May 21, 2021 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:57:06
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
The Joe Rogan Experience. | |
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Hello, Adam. | ||
| Hello, Joe. | ||
| How you doing? | ||
| I'm pretty good. | ||
| It's good to see you. | ||
| It's nice to meet you, man. | ||
| It's nice to be... | ||
| I've been a fan of your work for a long fucking time. | ||
| And it's always weird when you meet someone that you listen to their music or you've seen their stuff and you're like, oh, you're just a normal human being. | ||
| There you are. | ||
| A little whacked out, but yeah. | ||
| But it's, you know, like, I remember watching Mr. Jones on MTV, and I loved that fucking video, man. | ||
| And I loved you dancing in that, was it like a living room or something like that? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I'm like, I want to be that free. | ||
| Like, you seem so loose. | ||
| You were so in the moment. | ||
| I remember thinking that. | ||
| I remember talking to a friend of mine that night after a show. | ||
| I was at a bar. | ||
| I was like, you ever see that Mr. Jones video? | ||
| I go, when that dude's dancing, I go, I want to figure out how to get there. | ||
| Shit, I want to be that free. | ||
| You know, it's a weird thing. | ||
| I used to... | ||
| I'm going to take this off for now. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I used to be... | ||
|
unidentified
|
For me, you know, life is... | |
| Often very awkward and uncomfortable, but not on stage. | ||
| On stage, I always felt like, well, this is one place where everything I do is fine. | ||
| So when I started making videos, at first it was just like, this is easy. | ||
| Because all I've got to do is do the stuff I'm going to do. | ||
| And there's nothing wrong I can do. | ||
| I can just be as free as I want. | ||
| And that lasted about a year and a half. | ||
| Maybe two years. | ||
| Something about like... | ||
| Getting really famous out of nowhere and then, you know, all the kind of backlash that comes with it. | ||
| I noticed a couple years later I was a lot more self-conscious. | ||
| I'm still on stage. | ||
| I never think about anything. | ||
| When I'm playing it, nothing bothers me. | ||
| But in front of cameras, I got really self-conscious in front of cameras after Sometime in the middle of our second record, I just noticed that I started to suck on, not to suck on video, but definitely not like that Mr. Jones video. | ||
| You became aware that so many people were watching and criticizing you, or like what was it? | ||
| I think it was that, you know, because at first I just, well, didn't care, and I just thought that there's nowhere in the world I'm more comfortable than here, so I'm fine. | ||
| And then I think on our second album when we got a lot of backlash and you get a little too big and everybody, you annoy the shit out of people. | ||
| Especially in a band because you get a really successful song, they're gonna play it on the radio every five minutes. | ||
| After a while it's like, God, who wouldn't get sick of it, you know? | ||
| And then you get some backlash after that, people say some terrible things. | ||
| And then I started thinking about like, what do I look like on film? | ||
| Then I got really self-conscious, you know? | ||
| Does this song make my ass look big? | ||
| I noticed that I got kind of crappy just in front of cameras, not the rest of the time. | ||
| And not like cameras when I'm on stage at a concert. | ||
| Like, you play a big festival, there's lots of cameras. | ||
| It doesn't bother me there. | ||
| It's just kind of sometimes on TV and in filming, I got kind of self-conscious. | ||
| And I had never been that way. | ||
| The press stuff, like that kind of stuff got yourself- I think so. | ||
| I mean, I don't really know what caused it exactly. | ||
| The only reason I would say I think you're right about that is that it happened then. | ||
| And that was the first time I'd experienced that, because no one says anything bad about you when they don't know you exist, for one. | ||
| And then, on our first record, we couldn't buy a bad review. | ||
| But by our second record, we weren't even getting... | ||
| Forget him. | ||
| He's fucking this chick, so I don't have to forget his music, you know? | ||
| And then, like, he got fat, whatever it would be, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| You start, you know, when a nationwide, a national publication calls you fat, you know? | ||
| It's like, shit. | ||
| I remember getting a review in, like, in England once, and somebody called me, Ponce is a fishmonger's cat. | ||
| Which I suppose fishmonger's cats eat a lot. | ||
| Poncey? | ||
| Is that like chubby? | ||
| Poncey? | ||
| I thought it meant chubby, I assume. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| Poncey? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| It just sounded bad. | ||
| That's so British. | ||
| Just being compared to a fishmonger's cat. | ||
| The fact that fishmonger is involved at all as a word when they're talking about your concert seems like a bad sign, you know? | ||
| Yeah, there's a thing that happens, right? | ||
| Like when people discover you and they find out about you and you haven't gotten big yet, like especially for bands, I think. | ||
| Where they love the fact that they're the first to tell their friends, you gotta listen to this band, gotta listen to this album, this is awesome. | ||
| But then when you get really big and other people like it, and too many people like it, then you're like, aw man, they were good in the beginning. | ||
| Well, I think that music, unlike almost everything else, It becomes our personal cool, you know? | ||
| I mean, we literally wear it on our shirts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, and it defines who we are. | ||
| We talk about this genre or that genre as being our gang almost. | ||
| And when you're discovering stuff, yeah, it's really cool. | ||
| And then when you have to share it with that guy at the water cooler who likes the fucking worst music. | ||
| You know, that guy who's been coming in for years, and he's just listening to utter shit, and now he loves your band too, and you're like, I don't want to share this with Captain Asshole over there, you know? | ||
| I've never understood that, because why can't people with terrible taste also like great things? | ||
| Like, great things are great no matter what. | ||
| Like, everybody loves The Godfather, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's like, whoever says that movie sucks? | ||
| Nobody. | ||
| But people who like terrible movies still like The Godfather. | ||
| Well, I think it's less because they now like it as that you were in a club without them, and now you're in a club with them. | ||
| And that just sucks, because you didn't have to be in a club with them before. | ||
| It's human nature. | ||
| I mean, I get it. | ||
| I didn't like it when it landed on me, but... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I get it. | ||
| Well, and it happened to you pre-social media. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You guys were just getting reviewed by experts. | ||
| You weren't get shit on by the general public yet. | ||
| No, I mean, but that was a good thing for one. | ||
| For me, it had happened when I was kind of already into social media, because I remember moving down to LA after our first album, and that year, while I was writing the second record, discovering that AOL had these message boards. | ||
| This is 95, say, and I realized that AOL had these forums and message boards for all the bands, and it suddenly occurred to me, well, I could just go on there And talk to people. | ||
| Because when I read it, they were worried about, were we ever going to make a second record? | ||
| Were we going to shit? | ||
| Did we exist anymore? | ||
| All the questions that you wonder about your band between records. | ||
| And it suddenly occurred to me, well, I have the answers to all those questions. | ||
| I could just go on there. | ||
| And it took me a little while to convince the people on there that I was me. | ||
| Understandably. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| But eventually I did. | ||
| And then we sort of started this... | ||
| Kind of community there, you know, way before other social media. | ||
| But it occurred to me because the rest of the time, you can't get to your fans except through, or you couldn't then, except through the radio, the DJs, and the press. | ||
| So, like, you don't really get to give anybody your own words. | ||
| They've got to be filtered through everybody else. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that AOL thing was a chance to just, like, well, like what Twitter and everything is now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But... | |
| It occurred to me back then it was really cool. | ||
| Then I got into arguments with our own fans. | ||
| I've always done that. | ||
| What kind of arguments? | ||
| I don't think I'm who they think I am. | ||
| Who do you think they think you are? | ||
| A classic rock guy driving around in a pickup truck. | ||
| Like going to drive-in movie theaters. | ||
| Because that's this Americana dream vision of like, we all sit around, you know, going to drive-ins and living some dream of a Springsteen song that Springsteen isn't even any part of, you know? | ||
| And I would go on there and I'd be like... | ||
| Have you guys heard the first Justin Timberlake album? | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's got, like, Timbaland and the Neptunes doing all the songs. | ||
| And I would try and make this thing to tell them, like, you should listen to this. | ||
| It's brilliant music. | ||
| And they just couldn't grasp the Justin Timberlake thing, because in their mind, NSYNC was the guy at the water cooler. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so, like, I would get in these huge fights with them, like, you guys don't know shit about music. | ||
| You're just like... | ||
| You're in this little niche. | ||
| Rigid. | ||
| You like us, and I think that's very smart and intelligent. | ||
| It shows a lot of wisdom, but you're limited. | ||
| I get in all these fights with them. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| It's funny how people are unwilling to try certain kinds of music because it has this feeling to it. | ||
| If you like that, you can't be smart. | ||
| You can't be cool. | ||
| This is shit music. | ||
| You can't like this. | ||
| Well, you know, it came out of like... | ||
| It did seem at the time like the thing ruining music was the boy bands. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It just seemed like there was one after another back then. | ||
| It's kind of never stopped. | ||
| And, you know, I don't know how good some of them were. | ||
| Maybe they were. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I look back a little more fondly on the Backstreet Boys now, maybe. | ||
| At the time, I couldn't abide any of that. | ||
| But, I mean, I get it. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| But I don't think I was who they thought I was. | ||
| And why should you be? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like... | ||
| We're all really individuals and we're certainly not going to just fit into the peg that people would like. | ||
| Why would they know who the hell I am? | ||
| Because I don't know them, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then there's always like whatever the publicists have put out and whatever image they're trying to promote for you guys, like whatever. | ||
| And then people take it in. | ||
| They put you in a box. | ||
| They got you in their head. | ||
| You're that guy. | ||
| What's the guy's name from Stained Aaron Lewis? | ||
| Oh, Aaron Lewis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So now he's like, don't tread on me, country western, I'm always carrying a gun. | ||
| Like, he used to be this, like, you used to think of him as, like, this sort of alt-rock guy, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And then he's made this, like, hardcore shift to this, like, God, guns, and country type dude. | ||
| Yeah, and who else? | ||
| The other guy, a friend of mine. | ||
| Kate Quigley knows him. | ||
| Darius Rucker. | ||
| Darius Rucker. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah, Darius from Hootie. | ||
| He's been a country star for a long time now. | ||
| Bigger probably than even when he was with Hootie. | ||
| Which is weird because it's a different world that you don't connect to. | ||
| You usually don't cross that border. | ||
| That can be a real restricted, closed society. | ||
| He's had a lot of success over there. | ||
| He's huge, right? | ||
| Yeah, I think. | ||
| I don't really know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think he's gigantic. | |
| I don't know what goes on in that country scene. | ||
| I like a lot of new country. | ||
| I come from a country music background in that a lot of the guys in my band, but it doesn't really mesh much with what is country music now, I don't really think. | ||
| Well, there's a lot of different kinds of country now. | ||
| There's some really good artists that are doing... | ||
| Like Sturgill Simpson type dudes that are doing... | ||
| He's a really good writer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're doing country music, but they're doing great music that has just this sort of country flavor to it. | ||
| And his shit isn't even always country. | ||
| His last album threw everybody on their head. | ||
| They're like, what the... | ||
| This is some crazy arena rock shit. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| I haven't heard that record. | ||
| The new one's wild, man. | ||
| My guitar player loves Sturgill Simpson. | ||
| He's awesome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's a great dude, too. | ||
| You had him on? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I've become friends with him. | ||
| He's a cool guy to hang with. | ||
| I always wanted to meet you, because we have a lot of mutual friends. | ||
| Like, guys that I've known for a long time that just love you. | ||
| Jeff. | ||
| Jeff Ross. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Saget, Bob, for sure. | ||
| Love him. | ||
| Oh, you know, Brian Callen, too. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Love him, too. | ||
| The first time I ever met Brian, we went to his friend's house. | ||
| We had just gotten there. | ||
| It was in France. | ||
| And we were walking out. | ||
| Everybody's like, here, have a glass of wine. | ||
| We're going to go look at the sunset. | ||
| It was on this cliff by the Atlantic Ocean there. | ||
| And we were walking out across the lawn. | ||
| I had just met Brian like an hour before that. | ||
| And there's about eight of us, and we're walking across this lawn. | ||
| And Brian is just walking next to me. | ||
| And he turns to me and he goes, all right, now. | ||
| You're going to say to me, Captain, it's really quiet out there. | ||
| I'm going to say, maybe too quiet. | ||
| And you're going to say, what do you think it is? | ||
| And I'll take it from there. | ||
| I said, what? | ||
| He goes, all right, I'll repeat it. | ||
| You're going to say, Captain, it seems really quiet out there. | ||
| I'll say, maybe too quiet. | ||
| You say, what do you think it is? | ||
| And I'll handle the rest of it. | ||
| I'm like, uh, okay. | ||
| Wait till we get to the cliff. | ||
| I get out there. | ||
| We're in this group of people. | ||
| Everyone's looking at the sunset. | ||
| My friend is talking about how right at the moment before the sunset, there's this green light. | ||
| This is a deeply spiritual, beautiful moment. | ||
| And I go, Brian nods at me and I go, It's pretty quiet out there, Captain. | ||
| And he says, aye, maybe too quiet. | ||
| And I said, uh, what do you think it is? | ||
| He looks around and he goes, Orca. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Apparently, it's like this Richard Harris. | |
| Remember that movie Orca? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| The kind of Jaws rip off the camera? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So like, Orca. | ||
| That sounds like Brian Callan. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And then there was probably some gay stuff. | ||
| He probably talked about gay sex. | ||
| He's like, okay, we have to do that all the time now. | ||
| That's our thing. | ||
| Tocks and grabbing butts and... | ||
| Horses. | ||
| Horses? | ||
| Yeah, riding horses. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Maybe guns. | ||
| Probably the occasional sword. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Sword play. | ||
| Fencing. | ||
| Savate. | ||
| Maybe because you're in France, he'll bring up French martial art. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Savate. | |
| Savate, yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's quite a character. | ||
| Yeah, we know quite a few people. | ||
| Did you spend any time at the store? | ||
| At the comedy store? | ||
| More like the cellar with Jeff a lot of times. | ||
| I met Bob, I don't know how long ago, right when I first started out because my goddaughter's Her mother was really good friends with Lori Loughlin, so she's my goddaughter's godmother. | ||
| So when I was recording my first album, I met them and so Bob, I knew through her because he was on Full House and they would always come to shows. | ||
| I just stayed friends with him for years and then I met Jeff. | ||
| Bob had me come to the premiere of The Aristocrats, or not the premiere, it was like a screening at the Writers Guild just for all the comedians that were in it. | ||
| It was like me and a couple friends, and then Bob and 50 comedians. | ||
| And Jeff was there, so we met, and he had just made this movie called Patriot Games. | ||
| Did you ever see that? | ||
| No. | ||
| He took a trip to Iraq, right, when they first opened it after the desert storm, not desert storm, I guess it was the second Iraq war. | ||
| And he brought a little camera with him and he filmed all this stuff, the comedy stuff, but also like what it was like. | ||
| I mean, it was before they closed anything. | ||
| So they were playing like, you know, holes dug in the dirt, really. | ||
| He got to see all over the country at that point. | ||
| And he made a really cool film about, you know, being in a comedy tour over there with all the troops right then. | ||
| So he showed it to me and we just kind of became friends and started doing stuff together. | ||
| We did a trip with the USO, me and him and Sarah Tiana, Colin Cain. | ||
| I know Sarah very well. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Stewie Stone and like Robert Klein and we did a... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh wow. | |
| And me. | ||
| So like five comedians. | ||
| And me playing the only songs I can play on piano, which are the mopiest shit we have. | ||
| So it's like, I was right in the middle of the show. | ||
| We went around Germany together to the basses and played shit. | ||
| Why did you decide to go solo? | ||
| Why did you decide to go without a band? | ||
| It was just like, because it's just kind of comedy. | ||
| They're doing it really bare bones. | ||
| So Jeff's like, hey, you want to do this thing? | ||
| I was like, ah, let's go. | ||
| So it was weird, though, because I mean... | ||
| I'm not a very good piano player, I can only really play a few things, and they're mopey, you know, as shit. | ||
| So it'd be like, Colin would play, then Sarah... | ||
| And Stewie was hosting all of it. | ||
| And then it'd be me, and then Jeff, and then Robert Klein. | ||
| So it's a pretty stark change in the middle there to the Mope Fest. | ||
| I had to start telling jokes and just ripping with Jeff. | ||
| The Mope Fest. | ||
| It was such a bizarre contrast. | ||
| It was fun, though. | ||
| It was really fun to be... | ||
| It was like being at camp with all the funny people. | ||
| Your music is oftentimes so emotional. | ||
| There's so much... | ||
| Did you ever feel almost like this is what you have to do? | ||
| Because your initial success was in this kind of music? | ||
| Or has your music always sort of had that kind of emotional flavor to it? | ||
| I think that was always the thing. | ||
| You kind of want to find something that you can bear to people. | ||
| I mean, B-A-R-E. The more you can open something up and let people in. | ||
| And that's kind of the whole thing, I think, when we're trying to make a record. | ||
| You just kind of want to make a world that people can climb into for a while. | ||
| Feel something you know go from here to there with you and yeah, so I know I always just kind of thought that was You know, but sometimes you know, there's there's hope and joy in there too, but yeah, it's about feeling stuff mostly I think That was always kind of what it seemed like it was about because I think I always had trouble uh Feeling things with other people, you know, just in normal life, you know? | ||
| But, uh, and I always liked music, and when I would listen to it, I think that's one of the things I loved about it, was that you could get lost in it, and you could feel all this stuff, and they seemed to be able to communicate stuff to me when I was listening to a record. | ||
| You know, and I was, I just couldn't figure out what to do with music when I was a kid, because, you know, I didn't, I just could sing, so I don't know what that means, high school musicals or something, but where's that going? | ||
| When did you start? | ||
| When did you start singing? | ||
| I probably sang from birth. | ||
| As a kid I could always sing, and I liked singing, but I didn't know what to do with singing. | ||
| When I was a freshman in college, my first term, I wrote a song. | ||
| Within the first month and a half I was at school, there was a I was in chemistry class or something and I started kind of thinking of the song in my head and I wrote it down and was humming it to myself and after class I went back to my dorm because there's a lounge with a piano across the hall from my room and I went there like lock the door and sat there all day trying to figure out humming stuff and trying to figure out what note that was and then See if I could find a chord that worked with that note. | ||
| I kind of knew how to make a major and a minor chord, you know, that's all I knew. | ||
| And I wrote a song. | ||
| And as soon as I'd written that song, I was a songwriter. | ||
| Wow, so that was your first real attempt at creating a song, just out of nowhere in chemistry class? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think I'd written, like, lyrical stuff before, but I'd never actually tried to make it something I could play. | ||
| And I just figured this thing out. | ||
| And, you know, that's the thing when you're a kid. | ||
| You don't, like, you're pretty undefined. | ||
| You don't know what's going to go on with your life. | ||
| You don't know what you're going to be. | ||
| You know, like, the whole adulthood thing. | ||
| Because you've been pretty structured. | ||
| You go to school. | ||
| People tell you what to do when you're a kid, and you go do it. | ||
| You know, you do the best you can. | ||
| You go to school. | ||
| You go play a sport for fun. | ||
| You know, and, you know, I'm still in that in college. | ||
| The adulthood thing seems really confusing. | ||
| What am I going to do? | ||
| How am I going to take care of myself? | ||
| People get jobs, I guess. | ||
| Do people tell you what to do for the rest of your life after that? | ||
| That doesn't seem very good. | ||
| Literally, I wrote this song and it was like... | ||
| Light going off in my head or coming on. | ||
| I just, from that moment on, I was like, oh, I'm a songwriter. | ||
| I don't know how the fuck to do that or how to like, I'm not sure how to make a life being a songwriter, but I am a songwriter. | ||
| I'll have to figure that out. | ||
| You know, I kind of knew what I was going to do before any of my friends. | ||
| I didn't know how to do it, but like, it was just like, like something switch went on. | ||
| As soon as I did it, I knew who I was, kind of, in a way that I had never known before. | ||
| What did you think you were going to do for a living before that moment? | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| You just were trying to figure it out? | ||
| Yeah, my dad's a doctor. | ||
| My mom is, too, now. | ||
| What were you going to school for? | ||
| I thought I'd be a writer or something. | ||
| I liked English. | ||
| I liked writing. | ||
| I didn't really know. | ||
| For the first couple years, I was a women's studies major because I ended up in this class and it was really interesting. | ||
| I was kind of blown away by it. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| That's stuff you do in school. | ||
| Fields of study and things. | ||
| You could go on to school for a while. | ||
| But you had never been in a band or anything until that moment? | ||
| I had when I was a kid, like when I was like 13, I was in a band. | ||
| We played at Friends Bar Mises and shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh yeah? | |
| We just did like Beatles and, you know, our parents told each of us we could get one song book. | ||
| So we just bought the Beatles, the Stones, and Led Zeppelin because they had the most shit in the book, you know? | ||
| They were the thicker books. | ||
| But that's just like cover songs when you're 13 or 14. No, my first band was still a few years away, but I wrote every day from that point on. | ||
| I just was obsessed with like, because all of a sudden, I had this way where I could, all the stuff I'd been feeling and thinking, and like, you know, I had all this stuff that I felt like inside me, but you know, you're not, I felt kind of plain when I was talking to people. | ||
| It didn't really... | ||
| I felt like a pretty average dude and not really impressive in the way I wanted to be, you know, and not special in any way. | ||
| And I thought I was supposed to be, you know, but then I wrote a song and I could, you know. | ||
| Then it was like, oh, I can communicate all this stuff. | ||
| You know, pretty rudimentary back then, but even then it was like... | ||
| Well, for me, it was real powerful. | ||
| To play a song, people could feel things. | ||
| All of a sudden, all this stuff inside me had a place to go. | ||
| That was big. | ||
| Isn't that interesting? | ||
| It's like kind of everybody feels like somewhere inside of them is something special. | ||
| I think most people... | ||
| I mean, there's a few people that have self-esteem issues that maybe don't think that. | ||
| But a lot of people feel like there's moments where they're capable of doing something special. | ||
| They just don't know what that thing is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think they also don't realize... | |
| How much it takes to do things like that. | ||
| It is dedication. | ||
| You're going to play music. | ||
| You want to go on stage and do comedy. | ||
| It's not going to be that good at first. | ||
| It's going to be a struggle. | ||
| There's a lot of people who are better at it. | ||
| It's a lot of work, a lot of dedication, a lot of risk. | ||
| Thinking about doing a job that's really hard to support yourself at, especially if you want to work in the arts. | ||
| It's a fraction of a fraction of a fraction that's so small that it's like a number that doesn't exist. | ||
| People who can support themselves doing the arts, any kind of art. | ||
| If you want to play a musician, you're going to get in a band. | ||
| You're going to fight with your friends because it's not fun. | ||
| It's not a hobby anymore. | ||
| It's different. | ||
| It's satisfying, but fun is a very small term for what it means to do this sort of thing. | ||
| Fun doesn't quite cut it. | ||
| Well, I've always felt like a band was probably the hardest thing because not only do you have to figure your shit out, But you have to make sure that the other people in the band figure their shit out, too. | ||
| And you all have to be dedicated and professional and show up on time and be disciplined and be creative and also work together. | ||
| So you have to be cooperative and you have to be understanding and you have to figure out the ego dance and who's putting what and where and who's adding spice to the soup. | ||
| I mean, any kind of cooperative artistic thing like that, that is brutal. | ||
| It is really hard, but there's no way it's the hard... | ||
| I mean, to me it's funny, because to me it's always been comedy, because I have friends who do it, and you watch what it takes to be on stage. | ||
| I am not dependent on anybody in the audience to play a show. | ||
| Like, it just does not matter. | ||
| I'm glad they're there. | ||
| I really am. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| I hope they cheer really loud. | ||
| But I could play a great show either way. | ||
| In an empty room. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or a room that doesn't get it. | ||
| I'm still going to play a show. | ||
| It's still going to be good. | ||
| But man, I watch Jeff sometimes, especially lately, because when him and Dave are doing that thing, it doesn't seem like there's any preparation. | ||
| They're just kind of winning. | ||
| They're just riffing. | ||
| And that's complete freestyle improvisation. | ||
| But either way, even if it's just all written material, you're still riding... | ||
| It's like surfing an audience. | ||
| That's terrifying and dependent in a way, because if you have the success of the moment, it builds to the next moment to the next moment in a way that we don't need. | ||
| But as a comedian, man, it is such a tightrope to walk. | ||
| Dealing with heckler everything that goes into that shit is just like I went to an open mic night last night Yeah, it was wild I hadn't been doing open mic night in a while and it was it was interesting to watch because there was maybe Six or seven audience members and maybe 20 comedians in the audience so they're mostly just kind of practicing talking into a microphone and You know just trying to work it out and you're just seeing You're seeing, | ||
| like, single-celled organisms try to divide and become complicated life forms, and you can see, like, the sort of clunkiness to the idea. | ||
| Because, you know, a lot of the folks that were on stage last night probably had only been on stage a couple of times, or maybe it was their first time, and you could see it, you know? | ||
| And I was like, wow, this is wild. | ||
| That's really cool, though. | ||
| I mean, like, you could see, like, the... | ||
| Genesis of things, you know, somebody like developing something. | ||
| Someone doesn't have their material there yet, but they've got a thing, you know? | ||
| But it seems so far. | ||
| It's like a person who lands on Plymouth Rock and you're going to walk to San Francisco. | ||
| Like, yeah, it can be done. | ||
| People have done it. | ||
| It could be done, but oh, those first steps. | ||
| You have so many steps. | ||
| It's such a far walk. | ||
| It is far, but that's what I meant about people not understanding how much you want to do this, you can do it. | ||
| There's no rule that says you can't, but it's not just the talent. | ||
| It's a long walk. | ||
| There's a reason why so few people do it. | ||
| There's a reason why so few people wind up actually being a professional. | ||
| You have to be able to grind. | ||
| Some people just can't. | ||
| They can't just embrace this process. | ||
| Because the process, there's a lot of days you don't want to do it. | ||
| There's a lot of days you don't want to go on stage, but you must. | ||
| You must, and you've got to continue to try to figure it out. | ||
| There was a moment at the improv in L.A. where... | ||
| There's this lady on stage, and I think she had just started, or she was fairly recent. | ||
| And so she would do one of the things that comics do when they're first starting out. | ||
| They'll have a premise, and it doesn't go anywhere. | ||
| And then they go into a completely unrelated premise, and it doesn't go anywhere. | ||
| Their bits are very short. | ||
| They don't expand on their ideas. | ||
| They don't really know how to yet. | ||
| And she's kind of bombing. | ||
| And we're sitting there watching her, and I was checking to see when I was up, because I was up like two people after. | ||
| And me and the DJ are watching her bomb, and I just go, it's a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll. | ||
| And then two people later was me, and I went on stage, and he brought me up to, it's a long way to the top! | ||
| And that has been my opening song from then out. | ||
| Every time I do stand-up, every time I go on stage, if there's playing music, they play ACDC, Long Way to the Top. | ||
| Because it's like, it's a fucking long and bloody grind. | ||
| And that song just nails it. | ||
| That song, you know? | ||
| And you gotta be brave, too. | ||
| Like, on top of the length of it, don't forget that, especially, like, for what you guys do, it is scary. | ||
| A lot, especially in the beginning, and at least you always have a risk of the bomb, you know what I mean? | ||
| It's always out there waiting for you, and even if it comes, you can climb out of it. | ||
| But the risk of the bomb is what makes killing so good. | ||
| It makes it feel so good. | ||
| You know you can bomb. | ||
| Everyone can bomb. | ||
| We can all bomb. | ||
| And so you know that. | ||
| And I've had moments recently that are just not that good. | ||
| You have a bit that you're trying out and it's kind of clunky or you fuck something up and you're like, ugh! | ||
| You have sets that are just flat and you're like, shit! | ||
| But that's just part of the process. | ||
| And that makes it... | ||
| Like last night I had a great show. | ||
| And last night everything sunk in and just... | ||
| It just was seamless and it flowed. | ||
| It was free. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| And those moments only come out of the depths of despair. | ||
| You have to work your way through the shit. | ||
| And I guess it's got to be like that with music, too. | ||
| I mean, there must have been gigs that you guys did in the early days where you're just like, I don't even know how long I can do this. | ||
| I remember one. | ||
| I always remember this gig because I don't know that we've played this town since then. | ||
| It was a... | ||
| Was it Lexington, Kentucky? | ||
| I'm trying to remember. | ||
| It was a southeastern college town. | ||
| We were opening for Cracker, and it was this club, and it was upstairs was the club part of it. | ||
| And the stage is one of those ones that's in the corner, like a triangle, like comes across the corner. | ||
| And there's just, the audience is all out, the rest of the club is lengthwise. | ||
| And the stage is in the corner over here. | ||
| And there's no like, the backstage is near the front door. | ||
| And you gotta like, they just kept like a border around the club of people so you could walk and you have to walk around everybody to get up to the stage. | ||
| So we get up there to open the show, and the monitors are busted. | ||
| The tweeter's blown out on the monitors, so it's just like the whole time. | ||
| You can't hear anything, and I'm trying to sing. | ||
| It's before we had in-ears. | ||
| My voice is already wrecked from the first year of touring, because I had never sung that much. | ||
| I'm really tired. | ||
| So we played, and we were terrible. | ||
| I mean terrible. | ||
| Because it was just so bad. | ||
| I mean, later on that night, Cracker got on stage and they were pretty good, but they hated it so much that he stuck his guitar through that monitor after a while because he couldn't hear anything. | ||
| It was just like, you're a club, man. | ||
| Fix the goddamn monitor. | ||
| The horns are all busted. | ||
| So anyways, we get done this particularly terrible set. | ||
| And we do a lot of improvisation on stage, too. | ||
| We're making whole shit up, which doesn't get any better, by the way, when you can't hear anything and when you're sucking. | ||
| We're still trying it and it's still just like... | ||
| Just, you know, anything would have been better than what we did. | ||
| So, man, the set ends. | ||
| And it's just silence, man. | ||
| There's no booing or anything. | ||
| But nobody's clapping. | ||
| Like, nobody's clapping. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's just nothing. | |
| There's just fucking nothing happening in there. | ||
| It's just like... | ||
| Like, nothing had happened. | ||
| Like, they were just... | ||
| Everyone's just kind of looking at us. | ||
| Like, maybe we're going to play another song. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They don't really want us to. | ||
| But they're not trying to encourage us. | ||
| And so we just, like... | ||
| I remember some of those guys had to grab their stuff. | ||
| I kind of walked down off the stage and, you know, down the whole side of the crowd, across the back to the little dressing room. | ||
| Silence. | ||
| Just people looking at me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was just so fucking humiliating. | |
| Just the worst. | ||
| I've never forgotten it. | ||
| Except I guess I have forgotten where it was. | ||
| But I think it was Lexington. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But it was just the worst fucking show. | ||
| And just the utter silence, though. | ||
| Like, they were confused as to what we were doing. | ||
| As if, like, it would have been confusing to them if we kept playing. | ||
| It was weird that we stopped. | ||
| Whatever we were doing, they didn't really get it. | ||
| I mean, understandably, it was just... | ||
| One time I came off a tour and I had messed up my knee. | ||
| I had scraped up my knee early in the tour and it kept getting infected. | ||
| I ended up having a staph infection inside my knee. | ||
| It was really bad. | ||
| So I got off stage the last gig and I had to go for surgery the next day. | ||
| They opened my knee up and cleaned it out. | ||
| They released me later that day. | ||
| And it was the day that Jeff was releasing... | ||
| He wrote a book. | ||
| I can't remember what it's called. | ||
| You only roast the ones you love, maybe? | ||
| And he had... | ||
| He was having like a... | ||
| I don't know what you call it. | ||
| A book release party, I guess. | ||
| At the Friars Club. | ||
| Because he was real excited. | ||
| And he'd wanted me to come. | ||
| And I was like... | ||
| I'd just gotten out of the hospital. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That... | |
| Like... | ||
| Late that morning. | ||
| And I was... | ||
| But I felt okay. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And it was all sewn up. | ||
| So... | ||
| You know, I was a little high from the drugs, but I was okay. | ||
| So I put on like a tux, tails, but I couldn't wear the pants because I had this huge bandage on my knees. | ||
| So I just put some shorts on and nice shoes too. | ||
| And I got a cane and I went to the Friars Club to this thing. | ||
| I wanted to be there to support Jeff, you know. | ||
| So he comes, he's up on the dais, it's like in one of the rooms there, not a stage, but he's up on there talking, thanking some people, and he comes down, he got me a chair, it's just a room full of comics, and he got me a chair so I could sit down near the front, everyone else was standing, just because I had surgery. | ||
| And he comes down, I want to thank my friend Adam, who came with me, and we went on this trip a little while ago, and he's just a good friend, and he hands me the mic, and For some reason, instead of just saying, you know, congratulations, Jeff, or whatever, I took the mic out of his hand and I walked up on the stage to, like, the podium and put it in the mic thing. | ||
| Because, I don't know, some part of me thought, I'm at the Friars Club and I should make a speech for Jeff's thing. | ||
| But by the time I got up there and put the mic in, I realized, what am I doing here? | ||
| I'm like, I don't know what the fuck to do. | ||
| I just, like, sort of looked at them and I said... | ||
| So I peed on my girlfriend earlier today. | ||
| Because it had happened, you know, like when they finished the surgery, they gave me this epidural, and I'm your whole lower half of your body, so I don't know what's going on. | ||
| I'd come out of it and my girlfriend was like, how are you? | ||
| I'm like, I don't know. | ||
| I feel weird. | ||
| I feel pretty good. | ||
| Am I bleeding down here? | ||
| Am I wet? | ||
| And she reaches under the skirt to check me out and she's like, I think you're peeing. | ||
| That's all. | ||
| You're peeing yourself right now. | ||
| I'm like, how do you know? | ||
| And she goes, because you're peeing on me right now. | ||
| She pulls her hand and I'm like, oh shit, I'm sorry. | ||
| I didn't know what's going on. | ||
| I couldn't feel anything. | ||
| So when you're numb for an epidural, pee just comes out whenever it wants to? | ||
| I guess. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I felt weird and like a weird warmth and I asked her if there was something on there and she's like, yeah, you're peeing yourself probably. | ||
| And I'm like, how do you know? | ||
| And she goes, because you're pissing on me right now. | ||
| And I was like, so I'm standing there in the Friars Club and I just said, so I peed on my girlfriend earlier today and the place just breaks up and I was just, I guess that's one more thing she's got in common with my mom. | ||
| And I... I don't know. | ||
| I went on for a couple minutes, told that story, and I was just like killing. | ||
| I was like really good. | ||
| I was patient. | ||
| I was like not rushing anything. | ||
| Probably because I was kind of stoned from the drugs. | ||
| And I just like, I got about two minutes of it. | ||
| I just drilled. | ||
| It was hysterical. | ||
| I came down, some older guy comes up to me and goes like, You killed. | ||
| It was you and Vagoda. | ||
| You and Vagoda were amazing tonight. | ||
| You're always welcome to the front. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Where do you usually work? | |
| I'm like, I'm not a comedian. | ||
| He's like, you're kidding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's hilarious. | |
| It was like, but I mean, it was, it was the greatest thing. | ||
| Cause it's like you were saying, I was terrified. | ||
| I got, I stupidly got myself into the situation. | ||
| And then of all things, Did like, you know, it feels like I did 10 minutes, but it's probably like two minutes of stand-up. | ||
| I did like a minute and a half stand-up in front of like the history of comedy, like, and crushed it. | ||
| And as I'm coming down off the stage, I was like, hey, that was pretty good. | ||
| And Jeff goes, I know. | ||
| It's like crack, right? | ||
| And I'm like, that's amazing. | ||
| He goes, I'll talk to you more about it later. | ||
| And then he goes back up on stage. | ||
| I mean, it was just like, I don't know what I was doing getting up there. | ||
| It was the dumbest thing, but it was so like... | ||
| Could've worked out. | ||
| Yeah, because I've been there with friends of mine who are comics, and I've bantered with them, played piano, like, in that little keyboard, you know, in the cellar, with Jeff and with Bob sometimes, just done that shit with them, and, uh... | ||
| It's always terrifying, but that one moment, I wasn't even with them. | ||
| I just did it, and it was the greatest thing. | ||
| To this day, I don't know if there's a performing moment that I feel prouder of than that one, even though it was completely accidental. | ||
| Because it was so terrifying and unsupported. | ||
| I didn't have a band. | ||
| I didn't have anything. | ||
| I didn't have Jeff or Bob. | ||
| It was just... | ||
| It's probably just a minute, you know? | ||
| Whatever short it was, though, it was fire, man. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Is it recorded? | ||
| Oh, I don't think so, because it wasn't like a real performance. | ||
| It was like a little hall, and it was like one of the side rooms, and Jeff was in there. | ||
| Everyone was there to celebrate him, and a few people spoke. | ||
| I don't really remember where it was, because I've been to the Friars Club a few times, but... | ||
| I don't really know where that room was. | ||
| I'll have to ask Jeff sometime. | ||
| But no, there's no way it was recorded. | ||
| I don't think... | ||
| Because it wasn't like anyone was performing. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| At least I don't think so. | ||
| Did it make you think about doing it again? | ||
| Like actually preparing a set? | ||
| Or you're like, you know what, I'm one and done. | ||
| I'm one and oh, I'm going to retire undefeated. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I'll be honest with you. | ||
| Every time Jeff wants me to go play with him and do that sort of stuff, first of all, because I can't play piano very well, so I end up just picking four chords and playing them in a circle. | ||
| It's not like Mayer's up there with him who can actually play, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But I like bantering with Jeff, and it's fun, if terrifying, you know? | ||
| But he's so good, he can kind of, like, hold your hand. | ||
| Yeah, he really is. | ||
| And help you through it. | ||
| If you stumble, he's got something funny to cover it up with. | ||
| Yeah, and he's got that, like, I'm not sure there's a better sound in this world than that laugh of his, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When he's just giggling at the stuff that's going, I can't even do it. | ||
| The laugh, you know, when he's giggling, he giggles for his friends and laughs for his friends when they're being funny, you know? | ||
| I've known Jeff since before he was Jeff Ross. | ||
| Oh, Lipschultz, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I've known him back in the old days. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You know, he's a black belt in Taekwondo. | ||
| Only reason I know that is because I saw it on the... | ||
| When I was looking through your podcast at one point, I went to watch some of the ones with my friends on them, you know, people I knew. | ||
| Yeah, and I saw that picture of him when he's... | ||
| I don't know, how old is he? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He's pretty young. | ||
| Yeah, he looks really young. | ||
| He's got that big... | ||
| He used to have really curly hair, too. | ||
| You know, he had great curly hair. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that's a great picture. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did he not do it after that for a while? | ||
| I don't think he does anything. | ||
| I think he swims and, like, drinks. | ||
| Both pleasant. | ||
| Swimming can be unpleasant when you do it for too long. | ||
| Drinking is great. | ||
| Have you been to his house in Hollywood Hills? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I haven't either. | ||
| I've been to his place in the village. | ||
| He sent me photos of it. | ||
| He has a pool where when you go in the pool, if you're in his house, you can see the pool. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| The side of the pool's glass. | ||
| And it busts up against the house? | ||
| So someone's swimming in the pool, like you can get up there and you can see it from outside. | ||
| Wow, note to self, don't piss in that pool. | ||
| Yeah, don't, people can see it. | ||
| Wow, that's wild. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty wild. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So he's just up there lounging, looking at the world, watching it burn. | |
| From the Hollywood. | ||
| Like literally watching it burn sometimes, at least a couple times a year. | ||
| Yeah, especially now. | ||
| No, he's like, that was kind of wild seeing that. | ||
| You did Taekwondo, too. | ||
| You were the champion in Taekwondo, right? | ||
| Yeah, I won a bunch of tournaments. | ||
| That's all I did when I was 15, from 15 to like 21, 22. That's the martial art that I did when I was a kid. | ||
| I must have been pretty young. | ||
| I was like Texas and Denver, so I was like 7 and 8. It's a good martial art for kids, teaching some discipline and stuff. | ||
| I remember it being fun, but it got me hit. | ||
| I don't know when I started doing that. | ||
| In like 2000... | ||
| Two, maybe? | ||
| I started boxing, you know? | ||
| I started boxing with this boxing trainer in LA just to get in shape. | ||
| I was really out of shape. | ||
| And then he would come on the road with us for a while and we would like... | ||
| Trained with the whole band in the mornings usually, and then he and I, after soundcheck, we would do like 10 rounds, you know, wherever we were at the gig, and just exercise in the afternoon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So we'd do it for a while, but like early on when we were doing this, you know, he was doing some stuff where like, I was just working defensive stuff, and he threw like a low hook at me, and I did this thing, you know, I blocked it with my arm, and he's like, what was that? | ||
| And I was like, I don't know, it's a... | ||
| I just blocked it. | ||
| He goes, don't do that. | ||
| You'll get... | ||
| Why? | ||
| He goes, like, don't drop your hands when you're boxing. | ||
| It's a bad habit. | ||
| Like, okay, you know. | ||
| And then I did it one more. | ||
| He threw a low hook, and I, you know, just dropped my arm down to block it. | ||
| And he goes, where is this block coming from? | ||
| What is this kind of thing? | ||
| He goes, did you do taekwondo when you were a kid? | ||
| I was like... | ||
| Yeah, I did. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| Well, how'd you know that? | ||
| He goes, I think that's a Taekwondo block, but that's, you know, like, I think it works in Taekwondo because of the nature of the rules, but, like, you don't want to do that boxing. | ||
| Don't drop your hands boxing. | ||
| I go, what's the big deal? | ||
| He goes, well, because you're going to get hit. | ||
| You know, you're going to get hit in the head, too. | ||
| Don't drop your hands, especially not your right hand. | ||
| You know, that's where hooks come from, that side. | ||
| And I was like, well, I mean, I don't know. | ||
| I blocked your punch. | ||
| He goes... | ||
| Don't do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Don't say that. | |
| Don't say that. | ||
| I was like, alright. | ||
| So we do a little more and he threw a low hook again. | ||
| I went like this and he just whack, hit me in the head. | ||
| Not hard the first time. | ||
| And he was like, taekwondo. | ||
| And I was like, ah, fuck you, man. | ||
| So I did it again. | ||
| I did it again. | ||
| I could not break myself with a habit. | ||
| And every time I like, he would just like, whoop, whoop, hit me in the head. | ||
| Whoop, whoop, hit me in the head. | ||
| And every time he would just go... | ||
| Well, you know what it is? | ||
| A lot of martial arts, especially in the old days before the UFC came around, a lot of them were closed systems. | ||
| So if you were doing Taekwondo, you would only do it against people who were doing Taekwondo. | ||
| So you didn't know that the things you were doing left you susceptible to certain techniques from other sports. | ||
| So, like, in MMA, you don't ever see anybody blocking like that. | ||
| Because they've realized, like, first of all, if you block a kick like that, you break your arm. | ||
| And second of all, you do leave yourself open to punches. | ||
| So now people block. | ||
| When they block kicks, they try to block with two arms. | ||
| If someone's kicking high, you try to block with two arms, and you try to get as much of your body out of the way. | ||
| But you don't do this. | ||
| Like, Taekwondo style. | ||
| It doesn't really work, but in Taekwondo it kind of worked, because it was a closed system. | ||
| Right, that's what he was trying to tell me. | ||
| He's like, this is something that worked. | ||
| Boxers never do that. | ||
| You have a habit there, because that's the one thing you learn when you're younger, so don't do it. | ||
| It's like, don't drop your hands. | ||
| It also happens when people get hit in the legs a lot and they get in pain. | ||
| Like when a low kick starts coming, they try to stop it with their arm just because it hurts so much, and then someone sets them up and pretends to throw a low kick. | ||
| There's a thing called a question mark kick. | ||
| You ever seen that? | ||
| No, but I know what you're talking about. | ||
| It looks like you're going to kick someone low and then it turns around and it kicks them high. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Either it looks like it's going to go up the front or it looks like it's going to go low on the outside and then it comes around. | ||
| There was a guy named Glaube Feitosa who used to fight in K1. He had like the most beautiful question mark kick. | ||
| And they started calling it the Brazilian kick because he was so good at it. | ||
| He had these crazy hips. | ||
| If you watch him do it, it almost doesn't make sense. | ||
| His foot would be coming straight at you, and then out of nowhere, it would do a full question mark and chop down. | ||
| Let's see if you can find it. | ||
| Glaube Fatosa KO. Question mark kick was always the name of it. | ||
| That was a traditional... | ||
| It was either called fake front kick round kick or it was called question mark kick. | ||
| But then with Fatosa, a lot of people started calling it the Brazilian kick because he was so good at it. | ||
| But it was weird how good he was. | ||
| Like his hips... | ||
| I can't do what he does. | ||
| He's got a weird hip flexibility. | ||
| You got something? | ||
| I couldn't spell his name right. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| Yeah, it's a weird one. | ||
| He's Brazilian. | ||
| But he would literally, when the kick impacted, it would be coming down like a hammer. | ||
| Watch him. | ||
| Watch this. | ||
| That's not a good one. | ||
| That's a hard one to tell. | ||
| See if you can see it again, though. | ||
| Watch this. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Looks like it's coming up under his arm and then it whips over it. | ||
| And look at that. | ||
| He does that kyokushin, like the fucking ki at the end. | ||
| But look how it comes low. | ||
| And then, I mean, the way he would do it was like sensational hip flexibility. | ||
| Isn't that wild? | ||
| That rotation at the last minute. | ||
| Yeah, look at this wild man. | ||
| Nobody did it better than Glaube. | ||
| I mean, he's just famous for it. | ||
| A lot of guys are good at it. | ||
| Maybe Stylebender does it really good too. | ||
| It's wild watching, you know, mixed martial arts like that. | ||
| Interesting which disciplines tend to be effective. | ||
| I mean, it seemed to me early on when it first came around, it was a lot of grapplers, some guys that had beginning wrestling and then... | ||
| I mean, I haven't watched a ton of it, but jujitsu seemed to be really effective for a while. | ||
| What's his name? | ||
| Hoist Gracie. | ||
| Silva I was thinking of. | ||
| Anderson Silva? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, Anderson Silva was a Muay Thai guy. | ||
| He had Brazilian jujitsu. | ||
| He was a black belt in jujitsu, but his whole thing was striking. | ||
| He was a Muay Thai guy. | ||
| His whole thing was kicking the shit out of you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which would hurt. | ||
| Oh yeah, for him? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's, to this day, still one of the greatest of all time. | ||
| You choked guys out. | ||
| He did those chokes. | ||
| He definitely did. | ||
| He choked out Chael Sonnen in the fifth round of a fight where he was losing. | ||
| He was getting the shit kicked out of him in that fight. | ||
| Well, he went into that fight, apparently, legend has it, with a broken rib. | ||
| He had a fucked up rib going into that fight, so he couldn't really move properly, couldn't defend against takedowns, but still figured out a way to win. | ||
| Boy, Chael Sonnen was just pounding him, and he finally, it looked like he was done. | ||
| He had him on the ground, he was on top of him, and all of a sudden his legs just went... | ||
| Caught him in a triangle, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, well, Chell was a beast, but Anderson figured it out. | ||
| I mean, that's a guy like him who could do everything. | ||
| He can strike, he can submit you, and because he has all these skills, like, even when he's losing, he still could pull it out of his ass out of nowhere. | ||
| That's what he did. | ||
| Are any of the guys who, like, I just love martial arts movies. | ||
| Are any of the guys that were, like, you know, the... | ||
| Have any of them been really good fighters as well? | ||
| I mean, I wouldn't know how to tell. | ||
| In movies? | ||
| Chuck Norris. | ||
| Chuck Norris was a world kickboxing champion. | ||
| He was super legit. | ||
| Out of all the people that have ever been in martial arts movies that are famous guys, Chuck is the most legit. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| There's never been a guy who had more battle-tested combat sports experience who became a movie star than Chuck Norris. | ||
| Because in his day, kickboxing back then was not the same in karate tournaments and everything. | ||
| It's not like the level that people have today. | ||
| Like if you watch a Nikki Holtzkin or some elite kickboxing guy today, it's a different level. | ||
| It's more advanced. | ||
| But it's the same like going and watching the UFC from 1993 and then watching the UFC in 2021. Everyone's more advanced. | ||
| They're just better now. | ||
| It's just the sport evolves and gets better. | ||
| But in his day, Chuck Norris was a bad motherfucker, like legitimately badass world champion kickboxer. | ||
| And I think he learned in Korea in the military. | ||
| I think that's when he first started, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
| But he was a Tang Soo Do guy, which is like another Korean martial art. | ||
| But yeah, out of all the guys that have ever been... | ||
| Supposedly this is him fighting. | ||
| I can't tell if it is or not, but that's what it says. | ||
| Grand champion match. | ||
| Which one is he? | ||
| The one on his feet. | ||
| The one winning? | ||
| In the end. | ||
| Yeah, that's Chuck Norris with his back to us. | ||
| This guy here? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Ooh, these guys are good. | ||
| See, this is early days. | ||
| 1966. I wasn't even fucking born yet when these guys are doing karate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, so this is like a point karate championship. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is it music playing? | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Yeah, there's no sound. | ||
| I was hoping to hear something. | ||
| I think that's Chuck with his facing us, and the other guy's got his back. | ||
| It's hard to tell, though. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're so young. | ||
| Yeah, it looks like Chuck. | ||
| But anyway, he did this. | ||
| He also did kickboxing. | ||
| Yeah, Chuck Norris, he'd done a lot of stuff. | ||
| Does Muay Thai use as many, like, those heavy elbow strikes that you see, like, Tony Jaa doing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Muay Thai is Tony Jaa. | ||
| That's Muay Thai. | ||
| Muay Thai is all about the elbows. | ||
| They have the best elbow strikes in martial arts. | ||
| Elbows, knees, leg kicks. | ||
| Yeah, all that stuff, that's Muay Thai. | ||
| That's crazy to watch him. | ||
| It's pretty great. | ||
| Every time I see Ong Bak again, he's coming down with some guy's head with two elbows. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's very rare that a guy is like a legit martial artist and then makes his way and becomes a big time action star. | ||
| I guess Randy Couture has done pretty well. | ||
| He's done quite a few action movies and George St. Pierre was in Captain America. | ||
| But as far as like being like an action star, like the rock style star, it's definitely Chuck Norris. | ||
| He's the Mac Daddy of it all. | ||
| He's a super nice guy, too. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| He's like one guy that when I met him, I was so excited he knew who I was. | ||
| I met him at one of his World Karate Championship tournaments, his World Kick-Bot, I forget, World Combat League, that's what it was called. | ||
| And he's like, Joe! | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was like, oh shit, Chuck Norris knows my name! | |
| And I hugged him. | ||
| But I didn't get a picture with him. | ||
| I was like, fuck! | ||
| And then finally, later, many years later, there was this award ceremony that they were doing and they asked me to speak at it. | ||
| And I did it just so I could meet Chuck Norris again. | ||
| I totally get that. | ||
| It was like in this conference room thing and I got a picture with Chuck. | ||
| It's on my Instagram somewhere. | ||
| I just had to make sure that I documented I actually met Chuck Norris. | ||
| When they know you, like man, that's cool. | ||
| We were on a plane once. | ||
| We phoned to LA and then we changed planes and we were going to Hawaii for a corporate gig or something. | ||
| I was with my tour manager and he was sitting across the aisle. | ||
| I'm on the window seat over here. | ||
| And this guy, I wasn't looking. | ||
| I was looking out the window. | ||
| Out of the corner of my eye, this really tall guy comes and puts some stuff on the seat and then goes up to the bathroom. | ||
| And I turn back around and see he's walking away. | ||
| I see Tom, my tour manager, and he's like, Oh, really? | ||
| I got really nervous because I thought, oh, it's going to be really uncomfortable. | ||
| I've got a five-hour flight ahead of me. | ||
| I'm not going to know what to say. | ||
| I don't know what to do. | ||
| This is really weird. | ||
| I get kind of anxious about that shit. | ||
| I'm not really very good at talking to my idols at all. | ||
| And he comes back from the bathroom, and as he's walking up, it's fucking McLeatwood. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And as he comes back, he picks his stuff up off the thing. | ||
| He says, Adam, hello. | ||
| And I was like... | ||
| Mick. | ||
| He goes, I'm Adam. | ||
| He goes, I know. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| I said, how are you? | ||
| And he sat down and then he told me stories for four hours. | ||
| It was awesome. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| He told me history of Fleetwood Mac stories. | ||
| Talked about like... | ||
| It was like a fucking classic rock and roll history. | ||
| It was the coolest flight of my life. | ||
| He was just so nice. | ||
| And the next day, we exchanged phone numbers. | ||
| He came to our show, this corporate show. | ||
| I remember because whoever was at this company, Joe Torrey's daughter worked at the company. | ||
| Joe Torrey the comic? | ||
| No, Joe Torrey, the ranking manager. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| And so he came too because his daughter loved us and he brought her because he was involved with the company or something. | ||
| But Mick Fleetwood and Joe Torrey came backstage after us. | ||
| And then Mick just went to the bar with us and hung out at the hotel and talked to the other guys. | ||
| My guitar player, Emmer, is just a massive early Fleetwood Mac fan, Peter Green. | ||
| And it's his favorite song. | ||
| So he was going to flip out, and he wasn't there with us. | ||
| And I really wanted him to meet Mick. | ||
| It was just like, he still texts me to this day. | ||
| Happy birthday or Merry Christmas. | ||
| Just wanted to say hi. | ||
| It's been about 10 years now. | ||
| And it was just like... | ||
| He knew who I was, and he spent the flight chatting and telling me stories about rock and roll and shit. | ||
| It was fucking awesome. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| I'm not really good in those situations. | ||
| I have fled from people that I love. | ||
| Just been panicked? | ||
| Springsteen calls me. | ||
| I've known him forever. | ||
| He's the nicest guy on earth. | ||
| Like, I used to take my godson to school when I was still making my first album, so I hadn't even made it yet. | ||
| I had met Bruce because we played this Rock and Roll Hall of Fame thing, and his son went to the same school. | ||
| They were kids, you know, young kids, eight-something then, four, maybe younger, and so I would see him every day at school, and he would always come up and talk to me and say hi, and I just couldn't make sentences, couldn't think of anything to say. | ||
| It was so bad, you know? | ||
| He's doing a podcast now with Obama. | ||
| I heard. | ||
| I wonder how it is. | ||
| That show of his, that Broadway show, was so cool. | ||
| And he told such great stories. | ||
| I mean, it was... | ||
| I don't imagine the podcast can possibly be good. | ||
| Unfortunately. | ||
| I just feel like they would be so restricted in the way that community. | ||
| I think if you, let me phrase this better. | ||
| If Bruce Springsteen could be himself and Obama could be himself, and you could just put a camera on it and just let them shoot the shit, I think it'd be amazing. | ||
| Because Obama can be really funny. | ||
| Oh, he's brilliant. | ||
| He's a brilliant guy. | ||
| But I can't imagine that if they're doing something and they're recording it, that they're not acutely aware of how many people are paying attention. | ||
| And acutely aware of, like, getting the right message across and saying things... | ||
| Like, part of podcasting is being irresponsible. | ||
| Like, you're just talking shit, you know, and you don't even exactly know what you're going to say. | ||
| Like, right now, I have no idea what the next word out of my mouth is. | ||
| There's nothing prepared. | ||
| There's nothing like it when you think you're thinking out loud for hours, right? | ||
| Yeah, I never thought of that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| No, it's okay. | ||
| But if you're a president, I mean, you're a distinguished statesman, one of the greatest presidents we've ever had, and one of the most historically important presidents we've ever had, first African-American president we've ever had, and one of the all-time greatest speakers ever, right? | ||
| So he has this legacy. | ||
| And then you're hanging out with Bruce Springsteen, who's also this, like, Incredibly well-spoken, brilliant songwriter, iconic American musician, hero. | ||
| And the two of them together, there's so much, the weight of the eyes upon them is so heavy, I would imagine it would be very difficult to just shoot the shit. | ||
| But if you could get them, like a little buzzed, Just a couple of shots of tequila. | ||
| Just fucking talk, man. | ||
| Just to hear them talk for real would be amazing. | ||
| I just don't know if you could ever do that. | ||
| When I saw the podcast, I'm like, well, there's definitely camera people there. | ||
| There's definitely sound people there. | ||
| One of the best things about this place is it's just us and Jamie. | ||
| There's no one in here. | ||
| And so it feels like it's just us and Jamie. | ||
| But I've done other people's podcasts before, and I'm like, why are there so many people here? | ||
| Like Bill Simmons, who's great. | ||
| But I did his HBO podcast. | ||
| It was a show. | ||
| I'm like, dude, you have 100 employees. | ||
| Why is there 100 people here? | ||
| The nice thing about this is you don't necessarily need that. | ||
| You can do everything you want. | ||
| I assume they partake of the wonders of editing. | ||
| They feel comfortable. | ||
| But you're right. | ||
| I don't know what it is. | ||
| I don't know what it is. | ||
| But with all those people, it makes it very hard to just be two dudes talking. | ||
| Well, that's something. | ||
| I mean, I definitely had to... | ||
| I thought that to myself coming in here. | ||
| Well, you know, this is three hours of unedited shit. | ||
| So, you know, don't fuck your life up. | ||
| So don't fuck it up, sort of, but also like, you know, live with it, you know, because you're going to have three hours. | ||
| Like, you know, when we do our podcast, me and my friend James, you know, I definitely take stuff out of it at times. | ||
| You know, there are things I've been really careful. | ||
| What is it called? | ||
| It's called Underwater Sunshine. | ||
| We just kind of geek out about music. | ||
| Do you have a t-shirt? | ||
| I don't have them here. | ||
| I'll get you one. | ||
| Get me one. | ||
| I'll wear an Underwater Sunshine t-shirt. | ||
| I like the name. | ||
| It's the name of one of the records we made. | ||
| We did a record of literally the most obscure covers record ever made. | ||
| Oh yeah? | ||
| Nothing on there that anybody knows. | ||
| A couple songs people would know, but basically we just picked all songs by friends of ours that were really good songs, but the shit no one knew. | ||
| And then we have a festival called Underwater Sunshine, too, where we just do, like, it's independent artists. | ||
| It's totally free for a couple days in New York, usually. | ||
| Oh, that's cool. | ||
| We're going to expand it a little bit this year. | ||
| But we were expanding it last year when this whole thing happened, landed on us. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, coming in here, it's definitely a thought. | ||
| Like, okay, well, it's three hours of unedited talking. | ||
| Try not to, like... | ||
| I mean, like, I try and be really careful about, you know, I don't... | ||
| I will talk about things I love. | ||
| I love to talk about things I love. | ||
| I just want to geek out on music I love and shit I love all day long. | ||
| I don't want to talk about stuff I don't like because A, it's not going to turn anybody on to anything. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And, you know, everybody's got a sister. | ||
| You know, I know my sister doesn't like reading shit about me that somebody says that's just horrible. | ||
| You know, so I kind of try and avoid that stuff just because... | ||
| Yeah, through trial and error, you learn to avoid negativity. | ||
| It's just generally not worth it unless there's a real point to be made. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You have to, like, really express something because it's actually important. | ||
| But for the most part. | ||
| It's easy, too. | ||
| It's really easy to shit on somebody and, like, I don't know. | ||
| And it's very profitable. | ||
| Yeah, it certainly is that. | ||
| It's very popular. | ||
| People love when people shit on people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It is funny. | ||
| That's part of the problem as well. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| It's the amazing thing about what Jeff's done in the last decade or so, is making this thing not personal, to turn the roasting into something that's back like what it used to be when we watched Dean Martin when we were kids. | ||
| It's funny, it's insulting, it's not about getting the world to think you're a piece of shit. | ||
| It's about, I'm making up a joke about how you're a piece of shit right now. | ||
| And he's done it without anybody really Somehow he just makes it work without causing a huge uproar. | ||
| It's not even a bullshit uproar. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| He's managed to pull it off in a way that's good-hearted enough that I'm not sure how he's managed it. | ||
| Because that's actually who he is. | ||
| So what he expresses on stage is how he is. | ||
| And also, it's kind of how comics talk to each other anyway. | ||
| We always talk shit to each other, but it's with love. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| Like if someone shits on your clothes or shits on your face or shits on your head or shits on whatever it is, it's like we're all laughing along with it. | ||
| It's like it's an honor to get roasted by Jeff Ross or any really good roaster. | ||
| And Jeff is... | ||
| Because of his love of old comedy culture, like the Friars Club and that kind of stuff, he always loved that. | ||
| When we were in our 20s, he'd be like, I'm going to go to the Friars Club. | ||
| I'm like, what the fuck are you doing? | ||
| You're in your 20s. | ||
| We're not old dead men. | ||
| In my mind, I'm like, why are you going to the Friars Club? | ||
| He wanted to hang out with Don Rickles. | ||
| He wanted to pick his brain because he's got that Rickles-ish thing. | ||
| I get it now. | ||
| I get it now. | ||
| But back then, I was brazen. | ||
| Yeah, I get that. | ||
| When I was in my 20s, I was a different human being. | ||
| I didn't understand traditions and all that stuff. | ||
| I was like, get the fuck out of here with these old dead men hanging out, cracking jokes with each other in wheelchairs. | ||
| I just thought of the Friars Club as being this thing, but I didn't know what it was. | ||
| It was totally out of ignorance. | ||
| I'd never been there before. | ||
| And then I realized as I got older, oh, it's like a camaraderie thing. | ||
| Like these comics would get together and they had a place where they could hang out. | ||
| And then Greg Fitzsimmons had gone there and he told me he'd go there and play pool and hang out with these guys. | ||
| He's like, it was just a fun hang with a bunch of guys who were just cracking on each other all the time. | ||
| I was like, oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's nothing like that for us, for music. | ||
| You know, like... | ||
| He took me there. | ||
| Is there a place where you guys hang? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| I mean, there was at one point, you know, I bartended at the Viper Room for years. | ||
| Oh, did you really? | ||
| Yeah, well, that's how I ended up moving to LA. I was home. | ||
| It was getting really miserable in Berkeley. | ||
| I'd been home for about a week from the end of touring. | ||
| Everywhere I went, it was an issue. | ||
| Not, you know, mostly positive, but still, it's like, you feel like everybody's looking at you. | ||
| There are kids camped out on my lawn. | ||
| A couple days... | ||
| Bunch of days in a row at least one like a hundred people come up to me a day But one of them was like hey, are you that guy from County Coors? | ||
| Yeah, you're Adam Duritz? | ||
| Yeah You guys are so lucky. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I mean because you suck and there's so many good bands in the Bay Area It's wild that a band as shitty as you would be so successful to your face. | ||
| Yeah, I was just like It happened like four or five days in a row I mean it was dwarfed by the amount of people that were coming up just loving the band but still it was like it started to feel like If there's going to be one of these every day, is one of them going to have a gun? | ||
| Is this Mark David Chapman? | ||
| It seems such a weird obsession to walk up to a total stranger in the line for a bank and just say something like that. | ||
| It was so weird. | ||
| But we got really famous really quickly. | ||
| The only people I knew in L.A. really were people at the Viperim. | ||
| I'd met a few of them playing across the street at the Whiskey on their first tours. | ||
| So I went home that day. | ||
| I'd been home for, I think, seven days. | ||
| And it happened like six of those seven days. | ||
| And I got a phone call, and it was Sal and Johnny. | ||
| Sal Jenko, who ran the Viper Room, he's Johnny Depp's partner. | ||
| And they called me up, and they're like, hey, we want to invite you to this party tonight. | ||
| And I was like kind of half in, half out. | ||
| I wasn't really listening. | ||
| And finally, they're like, wait, what's going on, man? | ||
| And I told them what was happening. | ||
| And they're like, hang on a second. | ||
| I'm going to put you on hold. | ||
| I sat there on the phone and I didn't know what was going on. | ||
| They came back and they said, okay, it's Kate Moss's 21st birthday tonight and we're throwing a party here. | ||
| The club's closed. | ||
| We're just throwing a party for friends. | ||
| We wanted to invite you. | ||
| We got you a room at the Bellage and you have a reservation on the flight at 6 o'clock, Oakland to Burbank. | ||
| Just get on it. | ||
| Someone will pick you up at the airport. | ||
| You've got a room at the Bellage. | ||
| Get the fuck out of there. | ||
| So I like... | ||
| Grabbed my stuff, went to the airport, went to this party at the Vipram with just like interesting people. | ||
| And I was like, I didn't go home again. | ||
| That was it. | ||
| I moved to LA after that. | ||
| I did. | ||
| I stayed at the Bellage for a few days. | ||
| I moved to like a bungalow at the Sunset Marquee and then eventually... | ||
| I rented this house in the hills. | ||
| One of the bartenders, Shannon McManus, at the Viper, her best friend was Christine Applegate. | ||
| And she was my landlord. | ||
| She rented me this old, like, she had this fucking place. | ||
| It was like a little cottage in Laurel Canyon. | ||
| And it turned out it was built by the cowboy star, Tom Mix, in the 20s. | ||
| And then it was David Niven's, like, in-town fuckpad. | ||
| And he named it Rogues Retreat when there was a little sign up there after this TV show he was on called The Rogues in, like, the 60s. | ||
| And then, I don't know, I I don't know what it was after that, but she owned it, and I stayed there. | ||
| I wrote most of our second record in that place before I bought a place. | ||
| But yeah, man, the Viper Room, for a couple years there, I bartended all the time because it was just less crowded on that side of the bar. | ||
| My friends all worked there, so I would be there anyways hanging out with them. | ||
| So you bartended while you were a rock star? | ||
| Oh yeah, huge rock. | ||
| At the height of it. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| Because when I was back there and I'd be hanging out with Shannon, smoking a cigarette, drinking beers behind the bar, you know, in the downstairs bar there, the little one. | ||
| And I don't know, at one point, I'd help her out with stuff. | ||
| And at one point, she's like, I go to the bathroom, there's nobody else. | ||
| Will you just, you know, mind the bar? | ||
| And I was like... | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| So I did it. | ||
| And I had no qualms about berating people for tips. | ||
| I'm a rock star and they're not my tips, so why not? | ||
| So I made her a few hundred dollars in the five minutes she was gone. | ||
| And she's like, you've got to do this all the time. | ||
| So I just started going there. | ||
| I mean, that's where I lived anyways. | ||
| I was kind of there every day. | ||
| The only people I knew. | ||
| So I just started bartending every night. | ||
| And it was like my home. | ||
| It was like a cheers thing. | ||
| I felt like... | ||
| Okay there. | ||
| It's kind of a cool way to interact with people, too, because there is a barrier, and it is less crowded over there, and it's probably kind of fun. | ||
| Yeah, and you talk to them if you want to. | ||
| If you don't want to, you've got to get a beer for someone else. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And there was just so many people. | ||
| It was like what I thought... | ||
| The Left Bank would have been like in Paris in the 20s. | ||
| I mean, it was like Allen Ginsberg coming in and William Burroughs, the Hughes Brothers, all these different filmmakers, you know, musicians, Tom Petty. | ||
| It was just really wild. | ||
| Gibby Haynes from the Butthole Surfers. | ||
| You know, we were all just hanging out there. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It was like Johnny's Clubhouse, and we had barbecues on Sunset on Sundays. | ||
| You know, and we just sort of, for a few years, it was this really cool... | ||
| Like, club. | ||
| Kinda. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Like a clubhouse. | ||
| It was very much like that. | ||
| Was the negativity towards you, like, specific to the Bay Area? | ||
| Well, I think... | ||
| Because that's so unusual to me that someone would come up to you in person and tell you you suck like that. | ||
| Like, that's dangerous. | ||
| It is, and I think it's because... | ||
| And it's, like, unprovoked. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's just total strangers. | ||
| It's just trying to hurt your feelings. | ||
| So, like, where'd that narrative come from, though? | ||
| Because, first of all, you guys didn't suck. | ||
| Your music was amazing. | ||
| I was a giant fan. | ||
| I mean, still am. | ||
| But, I mean, back then, I was a giant fan. | ||
| So, like, it doesn't make any sense to me. | ||
| Well, I think it's just you get on people's nerves. | ||
| You know, you just do. | ||
| Just overexposure. | ||
| It's too much. | ||
| But I also think San Francisco in a lot of ways back then was a struggling artist town. | ||
| And so that kind of success wasn't Cool. | ||
| You know, it wasn't as well regarded. | ||
| When I moved to LA, it was a working artist town. | ||
| It was really nice for me there, because, like, all anybody wanted to do, you know, for all the... | ||
| There's a lot of things about LA I don't like. | ||
| I mean, a ton. | ||
| But I do like the part of it that it's like, it was a working artist town. | ||
| People just wanted to do their thing, and they were interested in what you were doing. | ||
| They wanted to show you maybe what they were doing. | ||
| But everyone was, you know, we were hoping each other had success, and there was nothing to be jealous of. | ||
| Everyone was doing stuff. | ||
| It just didn't feel like... | ||
| I love the Bay Area a lot more than L.A., honestly. | ||
| And in years since then, I've loved going back home. | ||
| But at that moment, it just seemed like it annoyed the shit out of some people in the indie rock scene I came from. | ||
| We were a college radio indie rock band in this club scene up there. | ||
| You got too successful. | ||
| Yeah, and pretty quick. | ||
| And I think it probably was all over the radio. | ||
| It didn't happen to any of our friends. | ||
| There were a lot of other bands in the Bay Area. | ||
| Three of us did really well right at the same time. | ||
| Primus a little bit before us, and then us, and then Green Day right after us. | ||
| But we were actually all Berklee kids, East Bay. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| But it happened for a little while, and then it stopped happening. | ||
| Well, the thing about San Francisco, the Bay Area in particular, is it's not a showbiz culture. | ||
| No. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's a culture of more art and a lot of really intelligent people. | ||
| I lived there when I was a kid from age 7 to 11. And I remember thinking, it was like a very good place to be at the time. | ||
| It was a very fortunate place to be at that age of my life, because I was around a lot of eclectic people, a lot of interesting, weird people. | ||
| You know, we lived in the center of it all. | ||
| We were right down the street from Lombard Street. | ||
| So it was like, yeah, and it was during the Vietnam War, you know, so it was like, It was all weirdos and hippies, and my stepfather was a hippie, so it all fit in. | ||
| It seemed normal. | ||
| And then we moved from there to Florida afterwards, and the contrast was so stark that it made me go, wow, I was really lucky to live there. | ||
| That was a cool spot. | ||
| People were... | ||
| It was just interesting and creative and there was a lot of music and there was a lot of art. | ||
| It was just a different place to be. | ||
| But it's not a showbiz culture by any stretch of the imagination. | ||
| Whereas in Los Angeles, people celebrate overexposure. | ||
| They celebrate Overexposure and over-publicized people and people that are on billboards. | ||
| Whereas in a place like San Francisco, that's not cool. | ||
| That's all fucked up. | ||
| They'd be more into going to an antique store or something. | ||
| And that's a thing that I... The thing that I came to not like about LA after a number of years was their worship of fame, being famous just for being famous. | ||
| And their sort of circular worship of fame. | ||
| But what I loved about it was that that all really exists and it's annoying as fuck. | ||
| But it exists around a bunch of people who are out there doing stuff too. | ||
| And I thought that was really... | ||
| It's funny that you came up with the Bay Area to Florida. | ||
| We went from Texas to the Bay Area. | ||
| My dad was in the Army during Vietnam in El Paso, and I loved it. | ||
| We lived in Houston after that. | ||
| I didn't like Houston as much, but El Paso was, man, it was just like... | ||
| Because I think it's a... | ||
| It was a lot of vacant lots and desert and bugs and snakes and shit. | ||
| And it's also the first place... | ||
| You know when you're a kid, you like... | ||
| First, as a kid, you just do stuff with your parents. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And the family. | ||
| And then, at some point, you go off and do something by yourself with another kid. | ||
| At a certain point, you get a little off on your own. | ||
| To me, I was six when I got there. | ||
| That's part of the first experiences I have with going fucking around with shit on my own. | ||
| Just like vacant lots and snakes and spiders and riding my bike. | ||
| I just really remember that about El Paso and really loving that. | ||
| And actually, I don't know why. | ||
| Even the army culture, which was kind of weird, seemed cool. | ||
| And I just liked it. | ||
| I liked that town. | ||
| And it's like... | ||
| But it's a weird town. | ||
| It's like right on the border. | ||
| It's a... | ||
| It's kind of very much its own place. | ||
| It's Texas. | ||
| I haven't been to El Paso yet. | ||
| I kind of love it there. | ||
| Even now, it was the last place that I'd lived that I hadn't played. | ||
| Because I grew up all over. | ||
| You know, Baltimore, Boston, El Paso, Denver, Houston, and then Oakland. | ||
| And then I turned 10. So all that happened really early on. | ||
| But the last place I got to play was El Paso. | ||
| I'd hit everything else. | ||
| And it was just a few years ago, and we were at this club. | ||
| It was a big open-air place. | ||
| It had a roof over it, but no ends. | ||
| And it was right across the river from Juarez, somewhere right on the Rio Grande. | ||
| Enough so that our phones kept switching over, thinking they were in Mexico. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| So it was just like... | ||
| The food was great. | ||
| The people were great. | ||
| I found the house where I lived, the two houses I lived when I was a kid. | ||
| I went in an Uber with my tour manager and found both of them. | ||
| I don't know how. | ||
| You know, it's like 1970. This is about five to ten years ago. | ||
| And I managed to, like, I remembered the street names and where they were on the streets from when I was six, seven, eight years old, you know. | ||
| I found both houses, which was fucking freaky. | ||
| I couldn't believe I found them. | ||
| That must have been a trip for the Uber driver. | ||
| Did he know who you were? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| But it was weird for me and Tom. | ||
| Like, wow, can you imagine just finding some house you lived in when you were six, when you were 50? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's really wild. | ||
| Yeah, that is wild. | ||
| I went back to the house that I went to high school with recently. | ||
| Where was that? | ||
| Newton. | ||
| Newton, Massachusetts. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I was wandering around that area, and it just seemed... | ||
| Familiar, but yet different. | ||
| Because your memory is kind of shitty. | ||
| If you had to draw a picture of what the street looked like from your memory, you'd be like, I think there was a tree here. | ||
| Here's the arch of the bridge. | ||
| And... | ||
| Randomly, like a year or two later, I'm doing a gig at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston, and I'm eating with one of my high school buddies at a restaurant, and this lady comes up to me and she goes, I live in the house where you grew up. | ||
| And I'm like, what?! | ||
| And I took a picture with her. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| But it was like, I'm here smiling with some lady who lives in my old house. | ||
| And she lived, yeah, and I had just been there. | ||
| Just like a couple years before with my family, wandering around. | ||
| I remember thinking, like, it's so odd. | ||
| It's so odd when you just try to... | ||
| Pieced together that weird, blurry slideshow of a memory, and then you see the actual place vividly, and everything looks so much smaller than you remember. | ||
| It's just strange. | ||
| Yeah, because you're bigger. | ||
| That's the weird thing. | ||
| I mean, because we do, especially those kid memories. | ||
| That's the thing, because that's how I found the first. | ||
| One of them I'm sure I found, the other one I'm not sure, because it was in the middle of a street, so I wasn't sure. | ||
| But one of them I knew was on a corner. | ||
| And it had a big stone wall on one side of the street and then the driveway on the other street. | ||
| And I remember thinking that I could find it because that stone wall, I used to climb it when I was a kid. | ||
| And, you know, when I saw that now, it's like this high. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But to me, it was... | ||
| In my memory, it's 8 or 10 feet high because I used to climb it and climb down it. | ||
| And there was like a... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I remember being big enough that I had to climb down onto a mailbox and then jump down to the street. | ||
| But it's not a lot bigger than a mailbox. | ||
| So I'm not sure why that would have worked. | ||
| But, you know, it's like I was six, you know, and I was a small kid. | ||
| So it was weird finding that because everything changes, you know. | ||
| The thing we were talking about when we were talking about going to LA and the showbiz culture and the culture of fame and all that stuff is there. | ||
| I was just having a conversation with a friend of mine about LA. The real thing that gets tainted is not necessarily the people that just happen to be famous, the artists that are doing things. | ||
| It's that... | ||
| There's a whole swarm of people that are trying to figure out a way how to get into that walled garden. | ||
| And they're bartending, and they're waitressing, and they're delivering Uber Eats, and they're doing all these different things. | ||
| So there's an anxiety of just... | ||
| There's like a feeling of all these people that desperately want in. | ||
| And they're all hovering around this area, and it changes the whole vibe of the town. | ||
| When you go to a place that doesn't have that, and it's one of the things that I love about Austin, it does not have that. | ||
| The feeling is different. | ||
| The feeling when you're around people, they're different. | ||
| There's people in LA that don't even admit that they wanted to be famous. | ||
| They just gave up on the dream. | ||
| They came out there for a very specific reason. | ||
| They wanted to be an actor or whatever it is. | ||
| And then it didn't work out and they became an architect or whatever. | ||
| Whatever it is. | ||
| But they wanted to be famous. | ||
| And then they want to meet people who are famous and then become friends with those people so they can get and hang out with famous people. | ||
| So at least they kind of get the rub. | ||
| And it's fucking weird, man. | ||
| It's a weird culture. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| There's a shallowness to it, but yet some of the most interesting, creative, and deep people live amongst that shallowness. | ||
| So you have all these really intense artists that are surrounded by all these very strange people that are trying to figure out how they can get on the cover of Rolling Stone. | ||
| But it's interesting because what you were talking about, it was one of the things that turned me off when I finally left because You're right. | ||
| Everybody, even people who do impressive things and are successful, only want to talk to you in conversation about the movie producer they had a meeting with last week. | ||
| You can be a very successful lawyer in finance. | ||
| You can be doing something very impressive in another field, and they aren't going to talk to you about being a doctor. | ||
| They just want to talk to you about the meeting they had for a pitch idea. | ||
| But I do think there's a flip side to that, too, that I did find kind of magical about being there, which is that So much of culture is about, I was born here, I grew up here, around all these same people, and we're all gonna do this thing here, too. | ||
| And there's a certain amount to which LA is about, like, it's a bunch of people who all decided they didn't want to do what everyone else in their high school did. | ||
| Whether it's to be a poet or a sculptor or a painter or a musician or an actor or a model. | ||
| But it's still like, I don't want to stay here and just do this thing. | ||
| I'm going to go over there. | ||
| And there's a certain pioneer aesthetic about doing that. | ||
| The problem is if you get there... | ||
| And then it just becomes about famous and famous. | ||
| I dig the part of it that is like, I got a dream and I'm willing to go all the way over there to get it and to do it. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| I felt like I had that in common with all those people. | ||
| But then there's a side of it you're talking about where, A, you lose what you came there for originally and it just becomes about chasing fame and success as opposed to doing anything for it. | ||
| And that got really annoying right after the millennium when the A lot of the reality TV stuff started to become bigger and bigger. | ||
| And suddenly it's just like... | ||
| Fame for fame's sake. | ||
| Fame for fame's sake. | ||
| It's nothing about doing anything. | ||
| And that was when I started to get... | ||
| I lost my taste for LA. I really charred it to about the millennium and realizing it was like a year after that. | ||
| We had these birthday parties every year and I used to love them and having everybody come up. | ||
| And for years we had these big parties on Friday night where just everybody would come to my house on Fridays. | ||
| You know, just like a huge party. | ||
| But I remember thinking, I don't want to have anybody over anymore. | ||
| I don't want to be here anymore. | ||
| And then I had been spending a lot of time in New York visiting friends. | ||
| And I had a lot of friends here from years before. | ||
| Do you know who Mary Louise Parker is? | ||
| No. | ||
| I know who she is. | ||
| Yeah, so her and I met when we were kids. | ||
| Like, she had just gotten out of college, done her first movie. | ||
| I was in my first band. | ||
| She was out doing a play in Berkeley at Berkeley Rep, and we became friends. | ||
| I had a huge crush on her. | ||
| But we became friends, this is like 1980, 87, 88, something like that. | ||
| And so we've been friends ever since then. | ||
| So I would go in New York and I would visit her and her boyfriend and we'd go see plays all the time and I thought, I was really liking life in New York. | ||
| And me and Billy Crudup, who was then her boyfriend, We went to see this play called Private Lives. | ||
| It's a Noel Coward play, and it starred Alan Rickman and Lindsey Duncan. | ||
| And after the play, Billy took me backstage, and we ended up going out that night with Alan, having some drinks, and hanging out for the rest of the evening with Alan Rickman and Lindsey Duncan. | ||
| It was just so great. | ||
| The whole experience, and I felt, it felt, I don't know, a lot more grown up, kind of. | ||
| I don't know, I just felt like I'd been having conversations with people from the real world, and now I was having a conversation with Alan Rickman and Lindsey Duncan, and I really liked it, and I thought, I think I gotta get out of LA. I think I would like to have these conversations more. | ||
| I realized how much I liked going to the theater, just because it was closer to what I do, going on stage and doing it live every night. | ||
| I wanted to get the hell out of LA. And I had really appreciated it up until about the millennium. | ||
| I had appreciated all the people that were creative and how much variety of it there was. | ||
| I really liked all that. | ||
| But something happened after the millennium where I just got really burnt out on it. | ||
| I think you nailed it with the comment about the reality shows, because that clearly changed the culture of the city, because now people realize you didn't really have to be talented. | ||
| You just had to demand attention. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there's a lot of people that are doing that now, whether it's TikTok or a lot of these... | ||
| YouTube stars and things along those lines, they don't really necessarily have a talent. | ||
| They just either stir up a lot of shit, cause arguments with people, do pranks, whatever they can do to get attention. | ||
| So it's not the same vibe, right? | ||
| It's not about someone who's just trying to create great music or someone who's trying to make good movies or whatever it is you're trying to do. | ||
| It's now become a culture of attention and fame. | ||
| And that's LA now. | ||
| I mean, LA is like a lot of these great restaurants and bars, they're TikTok places now. | ||
| You know that? | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Like, people go there because TikTok stars go there. | ||
| So, like, what is that place on Sunset? | ||
| Saddle Ranch. | ||
| Saddle Ranch is a TikTok place now. | ||
| Like, TikTok stars go there, and everybody goes there to see TikTok stars. | ||
| Is it even open now? | ||
| They're allowed to be open? | ||
| Fully open? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You go there every goddamn chance. | ||
| He's a TikTok fiend. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just kidding. | |
| Just kidding. | ||
| But that's a thing. | ||
| Like Boa is a big steakhouse on Sunset. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's infested with TikTok people. | ||
| I've only been there once with Bob. | ||
| Why are you laughing? | ||
| The steak was great. | ||
| Am I right about this? | ||
| It's always been infested. | ||
| Maybe different sections have been infested with young people. | ||
| Listen, when I say infested, maybe that's the wrong word. | ||
| It could be infested by rock stars. | ||
| Now it's infested by TikTok people. | ||
| It becomes the culture. | ||
| Well, you aren't wrong that, like, the way in early 2000s kids would flock to the front of MTV to maybe get a glimpse at some music video star. | ||
| They're standing out in front of Saddle Ranch, not going there. | ||
| They're just, like, taking their phones to take pictures with them. | ||
| That's the weirdest thing to me, because I remember that at TRL. You know, all that crowd in front of TRL on Broadway. | ||
| But, like... | ||
| That's a weird thing. | ||
| You know, you were talking about early on about being awkward in front of things. | ||
| I've never felt as awkward. | ||
| I already felt too old the first time we were on TRL. How old were you? | ||
| I mean, I had to be 30-something, so I was too old. | ||
| But, like, I became a rock star at 29 or 30. I mean, I put my first record out at 30 at 29. How old are you now? | ||
| 56. Yeah, so I'm, you know, I'm just inches away from death. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| But the very first time we were on TRL, everyone was really nice, but I felt weird and old and out of place and like over the hill already. | ||
| And I don't think it existed for our first couple albums, but it was sometime around the third that I was like... | ||
| Boy, we are past our sell-by date. | ||
| It's 1999, so it's been 22 years and we're still here, so that's pretty good. | ||
| No, that's very good. | ||
| When you first made it, what was it like to go from just being a guy in a band to all of a sudden, holy shit, it's the guy from Counting Crows. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| It's that dude. | ||
| That was fucking weird for me because I was really shy, you know, and I had, you know, I have dissociative disorder, which is not dissociative identity disorder. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| That's split personality. | ||
| Well, dissociative disorder is like, it's that you don't quite, it's hard to describe it, you don't quite connect with the world and you feel a little bit like you're at the back of your head watching things as they happen. | ||
| Isn't that everybody? | ||
| Yeah, maybe not to the extent. | ||
| Don't tell me my mental illness is something everybody has. | ||
| Keep questioning. | ||
| No, I mean, I think it is to a certain extent, but it definitely kept me at a distance from things, and I always felt a little awkward. | ||
| How did you get diagnosed? | ||
| Like, how does that get... | ||
| Well, finally... | ||
| Do you have to describe the issues that you're having, and then the psychologist sort of explains it? | ||
| I don't think I really got it diagnosed until I was almost 40. Because they'd been diagnosed as different things. | ||
| They thought I was kind of bipolar at times. | ||
| I was medicated for a lot of different shit. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, which is not pleasant. | ||
| During the stardom period you were medicated? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Did you get medicated after stardom? | ||
| No, before. | ||
| Before. | ||
| I just didn't want to tell anybody about it because you don't want to be a public spectacle while you're going downhill. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| No matter how much sympathy people pretend to... | ||
| To offer. | ||
| We love to watch trains collide. | ||
| Did you feel like fame exacerbated your issues? | ||
| Well, yeah, because I was very anxious and very shy and all of a sudden and very awkward in company with people and then all of a sudden everyone in the world is coming up to me and it felt like It felt like claustrophobic, like the world is just pressing on you all the time. | ||
| You know, I remember when we got offered the cover of Rolling Stone and I told my manager I wanted to think about it. | ||
| You know for a day because you know and of course you're never gonna say no to the cover of Rolling Stone It is if you want to have a career and you get off the cover of Rolling Stone You should fucking do it because that's that's a career maker right there You know, but I also I mean it's not like this nowadays because there are no newsstands really or very few but remember like Having your picture on the cover of a magazine like that meant that you were like omnipresent You're everywhere on every street corner everyone your face was everywhere so like any sort of anonymity is is gone I mean, it scared me. | ||
| It did. | ||
| It scared the shit out of me. | ||
| But, you know, you got to do that stuff. | ||
| So, I mean, I struggled with it at first. | ||
| It was really different. | ||
| People chase you down the street. | ||
| I remember going to a movie in Birmingham by myself in the middle of the afternoon. | ||
| Just went to see some movie. | ||
| It was a block or two from our hotel. | ||
| Just a matinee, you know, on a day off. | ||
| And I'm in there. | ||
| There's no one in the theater. | ||
| It's like one of those multiplexes. | ||
| There's no one in there, the one I was in. | ||
| And then, like, midway through the movie, this guy comes down. | ||
| Sits next to me, like in the middle of the theater. | ||
| He's like, hey. | ||
| I said, hey. | ||
| He's like, are you in County Crows? | ||
| I said, yeah. | ||
| And he goes, ah, I love your band. | ||
| Do you mind if I sit here? | ||
| And I said, you know, I'm kind of just trying to have some time to myself. | ||
| And he goes, okay. | ||
| Gets up, walks out. | ||
| Walks out of the theater. | ||
| Doesn't sit down in the theater, just walks out. | ||
| And I'm watching the rest of the movie. | ||
| Right at the end of the movie, guy comes in again, walks down a mile, sits next to me. | ||
| And I was like, God damn it. | ||
| And I turn, but it's a different guy. | ||
| And he's wearing the uniform from the place. | ||
| And he's like, hey, I'm sorry to bother you. | ||
| But the kid came in here earlier. | ||
| I said, yeah. | ||
| He said, well, he's been out in the lobby for the last hour on the payphone calling everyone he knows, I guess, because he's been on the phone the whole time. | ||
| There's like 100 people. | ||
| Out front now. | ||
| I was just like, fuck. | ||
| He goes, if you want to go out that exit, that takes you out the side of the building. | ||
| You can sneak out. | ||
| I was like, thank you. | ||
| I went down and ran. | ||
| I was around the side of the building, so I was a good block away before they spotted me. | ||
| And then they all came charging after me. | ||
| I made it to the hotel. | ||
| It's like some Beatles shit, son. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It was fucking weird. | ||
| It was like Beatlemania. | ||
| You don't expect that. | ||
| It was a lot to deal with. | ||
| For me, it just kind of freaked me out. | ||
| I've said this same quote a million times, but if you woke up on Mars, it would take you a minute to get used to the gravity. | ||
| But you do. | ||
| You adjust. | ||
| And I adjusted. | ||
| But at first, I was a mess. | ||
| I didn't know what to do about it. | ||
| So did they have you on medication before all of this happened? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| What kind of shit were you on? | ||
| Fuck, I don't remember now. | ||
| I mean, it's such a long time ago. | ||
| I was talking to a friend this morning because her son is taking Lamictal. | ||
| What is Lamictal? | ||
| It's like a drug for anxiety or depression. | ||
| I don't remember now, but I used to have to take it and it didn't work for me. | ||
| There's a different formulation for the chewable one that they gave to kids than the swallowable one that they gave to adults. | ||
| And the chewable one only came in like two milligrams. | ||
| And I had an ever-increasing dosage, you know, like 10, 20, 40, 100 milligrams. | ||
| Did it, like, stop working? | ||
| Is that why they kept increasing your dosage? | ||
| Well, they just generally do. | ||
| To get you on a drug, they start you small, and then they give you more. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Ramp you up? | ||
| But because the only formulation that worked for me, weirdly enough, was the chewable one, which comes in, like, two milligram package of pills, I had to take the chewable kind. | ||
| Because sometimes the formulations are different, you know, in the different kinds of ways they package up drugs. | ||
| And so something in the other version didn't work for me, so I had to keep taking the chewable one. | ||
| So at one point, I was taking, like... | ||
| 25 of them. | ||
| You get 50 milligrams, and it's like 25 of these little... | ||
| Can you imagine taking like 50 or 25 different Flintstones vitamins every morning? | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| All the liquid in your mouth just gets sucked out, and it becomes this paste. | ||
| You're trying to chew these fucking pills. | ||
| That's sort of the slightly sweet orange flavor of chewable pills. | ||
| She reminded me of this morning, and I just thought, oh my God, I forgot all about that. | ||
| Every morning, taking like 25 of these pills and chewing them up and just the fucking paste in my mouth for just this horrible, on top of everything else that's going on, you have this experience every morning, this trauma-inducing paste-in-your-mouth experience. | ||
| I called it happy paste, but it was just so fucking gross on top of everything else. | ||
| And you must have had to have cases of that stuff if you're eating so much every morning. | ||
| Yeah, it was weird. | ||
| So how'd you bring it in? | ||
| Like a suitcase everywhere? | ||
| Honestly, I don't remember. | ||
| Because if you're taking 25 pills every morning, is that what you're taking? | ||
| Yeah, they're real little, so you can get a bunch of them. | ||
| But yeah, it took like four pill bottles each dosage, you know, to get you through. | ||
| I mean, eventually they took me off, and it wasn't the right medication, and it was impossible trying to fucking chew up all this shit. | ||
| But the chewer... | ||
| Why would the chewable ones work and the other ones didn't work? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's, you know, sometimes... | ||
| The way, you know, there can be slight differences between generic versions and regular versions of drugs, where, like, just the formulation's a little different. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But the chewable form of it worked, and the other one didn't. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That was a long time ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What did it do for you? | |
| What did the chewable stuff do for you? | ||
| Shit, I don't remember what it was for. | ||
| I guess it's for anxiety or depression. | ||
| When something alleviates anxiety, what is the feeling? | ||
| How does it alleviate it? | ||
| What does it do for you? | ||
| Well, sometimes for me, especially when it first came on when I was like 20, the dissociation was like being on acid. | ||
| You know when you get high, you're on acid, and everything looks a little different? | ||
| Just a little weird feeling? | ||
| That's what it was like. | ||
| I spent like Between 20 and 22 on a year and a half, two year acid trip at one point. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| When I was young, which was really shattering. | ||
| Way before my career. | ||
| But for me, I didn't talk about this in my career until 2007. We were making Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. | ||
| Because even though I was kind of a mess, Saturday nights was the bottom of the bottom for me. | ||
| And I really felt like I was falling apart. | ||
| But... | ||
| The Sunday mornings was kind of about getting my life together after that. | ||
| It wasn't fixed, but I felt like I was not sliding down the drain anymore. | ||
| And that felt like a time where it was safe to talk about mental illness. | ||
| It's not my mission in life. | ||
| I'm not a role model for anybody, but I just had avoided talking about it. | ||
| Because I didn't want to be a public spectacle. | ||
| Well, a lot of shit was going on in my life. | ||
| And that's what I was writing about. | ||
| I just didn't say it, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
But... | |
| I don't know. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| Mental illness is a weird thing. | ||
| It's not like... | ||
| You know, diseases, most of the things that happen in your life, you're going to get cured of it. | ||
| You know, it's a problem, it has a cure, and then it sucks, and then you go back to normal, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Or, you know, I guess, or you die. | ||
| But most of the time, we expect to go back to normal. | ||
| But it's closer to a handicap. | ||
| Mental illness doesn't go away. | ||
| It's just like you learn, well, you get the right medication. | ||
| But then you get a handle on how to live with being a little different. | ||
| It's just something you carry around with you, and you've got to learn how to carry that weight. | ||
| That's your life, and it's different. | ||
| It's a good crucible for things in some ways. | ||
| I mean, you do get some determination, which is, as it turns out, a pretty necessary part of this kind of job. | ||
| I went through two years of feeling like I was on acid. | ||
| Other things aren't as scary to me anymore. | ||
| Quite honestly, stage fright's just not an issue. | ||
| So it's just like that. | ||
| But it doesn't seem like stage fright was the issue anyway. | ||
| No, it wasn't. | ||
| The general public stuff was the issue? | ||
| More? | ||
| More. | ||
| The fame, the pressure, the criticism, the craziness? | ||
| But maybe that's why Stage Fright wasn't an issue by the time it came around, because I had been through other stuff. | ||
| Like, I mean, in my first band, as an adult, you know, so I was like 25, 26 maybe, for the first three gigs, I woke up each morning, I remember this, like, our first one was at a street fair in Berkeley, the Solano Stroll, second one was at a club called The Omni, and the third one was at a club called The Hill. | ||
| Our first three gigs as a band. | ||
| I woke up each day of those gigs with complete and utter laryngitis. | ||
| I didn't feel anxious, I didn't feel like anything was wrong, but I couldn't make a sound. | ||
| Like, each day, I was like... | ||
| Just like some kind of fucking hysterical laryngitis. | ||
| Like I just lost my voice completely. | ||
| Out of nowhere. | ||
| Out of nowhere. | ||
| And I didn't feel nervous. | ||
| I was excited about playing gigs. | ||
| But on some part, you're like flipping out. | ||
| I played all three of those gigs. | ||
| Someone suggested that ginger is really good when you lose your voice because that just burns the shit out of your vocal cords and clears anything off them. | ||
| So I got those big ginger roots, you know, and I'd take it on stage with a knife. | ||
| And I would shave the fucking skin off the ginger root. | ||
| Cut off a little piece, like a stick of gum sized piece, put it in your mouth and chew, swallow the ginger juice that comes out of it, which burns your vocal cords clean of anything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| It works? | ||
| It will allow you to talk and sing. | ||
| It works for about a minute or two, and then you've got to swallow some more or you don't want to swallow that root, so you've got to throw that and shave a new piece. | ||
| Did you tell the audience what was going on? | ||
| Yeah, because it was too obvious. | ||
| I'm standing on stage with a fucking huge root on a stool next to me and a knife. | ||
| With a knife. | ||
| A big knife. | ||
| A big sharp knife or a paring knife of some kind. | ||
| And I'm shaving and chewing pieces of gum. | ||
| It went away after the third gig. | ||
| But the first three, complete laryngitis. | ||
| Do you think it was psychosomatic? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Wow, isn't that crazy that your brain can trick your vocal cords into seizing up? | ||
| Because your brain is like somewhere there's an understanding that if this motherfucker can't sing, we don't have to go through this shit. | ||
| This is what we're going to do. | ||
| We're just going to send some crazy vibes down to those vocal cords and paralyze the fuck out of them. | ||
| Little do they know, but it's not that we're not gonna have to do this. | ||
| It's that we're now gonna send him on stage with a knife and some ginger root. | ||
| He's gonna be singing all the songs and I'm already like an idiot. | ||
| I'm so nervous about not playing piano and singing. | ||
| I'm standing up in front of everybody because I came to rehearsal one day. | ||
| I was the piano player and singer in my band, you know, and I came to rehearsal one day and there's this other guy there and he's playing piano and he's really, really good. | ||
| And they're like, hey, this is Dan. | ||
| He's our Dan Eisenberg. | ||
| I'm like, oh, nice to meet you. | ||
| He's our piano player. | ||
| I'm like, I'm our piano player. | ||
| They're like, you're our singer. | ||
| That was it. | ||
| I was like booted out of... | ||
| Granted, he was way better than me, but then I had to learn to stand up, so my way of getting around that was I got a trench coat. | ||
| I thought Prince was cool. | ||
| He had a trench coat. | ||
| I could get a trench coat, and I'll stand on stage in a trench coat, and I'll be cool in my trench coat. | ||
| It would have worked better if I wasn't, as it turned out, also shaving ginger with a knife and chewing ginger. | ||
| You know, like cooking. | ||
| It's like a cooking show. | ||
| With a trench coat on. | ||
| It's asinine. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| This is the stuff we go through. | ||
| I'm going to play. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| My voice is gone. | ||
| I can't talk. | ||
| I'm going to find a way. | ||
| Chewing ginger. | ||
| Okay, that's going to do it. | ||
| It's not pleasant, but I will do it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Did you eventually figure out what's the best way to handle the anxiety and the weirdness? | ||
| What was the best way for you? | ||
| That year where I spent, or year or two, where I spent on the acid, you learned some tools during that. | ||
| One of them is just learning to breathe. | ||
| Breathing exercises? | ||
| Kind of. | ||
| Well, I mean, terror is a self-perpetuating thing because your heart rate speeds up. | ||
| That makes you more agitated and more scared. | ||
| If you slow your breathing down, your heart rate cannot increase. | ||
| If you keep yourself and you force yourself to breathe in... | ||
| And breathe out. | ||
| And breathe in. | ||
| Your heart rate is going to slow down. | ||
| And that will take some of the edge off that. | ||
| You know, it does. | ||
| You know, I had to learn to do that that year. | ||
| Because for a while after that, I would wake up in the morning and think it was happening again. | ||
| And I'd start to panic. | ||
| And that's going to cause it to happen. | ||
| But you just got to, like, you know, white knuckle it. | ||
| I still wake up a lot at, like, 6 a.m. | ||
| Like, right as the dawn is coming up, I wake up and... | ||
| Have a moment of like, oh god, not this shit. | ||
| But now it's like reflexive to just stop it. | ||
| But back then I had to make myself breathe. | ||
| So by the time I got to the stage fright thing, I wasn't really feeling stage fright. | ||
| But also I think I felt like I was in the right place. | ||
| I could express anything I wanted up there. | ||
| There's nothing wrong. | ||
| Any new melody, anything I wanted to sing, any feeling I wanted to put into it, it was all art. | ||
| It was all creativity, and there's nothing wrong about any of it. | ||
| I mean, you don't want to sing off-key all day long, but basically, you could just express yourself, and that was all By doing it, that's what you're there for. | ||
| You're there to express yourself anyway, so anything you do is just a part of that. | ||
| I felt pretty confident in that. | ||
| Whatever I did was the right thing to do, because that's what we were doing anyways. | ||
| By doing it, I make it the right thing to do. | ||
| So is it safe to say that the anxiety and the mental issues and all that stuff, it almost became tolerable because the art was so satisfying? | ||
| I think it made it a lot better, especially finding songs. | ||
| Finding the whole idea of songwriting, for one thing, gave me a place to put all that stuff. | ||
| That didn't fix the rest of the day, but I'd never had any place to put it before I wrote a song. | ||
| And now it's like, whoa, on top of... | ||
| People would ask me, is it cathartic to play music? | ||
| And I don't think it is. | ||
| It's not that—it doesn't process it and get it all out of you. | ||
| But if you have to choose between a day where you just feel shitty and a day where you feel shitty but you write a song, take the song. | ||
| You accomplish something that day, and that's what we're supposed to be— You know, life is supposed to be about accomplishing things, making things, doing things, so take the day where you do something, and then, you know what, try and do it again tomorrow, because it is better. | ||
| It doesn't fix it. | ||
| It's not replacing the difficulty, but at least what you know is that I can have difficulty, and I'm not a waste of space on Earth. | ||
| I'm not falling apart. | ||
| I'm not nothing. | ||
| I actually made a song, so in my difficulty of whatever yesterday was, Well, I made something beautiful. | ||
| And that's a powerful thing. | ||
| It means that while you were going through all that shit, you didn't just put your head in your hands and lay there. | ||
| You went ahead and made something, and you can take that with you for the rest of your days. | ||
| That song goes along with you, the sense of accomplishment, all the feelings of like... | ||
| Because I think that's the hardest thing about mental illness, is you know it's not what everybody's going through, you know it's harder than it needs to be, and there are people who are going through stuff, I mean, as I know now, they have their own difficulties, but it just seemed like it was harder, and there are times where you just want to go, I don't want to carry this today, you know, I'll just go sit here. | ||
| A big part of it is not to just sit there. | ||
| It's to do something. | ||
| Is that also exacerbated by a heavy tour schedule? | ||
| I would imagine there's days that you just need to slow down and take breaks. | ||
| And when you're out there, bang, bang, bang, show after show after show, I would imagine there's very little of that time where you get to sit by yourself in a movie theater and just chill. | ||
| Well, you know, like in anything in the arts, there's a lot of sitting around. | ||
| You know, there's always going to be time, you know... | ||
| When you're not on stage. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of it. | ||
| But you know it's coming that night. | ||
| Yeah, but I don't... | ||
| There's something to that, right, where if you have a bunch of shows in a row, like even if you have the whole day off, that show is looming. | ||
| Yeah, but I didn't dread it. | ||
| It was the good part of the day. | ||
| You know, it was the best part of the day. | ||
| It was the one part of the day where I knew I was where I was supposed to be. | ||
| I wasn't struggling with what to do. | ||
| I had a... | ||
| I even have a set list, you know, so I know a path through the next two hours. | ||
| That wasn't the problem, except, you know, I wasn't—my voice is kind of weird. | ||
| It can do a lot of great shit, but it's not particularly durable, and I sing really hard. | ||
| So it was not the best at recovering, and early on a big part of it was learning— There are limitations to how many days in a row I can do without paying for it. | ||
| Even if you just do one three in a row for me, I'll be paying for it and recovering from it for the rest of the tour. | ||
| Two on, one off. | ||
| Two on, one off works. | ||
| We mostly do that. | ||
| Every once in a while we'll put an extra day off in there. | ||
| But we had to learn. | ||
| It took years to learn it that you couldn't You couldn't be too flexible about that. | ||
| It might seem like you could only play this one thing. | ||
| If you play three in a row, just do it that one time. | ||
| But I'd be recovering the rest of the tour from that. | ||
| So we had to learn that. | ||
| Because losing my voice, dealing with a lot of... | ||
| I'm getting nodes in my vocal cords because the only thing that really fixes nodes is one silence and two steroids. | ||
| You know, like, not anabolic, but systemic. | ||
| Cortisone. | ||
| Cortisone, prednisone, you know, stuff like that. | ||
| That's heavy shit, too, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is. | |
| It's not great. | ||
| That's why when I scraped my knee up that one time on tour, it eventually got really infected. | ||
| And also why it stayed infected, because they'd give me all the antibiotics for it, and the antibiotics kick the shit out of the infection, but you also have that prednisone in there, which keeps bringing it back and keeping it alive so it would come back over. | ||
| Prednisone kept the infection alive? | ||
| Well, you know, steroids just kind of basically make things grow faster. | ||
| That's why you heal faster, you rebuild muscle tissue faster. | ||
| Aren't they just anti-inflammatories, those kind of steroids? | ||
| No, but that's not what anti-inflammatories do. | ||
| They help your body heal quicker by reproducing itself quicker. | ||
| Cell growth, I think, gets instigated. | ||
| I think they're reducing inflammation. | ||
| That's why things like ibuprofen are called non-steroidal anti-inflammatories. | ||
| Right, but the way that steroids work and why they work so much better, I think, than Advil is because they create cell growth that goes faster, which is why if you have a virus... | ||
| Steroid side effects may increase the risk of staph infections. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| New research suggests that long-term use of powerful immune systems suppressing steroids such as prednisone, hydrocortisone, and dexamethasone may increase risk of life-threatening staph blood infections by a factor of six. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Yeah, so like when I got the infection, the antibiotics were kicking its ass, but the steroids were kind of also, it's like the opposite. | ||
| Ramping it up. | ||
| It's like pouring gasoline on it, you know, and so like it was never quite going away and it, you know, would keep coming back. | ||
| That stuff's also, that shit will make you a little crazy too. | ||
| You know, prednisone can make you a little like antsy and crazy, which is since I was already a little antsy and crazy. | ||
| Oh no. | ||
| I mean, it's a great drug for fixing your vocal cords. | ||
| Do they have to give you IV antibiotics for your knee? | ||
| Little bits, like, not IV, but they give you a shot of it, and then they give you the antibiotics to take home with you, because my knee turned into a fucking balloon. | ||
| I've had staph before. | ||
| Yeah, it's bad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's rough. | |
| It's amazing how much those antibiotics wreck you, though. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, you're so tired. | ||
| Well, they're turning everything off. | ||
| They're killing all the cell growth to stop the one thing from growing more. | ||
| And, you know, that shit. | ||
| That's why it's the same thing, like... | ||
| It fucks with your immune system because it shuts all that stuff down. | ||
| That's why some people are at more of a risk for the COVID thing, too, because if you're on that kind of autoimmune suppressors... | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, a buddy of mine hurt his wrist, and they put him on... | ||
| The way he was describing it, he said it was essentially like a low-level chemotherapy. | ||
| He's like, just whatever this shit was they were doing for his wrist, because he just had constant wrist pain. | ||
| exacerbated the COVID symptoms. | ||
| He got COVID while he was on this stuff that was wrecking his immune system to try to deal with this autoimmune issue that he has in his wrists. | ||
| And then the COVID just fucking swamped him because his body was like in severe compromise state already. | ||
| That's the one thing they say. | ||
| The biggest people who are still at risk for getting COVID after being vaccinated are people who had autoimmune disorders or are on medications for things like that. | ||
| And obese people still. | ||
| It's still a factor. | ||
| Well, I imagine so because your body's having a harder time taking care of itself. | ||
| And it's inflammation again. | ||
| That's a big factor of obesity is you're dealing with inflammation everywhere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you hear about people that are taking different medications to deal with anxiety or depression, the frustrating thing for many of my friends that have been on these kind of medications is trying to find the right one and trying to get it dialed in. | ||
| And then dealing with all the stuff that's happening while you're trying to dial it in. | ||
| A lot of side effects for that medication. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, a lot of them were medications that weren't, you know, we don't really know. | ||
| That's the other thing that's kind of, it can really kill your Your hope when you're dealing with mental illness is that we don't understand how it works the way we understand how other parts of the body work. | ||
| We don't understand the brain and a lot of these medications they realize they work for mental things because they were medications for something else and then it just happened to have this effect so it's good but it has a bunch of side effects. | ||
| It was originally designed for something else. | ||
| We don't know exactly how to tune it in. | ||
| I mean just the fact that like People who are ADD and really hyper, you give them speed, basically, and it makes them calm down. | ||
| I know. | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| I mean, it's wild that it works that way. | ||
| I mean, because I had that problem, and when they gave me that, I was like, this is the worst thing. | ||
| I don't want to be more up. | ||
| And then they gave it to me, and I was like, oh, I get it. | ||
| I can think clearly. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| It's wild that it works. | ||
| But it does. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| You know, those drugs, because your brain, we just don't understand the brain that well lately. | ||
| Did you ever try meditating or like breathing exercises or exercise? | ||
| Did you ever try any of those things to deal with? | ||
| Yeah, I think exercise is really good. | ||
| The breathing also obviously really helped. | ||
| Meditation, I had a lot of problems with because I felt like It almost felt like I was relaxing all the barriers and structures I had in there to keep this shit under control. | ||
| Everything that I had to hold it together, when I would relax into the meditation, it felt like it was like... | ||
| I don't know if it's actually what it does or just a way I was conceiving of it. | ||
| In my mind, I was picturing like I was letting stuff loose. | ||
| It's so crazy how many really creative people struggle with mental illness. | ||
| It's almost more than don't. | ||
| I imagine it has something to do with you spend a lot of years keeping things to yourself, not communicating with other people as well as other people do. | ||
| You got a lot of stuff pent up. | ||
| When you find a way to express it, You dive into that. | ||
| Creativity and art is one way. | ||
| Also, a lot of us don't deal with authority very well. | ||
| Now you find a lifestyle that provides independence. | ||
| I haven't had a boss for a really long time. | ||
| Isn't that nice? | ||
| It's really nice. | ||
| I've been running an independent shop for 30 years now. | ||
| Who'd have thought I'd be able to grow up and, you know, run my own company basically, which is fucking cool. | ||
| It's the best for everybody. | ||
| If you could figure out a way to do that, just be your own boss, my God, your life would be so much different. | ||
| The pressure and the weight of, like, a shitty boss who's, you know, like... | ||
| Dominant over their employees and cracks the whip and yells at everybody in the company meeting. | ||
| All that shit you're dealing with. | ||
| Someone looking over your shoulder while you're doing your work. | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| The pressure of that. | ||
| It's got to be crazy. | ||
| But I mean, look, you're running a big thing here and you've got a lot of people working for you. | ||
| Being a boss means what are all the people that are running around here? | ||
| Those security guys are cool as fuck. | ||
| They just hang out. | ||
| Oh, they're security? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, because part of being a boss is taking care of everybody. | ||
| Dude, this is the most preposterous skeleton crew ever. | ||
| For something that reaches millions of people, it's the most ridiculous setup. | ||
| But that's the way it works so good, because it stays intimate. | ||
| Because like I said, I've been to other podcasts that become big, and they decide that they're now a Hollywood production. | ||
| And I met people, I'm like, what do you do? | ||
| Oh, I'm the executive producer. | ||
| You're the executive producer of what? | ||
| Do we need an executive producer? | ||
| The fuck are you talking about? | ||
| So you've got directors, executive producers, you've got camera directors, you've got people who are sound guys, you've got all these people. | ||
| You have people that are assistants, you have people that are PAs, you have people that are on the set that are They're interns, so they're getting college credits to be on the set, and they're taking notes and talking shit, and then occasionally there's problems, because some PA said something stupid to an intern, and now you have to have HR. You have HR? You have human resources at your podcast? | ||
| Oh my god, what have you done? | ||
| What the fuck have you done? | ||
| You've created an office. | ||
| Now you have a corporation. | ||
| Like, you used to have just a conversation, where it was you and your buddy, and there was some fucking YouTube video, and you had a couple of cameras running. | ||
| And now, because it became successful, you changed what the whole thing is, and now you've got people breathing down your neck, and you've got a bunch of people telling you what to do. | ||
| Like, ugh. | ||
| I've been doing this thing, you know, I got, you know, about a month into the quarantine, I started, I went to my girlfriend and I said, I'm really worried that I'll just wake up a year from now and I won't have done anything. | ||
| You know, I want to do that. | ||
| I'm going to start, I'm going to learn to cook everything. | ||
| You know, so I just started like, I've always liked cooking, but I started really, Researching it and trying to make all kinds of shit for her and for our few friends that we were seeing. | ||
| And then it seemed kind of cool after a while to be doing this, so I started making little videos and just putting them up on our Instagram stories. | ||
| And now I'm sort of filming them myself. | ||
| What kind of stuff do you cook? | ||
| I mean, all kinds of shit. | ||
| I did New Orleans crawfish bread a few weeks ago. | ||
| Crawfish bread? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like this thing you can only get at the Jazz Fest where it's like... | ||
| Kind of make this loaf of bread that's got stuffed cheese and crawfish and spices in it. | ||
| I've always wanted it because it's my favorite thing from Jazz Fest, but I never knew how to make it, and it's still a work in progress. | ||
| Red sauce, meat sauce, my Italian shit has gotten really good. | ||
| What else have I done? | ||
| I've done about 20, 30 of them now. | ||
| I've been putting them up on Instagram TV. And it's catching on with all these people who are like... | ||
| I mean, I have a bunch of friends who are chefs who are really good cooks. | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| But I've been really trying, you know? | ||
| And then I've been trying to show people how to cook stuff that, you know, some of it's as simple as just, look, maybe you don't know how to make grilled cheese. | ||
| Grilled cheese is great. | ||
| I'm going to show you. | ||
| It's really simple. | ||
| And some of it is complicated like a 12-hour meat sauce, you know? | ||
| But... | ||
| You know, as I was doing this, unbeknownst to me, all these people started getting interested. | ||
| And my friend who works on American Idol now, she's a producer for it. | ||
| She lives here, but she flies out there for that. | ||
| She's my piano player's wife. | ||
| And she's like, yeah, man, all these people on the set, they're all obsessed with your cooking videos. | ||
| And three of them come to me and said, like, what about a TV show? | ||
| We should get Adam a cooking show. | ||
| And then, you know, I talked to my manager, Mark, and a bunch of people came to him and said, we want to put together a show for Adam, like a cooking show. | ||
| And my thought was like, look, I really like what I'm doing. | ||
| I like the cooking. | ||
| I like filming it myself and editing myself. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| I had to learn how to do it. | ||
| Look at you. | ||
| That's crawfish bread I'm trying to make. | ||
| And what are you using? | ||
| Are you using a starter? | ||
| Is this like a sourdough bread? | ||
| No, I tried it the first time using my pizza dough recipe, and that was good, but it's the wrong texture. | ||
| This one, I found a recipe for like a... | ||
| Like a cheesy bread that looks like chewier. | ||
| And I thought that would be a better recipe. | ||
| And it's still not the right. | ||
| It's still not right. | ||
| But bread's not my... | ||
| I'm not really a baker. | ||
| I've just been trying to learn about it. | ||
| You should get together with Tom Papa. | ||
| Do you know Tom Papa? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-uh. | |
| Tom Papa the comic? | ||
| No, I don't know. | ||
| Hilarious comedian. | ||
| Amazing baker. | ||
| Really? | ||
| This fucking sourdough bread is off the charts, and he's been obsessed with it for years and years and years. | ||
| He's been working on cultivating the perfect sourdough bread and figuring out how to do it. | ||
| His starter's like 30 years old or some shit. | ||
| I forget how old it is. | ||
| You know, they start with... | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And he brings over fresh... | ||
| We used to, when we lived in L.A., I would give him elk meat, and he would give me fresh bread. | ||
| We would make a trade-off, you know, and his bread is off the charts, man. | ||
| It's so good, and it looks good, too. | ||
| Like, he's got the presentation down. | ||
| Show this motherfucker some Tom Papa bread. | ||
| I figured it would have been the higher up on it. | ||
| Bro, it's so good. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| We would eat it on the podcast. | ||
| Just put some butter on it. | ||
| Oh, sensational. | ||
| Sensational. | ||
| And he just is a master at bread. | ||
| Maybe you could talk to him, and he'll give you some tips on how to make the bread better. | ||
| That's what I need. | ||
| He's got this show called Getting Baked with Tom Papa. | ||
| That's the flour I use. | ||
| I love that flour. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| What kind of flour is it? | ||
| It's King Arthur's all-purpose flour, and they just make it better. | ||
| It's good flour. | ||
| So... | ||
| Is this just him talking? | ||
| It's part one. | ||
| He's got a... | ||
| There's one. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Give me a picture of that bread. | ||
| That's a beautiful piece of bread. | ||
| Goddamn perfection. | ||
| And it tastes as good as it looks. | ||
| When you slice it open... | ||
| He had a show with the Food Network, but they canceled it. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| That's better anyway. | ||
| He really should be doing it. | ||
| There's me eating his bread. | ||
| He really should be doing it 100% on YouTube. | ||
| I mean, that's... | ||
| That's really where it prolongs. | ||
| Just something like that where nobody tells you what to do. | ||
| Just do it. | ||
| Well, that was the thing, because everyone's talking about getting a cooking shot. | ||
| I'm like, I don't think you understand. | ||
| They say, well, you would love it. | ||
| I'm like, why would I love it? | ||
| I love cooking. | ||
| I don't love going on TV shows, and I don't know that I love having a TV show. | ||
| That's a whole different thing from cooking, having a TV show. | ||
| Then you've got some greasy producer that's like, Adam, we're going to do this again, but this time, you know, I'm not feeling you're having a good time. | ||
| I want you to smile. | ||
| I want you to smile, and your best friend is in this room, okay? | ||
| This camera is your best friend. | ||
| And you'd be like, what the fuck have I done? | ||
| What have I done? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, that's the thing. | |
| People think having a TV show sounds like fun because they like the idea of being on TV. Right. | ||
| But I got enough. | ||
| Well, I'm going to have a little more fame. | ||
| If this record does really well, it'd be great. | ||
| It's like a band where it could be magic or it could be fucking hell. | ||
| It could be the lead singer and the guitar player hate each other and they only do the gig and then they talk shit about each other afterwards. | ||
| Or it could be like a brotherhood where they love each other and it's great. | ||
| And that's how TV shows are. | ||
| That's how any cooperative effort when you get a group of people together are. | ||
| It's like you can get lucky. | ||
| And you can get really unlucky, and sometimes some really successful shows are really unlucky collaborations, where the people are good at what they do, but the stress of working with these cocksuckers, they fucking hate the other people. | ||
| And I know people that work on television shows, and they'll have a drink afterwards and go, fuck man, my executive producer is such a twat, I can't handle this dude, all he wants to do is blah blah blah blah blah, and you're like, oh, I thought you were on TV, I thought everything was great. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| It's not great. | ||
| It's a cooperative effort. | ||
| The beautiful thing about doing a cooking show on your own with just a camera and YouTube is it's just you. | ||
| It's purity of vision and expression. | ||
| There's just singularity. | ||
| One guy. | ||
| Your thoughts and what you're trying to do. | ||
| And you could figure it out. | ||
| And you could say, you know, I used to do it like this and I don't like doing it like that anymore. | ||
| I've realized I like myself more when I prepare this way or when I do that or when I approach it that way. | ||
| You'll find it. | ||
| You'll find it. | ||
| It's nice, too. | ||
| But if you've got some fucking network... | ||
| You know, we've gone over the metrics, Adam, and it seems like whenever you do this, people tune out. | ||
| It's like every show. | ||
| It's 13 minutes in. | ||
| They're tuning out. | ||
| So what do we got to do to keep those people tuning in for another 13? | ||
| Because Daddy wants to buy a new house. | ||
| What can we do, Adam? | ||
| I'm looking at a Lamborghini. | ||
| I like to get a Lamborghini. | ||
| And I can't get a Lamborghini if this is not successful. | ||
| So what do we do, Adam? | ||
| I have a Maserati. | ||
| I want to pay my lease. | ||
| How do I make this show better so I make more money and put my kids through college? | ||
| I want to bribe USC so I can get my children into that school. | ||
| I need more money to pay off people. | ||
| You're dealing with so many different people and so many different issues, and to do something creative, it's so hard to do it with a lot of other people's input. | ||
| Yeah, and that's the nice thing about our creative thing. | ||
| It's me and six of my best friends and a producer, and it's all there. | ||
| It's not like, I mean, I've worked on movie stuff. | ||
| It's like a lot of levels of people and a lot more money, and it's a huge hassle, the executive levels. | ||
| Like you're saying, that is the biggest problem. | ||
| It's like all these people who have to justify their job. | ||
| And they're not creative. | ||
| No. | ||
| Generally speaking, that's not what they do. | ||
| What they do is try to maximize profit. | ||
| They try to maximize profit. | ||
| And sometimes it gets in the way of creativity because they're like, the way you're doing it, I just don't think this is the best way for our image and our brand. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| What? | ||
| What are you saying? | ||
| What is this? | ||
| And I'm sure you had to deal with that with music, right? | ||
| Yeah, we didn't have to listen to it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Did you have that kind of record company pressure? | ||
| A little bit, but we had a huge bidding war at the beginning. | ||
| Pretty much every record company in the world offered us a contract. | ||
| From the beginning? | ||
| At the beginning. | ||
| Before we were signed. | ||
| How did you get signed? | ||
| Well, we had a lot of demos, and we had been making them for a while, and they were really... | ||
| Our Gronenbach guitar player was a really good engineer, and he had a little studio, and so when we made demos, we had like... | ||
| You know, you're supposed to get a two-song demo or a three-song demo. | ||
| We had a 15-song demo. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Which is, I mean, on the one hand, we're just huge rubes, and people that got it at first were laughing at us until they listened. | ||
| Because, you know, it's the whole first album. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We had a lot of songs, you know, and... | ||
| So when it got out, when we finally got a manager and a lawyer and that got out and the rec companies got these demos, it was like they came to see us. | ||
| There were two weekends in like 91 or 92, January of 92 maybe, where we played these shows on two consecutive weekends. | ||
| And between the two weekends, every rec company in the world came to see us play. | ||
| The only people that didn't offer us deals were like people in the same company. | ||
| So like, you know, Columbia and Epic were both part of Sony. | ||
| So only Columbia offers a deal. | ||
| But other than that, We got a shitload of offers and there were millions of dollars on the table. | ||
| And we signed with Geffen and we took home, I think, $3,000 each. | ||
| Because they gave us complete creative control in the contract and a higher royalty. | ||
| Which doesn't matter unless it pays off, but it did. | ||
| And that was back in the day when people actually bought albums. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is why, you know, we did really well and we had higher royalty back then. | ||
| And we didn't owe any money because we only took home, like, you know, I took home $3,000. | ||
| I bought a 1970 Karmann Ghia and drove it. | ||
| Did you really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I bought a convertible red 1970 Karmann Ghia and drove it down to LA to make the record. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I still have it. | ||
| It's a car I have. | ||
| I'll never get rid of it. | ||
| It's your only car? | ||
| You drive that? | ||
| Well, not much. | ||
| I did when I lived in L.A., but I live in New York now, so I don't need a car. | ||
| And so when you drive around New York, you drive this Carmen Kia? | ||
| No, I don't drive around New York. | ||
| You walk and take the subway. | ||
| Two of my friends and I bought a winery a few years ago, and so we were partners in Elise Winery. | ||
| The guy who runs my whole winery, he's a... | ||
| He's got it in his garage in Napa. | ||
| So when I go up there, I haven't driven it up. | ||
| I haven't been up there since... | ||
| He took it from me right before the pandemic started. | ||
| So I haven't been back there to drive my car around. | ||
| But it's in his garage. | ||
| Pretty much. | ||
| I mean, there's definitely been some things repaired over the years. | ||
| But it's pretty much the original shit. | ||
| Repaired but not upgraded. | ||
| It's basically as it is. | ||
| There's a better stereo in there now. | ||
| And I don't think the wheel's not original. | ||
| The steering wheel's not original. | ||
| Definitely some of the mirrors. | ||
| I mean, it's not... | ||
| It looks cherry. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| And it is cherry red. | ||
| Actually, I'll find it somewhere. | ||
| It's a great little car. | ||
| When I was a kid, I always loved those Karmann gears. | ||
| They look like the bathtub Porsches, which is what they're based on. | ||
| I love the Roadster. | ||
| The whole idea. | ||
| The sports car didn't really do it for me as much as the roads. | ||
| I love the idea of driving around a little convertible. | ||
| And I always wanted one of those. | ||
| And when I got my record deal, I took my $3000 and spent $2000 on a Karmann Ghia. | ||
| Barely ran back then. | ||
| Drove it down to LA. Made the record. | ||
| It was my car for a while. | ||
| I did at one point buy a Boxster when they came out with Boxsters. | ||
| I'd never owned a new car in my life, and so I wanted one that was like that. | ||
| And that was great, too. | ||
| That was a great little car. | ||
| Boxer's a beautiful little car. | ||
| Yeah, it was great. | ||
| It's a brilliant car, too, like mid-engine. | ||
| Yeah, and it doesn't go 3,000 miles an hour. | ||
| It's not a real sports car, but it was like an upgraded version of my Ghia. | ||
| Yeah, it could. | ||
| The problem with Porsche, they have a real situation where their 911 is essentially a poor design in comparison to the Boxster. | ||
| The Boxster and the Cayman are a better design in terms of weight distribution because it's a mid-engine car where the engine is right behind the driver and then the axle is behind the engine. | ||
| So the balance of weight is beautiful. | ||
| It was a great car. | ||
| Yeah, but Porsche hamstrings them. | ||
| They keep them lower horsepower. | ||
| They don't have the same suspension setup. | ||
| Particularly horsepower, they don't let it eclipse the 911. No. | ||
| I mean, it's nowhere near as fast as I had friends who had the other kinds of Porsches. | ||
| Not that I was trying, but it was clear the difference in their cars. | ||
| But not anymore. | ||
| Now they have a Cayman GT4, and then they also do, there's companies that, like aftermarket companies, they take it and they build it up. | ||
| I'll show you my car. | ||
| I want to say it. | ||
| I love those. | ||
| Those Carmen Ghias were like a funky 1970s sort of lost car. | ||
| Oh, that's gorgeous, man. | ||
| Wow, that's so pretty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's like two, three pictures of it right around it right there. | |
| That's really pretty, man. | ||
| Yeah, I love that thing. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's a really good color, too, for that car with the chrome and everything. | ||
| Can I send this to Jamie? | ||
| Yeah, go ahead. | ||
| I'll airdrop it to you, Jamie. | ||
| Until you can see it. | ||
| Alright, here you go buddy. | ||
| You got it? | ||
| Yeah, that was my first record advance, so I'm never going to sell it. | ||
| No, that's dope. | ||
| It's historical. | ||
| Yeah, it's special for me that way. | ||
| And it's also, like, it was the car I dreamed about having as a kid. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| You dreamed about Carmageas? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| I just really loved that, and I loved that Corvair Monza, the unsafe at any speed car. | ||
| That's a pretty car, man. | ||
| Yeah, they're just kind of beautiful cars. | ||
| It represents the time in which it was created, too. | ||
| It's like you look at it and you instantaneously know, like, oh, that's like late 60s, early 70s. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's got a little bit of a vibe. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| It's got a lot of a vibe. | ||
| I love those a lot, man. | ||
| You were there. | ||
| You were in the middle of your rock star life when Napster hit. | ||
| What was that like? | ||
| Well, I mean... | ||
| I guess in a way, when I look at it overall, I shouldn't be surprised because if there's one thing that we've never really valued as a culture, I mean, humanity has never really valued the arts. | ||
| It's like, I mean, we do. | ||
| We understand that a painting is going to be worth $7 million or something. | ||
| But in general, it's just like something we want to be entertained with. | ||
| We'll spend money on new tires or a VCR, but if we can get away with it, we don't want to spend money on records. | ||
| That's the kind of thing where if we could get away with taking it, we would. | ||
| Partially, this is the fault of the record companies at the time. | ||
| If you're going to tell me that a record is worth a certain amount of money, and then you're going to tell me that a CD is worth the same amount of money, and I'm going to take both of those home with me, and now you're going to tell me that a group of ones and zeros that equals that CD Is worth the same amount of money as the CD, I'm gonna call it a little bullshit. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| When they went to putting out digital music, and iTunes came around and let them sell it on the store there, you know, it should have been $5 for a record, not $15. | ||
| But they didn't want to cripple the physical record sales. | ||
| Is that what the idea behind it was? | ||
| I think part of it was, but it was short-sighted. | ||
| And they also were like, well, if people aren't gonna buy these anymore, we don't want to sell things for $5. | ||
| They just panicked. | ||
| They gotta get the money where they could get it. | ||
| But, you know, people weren't stealing records before that. | ||
| It's entirely possible that if you'd said, okay, now we're doing digital and it's a $5. | ||
| It's $5 for a record because there isn't anything. | ||
| You get the music and you get all the art, but it's not costing us anything. | ||
| We don't have to get trucks. | ||
| We don't have to build physical, which is true. | ||
| The hardest thing about being an independent record company, because I had a couple independent record companies, was... | ||
| Pressing up the CDs and then getting trucks to take them to mom-and-pop CD stores where you'd get three in there and if you were lucky enough to have the guys who own the store love you they'd play it in the store and then someone would buy them but then they're gone because they only had three and you got to get more out there because now they don't have it at all that was distribution was the hardest thing and that's gone with all sudden you just got to load it up it's easy They should have made it a $5 thing and been like, okay, now you're getting something that has no body to it. | ||
| We're not going to make you pay $15 for that. | ||
| And they should have done that and they didn't because they panicked. | ||
| And so after a while, people felt a little insulted by being told that now they should buy the same thing that they used to take home with them. | ||
| They should buy it for the same amount of money now that it doesn't exist at all. | ||
| And so when Napster came around and everyone could suddenly just steal it, I think they were like, well, fuck these guys. | ||
| And I don't think they were saying fuck you to the artists, really. | ||
| I think they were mostly saying fuck you to the record companies. | ||
| But when the artists protested, they said fuck you to the artists, too. | ||
| That's the part that really bothered me about Napster. | ||
| Not that they were taking the stuff, but that when someone like Lars Ulrich from Metallica came out and stood up and said what everybody already knew was true. | ||
| You're just stealing from art. | ||
| You're just stealing from us. | ||
| And people were like, fuck you. | ||
| Yeah, but see, the thing is, the comparison between that and a VCR and tires is not valid, because you can't just duplicate a VCR and tires instantaneously on a computer. | ||
| But you could duplicate these recordings. | ||
| Once they were in digital form, you could just duplicate it over and over again and send them to people. | ||
| There's no issue whatsoever doing that. | ||
| People always felt like it's not costing you any money because someone had to buy it originally. | ||
| It's costing you if I won't buy it and then I download it instead, but maybe I was never going to buy it in the first place. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I'm just downloading it. | ||
| But what you know for sure is that- But you know what I'm saying? | ||
| There's this weird justification that people have where it's not a physical thing that they're stealing. | ||
| It's not like there's a warehouse they go to and you have boxes of CDs and they go, oh, you got so many CDs, I'll just take these CDs. | ||
| They're like, no, but there was one that got sold. | ||
| But that's just because it's easier that way. | ||
| Well, it's a new thing. | ||
| But it's a completely gray area. | ||
| Once you've made a... | ||
| Once you buy a book, you could copy the book and press it up yourself and sell it. | ||
| But you're buying something. | ||
| That's the thing about art is it can be kind of ephemeral. | ||
| You're buying something that sort of exists as an idea. | ||
| But the difference is you could print up a book yourself and sell it, but the author deserves probably to get the money more than you do because it was his thoughts that went into it. | ||
| The thing about the music... | ||
| And the books, because it's happened to books too, is that it just, it was easy to duplicate. | ||
| But you are stealing because we know that within a year, record sales had dropped, well not a year, probably within about three years record sales had dropped by 50%. | ||
| Now they don't exist. | ||
| You know, like, but that's because now we have Spotify. | ||
| But for a while it dropped so much, the industry had been making all this money, and then it was gone. | ||
| Right, but let's look at it that way. | ||
| It dropped and then it doesn't exist, right? | ||
| Now it doesn't exist at all. | ||
| So wasn't it just a harbinger of things to come? | ||
| I mean, it wasn't necessarily stealing as much as it was an introduction to a completely new way of distributing music and the fact that it was digital. | ||
| They had to find new ways in order to profit because this thing of like buying physical copies It's not valid anymore. | ||
| Like, some people still do it because they love vinyl, and some people do it because they're nostalgic and they like to have CDs. | ||
| But the reality is, most people are just getting digital. | ||
| Right, but we're not really... | ||
| Well, that's part of what happened. | ||
| It's the same thing that caused the problem in the beginning, was the record companies, who were being so greedy, made it very easy to feel like it was okay to take it. | ||
| Because I don't disagree with that, because you were getting ripped off as a consumer. | ||
| If you want to tell me that something is the same amount of money when it doesn't exist as when it does, fuck you. | ||
| But also, what happened eventually was when they came up with Spotify, the record companies went to Spotify and said, pay us a lump sum, and we'll give you all of our music. | ||
| That's not trickling down to us in any way like it used to with record sales. | ||
| It only does if you own the music, right? | ||
| Right, but I mean- Like it's your music. | ||
| Even so, you're still getting kind of screwed. | ||
| Very few people own their own music for one thing. | ||
| Record companies are never giving that up. | ||
| And you can get it now kind of reverting to you in a shorter amount of years, but that was nothing that was available back then. | ||
| When did that change? | ||
| Well, because record companies have lost a lot of their power. | ||
| Because you needed a record company before, for one thing. | ||
| It was too expensive to make a record, and it was too expensive to distribute it. | ||
| So you needed the record company. | ||
| Now you can make a record on your computer at home, and you can distribute it by uploading it onto Bandcamp. | ||
| It doesn't cost you anything, so you don't really need a record company as much. | ||
| You can have one, and they'll do a lot of good things for you sometimes. | ||
| Like, we did this record with a record company. | ||
| But that was your choice. | ||
| Right, we sign one album deals now and we do it when we're done with the record. | ||
| We go to the record company and say, we have something. | ||
| We'll let you work with us. | ||
| You can do some of the distribution. | ||
| You can help us with some promo. | ||
| And there's some valid reasons to do it. | ||
| And we're getting it all back in a few years. | ||
| But you didn't have any leverage back then. | ||
| Do you remember that Courtney Love article that she wrote, I think it was in Spin Magazine, where she sort of laid out all the financial problems with record deals? | ||
| Yeah, there were a lot. | ||
| Did you ever see that? | ||
| I mean, I remember the idea of it, but I don't remember the article at all. | ||
| I think, you know, people were like, there's no fucking way she wrote this. | ||
| It was a ghostwriter because it was really well written. | ||
| Could be. | ||
| Could be. | ||
| But you saw it and you get to the end of it and you're like, Jesus Christ, this is how it works? | ||
| Like, it's really kind of crazy. | ||
| Yeah, it was terrible. | ||
| And then when you hear today, what they're doing is apparently they make these deals with bands when you first sign them. | ||
| Yeah, they have everything. | ||
| They take a piece of your touring, which doesn't make any sense. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| They take a piece of your merchandise, which doesn't make any sense. | ||
| They take a piece of you. | ||
| They take everything. | ||
| Everything you do. | ||
| I remember the first time a record company came to us with one of those offers. | ||
| What did they say? | ||
| Well, they were like, yeah, we're going to do a new deal. | ||
| We're going to give you a bunch of money up front. | ||
| Did you smell sulfur in the air? | ||
| Well, it was just kind of like, let me get this straight. | ||
| You are going to give me a piece of... | ||
| Of the part of our industry that is completely disappearing and worthless now, and in exchange, you'd like me to give you several pieces of the only things that still make money. | ||
| No. | ||
| How did they phrase it? | ||
| This is what I want to know. | ||
| Like, how do they make that sound good? | ||
| Well, they would offer a lot of money up front. | ||
| But it's all recoupable. | ||
| That's the thing about money up front. | ||
| It's all recoupable. | ||
| You don't really get any other money until they get that money back. | ||
| Right, and they want to take that money back out of the small percentage in your deal, not out of the overall. | ||
| That was the other thing about record companies that was so insulting. | ||
| It's going to cost this much to make the record, and you'll start making money again when it's recouped. | ||
| Not recouped out of money, period. | ||
| If it cost $200,000 to make a record or something back then, whatever it was, you weren't recouped when the record made $200,000. | ||
| You were only recouping out of your 15% of that $200,000. | ||
| So however many it takes to six times that or whatever it takes to recoup out of your 15%, then you'd start making more. | ||
| They had so many ways of fucking you that it was just a little insulting. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| But there were a lot of things, when the internet came along and changed all that, a lot of things got crazy in the record companies, because they panicked at the fact that the internet all of a sudden, instead of being this really wild thing that connected everyone in the world for free, basically, which is what it really does, you should be able to make a positive use of something that does that. | ||
| I mean, it really is quite the tool, as we've realized in years since then. | ||
| But all they could see was that it was like this drain that was slowly sucking all their money away. | ||
| So they saw Napster and what Napster was doing and they associated the whole internet with that. | ||
| I remember a year or two after that it all happened, we were doing a record It might have been Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. | ||
| I don't think it was Hard Candy. | ||
| So it was a few years later, and ABC comes along, and they want us to be on Good Morning America. | ||
| They love the record, and they want to feature our singles playing on the front page of ABC.com, which was a big website then, for a week and a half leading up to the release. | ||
| They're going to basically put our videos and everything on the front page of ABC.com playing for anybody... | ||
| What an advertisement! | ||
| That's like way better than, it's great, you know? | ||
| Universal's response was, okay, well how much are you gonna pay us to let us use the video? | ||
| They're like nothing and they said well, then you can't use it So we lost all that promo it happened like just just about like this is a few years ago when we released Some wonder wonderland our last record. | ||
| So it's like 2014 We were playing festivals in Europe. | ||
| We're touring we're playing pink pop in Holland's the biggest festival in Holland It's one of the oldest festivals in Europe and it's the sixth time we've played it we've at that point us and Pearl Jam have played that festival more than any other band at that point so They come to us before the show, like early that afternoon, and they told us that the national radio station, whatever, like the BBC in Holland, and the national TV station would like to broadcast our entire set live. | ||
| So, national TV, you're set on radio and television when you play. | ||
| Okay, that's pretty cool too, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Amazing. | |
| Yeah, we just need you to sign this thing, get the rec company to approve it and sign this thing. | ||
| So, same question. | ||
| What are they going to pay us? | ||
| We're like, you're kidding, right? | ||
| Later on, that guy, one of the lawyers came back and called our tour manager. | ||
| He goes, next time, don't tell me. | ||
| Just do it. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| It's corporate rules. | ||
| It comes down from the top. | ||
| I cannot say yes. | ||
| But it's crazy not to do it. | ||
| But that's the kind of... | ||
| They got so panicked about the internet. | ||
| There's no... | ||
| You want to know why the rec company is a fucking shambles? | ||
| Because they couldn't think any more complicated than Napster bad. | ||
| Internet bad. | ||
| So we should just like... | ||
| We're losing money. | ||
| We should get everyone to pay us something. | ||
| Every time. | ||
| Otherwise we're going to die. | ||
| But now they make like similar slimy deals... | ||
| With artists that they were doing before, but now they've figured out a way to weasel through streaming, right? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| But what I don't understand is what are they offering? | ||
| I mean, I guess... | ||
| Promotion? | ||
| Money to make it, because maybe you don't have any money. | ||
| Maybe you need to be in a studio because you've got a band and you can't do it in your home, on your computer. | ||
| God, but that seems like studios... | ||
| Promotion is a big thing. | ||
| Getting you on the radio, it's still something to get on the radio. | ||
| It does have some meaning to get you playlisted. | ||
| The radio? | ||
| Yeah, it still has some... | ||
| The fucking radio is still a real thing? | ||
| Nah, it's still something. | ||
| How much is it? | ||
| How many people are listening to the radio? | ||
| Well, don't forget this about streaming, is that a lot of people on their way to work and stuff, it doesn't have to be terrestrial radio, it could be satellite radio. | ||
| But think about this. | ||
| Here's the problem with, look, you want Spotify, you can get anything you want. | ||
| You can hear anything you want to hear, right? | ||
| The only bad thing about getting anything you want is there's no way to know you want something you haven't heard yet. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| It's the problem with it. | ||
| You have to be introduced to new stuff. | ||
| And so, like, I can go on Spotify today and listen to any record I want, and I do, but I can't use it. | ||
| It's not gonna necessarily show me new music. | ||
| So I can't get anything new. | ||
| So if I got a new song and I'm a new band, somebody's got to play me somewhere. | ||
| Record company can get you on playlists probably. | ||
| I don't know if it's worth a trade-off. | ||
| And they can get you on the radio, help you promote that. | ||
| That might get people to go to you on Spotify and get you streams because if you're new... | ||
| You can't get people to request you until they know you exist. | ||
| You need to break that ground somehow. | ||
| That's hard to do. | ||
| I can see some value in that. | ||
| I don't know that it balances out against the deals they're offering most people. | ||
| We don't have those same deals because you're not getting my record. | ||
| With all that crap, you're not getting Butter Miracle by offering me, by wanting a piece of my touring and my merch. | ||
| You're never getting it for a million years. | ||
| And you're also not getting it if you want to keep my record in perpetuity, because fuck you. | ||
| I'll put it out myself. | ||
| And you're not getting it, you know, if you want, like, to give me a 20% or 15% royalty anymore. | ||
| Not a chance. | ||
| You can have 20%, maybe. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I'll take 80 now. | ||
| But I don't know that every band can force them to make that deal. | ||
| I just don't understand their position in the food chain. | ||
| If I'm looking at it objectively from the outside, I'm like, are they a promotional organization? | ||
| Kind of. | ||
| It seems like a radio show or a podcast has far more promotional power. | ||
| If there was a podcast that's dedicated to breaking music, Like a podcast on a streaming service like Spotify that has deals to distribute stuff and says, you know, we're just gonna play the coolest shit. | ||
| Like, you decide, hey, it's me, Adam, I got a fucking great show, and I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna break great songs, and like, that would be so much more valuable than any other form of promotion. | ||
| And if you could attach it to an internet entity, Like some sort of Instagram page that they had set up with a lot of followers or people new. | ||
| They'd go there and cool music would be broke there. | ||
| I mean, you'd cut them completely out of this food chain. | ||
| Because I don't understand the position where they could get a 360 degree deal. | ||
| The 360 deal is like so bonkers to me that you would get live touring? | ||
| And someone told me they get 50%. | ||
| Oh, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure it's the art of the deal there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's the Wild West still. | ||
| And it was back then. | ||
| That is so crazy, though. | ||
| 50% of live touring is so—if that's true, someone said that it's— Well, I'm sure they've gotten that from some people. | ||
| That's bonkers. | ||
| Yeah, but I mean, don't forget that at a certain level, live touring, it takes a lot of people. | ||
| To get into the profit in live touring. | ||
| Mostly you're losing money. | ||
| But not only that, but if you have a manager or an agent, right? | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| The manager or the agent, they don't get that much. | ||
| They don't get 50%. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| But they're not giving you money to tour, too. | ||
| How the fuck does a record company get 50%? | ||
| Well, in the early days, they'd pay you money. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I can't believe I'm... | ||
| I'm not trying to defend them. | ||
| I can't stand most record companies. | ||
| I will say this. | ||
| Since we've been independent, Working with record companies is pretty much a pleasure because we get the right situation where we can get them to do what we want them to do without getting ripped off and they do some great work. | ||
| My experiences since becoming independent with record companies have been nothing but positive. | ||
| They've done great jobs for us, but the other in the old days, but don't forget like music for me as a fan, okay, is way better than it's ever been before because it's so easy for bands to make music. | ||
| And so inexpensive that they can all do it. | ||
| And that means there's way more bands making way more great music. | ||
| Bands can stay together for longer so they actually get really, really good. | ||
| As a fan, it's an amazing time. | ||
| But you still have way more music than you ever have before. | ||
| And if I'm one of those individual bands, I've got to find a way to rise up out of the masses and get anyone to notice me. | ||
| Now the question is how do you do that? | ||
| How do you get anyone to notice that you exist? | ||
| You want to go on tour? | ||
| It's expensive to go on tour. | ||
| You're not going to break even necessarily even until you get up to... | ||
| Breaking even just on the money you're spending and the money you're making. | ||
| You can sell merch and make money too. | ||
| But like... | ||
| It could be a couple thousand people before you break even. | ||
| So how do you tour for a while when you can't possibly draw that kind of people? | ||
| Right. | ||
| It costs money. | ||
| That's one of the reasons I think people can turn to record companies. | ||
| They need money to tour. | ||
| If they have a band and they found they can't do it in their home, they need money to go to the studio, there can be reasons. | ||
| And they don't necessarily understand the business, and the record companies do. | ||
| Yeah, and they got better lawyers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you can get, I mean, they're still, I'm sure, ripping you off. | ||
| It also probably makes you feel like you're attached to something big. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, hey, Universal did this, yeah. | ||
| I felt like, when I got that deal, I felt like I was on top of the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All that stuff that had been pent up inside me all those years, that finally got released when I was making, writing songs, still, no one was hearing those songs, and, like, the knowledge that people would, that I'd at least get a shot, I was on Geffen, my label mates. | ||
| Geffen was different from any place else, for sure, but it was a little bit like the Viper Room. | ||
| I knew all those guys, the Posies. | ||
| Maria McKee, Nirvana, Sonic Youth. | ||
| I met them all right in the beginning. | ||
| We got to know everybody and it was cool. | ||
| It was really an incredible feeling. | ||
| The deal itself was probably shitty in some other ways. | ||
| Good in some ways because we argued for it. | ||
| But in order to get those royalties, we gave up a lot of money. | ||
| More than most people thought was smart. | ||
| We had a lot of money on the table, and if we'd never been successful, maybe we would have regretted never keeping any of that. | ||
| Who argued for you to do that? | ||
| Was that your idea? | ||
| Me? | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| I mean, I don't think our lawyer was against it either, or our managers. | ||
| I think we all were pretty excited about the band. | ||
| They had a lot of faith in us. | ||
| There was a reason everybody wanted to sign us. | ||
| We had... | ||
| Good songs and a lot of them. | ||
| And that's like the gold standard for a band. | ||
| Like, it's one thing to have a sound that's cool, but you don't know if that's gonna mean anything in a couple years. | ||
| But songs, that's reproducible. | ||
| If you've got good songs and not just one, you could probably write good songs next time, too. | ||
| And that seems like some real value, you know? | ||
| So, I had a lot of faith in this. | ||
| And I wanted a career in this. | ||
| I didn't want... | ||
| I wasn't there for, like, a payoff. | ||
| I wanted something to do for the rest of my life. | ||
| How long was it after you signed before things got really weird? | ||
| Like, before you really popped? | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| We got signed sometime in... | ||
| Mid-92, and I think we blew up in... | ||
| The record came out in the fall of 93, and we blew up in the spring of 94. We didn't feel it yet, but we played Saturday Night Live in January of 94. We weren't even in the top 200. I'm not sure why they put us on. | ||
| They liked the band. | ||
| But the record jumped 40 spots a week for five or six weeks. | ||
| After we played around here on Saturday Night Live, the record literally jumped 40-plus spots every week for five weeks and landed us at Lake. | ||
| 13 for a couple weeks, then six for three weeks, and then we were two for two years. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Never one. | ||
| But two for a long... | ||
| We were one on our next record. | ||
| But the first record never got to number one. | ||
| People kept jumping us. | ||
| Bonnie Raitt jumped us. | ||
| The fucking Lion King jumped us. | ||
| The Lion King. | ||
| That was a huge record, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, sure. | |
| And Asa Bass jumped us. | ||
| The last one was The Lion King. | ||
| We had been at two for so long. | ||
| Bonnie Raitt came up, went back down. | ||
| Asa Bass came up, went back down. | ||
| And we were like, we're going to be number ones because we're still selling like 40,000 records a week for like a year. | ||
| It just went on forever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's crazy. | |
| And then we were like, We had a really good week with something, and it seemed like it was going to go up again, and then The Lion King came out, and it was just like, man, we're never going to see number one. | ||
| That must have felt like a real genius move, though, to get royalties, to get less money up front, and then to get royalties like, Goddamn that, Adam. | ||
| When that second or third check came in, the one that was like the big one, I was like, fuck. | ||
| Told you, bitches. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| Especially the publishing check, because that mostly went to me. | ||
| We still split everything evenly in the band for the other stuff. | ||
| Just the general record royalties, we split evenly. | ||
| And even publishing, I mean, I give a third of every song. | ||
| My songs are divided up. | ||
| Music is a third, lyrics is a third, and then whoever plays on it in the band gets a third. | ||
| We split between us. | ||
| But still, that publishing check was... | ||
| That was a big thing. | ||
| What did it feel like to all of a sudden be rich? | ||
| I wasn't sure what to do. | ||
| I remember like I bought I just bought a lot of CDs and I bought a lot of things that went on shelves. | ||
| I bought CDs, I bought DVDs, or not then, it was like VHS and... | ||
| what's the name? | ||
| Laser discs. | ||
| And then I bought a few pieces of art. | ||
| I bought some paintings. | ||
| You know, a guy who's one of my best friends now, Felipe Molina, who did the album cover for Somewhere Under Wonderland, our last record. | ||
| And painted a different painting for every song in there. | ||
| I bought a couple of his pieces. | ||
| I was wandering through, like, Soho. | ||
| We were on tour. | ||
| And I kept looking. | ||
| I went to this gallery. | ||
| I never really wandered through art galleries. | ||
| And I kept seeing these paintings by this guy. | ||
| And I loved them. | ||
| I spent a bunch of time in there one day. | ||
| And then I went off. | ||
| We played a show, like, at the Beacon or something. | ||
| And I went back down there the next day. | ||
| And I looked at these paintings again. | ||
| And, like... | ||
| The third day I went down there, I was like, I went away that night and I thought, well, I could actually buy a painting. | ||
| I mean, it was a couple thousand dollars. | ||
| It wasn't really, really expensive or anything like that, but it's more money than I'd ever spent on anything other than my car. | ||
| You know, and I bought a few of his paintings and I sent them to my place in California. | ||
| I was like, I'd never owned anything like that. | ||
| So it was cool. | ||
| I mean, honestly, I didn't know what to do with it. | ||
| Had an indie record company too over the years. | ||
| Spent a lot of money on making records. | ||
| Lost a lot of money making records. | ||
| Made some great records. | ||
| Why did you decide to start an indie record company? | ||
| I had a lot of friends who I thought were really good and I just didn't think they had good... | ||
| I thought record companies were really bad situations and I thought they pushed them to do things that weren't really great for their band musically and I thought I could make really cool records with these guys. | ||
| They're great. | ||
| Nobody realizes it. | ||
| But what about publicity? | ||
| What about publicizing them and promoting them? | ||
| Well, we tried. | ||
| We made great records and we didn't, like I said, the hardest part was distribution. | ||
| It was really hard to sell the records. | ||
| I think the bands got great reviews. | ||
| Critics loved them. | ||
| We did okay, but we never really... | ||
| It's why I like doing the festival now, because I never feel like I failed. | ||
| And I felt like I failed a lot with the indie record company, because we never made big successes of any of the bands. | ||
| We tried really hard and spent a lot of money on it. | ||
| Did any of them become marginal successes? | ||
| Well, some of them were already. | ||
| I mean, you know, Gigolo Ants are a band from Boston that I really loved. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| They're great, I know. | ||
| Gigolo Ants? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A-U-N-T-S. Oh. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a Sid Barrett song, the guy that was the original lead singer of Pink Floyd. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| So he had a song called Gigolo Ants. | ||
| That's the guy that went crazy, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So it's based on one of his songs, but they're an incredible band. | ||
| They're a fucking fantastic band. | ||
| They were some of my best friends. | ||
| I lived with the lead singer for a long time. | ||
| Have you ever thought about doing that again now, like the way we were talking about? | ||
| If you promoted something like that, you did it through a podcast and you had a social media page, like a Facebook page or an Instagram page or both, that seems like now that's a viable strategy to introduce people to bands and those bands could actually probably take off. | ||
| If they're really great bands, you could actually get eyes on them. | ||
| And ears on them. | ||
| That's what I feel like I do do now, because without the record company part of it, we run an independent festival. | ||
| We spend a year, or six or eight months each time, talking about every band that's going to play the festival, all 30 bands or whatever it is, and we... | ||
| For each band, when we release the announcement, we do a whole page about them. | ||
| We write essays. | ||
| We put the videos up and put the music on there. | ||
| We introduce you to each of them week by week. | ||
| We make the festivals entirely free so anyone can come and you never have to pay. | ||
| We make it as easy as possible to introduce you to all these bands. | ||
| We play them on our podcast. | ||
| We talk about it. | ||
| We film at my house every band. | ||
| The festival might be that weekend, but starting Tuesday of that week, we film acoustic sessions at my house in the living room with every band and put them up on our page on the Underwater Sunshine website. | ||
| Oh, that's awesome. | ||
| They're really cool. | ||
| That's very cool. | ||
| So, I mean, I feel like I'm doing all that stuff. | ||
| So you do these in your house in New York? | ||
| The festival's at a club. | ||
| But the filming? | ||
| Is at my house, yeah. | ||
| We have this area. | ||
| I call it the garden. | ||
| When I first got my place, you know, outdoor space is really expensive in New York. | ||
| It costs so much money to get just a balcony. | ||
| I bought this empty loft, you know, 20 years ago almost. | ||
| And it had a lot of windows, didn't have any outdoor space. | ||
| For a place half that size, it was like a million dollars more to have a little balcony. | ||
| So what I did instead was... | ||
| I put AstroTurf down at one end of the loft and then put a bunch of garden furniture. | ||
| And it feels like you're outdoors. | ||
| And it's really cool. | ||
| So I got a piano in the middle of the AstroTurf. | ||
| So we have the bands come and play. | ||
| We call it the garden. | ||
| It's just like this AstroTurf with beach furniture around it. | ||
| Oh, that's funny. | ||
| And the band's set up there and they play there. | ||
| Let me see what that looks like. | ||
| There might be a picture. | ||
| If you film it... | ||
| Oh, look on UnderwaterSunshine.com. | ||
| There's all kinds of... | ||
| They're called the Garden Sessions. | ||
| And so, I mean, I do all that, and I don't feel like I fail anybody. | ||
| Like, the bands we're taking out on this tour, Frank Turner's coming for the end of the tour, but I'm taking two of the Underwater Sunshine bands out, two of the guys, Matt Susich and Sean Barna, both of whose records I sung on, too. | ||
| I do a lot of that. | ||
| I sing on a lot of records, but mostly just with my friends. | ||
| Is this it here? | ||
| Yeah, that's like... | ||
| That's my living room. | ||
| That's a band called Scout. | ||
| That's Laura from Scout. | ||
| And you can see a couple of Felipe's paintings are in the background. | ||
| This clock of mine is up there. | ||
| I wish you could show the lawn. | ||
| It's really cool if you get a more distant shot because you can see the green. | ||
| Dude, this has a hundred views. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Well, it's hard to promote stuff. | ||
| See, that's what it looks like. | ||
| That's bonkers. | ||
| A hundred views. | ||
| You know, I do what I can. | ||
| I'm not wildly successful at the podcast or this, but we play people's music. | ||
| They're really good. | ||
| That is kind of cool that you have a setup there with the AstroTurf. | ||
| It's hilarious. | ||
| Paintings behind you. | ||
| Yeah, so it's like all the press I've done for this record, except for this, I've done sitting right there. | ||
| I just put a chair there, and we got some cameras, and I've done every interview on Zoom, except for your interview. | ||
| And we even filmed for the Today Show and Kimmel right there, because we couldn't really go there, so we just did that. | ||
| I just love that you're so dedicated to music. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love it. | |
| It's just like 24-7. | ||
| I'm a music geek. | ||
| I can tell. | ||
| How do you find new music? | ||
| I look. | ||
| I spend a lot of time looking. | ||
| I've got about six, seven, maybe ten of us now, who work on the festival. | ||
| Some of us are musicians, some of them are journalists, some of them are bloggers. | ||
| Just people who really love working music. | ||
| My partner, Barbara Rappaport, Barbara Garrett now. | ||
| I met her when we were doing the Outlaw Roadshow, our first festival here in Austin during South by Southwest. | ||
| And she started doing that with us, and then her and I started Underwater Sunshine years later. | ||
| She lives in San Antonio now, but she's from down here. | ||
| And it was a lot based on kind of, we would come down here and we would put this big festival on in the middle of South by Southwest. | ||
| We would put on free shows with all these bands, like 30 bands at a show, like on many different stages over a couple days. | ||
| And we used to do... | ||
| What did we do? | ||
| We did the Rusty Spur for a few years. | ||
| I don't know if it's still there even. | ||
| It was up on... | ||
| What street was it? | ||
| Like 7th Street or 8th Street? | ||
| I can't remember. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, I just kind of loved... | ||
| Also, it's nice to have peers again. | ||
| When I was coming up in the clubs, I had a lot of friends who played music. | ||
| And then when you get out there, unless you're gonna hang out at the MTV Awards, you don't know a lot of people anymore. | ||
| But then with the festivals, I got all these friends who play music. | ||
| I sing on lots of records, but they're mostly just my friends' records. | ||
| And they're really good. | ||
| I'm really proud of them. | ||
| We're taking Matt and Sean out on tour this summer. | ||
| They're going to flip-flop each night who plays first, so they'll both get to play. | ||
| I kind of feel like I do all the stuff I used to do with the record company, and I never fail anybody, which is nice, because I really failed it. | ||
| Also, it cost me a lot of money. | ||
| A shitload of money. | ||
| How much do you think you blew in the indie record company? | ||
| I had two different ones, but I'd say... | ||
| Several million probably over the years. | ||
| It just costs money to do that stuff. | ||
| You know, you're supporting bands on the road and... | ||
| And how'd you get out of it? | ||
| At some point, I just stopped. | ||
| The second company, I... Just after a few years, I just kind of just didn't want to do it anymore. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So we started doing the festivals, and I really like that. | ||
| We're still helping out the bands. | ||
| We're doing what we can do, and maybe it'll take off. | ||
| Even me, though, it's hard for people to discover it. | ||
| Maybe if this record's really successful, everyone will check out Underwater Sunshine. | ||
| We packed the house at all the festivals completely, but they're small clubs. | ||
| We're going to try and expand it this year. | ||
| What size clubs are you doing? | ||
| Well, Rockwood, I don't know. | ||
| Rockwood has three stages. | ||
| I don't know, you know, probably a few hundred people, a few thousand over the course of the two nights come in and out. | ||
| But we're spreading out to like two or three clubs this year at the same time, making like a little mini festival in the clubs there. | ||
| And we're also going to like do our show in New York with some of those bands opening. | ||
| And Frank Turner's going to play it this year, which will give a little more exposure. | ||
| The intimate shows like that are fucking cool anyway, man. | ||
| Do you see a really good band in a 150-seat room? | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's almost like an amusement park, because there's three stages going at once with staggered start times, and you can just run to the ones you want to see. | ||
| Meet a bunch of different people, go between the clubs. | ||
| They're free, so you don't have to worry about paying each time, and it's just... | ||
| We also do... | ||
| The only thing we... | ||
| The only way... | ||
| The bands we don't pay either because they're free shows. | ||
| What we do do is we buy... | ||
| I think we did $400. | ||
| We bought $400 worth of merch from every band. | ||
| So it enables us to give them $400. | ||
| And then we set the merch up. | ||
| It stands at the show and we give it away free to the fans. | ||
| So people can get their music, their CDs, their t-shirts for free. | ||
| And it enables us to pay the band's money. | ||
| And it's just like make it as easy as possible to like... | ||
| Exposed people to these things. | ||
| Well, it's also the spirit in which you're doing this is so pure, right? | ||
| This is a completely non-profit venture. | ||
| You're not trying to make money. | ||
| You're just trying to distribute great music. | ||
| I fucking love it, man. | ||
| I just love hearing that you do it this way. | ||
| It's really cool. | ||
| You know, we wanted to sort of like expand because we've been doing all this music stuff for a while and the last time we did it, which is now like October two years ago, I guess it was 2019, Last time we did the festival. | ||
| And we had expanded to a place with three stages instead of two. | ||
| It was really successful. | ||
| But Kate Quigley came, and she was hanging out for the whole thing, and she was like, man, you should add some comedy to this. | ||
| Because we went out one night and watched an open mic with her, and she got up at it. | ||
| When you were telling about the open mic earlier, I was really thinking about that. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| Kate and I, we met because we matched on a dating site years ago, but never met each other, but we sort of corresponded a little bit. | ||
| I hadn't talked to her in a long time, and I guess she wrote to me again later, and I was like, I'm just going to introduce her to my girlfriend. | ||
| I introduced her to my girlfriend, and my girlfriend and her are the best. | ||
| It's the best way to be safe about things. | ||
| Just any hot girl, introduce them to your girlfriend. | ||
| So they become best friends with your girlfriend. | ||
| You never make a mistake ever. | ||
| And your girlfriend has cool friends. | ||
| And you get to hang out with people. | ||
| I always liked Kate. | ||
| I thought she was funny. | ||
| Now I get to be her friend because there's nothing to worry about. | ||
| She's best friends with my girlfriend. | ||
| So I can be her friend from now on. | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| But yeah, she was talking about how cool it would be to bring comedy into it, too. | ||
| I thought that would be a great thing. | ||
| That's a completely different kind of animal. | ||
| It is, it is. | ||
| You'd bring a completely different kind of mental illness into your little party there, too. | ||
| Well, you'd do it at a different club. | ||
| I'm not sure I'd mix them up on stages. | ||
| 100% do it in a different club. | ||
| Because you'd want to be able to just run them, get people lined up. | ||
| Don't get involved. | ||
| Stay out. | ||
| Just leave that to other people that are used to dealing with these fucking maniacs. | ||
| You understand music, right? | ||
| You know comedians. | ||
| It's not the same thing as understanding it. | ||
| I hear you. | ||
| I don't want to do a music festival. | ||
| I would think about doing a comedy festival because they're my people and I get them, but I would not wish that upon anyone else to handle comedians. | ||
| We'll put you in charge. | ||
| Uh-uh. | ||
| Nuh-uh. | ||
| No, seriously. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It's your comedy festival with my name. | ||
| No. | ||
| They do have several of them out here, right? | ||
| They got Moon Tower. | ||
| What else do they have out here? | ||
| There's more than one comedy festival out here, right? | ||
| South by Southwest, I think, was the whole thing. | ||
| Yeah, sorta. | ||
| I mean, they have comedy at it, but Moon Tower is basically just comedy, right? | ||
| That whole thing is, by the way, just for people who've never spent much time in Austin, that whole Moon Tower thing, the whole concept behind putting these towers around town that light up the town at night and that all look like different little moons, that's a crazy fucking thing to do. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| I have not seen it. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I just thought it was a name. | ||
| I didn't know they did that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Someone had an idea in like the 50s or 40s. | ||
| It was a long time ago to build these big towers with these big lights on top of them. | ||
| So there was almost like, instead of just being one moon to light up a town, there was a shitload of them. | ||
| Like an alternative to streetlights in a way. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Like, dazed and confused. | ||
| They're going to the fucking moon tower. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| And he's climbing up it. | ||
| And there's, like, I think, I've seen, there's five of them, I think, around town. | ||
| Yeah, most of them are gone. | ||
| They're only, yeah. | ||
| It's very weird. | ||
| Big fucking towers. | ||
| I don't get it. | ||
| It is the coolest idea ever. | ||
| So it lights up whole neighborhoods at night. | ||
| So it's like, you're not just in a dark, shitty neighborhood. | ||
| Oh, that makes sense. | ||
| So it's a little safer, too, probably. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that was kind of the idea, to really light up a town at night. | ||
| And I don't think they have many... | ||
| Like you said, there's five left, maybe? | ||
| I think there could be a couple more than five, but I remember looking this up when I first... | ||
| 1890s. | ||
| First put up in the 1890s. | ||
| So when did... | ||
| Is Moon Tower a comedy festival, or is it just... | ||
| It is that, too, yeah. | ||
| And that's the main one that pops up, Moon Tower Comedy Festival. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's probably... | ||
| Because they go to the Moon Tower in Dazed and Confused, in Linklater's movie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Roy Wood Jr., powerful Roy Wood Jr. Interesting. | |
| I mean, it's a really cool fucking thing for like... | ||
| This is a great... | ||
| College towns are the greatest thing on earth, and this is a really good one. | ||
| Well, this is a little bit more than a college town, you know? | ||
| It's like it's a live music town. | ||
| It's got... | ||
| That whole 6th Street has got this vibe to it that's so different. | ||
| The downtown area is so different. | ||
| It's a great town. | ||
| It's really special. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| I mean, I grew up in a college town. | ||
| I've always loved them. | ||
| It was my favorite thing when we'd do just, like, the tertiary tours, like, in those towns, as opposed to just the big cities. | ||
| Like, we'd do the big cities in the summertime, and then we used to do, like, in the fall and the spring, we would do the college towns more. | ||
| And it was such a... | ||
| I mean, I just... | ||
| Growing up in Berkeley, I've loved that kind of place. | ||
| Bloomington, you know, Athens, Georgia, especially Austin. | ||
| But it was always really cool. | ||
| But this one, like... | ||
| Because it turned into such a music town, too. | ||
| It's just a blast. | ||
| Yeah, it's an awesome town. | ||
| It's a great-sized place. | ||
| This is what I always tell people. | ||
| It's only a million people, and then there's a million outside of it. | ||
| And that's not that much. | ||
| But it's good enough. | ||
| It's plenty of room for great restaurants, great comedy clubs, great music. | ||
| You go down 6th Street, you'll hear great bands playing. | ||
| You've never even heard of them before. | ||
| You hear all this live music, and people are walking around. | ||
| There's a vibe. | ||
| There's an energy. | ||
| To this town that's just different. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, when you get those towns that support music, it's usually a pretty Temporary and then it cycles out of it because if you have that area where musicians can live and play There's usually some warehouses and they can get rehearsal spaces, | ||
| you know, San Francisco used to be that way Yeah, you know, but then they become cool places to live and then people move into those areas and they want to live in those kind of warehouses and then it gets upscale and eventually Bands can't afford it and then someplace else becomes that area, you know, but Austin's managed to stay Keep Austin weird. | ||
| It's managed to stay nice and weird for a long time now. | ||
| Strange, too, because it's the capital. | ||
| Yeah, people are worried now because of Google and tech companies and Apple's putting a campus here and Oracle, and they're like, oh my god, we're going to bring in the Silicon people. | ||
| Well, that could do it, too, because if you get too upscale, it becomes hard to afford just the rehearsal spaces, empty, cheap places to rehearse. | ||
| That'll kill the music. | ||
| It did it in the Bay Area in some ways. | ||
| It just got every warehouse turned into condos. | ||
| And the real estate here has gone bonkers. | ||
| It's very crazy. | ||
| It's hard for people to find affordable places to live in Austin. | ||
| They're all moving outside the outside area. | ||
| But that's kind of normal, right? | ||
| The normal expansion and spread. | ||
| But it's still tolerable and manageable. | ||
| It still works. | ||
| It's a good town that's managed to keep itself as that kind of a cool town for, I mean, a long time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It also has the ethic of having small, independent businesses cherished, as opposed to, like, chains. | ||
| You know, it's like there's a lot of, like, particularly restaurants, a lot of, like, independent... | ||
| Individual places that are cherished. | ||
| There's like a vibe to that here. | ||
| And they get supported. | ||
| People line up. | ||
| There's food here that people can't get because it's just gone by the time you get through the line. | ||
| And they've managed to keep that sort of vibe alive for a long time. | ||
| Yeah, the barbecue vibe here is insane. | ||
| It's so strong. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| It's good, too. | ||
| Where have you gone in town? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I haven't been here in years. | ||
| Have you been to Terry Black's? | ||
| I had it last night. | ||
| I had a delivery from it last night. | ||
| It was really good. | ||
| I think it was Black's last night. | ||
| I was trying to get it from Stiles. | ||
| I haven't eaten there yet. | ||
| They call me back, which is something you don't get in New York. | ||
| We're out of everything except for turkey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| I don't want that. | ||
| I want ribs. | ||
| Yeah, turkey? | ||
| Like, come on, man. | ||
| I'm not trying to be healthy here. | ||
| What am I doing with this turkey? | ||
| There was one... | ||
| What's the name of that place? | ||
| It was way in the east side. | ||
| They had a big poster up that said, Don't need no teeth to eat my beef. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I've seen that. | ||
| I remember the name of the place. | ||
| That was really good. | ||
| Yeah, you get that Terry Black's brisket. | ||
| You could chew it with your fingers. | ||
| It just slices right through. | ||
| That's one of the things I was working on this year, was how to make... | ||
| Like, decent brisket. | ||
| House Park BBQ. That's what it is, yeah. | ||
| Need no teeth to eat my beef. | ||
| That place was great. | ||
| I love the sign, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you know... | ||
| Barbecue is a weird thing because it moves around the United States. | ||
| You know, almost all came from the South. | ||
| But, you know, depending on the area, what was going on, like Oakland, where I grew up, is big barbecue because everyone came out to the shipyards to work from the South in World War II. And so all this whole community of black people from the South ended up also because the South can be not a great place to live at times if you're black in the 50s and 40s. | ||
| You know, came out to California and ended up in Oakland. | ||
| So had great barbecue there growing up. | ||
| Adam Curry, do you know who he is? | ||
| The original podfather? | ||
| He's the MTV VJ? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| He's out here now. | ||
| He lives out here. | ||
| He's literally the original podcaster. | ||
| He's the podfather. | ||
| And he explained to me why Austin has this long history of barbecue, and it has to do with Germans, that Germans smoke meat. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| Smoking. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Smoking and then they sort of adapted it to like brisket and ribs and Texas barbecue and it all became like the Central Texas barbecue became like a scene. | ||
| It's a very specific way of barbecuing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like the stuff in, it was more like, I think, I feel like the Oakland barbecue is closer to what I've had in Mississippi. | ||
| What kind of barbecue is that? | ||
| What is the style? | ||
| The sauce is a little sweeter, and it's got a nice bark on it. | ||
| There's just this place in Oakland that I really love called Everett& Jones. | ||
| It's a little shack at the bottom of University in Berkeley, and then they actually opened a full-on restaurant in In Oakland, in Jack London Square. | ||
| I want to say a few years ago, but it must be 20 years ago now. | ||
| But the Shack was where I grew up going. | ||
| And I still order barbecue sauce from them, get it shipped. | ||
| I love their sauce. | ||
| I get it shipped to New York. | ||
| Because even if I get barbecue from one place, I generally don't love the sauce. | ||
| So I keep my Everton Jones sauce. | ||
| But also, that was one of the things I tried to do cooking this year. | ||
| Make a nice sauce. | ||
| I don't have a smoker. | ||
| How am I gonna... | ||
| No, not the sauce, but the meat. | ||
| How am I... I gotta learn to make a good barbecue brisket in my oven. | ||
| I gotta figure this out. | ||
| Maybe it's just a really low temperature for a long time. | ||
| If I get up early in the morning, I rub it all with salt and brown sugar the night before. | ||
| Did you figure it out? | ||
| Kinda. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| You don't have a patio? | ||
| No. | ||
| Because remember, I didn't get the outdoor space. | ||
| So I can't get a smoker. | ||
| But, you know, I figured out ways to do it, like just really low heat. | ||
| Like 200 degrees and just start it at noon. | ||
| It'll be ready by about 6. Keep it covered for the first 2 or 3 hours. | ||
| Then take the foil off. | ||
| Let it get some air for the next 2 or 3. Sometimes I'll sear it all first before I put it in. | ||
| Yeah, it turns out pretty good. | ||
| I mean, I did it. | ||
| I wanted to make... | ||
| I used my beef brisket recipe on a pork shoulder I had a little while ago and just cooked that. | ||
| And I spent the next, like, three weeks eating pork sandwiches that were fucking incredible. | ||
| They were just thin-sliced pork. | ||
| Some of the best barbecue I've ever had is out of Van Nuys. | ||
| Van Nuys, California. | ||
| Dr. Huggly Wuggly's. | ||
| Dr. Huggly Wuggly's. | ||
| Tyler, Texas Barbecue. | ||
| Damn good place. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| It's fantastic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fantastic. | |
| That's the closest I've come to what... | ||
| That's what Everton Jones tastes like. | ||
| Tyler, that place is like, you don't understand why it's there. | ||
| The neighborhood, it doesn't make any sense where it's at, but it's been there forever. | ||
| I think they've been there since the 70s. | ||
| It was there the whole time. | ||
| I moved there, and my A&R guy took me there while I was making the record in, like, 92, and we would always make the trek out there. | ||
| There's nowhere else to get good barbecue. | ||
| I don't care what they say. | ||
| There's nowhere else to get good barbecue in L.A., or there wasn't then, but... | ||
| Dr. Huggly Wugglies, that shit is fantastic. | ||
| Fantastic. | ||
| And the people there are cool as fuck and there's no pretentiousness to it. | ||
| They've got shitty wood panel on the walls and dumb paintings that nobody gives a fuck about. | ||
| It's all about the food. | ||
| They bring that brisket out there and you're like, oh my god, there it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dr. Huggly Wugglies in Van Nuys. | ||
| I mean, that's indicative of how weird it is. | ||
| You look at the signs, like the fucking graffitis on the billboards and everything, and that's the inside, like right there, scroll back up where you were, right there, bam, that's what it looks like inside. | ||
| I mean, it's just so unpretentious, just booths and wood paneling, and look at that stupid fucking rodeo sign. | ||
| Nobody gives a shit about it. | ||
| No, they're not even looking. | ||
| The ribs and the brisket there are off the hook. | ||
| Everything's great there. | ||
| They're so good. | ||
| The chicken's great there. | ||
| Everything's great there. | ||
| Their sauce is great, too. | ||
| That is great. | ||
| That is the closest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at that. | |
| Look at that, son. | ||
| That's what Everett Jones is like. | ||
| It tastes just like Hagi Wagi's, which is like Southern Mississippi barbecue. | ||
| Brisket just melts in your mouth. | ||
| It's sensational. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I knew exactly what you were going to say the moment you said Van Nuys. | ||
| I was like, yes. | ||
| LA can have a lot of places that look just like great restaurants look, but that aren't as good. | ||
| But that place, that is the shit, man. | ||
| That place is the shit. | ||
| It's so fucking good. | ||
| It's the shit and it's like a hidden spot. | ||
| You go there, you're like, what is happening here? | ||
| Why are you here? | ||
| What is this? | ||
| Wish it was in town, but no, it's better. | ||
| Stay out here. | ||
| Stay right in this weird little neighborhood of Van Nuys, next to a barber shop and shit. | ||
| You know, it's just, it's cool. | ||
| We would trek out there. | ||
| When I lived... | ||
| I had too many people living with me at that cottage. | ||
| Too many friends. | ||
| Half of New Orleans came out and lived with me. | ||
| All my friends from New Orleans came out and lived with me in that cottage. | ||
| Eventually, I bought a house in Beverly Hills. | ||
| I bought a big old mansion so that all of us could live there because there was like 10 of us living at my house. | ||
| I bought this big place, but we would take treks out. | ||
| Someone would just go to Hoggly Woggly's to bring it all back. | ||
| Or we'd go out there together, but we would bring dinner back for everyone from Hoggly Woggly's. | ||
| Yeah, they have great to go. | ||
| It's the big trays of brisket and meat. | ||
| Now I'm hungry. | ||
| Adam, I really enjoyed talking to you, man. | ||
| Joe, thank you, man. | ||
| I appreciate this. | ||
| It was very cool. | ||
| I really enjoyed it. | ||
| Like I said, I've been a fan forever, so it means a lot that you came in here and did this. | ||
| So your album, it's available now. | ||
| You gave me a physical copy. | ||
| Thank you very much for that. | ||
| Can people get it digital? | ||
| It's available everywhere. | ||
| Yeah, it'll be digital. | ||
| The only way you can get it, there's no CD, so we made vinyl, and it's on, it's digital everywhere. | ||
| And, oh, I forgot to tell you one, we're gonna go on tour. | ||
| We're gonna leave, we're gonna go on tour in August in America. | ||
| August, September, October. | ||
| How can anybody find out about that? | ||
| Countingcrows.com. | ||
| They'll put all the shit up. | ||
| And they'll have the tour dates, and when will they be announced? | ||
| Today. | ||
| This is me doing it. | ||
| I'm not sure the exact... | ||
| We're not going to go on sale for a few weeks, but I think the dates will be up today on the website, and this is the first I've told anybody about it. | ||
| Oh, that's exciting. | ||
| Breaking the news right here. | ||
| Are you coming through here? | ||
| We are coming to Austin, yes. | ||
| When? | ||
| Well, we're playing the Moody Amphitheater, and I don't... | ||
| I could look it up. | ||
| I have it on my phone somewhere. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I took a picture of the schedule. | |
| Breaking news. | ||
| Great minds, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great minds. | |
| Here it is. | ||
| So, Austin. | ||
| Where the hell are you? | ||
| Austin. | ||
| Still in Texas. | ||
| Right here. | ||
| Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo. | ||
| Wednesday, September 15th. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Shit. | ||
| Why? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| I might not be here. | ||
| Where are you going? | ||
| You going on tour? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I might be here. | ||
| I might be elk hunting. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| See how I'm here? | ||
| Well, you can come anywhere you want. | ||
| There's plenty of places. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Well, I would love to see you here. | ||
| What do you hunt with when you hunt elk? | ||
| Bow and arrow. | ||
| You're hunting bow hunting? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| No shit? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm just curious. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I do. | ||
| I've never hunted with a bow and arrow. | ||
| Mostly because I would miss and if I hit it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I practice a lot. | |
| A lot. | ||
| Yeah, it's an obsession. | ||
| It's not a thing you just go and do. | ||
| It's a thing that I practice all year round. | ||
| I'm a big archery fanatic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| I have a 3D range in my backyard with a giant rubber elk, 85 yards that I shoot. | ||
| Yeah, I shoot all the time, constantly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, and it's one of the things I do every year to acquire meat and go and bow hunt. | ||
| I did some of that when I was in England because I was on my own, so I would spend days just hunting rabbits. | ||
| I kind of liked cooking for myself after doing that. | ||
| Oh yeah, man. | ||
| Cooking something that you've actually went out and harvested yourself is something special. | ||
| Pheasant. | ||
| A lot of pheasant and rabbit. | ||
| Rabbit, different. | ||
| I mean, obviously very different. | ||
| Pheasant's a shotgun thing. | ||
| I've only pheasant hunted once with Anthony Bourdain and he got one. | ||
| He got one and I missed it. | ||
| I missed one. | ||
| It's a different kind of thing than aiming at something, you know, this is a movie. | ||
| Yeah, it's like... | ||
| I'm not adept with shotguns. | ||
| I need to learn how to, like... | ||
| I think there's got to be something to it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Some technique that I'm missing. | ||
| You've got to lead it. | ||
| You think about it as a cone, like you're throwing a net in front of something. | ||
| It's a different... | ||
| It definitely... | ||
| One of the reasons I think I got into it is because since you missed the first hundred times, you lose all sympathy. | ||
| You hate it so much after you've missed it 50 times. | ||
| It's like, fuck you. | ||
| I don't have any sympathy for you anymore. | ||
| Because you've been fucking with me for an hour now. | ||
| All right, man. | ||
| Well, let's wrap this up. | ||
| Thank you very much for being here. | ||
| And I appreciate it. | ||
| And Butter Miracle, out now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Everybody can get it. | ||
| Go get it. | ||
| Support Live Music. | ||
| And your music festival is when again? | ||
| Underwater Sunshine. | ||
| It's going to be in October. | ||
| We'll finish up a tour in New York and then just the festival right after that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Woo! |
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