Sept. 30, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:37:20
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| We willed it into existence to Sturgill, motherfucking Simpson, and his band. | ||
| Just let's introduce everybody. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Want to do that? | ||
| Yeah, you can do it. | ||
| Alright, next to you is my drummer, Miles. | ||
| We have Chuck. | ||
| He plays the bass. | ||
| Down on the end is Bob. | ||
| He plays the keys. | ||
| And this is our head of security. | ||
| This is Justin. | ||
| He's a... | ||
| You know, we weren't sure about this place, so we brought... | ||
| It's a sketchy joint. | ||
| You guys were fucking fantastic last night. | ||
| We had a great time. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| The Troubadour is such a great place to see you, too, because it's so intimate, man. | ||
| It's a really interesting place. | ||
| It's so tight. | ||
| It's so old school, and a fucking million shows have happened in that joint. | ||
| Everybody. | ||
| Everybody. | ||
| Yeah, it was interesting for us. | ||
| We didn't feel like it was a good show. | ||
| I think we kind of woke up about halfway through, but also the first time we've been this close to people in a while. | ||
| It was a great show, man. | ||
| I enjoyed the fuck out of it. | ||
| And Suzanne from Honey Honey, Suzanne Santos, she came with me too. | ||
| She loved it. | ||
| It was great, man. | ||
| We had a good time. | ||
| It wasn't a bad show either. | ||
| No! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Come on! | |
| It was amazing. | ||
| We had a great fucking time. | ||
| And it's such a treat to see someone in such a small venue. | ||
| That venue is so... | ||
| Everybody was jammed up on top of everybody. | ||
| So when people went nuts for the songs, you felt it. | ||
| You really realize when you're in a venue like that how much that contributes to the experience. | ||
| You know, intimate venues. | ||
| A venue can ruin a good show. | ||
| Sure, yeah. | ||
| I don't really like the amphitheater, like the outdoor amphitheater. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| The tin roof sheds. | ||
| I feel the same. | ||
| There's no connection, because everybody that is close to you is sitting down, and then there's this giant picnic going on behind them up on the grass. | ||
| It's always just a weird separation. | ||
| What happened, Jamie? | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| I thought you were trying something new out. | ||
| Yeah, the amphitheaters are weird. | ||
| I mean, they could be great. | ||
| Oh, there's the picture from the Troubadour last night. | ||
| That was fun, man. | ||
| That place, I mean, how many people is that seat? | ||
| Probably 400, I think. | ||
| 500. They're stuffed in there. | ||
| That is a fire hazard. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Bobby's organ's a fire hazard. | ||
| It was a good time, though. | ||
| It really was. | ||
| I saw Everlast perform there recently. | ||
| He was there just a few weeks ago. | ||
| I met that dude once. | ||
| He's awesome. | ||
| He is a chill guy, man. | ||
| He really is. | ||
| He's the best. | ||
| It was at this guy, Dom. | ||
| It's like a skate shop. | ||
| My buddy Ian took me to this skate shop. | ||
| He had a bunch of sneakers there. | ||
| I was looking for some sneakers. | ||
| And it was just this little sleepy skate shop. | ||
| And then he's like, yeah, let's go out back. | ||
| And we walked out back and there's like 12 X Games champions back there just slaying this half pipe. | ||
| I've never really seen that shit up close like that. | ||
| Just like, you know, thrashing. | ||
| And it was intense. | ||
| And then we're sitting there hanging out and then fucking Everlast shows up. | ||
| And I was just like, this dude from House of Pain is crazy. | ||
| But he was so cool. | ||
| He's super cool, but I remember one of the first times I ever met him, it's one of those weird ones where you're like, am I really hanging out with this guy? | ||
| Is this really Everlast from House of Pain? | ||
| You know, Jump Around was such a goddamn gigantic hit. | ||
| It was like one of the greatest hits of all time. | ||
| One of the greatest, I mean, I guess you would call that a hip-hop song, right? | ||
| But it was a giant hit with my generation, so to be hanging out with him was super surreal. | ||
| I'm sure he's had a very interesting journey. | ||
| Fuck yeah, he has. | ||
| He was the first guy I ever smoked a joint with inside a casino, too. | ||
| He just fired it up. | ||
| I go, where do you want to smoke that? | ||
| He goes, where? | ||
| He just starts smoking it. | ||
| I was like, alright. | ||
| I guess we're gonna do that. | ||
| That was a pretty, that album, I think I was in like 7th grade, 6th grade? | ||
| It was very nefarious. | ||
| I remember that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nefarious is a good word for it. | ||
| You know, I rip shit, kill it, cut your gut and spill it, treat you like a gas tank, take that ass and fill it. | ||
| Yes, that's nefarious. | ||
| Go for a ride to where I reside, put your face on my pillow and have you weeping like a willow. | ||
| It's what it is, y'all. | ||
| It's prolific. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's prolific. | ||
| That's intimidating. | ||
| Right? | ||
| For sure. | ||
| That doesn't freak you out a little. | ||
| Especially if someone says it with his voice. | ||
| You know, all smooth and chill. | ||
| And a Larry Bird jersey. | ||
| You've tried a lot of different forms of music. | ||
| Do you ever think you would ever do hip-hop? | ||
| Oh God, no. | ||
| That would be a weird stretch. | ||
| Well, there's just so many other people that should do it other than me. | ||
| I would love to, but no. | ||
| I would love to produce a hip-hop record with Bob. | ||
| I think we could probably make some fat fucking tracks and just get some rappers to do the actual art. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know what you're saying. | ||
| I know how you're feeling, but I think you could pull it off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like rapping? | |
| Yeah, I think you could. | ||
| Sturge Ill? | ||
| Yes, you could. | ||
| He kind of already does. | ||
| Alright, you gonna give me up, man? | ||
| Yeah, he kind of raps a little bit. | ||
| No bullshit. | ||
| I spit on the bus a little bit, truth be told. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You'd have to be lit, but you could do it. | |
| You know who can fucking rap for a white guy? | ||
| Shia LaBeouf, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can he? | |
| Yeah, he did some radio show years back out here in L.A., and it was actually impressive. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, his freestyle was... | ||
| It was fire. | ||
| For a dude who's a white guy, it's a risky choice. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's a risky choice. | ||
| He brought it. | ||
| And you've got to figure, you've got to decide whether or not you're going to go with the urban access. | ||
| I want to produce a Shia LaBeouf album. | ||
| A rap album. | ||
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There you go. | |
| There you go. | ||
| Open up the doors. | ||
| Manifest it. | ||
| Make it happen. | ||
| Yeah, white guy rappers have to be real careful with their accent. | ||
| You've got to figure out how you're going to do that. | ||
| Yeah, that's always weird. | ||
| How you're going to pull that off? | ||
| I went to high school with a lot of those white guys that tried to talk like they were black. | ||
| I never could understand what was going on. | ||
| It's a weird one. | ||
| It's a weird one. | ||
| Miles and I went to the same high school. | ||
| He graduated like 15 years after me, so he knows about the Wofo. | ||
| Woodford County. | ||
| What I'm talking about. | ||
| I'm sure it was still very much a thing. | ||
| Oh, it still is. | ||
| We were just talking about how few white guys become successful rappers. | ||
| Of all the things that people attempt to do, that might be one of like, there's only like a few. | ||
| There's like, you know, Eric from Everlast from House of Pain. | ||
| There's Eminem. | ||
| There's Mac Miller. | ||
| Mac Miller. | ||
| Yeah, Third Base. | ||
| Third Base, for sure. | ||
| Those guys. | ||
| Those guys were great. | ||
| Eminem, of course. | ||
| Yeah, Eminem, of course. | ||
| He might be number one. | ||
| Yeah, he's number one, I think. | ||
| He's just an all-time great rapper, period. | ||
| White guy or not. | ||
| But, like, white guys that want to rap? | ||
| Boy. | ||
| The white guys that want to rap versus white guys who are successful rapping, that fucking number's stupendous. | ||
| Those are not good odds. | ||
| That's intimidating, right? | ||
| There's no denying that some white guys have pulled it off. | ||
| You remember Snow? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Informa. | ||
| Like, he had, like, a whole... | ||
| He did the patois thing. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Talking to Mike, brother. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| I just said he did the patois thing. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| He went Jamaican on us, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But it was really good. | ||
| Which is even weirder. | ||
| Unless he's from Jamaica. | ||
| Toronto. | ||
| Oh, was he? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, it's not better, but there's a lot of... | |
| That just keeps getting better. | ||
| That's Canada. | ||
| They're nice as hell up there. | ||
| Go to the mic. | ||
| Snow is from Toronto. | ||
| I would never have guessed that. | ||
| Yeah, let's look that up. | ||
| Good call. | ||
| I loved that one song, though. | ||
| That Informer song was badass. | ||
| That's insane if he's from Toronto. | ||
| I have no idea what we're talking about. | ||
| It doesn't say what city, but he's from Toronto. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's from Toronto. | |
| Born in Toronto. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He went Jamaican. | ||
| And no one else even ventured to step in his footsteps. | ||
| It was like a successful hit song, but it didn't open up a whole door of Jamaican. | ||
| It didn't even open up a door for him, man. | ||
| That's the only fucking song anybody ever heard. | ||
| But how could it be that good? | ||
| That always freaks me out about your business, is that there are a few cats that come up with one song that just fucking smashes it. | ||
| Well, that happens because... | ||
| Whoever is in charge of their career has one veteran's interest, which is pushing that single, and then it does its thing. | ||
| And if they can't come up with the identical thing again, they don't know what to do, and then they just stick them on a shelf and you never hear from them again. | ||
| I know, but it's so final. | ||
| Like, if you're a comic and you have a shitty special, you can get your shit together and come up with a good next special. | ||
| There's nothing like a huge hit to destroy your music career. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| How many, I mean, really, really good songs, if you stop and think about history, were from a band where you heard, like, maybe two of their songs ever? | ||
| I would say 90% of them. | ||
| So many. | ||
| So many. | ||
| In the pop, in that world, you know, if you're, like, radio songs and syndication, yeah, this is usually... | ||
| How much is that changing for you guys because of the internet? | ||
| I mean, when you first started your career, how much of an effect did the internet have on promoting things or getting the word out on things versus now? | ||
| Huge. | ||
| Because we're not on radio even now. | ||
| When did you... | ||
| We had AAA play now and things like that, but you're not going to... | ||
| I guess early on touring, blogs and reviews, press and things like that get circulated, word of mouth from shows. | ||
| People come to shows, they get their mind blown, they talk about it on Twitter. | ||
| And then it's just this organic grassroots kind of thing. | ||
| And you sort of realize at a point you don't really need any of that other antiquated shit. | ||
| But to make it happen like we did, you have to go out and do the laps. | ||
| You have to put the time in and earn your medals. | ||
| You can't just sit on YouTube talking about yourself all the time. | ||
| That's a big part, right? | ||
| Your shows. | ||
| How many live shows you guys are doing? | ||
| Well, now it's already out there, so people just do it for you, really. | ||
| It spreads easier and faster now, but Miles has been with... | ||
| We've been playing together since he was 19, man. | ||
| In a van, four people sleeping on one floor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| This was about two weeks ago. | ||
| You drive seven hours and you hope 13 people show up. | ||
| To maybe buy a t-shirt and shit so you got gas to get to the next town. | ||
| There's a lot of life questioning nights out there in the early days. | ||
| Do you know who Roy Wood is? | ||
| Roy Wood Jr. Really hilarious stand-up comedian. | ||
| He had a really similar story when he was talking about his beginnings as a comedian. | ||
| That he would get these gigs, and he wouldn't have enough money to get home. | ||
| And that he would get gigs, and while he was there, he would take a job. | ||
| Like a day job. | ||
| Like a day laborer. | ||
| He would wear fucking hard hats and gloves and shit, work all day, and then do the stand-up at night. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| Those guys who go through that kind of stuff, there's no substitute for that. | ||
| No. | ||
| There's no other way. | ||
| There's something about the seasoning of the unsuccessful or barely successful early years, it seems, for all my favorite artists. | ||
| It's so critical. | ||
| They all have it, whether they're comics or whether they're musicians. | ||
| There's that fucking grind in the beginning where it could go left or right. | ||
| You could make it or it could completely fall apart. | ||
| You have to be almost delusional and a little crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I had a great job that I quit to go do this shit finally, like give it a go. | ||
| I was probably 35 years old. | ||
| There was a lot of nights where I was like, what in the fuck am I doing? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But that's why last night is so fun. | ||
| Because nobody else... | ||
| Well, I wrote a song about turtles and drugs one year and nobody else did. | ||
| So I just... | ||
| Yeah, whenever a country music song comes out with DMT in it, you got my attention. | ||
| Psilocybin, LSD. That was a great song, though. | ||
| It was a great song to introduce the world to a different idea. | ||
| It's just music, man. | ||
| Whether it's country or psychedelic or psychedelic country, if it's great, it's just great. | ||
| And you switch shit up. | ||
| This new album is so weird, man. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It's great, but it's so interesting. | ||
| If you go back to your first album and then listen to this album, you'll be like, that's not the same fucking guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But it is. | |
| It is the same guy. | ||
| They're all different expressions or interests. | ||
| but that's really exciting you know when when someone mixes their style up as much as you do and you guys put together these albums you know each one of them is they're uniquely you but they're all different it's a it's a you've got a real weird thing going on man like if you went back and listened to your first album and then listened to the they're all awesome but they're awesome in like all these different ways man It's so cool to see all this experimentation, like this anime thing you're doing with this. | ||
| It's really badass. | ||
| That was really just sort of a lot of things lining up out of my control. | ||
| That movie, we only started on that literally a little over a year ago. | ||
| And just the way it all came together and how many people were working simultaneously is the only reason it got finished as fast as it did. | ||
| But it definitely delayed me releasing the record for at least a year. | ||
| But it's such a great idea. | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean, you know, if we're here to... | ||
| Well, the whole reason we went in the studio and made this thing is because we reached a point of burnout, I definitely did. | ||
| And then you also reach a point where now you realize the only way we're going to survive and make money as musicians is touring. | ||
| So why wouldn't we make this as fun for ourselves as possible? | ||
| You play these festivals and then you're rocking out three or four songs and then people are jumping at them. | ||
| And I just kind of asked everybody, why can't we just go do that for two hours and make music that people can dance and have a great time to and still... | ||
| Miles has probably been listening to me talk about Making a fucking dubstep rock and roll record for five years and we finally just did it. | ||
| But it's great that you take those steps. | ||
| These guys help a lot, too. | ||
| We were touring in 2018, and the music was just sort of going there anyway on stage. | ||
| How's it going there anyway on stage? | ||
| We were just stretching out more abandoning core fundamental structures of the songs. | ||
| I don't want to be a karaoke machine anymore. | ||
| I just got so bored and burnt out with staying up there and playing this shit the same way every night. | ||
| And you do isolate some fans, but at the same time, if we're not inspired, how the fuck is anybody else going to be? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So eventually you will find your audience that wants to go with you. | ||
| And when these songs are turning into 10 and 15 minutes, just me being high and having a good time, you know? | ||
| I caught that, the Brace for Impact on Colbert. | ||
| Somebody shared it. | ||
| I hadn't seen it basically since we did it in 2016, and it's almost a completely different song. | ||
| You could literally see the changes from 2016 to now. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Yeah, so we made this record June of 2017 and had to sit on it, couldn't play any of it. | ||
| You know, you go out and you do the other thing. | ||
| So now, almost two and a half years later from the time we recorded in the studio and I was writing those lyrics, we were making this music in the moment. | ||
| We'll go out, we've been rehearsing for two weeks and it's already at a point like, shit, I wish we could have recorded it now. | ||
| Because you have all these ideas that you just don't have in that moment. | ||
| And you get... | ||
| A year and a half later on a tour playing that material, it's a whole other animal, you know, because you just found all these little idiosyncratic nuances and things that you can flourish that you just don't think about when you're in a control room for 18 hours a day. | ||
| Is that a common tactic, where you're always changing your songs? | ||
| You're always fucking with them and continuing to? | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But is it common with other artists? | ||
| It should be. | ||
| It should be if they're, you know, worth a shit. | ||
| But is that a normal thing, like when you guys get together and talk about how you make songs? | ||
| Like, comedians talk about how they make jokes. | ||
| We don't really talk about it. | ||
| You guys don't ever get together? | ||
| I'll write lyrics and stuff, or maybe have a rough idea, structure, and form. | ||
| But these guys are all bonafide musical geniuses, man. | ||
| Their flavor... | ||
| that's why you know like on this record i've never done it before but um at a certain point anybody that's in the room is contributing whether they're writing the songs or not just their presence the energy they bring to that track like they're if you got a guy that plays the perfect thing the first take what are you really producing you know you're hiring you're hiring someone for what for as a tool and you know like nashville | ||
| there's all these session players so in a sense it's just this giant toolbox. | ||
| And there might be ten guys you could call today to do this thing, but two of them might be way more perfect for this specific thing than those other eight. | ||
| They're all badasses, but you can flavor. | ||
| I just found the right flavors that I want to stand up there with. | ||
| I could make ten records with these guys, and they're all going to sound like ten different bands. | ||
| Now, is this because you guys don't have, I mean, how much of influence do record companies have on new bands? | ||
| Like when new bands are coming up and they're trying to put together their music, how much influence do record companies have on the creative process? | ||
| It just depends. | ||
| Did they discover them or are they jumping on board with something that's already working? | ||
| Well, I mean, someone as an artist, like someone looking at you as an artist, you go, yeah, you let him do whatever the fuck he wants. | ||
| No, that's a very rare thing. | ||
| It's rare. | ||
| You're dealing with record companies. | ||
| I got it contractually written into my contract that nobody could tell me what to do. | ||
| So it's common that you get fucked with. | ||
| Everybody's going to have their two cents, their input. | ||
| Here's what we really want you to want to do. | ||
| Right, because probably I would think there would be executives who go, stop, stop fucking with it right there. | ||
| Just leave it right there. | ||
| Trust me. | ||
| Put it out like that. | ||
| Those would be like actual record men. | ||
| The guys that used to run the record business, they knew what the real shit was, and you don't fuck with the real shit. | ||
| But there's very few of those people actually working in the record business anymore. | ||
| It's all like 25, 30-year-old bottom-line quarterly report motherfuckers. | ||
| It's all about the money. | ||
| But wouldn't you think that excellence would bring money? | ||
| Especially today, in this day and age, with the internet? | ||
| They can sell excellence, but then they have to work and find it. | ||
| As opposed to formulating this tried and true Mrs. Butterworth recipe. | ||
| Proven. | ||
| Just give me 17 of those. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| It would suck to be in a business with art. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Or like thinking about it like a business. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's art. | ||
| It's a product. | ||
| But your music is art. | ||
| You get enough people involved, anything turns into a product. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it's just the business aspect of it. | ||
| Like someone trying to think about what's the best way to sell it? | ||
| What's the best way to push it? | ||
| What if we change this and added that? | ||
| What if we put some gospel singers in the background? | ||
| What if we did this? | ||
| You know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| But you've avoided it. | ||
| What if we get this person to rap a verse on it? | ||
| How'd you avoid it? | ||
| What did you do to avoid most of that bullshit? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Still figuring it out. | |
| I don't know, man. | ||
| Just didn't do it. | ||
| I say no a lot. | ||
| I think that's the thing to say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I'm lazy as shit, too. | ||
| I got to really want to do something. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Especially when you don't have to, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Man. | |
| What were you doing at 35 when you quit? | ||
| You working on a railroad, Sean? | ||
| I was an operations manager at a rail yard, an intermodal yard out in Utah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I'd run in a rail yard just overseeing the switching crews that when the trains would pull in from the east and west side of the yard, we would break those trains apart and look at other manifests and drive cars off other rails and build them into those trains and then crew them again and get them on the line. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| So I was working like 90 hour weeks. | ||
| Mostly cleaning up train wrecks and derailments or like they blew a switch and put three cars on the ground. | ||
| We were the central artery in the Midwest. | ||
| Really, that corridor is kind of the cross section of the entire country's shipping commerce. | ||
| So if we fucked up and tied up the main lines, then we kind of shut down the railroad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Do you know what's fucked up? | ||
| You could never tell a kid, hey, you want to make meaningful music? | ||
| This is what you got to do. | ||
| You got to struggle in difficult jobs until you're about 35 and barely get to where you want to be, where you're really kind of freaking out about your future, and then pour yourself your heart and soul and then find success after that. | ||
| That's a good move. | ||
| If you want to have impactful music. | ||
| But if you get into music early on in your life and make a career early on in your life, you miss everything that you did by being an older... | ||
| You're a 35-year-old man that makes a jump. | ||
| That's a bold move. | ||
| That makes sense, but there's been a lot of incredible artists that made some truly visionary shit at 20. For sure. | ||
| But there's a life experience aspect to your music. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| I wouldn't have any of this shit to write about if I'd done it at 20. God knows what I'd be writing about. | ||
| Probably pussy. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you're young? | ||
| What are you thinking about? | ||
| If you're talking about stars and horoscopes and shit, you're probably bullshitting people. | ||
| This podcast got weird real quick, huh? | ||
| He does that now. | ||
| Sturgill talks about stars and horoscopes now. | ||
| What do you think about horoscopes? | ||
| Do you think that shit's real? | ||
| Like astrology? | ||
| What do you think about horoscopes? | ||
| I'm actually interested in what he thinks about horoscopes. | ||
| Yeah, what do you think about it, man? | ||
| I mean, somebody's just making shit up for other people to read. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You can move that mic so you don't have to break your neck. | |
| Yeah, you're just making stuff up. | ||
| If you're reading a horoscope or someone's trying to give you some sort of indication of what's going to happen serendipitously or by fate, either way, it's just someone making the shit up. | ||
| It's just horseshit. | ||
| People looking for patterns, I think. | ||
| I'd have to learn about like the astrology aspect if they're trying to, if they're using that or something effectively. | ||
| Numerology is the only thing in that world that even remotely interests me. | ||
| How's that interesting? | ||
| It's based on like mathematics and universal equations and shit. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Basically like don't. | ||
| Some people can get a little loopy with it, and they won't fly on an airplane. | ||
| They'll have their numerologist look at the flight numbers or the number on the plane and how these things all correlate, whether this is a wise decision or not. | ||
| That, to me, is just like, what? | ||
| You know, Nancy Reagan was all deep into that. | ||
| Really? | ||
| She was deep into astrology, actually. | ||
| And she had some famous astrologer who would do the readings for them, and she would dictate whether or not Ronald Reagan should go and do shit. | ||
| Based on numerology. | ||
| Based on astrology. | ||
| It's not the same, right? | ||
| Numerology is just numbers, but astrology is... | ||
| But didn't she? | ||
| Is that the case? | ||
| I'm pretty sure she was, like, balls deep into it. | ||
| Like, really into astrology. | ||
|
unidentified
|
After the assassination... | |
| Should we look that up? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| We should look that up. | ||
| Yeah, we're looking that up. | ||
| Jamie's always on it. | ||
| You got it? | ||
| What do you got? | ||
| Here it goes. | ||
| Quigley was born in Kansas City, Missouri. | ||
| She was called on by First Lady Nancy Reagan in 1981 after John Hinckley's attempted assassination of the President and stayed on as the White House astrologer in secret until being ousted in 1988 by ousted former Chief of Staff Donald Reagan. | ||
| She said, I was responsible for timing all press conferences, most speeches, the State of the Union addresses, the takeoffs, and the landings of Air Force One. | ||
| What the fuck is what she claimed, though? | ||
| She claimed a bigger role in her 1990 book. | ||
| What does Joan say? | ||
| Well... | ||
| Yeah, interesting. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Yeah, people love to believe in patterns. | ||
| But then there are patterns. | ||
| So maybe there's a thing. | ||
| Maybe there's a reason why we like to believe in patterns. | ||
| But I agree with you. | ||
| This idea that someone's going to be able to like, when were you born? | ||
| Oh, Tuesday? | ||
| 7 a.m.? | ||
| Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Stay home tonight. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| Bitch, you don't know what the hell's going on. | ||
| This is guesswork. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But also, statistically, you're going to have patterns. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| 330 million people. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Same thing that we were talking about earlier. | ||
| Yeah, 100%. | ||
| I don't really notice patterns. | ||
| And people also find a way to take what someone has said and make it seem like, oh, he means my brother. | ||
| My brother and I have this problem. | ||
| We really have to work it out. | ||
| That's what you're saying. | ||
| Yes, I think it is your brother. | ||
| In fact, what color is his hair? | ||
| It's black. | ||
| Yes, this guy's black hair. | ||
| Oh my god, I knew everything about my brother. | ||
| Have you ever been to an empath... | ||
| No, I have not. | ||
| No? | ||
| What do you think about that? | ||
| Exactly what is that? | ||
| It means they... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I guess that's what they call psychics now, so you don't feel like you're getting ripped off. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| They call them empaths now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Empaths. | |
| They're very empathetic. | ||
| They feel things. | ||
| Oh, is that what it is? | ||
| Your dead family and... | ||
| I don't think that anyone on this planet, I don't think there's an equal ability to perceive anything. | ||
| I think some people are way more perceptive, some people are smarter, they see patterns better, they see trouble coming, they see problems, they see things better than other people do. | ||
| And I think there's feelings that you get sometimes. | ||
| Like weird feelings. | ||
| Then someone will call you and you're like, fuck, I was just thinking about that, dude. | ||
| That is weird. | ||
| Like someone sends you a text. | ||
| You haven't thought about them or talked to them in months and months and months. | ||
| And all of a sudden you think about them and bam, a text comes through. | ||
| Or they're calling you. | ||
| I don't know what that is. | ||
| One time we were all texting about Jean-Claude Van Damme and five minutes later my Netflix recommendations are full of Jean-Claude Van Damme. | ||
| I've never watched a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie on Netflix in my life. | ||
| That's the government, bro. | ||
| Eight of them. | ||
| Someone's listening. | ||
| That should creep you out. | ||
| That should creep you out. | ||
| I had a meeting with Netflix about this anime thing early on and I brought this shit up and asked them point blank. | ||
| They said no. | ||
| Of course they did. | ||
| Maybe they just get results. | ||
| Maybe it's like they have a cleaner and they say to this guy, listen, I don't give a fuck how you find out what these people are talking about, but you can find out, right? | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| Just don't tell me. | ||
| Just do it. | ||
| Just do it. | ||
| And this guy just, like, this thing is just listening to every goddamn word you say and providing suggestions for things you could buy on Amazon. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| What I was thinking about psychics, though, is I think some people are probably better at that. | ||
| I bet there is moments where some people have a weird sense. | ||
| I just don't think it's consistent enough for anybody to pay money for it. | ||
| I don't think anybody's ever demonstrated a real, like, provable psychic power. | ||
| But it doesn't mean that I don't think that that's Look, we can smell. | ||
| Why can we smell? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| It's some shit you can't even see? | ||
| And you can determine whether or not something's terrible based on it? | ||
| I mean, you can smell rotten meat. | ||
| You're like, oh, what the fuck? | ||
| That's your whole body. | ||
| You don't even see anything. | ||
| Where is that? | ||
| How do we not know that there's other senses that we can develop? | ||
| Like our ability to perceive good and bad in people. | ||
| Our ability to perceive whether or not someone's like a truly... | ||
| Kind person or with someone sociopathic. | ||
| Maybe there's ways to see whether or not people are compatible with your way of thinking. | ||
| Maybe there's ways to see weird shit that people are thinking. | ||
| Like if someone's planning and they're angry, they're about to hit somebody, maybe you could see it. | ||
| Maybe you could feel it. | ||
| Maybe you don't even know what the fuck it is, but it smells like the same way rotten meat smells. | ||
| Like, whoa, I gotta get the fuck out of here. | ||
| There's feelings you get from certain people that are just unhinged. | ||
| Spidey sense. | ||
| Spidey sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it just sucks. | ||
| Just like early chimps were really bad at talking, you know, and then eventually they became people who talk for a living. | ||
| We talk all day. | ||
| You sing. | ||
| You know, fucking chimps. | ||
| A couple fucking noises. | ||
| That's all they have. | ||
| Do you know they lie to each other? | ||
| Monkeys do. | ||
| I was listening to this podcast. | ||
| I forget what they were talking about. | ||
| But they got to this thing where it was deception with primates that they'll pretend like that there's an eagle coming so that everybody dives down and they'll steal the fruit. | ||
| They'll make noises. | ||
| They'll make noises like different animals coming to get you. | ||
| And they fuck with each other. | ||
| Like, they have noises that equals eagles, and they'll duck down. | ||
| Like, and they hear, fucking eagles? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, Jesus! | |
| Like, they imitate the eagle? | ||
| No, no, no, they have a word. | ||
| They have a word for it. | ||
| The word for these monkeys. | ||
| Like, there's a certain screech that they make that represents something coming down from above. | ||
| Miles just sings Take It Easy on the Bus. | ||
| I do the same thing. | ||
| It's your favorite song. | ||
| I gotta sing it. | ||
| He loves the eagles. | ||
| After Joe Walsh, they were a different band. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He actually... | ||
| This is like pre-Joe Walsh, Eagles. | ||
| Joe Walsh makes everything better. | ||
| Joe Walsh is a savage. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Victim of Love. | ||
| Anybody who doesn't love that song, you can fuck off. | ||
| It's a great goddamn song. | ||
| This is a... | ||
| Oh, do we even... | ||
| We didn't introduce you properly. | ||
| No? | ||
| Okay, that was Justin. | ||
| I think we did introduce Mike Tyson, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| I'm hanging out with these guys because I'm a Green Beret and I got hurt and you saw the show last night. | ||
| So I'm speaking at the shows because Sturgill on his own... | ||
| Well, let me back up. | ||
| I got blown up in March and I was in the hospital. | ||
| Previous year, I'd come off of a deployment. | ||
| I had like 11 months before the second one was a bit down in the dumps. | ||
| Got divorced. | ||
| Had a dude die on the first trip. | ||
| So it was kind of like, it was real rough to deal with. | ||
| And then I was listening to these dudes quite a bit. | ||
| And then led into the next deployment. | ||
| I was there a month. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| Almost died pretty hard. | ||
| Teammates saved me. | ||
| And we had blood on the ground. | ||
| Like, I got blood on Target. | ||
| And then they made a hellacious movement to get me to the medevac. | ||
| Long story short, I'm eating dinner in the hospital. | ||
| One of the first meals, jamming out to these dudes. | ||
| And I was like, Mom, I want to meet Sturgill Simpson. | ||
| And then she tried to get a hold of him, SOCOM eventually did, and he came, hung out for like two hours. | ||
| I made my friend now, General Beaudet, wait like 15 minutes so that we could finish talking about what we were talking about, which when you're an enlisted dude, you don't make generals wait. | ||
| But I was on a lot of ketamine, so it was sweet. | ||
| Then Sturgill had it on his own accord to donate to the foundation. | ||
| So this little tour going on that coincides with the actual album release is donating to the Special Forces Foundation. | ||
| So that helps Gold Star Families, which are the families that remained of the friends that got killed on this trip. | ||
| So there were four Green Berets and two EOD techs. | ||
| And... | ||
| So that money's going to them, and that's what I care about. | ||
| I'm alive. | ||
| I don't have any legs below my knees, for those that can't see my legs on the video anyway. | ||
| And I don't have my testicles either, so that's a different set of challenges. | ||
| But I don't care about getting taken care of, other than the normal army processes, but I want them to get taken care of from the foundation. | ||
| I'm grateful to have these guys as friends now. | ||
| They're awesome. | ||
| They're amazing musicians, but amazing people. | ||
| And then I'm grateful to be here and just to push that out. | ||
| People that are coming to the shows, all that money goes to the Foundation. | ||
| And then people can go on the Foundation's website, which is SpecialForcesFoundation.org. | ||
| And yeah, I appreciate it. | ||
| That's fucking awesome, man. | ||
| That's really, really cool. | ||
| That's really cool that you're doing this. | ||
| And thank you for coming here and telling everybody this. | ||
| You know, it's a great way to help out and your music, you know, to connect it to that. | ||
| I think that's just a fucking incredible thing. | ||
| It's really cool. | ||
| You know, when you were sending me the text messages telling me you were going to the hospital, you know, it's very touching. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was like, yeah. | |
| Yeah, you were, you know, you could tell you were seriously moved by this. | ||
| And, you know, for someone like you who truly understands the consequences of war, like the physical consequences in a way that none of us will understand, you know, it's very, not just... | ||
| It's brave of you to talk about this, but it's also so valuable. | ||
| So valuable for everybody that hasn't served to understand what it really is. | ||
| So thank you for that. | ||
| Well, I always say I really like combat, because I was in a lot of it, relatively speaking. | ||
| A bunch of guys have been in way more combat, a bunch of people have treated more casualties. | ||
| I'm a medic, but I was in a fair amount, almost got killed on the first trip a good handful of times, so I just don't like the war aspect when you see your friends get killed. | ||
| And, uh, you're stuck in a hospital bed on top of all this stuff that's, you know, I didn't shit for a week. | ||
| I pissed blood for a week. | ||
| I've had tons and nights of excruciating pain. | ||
| That's the life of an amputee or there are guys that are worse than me. | ||
| So I'm just grateful for having what I have. | ||
| And, uh, Yeah. | ||
| That's the beginning of it. | ||
| Like, especially on ketamine, when you're going through all that and you're just like, I was telling like the people that took the trash out in the room, like, hey, I'm grateful for you, brother. | ||
| Like, right on, brother. | ||
| What is ketamine like after a catastrophic injury like that? | ||
| Does it relieve the pain? | ||
| Does it just put you in another dimension? | ||
| So ketamine is an MDA antagonist in the brain, so essentially it's a dissociative. | ||
| So the way that it feels, because we learned this in class as a medic and everything, but the way that it feels is kind of... | ||
| It takes your perspective and it's like... | ||
| It always felt like a whirlwind if I was getting a push of it. | ||
| But it's like you're starting to get your vision masked and you're still there but you're dipping into subconscious because you're still conscious. | ||
| Because unconscious would mean that you pass out and you cannot have a gag reflex depending on how unconscious you are. | ||
| Ketamine... | ||
| I would close my eyes and immediately trip the most insane balls that you could imagine and open them and I'd be back in the room and I'd be like, what the fuck? | ||
| And then a friend of mine, when I left my first rotation, he was an Air Force CCT that got blown up in the same village I had a few casualties in. | ||
| He stepped in ID, he's in above the knee, some missing fingers, but when he was on ketamine, when he was awake and looking around, he'd see the walls on fire. | ||
| And then there'd be like women, like white pale skin in the corners, peeling the skin off their back. | ||
| And he was like awake. | ||
| And I was like, dude, that's... | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Like whatever, I don't know. | ||
| It must be like someone's psychology when they go in, like set and setting type thing. | ||
| But I was in it when I got a lot of ketamine. | ||
| My legs were blown off. | ||
| I'm getting worked on. | ||
| I'm telling dudes how to treat me. | ||
| I cut my own shirt off. | ||
| And then I get the ketamine. | ||
| And I'm like in and out. | ||
| And I see these visions back and forth. | ||
| And like I was convinced I was... | ||
| There are two distinct moments I was like, I'm not going to make it, and had that conversation. | ||
| And what's surreal about this right here is that you were talking to him on this show, and you guys talked about combat medics. | ||
| And you were like, and I'm just singing key. | ||
| And I was like, right on, they're talking about me. | ||
| And then I got all kinds of jacked up. | ||
| Makes you appreciate life. | ||
| And I've gone through a huge development last year through depression and then this year after this blast of being grateful and doing introspection and communicating and having empathy for other people and being a compassionate human. | ||
| Which General Mattis has told us, a group of us, on the way back from my first trip. | ||
| It's like, don't let this experience of war make you a more hateful human being because people haven't experienced it. | ||
| Let it allow yourself to go through post-traumatic growth and become a better human being and treat other people like you want to be treated. | ||
| And I would add on to that, which came from Tim Ferriss, treat yourself the way you treat other people, too. | ||
| That's not a side of Mattis that you ever hear in the press, huh? | ||
| I suppose not. | ||
| I think that would be very valuable for people to know that he thinks that way. | ||
| That's a very powerful way to view the inevitable consequences of war. | ||
| That started scraping me off the bottom to focus on that after that trip, yeah. | ||
| That ketamine shit is a weird one because a lot of people do it recreationally and apparently they... | ||
| They blast off and go into other dimensions and shit. | ||
| They go into K-holes. | ||
| Yeah, I never did it. | ||
| I never tried it. | ||
| I knew a dude who died from it. | ||
| He was really into it. | ||
| He was doing it a lot. | ||
| What happened? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Like an infection? | ||
| I know he probably was doing a bunch of other things as well. | ||
| But he was getting treated for ketamine, for addiction, and then he wound up dying. | ||
| You can dose the shit out of ketamine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It doesn't kill you. | ||
| You can give a kid 300 megs of it, and they will fucking trip balls, but they're not going to die. | ||
| It's like the opposite of all the other drugs. | ||
| I think he was doing other shit, too. | ||
| I think the ketamine was just something he was treated for. | ||
| I think he was doing a bunch of speed and stuff, too. | ||
| Ketamine was originally, isn't it a cat tranquilizer or something like that? | ||
| My wife's best friend is a veterinarian. | ||
| She definitely is jacking animals with ketamine on the back. | ||
| It's increasing now in civilian hospitals. | ||
| It started as a veterinarian drug. | ||
| I mean, it works great. | ||
| Combine it with some other stuff. | ||
| Do you know who John Lilly is? | ||
| John Lilly was this scientist. | ||
| He was a pioneer in interspecies communication. | ||
| He did all his work with dolphins. | ||
| And he was also a big acid freak. | ||
| And he would take acid and try to communicate with dolphins. | ||
| He didn't allegedly give dolphins acid. | ||
| He was a part of this long-standing program to try to get dolphins to talk to him. | ||
| But one of the things he invented was... | ||
| Why is there not a movie about this? | ||
| There is. | ||
| Altered States. | ||
| No way. | ||
| Altered States is based a lot on John Lilly, because he invented the sensory deprivation tank. | ||
| Does he give the dolphin's ass in the movie? | ||
| No, because it just was loosely based on him, because in the movie, the guy experiments with a bunch of different types of sensory deprivation tanks, and everybody knew that this guy, he was a legitimate doctor, a brilliant guy, but he was also a ketamine freak. | ||
| And one thing he would do is take intramuscular ketamine and then get into the sensory deprivation tank. | ||
| Yeah, that's a double whammy. | ||
| Yeah, a double whammy. | ||
| So is that stuff difficult to get off of or do you have to worry about that? | ||
| Is there like a withdrawal symptom? | ||
| The issue would be with the pain. | ||
| Like when you have something that's controlling some sort of level of pain and then coming off of that, you usually wean off of it. | ||
| But there's not a physical addiction issue? | ||
| You know, I should know the answer to that definitively as a medic, but I haven't heard of anything that Wordscard had come off of. | ||
| They had you on other stuff, way harder to come off of. | ||
| Oh yeah, I was on methadone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oof. | |
| And Sturgill Friend Shooter and Duff McKagan came to the hospital and Duff was like, methadone is worse than heroin. | ||
| G&R guys were rocking it in the 80s. | ||
| But that was like... | ||
| I mean, one week I dropped down 20 migs instead of the 10, and it was like being a junkie for nine hours. | ||
| I was just rubbing my legs because they're just lit up with nerve pain. | ||
| It feels like there's daggers in your leg or some sort of electrocution. | ||
| You look like on a movie with someone cracked out or something. | ||
| I was just rubbing my shit. | ||
| We used to see these guys who would come into the pool hall when I used to play pool in White Plains. | ||
| They would come in. | ||
| There was a methadone clinic down the street. | ||
| And they were all heroin people. | ||
| And my friend Johnny B would call them methadoneans. | ||
| Because they would come in. | ||
| They all had this sort of dull shuffle to them. | ||
| They were all slowed down. | ||
| And I could never understand it. | ||
| I was like, is this like a culturally... | ||
| Did someone agree? | ||
| Did we make some sort of agreement? | ||
| Like, this drug's okay? | ||
| It's got some stamp of approval, so we're accepting that they have to get methadone every day, but they can't get heroin anymore. | ||
| Why don't we just give them heroin? | ||
| How much different is the methadone? | ||
| Does the methadone get them high? | ||
| It's synthesized, so it's easier to control. | ||
| But does it get them high? | ||
| I didn't have any effect. | ||
| After a while, no, it's just fighting off the physiology. | ||
| So it just fights the physiology of... | ||
| You'll never get high the first time you spike. | ||
| But it's a potent narcotic for the adverse effects. | ||
| But don't people have the best effects with Ibogaine and things like that when it comes to getting off of opiates? | ||
| For getting kicking opiates, yeah. | ||
| I mean, if you want to go through that, I would say that would probably be your best bet. | ||
| For a quick solution, if that's what you mean. | ||
| But methadone, it is actually bad for you, isn't it? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It fucks yourself. | ||
| I didn't sleep. | ||
| I didn't have deep sleep for four months. | ||
| And I'd get in bed at nine, not fall asleep until three in the morning. | ||
| That fucks with everything, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It was a pretty shitty year. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| And how long did it take to get you off of the methadone? | ||
| I mean, once you're off of it, the doctors were saying that it stays in your adipose tissue, which is your fat, for like two or three weeks. | ||
| Because I'd have random nights when I was off of it and just get lit up with nerve pain and like getting hit with a hammer on my toes. | ||
| So probably four to, probably like six weeks of weaning that and then I weaned another drug. | ||
| Lyrica. | ||
| I mean, for you it had to feel, I mean, because you were there at Walter Reed the whole time, you had to feel frustrated, but for somebody like Mike, the first time I came to see you, it was only what? | ||
| What, a month after the blast? | ||
| At most, yeah. | ||
| So he was still in a lot of, I mean, more pain than I could even comprehend somebody being in, you know, from nerve pain, for how many surgeries on each leg? | ||
| It's close to 30 surgeries total, which is a lot, but there's a lot more. | ||
| He still had staples in your back, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Were they taking, I mean, you described this, man, just like, how can anybody... | ||
| You know, and then he was still, as he said, the first time we met, he was highest giraffe balls on Academy. | ||
| But, like, I was profoundly impressed by even then, like, how clear-headed and articulate, and I was obviously, like, this guy's obviously brilliant. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, he just threw the fog and awareness of everything going on in the room, despite the pain he was trying to pretend like he wasn't in. | ||
| I just, and then that place was full of guys like him. | ||
| And then when I went back, it's like all new faces. | ||
| You know, these people. | ||
| But then when I went back, the second time I went to see him was there for a couple days, and it was like just in a matter of short time, it was leaps and bounds. | ||
| He's in the gym on one leg, like fucking busting out 20 pull-ups and everything, you know. | ||
| It was just kind of like... | ||
| There's got to be something, anything you can do to help in whatever way. | ||
| And these guys, since I've known him, I've never once ever heard him ask for anything. | ||
| His only concerns were for the families of the guys that didn't make it. | ||
| It's just like really around an album release if I'm going to have a bunch of attention on me I thought it would be a good opportunity to put attention on what other people can do to help these guys and their families because you know the sacrifices especially sitting in these rooms and looking at these dudes man I can't even you can't you know what do you call that? | ||
| Yeah well I want to help so after the show Let's figure out what we can do to jump in. | ||
| I want to help. | ||
| So help with the podcast, help with some comedy shows maybe. | ||
| Do just whatever we can do. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| Listen, I'm blown away by all this. | ||
| As much as I think all these people are listening and watching. | ||
| It's beautiful that you're doing this, man. | ||
| And I think that's inspiring me to do something. | ||
| I think it's probably inspiring a bunch of other people. | ||
| And that's... | ||
| That's those things that people talk about. | ||
| One thing that you might experience or hear in life that sort of changes your worldview and moves you in a better direction. | ||
| This could be one of those things, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well... | |
| You're a good man. | ||
| Well, I'm not fucking anything, man. | ||
| He's... | ||
| I'm just a dude. | ||
| Well, you're just an awesome dude. | ||
| All you guys. | ||
| It's cool. | ||
| I'm very happy that you're bringing awareness to this. | ||
| I'm real happy that you're doing that. | ||
| It makes me feel great. | ||
| And it's, you know, like Justin said, the war side of it is the... | ||
| The tragedy, I guess. | ||
| So it's not like, you know, right or left. | ||
| It's just like this is the reality of it and people are making these sacrifices for you and when they come home, what do we do for them, you know? | ||
| It's a hard thought for people to accept that war is inevitable. | ||
| It's a hard thought. | ||
| And it doesn't seem like it's inevitable because it's not inevitable in this room. | ||
| I mean, if we were the last people on Earth and there was a bunch of food and places to sleep, I think we'd probably not kill each other. | ||
| We probably wouldn't go to war, right? | ||
| It's like, what is the number where you go to war? | ||
| Is it a million? | ||
| Is it two million? | ||
| Is it separated by oceans? | ||
| Is it just mountains or boundaries? | ||
| But the fact that no one thinks that war can be solved. | ||
| No one that I know thinks that in our lifetime there'll be no war. | ||
| There's never been a period where someone on Earth that's human hasn't been going to war with each other. | ||
| It's a horrible truth of being a person. | ||
| And nobody knows it the way you do. | ||
| So for you to come on and tell your story the way you just did, I appreciate the fuck out of that, man. | ||
| I would just want people... | ||
| If they hear that and it moves them, it's more of like a... | ||
| Just be grateful on a regular basis for anything. | ||
| I mean, Steven Pinker was on your show. | ||
| I ended up FaceTiming with him as a result of all this. | ||
| But he has that book about basically the Enlightenment worked. | ||
| And we still have war, and then there are people still fighting it. | ||
| But overall, the world is continuing to improve. | ||
| And like... | ||
| Steadily getting better and fewer people are dying from genocide and war, but it still exists. | ||
| So I would want the respect for war if someone is wanting to go to war. | ||
| You know, if someone is going to be a commander-in-chief and that's a heavy thing to like toss back and forth. | ||
| Yeah, extremely. | ||
| It means that I may never have kids because I don't have my balls, you know, like there's sacrifice. | ||
| And I'm the one that lived. | ||
| And I didn't have any kids, but, like, my friends have four girls. | ||
| My other friend has three kids. | ||
| So, like, if you're going to move the chess piece to war, then we need to understand the implications of what that means and try to do everything in political power and state strategy to avoid overt war, because it's nasty. | ||
| Especially with a near-peer. | ||
| You mean Russia or something like that? | ||
| Yeah, near-peer war would be the worst thing. | ||
| That's World War III. Mutually assured destruction is the strangest thing on Earth. | ||
| That we all have enough weapons pointing at each other to literally nuke every fucking man, woman, and child off the face of the Earth many times over. | ||
| And that's what keeps us from using them. | ||
| But yet we still have them. | ||
| And we still have them pointing at each other. | ||
| I mean, remember when you were kids and we were worried about Russia? | ||
| Do you remember that shit? | ||
| I'm older than you guys. | ||
| Now I have kids and I'm worried about people walking into Target with a suicide vest. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| When's that coming? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, you could, all of it. | ||
| Because Europe's been dealing with that shit for decades. | ||
| You know, we really haven't tasted that yet. | ||
| Like on a widespread, habitual scale. | ||
| So that means a lot of people are working very hard to make sure we don't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| How does anybody ever fix that? | ||
| How does any country, how does civilization as a whole ever fix that? | ||
| I don't think you really can, because it's an idea. | ||
| It's like you have to change somebody's mind. | ||
| I was going to say mushrooms, but the Vikings took mushrooms. | ||
| Isolation tanks. | ||
| The Vikings love taking mushrooms and fucking people up. | ||
| Kind of being in isolation tanks would be a pretty good start, I think. | ||
| That would put everybody in a good place. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| I mean, most people, most of the time, are not thinking about killing somebody. | ||
| But we know that it is just an inevitable part of being human that groups of people are going to get together and fuck up other groups of people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's always been a part of us. | ||
| It's one of the strangest things about human beings. | ||
| It's truly strange because the consequences are so awful and yet it's inevitable. | ||
| I had to make that decision this year. | ||
| I found out I'm not a psychopath. | ||
| It was very reassuring. | ||
| Yeah, you told me about that story. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| To be honest, I'll tell the story before I forget the thought. | ||
| It was everything else associated with what happened after that I found more impactful. | ||
| The stuff that lasts or stays with you. | ||
| It wasn't what actually happened. | ||
| It was seeing the aftermath and the system and how it all pans out. | ||
| We had two home invasions within 36 hours, I guess. | ||
| The first time the guy came in, in the middle of the night, about 2.30, 3 a.m., and our back door had this sensor on it and made a very signature noise. | ||
| And if you live in your house, you know the noise is in your house. | ||
| And for whatever reason, it just woke me up from a dead sleep, and I knew what I heard, and there's the only thing that would make that noise. | ||
| So I kind of snaked my way out the hall and down to the top of the stairs And when I hit the top of the stairs, I heard the dog growl and the door closed back. | ||
| So I knew that was somebody leaving. | ||
| We have a huge fucking dog. | ||
| Basically useless, but he did growl and he made a very primitive noise. | ||
| I was proud of him. | ||
| And... | ||
| The guy didn't come in because of that, and I went downstairs and kind of swept the ground floor, and then he was gone. | ||
| I didn't want to freak my wife out, so I waited until the morning to tell her, and then we called the police. | ||
| Of course, one of the neighbors got on a ring cam in the back alley, the guy leaving and going down the street, so I had a very clear view of him. | ||
| For whatever reason, my wife and the kids, they had to go on down to where we actually live. | ||
| I was working that week in Nashville, probably mixing a record or something, so I had to stay behind. | ||
| As a result of me being home alone that day, I was cleaning and working on a firearm I had recently purchased and assembled. | ||
| Went to bed that night, locked everything up, and because they weren't home, I put the gun on the floor on a padded case next to the bed. | ||
| So I'm looking the next morning. | ||
| It's like 7.15 a.m., sun's shining, neighbors going to work, and I hear the back door open again. | ||
| And I was like, what the fuck? | ||
| Is that the maid? | ||
| Who would be here that early? | ||
| And I guess out of paranoia, For whatever reason, I grabbed that gun and just went to the top of the stairs to look. | ||
| I still think it's the maid, and when I hit the top of the stairs and looked down the staircase, same guy, same clothes, just standing in my living room, rolling the cord up on my headphones. | ||
| And I was like, well, alright. | ||
| I was almost impressed. | ||
| The one that he came back with was just like, I couldn't believe it was happening at this time. | ||
| So I started down the stairs on him, very quietly, and I got about halfway down by the time he turned and saw me. | ||
| And I was looking at his fucking head through a red dot, like a video game. | ||
| I'll never forget that image of this guy. | ||
| Probably thinking he's about to die. | ||
| And the back door was thankfully still open. | ||
| The only thing I said to him was, what are we doing here, man? | ||
| And I hit him with a strobe, which kind of like, probably to his brain, he thought was the gun going off. | ||
| Because he kind of like, seizureed. | ||
| And then I saw the adrenaline spike. | ||
| And he turned and went out the back door and jumped clean off my fucking porch. | ||
| Like never hit a single step and ran. | ||
| At the back gate, he had latched it. | ||
| I saw this on the video later. | ||
| When he came in, he shut the back gate back. | ||
| So he hit that back gate on a dead run and just blew it to hell. | ||
| Latches and wood splinters flying and took off down the alley. | ||
| I'm standing on my porch looking like a jackass. | ||
| My neighbors are literally walking out of the house going to work and shit. | ||
| I'm just like... | ||
| Okay, that happened. | ||
| So then, the next thing, there's like eight police officers in my living room. | ||
| All they wanted to see was my gun. | ||
| And every single one of them asked me why I didn't shoot the guy. | ||
| Which I found very interesting. | ||
| And I thought about it, finally. | ||
| One, when I'm going down the stairs, you would not believe how much shit can go through your head in like four seconds. | ||
| I had this whole conversation with myself as to like, Wife and kids aren't here. | ||
| You know, this guy doesn't even know I'm here yet. | ||
| I'm holding a fucking assault rifle and he's not a threat to me. | ||
| But if I put one through his dome, which I have every legal right to do right now, there's going to be news vans on my lawn. | ||
| This is going to be on your fucking Wikipedia page. | ||
| You know, all of that. | ||
| I'm just like, this guy is not a threat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And thankfully he chose to go out the door. | ||
| It was just so weird. | ||
| They were like, why didn't you shoot him? | ||
| And I said that. | ||
| And they just kind of looked at me. | ||
| And I was like, literally by the time we engaged, man, two seconds later, he's running out the door. | ||
| I said, well, am I going to shoot him in the back? | ||
| And then you put me in prison? | ||
| And they were like, ah, fuck, man. | ||
| Twice in a week? | ||
| You'd been fine. | ||
| We figured something out. | ||
| Figured something out. | ||
| Who wants to take that chance? | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| With a life in prison or not? | ||
| Yeah, roll the dice. | ||
| I mean, if he had turned and ran at me, we'd probably be having a different conversation, but he didn't. | ||
| Or if he reached for a gun. | ||
| Anything, which he didn't. | ||
| Was he a junkie? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, he's like 25. Honestly, I saw his whole fucking life on his face. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Probably hard times. | ||
| Just a mess? | ||
| Punk kid, probably like I was. | ||
| I didn't do any shit like that when I was his age. | ||
| His toxicology came back clean. | ||
| He had one prior for possession. | ||
| It was a hard time. | ||
| I was desperate. | ||
| So I got subpoenaed. | ||
| Because I was the only one that actually met him. | ||
| And I go to the court case and, you know, that was a very interesting and telling experience for me because I'd never really been to anything like that. | ||
| And he was one of maybe eight or nine other people on the docket that day, all... | ||
| I signed the same public defender who literally shows up 15 minutes before they start the day to familiarize himself with every single case. | ||
| And you just saw this factory, like these young, underprivileged black males just getting pumped into the system. | ||
| The DA came over and she was just like, thanks for being here, yada yada. | ||
| And, you know, unluckily for him, he broke into like 13 other houses and they had him on tape and a lot of things. | ||
| So we had 13 or 14 aggravated burglary charges, which is pretty fucking heavy. | ||
| You know, every one of those is like a class B. So he was looking at 12 to 15. I think he sang like a bird, pleaded down, got six, and then if he does a successful rehabilitation program in prison, he could be out in two. | ||
| And she was like, yada, yada. | ||
| And I just realized, like, wow, they're just throwing this kid's life away because he... | ||
| Granted, he came into some people's houses and he almost got fucking killed. | ||
| And they caught him the next night, like three streets over in the act, doing the same thing. | ||
| But he had no priors. | ||
| He wasn't on drugs. | ||
| It was just like no direction, probably no discipline, no guidance, no heroes. | ||
| And I struggled with that. | ||
| I was like, man, there's got to be like, what if I gave him a job? | ||
| It depends entirely on who he is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Which I never got the chance to sit down and find that out. | ||
| I never got to talk to him face to face. | ||
| It might turn out awesome. | ||
| If he was just some punk fucking kid, I'd be like, good luck, man. | ||
| It might turn out awesome. | ||
| It might turn out terrible. | ||
| It's depending upon the person. | ||
| But there's so many people in this country that are set up to fail. | ||
| Their circumstances, their life, their environment, what they're surrounded by all day long, they're set up to fail. | ||
| And I've always said that if we really cared, we have this plan that we always sort of impart, we put X amount of money toward this and Y amount of money towards that, but if we wanted to make this country, we wanted to really make it stronger, you would want less losers. | ||
| So how do you get less losers? | ||
| You prevent them from ever becoming losers, but you help them when they're kids during their developmental period. | ||
| I mean, spend more money on education, spend more money on cleaning up impoverished neighborhoods and crime-ridden neighborhoods. | ||
| It's not impossible. | ||
| It's not like fucking breathing on the sun. | ||
| Like, it can be done. | ||
| Like, neighborhoods can get better. | ||
| They get better. | ||
| But the idea that there's so little time and effort put into fixing those parts of our own country. | ||
| I mean, we have the most resources. | ||
| We have this fucking spectacular country filled with amazing people. | ||
| And some of them just don't get a chance. | ||
| Because they're stuck in a rut from the moment they come out of their mother's body. | ||
| They're stuck in this rut. | ||
| You've been assigned your lot. | ||
| You got fucked. | ||
| You got a bad roll of the dice. | ||
| That's a lot of countries, man. | ||
| This is one of the few countries where anybody can just put the fucking boots down and make something happen. | ||
| One of the few. | ||
| Japan, you pretty much know by second or third grade what your lot's going to be by your test scores already. | ||
| You know if you're going to be working class or if you're going to university. | ||
| This country we applaud when you started out poor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| We love it. | ||
| Like, people who start out poor and then become successful, that's like our favorite shit. | ||
| It is, right? | ||
| Like, what is this country like more than a success story? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, he started out eating bread, and all he had is money to barely get to school and barely get home, but he keeps showing up every day. | ||
| Everybody wants to hear that story. | ||
| That's the fucking story. | ||
| Rocky Hart. | ||
| Yeah bro. | ||
| How many shows are you guys doing? | ||
| We're doing six of these just as a conversation starter. | ||
| But then the real tour will be... | ||
| Oh, I should probably announce that. | ||
| They told me to while we're here. | ||
| We're going to do a full U.S. tour starting mid or late February. | ||
| And with myself and a young man named Tyler Childers opening. | ||
| I love that dude. | ||
| Yeah, we do too. | ||
| Big fan of that dude. | ||
| So that's happening next year. | ||
| And those will also tie into fundraising, Ticketmaster and ADG and everybody participating. | ||
| That's going to... | ||
| I was listening to his Purgatory album on the way over here. | ||
| Were you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Miles and I both fucked around in the room when that got made. | ||
| It's great shit. | ||
| Miles played drums on both records, right? | ||
| I just stood in the control room and pretended to do stuff. | ||
| I can confirm that. | ||
| So, when you do a show like The Troubadour, is it like knock the rust off? | ||
| Well, definitely. | ||
| We haven't played in over a year, and we're going back and working up material. | ||
| We literally haven't played since we recorded it two and a half years ago. | ||
| We don't really rehearse. | ||
| We just sort of knock the rust off. | ||
| It takes us about three or four shows to feel like we even know what the fuck's happening. | ||
| So you guys don't get together before you tour? | ||
| No, Chuck and Bob both live in Detroit. | ||
| Miles and I are in Tennessee. | ||
| We haven't seen these guys since October. | ||
| We get a lot done at Soundcheck, basically. | ||
| But you're all still active as musicians, even when you're not together touring. | ||
| I don't know what they do. | ||
| I am. | ||
| I'm a freelancer in Detroit. | ||
| So when you say freelancer, what does that involve? | ||
| Like what he was saying, if someone needs... | ||
| Yeah, I've been in the area for like 25 years, so I play with a lot of bands, a lot of friends, there's a big group of people. | ||
| Detroit's a great city for musicians, so you can stay busy, you know, if you know the right people and you're not a dick, so... | ||
| Dude, I mean, I have zero musical talent, or never pursued any of it, so I love music. | ||
| It's one of my favorite things to hear, stories about people, because... | ||
| I just love the idea of you going out and, you know, hey, we need a badass bass player, and they send you over to this place, and that's like a fucking gun for hire. | ||
| To me, as a kid growing up in Newton, Massachusetts, I used to always listen to music. | ||
| I never thought about doing it. | ||
| So when I see people that do do it, it's like, whoa, that guy is making a living making music. | ||
| It's, to me, one of the coolest forms of art. | ||
| Because... | ||
| Everybody gets inspired by it. | ||
| Almost everybody loves it. | ||
| And almost nobody knows how to do it. | ||
| You can always tell the people who do it better than others, too. | ||
| Yes, there's levels to it, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, Suzanne Santo and I were talking about Gary Clark Jr. last night. | ||
| Like, this guy, he's got some weird thing going on with his fucking guitar. | ||
| Like, it's a Gary Clark Jr. guitar. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, it's a sound he puts out. | ||
| He has a certain sound that's... | ||
| Like, you could hear it. | ||
| Like, I could hear a new sound. | ||
| Oh, that's a Gary Clark Jr. song. | ||
| Like, by his guitar sound. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's, like, something to the way he's got, like, this... | ||
| He did a cover of Midnight Rider with Suzanne and Honey Honey at this, like, little hole-in-the-wall place in downtown LA. It was, like, maybe 100 people in the room. | ||
| Tiny-ass little crowd at, like, midnight on a Tuesday night. | ||
| And... | ||
| I mean, maybe I'm exaggerating. | ||
| Maybe there's 300 people, but it was fucking small shit. | ||
| And he did his Gary Clark Jr. version of Midnight Rider. | ||
| Fuck, it was amazing. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| It's like, there's... | ||
| Yeah, but a guy like him, he could pick up any guitar and plug it into any amp and it's still going to sound like him. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't know that, but I believe it. | ||
| I don't know shit about playing a guitar, but it makes sense to me. | ||
| Yeah, he's got a thing. | ||
| I think it's awesome that a guitar-driven act is headlining huge rooms, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They play the Hollywood Bowl. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| He's undeniable. | ||
| You just gotta get the fuck out of the way. | ||
| You know, he's undeniable. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that kind of music is... | ||
| I've never met him. | ||
| We played a festival once he was at, and I just saw him walking across the grass backstage, and I was like, that's a cool motherfucker right there. | ||
| He's the nicest guy ever. | ||
| You'd love him. | ||
| He's so nice. | ||
| He's a really, really cool guy. | ||
| Does any of your family play music, or did? | ||
| Well, my oldest daughter does. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, but no one in my mom's side or my dad's side, no one in that part of the family played music. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| But everybody loves it. | ||
| I think there's some kind of music in everybody. | ||
| You can repeat rhythms back. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And that counts. | ||
| Conjunction, junction, what's your function? | ||
| You're a musician. | ||
| Everybody. | ||
| Everybody has music in their life. | ||
| I mean, everybody. | ||
| People who don't like it. | ||
| The only person I know who doesn't like music, he might have changed his stance on it, is Doug Stanhope. | ||
| It's like, ah, I fucking hate music. | ||
| I hate songs. | ||
| But I don't know if that's true or if he's just working on a bit. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's hard to tell. | ||
| But he's the only guy I know that's even espoused those ideas, that he doesn't like music. | ||
| Do you ever do that? | ||
| Do you ever have conversations with people and they don't know you're actually working on material? | ||
| No, because if I'm saying it, I probably really do mean it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, or I'm just trying to be funny, and then it turns out like, oh, I could say this on stage. | ||
| But it's never like, hey, I'm going to work out my IHOP joke on Sturgill today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Hey, Sturgill, been in IHOP lately? | ||
| Waffle House, actually. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, Waffle House is synonymous. | ||
| That was a better choice. | ||
| Waffle House is synonymous with fucking knife fights and brawls and, you know. | ||
| And Sturgill Simpson, though. | ||
| 24-hour food. | ||
| Actually, I used to work at IHOP, so my loyalties go back. | ||
| I'll sing for Waffle House, but I'm IHOP. But no one's totally relaxed at a Waffle House at 2 in the morning. | ||
| Fuck no. | ||
| No. | ||
| You gotta be like a fucking deer listening for branches now. | ||
| Nobody's even sober in a Waffle House at 2 in the morning. | ||
| It's a dangerous time, man. | ||
| Some of the most interesting people I've ever met in my life were in the wee hours of the night in a Waffle House. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| But you gotta take a risk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well... | |
| Yeah, you're taking a risk. | ||
| For that delicious ass food, man. | ||
| Delicious ass food. | ||
| Covered in chunk, man. | ||
| Dude, you take those big slabs of butter and lather the shit out of that waffle and just don't even worry about your cholesterol count. | ||
| Just pour that fucking syrup on it. | ||
| Who gives a fuck about calories? | ||
| Tonight we live... | ||
| And you cut up that ham, steak, and eggs with that fucking waffle with thick, like a half an inch of butter and syrup all over it. | ||
| We did at truck stops in the South, sometimes two, three, and more. | ||
| And him and some of the other younger dudes, they'd go in hard and brave, man. | ||
| We're like, what the chili? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What the fuck was that? | |
| Well, no, that was... | ||
| Who did that? | ||
| Dalton. | ||
| Dalton, yeah, Dalton. | ||
| Shout out to Dalton. | ||
| Was Dalton, yeah, was he born before or after Roadhouse? | ||
| That's really important. | ||
| After, but he'd never seen the movie. | ||
| We immediately started calling him Roadhouse or Double Douche. | ||
| And he finally had to see it. | ||
| He's like, man, this shit was fucking whack. | ||
| I don't want to be Roadhouse. | ||
| I was like, you know nothing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| How can he say it's whack? | ||
| He's got the wrong context. | ||
| Don't you dare talk bad about Patrick Swayze. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| That's an all-time classic terrible movie. | ||
| But in the best way. | ||
| Like you get super excited. | ||
| It's extremely homoerotic. | ||
| Looking back now, I mean, that whole fight scene with him and the guys, I used to fuck guys like you in prison, like, what was going on there? | ||
| Yeah, I think that's just bad writing. | ||
| Is that tough guy talk? | ||
| I think it's Patrick Swayze, so handsome, everything with him was homoerotic. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because he's beautiful. | ||
| Beautiful guy, man. | ||
| Plus, he was literally a ballet dancer. | ||
| Yeah, he moved like one. | ||
| Yeah, when he was like the karate expert and shit. | ||
| Like he said, just the right amount of musculature. | ||
| Red Dawn, brother. | ||
| That too. | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| This is one of the worst fight scenes. | ||
| Look how bad this is, like in terms of movement. | ||
| Ha! | ||
| Dude, the speed of his techniques. | ||
| The impact of these strikes. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| This is where Sam Elliott shows up eventually, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| Oh, the double headbutt move. | ||
| Oh, the bottle over the head. | ||
| There he is. | ||
| Oh my goodness. | ||
| Sam Elliott. | ||
| We've actually seen a guy take a bottle to the head, so I can attest for a fact that you can still fight after taking a giant, full, unopened bottle of Grey Goose to the head. | ||
| Oh, fuck. | ||
| But only in a Mexican discotheque in McAllen, Texas. | ||
| He had a big white cowboy hat on, and he looked like a bodybuilder, and he had two ladies at the table, and he was flossing hard, and I think he turned around and spit a little game at somebody else's woman. | ||
| Oh yeah, let me back up that fucking story. | ||
| It was the first... | ||
| Real tour we ever did. | ||
| We finally got a booking agent and we went out and we did two weeks opening for Dwight Yoakam, which was fucking awesome. | ||
| It felt like an actual huge break. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| We went from playing dive bar shitholes to 12 drunks to standing in front of 4,000 or 5,000 people. | ||
| Texans. | ||
| Texans. | ||
| With hats. | ||
| And we were down in far Texas with P-H-A-R-R, which is right on the border. | ||
| And We went down and did the gig, and it was fucking amazing because it was in this giant auditorium, and they had these long tables like you would have in a school cafeteria, but there were rows of them as far back as I could see. | ||
| It looked like it might as well have been 1955, man, and we were playing the Hayride or some shit because it was white cowboy hats, just an ocean of white cowboy hats, whites and Hispanics, and everybody was seated and sort of turned sideways enjoying the show. | ||
| It was a very civil little vibe. | ||
| And then after the show, the promoters, these guys were like, you guys want to go to a club? | ||
| I was like, not really, but the younger guys might. | ||
| I was basically babysitting you assholes at that point. | ||
| They're all fucking kids. | ||
| So they round us up and take us to this fucking discotheque. | ||
| And we're the only gringos in this place, man. | ||
| And it was like, there was some serious mochismo being thrown around. | ||
| It was a little threatening. | ||
| And the guy starts telling us, they get on the mic with the DJ and And they're telling everybody that we're Dwight Yoakam's band. | ||
| I realized like, oh shit, this guy, we're a promotion tool. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| To make his club look cool. | ||
| We don't play for Dwight Yoakam. | ||
| But they said it like 50 fucking times, you know? | ||
| And finally, we're just kind of sitting in the corner, not speaking and minding our own business so that we don't die. | ||
| And Miles and I were sitting at a table on some chairs and all of a sudden it's just liquid and broken glass just raining down on us from behind. | ||
| And I kind of turned around to see this guy... | ||
| Sort of stumble, and the dude's still standing there holding the bottleneck, and it was like he had these big, unopened bottles of Grey Goose, like big-ass Grey Goose bottles on ice, and the dude just came up to his table behind him, like, fucking necked one and took it to the dome, and the guy kind of stutter-stepped. | ||
| He turned around, he took his cowboy hat off, and he went at him and beat the fuck out of both of them. | ||
| And I told him, I was like, I think this is where we leave. | ||
| Yeah, everybody left. | ||
| Yeah, it just cleared the whole place out. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| But I couldn't believe it. | ||
| I thought I would kill somebody. | ||
| It depends on where you hit them, and how you hit them, how hard you hit them. | ||
| You could definitely kill somebody with a bottle, though. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, it certainly happened. | ||
| I was reading some horrible story about a 13-year-old kid who got sucker punched and wound up dying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you could kill somebody. | ||
| Accidentally. | ||
| Even if you didn't mean to. | ||
| You hit somebody, they fall, they hit their head, they die. | ||
| That happens all the time. | ||
| Like that dad at the hockey game. | ||
| Oh, that was horrible, man. | ||
| This kid, like, watched that happen. | ||
| Over nothing. | ||
| Over hockey. | ||
| Over kids' hockey. | ||
| Yeah, man, people get real weird. | ||
| Bob's being awfully quiet. | ||
| I just want you to know he's fucking hilarious. | ||
| Bob was so high last night. | ||
| He could say anything. | ||
| This is probably... | ||
| Bob just was hitting that joint so hard. | ||
| I didn't have anywhere to put it down, you know, his plan. | ||
| I thought you were going to come over and take it. | ||
| The path wasn't quite as clear as I thought it might be. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I noticed that right when we walked out, Justin introduced, and it was like, where do I walk to get to the thing, you know? | ||
| What was the instrument that was facing the crowd to your left? | ||
| Well, up there was a Hammond B3, and then on top of that was a Clavinet. | ||
| And what was this one that was facing you, but the back of it was to the crowd? | ||
| It was all exposed wiring? | ||
| That was a B3. Yeah. | ||
| That's a trip to look back into the gears. | ||
| Bob's like a gearhead, kind of a reverse engineering genius. | ||
| He only uses primitive audio gear, and I'm pretty sure now I've known him since 2011. I'm convinced he only does it. | ||
| You buy a shitty nose, it'll break, so he can fix it. | ||
| That's it right there. | ||
| There's a picture from my Instagram. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It looks cool. | ||
| I mean, it's supposed to have a wood back, but it looks cool. | ||
| It looks cool as fuck. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| But it's very revealing. | ||
| Like, oh, there's a lot going on there. | ||
| You can surf them, too. | ||
| I've seen him do it. | ||
| On top of it, you mean? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Saturday Night Live. | ||
| Just Saturday Night Live stuff. | ||
| We got pretty fired up. | ||
| Yeah, it's no big deal. | ||
| I looked over and Bob's fucking playing Teen Wolf on his organ. | ||
| I was like, all right. | ||
| Yeah, that was a little terror and absolute joy at the same time. | ||
| When I saw that symbol fall off and I looked up like what was going on and Bobby was standing on his organ, I was just like, Why not? | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Hey, man. | ||
| Fucking do whatever you want. | ||
| Just keep doing what you're doing. | ||
| Do whatever the fuck you want. | ||
| If you guys can keep doing what you did last night, I love it. | ||
| I'm in. | ||
| It's only going up from there, really. | ||
| That was the first one, so we were very critical and unhappy. | ||
| It was fun as fuck, man. | ||
| It was fun as fuck. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Oh, that's when he did it on SNL? Oh, there it is. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| That was the first time we played that record last night. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| That's some good shit right there, man, if I gotta say so myself. | ||
| That was a lot of adrenaline, man, because we'd all, literally, everybody, we had all the horns with us, but everybody in the band, you know, as a kid, you dream about that shit right there from the time you even think about playing music, you know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Going out rocking SNL. Before the second song, we were backstage, and I just told everybody, like, you know, this is most likely the only time we may ever get to fucking do this, so don't leave anything out there, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Somebody wrote a great article about it saying that a musical artist named Sturgill Simpson just snuck in a song about the illegal heroin trade on SNL. Yeah, that happened. | ||
| I didn't think about it that way. | ||
| We just knew that shit would be fun to play, but yeah, it is kind of a... | ||
| I mean, that's what you did. | ||
| I mean, that's what it's about. | ||
| Do you ever see that video of Geraldo Rivera walking through the poppy fields? | ||
| Where the military was guarding the poppy fields? | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah, the military was guarding the poppy fields because in order to get information from the people that lived there, you had to get them on your side. | ||
| So the way to get them on their side was to protect their heroin production. | ||
| So you got the United States military walking through these poppy fields with Geraldo Rivera interviewing them. | ||
| And they're trying to explain. | ||
| Suspect. | ||
| It's the craziest thing you've ever seen in your life. | ||
| You're like, this is a movie. | ||
| This is not real. | ||
| This is a movie. | ||
| Geraldo Rivera is interviewing soldiers. | ||
| And the soldiers, United States soldiers, fucking machine guns out, are guarding poppy fields. | ||
| And you're like, what? | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| They're guarding heroin? | ||
| Where? | ||
| Afghanistan. | ||
| It's a fucking trip. | ||
| If we play it, we have an issue, right? | ||
| If we play it, how does that work? | ||
| We'll get kicked off of YouTube. | ||
| It's not as easy to find anymore. | ||
| Why would you get kicked off of YouTube? | ||
| I mean, I'm just looking. | ||
| It's hard to find now? | ||
| We've played it on the podcast many times. | ||
| They might be trying to wash it from the internet. | ||
| They know. | ||
| Dude, it's a trip. | ||
| It's Geraldo Rivera interviewing this guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's an old clip. | |
| Here it is. | ||
| We won't play the volume because otherwise we'll get kicked off of YouTube. | ||
| But when we're watching this, Geraldo Rivera is interviewing these soldiers who are talking about how they have to guard these poppy fields. | ||
| So they guard these poppy fields so that they can get information on the Taliban and that these guys who are the farmers will be on their side. | ||
| You have to see it. | ||
| You have to see the whole thing. | ||
| It's a long video that plays out. | ||
| Was the Taliban, would they burn it down, or did they just control the money from it? | ||
| It's a good question. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Are you protecting the heroin, or are these farmers' means of income? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's the farmers' means of income, right? | ||
| Politically, I guess you're asking a very important question. | ||
| Everything's about money. | ||
| Everything's about money. | ||
| Was the Taliban anti-heroin? | ||
| Do we know that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Heroin has ramped up since this time period. | ||
| Heroin use. | ||
| Well, from that time period of that video, yeah. | ||
| It just keeps ramping up, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Ramped up in Vietnam pretty hard, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What a coincidence. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| There's no way that the United States government back then, the 60s, when no one was accountable, would ever be involved in heroin trade. | ||
| I've met at least two elder gentlemen in my life randomly in bars who claim to fly airplanes for the CIA in Vietnam. | ||
| I just assumed they were both completely full of shit. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Did you ever see that CIA drug plane that crashed in Mexico with like a ton of cocaine on it? | ||
| They ran out of gas and they wouldn't let them land in Mexico to refuel because they knew what they were doing. | ||
| These guys are like, you know, they have way too much weight and they crashed. | ||
| And it's the craziest fucking series of images. | ||
| You look at this plane all fucked up, strewn across the field, but all the cocaine is intact. | ||
| It's all stuffed into this airplane. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Wow. | ||
| That's what they recovered. | ||
| But there's pictures of the wreckage. | ||
| Oh, you can kind of see the wreckage in the background there. | ||
| So in the wreckage, as these planes crash, it's just plumb full of cocaine. | ||
| Four tons of cocaine. | ||
| Cocaine! | ||
| That's 8,000 pounds, man. | ||
| That's so heavy. | ||
| 400 tons. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Oh, not four. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know one of these is not accurate, but it's just all memes. | |
| That can't be right. | ||
| 400 tons? | ||
| It's a lot. | ||
| Did you ever see that Tom Cruise movie about Barry Seale? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's all about that. | ||
| It's all about a few cowboys, rogue CIA agents that decided to try to make a little bit of money. | ||
| My buddy Caleb was in that movie for like five minutes and he steals the whole fucking thing. | ||
| Who is he? | ||
| He plays his wife's younger brother. | ||
| Oh yeah! | ||
| The little degenerate dipshit. | ||
| He was awesome. | ||
| He's great. | ||
| He's a funny dude. | ||
| That's a lot like the bluegrass conspiracy. | ||
| You know about that? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| The bluegrass. | ||
| Basically, it was a Lexington, Kentucky police officer. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| It went all the way up to the governor's office. | ||
| Yeah, and it was deep in Kentucky politics for years and years and years. | ||
| And he was flying a plane, a little prop plane with weed and money, millions of dollars in cocaine. | ||
| He crashed in Knoxville, Tennessee. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And they found everything. | ||
| They didn't know he was a police officer until he died. | ||
| He jumped out of the plane with a parachute with the coke strapped to him. | ||
| Gucci loafers. | ||
| They found him on the ground with his chute half open and just like... | ||
| Like a powder poke. | ||
| And a bear also ate all the cocaine. | ||
| And died, right? | ||
| Like a big strawberry shortcake just laying there in a horse farm field. | ||
| There's pictures of all... | ||
| Well, not all of that. | ||
| How much coke does it take to kill a bear? | ||
| It says how much he ate. | ||
| I don't know off the top of my head. | ||
| Poor thing. | ||
| I think they have it stuffed in Lexington. | ||
| That's a really good book. | ||
| You should read that book, Bluegrass Conspiracy. | ||
| One, it's a true story, but it's a small state-level corruption at the utmost level in terms of drugs. | ||
| Pablo Escobar. | ||
| Pablo Escobar. | ||
| The story of the legendary cocaine bear of Kentucky. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Is that the bear they mounted him? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's got a fucking sign around his neck that says cocaine bear. | |
| I think that's a company. | ||
| I love Kentucky. | ||
| Kentucky for Kentucky. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| That's like a gold chain. | ||
| That's like he's a rapper. | ||
| Look, he's got his hat sideways, and he's got a fucking sign around his neck that says cocaine bear. | ||
| It's all gold. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Bluegrass. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bluegrass, baby. | |
| I got a reading of that. | ||
| I definitely had heard about the bear eating the coke. | ||
| The Barry Seals one is a terrible one because the reason why they found out about it is because these two kids found the coke drop. | ||
| They found the coke and they wound up murdering these two kids when they went to retrieve the coke and they put their bodies on the railroad tracks. | ||
| And they told the parents that the kids got high and fell asleep on the railroad tracks. | ||
| But the parents did an independent autopsy and they found stab wounds. | ||
| And the kids. | ||
| You know what's really fucked up also? | ||
| What would give that away? | ||
| I've seen that when, like, transients or bums come in on, you know. | ||
| It's always, part of our, we would have to find, like, young kids and shit playing hop car and, you know, doing the gutter rat lifestyle and the $1,000 fucking North Face parkas and shit. | ||
| It's like, what are you doing, man? | ||
| You're going to die. | ||
| But, like, bums would come in on the trains. | ||
| And this didn't happen in our yard. | ||
| It was over at the North Yard, this guy. | ||
| He thought they were done with the movement. | ||
| You know, you took 5,700 foot steel with fucking 45,000 horsepower on the front of it. | ||
| Like when it starts moving, it's very sudden and hard. | ||
| So if you just go to stand up all that thing, all of a sudden when it starts rolling and then you lose your footing and you fall down on the tracks between the cars. | ||
| But when you get run over by a train, it's not bloody and messy. | ||
| Especially if it's been on the main line, it's rolling really hard and hot. | ||
| You put a limb on a track or a body or a corpse, all that weight and friction and heat, when it goes over, it just cuts it like butter and cauterizes everything, like pinches you off like sausage. | ||
| So we find pieces. | ||
| Not a mess, just pieces. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Unless you hit a fucking cow or something standing in the middle of the track and you're going 70 miles an hour and then it's just asshole and guts hanging off the front of the train. | ||
| Does that even slow the train down? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| A cow doesn't slow the train down. | ||
| It's less than a bug on your windshield. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Could you imagine... | ||
| Let's hit a cow. | ||
| Being in the fucking seat, the driver seat? | ||
| Yeah, I've done it. | ||
| Have you actually seen a cow? | ||
| Yeah, I've operated locomotives. | ||
| I've never hit a cow, but I've definitely driven a train. | ||
| But what was the biggest thing you hit? | ||
| I didn't really hit anything. | ||
| Nothing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Oh. | ||
| I mean, imagine, though, being in the front seat. | ||
| I only operated one within the yard, so probably like 35, 40 miles an hour tops. | ||
| But on the main line, when they're really rolling, they're doing like 70, 72 miles an hour. | ||
| Like I said, it's a mile and a half long train with four or five locomotives on the front of it, all with 30,000 horsepower each. | ||
| I mean, it's a bag of fucking blood, man. | ||
| You're not even going to... | ||
| But it just like... | ||
| Do they have special fronts that are designed to hit things like that? | ||
| Yeah, it's a big giant steel plow. | ||
| It's designed to push 10 feet of fucking snow out of the way if it has to. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So like essentially like those things that semis used for deer in the middle of the night? | ||
| But it's actually a big steel shovel with like an axe wedge in it. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| And it just hangs and it sits about six inches off the rail itself. | ||
| And its whole idea is to just splatter everything. | ||
| Just push anything out of the way and destroy it. | ||
| So to keep the train from derailing. | ||
| Because the only thing holding those things on the rail, the inner flange of a wheel set, you know, there's like a little... | ||
| Three quarter inch lip that kind of hangs over on the inside of the rails. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's all just gravity and downforce, keeping that thing going. | ||
| So you could put like a brick, technically. | ||
| You could take anything, a piece of fucking metal or a car jack and just lay it on that thing. | ||
| And when that train hits it at 70 miles an hour, it's coming off the rail. | ||
| Everything behind it is still going 70 miles an hour, stacking up behind it. | ||
| Every time you pull up to a crossing in the city and you see a train go by 10 miles an hour and there's like 20 tankers on there full of raw chlorine, you could really fuck some shit up if you knew what you were doing. | ||
| You'd kill a whole city. | ||
| You'd derail that train. | ||
| We'd have to think about that and Homeland Security would come out and we'd have to have courses and shit. | ||
| But you have so many miles of track. | ||
| How do you make sure that nobody does anything? | ||
| There are crews that drive that track on a daily basis and repair things. | ||
| Dude, you freak me out. | ||
| Fuck trains. | ||
| That's why I quit the job. | ||
| I watched enough of those things happen right in front of me, and it was my job to clean them up and get a crane out there. | ||
| I had a fucking cot in my office. | ||
| I would live at the yard for three or four days until we got everything repaired and back together and rolling. | ||
| But two or three times where you'd be sitting out there in the middle of switching leads, this happened where I'd be in a pickup truck at night or during the daytime with one of the guys I work with. | ||
| You know, maybe it's a guy, you're tired, you're trying to get done early, and you got a bunch of empty cars on the back, and the dude puts the throttle down before the air goes through the system all the way to the rear of the train. | ||
| So, you know, you got this dead weight, and he thinks, oh, fuck it, I got three locomotives, I can push you, it'll be okay. | ||
| Until... | ||
| When they designed the system 100 plus years ago, nothing has changed since then. | ||
| It's a very primitive, functional air brake system design. | ||
| You hook all these hoses up from the front to the back. | ||
| It runs air through, which allows the brakes to release. | ||
| So then the engineer can control those brakes. | ||
| Well, if the air doesn't go all the way to the back, the brakes are still on those cars. | ||
| So when all this horsepower... | ||
| Pushing rolling metal hits metal that does not want to roll. | ||
| It just buckles up in a teepee almost instantaneously, goes off, and you won't even feel it if you're 30 cars up that you're pushing shit into the dirt. | ||
| And it's all just piled on top of itself. | ||
| In only like two seconds, I watched this train go from being on the track to literally digging out a 10-foot trough of earth and just displacing it. | ||
| And I think, like, every day, me or one of my guys is standing right there. | ||
| I was like, I'm gonna go write songs. | ||
| Dude, good thinking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, very good thinking. | ||
| It's a good job, but... | ||
| Somewhere someone is on a fucking train listening to this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Freaking out. | ||
| Freaking out. | ||
| They're just about to go to sleep. | ||
| I'll just listen to Sturgill Simpson. | ||
| They should just go write songs, brother. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Right on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oof. | |
| Aren't they trying to do some bullet train? | ||
| Is that one of Elon Musk's ideas? | ||
| He wants to do a train that goes all the way across the country in 30 minutes or something? | ||
| We've got to get from here to Vegas first, and then maybe one up to Sacramento. | ||
| Do you think people would use it? | ||
| Do you think Americans would use a mass transit train system? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They don't use the one we have really much. | ||
| Well, not down here we don't. | ||
| It sucks. | ||
| We ride them in Europe because it's awesome. | ||
| You don't ever want to get on a fucking train from D.C. to New York. | ||
| It'd be the worst day of your life. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| I did it once. | ||
| Never again. | ||
| I did a whole tour on the East Coast by myself by train. | ||
| Awful experience. | ||
| Why is it so bad? | ||
| Self-importance, lack of compassion or understanding of considerations of other space on the part of Americans. | ||
| We don't function well in cram spaces. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's very specific. | |
| And then when I was in D.C., what station is a big one in D.C.? Union? | ||
| Is it Union? | ||
| No, that's... | ||
| I'm just guessing. | ||
| That's a good name for a station. | ||
| Okay, yeah, yeah, Union. | ||
| The train got delayed. | ||
| They announced this delay because of weather. | ||
| There was like a downed power line. | ||
| There was a fucking winter storm. | ||
| There was nothing to do. | ||
| And we travel all the time. | ||
| And as you do. | ||
| So if you travel all the time, you don't get the same anxieties about travel that most people that don't travel all the time get. | ||
| I would rather ride a bus for 20 hours than go get on an hour flight in an airport. | ||
| Because that anxiety is just fucking palpable, man. | ||
| And... | ||
| You see, you go to this calm, weird place when we were out in the bubble on a long tour where everybody's just sort of not talking at the airport or whatever it is, and you're just in your little happy zone. | ||
| And I'm at this fucking terminal in D.C., and they announced this cancellation, and this place just erupts. | ||
| And it's like 30 people literally over there screaming at the Amtrak employees. | ||
| I saw a pregnant lady get pushed down. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| In front of me when they finally opened the doors and people were trying to get up on the train and straight up just knocked this pregnant lady down. | ||
| I was just like, wow. | ||
| You go to Europe or Japan, everybody rides the tram. | ||
| In Japan, there'd be more people than you've ever imagined in your train car and nobody's touching one another. | ||
| It's like sardines, yet no one is touching you. | ||
| They're so considerate for the space and privacy and existence of everyone around them that you feel somewhat less crowded somehow. | ||
| Isn't it interesting culturally that they have that, whereas China has very different. | ||
| China, they just bump into each other. | ||
| It's so weird. | ||
| And then, you know, every country has their own way of interacting. | ||
| It's so interesting. | ||
| Japanese... | ||
| I've only been to Tokyo once, but I was like, if you told me, if I didn't know about Tokyo at all, and someone said, hey, I'm going to take you to another planet where human beings live, and they're so much like you, but their city is very orderly, and they have beautiful neon signs and great architecture, and there's millions of them on this one island, but they're super considerate. | ||
| It's this weird parallel universe. | ||
| That's what it felt like. | ||
| It's like if you didn't know about the Japanese culture and then you went over there, you'd be like, what is happening here? | ||
| Is this a real place? | ||
| What is going on here? | ||
| It is about the most foreign or alien experience, especially as an American. | ||
| If I was going to tell anybody to go anywhere to feel like a mindfuck, that would be the one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what you told me earlier. | ||
| It's kind of the place, too, that you can go drinking at night and go in bars and there's people passed out drunk right there on the floor. | ||
| On the street. | ||
| On the street with their cell phone wallet and nobody's going to fuck. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where does that happen? | ||
| It's such a unique country when you think about the history and their contributions to the martial arts in particular. | ||
| Just, I mean, the warrior ethic of the samurai, like that book Miyamoto Musashi's The Book of Five Rings. | ||
| That's a great book for your life, just to think about excellence in your life and pursuit in your life and how all things balance out. | ||
| All other aspects of your life, like his idea of being a great samurai. | ||
| You had to also be great at calligraphy. | ||
| You had to be a great artist. | ||
| You had to be able to write poetry. | ||
| You had to be a balanced human being in order to fight correctly. | ||
| This fucking guy was like 60 and 0 in one-on-one sword fights. | ||
| And became a pacifist in his later life. | ||
| And that Book of Five Rings is... | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| It's an amazing book, man. | ||
| We got a Musashi quote at the end of the anime film. | ||
| That's him. | ||
| That's him on my arm. | ||
| Yeah, just that whole culture, their contributions to martial arts, what they've been able to do with design. | ||
| It's an interesting place. | ||
| Even their automobiles. | ||
| I mean, they make bulletproof cars that last forever. | ||
| They were the first people to figure it out. | ||
| Just make cars that don't break. | ||
| And go really fast. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's a fascinating culture. | ||
| So what connection did they have to the anime thing? | ||
| Who was making all that animation for you? | ||
| Well, I had the idea for the record first, then we played Fuji Rock in 2017. I have a very good friend, a Japanese friend, who grew up in Kentucky on an exchange program with my wife, and he later moved back to Tokyo for college, became a radio DJ. His name is Shunsuke Ochiai, and he did the radio thing for a while, and then he got into voice narration for Marvel over there. | ||
| He's just a good dude. | ||
| We were talking. | ||
| I went over for a couple weeks before we played Fuji Rock to hang out with him and my buddies and get some time on the ground. | ||
| The record was recorded the month before. | ||
| I was like, man, it'd be really cool to do some animated videos for this album. | ||
| If it's like one or two And we were sitting around his place watching a lot of old animation and anime films and the textures and the color and everything, just stuff you don't really see anymore. | ||
| And I was just thinking about some of my favorite cartoons from that, especially the older stuff, the 70s and 80s that came from that world. | ||
| So we decided to start taking meetings with producers just to get an idea of what would this cost? | ||
| How long will it take? | ||
| Is it even possible? | ||
| Would they do it? | ||
| It was kind of trial and error for a while. | ||
| We finally had a meeting with a guy named Hiroki who... | ||
| Was very understated in the meeting. | ||
| Sold himself short. | ||
| Just like a mid-50s guy in a tracksuit. | ||
| But we come to find out a week later he's the fucking man. | ||
| And all his buddies are the man too. | ||
| And those guys are also used to working under... | ||
| Not necessarily restrictions, but if they take a project on, it's from a big studio. | ||
| The story's already dictated. | ||
| The parameters are dictated. | ||
| Basically, they have to stay within someone else's lane with their vision. | ||
| He asked me what kind of animation I was interested in, so I named off some of the references of the things that I loved and was looking to get in terms of aesthetic and texture. | ||
| He just went straight to the guys that made those things, because they were drinking buddies with all of them. | ||
| Junpei Mizusaki especially was the one director who I think Shun translated all the lyrics for them because I wanted them to know, one, what the record was about so they could gauge interest. | ||
| And he just sort of said at dinner one night, he's like, you're talking about the same things that I deal with as an artist. | ||
| He's like, you know, I feel like this could be me talking. | ||
| We deal with the same things in terms of dealing with business and commerce versus art. | ||
| So he just sort of reacted passionately to the music, and he just said, I want to do the whole record. | ||
| He's like, this is kind of a dream project for me. | ||
| And I said, okay. | ||
| And then I was like, well, how are you going to do the whole record in a year? | ||
| Because we've already been sitting on this thing for a year and a half now. | ||
| And they assembled four other directors who were running teams or project teams at the same time simultaneously and breaking the songs up into chapters. | ||
| So even though there's somewhat of a linear narrative told out of chronological order, and then two little side vignettes, which are sort of same universe, different world, just to give a different perspective on some of those songs, because some directors were doing one song, other teams had two, and he was overseeing the entire team, but had them all working simultaneously on it so we could finish on time. | ||
| So I went over six times in the last year, and I realized about the second trip that those... | ||
| Visits were very beneficial because those guys don't do half-ass. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And they definitely pride themselves on their work and they all wanted me to be impressed. | ||
| So every time I would come back, they knew I was coming. | ||
| I could tell that was really motivating them to go outside the box. | ||
| And everybody wanted to be the guy that blew my mind the most. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And they did every fucking time. | ||
| It was just like... | ||
| Some of that stuff, I know how they did it and I don't know how they did it. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Where can anybody see the whole thing? | ||
| Netflix. | ||
| Oh, it's all on Netflix. | ||
| It's on Netflix right now. | ||
| But you put some of it on YouTube? | ||
| Well, yeah, I didn't want to. | ||
| The label has to have a single because they got the relationship with Spotify and all that shit, so they got to... | ||
| Which is also frustrating because we make cohesive concept records that are meant to be consumed as a whole. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then, like, if I'm not going to radio, why do I need a single? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Just put the fucking record out. | ||
| Skip the lead up, the whole traditional setup, because we're not... | ||
| we don't fit that model right just by making records we're antiquated you know but they put a single out so they put one section of the movie up on youtube which i think we'll take down now that the whole film's out but uh yeah for people they'd be like what is going on here Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We basically made a, you know, heavy metal or the wall, but with Japanese animators. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I wouldn't compare it to the wall, but same idea. | ||
| Just a visual. | ||
| It's a visual age. | ||
| It's beautiful, too. | ||
| The animation that they did for it, it's really, it's incredible. | ||
| Was it weird seeing their vision connected to your music? | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, I wrote the initial story, the main byline screenplay, and then told Junpei. | ||
| We were trying to do an homage of specifically Ojembo and then a couple other famous samurai films like Takeshi Kitano's Zatoichi and a lot of Kurosawa things like Very reoccurring storylines. | ||
| And we were watching Kurosawa films in the studio making the record on silent in the control room just to kind of keep our mood right. | ||
| Like to keep everything kind of dark and ominous and no second guessing. | ||
| But yeah, it's kind of like a futuristic dystopian Yojimbo, which is also a fistful of dollars where you got... | ||
| One town of people being oppressed by a couple rival factions or gang leaders and sort of using them for their own billing. | ||
| So in the future now, Junpei and I talked about it. | ||
| Sex, drugs, and weapons, and war are really the main drivers of the economy. | ||
| So let's just say that those are the only economy. | ||
| Those are the only things that have value anymore at that point. | ||
| And he got weird. | ||
| So I gave him a rough script. | ||
| I said, but I want you guys to do what you do, so feel free to add or take things in any direction you want at any time. | ||
| So then you get... | ||
| 30 women with their tits out dancing. | ||
| That was Junpei's idea. | ||
| I told him there was a very old famous samurai film called Zatoichi and at the end of it, this blind swordsman conquers this evil force and the townspeople celebrate and there's this very famous scene in the end of it with this traditional dance and they're doing this dance and I said, can we sneak this in as a dance sequence slash homage? | ||
| Anybody that has to be a film buff geek like me would get it. | ||
| Anybody else just be like, this is fucking cool. | ||
| So they decided to take the gimps and the sex-trafficked slaves, so to speak, and then just make a big chorus line. | ||
| But then they had a woman, a traditional Japanese dancer, come in and they put her on motion capture and green screen and she did the actual dance from the film and they animated everyone to that. | ||
| I was like, that's pretty sweet. | ||
| I wouldn't have thought of that. | ||
| But he did what I wanted. | ||
| He just gave me what he wanted to do with it. | ||
| Now, how long is the whole thing? | ||
| The audio is the album. | ||
| It's 42 minutes. | ||
| It's a fucking brilliant idea, man. | ||
| It's really cool. | ||
| I just love the idea that you're experimenting with something like that. | ||
| Just trying it out. | ||
| But it had to be a long stretch. | ||
| That was the hardest part, was sitting on it so long. | ||
| And then hyper-focusing. | ||
| I mixed the record, I think, three times. | ||
| I mastered it twice. | ||
| And then we had to do a surround sound mix for the movie. | ||
| So I'm pretty fucking burnt out on it, I'll be honest. | ||
| I'm ready to go play it live, but I don't ever want to hear that shit again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Does that contribute to the way you get creative with the sound when you're performing live and you change up? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Do you think you're going to do this in the future again? | ||
| Like this kind of animation thing? | ||
| Or is this a one-off? | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| There's already talk of doing... | ||
| I wouldn't do the music again. | ||
| I would certainly... | ||
| I might... | ||
| If they want to run with the story, I'd be all about it. | ||
| Either prequel or sequel action. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| I wouldn't want to make this sonic signature. | ||
| I would probably use traditional Japanese musicians and then contemporary production methods and actually have dialogue and sound effects and make a story. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are you going to get into the cartoon business? | |
| I got three kids. | ||
| That would be fucking awesome. | ||
| It looks awesome. | ||
| I gotta watch the whole thing. | ||
| I gotta check it out. | ||
| It's really fucking weird, man. | ||
| It's super trippy. | ||
| Light that big Mike Tyson blunt when you get home at midnight and your kids are asleep and watch that shit. | ||
| And then you think about what a weird motherfucker I am. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| Now, when you think about doing another storyline like that, like following that storyline... | ||
| I haven't thought about it. | ||
| You haven't thought about it? | ||
| It'd be pretty easy, though. | ||
| I mean, she rides off with the two robots, and there's like an AI monster on Lyft dealt with. | ||
| Or you could go back in time to the origins of the two Slick and Slims feud with her dad while they show up to the dojo and kill everybody. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There's all kinds of... | ||
| Just making up shit. | ||
| Pretty straightforward. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, when you go back to writing new music, are you constantly working on new music? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| No? | ||
| When do you decide? | ||
| When you have an album release, when will you decide to try it? | ||
| Because you've been pretty consistent every, what, how many years? | ||
| Well, High Top and Metamodern came out like nine months apart from each other. | ||
| Sailor's Guide was 2016. Now here we are 2019. But we recorded that record 2017. No, man, it's like there is a tread water or drown mentality now. | ||
| Everybody thinks you have to be in front of people all the fucking time. | ||
| Or you've got to be blowing air into your brain balloon on Twitter and showing everybody how funny and enlightened you are to be a musician. | ||
| But like... | ||
| I think sometimes the best thing you do is just go the fuck away and process and recharge and look for holes that aren't being filled and exercise other interests. | ||
| Like I said, these guys, I don't want to play music with anybody else. | ||
| The only reason I would need another band is if I made a bluegrass record. | ||
| You know, so you just get the hang down and the people you want to be around and love and have a good time with. | ||
| Like I said, we could make ten records, it's all going to sound like ten different bands. | ||
| Because all these guys have extremely broad and diverse influences and ability. | ||
| I don't want to be in a box. | ||
| I don't want anybody to put a lid on it for me. | ||
| And we love all kinds of music. | ||
| So it's not really saying we're going to make this kind of record. | ||
| We just went in and made fucking noise. | ||
| And this is what happened with those tools. | ||
| It's interesting to see your conscious decision to sort of just check out and recharge. | ||
| Well yeah, you got a certain point you just realize you're not in charge. | ||
| And I'm a very controlling personality. | ||
| I like to feel like I'm in control at least of myself. | ||
| With music I've learned like you can put ideas out there but they decide what they want to be. | ||
| You know I knew I didn't want to put a wanky fucking noodley guitar solo on every single song. | ||
| Two or three of those on a record you're pretty good to go. | ||
| Especially now when the guitar is kind of dead. | ||
| But Bob's an amazing keyboard player, and we had this badass old Moog Model D synthesizer that does the Dr. Dre shit. | ||
| And we did it on one song, and we just kept going and cracking it out and putting higher and a lower octave and then running it through amps and blowing it out and getting it really dirty like a big cracked out laser beam. | ||
| And I was just like, that's the fucking sound, man. | ||
| We've got to put that on everything and cohesively tie the album together. | ||
| So most of the solos are Bob. | ||
| Making this fucking sweet ass like synth thing over some Black Sabbath and I never heard that record growing up, you know, so we made that record. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So when you're touring with this music now and you're fucking with it and you're switching things up, like when will you decide that it's time to write some new shit? | ||
| Will you just tour and then stop touring? | ||
| Well, I'm always writing poetry. | ||
| I used to sit down with a guitar and like, I'm going to write this song. | ||
| You get like a part and words and you find meter and phrase. | ||
| I've discovered I'm really just a poet. | ||
| It's easier to write the words out and craft the meter and phrase to those words musically in the studio. | ||
| I would say both, all the other three records, I would probably wrote half of them while you go in to make the record. | ||
| You think you have the songs, and you realize that those songs are not supposed to be a part of this record, and I would go home at night and write songs that fit that record. | ||
| Where I would come in with parts, like Sailor's Got, I had a lot of parts of music that get pieced together in the studio, and these guys probably all thought I was fucking insane. | ||
| It scared Ferg to death, because he's like, I want to hear the songs. | ||
| I was like, I got some notes, you know? | ||
| But really, the music happens, you lock yourself in that room with the right people for a matter of days, and you just keep going until it's done. | ||
| And you have ideas in the moment. | ||
| But now I don't even pick a guitar up to write. | ||
| I just write what I want to say, what I'm feeling. | ||
| And then these guys, you know, push and encourage and motivate me to try to do the other thing as well as I'm able. | ||
| So are you writing longhand? | ||
| Are you writing on a computer? | ||
| No, I always write it. | ||
| You always write it out with your hand? | ||
| And I have notepads. | ||
| And I'll go through and just scribble out sections or pick this can fit with this. | ||
| This record was very... | ||
| Deconstruct it, I guess. | ||
| We did some loops and we would record riffs in a certain key and then record that same riff in every other key so I could take it and chop it to a loop and make it super precise like a hip-hop album. | ||
| And then some stuff was just live as fuck, you know. | ||
| And you're just having fun. | ||
| We had a lot of fun. | ||
| The improvisational part of it sounds terrifying, but awesome. | ||
| That's what you want. | ||
| Sometimes you get something, if it's a melodic hook or something, the first take, it's usually the one you keep. | ||
| You go back and try to make it perfect and it's not as cool. | ||
| And we knew that, having done this before, so with these sessions, that was the only rule. | ||
| There was no second guessing or indecision, hence the samurai films on the wall. | ||
| Because in a sword fight, you got one fucking move. | ||
| That was the M.O. for these sessions. | ||
| The first thing, it doesn't matter if it's the right thing, it's the thing. | ||
| So when you're doing that and you're recording things, do you pause and go listen to it and play it again? | ||
| How do you guys do it? | ||
| Sometimes. | ||
| It depends. | ||
| If it sounds cool, like Bobby said, then you probably just keep it. | ||
| And if you're like, eh, that didn't really work, try something else. | ||
| Most of his solos on the record were like first, second take. | ||
| I mean, Chuck, I don't think I've ever fucking punched a single thing in Chuck's life. | ||
| Chuck's perfect. | ||
| He just kills it. | ||
| He's the man. | ||
| But Bob... | ||
| I've got a bunch of videos somewhere on our computer. | ||
| I made him record all of his solos with a joint in his mouth. | ||
| Well, like the intro thing, they were like, we need a thing for this. | ||
| And I was like, well, I need a doobie. | ||
| And I smoked it, and I just played that part. | ||
| I have some of those videos, too, on my phone. | ||
| So from that point on, every time he played, he had a joint in his mouth. | ||
| So he was like, not just thinking about the music. | ||
| It was like anything to just settle... | ||
| It was pretty fun. | ||
| I mean, we were kind of just... | ||
| We were fucking wasted. | ||
| You know, just kind of like doing the Arsenio. | ||
| Can you get too high and play music? | ||
| I'm still trying. | ||
| What did you say? | ||
| You said you want to get so high you don't even know what chord you're playing. | ||
| Yeah, I don't want to know what song we're playing. | ||
| The problem is we get so high when we record that and then we have to remember that live or relearn it. | ||
| And then if you get high live you can't remember what you played high when you record. | ||
| That is an issue. | ||
| So then do you go back and listen to recordings and go, what? | ||
| Yeah, what was that? | ||
| The fuck were we doing? | ||
| I mean, I had to go back. | ||
| Before rehearsals, this was a really weird thing that's never happened. | ||
| I went from mixing and processing, looking at this film for the past year, to now we have to learn these songs. | ||
| So you're actually paying attention to what you did there, or played these chords. | ||
| I was like, why the fuck did I do that? | ||
| Just so weird. | ||
| That and we did it so relatively quick, quicker than the other stuff, that we did shit. | ||
| Yeah, we had to learn it all over again because we didn't remember doing any of it. | ||
| It was just so creative and quick. | ||
| They hadn't heard any of the songs since we recorded them until I sent them the record three weeks ago. | ||
| Is it surreal going and listening to all of it after it's all pieced together? | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For me it was, yeah. | ||
| It's like riding a bike though, really. | ||
| Especially not playing in a year. | ||
| We know each other. | ||
| Just jump back on it. | ||
| I'm still catching things in the recordings that I don't play live. | ||
| I'll hear little bits and things still. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I got a question. | ||
| When you're in the studio with them, are you in producer mode because you've produced other artists? | ||
| Or are they kind of producers with you and you guys are finding it together? | ||
| Oh man, I couldn't tell these guys to do what they do. | ||
| I don't want to work with people. | ||
| I want to work with the guys that just do shit that amazes me. | ||
| But no, I'm not like... | ||
| I have a rough structure in my head of what it sounds like. | ||
| You know, I guess, I don't know, maybe you guys should answer that question. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you said it, but you have an idea of what you want, but you kind of give us the reins. | ||
| Yeah, if it sucks, I tell them. | ||
| You'll tell us. | ||
| I give them an opportunity to not fuck up. | ||
| You'll say, like, a Wu-Tang vibe or something. | ||
| Wu-Tang vibe. | ||
| So there's definitely, I have, like, the idea of the sound I'm chasing, and it's hard to articulate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But with this, I realized maybe by the end of the second day, we were doing something I know I hadn't really heard before. | ||
| Or maybe I was hearing 15 of my favorite records all at the same time. | ||
| I was just like, okay, this is what this is going to be. | ||
| And it's probably going to destroy my career, and that's okay. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| That's all that matters. | ||
| Everyone brings such a different element to it. | ||
| I'm obsessed with old records and equipment and getting sounds. | ||
| What's this sound? | ||
| It's this piece of gear and this. | ||
| I'm obsessed with it. | ||
| We can find those things and put them all together. | ||
| A big part of it too, to be completely honest, was every other record I've made, even the ones that some of these guys have played on, it was much more like I came in You're the songwriter and session musicians. | ||
| And then you go out and you're the commodity. | ||
| You're the singing head. | ||
| You're the star. | ||
| And I think maybe around 2017 there was a big part of me that really rejected all that. | ||
| The newness of it and the responsibility of it. | ||
| All I ever wanted to do was play guitar in a band as a kid. | ||
| And maybe I wanted to feel like a part of something that wasn't all about My fucking head. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And I realized I was finally in the band I'd always wanted to be in since I was 13 in my bedroom. | ||
| So why wouldn't I make those records? | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's funny because we imagine, I mean, think about the first one that we made together. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, Bobby, I met, I actually met Bobby before I met Miles. | ||
| Bobby played organ on my very first record. | ||
| I'd never met him. | ||
| He got called down by the producer. | ||
| And we instantly, I was just like, okay, this guy's cool as shit. | ||
| And then I think we were hanging out for like a week and we were both going pretty hard in the paint still back then. | ||
| Bobby and I would go out drinking and then come home and wake my wife up at four in the morning and eat all the ice cream. | ||
| And that was like... | ||
| And I think it was one night in particular in Nashville. | ||
| I was working at a fucking grocery store. | ||
| He was sleeping in his car. | ||
| We're both just pretending we're not miserable and enjoying each other's company. | ||
| And we went out and got real shit-faced, man. | ||
| And... | ||
| We were walking up to Mumbry and going to the only place that was still open to get some food at like 3 in the morning. | ||
| So all these meat market bars are letting out. | ||
| And we both look like a couple degenerate scumbags probably. | ||
| We walk by and there's this group of like four or five obviously Vandy fucking football players, like just huge dudes, young men, and pretty inebriated. | ||
| And we're walking by and I hear one of them say, oh look, it's the Strokes. | ||
| He's like, I love your records, man. | ||
| And I blew it off, whatever, I'm a grown-ass man, and I just kept walking and I got about 10 feet. | ||
| I don't know why, I could just tell Bobby wasn't with me anymore. | ||
| And I turn around and look back to see this motherfucker standing in the middle of the circle of all of them, like literally eight inches from this guy's face with his hands on his hip, wearing his leather jacket. | ||
| And Bobby's from Detroit, man. | ||
| He don't fucking play, you know? | ||
| And I look, I was like, all right, well, I guess I'm going to jail with Bob tonight. | ||
| And I turn around and like kind of walk back over there. | ||
| And about the time I get to the group of dudes, one of them was eating a street hot dog. | ||
| And I will never forget this as long as I live. | ||
| Bobby, like, snatched the hot dog out of his hand and kind of crushed it like a paper wad and bounced it off his forehead. | ||
| Oh, Bobby. | ||
| And I was like, well, now I'm definitely going to jail with Bob tonight, you know? | ||
| Bradley Coopers. | ||
| Yeah, the Bradley Coopers. | ||
| We called them Bradley Coopers because there's, like, this swarm of, like, dudes that had pink shirts on that look like Bradley Coopers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're surrounded by them. | |
| And I don't know. | ||
| It was pretty fascinating to watch them all immediately knew that they were dealing with something that they'd never experienced and they wanted fucking none of it. | ||
| I was like, I think this is my new best friend. | ||
| I'm going to be friends with this guy the rest of my life. | ||
| This hot dog destroying man is not to be fucked with. | ||
| This David Lee Roth organ playing motherfucker is alright with me. | ||
| We were just walking, having a drink. | ||
| We weren't bothering nobody. | ||
| They were dicks. | ||
| Total dicks. | ||
| And then we went back and ate all of his ice cream out of the same container with a... | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was disgusting. | |
| And now we sleep on a bus and have our own hotel rooms. | ||
| The bus thing's gonna be a trip, huh? | ||
| It's a lot like being on a ship. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| It's just like the Navy. | ||
| You sleep in bunks and you wake up every day and wonder where you are. | ||
| But no shitting on the bus, right? | ||
| Can't poop on the bus. | ||
| For a thousand dollars, you know. | ||
| You pay a thousand? | ||
| You can poop on other people's buses. | ||
| Yeah, or on other people's buses. | ||
| You don't poop on our bus. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So what do you guys do? | ||
| Just tell the guy to pull over to a rest stop? | ||
| You find a nice pilot somewhere in Omaha and shit on the toilet the same 38 truckers have today. | ||
| It's already warm. | ||
| It's all the glory. | ||
| It beats being in a van, though, by far. | ||
| Oh, for sure, right? | ||
| I see you guys listening to music, playing music. | ||
| What are you doing when you're on the bus? | ||
| Movies. | ||
| Movies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Movies or, you know, cereal. | |
| Very few comics travel like that. | ||
| Bert Kreischer is one of the rare ones. | ||
| He travels by bus and puts his fucking face on it and shit. | ||
| I mean, at the end of the day, this... | ||
| We are very grateful. | ||
| I want to touch on that. | ||
| But the bus thing, it's a quality of life issue, as you well know. | ||
| Touring is all about quality of life. | ||
| There's no way to make it not suck other than the shows themselves. | ||
| But everything else, that 22 hours a day, it's like just trying to... | ||
| One, some kind of circadian rhythm so you don't get all serotonin weird and shit. | ||
| That nightly adrenaline blast is the hardest thing on me. | ||
| I find after a tour that I have to... | ||
| Figure out what's going on in my brain and not be... | ||
| You get home from that after six weeks. | ||
| I can't get off the couch for a week. | ||
| It's like this weird, strange fatigue I've never experienced in anything else. | ||
| But the bus... | ||
| We kind of, I'd rather, like I said, I'd rather ride a bus for three days than go to an airport. | ||
| Amen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Absolutely. | ||
| You're in a cocoon. | ||
| It's your home. | ||
| You're on the ground. | ||
| It's familiar. | ||
| It's a safe haven. | ||
| We're all just chilling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We hang out. | ||
| We're all around each other more than we are our families most of the time. | ||
| And we're in this little motor home. | ||
| And if you get off, it's just like fucking Joseph Conrad, man. | ||
| Don't get off the boat. | ||
| If you step off the boat, that's when weird shit happens. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Right. | ||
| When you guys go out, how long do you go out for? | ||
| Well, the first couple of tours, those records were pretty brutal. | ||
| We played about 300 plus for two or three years straight. | ||
| 300 nights a year? | ||
| Yeah, but you know, I've got a problem where like... | ||
| I felt I had to. | ||
| I felt I had to do that because I had a wife and kids on the way and it was like, this is it. | ||
| I've got to make this fucking happen. | ||
| And then it makes you happen. | ||
| And then other people are making you do that now because it's making so much money. | ||
| They can't afford for you to not be out there doing it. | ||
| And you reach a point of exhaustion and burnout you're not even aware of because you're still doing what you love every night. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But all the other shit catches up, and it caught up to me pretty hard around the second kid. | ||
| And I just realized, like, there's a smarter way to do this that will still provide for my family and all these guys, which is, like, less is more. | ||
| And now I'll never tour like that again, because there's no need, one. | ||
| But two, it's just not healthy. | ||
| You're making a lot of people happy, but, like, it's not healthy. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| And that's where a lot of guys get into substance abuse, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| James Hatfield just checked himself back into rehab. | ||
| Yeah, because those guys, at their age, they got fucking more money than God, and they're still out hitting it harder than ever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| After the live... | ||
| Well, that actually might get me sued. | ||
| I better not say that. | ||
| Yeah, no need. | ||
| That's a tough call, man. | ||
| Yeah, it's a real tough call. | ||
| Yeah, those guys, the great things about comedy is you only have to go out for a weekend. | ||
| Sometimes I'll travel somewhere for one night and come home, and most of the shit I do is around L.A. It's like the practice stuff, just to stay sharp. | ||
| But I have friends that do the long touring, and they start to go crazy. | ||
| Get a little nutty, man. | ||
| I mean, if you're single, you don't have children. | ||
| Yeah, but even then. | ||
| Even then, it gets a little nutty. | ||
| But even more dangerous if you were single and have no kids, it'd be real easy just to stay out there forever. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Lost in that cycle of like... | ||
| Especially if you like Coke. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Woo! | |
| Well, if you're partying and drinking, you don't realize how tired you are. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And then when you do it sober, you're like, holy shit. | ||
| Yeah, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's the greatest job in the world, like, to be a professional entertainer. | ||
| But there's definitely some pitfalls to it. | ||
| Just like everything else, there's a balance. | ||
| And those guys that run it too hard, they run that engine too hot. | ||
| Which I think anybody that really cares about it is going to be accused of that at some point. | ||
| I definitely push things too hard. | ||
| I sing really hard. | ||
| I learn, like, singing very hard and physical, it... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's like you're tired from the outside in and then back out. | ||
| It's a weird feeling, man. | ||
| Comics always talk about it the same way that when they're on the road too much, the words stop meaning anything. | ||
| They're saying these things, but they don't have a connection to it anymore. | ||
| They lose their connection to the material. | ||
| And the only way to get around that is to constantly be writing new shit. | ||
| Because if you're doing the same shit for too many shows in a row, you start to go bonkers. | ||
| I mean, it seems to be, correct me if I'm wrong, but similar to why you guys are always changing your songs. | ||
| There was a few songs you did last night that I recognized as a song, but it was a totally different beat. | ||
| A lot of it was different. | ||
| You can't change the words, but I can change the notes. | ||
| I can keep it inspiring for me by focusing on the notes that I'm singing or playing. | ||
| I don't even read music. | ||
| I don't know what fucking notes I'm singing. | ||
| I just know... | ||
| He can probably tell you more about that, Theory Master. | ||
| When I was a kid, I used to hate live albums because I felt like they went too fast. | ||
| Very few of them actually were live. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They're faking it? | ||
| They're faking it. | ||
| Like Kiss Alive 2. Totally not a live album. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Frampton comes alive. | ||
| That's real. | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
| What? | ||
| Oh, you fucked up. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| The Kiss record's definitely a studio record with audience. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe we should look it up. | ||
| That's marketing genius. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jamie. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| 100%? | ||
| Maybe we should look it up. | ||
| Are you looking it up? | ||
| I'll say. | ||
| Are you guessing? | ||
| Are you guessing if you know for sure? | ||
| I'm pretty sure the Kiss record was a fucking... | ||
| But they sounded different. | ||
| I think so, too. | ||
| The Kiss thing is like... | ||
| They were like... | ||
| You can tell by the way it sounds. | ||
| And it sounded... | ||
| Well, I'm a moron. | ||
| I don't know anything about music. | ||
| But to me, it sounded like they were performing the songs faster, which I always attributed to them being hyped up because they're in front of an audience. | ||
| Yeah, that's exactly right. | ||
| The tempo. | ||
| Is that how... | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| The adrenaline, because everyone's going crazy, and you just... | ||
| Yeah, that's what I assumed. | ||
| Because I would listen. | ||
| They would sound different. | ||
| On some of those records, it might not even be them playing. | ||
| How dare you! | ||
| They get ghost players and they have to sign waivers and stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like the monkeys. | |
| Which, those records are incredible. | ||
| You know, because it's all the wrecking crew playing the music. | ||
| Those are good songs. | ||
| Harry Nilsson and Neil Diamond wrote 90% of that shit. | ||
| Really? | ||
| That's why they're great songs. | ||
| The Beach Boys. | ||
| The Beach Boys, exactly. | ||
| And they were all cut out here with the A-Team musicians. | ||
| The Monkees made some killer records, man. | ||
| Then I saw her face. | ||
| Porpoise song. | ||
| One of the most psychedelic things I've ever heard. | ||
| Yeah, they got dismissed because everybody knew they were kind of an artificially created band. | ||
| Well, they were. | ||
| Yeah, that they were put on television. | ||
| They were singing it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They were actually singing it. | ||
| Who do you guys think is the best singer of the Monkees? | ||
| Ooh, Mickey? | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Who's the best? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| The best singer? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I only know one name. | ||
| I know Mickey. | ||
| Mickey Dolenz. | ||
| Davey Jones. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I forgot about Davey Jones. | ||
| Davey has the cleanest voice, I think, but I don't know if he was my favorite singer. | ||
| Who are the other monkeys? | ||
| Mickey Dolenz, Mike Nesmith, and Peter Tork. | ||
| Mike Nesmith and Peter Tork. | ||
| Mike and Peter were the real musicians. | ||
| Mike made the best solo records, I think. | ||
| I think Mickey's a good singer. | ||
| Mickey was a good singer. | ||
| It's kind of annoying the way he sings some of the R&B stuff on Head or something. | ||
| It's annoying? | ||
| Yeah, it's a little much. | ||
| Have you seen Head? | ||
| I don't remember it, no. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| You've got to watch the movie. | ||
| It's... | ||
| What is it? | ||
| The Monkees movie. | ||
| The Monkees made a movie? | ||
| It's psychedelic as Brian Auger and Julie Driscoll. | ||
| It's called Head? | ||
| Yeah, all these guest musicians. | ||
| Like as in your head? | ||
| Feed your head? | ||
| Jefferson Airplane? | ||
| Do drugs? | ||
| Really? | ||
| It's an insane psychedelic movie. | ||
| What in the fuck? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The visuals are pretty incredible. | |
| I live in an alternate universe. | ||
| I didn't know this existed. | ||
| Do you think that's on Netflix? | ||
| Please check. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Annette Funicelli's in it. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Powerful Annette Funicelli. | ||
| Jack Nicholson. | ||
| Sonny Liston's in it? | ||
| The boxer? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Oh my god. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Jack fucking Nicholson, man. | ||
| I forgot about that. | ||
| Western Desert Saga, horror film, musical horror film, science fiction. | ||
| It's memorable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's memorable. | |
| Find out the things on Netflix. | ||
| Might have to recommend that to people. | ||
| We should have a fight companion where we just watch Head. | ||
| We just get blitzed. | ||
| It's on YouTube? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Good. | ||
| Good to know. | ||
| That's what we'll do. | ||
| We'll have a fight companion where we watch The Monkey's Head. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A list of movies. | |
| Oh, Jack Nicholson wrote the screenplay. | ||
| Did he really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Bob Raffleson. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| What does it say? | ||
| 1968? | ||
|
unidentified
|
1968. 1968. Big box office. | |
| Whoa, it made $16,000. | ||
| Bro, it made $16,000 in the box office. | ||
| Somebody got fired for that fucking movie. | ||
| When did they try to make it? | ||
| 68? | ||
| When was it over for the Monkees? | ||
| Was this like their attempt at... | ||
| 67, 68 was sort of the peak, right? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Probably after that movie, man. | ||
| When was the TV show? | ||
| Late 60s. | ||
| Late 60s. | ||
| They had to make... | ||
| They got it canceled so they could make room for Joyce DeWitt. | ||
| From Three's Company? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Chuck and I have the official Joyce DeWitt Appreciation fan club. | ||
| If you want to be a member, we can talk about it. | ||
| I think I'm already in. | ||
| I have my own chapter. | ||
| Yeah, but you ain't in these guys' chapters, man. | ||
| It's different? | ||
| How do you guys rock it? | ||
| Can't say it on air. | ||
| Five-year-old fetish obsession level, maybe? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I used to be a Mary Tyler Moore fan. | ||
| That was my gal. | ||
| She's no Joyce DeWitt. | ||
| No? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| But not Suzanne Somers? | ||
| No, Chrissy can go home. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Why do you think that? | ||
| Do you think she's too needy? | ||
| What happens with Chrissy? | ||
| She's just not Joyce DeWitt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| That's just your thing. | ||
| Do you feel like she was overlooked? | ||
| Sort of like Ginger? | ||
| No, not Ginger. | ||
| Marianne. | ||
| Sort of like Marianne from Gilligan's Island? | ||
| Was Janet overlooked? | ||
| It seemed like it. | ||
| Marianne was definitely overlooked. | ||
| Everybody was into Ginger. | ||
| What a conversation. | ||
| Marianne looked like a giant pain in the... | ||
| I mean, Ginger, rather, looked like a giant pain in the ass. | ||
| There's Joyce Duet. | ||
| Oh, look at that one there. | ||
| That's not her, is it? | ||
| Everybody gets old. | ||
| Come on, get old. | ||
| Is that a mugshot? | ||
| Yeah, probably. | ||
| Cops, DUI, yo. | ||
| Mugshot. | ||
| Sorry, Joyce. | ||
| But when she was in her prime... | ||
| What a doll. | ||
| Love God's creation. | ||
| Is that what it says on her shirt there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
there? | |
| No. | ||
| Do you remember when they took Suzanne Somers Yeah. | ||
| She had a call in. | ||
| She was like, calling in. | ||
| It's like, hey, it's me. | ||
| I know I'm still on the show, but I'm on a vacation. | ||
| I'll miss you guys. | ||
| Bye. | ||
| Like, that was her being on the show. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| They'd have a phone call with her, and she wouldn't be interacting with them. | ||
| Your cousin Cindy took over. | ||
| Yeah, and then they fired her, right? | ||
| It was like contract negotiation. | ||
| That was the first time you realized, like, even people on TV are never happy. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| They're on TV. They want more money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Woo! | |
| The Regal Beagle. | ||
| Ooh, I remember that. | ||
| Remember when they switched the old folks, too? | ||
| Yeah, it went from Mr. Roper to Mr. Furley. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Mr. Furley was a decent... | ||
| Don Knotts? | ||
| You know, that was a good fill-in. | ||
| Our guy at Dan Tana's last night was basically Mr. Furley. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Mr. Furley never broke the wall, though, the way Mr. Roper did it. | ||
| That was the best part. | ||
| He'd get a zinger in and look at the camera. | ||
| That's the funniest shit ever, man. | ||
| Mr. Roper had a special sense of humor, and he was also a lovable pervert. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| Remember? | ||
| He was like really into the girls? | ||
| Mr. Roper was like for sure. | ||
| That was Don Knotts, right? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think it was Mr. Roper. | ||
| Was it Don Knotts? | ||
| Who was the lovable pervert? | ||
| Was it Don Knotts or was it Mr. Roper? | ||
| But I thought the other one was kind of a perv too. | ||
| No, he was married to Mrs. Roper. | ||
| He was, though. | ||
| Wasn't he kind of a perv to the girls? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He just, yeah. | ||
| Guys could be way more pervy on TV back then. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, man, there you go. | ||
| Yeah, Don Lotz was a player, remember? | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| I met John Ritter. | ||
| John Ritter was on an episode of News Radio. | ||
| Super nice guy. | ||
| Real, real nice guy. | ||
| Everybody loved him. | ||
| As I got older, I always wondered about that guy. | ||
| I've always been fascinated by people who do a lot of pratfalls. | ||
| Those guys get really hurt. | ||
| That pratfall shit, it's like you're playing rugby with yourself. | ||
| You're throwing yourself into chairs and onto the ground. | ||
| You're falling down the way somebody falling down falls down. | ||
| Yeah, you're falling down and taking the impact on your fucking back. | ||
| And a lot of those guys get significantly injured. | ||
| And if you read back on ancient movie stars, a lot of them got... | ||
| Really badly hurt. | ||
| It was Buster Keaton. | ||
| Had the broken neck. | ||
| We showed this video of him. | ||
| He did these crazy stunts and one of the stunts he did like he had this water come down from this thing and hit him in the head. | ||
| Who told us about this? | ||
| Was it Penn? | ||
| Penn Jillette? | ||
| And he broke his fucking neck from the water hitting him. | ||
| They didn't anticipate the weight of the water and the water was so powerful that slammed him to the ground. | ||
| And broke his fucking neck, and he continued with the scene. | ||
| And then later, when he was older, the doctor was examining him, like, when did you break your neck? | ||
| He's like, I never did. | ||
| And he's like, the fuck you didn't? | ||
| Like, bro, you broke your neck. | ||
| You broke your neck, dude. | ||
| You didn't even know he was running around with a broken neck. | ||
| Different humans back then, son. | ||
| They made people different. | ||
| All the Cliff Booths of the world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But him, Jack Tripper, John Ritter, he did a lot of pratfalls, man. | ||
| A lot. | ||
| I always wondered about guys like that. | ||
| I'm like, how much pain is that dude in? | ||
| What's his face? | ||
| Chevy Chase? | ||
| I gotta think that was a contributor to him being cranky. | ||
| People always say that Chevy Chase is cranky. | ||
| There was some recent thing where he was yelling at somebody for something. | ||
| A guy's probably in fucking pain all the time from falling down. | ||
| Like, guys with back injuries from doing a lot of those pratfalls. | ||
| Like, they're always throwing themselves up in the air, legs up. | ||
| Bam! | ||
| Bouncing off the ground. | ||
| It hurts being Clark Griswold. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| All that shit he did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| He was always falling down, right? | ||
| He was always falling down on SNL. Always getting fucked up, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He fell off the roof. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| He did fall off the roof. | ||
| He fell out of the attic? | ||
| He fell out of the attic. | ||
| I wonder what they did with that. | ||
| How did they set that up? | ||
| These stunt guys, you think? | ||
| It's hard to say, man. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've ventured into thespian a little bit myself. | |
| The stunt guys do the crazy shit, but like... | ||
| You know, you can still get fucked up. | ||
| Stunt guys get fucked up a lot. | ||
| My friend Tate just got a severe concussion from doing some stunt work in a movie. | ||
| He's having a hard time looking at lights. | ||
| I fell on my back in some rehearsals for a movie last year. | ||
| We had to go to New Orleans for like a week and rehearse this scene because it was going to be one like 12 minute shot. | ||
| And Daniel Kaluuya and I had to like body slam each other on the pavement about 20 times one day and I guess I landed on the pad on the curb wrong. | ||
| I got home that night and it felt like my kidneys were on fire and then I had to piss like every three minutes for the next week. | ||
| I had some blood tracing and so of course the next week is when we went to actually film the fucking thing in Cleveland in the middle of the polar vortex. | ||
| We're out there in the shoot and the whole time I'm just like I feel like I got a bladder infection from just from falling down one time wrong. | ||
| And you have to do it again. | ||
| Oh, we did it like 150 times. | ||
| Just for this movie? | ||
| For one scene in the movie. | ||
| Yeah, I'll never question how hard those people work ever again, man. | ||
| Did you get an MRI? I went to a doctor in New Orleans and she checked it out and said there was trace blood, but nothing was... | ||
| She said, don't be a pussy? | ||
| Don't be a pussy, essentially, yeah. | ||
| Pretty much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was like, alright, I won't be a pussy. | |
| Yeah, that kind of impacts. | ||
| That's no bueno. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a weird way to make a living. | ||
| I mean, you guys probably have... | ||
| Every single person that does your job for at least a few years probably has sustained impact and stress injuries, I would imagine. | ||
| Oh yeah, dudes are jacked up all the time. | ||
| Dudes are jacked up while they're active duty. | ||
| Like, the guys that actually walk in here and are on your show, like they're... | ||
| They're probably all jacked up and then they're probably the better off ones because they took care of their bodies. | ||
| A lot of people don't do that. | ||
| That's like becoming more of a thing like the tactical athlete. | ||
| But knees, I mean my knee was getting janky before the foot blew off of it. | ||
| How much of that was from squatting 8,000 pounds all through your 20s though? | ||
| I would say that was a preventative measure. | ||
| Really? | ||
| You train all the time. | ||
| You maintain going through full ranges of motion and keeping structures loaded and pliable. | ||
| Strength train and do conditioning, endurance-based stuff and maintain mobility. | ||
| You lose mobility, you start dying. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Definitely when it comes to anything that's going to be throwing you around or battering you into something, the more muscle, the more strength you can put into your body, the more you can protect yourself, but obviously only so much. | ||
| But when you think about wrestlers or anybody who does anything when they're getting slammed to the ground a lot, they're mostly doing it, if they're doing it as a competitive wrestler, doing it on mats that are cushioned. | ||
| If you're doing it on the street, and they've got you doing some sort of stunt maneuvers, what kind of pads do they have underneath you? | ||
| Like a basic martial arts... | ||
| Like a big, thick, bad boy? | ||
| Not real thick. | ||
| No, it's just those little blue... | ||
| Thin ones, really? | ||
| ...that fold up. | ||
| Because they want to see your body actually hit the ground. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And then when they actually shot the thing, the only thing that we didn't... | ||
| There was a part where... | ||
| I definitely had to like judo flip his ass off onto a pad and we did all that but then like the stunt guys came out and did that shit for real onto frozen fucking concrete in negative 20 degrees and I was like oh yeah y'all can have at that you know but they for real like dude straight up suplexed this motherfucker on the pavement and they had knee pads and elbow pads on everything but you know it had to look real Those are the guys you wonder | ||
| how long that career lasts. | ||
| That's where I can't wait for robots to get really good at body slams. | ||
| You see what they're doing now with the parkour robots and shit? | ||
| That's what we need. | ||
| Just robots body slamming each other. | ||
| Or just get it to where CGI doesn't offend me. | ||
| You know, like I watched Avatar the other night, again. | ||
| Remember, you go back and look at all those old Jackie Chan movies, knowing what that guy is putting his body through? | ||
| Oh my god, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, no doubt about it. | ||
| Definitely was slammed into things left and right. | ||
| But if you go back and watch Avatar, it's fucking, first of all, it's fucking awesome. | ||
| I mean, it's fucking awesome. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| But the CGI, it's so obvious that it's not real people. | ||
| So the guy who invented the software that James Cameron used to make Avatar did the video for the number four song on this film, Michael Arias. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Still a great fucking movie. | |
| The guy was so fucking genius, he couldn't articulate sentences. | ||
| It was like the driest meetings I've ever been in, because his brain, there was so much shit going on on levels we could never comprehend. | ||
| He was just like, so... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I thought... | |
| You're just like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| But he's making computers and shit. | ||
| I can't do that. | ||
| That was ten years ago that Avatar came out, too, which is crazy. | ||
| I didn't know it was that long ago. | ||
| Some fucking great scenes in that movie, man. | ||
| People got depression after that movie. | ||
| They got a thing they called Avatar Depression. | ||
| Because they wished that they were living in Avatar. | ||
| They wished that they were on Pandora. | ||
| They wished they were the Na'vi. | ||
| Like living a spiritual life connected to Mother Earth. | ||
| What would they call her? | ||
| Iwa. | ||
| Right? | ||
| If they only knew they are. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| Yeah, but, you know, cell phones and shit. | ||
| They really want to be flying around on dragons. | ||
| Fucking turtles, man. | ||
| Shooting bows and arrows at people. | ||
| You know? | ||
| See, I need to be on Twitter, man. | ||
| But that's a powerful movie where people actually get depression. | ||
| From not living in the place where the movie was taking place. | ||
| Never seen it. | ||
| You've never seen Avatar? | ||
| I haven't seen it either. | ||
| You've never seen The Goonies either, though, so that's not really, you know. | ||
| How have you never seen The Goonies? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was born in 1992. Yeah, but how have you not gone back? | |
| Avatar, that doesn't make any sense, man. | ||
| That's 2009. Did you get abused as a child? | ||
| No, I'm just waiting to go on the road so we can watch The Goonies. | ||
| Dude, you've got to watch Avatar, man. | ||
| It's a three-hour masterpiece. | ||
| You might tear up a little bit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Now I got something to do on the bus. | ||
| Dude, it's a dope movie. | ||
| James Cameron can direct the fuck out of a movie. | ||
| He can do just about anything he wants to do, I think. | ||
| Yeah, basically. | ||
| If he can't do it, he just invents some shit so he can go do it. | ||
| But I forgot how good that movie was. | ||
| I haven't seen it in forever. | ||
| I watched it again. | ||
| I was like, fuck, this is a good movie. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| People go, oh, it's like an alien version of Pocahontas. | ||
| Save it. | ||
| Save that shit. | ||
| Keep it to yourself. | ||
| I enjoy it. | ||
| It's a trippy fucking movie, man. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| But every story is like a version of another story that's always existed. | ||
| There's classic archetypes that are unavoidable. | ||
| Doesn't mean it's not an awesome movie, you fucking pain in the ass. | ||
| Goddamn malcontents out there. | ||
| There's always somebody. | ||
| Avatar is fucking terrible. | ||
| You like that movie? | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| You have no soul. | ||
| There's nothing inside you. | ||
| It's a lot like Roadhouse. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly! | |
| There's a few. | ||
| Were you sober when you watched it? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes, I was. | ||
| Right on, brother. | ||
| How dare you for the insinuation? | ||
| Well, there's a lot of colors to be like. | ||
| It's the perfect movie to get in front of. | ||
| You know what you can't be sober for? | ||
| Showgirls. | ||
| Showgirls might be the ultimate bad movie. | ||
| Elizabeth Berkley. | ||
| Remember? | ||
| She played a girl trying to make it as a showgirl in Vegas and it's just like cartoonishly ridiculous. | ||
| And they have a scene where she's having sex with Kyle. | ||
| What the fuck's his name? | ||
| What's that dude's name, Jamie? | ||
| The guy from Twin Peaks. | ||
| Jamie. | ||
| Anyway, she has the most preposterous sex scene in the history of film. | ||
| Where she starts flopping around. | ||
| They're having sex in a pool. | ||
| And she starts flailing. | ||
| Just flailing. | ||
| Like you would have to be an asshole to keep fucking her. | ||
| A healthy person would be like, this girl is having a psychotic break. | ||
| I need to step away, stop thinking about my dick, and help her. | ||
| She's my friend. | ||
| She's having some sort of a psychotic seizure. | ||
| She's flailing. | ||
| Flopping back and forth and flailing. | ||
| If you were dating a girl like that, you'd be like, oh my god, dude, she's so annoying. | ||
| Everything she does, she has to throw her body around and flail. | ||
| You've never seen that scene? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're about to. | |
| We've pulled it up on here before, I think. | ||
| But Sturgill's never seen it. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| What year is this movie? | ||
| 95. Oh, okay. | ||
| I was thinking... | ||
| It was right when I first moved to L.A. I was like, so this is how it is out here, huh? | ||
| I've seen it. | ||
| I tried to block it out. | ||
| Dude, I still remember the billboards on Sunset. | ||
| I was driving down Sunset. | ||
| First year living in L.A. And I was like, look at this shit. | ||
| What the fuck kind of piece of shit movie is this? | ||
| Is this what these people are into? | ||
| But it's one of those movies where you watch, like, people forgot how bad it is. | ||
| It's the cocaine days of films. | ||
| When they were making these movies, there were obviously someone was on coke. | ||
| Someone making that movie was on coke. | ||
| Is there... | ||
| I'm looking for the video. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I have seen that. | |
| Yeah, you see her ta-tas, too. | ||
| Her ta-tas are hot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've absolutely seen this scene before. | ||
| You've never seen it, Sturgeon? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's awful. | |
| I've seen it. | ||
| It's awful? | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| But if you get really, really high, it might be good again. | ||
| That sex scene's not good. | ||
| It's a terrible sex scene. | ||
| But that's what's good about it, is how terrible it is. | ||
| The other movie you guys have to see on the road? | ||
| Grizzly Man. | ||
| Have you seen that? | ||
| The documentary? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I've seen that shit. | ||
| The greatest unintentional comedy in the history of comedies. | ||
| What could go wrong? | ||
| What was the thing you showed us yesterday? | ||
| Bear? | ||
| Is that the 80s movie? | ||
| The bear eats mushrooms? | ||
| When he eats the mushrooms? | ||
| Yeah, it's the bear. | ||
| I hadn't seen it, but maybe, have you seen that? | ||
| No, there's a movie about a bear who eats mushrooms? | ||
| Like Jamie, look up the scene on YouTube. | ||
| Yeah, it was 88. You gotta look it up. | ||
| What is this movie about? | ||
| It's about a... | ||
| Yeah, dude. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If you get Jamie to say, holy shit, you got to look real. | |
| Oh, these are Amanita Miscarias. | ||
| Those are really hard to get high on. | ||
| When I was a kid, this was fucking terrifying. | ||
| He, like, sees a butterfly or something, and he's tripping balls. | ||
| So this is a nature documentary. | ||
| Well, it looks like a real bear, though, so we're not sure. | ||
| I mean, I don't think that's what the bear was seeing. | ||
| Maybe the bear's taking a nap, bro. | ||
| Oh, this is hilarious. | ||
| That Amanita muscaria mushroom is a weird mushroom. | ||
| That's that one that they think is, that's from the John Marco Allegro book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. | ||
| He attributed that to the birth of Christianity. | ||
| Makes a pretty good outfit, though. | ||
| Yes, it does. | ||
| The Santa Claus outfit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Or the Pope? | ||
| Yeah, the Pope, yeah. | ||
| There's a lot of connections between mushrooms and ancient Christianity. | ||
| It's fucking really interesting stuff. | ||
| Holy shit, what are we watching? | ||
| This is what the bear's seeing. | ||
| This is the bear. | ||
| Bear's tripping balls. | ||
| Bear's tripping balls? | ||
| They glued a butterfly to him. | ||
| He loves it. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| You know that butterfly's not really there? | ||
| Oh, it is real. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Well, you ever see the jaguar tripping out on ayahuasca? | ||
| Jaguars eat the... | ||
| The pork. | ||
| They're either eating the harmean or they're eating the ayahuasca vine. | ||
| One of the two. | ||
| It might just be the harmean. | ||
| But whatever they're eating is having some sort of a psychedelic effect on them. | ||
| And the jaguars eat these leaves and then they're just lying on their back. | ||
| And their pupils are dilated and they're tripping balls. | ||
| Like, obviously tripping balls. | ||
| Like, to see a jaguar rolling around on the floor in the middle of the jungle after eating leaves. | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
| You've never seen that? | ||
| No. | ||
| Young Jamie, please. | ||
| I was trying to find out what that movie The Bear was all about. | ||
| I just found it. | ||
| It's from 1988. What is it about? | ||
| I found the whole movie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| It's about the life of a bear. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Some kid's movie from France or something. | ||
| It's a kid's movie. | ||
| I mean, Alice in Wonderland. | ||
| Find a jaguar high on DMT to trip. | ||
| You watch this jaguar eat these leaves. | ||
| Here it goes. | ||
| Go full screen, young Jamie. | ||
| Go full screen. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| He's tripping. | ||
| So this jaguar, he seeks out these plants, eats them, and then he's just lying there like, The thing about the people who take that ayahuasca too is they see jaguars. | ||
| It's part of the vision. | ||
| I wonder if what they're doing is connecting to some jaguars that are out there tripping balls, too. | ||
| Look at them. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, look at them. | ||
| Yeah, that's a really common vision, that people who take ayahuasca, they see serpents, and they see jaguars. | ||
| Spirit animals pass home. | ||
| You ever seen young guns, Miles? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| When they go to the spirit world? | ||
| He says, how come he ain't killing us? | ||
| He said, because we're in a spirit world, assholes. | ||
| They can't see us. | ||
| That was Charlie Sheen's brother. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Emilio. | ||
| Emilio Estevez. | ||
| He's the only one who kept the family name, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Their real name was Estevez. | ||
| But Emilio took a chance. | ||
| He's like, I'm going to go with this whole Latino angle. | ||
| My first name's Emilio. | ||
| Tino Wagle. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Because Charlie Estevez is like, eh. | ||
| He'd been compromised. | ||
| He made his own name. | ||
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
| Bunch of handsome bastards. | ||
| Kiefer Sutherland. | ||
| Everybody, look at them all. | ||
| Lou Diamond Phillips in the house. | ||
| Who's that other guy in the back? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That guy. | ||
| He had a shitty agent. | ||
| Oh, Dermot Morrini. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dermot? | |
| Dermot and Will Rooney. | ||
| Yeah, he was in a bunch of those movies. | ||
| But the other guy, who's the guy? | ||
| The Casey guy. | ||
| Casey Slamasco. | ||
| Oh, hey Case. | ||
| Shout out to Casey. | ||
| So, let's wrap this bitch up. | ||
| I think we're way too high to be making any sense to people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, man. | |
| I have a question for you, though. | ||
| Please. | ||
| Do you know who Butcher Brown is? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| We've got to have this conversation. | ||
| Who's Butcher Brown? | ||
| I think his first name is John. | ||
| He's a doctor that did a bunch of, like, unlicensed sex change surgeries in, like, garages, motels. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| He's on Murderpedia, if Jamie wants to look at it. | ||
| Butcher Brown. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So he did unlicensed sex change operations and people died from it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| While eating hot dogs. | ||
| While eating raw hot dogs, drinking coffee. | ||
| Raw hot dogs. | ||
| So he's eating hot dogs and cutting off dicks. | ||
| Nothing weird there. | ||
| Yeah, keep going, bro. | ||
| That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. | ||
| He was eating raw hot dogs and cutting off dicks. | ||
| That's what he does. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ooh! | |
| Man. | ||
| While drinking Dr. Pepper. | ||
| And how many people did he... | ||
| I think it was almost... | ||
| I mean, it was hundreds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| There's a detailed, descriptive article that's... | ||
| Did it work on anybody? | ||
| Did everybody die? | ||
| You've got to read it. | ||
| Watch Head and read that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, no. | |
| Why did you... | ||
| Out of all the things to curse me with... | ||
| I was thinking about it, but he's known as America's worst doctor. | ||
| Well, ever? | ||
| I think ever. | ||
| Once you read it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You have to look that up to see if that's actually crazy glue. | |
| You see the guy's picture and you're like, yep. | ||
| Let me see his picture, Jamie. | ||
| He injects silicone wherever you want it for like 200 bucks. | ||
| Just like caulk? | ||
| Yeah, plug it up with crazy glue and tell you to lay down flat for two days. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| But he had a lot of business. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not sure I found him yet. | |
| Did it work on anybody? | ||
| Imagine if he made one bomb ass. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, look at that. | |
| Great job. | ||
| He came out great once. | ||
| And he's like, I'm just chasing that dragon. | ||
| Every time. | ||
| One time I nailed it. | ||
| I put the right amount of cock in this lady's ass cheeks. | ||
| Dude, it helped. | ||
| It made it look better. | ||
| Most of the time it looks like a disaster. | ||
| You found him? | ||
| Let's see what Butcher Bob looks like. | ||
| I don't like to judge people based on appearances. | ||
| There he is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But... | |
| Jesus. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Look at the frown on his face. | ||
| He's like a caricature. | ||
| That's a smile. | ||
| I would not assume that guy's friendly. | ||
| Homicide. | ||
| Self-appointed sex change specialist practicing medicine without a license. | ||
| Oh, he didn't even have a license. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| They should make a movie about this guy and let Bryan Cranston play. | ||
| Sentenced to 15 years to life, died in prison in 2010. The funny thing is, you read in here that there's another guy that's his competition. | ||
| That's the second worst doctor, or debatable. | ||
| But was this guy a real doctor? | ||
| No, he said self-appointed. | ||
| I thought he had some sort of a military thyroid surgery thing. | ||
| Self-appointed sex change specialist carried out hundreds of operations. | ||
| Don't do that, folks. | ||
| Renegade doctor. | ||
| His place was called the... | ||
| What was it called? | ||
| The Room of Dreams? | ||
| Born into a strict Mormon family. | ||
| Brown was a gifted child. | ||
| Oh boy, how many fucking disasters start out with that sentence? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Born into a strict Mormon family, Brown was a gifted child. | ||
| That's the open parts of a novel that goes terribly wrong. | ||
| He had a miniaturization technique for clitorises. | ||
| He took the patient's penis and turned it into a clitoris, apparently guaranteeing his client's full sexual pleasure. | ||
| He presented his work at the 1973 Medical Conference, where his technique earned him the respect of some of the world's most famous surgeons. | ||
| Without surgical qualifications, Brown had to perform his operations in the most unlikely and inappropriate locations. | ||
| One early patient remembers going to his office assuming he would do a checkup but awoke from the anesthetic to discover that he had operated in the office. | ||
| He turned his garage into an operating theater. | ||
| And the more operations he did, the further his standards slipped. | ||
| Oh no! | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Read this next paragraph. | ||
| Despite the concerns of his peers, many of Brown's patients appeared to be happy. | ||
| That's like if you bought a really small book, it would end right there. | ||
| One of his early patients, Elizabeth, had been delighted with her surgery. | ||
| But a year later, things started to go wrong. | ||
| Her vagina started to tighten and close up. | ||
| That's a Hemingway sentence. | ||
| You wanted it tight. | ||
| Brown was abandoning his patients and leaving them to other surgeons like Dr. Jack Fisher to pick up the pieces. | ||
| He says, It's hard to imagine anyone worse than John Brown. | ||
| He didn't care much for evaluating his patients before surgery or for post-operative care. | ||
| He was totally focused on the technical procedure itself, and he didn't do that very well. | ||
| Jesus Christ, man. | ||
| Putting some good shit out in the world. | ||
| Why have you done this to us? | ||
| That's a black comedy right there. | ||
| You gotta do head, this, and then watch Chuck and Buck. | ||
| Chuck and Buck? | ||
| What are you doing to me, man? | ||
| What is Chuck and Buck and why do I not want to look? | ||
| What the fuck are you doing to me, man? | ||
| Do you want to play a game, Joe? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| Hey, Jamie, look up, you want to play a game? | ||
| What's Chuck and Buck? | ||
| It's the most awkward fucking film ever made. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| More awkward than that. | ||
| What was that one with the dude that made The Room? | ||
| Where they made a movie. | ||
| What's his face? | ||
| The fucking handsome guy. | ||
| James Franco made a movie about the movie being made. | ||
| Remember The Room? | ||
| Do you guys know that movie, The Room? | ||
| Where he played the... | ||
| You know what it is? | ||
| James Franco actually made a whole movie. | ||
| The movie's so insane, James Franco made a movie about the making of the movie, about how insane it was. | ||
| A guy was like this dude who's like an actor and things weren't going so well, so he put together enough money to make his own movie, but it was terrible. | ||
| And in every scene, he was like making out with girls. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tommy Wisnow. | ||
| Never saw it, but I haven't read about it. | ||
| It's hard to watch. | ||
| It's one of those movies that's so bad, you think you're going to get schizophrenia from watching it. | ||
| It's distorting reality in a way that's not compatible with your senses. | ||
| It's confusing. | ||
| You watch scenes in the film, that's the movie called The Room, and he bought billboards around town. | ||
| When I first moved to LA, there was a billboard around town for The Room for a long time. | ||
| Where do you get the money? | ||
| Somewhere terrible. | ||
| That shit's not cheap. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that movie was. | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| Are we watching Chuck and Buck? | ||
| It's just a trailer in case there's anything worth mentioning. | ||
| This is the Chuck and Buck trailer? | ||
| What is Chuck and Buck about? | ||
| I think the scene... | ||
| Is there a scene called Let's Play a Game? | ||
| So what is Chuck doing here? | ||
| He's messing with some dials and he's laying back and this guy's packing up his gear and he's getting in his car. | ||
| He's getting out of town, man. | ||
| What the fuck is this movie about, man? | ||
| I feel You'll have to find out. | ||
| What am I going to get it from watching? | ||
| Is that Ashton Kutcher? | ||
| No. | ||
| Who's that guy, that handsome bastard? | ||
| What year is this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
2000. That might be Ashton Kutcher, bro. | |
| That is Jack Black's roommate from School of Rock. | ||
| Oh, that guy right there? | ||
| So if we can't listen to this, I have no fucking idea what's going on. | ||
| There's no way we can listen to this. | ||
| So I'm going to have to do this offline. | ||
| You're going to have to just, like I said, go home, kids are asleep, spoke blunt, watch our anime film, and then right after that, watch Chuck and Buck. | ||
| Yeah, I'm going to definitely watch your anime film first. | ||
| Chuck and Buck would be a good chaser. | ||
| I don't know if Chuck and Buck is next. | ||
| I think I've got to go with Head next. | ||
| You might actually want to end on Sound and Fury to end on something positive and cool and good. | ||
| Yeah, but I might be wrecked. | ||
| Yeah, you might just want to go to sleep. | ||
| The amoeba, what's in your bag, Joe Rogan? | ||
| Chuck and Buck? | ||
| Head? | ||
| Dr. Richard Brown? | ||
| Yeah, that's a good description right there. | ||
| An oddly naive man-child stalks his childhood best friend and tries to reconnect with their past. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| Gentlemen, thank you for last night. | ||
| It was fucking awesome. | ||
| Thanks for being here today. | ||
| The album, it's out. | ||
| Sturgill, tell these people what it is, where to get it. | ||
| Sound and Fury. | ||
| I don't know where the fuck you would go buy that. | ||
| Probably at a record store. | ||
| iTunes. | ||
| iTunes. | ||
| Record store. | ||
| Or you can steal it on Spotify and just come to the show. | ||
| Your call. | ||
| Ooh. | ||
| Open invitation. | ||
| Specialforcesfoundation.org Get that shit. | ||
| Get that shit. | ||
| Alright, thank you gentlemen. | ||
| It was a lot of fun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Appreciate it. | |
| Fun times. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| My pleasure. |
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