugly dudes and most their songs about getting away from women like I gotta go I gotta be free I'm moving on call me the breeze it was so like I gotta get the fuck out of here before you lock me down that was a big part of their music but when you see like Like some of their, like Freebird. | ||
| That Freebird solo, which is one of the greatest solos in the history of all music. | ||
| Well, there's some specific reasons for this. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| One of the more specific reasons is you had to build. | ||
| It has a beginning, a middle, a crescendo, an end. | ||
| There are specific names to this. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| When we moved to more channels in recording, when Leonard Skinner recorded all their early stuff as 8-track, and then you had to double up early Van Halen, same thing. | ||
| You had to compile your tracks or whatever. | ||
| You had to really walk in with your solo written, okay, and play, and you would work it until it really had a thing, and then crescendos. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Once there were many tracks, guys would come in and just wing it and go, okay, let's try one. | ||
| Okay, great. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| Let's do it again. | ||
| Track two. | ||
| And they just make it up as they go. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| And then when it's time to mix, they'll put a little of track two and a little of track six and start moving those channels in a way that you would never think To play the guitar. | ||
| For example, Ed started doing that on a couple of tracks. | ||
| Original solos, running with the devil. | ||
| These are thematic solos. | ||
| Most Beatles solos, thematic. | ||
| Listen to the solo and ain't talking about it. | ||
| These are thematic solos. | ||
| When it started going like this, he'd record six different versions of the solos. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And then just start, move the channel. | ||
| Like here, turn this one on, turn this one off, turn this one on, turn this one. | ||
| And then he'd have to go learn the solo. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So you'll see his hand move from down here to up here and down there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| effort, more elbow and shoulder to get his hand from the far end of the fretboard all the way up to the pickup and back to duplicate that Wabasabi approach to making solos. more elbow and shoulder to get his hand from the That Wabasabi approached to making solos. | ||
| So it was a very oblique or unique kind of way of creating a solo. | ||
| It was utilizing the digital future, multi-tracking, and improvising. | ||
| As opposed to, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to create something like a book. | ||
| Here's the beginning, here's the scene, here are the characters, here's the conflict. | ||
| Instead, it's, let's just mix that all up together in interesting ways. | ||
| In literary, Burroughs came up with, Bill Burroughs many, many years ago, came up with the idea of writing a book, then clipping the pages into pieces, putting them all in a hat, then pull the pieces out one by one. | ||
| This is piece number one, this is piece number two, piece number three. | ||
| And that's the way you actually remember a story. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh. | |
| I don't get that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You remember a wedding? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You don't remember in sequence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| We had a batch party. | ||
| Then I got measured for the tuxedo. | ||
| Then I went here. | ||
| You remember, batch party, then putting the ring. | ||
| Then I was throwing up back behind the... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, and then there was a car. | |
| It doesn't come in sequential order. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So it's another way of... | ||
| It's kind of a crafty way of writing an essay. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Perhaps a bit difficult to digest, but movies are made that way now. | ||
| Tarantino starts in the middle. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Get used to it. | ||
| Yeah, he always does. | ||
| James Bond always starts in the middle of a chase. | ||
| Door flies open. | ||
| Whoa, these guys are... | ||
| Catch you off guard. | ||
| He's running across the top of a train, because they started, as opposed to, here's the field, horse walks onto the field, I see the cabin... | ||
| What I'm getting from this in regards to song making, in particular the way Eddie and you did it, was there's no shortcuts. | ||
| You know, and the fact that... | ||
| First of all, you know, he's one of the great masters, right? | ||
| Eddie Van Halen's one of the great masters. | ||
| If you have... | ||
| I mean, a hundred of the greatest guitar artists of all time in the history of the human race. | ||
| He's in that group. | ||
| Well, he certainly made a contribution commensurate with that. | ||
| Yeah, 100%. | ||
| So you have to have that, but then there's also no shortcuts, even when you're a great master. | ||
| No. | ||
| There's no shortcuts. | ||
| No, you will have to sharpen and sharpen and sharpen. | ||
| You described sharpening of sorts. | ||
| I visited a foundry where they make swords, north of Tokyo. | ||
| How was that? | ||
| Well, Harasan, his work goes in the museums. | ||
| That is one of the things that I really want to do. | ||
| Yeah, the old school foundry, four guys with hammers, super sweaty, hot, like visiting the 1600s. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's not who sharpens and polishes the sword. | ||
| That's my other friend who's 55 years old, lives in a suburb of Tokyo, and that's all he does for a living. | ||
| So they take the first sword to him, and then he sharpens it? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay, and he's the one who makes it get that chrome finish. | ||
| So the man who forges it does not sharpen it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct. | |
| It's a different specialty. | ||
| Has that always been the case? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And a sword polisher does the sharpening, and that's a specialty. | ||
| It requires certain stones from different parts of Japan. | ||
| You don't use wheels. | ||
| You use the old stones from the mountains, etc. | ||
| You use water from a wooden bucket, and you rub it with your hands. | ||
| He's 55 years old. | ||
| This is all he does for a living. | ||
| Museums from around the world. | ||
| Is there a video of this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's the gentleman's name? | ||
| I love him around. | ||
| We'll find it. | ||
| I'm stalling for a sec. | ||
| He lives in a very little apartment and he's got two gun safes. | ||
| Like you would use, you know, like Liberty gun safes? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And museums from all over the world send him swords. | ||
| Oh, here he goes. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| That become rusty humidity. | ||
| Oh, what is that? | ||
| Okay, this is a paste, and he's going to be using, that's what they use to laminate. | ||
| By putting paste on that sword, parts of it will cool differently. | ||
| Anyways, sharpening that sword takes forever. | ||
| That's what makes your patterns. | ||
| Oh, so they do it... | ||
| You want that edge a little different of hardness than you want the rest of the sword. | ||
| You clad it. | ||
| And what is that stuff he's pasting on it? | ||
| What was that stuff? | ||
| It's made of ash and it's made of ore. | ||
| Ore. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And so when it heats up, is that when it becomes a part of the sword? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Wow. | ||
| Well, he's going to laminate that, okay? | ||
| This is wild. | ||
| Oh, they got a scientist. | ||
| Look at this motherfucker with his lab coat. | ||
| He's examining. | ||
| You're going to ruin it. | ||
| Get him out of there. | ||
| Get that scientist the fuck out of there. | ||
| It's made from a certain kind of steel, tomahogany. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And when you do the little padding like that, that's ash. | ||
| So he's putting little pieces of ash on it on purpose? | ||
| Yeah, that's a stone. | ||
| And that's how he's going to sharpen that. | ||
| And he'll spend hundreds of hours doing that on a sword, which is why they cost so much. | ||
| And there are many different kinds of stones that they'll use on different parts of the sword. | ||
| Can you dig? | ||
| The point at the top gets a different kind of stone in the middle of the sword, etc., It's amazing. | ||
| Japanese culture, and especially when you look into the ancient samurai culture, Book of Five Rings is one of my greatest all-time books. | ||
| I've read it dozens of times in my life. | ||
| But to put yourself in the mindset of someone with such a singular vision, to become a great samurai, he needed to become a No, just like your kids. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Kids got to take chess lessons or go. | ||
| Or go. | ||
| Go lessons. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| They got to learn to paint and draw. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Got to learn some martial arts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Multiple languages. | ||
| This is a liberal arts education as seen through the eyes of somebody in the 1500s. | ||
| It's just I'm so fascinated with Japanese culture because so many things came from that one small island. | ||
| I mean, in terms of, like, martial arts contributions, I mean, it is probably... | ||
| There's a bunch of contributors, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Chinese Kung Fu and Western boxing, but goddamn, you look at the contributions of Japan. | ||
| I mean, overwhelming. | ||
| Just overwhelming between Judo and Jiu-Jitsu and so many different martial arts. | ||
| Karate, there's so many different styles that were perfected in this one small place. | ||
| Okay, it's an island. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| And that lends itself towards drilling down, burrowing in, really digging in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If somebody is going to make a sword, it takes six different people to make one sword. | ||
| The person who makes the handle is not the person who wraps the handle. | ||
| The person who makes the sword is not the one who sharpens it. | ||
| The collar, the furniture on the sword, the peg that holds it in, that gold collar, that's a different person. | ||
| And the person who makes the scabbard for the sword is a different person. | ||
| You want me to keep going? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Yes, I mean. | ||
| It's an age of specialization. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Started for them many, many decades ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The idea of, I'm one man and I'll build everything in the cabin. | ||
| Alone in the Wilderness. | ||
| Great movie. | ||
| Comes from 1960s. | ||
| The fellow who builds the cabin. | ||
| And uses handmade tools to do it. | ||
| Up in the woods, right? | ||
| I'll dig the well, I'll plant the potatoes, I'll build the house, I'll create the hearth, I'll fish the fish, I'll hunt the elk, etc. | ||
| And the Japanese, perhaps, as well as other neighborhoods, said, I'm just going to specialize in elk. | ||
| And somebody else said, I just like to cook, if that's okay. | ||
| And somebody else said, I'm not even going to cook it. | ||
| I'm going to eat it raw. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Have you ever fucked around with archery? | |
| Oh, a million years ago, you know, with scouts, whatever. | ||
| That seems like something that would be right up your alley. | ||
| It's an act of doing it without doing it. | ||
| Yes, it is a mind-cleansing thing, too. | ||
| I think it would be perfect for you. | ||
| I saw you have a virtual reality range out there. | ||
| Oh, wait a minute. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, officer. | ||
| I confess it's all coming back. | ||
| I saw you on TV filling the refrigerator or getting ready to fill the refrigerator with a bow and arrow or some such. | ||
| Tell me about this. | ||
| No, I bow hunt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But you actually eat what you're shooting, right? | |
| Oh, 100%. | ||
| Tell me. | ||
| Most of what I eat is elk meat or deer meat. | ||
| If you look at my diet on paper, it's probably 60% elk meat. | ||
| When did you begin this? | ||
| 2012 was the first hunting trip I went on. | ||
| My good friend Steve Rinella took me on a trip on his television show Meat Eater and then I became obsessed. | ||
| Well, I was trying to figure out what I was doing because I had seen a bunch of factory farming videos and I was like, okay, I'm either going to become a vegetarian or I'm going to become a hunter. | ||
| Like, this is... | ||
| I follow that. | ||
| I can't be a part of this. | ||
| I follow that. | ||
| And so I became a hunter. | ||
| And first of all, the nutrition that you get from wild games... | ||
| You see a difference? | ||
| You feel the difference? | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Everybody does. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I give it to my friends. | |
| Strong red bull. | ||
| You just feel better. | ||
| It just feels amazing. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, it's so nutrient-dense. | ||
| It's red and rich. | ||
| You're eating an athlete. | ||
| You're eating a wild athlete that's running away from wolves and mountain lions. | ||
| I mean, it's just a different thing than a cow that's locked up in a cage or a pig that's locked up in a stall. | ||
| It makes stellar sense. | ||
| And they live a free life. | ||
| It's a wild animal. | ||
| There's no one telling them what to do or where to go. | ||
| And you've got to be able to sneak up in on them on the right wind with the right conditions and make sure you get a shot off on them. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| Yeah, I love it. | ||
| How often do you go out? | ||
| A couple times a year, usually two or three times a year. | ||
| And that provides for the freezer all the way? | ||
| Yeah, I have three commercial freezers in the back. | ||
| I'll show you after we're done. | ||
| I have two elk that are parsed up, and two elk and two axis deer in those freezers. | ||
| Yeah, each elk is several hundred pounds of meat, you know, and then I give a lot of it to my friends. | ||
| A good portion of my friends, they always get little packages of elk for me, elk sausage and elk roasts and all these different things. | ||
| I'm always giving people recipes, showing them how to eat it, showing them how to cook it. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| That's the most modern way, is the classic. | ||
| I eat what I call rabbit food. | ||
| It's the croco diet, like a crocodile. | ||
| Birds, foliage... | ||
| One crocodile says to the other, what'd you have for breakfast? | ||
| A chicken? | ||
| Ending the slow. | ||
| What was it sitting in? | ||
| Wheat? | ||
| What'd you have, fish? | ||
| What'd you catch it in, seaweed? | ||
| But that seems to serve me. | ||
| The Brady diet, everybody's talking about the Tom Brady diet. | ||
| What does he do? | ||
| Well, we call it eating clean. | ||
| He's not eating any processed food. | ||
| He's not eating any white bread. | ||
| He's eating oatmeal and clean proteins, you know, no fried stuff. | ||
| He's in his 40s, which is crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is he a miracle? | ||
| It's something. | ||
| It's special, huh? | ||
| And when you look at his body, he looks like a guy at the beach, like a regular guy. | ||
| He doesn't look like a super athlete, one of the greatest football players of all time. | ||
| Are we seeing something because between him and Alex Honnold and there are a couple of other stellar like whoa are we starting to see a trend because of better nutrition and better training and cross trainings and I think there's so many factors when When you deal with football, there's so many factors. | ||
| People are bigger. | ||
| People are stronger. | ||
| Well, I think with Tom Brady, I think it's training, intelligence, dedication, obsession, and then also nutrition. | ||
| All those factors. | ||
| But you have to really be... | ||
| There's no way to be as good as he is without being incredibly immersed in whatever you're trying to excel at. | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| And with Alex Honnold, I mean, the guy lives out of his van because he wants to live out of his van because all he wants to do is just drive around to different mountains and climb them. | ||
| I mean, that's his thing. | ||
| For me, it was the surfers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 1960s, exact same lifestyle. | ||
| They needed to be on the water. | ||
| He's a vertical surfer. | ||
| Conquistadors of the useless, they call themselves sometimes. | ||
| Vertical surfer, that's it, yeah. | ||
| He's a vertical surfer. | ||
| For me, it was, you know, we're going to go camp at San Onofre. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you talk to surfers, there's something... | ||
| There's a weird, corny way to put it, but I haven't talked to all of them, obviously, but a lot of high-level surfers like Kelly Slater or my good friend Shane Dorian, they're spiritual in some strange way. | ||
| They're at peace in some strange way. | ||
| And I think part of it is because they're constantly on that ocean. | ||
| And I think the ocean is like a battery. | ||
| I think you get energy out of it. | ||
| I think it's alive. | ||
| It feels alive. | ||
| I think it stimulates you in a very unique way. | ||
| And with those guys, they're riding these immense waves, these creations of nature and gravity and force and mass and water. | ||
| And they're riding them. | ||
| And they're riding a living thing. | ||
| There's organisms in it. | ||
| It's filled with salt. | ||
| I mean, it charges the body. | ||
| It's got a different frequency than the rest of the world. | ||
| And these guys, they seem different. | ||
| There's a different vibe about them, a more content vibe. | ||
| I've always said there's something about beach towns. | ||
| Why is everybody by the beach so fucking chill? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| You're right. | ||
| Something crazy. | ||
| Beach music isn't chill. | ||
| Well, Jack Johnson is, but you know what I'm saying. | ||
| Classic surf music is... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I guess it's some... | |
| Sounds like the waves. | ||
| Mimic the waves, yeah. | ||
| The way perhaps Dick Dale and the Deltones were imitating the way waves made you feel. | ||
| And now they're playing what it feels like to sit around the campfire on the beach. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, that kind of shit. | ||
| That's kind of a beach town, yeah. | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| Is it runner's high? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There's something about the people that live there. | ||
| Because we used to walk into the running stores and, you know, everybody behind the counter goes, oh, I did 10 today. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hey, Ray. | ||
| And it stays with you. | ||
| Yeah, that's real. | ||
| That stays with you. | ||
| I ride my bicycle everywhere. | ||
| I'm on two wheels. | ||
| I've successfully replaced the automobile in Pasadena. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| I gotta go to the 7-Eleven, I'm on the bicycle. | ||
| You still living in Pasadena? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| I wanna go to the, you know, wherever you get on the bicycle. | ||
| Right. | ||
| In the rain, doesn't matter. | ||
| Really? | ||
| You don't drive a car? | ||
| In Pasadena, as infrequently as possible. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And this is how I cross train, as opposed to, I'm gonna hire a coach and just stay on that bike. | ||
| What if you go to dinner somewhere? | ||
| Don't laugh. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| I'll take it to an extreme. | ||
| When I'm in New York City, I have my bike and everything set up over there, my bicycle and so forth. | ||
| Got a little apartment there. | ||
| I saw a scene in Dr. No. | ||
| Careful what you let your kids see it could be for life. | ||
| Sean Connery comes out of the ocean in one of those black neoprene wetsuits, right? | ||
| And he peels it off, and he's got a blue tuxedo on underneath without a drop of water on it. | ||
| Do I have to finish this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No, I got my jumpsuits and I got my flight suits and everything. | ||
| More than once, I've gone to a club or a dinner. | ||
| I give the door guy or the parking guy or the valise, that's my bike chained up over there in the corner. | ||
| It's $20. | ||
| Keep an eye out. | ||
| Don't let any pros snap that lock. | ||
| And I just stuff my backpack up under the bike like this. | ||
| I do this in the rain. | ||
| I do it in the snow. | ||
| I do it when somebody says the rain. | ||
| I go, yeah, like every kid in Hawaii. | ||
| There are no snow days in Hawaii. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's raining. | ||
| Just assume it. | ||
| There are no snow days in the Dakotas. | ||
| It's snowing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Go to school. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I've done this all over the world. | ||
| I take my bicycles with me wherever I go. | ||
| So when you were in Japan, you took a bike? | ||
| Oh, I know all of Tokyo bikes like I know the roof of my mouth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| I can take you anywhere on those streets. | ||
| I know every alleyway. | ||
| I know all the ways downtown. | ||
| I would routinely make a two-hour trip to my art lessons from where I lived all the way downtown into Ebisu and all the way back like that. | ||
| When you drive around today as opposed to in the old days before cell phones, do you notice a difference with people paying attention? | ||
| Text moves. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know that getting off the line could take a week depending You can see, you know, the light changes and counting on how long it takes is everybody's got to sign off their phone, turn off the computer, do as or whatever. | ||
| By and large, what I have noticed is that when people are watching you, they no longer have their hands in their pockets and pretend to be whistling. | ||
| Now you pretend to stare into your cell phone. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| You fall when a fan or somebody is watching you. | ||
| Instead of you going... | ||
| That's 1960s. | ||
| Now they look at their phone like you pretend. | ||
| More often than not, I'm the only guy who's actually present in a place. | ||
| I walk into a coffee shop. | ||
| You don't carry a cell phone? | ||
| No. | ||
| I walk into a coffee shop or a restaurant or even a club, which is, essentially, a social experience, and everybody is staring into their cell phones at different banquets and different whatever. | ||
| More often than not, I'm the only one who's actually present. | ||
| Looking, seeing, hearing, smelling. | ||
| Have you ever meddled with those things? | ||
| Have you ever fucked with them? | ||
| And you decided it's not for you? | ||
| I'm going to let you in on a little secret. | ||
| Please do. | ||
| I'm very digitally literate. | ||
| I can fly a $6 million helicopter backwards. | ||
| Can you really? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But it forces people to make eye contact. | ||
| You want to talk to me? | ||
| You have to sit just like this. | ||
| And you can't text me, because that's avoidance. | ||
| There's a whole lot of off-ramps I take out of the program. | ||
| What about email? | ||
| I don't. | ||
| You don't email? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| I'm surrounded by individuals. | ||
| And I know exactly what to ask for and what to about. | ||
| So what if they want to get a hold of you? | ||
| They have to go find you? | ||
| At no point in my life, like with yourself, I'm assuming, am I more than five feet away from somebody with a cell phone. | ||
| I was laughing. | ||
| It's like James Bond or some secret agent where even Miguel the Gardener has a smartphone. | ||
| Everyone has one. | ||
| He's going to pull a gun and defend me. | ||
| Did you ever carry them at one point and decide to stop carrying them? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And it became a constant, as show people, we are targets. | ||
| Targets for love, targets for greed, targets for proximity, etc. | ||
| And it became a constant interruption. | ||
| It became a constancy in an effort to find my way to where Shane Dorian is. | ||
| I want to be out on that wave, man. | ||
| I want calm. | ||
| I want to live in New York City. | ||
| I want to live in the middle of the noise and the clamor. | ||
| And I want to be able to keep my heart rate down. | ||
| I want to be able to keep my waist down. | ||
| You dig? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I found myself constantly having to answer that phone and having to deal with, hey, man, how are you? | ||
| Cut to the crash. | ||
| And getting texted is avoidance. | ||
| Nine and a half times out of ten, it's just somebody who didn't really want to talk on the phone. | ||
| You hear this of, well, I texted you. | ||
| You're the only plan I'm landing today. | ||
| But at any given time, The guy driving the car, the assistant, even the gardener has a smartphone and everybody knows you can find me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you keep it that way. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So what year was it where you decided to do this? | ||
| How long ago? | ||
| About four years ago. | ||
| Four years ago. | ||
| You bet. | ||
| So up until then, you were carrying the phone, doing the whole deal, and you went, I don't want this anymore. | ||
| It was constant phone ringing, constant having to check in, constant of... | ||
| I called you, how come you didn't call me back? | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| It became a leash. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It also indicates, you know, as you start to call over and over and over again, it's like a tracer, you follow. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| You have stalkers? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Got a good one? | ||
| No, not right now. | ||
| I got stalkers. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| I got a stalker who makes prank calls. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| Okay? | ||
| I can tell you what time to get to work. | ||
| I can tell you what time he goes home. | ||
| I can tell you if he went to church and then brunch and what time he got home from that. | ||
| I can tell you if you had something to drink the night before and went home and slept it off the next day. | ||
| It's the nature of communications. | ||
| Remember, tracer bullets work both ways, boy. | ||
| You're going to indicate everywhere you are and everything you do and your entire thing of your life is very Orwellian. | ||
| Especially with social media, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And probably the last thing I want you to know about me is how boring I am. | ||
| I'm not kidding! | ||
| Well, there's also a thing of giving in to this non-human device and integrating it with your life. | ||
| Where people just, they never leave it alone. | ||
| They're constantly on it. | ||
| They're checking it. | ||
| You're not even getting anything out of it. | ||
| You're just checking it for nothing. | ||
| You're just checking your email, checking your photos, checking your Instagram. | ||
| There's nothing positive coming out of it. | ||
| It's just like this weird distraction from life. | ||
| Used to use the refrigerator for that. | ||
| Yes, right. | ||
| It's almost the same. | ||
| You're so right. | ||
| It's like a digital version of opening the refrigerator when you know nothing's in there. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| That's so true. | ||
| It's so true. | ||
| It's like a boredom exercise. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a habit. | ||
| You just gotta reach for it or reach for it. | ||
| Do you have one just in case you have to use it? | ||
| I'm giving away all my secrets. | ||
| I am constantly... | ||
| In the grid. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| One of my closest colleagues that I work with two and three nights a week, Colin Smith, has written 17 books on how to run Adobe Photoshop. | ||
| We've been working on an art project together for quite some time. | ||
| We'll debut that at another time. | ||
| I love the internet. | ||
| I love what the DigiFuture has brought to us. | ||
| My only real regret in life is that I didn't have this growing up. | ||
| Go look it up. | ||
| I should have that tattooed and signed by my parents. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah, it's a great time for finding things out. | ||
| If you need information, if you want to learn. | ||
| The Encyclopedia Britannica was what we had. | ||
| Go look it up. | ||
| And Canterbury Records, in case you wanted some music, which was an hour's bike ride each way. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I can keep going. | ||
| And now you can get music instantly. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| For somebody like me, when I was Flavor of the Week the first time, You know, I did all the rock star stuff. | ||
| And one of the first things that I wanted to do, because I'd read that Elton John did this, is you would get them to close the store. | ||
| Ah, yeah. | ||
| And you shop around by yourself? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And no, you got to have a security guy. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Who brings a pillowcase. | ||
| Ah, you put the records on a pillowcase. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And with impunity, you pick your records. | |
| You don't even read the liners. | ||
| If you have a good cover, you're in the case. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What is this? | ||
| Sit alone. | ||
| Asian something. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I remember that. | ||
| I used to buy records based on how cool the cover looked. | ||
| Oh, routinely. | ||
| So give it a chance. | ||
| Routinely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Especially double album covers. | ||
| And, and, and, and. | ||
| And I would routinely, I would shop by weight. | ||
| I would do that at bookstores, too. | ||
| As much as we could carry coming out of the bookstores, because, for example, I like many different kinds of music. | ||
| One of my favorites is danceable electronica. | ||
| R&B, disco, anything that has, I call it floor. | ||
| If it has anything to do with dancing, it's floor. | ||
| And there were no floor stations here in California in the 70s. | ||
| You wanted to hear anything that's, you know, you had KJLH maybe, you know, some small AM kind of a station, but you went to New York. | ||
| You had, let me put the headphones on so I can do the voice. | ||
| This is Paco, WKTU, Shuttle Traffic. | ||
| This time, baby. | ||
| We're missing DJs, right? | ||
| Sorry? | ||
| We're missing DJs. | ||
| That's something that's missing from our culture. | ||
| Poppin' and poppin' and poppin' with the best bet for the boss beat at the top of the pop smash. | ||
| Gold, I'm Diamond Dave. | ||
| No time to waste making the taste, baby. | ||
| Shut up! | ||
| Time to play the record, baby. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Wolfman Jack. | ||
| Those guys are gone. | ||
| That's like a missing segment of our culture. | ||
| I was in Pasadena listening for the first FM radio underground station, which was KPPC. | ||
| It was Metromedia, I believe it was Channel 5. | ||
| Tell me if this gets too boring. | ||
| Here's the history of it. | ||
| During the Cold War, right around 1965-66, it became a legal imperative that all radio stations, regular ones, had to operate an FM band station. | ||
| FM had been around since the 1930s. | ||
| My Uncle Manny remembered it. | ||
| But it never got used. | ||
| It was AM radio. | ||
| KFWB! Channel 98. Right, right, right. | ||
| It was like the mighty 1090, you know, that kind of screaming DJ kind of thing. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because, you know, in case there's a national emergency. | ||
| You were not allowed to take your normal programming, though, from KFWB and put it on your sister station on FM. Had to be different programming. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| You can't just dominate FM because you got the advertisers. | ||
| You're Channel 5. You got a lot of advertisers. | ||
| You got Earl Scheib Carpainter. | ||
| You have Rinso. | ||
| You've got Chase and Sanborn Coffee. | ||
| You're going to squeeze me. | ||
| me right right so you're not allowed to have the same programming and channel five they operate uh kppc which is uh 106.7 today it's krock or whatever you know like 106 right in there and uh uh they brought in literally all these fm stations so you know the the bosses you know all said well uh my nephew he loves that rock stuff you know he's got a lot of records maybe he'll be a dj | ||
| Kind of thing. | ||
| Or who would be a DJ for this kind of stuff? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Who's a non-screamer? | ||
| The jazz guys. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| They brought in Big Daddy Tom Donahue and his wife Rachel. | ||
| And they came there and they started broadcasting on KPPC. And Tom was a jazz DJ. And he would talk just kind of like this. | ||
| And he'd, okay, we got a new Quicksilver here. | ||
| Can't wait till it comes out in stereo. | ||
| Take a listen now to First Side. | ||
| See you in a few. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And we would practice that. | ||
| There's an art to that. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| There's an art to preparing you for a new song. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Okay, got a brand new one here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he used the velvet hand like DJs, you know, like jazz. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jazz guys back then, a lot of them were doing things that cause you to slow down. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And we started doing those things, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Get a little gauge here. | ||
| A little strength of patience. | ||
| Joe knows what I mean. | ||
| I do. | ||
| Right after that. | ||
| And then it would set you up for the music. | ||
| You'd actually enjoy the music a little bit more because of that guy. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It enhanced it. | ||
| Okay, here's a little something. | ||
| You were kind of co-conspiring. | ||
| If streaming services were smart, they would bring that shit back. | ||
| They'd find someone. | ||
| You know, because streaming services are the new radio, right? | ||
| I mean, that's where a lot of people get their music now. | ||
| Agreed. | ||
| Are you talking about Pandora and Spotify? | ||
| Yeah, all those things. | ||
| That's sort of what Apple's pitch was. | ||
| They have a whole radio section on Apple Music. | ||
| They have DJs? | ||
| Yeah, they have shows and... | ||
| Well, the DJ is... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Influencers are running them, but for the most part... | |
| Yeah, but like as a sports net, what is it in the natural? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Great movie, Bob Redford. | ||
| Duvall. | ||
| Duvall's a writer. | ||
| He's a writer. | ||
| And they get into a little bit of an argument. | ||
| He says, you don't play baseball. | ||
| He says, yeah, but... | ||
| On a good day, I can make it look a little bit more interesting. | ||
| I can make it a little more exciting. | ||
| To help you see what you... | ||
| To help you understand what... | ||
| I'm paraphrasing, of course. | ||
| Sure, that's what I do with color commentary. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| And that's an art form that implicates everything. | ||
| Drama, pathos, hilarity, all in one paragraph. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I've watched you go from... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like flipping a channel. | ||
| Seamlessly. | ||
| I grew up with the great Scully Cosell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So tell me, so tell me, Ali. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So Cassius, please, it's Ali. | ||
| Cassius, okay. | ||
| And we would imitate that voice. | ||
| You know, trying to get that kind of an eloquence out of it, you know. | ||
| But... | ||
| You have DJs. | ||
| They're not really DJs. | ||
| They are representatives of a lifestyle. | ||
| For example, I'm going into DJ voice because I got the headphones on. | ||
| This is why I don't wear the headphones. | ||
| You've become too aware. | ||
| Yeah, the sun goes down. | ||
| I haven't been to sleep since the late 80s. | ||
| What was I talking about? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I started riffing there. | |
| DJs now. | ||
| DJs now aren't really DJs. | ||
| When you listen, for example, to Sirius XM, you have, for example, the country artist. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And it's No Shoes Radio. | ||
| And, you know, he's not a humorist. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| He's not even an interlocutor. | ||
| And behold, and so it came to pass, like in Greek tragedy, and so it came to pass that the sun came and the war was won. | ||
| He's not that. | ||
| It's Kenny Chesney going, and I say it with respect, you know. | ||
| Hi, this is Kenny, and I was just walking down here in Panama City, and my phone went dead. | ||
| No, I walked inside, and I asked these good fellas right here at the Joe Rogan Barbecue to fire it up, if I could just sort of charge it up, and they said, hell yeah. | ||
| So I just want to tell you, y'all come down to Rogan Barbecue, and see, you can always find us right here on No Shoes Radio. | ||
| Oh, so there's something. | ||
| It's not really... | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's not the same. | |
| Do you follow? | ||
| It's not announcing. | ||
| He's kind of being. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Tom Petty. | ||
| He was a co-conspirator. | ||
| You know, like, hey, man, I'm down here in the basement, man. | ||
| I'm listening to some record. | ||
| Come on down. | ||
| We'll fire up the bong. | ||
| And check this out. | ||
| This is fucking tasty. | ||
| This is... | ||
| It's an import... | ||
| I had friends like that. | ||
| You did? | ||
| Well, they could choose the music, too. | ||
| That was the other thing about DJs. | ||
| They would choose the music. | ||
| I don't know if... | ||
| They were tastemakers. | ||
| Oh, well, the FM radio did. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You bet. | ||
| Yes, you bet. | ||
| And, yeah, that makes a big difference. | ||
| I did not think about that. | ||
| I was listening to WBCN in Boston. | ||
| It was, like, 1980s. | ||
| And they wanted to play Michael Jackson. | ||
| And the guy said, listen, I know this isn't rock. | ||
| Because WBCN was the rock of Boston. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And they were like, look, I know this isn't rock, but damn, this is good music. | ||
| And they played Billie Jean. | ||
| I remember thinking, wow, what a bold choice. | ||
| Well, it's a bold choice in a certain sense, okay? | ||
| And the certain sense is that after a while, FM radio became very codified. | ||
| You know, just like the horse races. | ||
| Somewhere in the mid-70s, late-70s, it became a playlist. | ||
| And the DJs no longer picked their own records. | ||
| Program directors picked the records, okay? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it became very specific. | ||
| Target demo. | ||
| We want a home in and whatever. | ||
| Now keep in mind when Howard Stern left regular radio, terrestrial radio for the stratosphere, I got his job in New York City. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| I was broadcasting in seven different cities. | ||
| I forgot you did that. | ||
| Okay, Dallas, New York, Philly I think I was in, etc., etc. | ||
| And It turns out I think what they wanted was a version of Howard Stern. | ||
| Okay, great. | ||
| It'll be a third-class Howard Stern or a first-class David Lee. | ||
| My approach to it is very different than his would be. | ||
| We're two very different people. | ||
| He's a personality. | ||
| It's all about interaction. | ||
| I see myself as show people. | ||
| I'm music first. | ||
| So the first thing I'm going to pick when we throw a barbecue is not the food or the guest list, but what's the music? | ||
| White people listen to Bob Marley when we're on vacation. | ||
| And when we celebrate things, we listen to Kool and the Gang. | ||
| And I would play those and the ratings were going up and they were pissing off management. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Well, they said, we feel that Leonard Skinner and Nickelback are more appropriate for your audience. | ||
| So the ratings were going up and they were upset? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And because you couldn't rein me in, okay? | ||
| Now, keep in mind, I hired Cool and the Gang to open for Van Halen tour before last. | ||
| You have never seen so many people dancing in one place. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Celebration. | |
| Because that's the sound of every wedding, bar mitzvah, prom, bachelor party. | ||
| Because this is ladies' night. | ||
| Right. | ||
| and the feeling oh oh what did I and you gotta sing that you look at each other as you're driving going oh what did I so what did they say to you before you took the job like what was the what was the conversation when you agreed to do it what did you think was gonna happen as opposed to what did happen well what you say and what is real Yeah, that's the problem, right? | ||
| We discussed doing commercials, for example. | ||
| And I don't feel comfortable doing commercials unless it's something I actually use, you know, like sunglasses or cigarettes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Beyond that, you know... | ||
| Vermont Care Bear kind of a thing. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So it was uncomfortable from the beginning. | ||
| I got fired for playing too much ethnic music and for late night humor too early in the morning. | ||
| But that was Howard Stern's whole deal was late night humor. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| It's a different kind of humor. | ||
| What was your deal as opposed to his? | ||
| Well, whenever we brought on porn stars, I actually knew them. | ||
| We'd already gone through the getting to know you phase seasons earlier. | ||
| Did they expect you to do all talk or did they want you to play music as well? | ||
| No, it's just my sense of humor is different, unique, as is his and as is yours. | ||
| We have a league of imitations in our end of the business in broadcasting, okay? | ||
| But... | ||
| There's no snare drum and hi-hat, nor is there for Howard, you follow. | ||
| Again, I start with the music. | ||
| I start with the ambiance. | ||
| And if humor arises or personalities arise or we have guests, great. | ||
| If we don't, that's fine, too. | ||
| And I think they expected others. | ||
| What I showed up with was... | ||
| It also ranged... | ||
| It wasn't always funny. | ||
| Do you think that it was just maybe something you would have excelled at if they had different expectations? | ||
| Like, instead of following Howard Stern, they just did the David Lee Roth show. | ||
| Oh, you bet. | ||
| Do you think you'd still be doing it? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Their expectations was the funny, the funny, interview the guests, have pop... | ||
| Culture funny guests right in the subject matter just as we've touched on subjects here that are Hilarious and subjects are pretty dense Yeah, as I call it, you know, it's gonna detonate halfway down the turnpike. | ||
| Oh, that's what he fucking meant Mmm. | ||
| Yeah, it's not stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's gonna go away real quick Do you have you thought about doing that now? | |
| Like what if Apple came to you or one of these streaming services came to you and wanted to do something like that? | ||
| They always arrive with expectations and And the expectations, just as we discussed the three phases of Anna Nicole Smith and Elvis, which Dave are you referring to? | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Well, I just think with someone like you, I mean, I'm not a program director, but if I was, I would say just let him be him. | ||
| Just figure it out. | ||
| Just give it time to grow. | ||
| That's what people don't do. | ||
| They meddle. | ||
| They meddle. | ||
| Look, from what I know of you, you're going to do your best at everything. | ||
| Everything you do, you're going to do your best. | ||
| If I was going to hire you, that's what I would say. | ||
| Everybody get the fuck away from him. | ||
| He's going to do his best. | ||
| Now let him hire who he wants to hire and do what he wants to do and put what he wants to put on and let him figure it out. | ||
| But you hired David Lee Roth. | ||
| You didn't hire Mike Fitzgerald and Ken Buchanan or whoever the fuck the other people are that work in the office that also want the jizz and the soup. | ||
| No, you hired David Lee Roth. | ||
| Let David Lee Roth be David Lee Roth and let it find his legs. | ||
| That's a difficult entity because it comes with a lot of history. | ||
| And then the folks will start conducting. | ||
| Well, you've got to play this. | ||
| You've got to play this. | ||
| And it has a very specific expectation, usually. | ||
| However, in this age, there's a lot of freedoms. | ||
| There's a lot of... | ||
| You know, what you're discussing is something that I think about occasionally. | ||
| So it seems like something you'd be open to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe I could get you a job just from this particular interview. | ||
| I would be very open to it. | ||
| You know, they've approached me before to talk about it. | ||
| My interest in music is diverse, but it's energized. | ||
| Switched on. | ||
| Do you know Henry Rollins? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| You know, he does his own radio show and he picks his own playlist. | ||
| It's like one of the last few things that a person like him is able to do like that. | ||
| And he does it once a week, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think so, yeah. | |
| I think one night a week he does. | ||
| And he loves it. | ||
| Something else that people have approached me for is writing a column. | ||
| Some of the good magazines have approached me. | ||
| Big ones. | ||
| About becoming a writer. | ||
| Is that interesting to you? | ||
| You bet. | ||
| Yeah, it seems like it would be. | ||
| You bet. | ||
| It's a different sound when I write. | ||
| It's in a bit of a different voice. | ||
| It's... | ||
| My sense of humor comes out a little bit more in terms of darkness. | ||
| I remember reading an article in New York Magazine's Farbags 1968. I don't remember the element. | ||
| The fellow was the theater critic for New York Magazine, and the title was In Defense of Booing. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Why do we always have to tolerate clapping, especially for shitty performances? | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's the clapper who claps because they're part of the gang. | ||
| And there's the clapper who yells bravo so that they exist. | ||
| I am heard. | ||
| And he talks about how, you know, he gets thrown out of an opera for booing and everybody knew. | ||
| Theater critic for 36 years at New York Magazine. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You know. | ||
| In Italy, they permit booing, and I support that. | ||
| America stands alive. | ||
| Well, that kind of sneaks in, not just as a form of negative targeting, but as a form of elevating. | ||
| You dig? | ||
| You don't go to the golf swing guy, put on all the electrodes. | ||
| They do the slow motion thing so you can go, you're great, Joe. | ||
| No, he wants to go, see, your wrist. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| See what you're doing with the elbow? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You're making a mistake. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| He's there to identify the flaw. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If there's no flaws, there's no booing. | ||
| You know, a lot of folks are going to go, Jesus, man, you concentrate on the negative. | ||
| I love booing as much as going yay. | ||
| In fact, I can think of certain heavy metal records that we could discuss on the airplane from LA to New York. | ||
| That's a five-hour flight. | ||
| And I could discuss the record endlessly as long as we're going boo. | ||
| If we're discussing what's wrong with it, you can go for five hours. | ||
| What's great about it, how long are you going to sustain that? | ||
| 20 minutes? | ||
| It's really smart. | ||
| and smart. | ||
| The criticism, you know, identifying the flaw is not negative. | ||
| I'm having a ball over here. | ||
| A good example is Ed Wood's monster movies. | ||
| You see the string, you see the smoke, you see the flying saucer, it looks fake. | ||
| That's a version you feel smugly superior. | ||
| You always say, ah, look at that thing. | ||
| That's a form of buoy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, today, if people weren't doing that, you wouldn't have Black Panther. | ||
| You wouldn't have Spider-Man. | ||
| You wouldn't have Avengers and all the amazing special effects and CGI and everything else. | ||
| It's because of high expectations. | ||
| Oh, it's just somebody going, I see the string! | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Joe! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| All right, let me invent computers and I'll get back to you. | ||
| David Lee Roth, we just did three hours. | ||
| Can you believe that? | ||
| Time flies when you don't know what you're doing, Joe. | ||
| You know what you're doing, you sly son of a bitch. | ||
| Doing nothing means a lot to me. | ||
| Did we really nail three hours? | ||
| Yeah, we really did. | ||
| Tell people one more time about your product line and what website it is. | ||
| Inc! | ||
| The original. | ||
| And please say it that way. | ||
| Ink. | ||
| The original. | ||
| Ink. | ||
| The original. | ||
| Not theatric enough? | ||
| Ink. | ||
| The original. | ||
| Oh, she's pretty. | ||
| That's a good move. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Get a pretty girl and sell your shit. | ||
| We make it for everybody who's got ink. | ||
| Anybody who's got tattoos and stuff. | ||
| Virtually everything that you're going to use in the boudoir, the bathroom, anything you're going to put in the locker. | ||
| But especially that brightener, man. | ||
| That stuff's the shit. | ||
| That will read. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| No more rubbing it with your finger, etc. | ||
| And we got a whole product line coming in. | ||
| Laugh to Win is the name of the company. | ||
| I'm going to order today. | ||
| I'm going to order a bunch of shit today. | ||
| Oh, you don't have to order. | ||
| We'll have it delivered. | ||
| I'm going to order just because I love you. | ||
| God bless. | ||
| David Lee Roth, you're a bad motherfucker. | ||
| Thank you for being here. | ||
| Joe, that's a very special belt to wear. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| David Lee Roth, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Good night. |
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