July 7, 2021 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:26:42
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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The Joe Rogan Experience. | |
| Train by day. | ||
| Joe Rogan Podcast by night. | ||
| All day! | ||
| Hello, Jacob. | ||
| How you doing? | ||
| Good to see you again, man. | ||
| Good to see you. | ||
| First time we met, we were talking about earlier, you took your kids to Fear Factor. | ||
| It was a gross day, right? | ||
| Weren't they all? | ||
| No, the second day is always the gross day. | ||
| Oh, I didn't know that. | ||
| Yeah, the first day is a big stunt. | ||
| Oh, the first day is the sports day. | ||
| Yeah, and then the second day, it's disgusting. | ||
| And then the third day, it's usually something. | ||
| Well, had I had a choice, we would have picked the disgusting day anyway. | ||
| That was pretty wild. | ||
| I don't remember what it was. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| No, you know, it was downtown. | ||
| It was in an abandoned building, like a warehouse style. | ||
| And it was disgusting before you guys even started. | ||
| It was. | ||
| I do remember what looked like an exploded, melted cat on a chair. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| There was fur, there was a face, and it had been, like, for many, I don't know how long it had been. | ||
| That might be just a part of the landscape. | ||
| I'm saying that had nothing. | ||
| That wasn't you guys. | ||
| Those downtown buildings, that was when I first found out about Skid Row was working for Fear Factor. | ||
| If you're a person that just spends time in Hollywood or Beverly Hills or Tarzana or whatever, you don't know that there is this crazy spot in downtown where they've basically contained homeless people. | ||
| They've set up shelter and food and then people just camp out on the street. | ||
| And obviously that's an issue now in LA. But this was 2003. Yeah, that was mainly where you saw it then, but if you've been out there lately, it's pretty much everywhere. | ||
| Yeah, I'm excited to have escaped. | ||
| Yeah, good for you. | ||
| Yay! | ||
| You living there? | ||
| I do, just mainly because I've always been there. | ||
| I think often about going somewhere else. | ||
| You just transplanted here. | ||
| Yeah, that was my concern, too. | ||
| I've been there for so long that I was just going to stay there. | ||
| Where were you out there? | ||
| I was in Calabasas. | ||
| I was out in the suburban area, which is nice. | ||
| It's quieter, but it's not quiet enough. | ||
| I moved there in 96 or 97, something like that. | ||
| But when I moved there, it was... | ||
| No one was out there. | ||
| It's like coyotes and owls and shit. | ||
| That's what I like. | ||
| I like quiet. | ||
| Did you have to commute every day for anything? | ||
| Yeah, but you just leave on time. | ||
| When I was doing news radio, the TV shows when I first moved out there, we didn't really start until 10 a.m. | ||
| at the earliest. | ||
| By that time, traffic started to die down. | ||
| It's not that big a deal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's back. | ||
| Traffic is back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We were just talking earlier that we thought there was an exodus of people leaving these major cities, but I haven't noticed that. | ||
| It seems like more people than ever out there. | ||
| Well, there's so many people. | ||
| Even if you lose a million people or two million people or three million people, you still have 25 million people jammed into an area where when I moved to LA in 94, I guess, It's probably, I mean, I gotta think the population was like a third of that. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Or a third less. | ||
| A third less. | ||
| When I was growing up out there, there was traffic from, I think you didn't want to be in your car, from like 5 to 6 p.m. | ||
| Right, that's it. | ||
| That was it. | ||
| Well, morning traffic I wouldn't know about because I wasn't driving. | ||
| But, no, it's just all day long, every day now. | ||
| Sometimes I would come home from the comedy store at 1 in the morning and be stuck in bumper to bumper traffic. | ||
| I'm like, what the fuck is this? | ||
| Yeah, we landed LAX at 2 in the morning and then take two hours to get home. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| Or just the airport itself. | ||
| It's such a jammed up airport. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| I don't know whose idea. | ||
| How about just a loop where everybody's just in the same... | ||
| You go to other airports, you see how they figured it out. | ||
| They have separate terminals. | ||
| Everyone's not just log jamming into the same spot. | ||
| It's pretty crazy. | ||
| Do you like L.A. because you like to perform there? | ||
| I actually don't perform there very often. | ||
| I mean, not any more than I perform anywhere else. | ||
| I'm just there because I've always been there. | ||
| There's good people there. | ||
| I mean, there's shitty people everywhere. | ||
| I mean, it's not L.A. I don't stereotype it that way. | ||
| Have you ever thought about moving? | ||
| This is the part where I try to convince Jacob Dillon to move to Austin. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| I got famous people here. | ||
| Well, yeah, you know what? | ||
| At this point, if you're from L.A., yeah, I know more people in other towns. | ||
| So many people have left for a lot of different reasons, but I know more people out of L.A. than certainly that I know in L.A. Is the Troubadour still happening? | ||
| I heard that the Troubadour was about to go under. | ||
| Oh, I don't know. | ||
| You mean like right now? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know what they're going to do. | ||
| Because I know Bill Burr was really worried about that. | ||
| He loves that place. | ||
| He's going to buy it. | ||
| Maybe he will. | ||
| He might. | ||
| Somebody bought Nate Niles. | ||
| You know Nate Niles? | ||
| Yeah, they did. | ||
| They closed that down. | ||
| They shut that down and somebody rescued that. | ||
| Oh, well that's good. | ||
| Bill needs to go rescue the troubadour. | ||
| He may. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He's a cautious fella when it comes to investments and stuff. | ||
| He's a wealthy guy that pretends he's not. | ||
| That's smart. | ||
| Yeah, it is smart. | ||
| He is smart. | ||
| And we were talking about how Bill has your friend Dean Del Rey opening for him, which is hilarious that you know Dean from the music days. | ||
| Yeah, I've known Dean for more than 25 years or so. | ||
| Well, he was always a great entertainer and always a funny guy, and I know you know him as well. | ||
| I was not surprised that he decided to be a stand-up, but I guess you made me aware that it's surprising to do that in your early 40s. | ||
| It's real odd, yeah, for someone to take a chance like that and shift careers because it's a risk. | ||
| It's a giant risk. | ||
| Well, how so? | ||
| Well, you know, it might not work. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're saying if you try it in your 20s and it didn't work, you got time to go do something else? | ||
| Yeah, or you have time to make it happen. | ||
| To make it happen as a comic, it legitimately takes 10 years. | ||
| It takes 10 years to get good at it. | ||
| It really does. | ||
| In some weird way. | ||
| I don't have that kind of time. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| And for Dean to just take that... | ||
| I think he was like 46? | ||
| Something like that? | ||
| Yeah, but it seemed like a pretty natural evolution. | ||
| And I know other people who've done the same thing. | ||
| It's their... | ||
| I'm not surprised. | ||
| There is a connection between guys jumping around on stage singing songs to guys doing stand-up comedy. | ||
| There is a connection. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Just the comfort level of being able to do that. | ||
| Just to speak in front of people, sing in front of people. | ||
| Be looked at. | ||
| Get over somehow, get the attention. | ||
| They're very similar. | ||
| This new album, when was the last time you guys had an album? | ||
| 2012. Wow. | ||
| Yeah, but I did not anticipate... | ||
| I mean, time flies. | ||
| Yeah, it does. | ||
| I didn't realize that. | ||
| But I tour every year, so I'm far enough along where I don't need to worry so much about making records all the time if I'm not focused or have the ideas. | ||
| So if you don't pay attention, you just keep touring and touring. | ||
| And then I did a movie as well, a documentary, which had a soundtrack in between that, the Echo and the Canyon movie, which was an interview where we spoke to a lot of people who were around in the mid-60s, particularly 65 and 66. The bands went to Laurel Canyon. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, wow. | |
| So that took a long time to do. | ||
| And we interviewed people like Eric Clapton and... | ||
| And this was your project? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What was the motivation to do something like that? | ||
| Well, if you don't take a minute, you've got to get off the treadmill at some point. | ||
| My first record was 1992. Wow. | ||
| So I wanted to do something different. | ||
| And I think it actually took too long to do something different. | ||
| But those take a long time. | ||
| Documentaries don't really have scripts. | ||
| They just unravel. | ||
| So you just have to keep going until it changes. | ||
| The story keeps changing as you go. | ||
| And then you need to talk to this person to fill in that blank. | ||
| And then you have to keep doing that. | ||
| And before you know it, it took three years. | ||
| So who was in the Laurel Canyon scene in the 1960s? | ||
| Hendrix was there, right? | ||
| He may have passed through. | ||
| No, he's not an L.A. art, like a Laurel Canyon artist. | ||
| I thought he had a place in Laurel Canyon for a while. | ||
| He may have. | ||
| We really zeroed in on one year, like 65, with Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds. | ||
| These people getting together with so much talent in one group. | ||
| That dream didn't last. | ||
| None of those groups were able to stay together. | ||
| But it's not about Little Canyon in its entirety. | ||
| It's people, they wondered where Joni Mitchell was or Frank Zappa, but that was a different experience. | ||
| And Carole King, that's all down the line a little bit later. | ||
| That's more of the singer-songwriter era. | ||
| And someone can make that. | ||
| I recommend Ken Burns makes that documentary because that's going to be like a long one. | ||
| And we didn't get into the riots in the Sunset Strip and all that. | ||
| It was really about one year specifically. | ||
| Why that year? | ||
| Just because it was like when these bands, you got Buffalo Springfield, you got Neil Young, you got Stephen Stills in the same group together. | ||
| That wasn't gonna last. | ||
| It's just two giants in the same space. | ||
| So they were kind of figuring out what groups could do. | ||
| I don't think anybody imagined having jobs very long. | ||
| I don't think anybody was Looking at each other's paychecks yet and noticing how the dream is not going to probably stay together too long. | ||
| But that's what we found to be interesting. | ||
| Really, if you wanted a documentary about Laurel Canaan, I wouldn't be capable of doing it. | ||
| It's too large in its entirety. | ||
| It's probably something that you'd have to do for multiple shows, right? | ||
| Like a Netflix-style series. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You could. | ||
| You absolutely could. | ||
| There's a lot of different eras up there. | ||
| And there's also the CIA. There's all kinds of shit you can get into up there. | ||
| I mean, it's not just the music. | ||
| Have you read that book, Chaos? | ||
| The Tom O'Neill book about the Manson family? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's all about the CIA and about the CIA infiltrating the hippie culture and literally supplying acid to the Manson family. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I know you like a good conspiracy. | ||
| Oh, I love a good conspiracy. | ||
| The hippie movement, you might say that was dumbing down America intentionally. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of conspiracy in that. | ||
| Well, if not dumbing down America intentionally, this is what I think about a lot of conspiracies where people think that they're engineered. | ||
| I think more often than not, they take advantage of a moment and exacerbate a situation rather than engineer it from scratch. | ||
| Like, I don't think it's possible to engineer the hippie movement. | ||
| But I think you can take moments like that and make the people involved look more ridiculous and more stupid and dumb down America in a certain sense or make people have a, like, you know, the 70s bounce back from what the 60s represented was a lot of it was people being upset at the negative aspects of the hippie culture in the 60s. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't be, you know, the most informed to get into too much of that. | ||
| But we're doing it today. | ||
| It's the same thing. | ||
| It's, you know, distraction. | ||
| You know, when you give people all... | ||
| I mean, isn't it interesting, Laurel Kennedy... | ||
| Look, I mean, there's another book. | ||
| What is it? | ||
|
unidentified
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Strange... | |
| Oh, it doesn't matter if I can't think of the name of the book. | ||
| But that's all, you know... | ||
| None of those people, there's other conspiracies that none of those people, including Frank Zapp, wound up on the Royal Canyon for no reason at all. | ||
| It wasn't by accident. | ||
| I mean, they all have bloodlines that go back very, very far, particularly with the military and royalty. | ||
| That they all wind up in the same place at the same time is pretty much, there you go, weird scenes. | ||
| You should check that book out. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Weird scenes inside the canyon. | ||
| Laurel Canyon, covert ops, and the dark heart of the hippie dream. | ||
| Keep this away from Eddie Bravo, whatever you do, because he's already read it. | ||
| You might not believe everything in it, but you will think everything in it's possible. | ||
| So those artists all had a background where someone in their family was involved in the military or something along those lines? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| They all came from very prestigious places. | ||
| I mean, all of them. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's been a while since I read that book, but when you read that, That's why when I bring that up, because people ask about Laurel Canyon, it's like, I did not attempt, we did not make a documentary about Laurel Canyon, because that's the other half of Laurel Canyon that needs to be discussed as well, if you care about it. | ||
| And that's, I mean, bands are endlessly interesting to me, but that stuff, up on the hilltop, having the CIA, having like a photo, you know, they had a film place up there where they had loads and loads of film that's gone, that's burned, the building is gone, why is it gone? | ||
| I mean, you'll have fun with that book if you want to check it out. | ||
| Send me that link, Jamie, please. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| Well, it was a strange time if you connect like the 50s and then the 60s. | ||
| The contrast of the style of the country, like just the culture. | ||
| It was so radically different. | ||
| And the music is the best representation of that. | ||
| Music and films. | ||
| Like music of the 50s versus the music of the 60s is a giant monumental shift. | ||
| Yeah, well, it was brand new. | ||
| That's why most of those bands were good. | ||
| They didn't have any bad influences yet. | ||
| I mean, not to name names, you get further down the line, I mean, as much as you might love David Bowie, he also was responsible for influencing a lot of stuff that you don't like. | ||
| Because it becomes harder and harder to find your influences, and you're You're having to sift through the muck of not only just bad influences, but bad equipment, bad guitars, bad microphones. | ||
| This all starts to change, and it becomes, instead of, I got four choices in front of me to listen to, and they're all really good, to now I got 20 choices. | ||
| It becomes more difficult to figure out which stuff is just clouding up your influences. | ||
| But anybody around the 50s, that's why you get those compilations. | ||
| Why was everybody so good? | ||
| Because they just didn't have any bad influences yet. | ||
| They were all listening to the same stuff, and it was all really good. | ||
| That's an interesting perspective. | ||
| So it was like fresh and it's almost like they didn't have a chance to fuck it up yet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They didn't. | ||
| I mean, it's kind of interesting if you think about it. | ||
| I mean, even the most mildly talented person, if they were only listening to great stuff, they'd probably be pretty good just because their sources are so good. | ||
| And they were so close to the source. | ||
| I mean, rock and roll was so young. | ||
| In the 50s, it was brand new. | ||
| But even the early 60s, it's still like you don't have... | ||
| I mean, I've been making records for almost 30 years. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| If you're starting out in 1960, like, 30 years is from the 30s. | ||
| Like, there was nothing for them to be running around doing. | ||
| That's a great point. | ||
| I never thought of it that way. | ||
| That is a great point. | ||
| And then you also have to take into consideration that a genuine rock star was literally a decade old. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There was no real rock stars. | ||
| You had Buddy Holly, you had Elvis, you had a few, Chuck Berry, Lil Richard. | ||
| You had a few rock stars. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then in the 1960s, that concept was little more than a decade old. | ||
| Yeah, and it seemed like a good option at that point. | ||
| Minus the plane crash, what if you could be one of those guys? | ||
| How big could Buddy Holly's dreams have really been? | ||
| Was he 22? | ||
| The idea of having any job I mean, I've had my job for 30 years. | ||
| That's amazing for anybody to have any line of work for that long. | ||
| So you go back to those guys starting, I can't imagine anybody wondering what kind of records we'll be making in the 60s and the 70s. | ||
| I mean, I can't imagine any kind of foresight. | ||
| Yeah, that's a really good point. | ||
| Imagine if that guy was still alive. | ||
| You know, he wouldn't be as old as you think if he was still alive. | ||
| I wouldn't do that. | ||
| I wouldn't bring a phone into a podcast. | ||
| I always use the do not disturb. | ||
| I think I did, didn't I? Probably just put it on silent. | ||
| What did you say? | ||
| You just asked me something. | ||
| Imagine if Buddy Holly stayed alive. | ||
| Yeah, you know, he wouldn't be as old as you think. | ||
| How old would he be now? | ||
| 22 in the 50s. | ||
| He'd be 80 fucking years old. | ||
| Well, so is Mick Jagger. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like that generation, they're going into their 80s. | ||
| And maybe he'd be, I don't know exactly, maybe 86, 85. Right. | ||
| But you'd think he'd be 105. He wouldn't be. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's really interesting, the history of rock stars. | ||
| It's got to be a weird thing growing up being the son of literally one of the greatest musicians of all time. | ||
| How weird is that? | ||
| You have to be maybe a little more specific. | ||
| Your dad? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know who he is. | ||
| I know that. | ||
| But I mean, what is it like? | ||
| It's got to be fucking bizarre. | ||
| It's all you know. | ||
| It's all you know, but in contrast to what other people know. | ||
| It's got to be very strange. | ||
| I don't think it's strange. | ||
| I never thought it was. | ||
| I mean, I was always aware it was different from the guy next to me. | ||
| But I thought his life was probably pretty weird, too. | ||
| I mean, somebody's dad being an oral surgeon was strange to me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I also grew up in the 80s. | ||
| It was a little bit different then. | ||
| And kids didn't really care. | ||
| My friends, the people I was growing up with didn't know or care about that stuff. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| It's not until later, really. | ||
| You saw people's parents act weird around you. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Kids didn't care. | ||
| No kids? | ||
| That's strange. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Well, I'm also talking about L.A. Yeah. | ||
| Well, L.A. in the 80s was a Guns N' Roses fuckfest, right? | ||
| That's late 80s. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, I was, uh, yeah, I guess so, right? | ||
| That was, like, 87, 88? | ||
| The Guns N' Roses era? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that's a little dip. | ||
| That was a quick, short era. | ||
| It was a weird era, right? | ||
| All of a sudden, everyone was wearing makeup and teasing their hair like a girl. | ||
| You know, I honestly didn't see much of that. | ||
| I only went to the Sunset Strip one time. | ||
| I didn't grow up too far from there. | ||
| And I still can't really, I mean, if it was like that every night, like, Jesus, like, I never saw that. | ||
| It wasn't the music I listened to, or none of the fashion, any of that stuff appealed to me. | ||
| But they took over that street, and it was literally, like, the street was just nothing but paper flyers, and it was pretty something, pretty wild. | ||
| Yeah, you didn't experience any of that? | ||
| You never went to like the Rainbow Bar and Grill? | ||
| No, not too long. | ||
| I was like maybe 35. Oh, okay. | ||
| No, I never went up there too much. | ||
| Those guys are still there. | ||
| Yeah, that thing is still there. | ||
| Yeah, you can still go. | ||
| It's a fun spot. | ||
| It's like a weird little, almost like, not quite a time capsule because you get to see that they've aged. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's a time capsule. | ||
| I mean, I've only been there a couple times. | ||
| I certainly didn't see that part of it, but it was a tough time coming up to bands at that time because that was pay to play. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, that was very difficult. | ||
| Can you explain that to people? | ||
| Well, that's because there's so many bands in LA. You want to play. | ||
| Traditionally, you get paid to play music. | ||
| You're the entertainer. | ||
| But because there's so many bands, they'd sell you the tickets. | ||
| Now you go sell them. | ||
| So it takes the weight off the venue having to sell tickets or not. | ||
| So you buy the tickets for 500 bucks. | ||
| And now they don't care if you bring people in or not because they already made their $500 for that band and there's five bands that night. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So if you didn't have a lot of friends and you didn't want to go throw flyers around all day long, this is obviously before the internet. | ||
| So how do you get people? | ||
| So when you're going to ask your friend to go, who doesn't care about your band anyway, and then you're going to say, can you spend $15 to get in? | ||
| It just wasn't a good model for a lot of bands. | ||
| And we did it one time and we ate all the money. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| It didn't work. | ||
| But there were so many bands that they could get away with doing that. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I do get it. | ||
| I do get why that was the thing that they did then. | ||
| But it certainly excluded anybody who just couldn't afford to buy $500 worth of tickets. | ||
| That band can't play. | ||
| And a lot of great artists are weirdos and they don't have friends and they can't do that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Well, that time period was almost oversaturated, right? | ||
| Well, in L.A., just in general? | ||
| Well, certainly that scene was... | ||
| I think that was the Mecca. | ||
| People came from all across the country in their... | ||
| That was the dream. | ||
| I mean, literally, Welcome to the Jungle, the video, right? | ||
| Well, yeah, you had to have a scene. | ||
| I mean, Guns N' Roses is really, that's the end of it, really. | ||
| Well, maybe it was still around, but I don't consider that group to be part of that. | ||
| They were really a fantastic group. | ||
| They still are, but the scene I'm talking about, and I think anybody who saw it would also agree, they weren't really a part of that. | ||
| Who was part of that? | ||
| A lot of bands with two X's in their names, a lot of... | ||
| Two X's? | ||
| Yeah, a lot of bands misspelled. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, it was more on the model of groups like Poison, which I'm sure you're aware of. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| That was the look, that was the sound. | ||
| And there was good music for some people. | ||
| I mean, some people still love those songs. | ||
| I mean, that's not what I'm talking about. | ||
| It was just the scene was pretty crazy. | ||
| And that scene was the dominant scene in Hollywood, right? | ||
| Did it very much? | ||
| Was there other styles of music that was coming out of that area? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I think if you went East, you had LA groups. | ||
| Well, I mean, LA's had great... | ||
| When I was a kid out in LA, you had X and the Blasters. | ||
| You had exciting groups that I liked. | ||
| And then I think there's also Jane's Addiction later. | ||
| There's other scenes out there. | ||
| It wasn't just the Sunset Strip. | ||
| It is always fascinating when one area becomes responsible for a giant chunk of the culture when it comes to music culture. | ||
| That was one area. | ||
| It's not even a big area. | ||
| You think about Sunset Strip if you're from out of town and then you go down there and you drive two miles and it's over. | ||
| You're like, oh, that's it, huh? | ||
| Yeah, and it's funny you mention that. | ||
| I wonder if you went to New York in 1986. I never heard of it. | ||
| Did they have a glam scene? | ||
| I don't think they did. | ||
| I mean, why only LA seemed to have that? | ||
| Everybody got in their trucks and drove out to LA to be a part of it. | ||
| Well, New York was different, right? | ||
| It was a lot more punk. | ||
| It was CBGB. It was, you know, the Cro-Mags. | ||
| It was a different kind of scene in New York, right? | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Well, I guess so. | ||
| It's a grittier place, I guess. | ||
| Yeah, it's just funny. | ||
| I don't know how they dodged that glam metal scene. | ||
| They dodged it entirely. | ||
| They kind of did. | ||
| I think that if you were into that, you had to go to LA, I suppose. | ||
| By the time you get there, it's the same as anything. | ||
| By the time you get to where you're going to follow the scene, it's over. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's how that works. | ||
| I didn't hear about any bands who were not from Seattle who went up there with their flannel shirts and got a record deal after that explosion. | ||
| I think you kind of had to be there. | ||
| Yeah, I guess so. | ||
| I remember very clearly when Nirvana came out, because I was at a buddy of mine's house, and he goes, dude, you've got to listen to this shit. | ||
| And he put on the Nevermind album, and we were all sitting around listening to it, going, I've never heard anything like this before. | ||
| I think I remember the same thing, too. | ||
| It wasn't at your buddy's house, but I was in a van. | ||
| We were doing shows. | ||
| We heard it, and You know, it was explosive, but you also, like they said, you knew this is the beginning of something else. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it was the end. | ||
| My friend Eddie always says it was the end of that hairband era. | ||
| Many of those people have said so. | ||
| Said when they were sitting there watching MTV with their sky-high hair, they saw that and they said, we're done. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's so wild. | ||
| That's so wild that an artist... | ||
| I mean, really, their jaw would drop, and they just said, that's it. | ||
| We're done. | ||
| Because it was everything everybody could experience at the same time. | ||
| I mean, it was real, it was live, there was no shenanigans, and that's the writings on the wall. | ||
| When that gets over, and you don't have to be an actor, like a lot of people do, to get by, it was over. | ||
| Yeah, they just nuked the whole scene. | ||
| It's incredible that something can come along that resonates that well, that just hits a nerve that well, that everybody sort of agrees. | ||
| Well, that's a wrap, kids. | ||
| Time to throw away the hairspray. | ||
| I think just across the board, everybody felt at the same time. | ||
| They didn't have to go, do you think so, though? | ||
| Really? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Everybody at the same time was like, oh, that's it. | ||
| It's a wrap. | ||
| I remember a few years later seeing hair bands and feeling sad for them, seeing them do things, and nobody gave a fuck about it anymore. | ||
| It was so hot, and then not anymore. | ||
| Well, it's hot again. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| Nostalgia comes around. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| People get excited about singing. | ||
| There's a lot of boats out there playing to those bands, jumping around playing. | ||
| That's so true, dude. | ||
| I live on a lake. | ||
| They drive by. | ||
| It's that and... | ||
| Well, it's those cruises. | ||
| And it's fun. | ||
| Some of those people, they meant business. | ||
| They still love it. | ||
| They still care. | ||
| So who can argue? | ||
| Well, it's one of those things when people hear those old songs, it brings it back to high school or brings it back to when they loved those songs. | ||
| No intoxicant like nostalgia. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's the most powerful. | ||
| Nobody's void of that. | ||
| Doesn't matter. | ||
| It's fun to have a band that you used to be embarrassed about that's not embarrassing anymore, too. | ||
| I never had that problem, to be honest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No? | |
| That's lifestyle bands. | ||
| That's the people who, when you're growing up, they either wear a shirt or a sticker on a notebook that really just want to tell you what kind of guy or girl they are. | ||
| It's not really about the band. | ||
| It's kind of synonymous with the jeans you're wearing. | ||
| Lifestyle music. | ||
| And there were people, when I grew up, I remember you couldn't like the Smiths. | ||
| If you also like the police it's just like you got to pick a team and it's just like so childish and that's high school in general really but when you get older I think you just you realize wait a second you know what I really did like Adam the Ants and I really did like I did like The Clash at the same time but I didn't realize I was allowed to do that. | ||
| Yeah I loved Led Zeppelin but I also loved Kiss and Kiss was the embarrassing one and I had to hide it from people. | ||
| You know what, though? | ||
| I mean, I think we're pretty much the same age. | ||
| That's the badge on everybody. | ||
| I did not have a Kiss face. | ||
| I mean, I've been around those people, and I like them, and I see the merit in it, but that did not blow through my basement and knock me out when I was a kid. | ||
| When I was really young, my uncle Vinny worked for Howard Marks Advertising, and they were the ones who did the album covers for Kiss. | ||
| So I met Ace Frehley when I was like... | ||
| I don't remember how old I was. | ||
| I was pretty young. | ||
| Younger than 10, I guess, probably. | ||
| And he had no makeup on. | ||
| I met him when he had no makeup on. | ||
| He came into the office, and no one knew what he looked like. | ||
| And I'm like, I knew a secret. | ||
| As a 10-year-old, I knew some crazy secret. | ||
| I know what Ace Frehley looks like. | ||
| So, because my uncle had introduced me to them at a young age, I was a fan from 10 to all through high school. | ||
| Oh, I get it. | ||
| No, I totally get it. | ||
| The comic book thing, I get it. | ||
| They were genius. | ||
| And I'll actually tell you a funny story. | ||
| I don't think he might have seen him in a long time, but the first time I met Paul Stanley was in a studio out in L.A. probably in like 97, I want to say. | ||
| So my son was four, maybe, and he was with me at five at the studio. | ||
| The studio had a big lounge with a big fish tank, and I was... | ||
| I was small talking with Paul Stanley, and my son didn't, he didn't have makeup on of course, and we were just catching up on stuff, and an intern from the building, or somebody who worked upstairs, came down with, they just reissued the new Kiss dolls, and he came down with a box, and he was hoping Paul would sign it. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Because you gotta have it in the box, can't open it, and if he's in the building, you gotta have it signed. | ||
| So Paul notices that my four- or five-year-old is looking at the doll and looking at him and realizing that there's a person in front of me who's actually a doll also. | ||
| He'd never seen that. | ||
| And it kind of tripped him out. | ||
| His eyes were going back and forth from the doll to Paul. | ||
| You know, back and forth. | ||
| And Paul leans down and says, did you want one of those? | ||
| And my son just kind of shakes his head. | ||
| He's speechless. | ||
| Now there's like a superhero in the room. | ||
| And he says, did you want one of those? | ||
| You want one? | ||
| And my son just kind of shook his head. | ||
| And then he leans back up. | ||
| He says to me, you know, if you go up on Hollywood over by Vine, they've still got some left. | ||
| They're not too pricey. | ||
| They haven't overpriced them yet. | ||
| He tells me where I can go get one. | ||
| It looked like it was going to be the moment of like, I'm going to send you a couple of those. | ||
| But he tells me where to go get some. | ||
| Which is funny in itself. | ||
| Devastating. | ||
| Kinda. | ||
| It was like... | ||
| So he learned a couple things all at once there. | ||
| Superhero person. | ||
| Yeah, you can buy your own shit. | ||
| Yeah, it's almost like how does it feel to want? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you want one of those? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Yeah, how does it feel to want? | ||
| Yeah, that's kind of what it was. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Shit. | |
| It was funny though. | ||
| I went to see KISS in... | ||
| I guess it was the 90s when they had their comeback tour. | ||
| And it was me and Kevin James. | ||
| And Kevin James was also a closet KISS fan growing up. | ||
| We shared that in common. | ||
| And we went to see him in L.A. And the nostalgia was so high. | ||
| Because they were wearing makeup again. | ||
| Because they went through that whole phase with no makeup. | ||
| And then they put the makeup back on and had the costumes back on. | ||
| And it was like, yes! | ||
| I think it was, it might have been at the Forum, some big place in LA. That's like the first reunion, to never take the makeup off. | ||
| Nah, I should have never taken it off. | ||
| I mean, well, you know, if I could do it all over again, I'd start out with makeup. | ||
| They'll never see you get old, and you can do whatever you want. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, how great is that, to be like... | ||
| Seven years old and get to jump around in makeup and I mean at some point everybody yeah, I'd like something on my face too. | ||
| Yeah, and you can sneak around that way. | ||
| I mean they went everywhere. | ||
| With makeup or without? | ||
| Without makeup they can go anywhere. | ||
| We didn't know. | ||
| Yeah, I mean the only thing was like... | ||
| Do you remember all those like... | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| Coming out of clubs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There was a lot of that. | ||
| I remember Paul Stanley had a bandana on like COVID days. | ||
| Bandana. | ||
| It was coming out of somewhere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just interesting that a band pulled that off, though, that there was a band that became huge wearing makeup. | ||
| And they were interesting in that they'd got very little airplay, but they still would sell out enormous arenas every night. | ||
| Yeah, they united these people like yourself. | ||
| And that was part of the attraction was they're not on the radio. | ||
| This is our band. | ||
| So many great rock and roll bands are like that. | ||
| Yeah, that is a thing with... | ||
| That's a weird thing that happens with certain bands where when they become more popular, the original people that got into them get upset. | ||
| Like, they go, man, I fucking knew these people when they were underground. | ||
| Sold out. | ||
| Yeah, they sold out. | ||
| It's not my band anymore. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That band that was your band, like, now that... | ||
| They're a lot happier now. | ||
| There's a lot more people listening. | ||
| That's what they wanted from the beginning. | ||
| They didn't just want you and your two friends. | ||
| They wanted everybody to like them. | ||
| That's a weird thing, right? | ||
| Where people don't want things to get too successful because then it's not their secret anymore. | ||
| Well, not only that, if everybody likes it, how unique can it be? | ||
| The people like to feel unique. | ||
| Then I'm the only one who gets it. | ||
| It's such a stupid inclination because, obviously, if it's good, If you like it and it's good, wouldn't you want other people to know about it? | ||
| Like, isn't it good if more people find out about- Well, you know, the goal is to be awesome and really big. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like Prince. | ||
| That's the goal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Perfect example. | ||
| Everybody thinks you're awesome and you're really, really popular. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you didn't like Prince, like, what the fuck is wrong with you? | ||
| Like, everybody liked Prince. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Someone tells you you don't like Prince, they don't like the Beatles. | ||
| You don't trust the person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| They're either lying or you should probably just hightail it. | ||
| Yeah, I've heard people say, well, a lot of the Stones songs suck. | ||
| And you go, well, they had some great ones. | ||
| They had some great ones. | ||
| They had some songs that I'm not really into. | ||
| Everybody does. | ||
| Yeah, but you can't say the Stones suck. | ||
| No. | ||
| You're not allowed to. | ||
| Well, I used to, there was that, I don't know if they still do it anymore. | ||
| I used to hate that people would ask you, Beatles or Stones? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, those questions. | |
| I mean, it would just make me livid. | ||
| That's like saying indoors or outdoors. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I need them both. | ||
| Food or sleep. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| We kind of need them both. | ||
| They're not similar. | ||
| Again, why are we picking teams? | ||
| Are you kidding? | ||
| They're not the same at all. | ||
| What is it about people that do want to pick those teams, though? | ||
| They really do. | ||
| Well, they like to argue. | ||
| There's no right or wrong answer to that. | ||
| Or I should say there's no right answer. | ||
| If you say, well, the Beatles, then you're going to get a... | ||
| That person's going to be a pro-Stone's person in a second and just won't argue. | ||
| Now, you're not... | ||
| We were talking about this before the show, that you're not a social media person. | ||
| You're not interested in any of that stuff. | ||
| But a lot of people use that as like... | ||
| As a thermometer, to read the temperature of the audience, to try to figure out what people like or what they don't like. | ||
| That influence can either be beneficial, like you can learn something from your audience and get feedback and it can help you or it can fuck you up. | ||
| The way you developed without all that stuff, is it detrimental for artists to have that much interaction with people that are into them? | ||
| And to be doing social media back and forth with fans? | ||
| Well, I would say first, if you enjoy doing it, you should do it. | ||
| There's people not unlike myself who don't actually find the joy of it. | ||
| And that's when I feel bad for people who engage in it who aren't genuinely just enjoying it. | ||
| Because it is something. | ||
| And for people like myself, if you just put up tour dates and record release stuff, that's not interesting enough to people to really get that kind of traffic you're talking about. | ||
| But is it detrimental? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't have a grip on it. | ||
| I couldn't advise anybody. | ||
| Again, if you like doing it, you should. | ||
| But if you're not good at social media, then maybe you won't get noticed. | ||
| And I'll use Prince again. | ||
| Prince wasn't into it. | ||
| You know, he was large enough that he'd probably get over anyhow, but he might stumble a while because people are expecting that format of the interaction, of closeness, of pretending to be friends, and maybe it wouldn't work for him. | ||
| Is that expected of musicians today? | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So is that like something that's written into with contracts? | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, if you're young and you had a band that's really good, you know, before you send your demo tape to somebody or your link... | ||
| They're going to go to your Instagram and see how many followers you have. | ||
| Because they want to know you're going to do the work with them. | ||
| And I get that. | ||
| If you've got 100,000 followers, that looks really good to a label that might want to work with you. | ||
| That means you know what you're doing, and you know how to use social media, and it's a big asset. | ||
| If your tape is really good, and you've got great music, and you don't even have instant media, or you have 200 followers, that looks bad. | ||
| And that might hinder your chances of working with people. | ||
| Do you think that would fuck you guys up if you started today? | ||
| Would you think you would adapt and just change your approach? | ||
| Maybe if I was 21 again, maybe I'd enjoy it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Do you have anything? | ||
| I mean, I got stuff. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Do you have Instagram? | ||
| Do you have Facebook? | ||
| Do you have those things? | ||
| Yeah, we use Facebook. | ||
| I have stuff. | ||
| Do you want to come to my house? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| I got things. | ||
| Sure you do. | ||
| I don't excel at that format, we'll say that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I try to. | ||
| Well, if somebody asks me, do you think Jacob Dillon's big on Instagram? | ||
| I'd be like, that motherfucker probably doesn't even touch it. | ||
| Yeah, it kind of spooks me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's all. | |
| I mean, it's all. | ||
| Follow your nose. | ||
| If you like it, do it. | ||
| If you don't, don't let people pressure you to do it. | ||
| Because the reaction that you're looking for, if it's not genuine, they don't want management putting things on it. | ||
| They want to feel you. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And if they don't get that, you look at people's Instagrams. | ||
| If you notice this pattern that starts out, whether it's people like yourself or people in bands or actors or anybody, it starts out with pictures of their plants. | ||
| It starts out with their new car. | ||
| It starts out with their foot in the air by a pool. | ||
| And then you see the traffic start to pick up. | ||
| As you get closer now to today, it's pictures of their kids and it's them at the beach. | ||
| And it becomes very personal. | ||
| But when it's more of your art pictures, your photography, nobody really cares too much. | ||
| They want to see your candid, funny moments with Kevin James at a KISS concert. | ||
| That's what they want to see. | ||
| They want something that gives them a view into your life that's not available otherwise. | ||
| And that's not for everybody. | ||
| Or they want your honest expressions, too. | ||
| They definitely know if you've got some management team fucking with it. | ||
| Yeah, that's not good. | ||
| No, that doesn't work. | ||
| I mean, it kind of worked, but there's a feeling they get. | ||
| It's a plastic feeling. | ||
| That's not really using it for what it's worth. | ||
| That's not what they're looking for. | ||
| Yeah, it's just the concern that I would have for young artists is that I think you need a lot of time developing your thoughts and thinking about things from an honest perspective. | ||
| You know what you're never going to read about me? | ||
| You're never going to see my name in a quote that says, in a now-deleted post. | ||
| I mean, everybody's gonna get their first one of those, right? | ||
| I mean, it's forever. | ||
| There's always a tweet, right? | ||
| That's true, yeah. | ||
| Well, especially if you like to drink. | ||
| Yeah, no tweeting after what, 9 p.m.? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you could be hammered by 9. How about just don't name names? | ||
| Tell your story, be as funny as you want. | ||
| Just don't say anybody's name in your tweet that it's gonna come back to get you. | ||
| Yeah, there could be that, or your hot take on some controversial political situation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not for everybody. | ||
| Well, it's a weird way to interact. | ||
| It's a good way to get information across as far as if you're a journalist or something. | ||
| I think Twitter is better for journalists than it is for anybody else. | ||
| And maybe up and coming comics, it's not bad because I've followed quite a few people while I see their posts and I go, that's a fucking funny person. | ||
| I'm going to follow them. | ||
| Just give me some more of that. | ||
| What else you got? | ||
| But how does that always benefit that person you're following? | ||
| Well, it benefits them that they tweet, I find out about them, and then maybe I meet them. | ||
| And I have had this happen, where I run into a comic and I go, hey, I follow you on Twitter, funny shit. | ||
| See, I wonder for a lot of people who have that middle level of like 30,000, 40,000 followers, how that's translating to their... | ||
| Outside of the Instagram, where are you seeing that work? | ||
| Where is it coming back to you? | ||
| Because that's why they're doing it. | ||
| Well, for stand-up, sure. | ||
| But for bands, I haven't heard those people have 30,000 followers and put their record out. | ||
| They don't sell 30,000 records. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| It seems like for bands, you gotta get on something. | ||
| There's gotta be something where somebody showcases you, whether it's the Jimmy Kimmel show or something, where you play a song and go, oh, that's fucking great. | ||
| And then it catches on. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's good. | ||
| I mean, I don't participate very much in it, but there's, I mean, I look at the stuff too, I get it, you know, but if it feels natural, you enjoy it, then you should do it. | ||
| But if you don't, like, I feel bad for people who just go along with it, even though it doesn't feel good. | ||
| Well, now there's new things like TikTok. | ||
| I can't keep up. | ||
| There's always some new sort of style of social media that you're supposed to adapt to. | ||
| And I'm like, okay, that's where I draw the line. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know much about that one. | ||
| I've had it explained to me a few different times. | ||
| I don't really understand what... | ||
| How TikTok's better. | ||
| Different than the other things that are going on. | ||
| It's an assault on your attention span. | ||
| It just sucks your attention span in. | ||
| I don't need any more of that. | ||
| It grabs it and drags it. | ||
| Because the videos start playing instantaneously. | ||
| You don't play them. | ||
| They play instantly. | ||
| You open the app. | ||
| They just play video after video after video. | ||
| And you're just like, ah! | ||
| It just hooks you. | ||
| I need more of that. | ||
| I know a lot of people that will say, I'm just going to look at it for a couple minutes. | ||
| And the next thing you know, an hour and a half is gone. | ||
| I'm like, what the fuck? | ||
| Where's my day? | ||
| Yeah, there's funny stuff out there. | ||
| I mean, I don't have a problem with it. | ||
| What do you do to entertain yourself? | ||
| Do you have a specific thing that you like to do when you wind down? | ||
| Do you like to watch documentaries? | ||
| I do watch a lot of documentaries. | ||
| I read a lot of memoirs. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I like those. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of music memoirs. | ||
| I'll read most books. | ||
| I'm going to give a shout-out right now. | ||
| I don't know them. | ||
| Richard Marks. | ||
| It has a great new book. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, I was reading it on the airplane yesterday. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| So he should know. | ||
| He's a social media guy. | ||
| Is he? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he should know it's working. | ||
| Countering everything I just said about my own shit. | ||
| His is working because I picked up his book and I think it's great. | ||
| It's really entertaining. | ||
| What's it called? | ||
| Oh, here he goes. | ||
| Laptop. | ||
| Jamie, you got it? | ||
| Let's see, we're going to put it up on the big screen? | ||
| Stories to tell. | ||
| Stories to tell. | ||
| Is that it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sorry, the tweet didn't blow. | ||
| That's what it's called. | ||
| Well, because I think anybody who's in my shoes in any similar capacity, they've got an interesting story. | ||
| There he is. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Is that live? | ||
| Hey, man. | ||
| Still got the messed up hair on purpose. | ||
| But everybody who came to L.A. to make it, I find their stories are interesting. | ||
| Or New York, wherever they went. | ||
| Do you contrast those to your own story? | ||
| Does it give you a feeling of understanding that everybody's weird little path to try to get to where they are is different? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| What do you mean more specific? | ||
| I mean just that your business like if you're if you're reading music memoirs that is your business and it's a strange business right and it's a business it's very much like comedy in a way that you know you're off with your first footsteps and good luck who knows where this journey is going to take you and it's fascinating to me I've read a bunch of comedians memoirs or autobiographies or biographies on comics And it's fascinating just because I contrast those to my own life and just think about this weird path that they | ||
| went on. | ||
| And I think of my own weird path and that it's a wild world you're carving out when you're carving a career in music or in comedy. | ||
| You're just kind of like hoping it works out and you have no idea. | ||
| Yeah, and that is what connects a lot of those stories is interesting. | ||
| Most people you're talking about, they come from nowhere. | ||
| They come from nothing. | ||
| And that doesn't mean they don't have a nice family life. | ||
| I just mean that no one's watching them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It could be anybody. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, talent is not, you know, it's not a genetic thing. | ||
| You know, it's like literally just thrown up in the air and it just somewhere falls on the brand of people around the world. | ||
| You know, so how does it connect to one person who then has the ability to figure out a way to make it through, call it a dream, whatever, and get there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's no blueprint. | ||
| The blueprints don't work. | ||
| Any template you might try to follow, it worked for that person, and there's just no reason for you to think it's going to work for you, too. | ||
| You might start out chasing that, but inevitably you're going to have to find your own path. | ||
| A hundred percent, but it's really interesting watching someone's path when you know that they already did it. | ||
| There's something about that, like reading about Kinison, like knowing that he already did it, just to read the path and how it all went down. | ||
| Yeah, and it's interesting, too, if you look at like, you know, Prince had a really good book. | ||
| It was actually a collection of things he'd written with somebody just before that he passed. | ||
| You read the book and it's interesting because of course you know he's going to be Prince, one of the more talented people that may ever walk the planet. | ||
| So you're reading it and you're hearing him get denied with demo tapes and you're hearing no one's believing in him, that he's a weird kid and all that. | ||
| But you know that he's Prince. | ||
| As you read the book, you kind of have a secret that... | ||
| You're unstoppable. | ||
| This stuff doesn't really matter what you're going through in your high school and you like basketball and this person denied and that person didn't want to be. | ||
| It's interesting, but what's actually most fascinating is you literally were destined to be Prince one way or another. | ||
| This stuff is almost inconsequential. | ||
| You're going to be Prince someday. | ||
| Well, it is fascinating knowing that he did become Prince, but you kind of feel the anxiety of the journey, right? | ||
| Like when you're reading about someone, even though you know it is inconsequential, you are. | ||
| There's no denying he became Prince. | ||
| But he didn't know that. | ||
| Wow, it was all going down. | ||
| No. | ||
| That's what's cool about it. | ||
| But it's fun to read. | ||
| You can read that, and you can hear the people who don't believe in him, and you can be like... | ||
| We all have a, I miss that one kind of moment, or I didn't see that, but like, imagine being the guy who's like, yeah, you know, I had, Prince came in and I didn't hear it. | ||
| I didn't hear it. | ||
| I remember the exact moment I first listened to Prince. | ||
| I was in an Audi Fox. | ||
| I had an Audi Fox. | ||
| It was his little... | ||
| Shitty front-wheel drive car. | ||
| I was driving on the Massachusetts Turnpike, and I had a cassette that I just bought. | ||
| And I just unwrapped it, and I popped it into the cassette player, and it was, I listened to I'm Gonna Be Your Lover. | ||
| I Wanna Be Your Lover, that song. | ||
| And it was the one where, you know, the cassette where him, it's like he's got no shirt on, and it's like he's just staring at the camera. | ||
| And I remember thinking, like, holy shit, like, who is this guy? | ||
| Like, this is just different. | ||
| It's like he's singing in a falsetto about being in love with a girl and his voice is incredible. | ||
| Or you could be that outrageous if you're gonna be really good. | ||
| We get a lot of the other, which is people who are outrageous and they're compensating for not really having much to sing or say, but he was fully loaded, he had all of it. | ||
| Well, he was that guy. | ||
| I mean, that's who he was. | ||
| I mean, it was outrageous because he was an honestly eccentric human being. | ||
| I mean, that really was who he was. | ||
| An insanely talented, eccentric human being. | ||
| You know, I met him once. | ||
| Actually, I met him with Dean Del Rey. | ||
| No way! | ||
| Yeah, at a club out in New York. | ||
| Maybe it's early 2000s. | ||
| And I forget what the club was, it was crowded, and somebody, this is a true story, somebody had come to me and tapped me on the shoulder and said, you know, Prince is here, he wants you to come sit down. | ||
| And I seriously, I started, I followed, and I thought I was gonna go sit with Prince William. | ||
| That sounded more believable to me. | ||
| That sounded like, that I believed. | ||
| And then we went over and it was obviously... | ||
| Prince Rogers Nelson. | ||
| Yeah, but it was a really funny night. | ||
| I'm glad Dean was there too. | ||
| We sat in a booth. | ||
| It was Prince and it was his lawyer bodyguard. | ||
| He had a lawyer slash bodyguard? | ||
| That's what he was. | ||
| And he was a very big guy. | ||
| And we sat in a booth. | ||
| And it's hard to imagine now that like, you know, the guy, he wasn't like being swarmed with people. | ||
| It was Prince, you know, but... | ||
| It's awkward. | ||
| It's like, you know, you're sitting, the four of us from the booth, just kind of like, you know, I know what to say. | ||
| And it's kind of loud, so if I did want to really have a conversation, it'd be difficult. | ||
| The bodyguard kind of nudges me and he says, you know, it's been 25 years since Purple Rain. | ||
| And I was like, oh, that's awesome. | ||
| And then he's sitting next to me. | ||
| He goes, excuse me? | ||
| I said, that's awesome. | ||
| He goes, what's awesome? | ||
| I go, that Purple Rain is 25 years old. | ||
| What a great record. | ||
| And he goes, great record? | ||
| I say, yeah. | ||
| He goes, well, tell him. | ||
| And he's pointing at Prince. | ||
| So now I'm like, he's a very large man. | ||
| He's like nudging me. | ||
| And I'm thinking, that's amazing. | ||
| Prince, seriously. | ||
| He cannot be insecure that people don't love Purple Rain. | ||
| But I leaned over and I said, you know, Purple Rain, like, wow, 25 years, what a great record. | ||
| And he kind of fanned himself. | ||
| He's like, oh, well, you think so? | ||
| And like, even Prince needed to hear once in a while that he was awesome. | ||
| How weird is it that his bodyguard, this big giant dude's like nudging you to tell Prince that he's awesome? | ||
| I felt like I got set up. | ||
| Like he knew Prince needed a compliment maybe. | ||
| I'd be nervous and he would go, of course it's good, motherfucker! | ||
| Yeah, I was nervous. | ||
| Well, it was awkward. | ||
| Like, what is it? | ||
| It's like the night at the Rocks where you just kind of sit in the booth just like, you know. | ||
| It is Prince, right? | ||
| It is. | ||
| And then like, you know. | ||
| And so you guys aren't really interacting? | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| Not a lot. | ||
| I think he just invited me just to come sit in his booth. | ||
| Just to sit? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It was very loud, but that wasn't the problem. | ||
| I don't know why I was asked to sit, but he was very nice. | ||
| He was very cool. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, I fucked up once. | ||
| Real bad. | ||
| I had an opportunity to see him live at the House of Blues in Vegas. | ||
| And he was in the foundation room, you know, that small room upstairs. | ||
| And I had a show, and my show was done by like 10 o'clock or something like that, and Prince was going to go on somewhere after midnight. | ||
| And it was like 11.30, and I was like, fuck, I'm tired. | ||
| I don't want to wait around. | ||
| And I fucked up. | ||
| Yeah, you did. | ||
| And it was like early 2000-ish, somewhere around then. | ||
| Well, you feel like you fucked up only because you never got it. | ||
| Well, it's hindsight. | ||
| You never had a chance to see him. | ||
| I was just being a bitch. | ||
| Like, stay up. | ||
| Power through. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of times you could say you couldn't see that coming. | ||
| That one you probably should have stuck around for. | ||
| You wouldn't get a lot of chances. | ||
| I think it was one of those, there was a lot of nights where I would do the UFC, and then after I did commentary, then I would do a show, and then after I did a show, I was done. | ||
| I was just beat. | ||
| But I still should have powered through. | ||
| If I had the opportunity today, I would have fucking won. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of times you do the wrong thing, but then you can say, well, yeah, but I got the story. | ||
| Your story sucks. | ||
| My story sucks. | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| I never met him. | ||
| I never saw him. | ||
| But I had a chance to see him in a small venue. | ||
| And they were setting it up for me. | ||
| They were going to hook it up. | ||
| If you're in bands traveling through Minneapolis, every time you went through there, no matter what, from like, maybe like 91 when we started... | ||
| Mostly up until he passed. | ||
| Every time your band went through town, somebody told you, you know, he's doing a private gig tonight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ooh. | |
| So, woo, where's that at? | ||
| And they'd tell you, and, like, you would, like, hang out, and you'd be like, you know, well, he doesn't go on until four. | ||
| I mean, it was, like, literally every time the rumor would circulate that he's playing right around you, right around the corner, you should stick around. | ||
| And he never did. | ||
| Really? | ||
| He just wouldn't show up? | ||
| I don't think he ever was gonna. | ||
| I think it was just the Minneapolis rumor nightly. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Because he liked to do that, and he would do that sometimes. | ||
| He liked to do those gigs or he liked to tell people he was going to do gigs and not show up? | ||
| No, I think he liked to just surprise people and play. | ||
| I mean, I could do that sometimes. | ||
| We're on tour. | ||
| You can go late night to where a bar band's playing and you can ask to use the gear and play a little bit. | ||
| When you're on tour, a lot of bands like to do that. | ||
| So I'm sure he liked to do that too. | ||
| And just go downtown Minneapolis and just hijack somebody's stage and play some music. | ||
| And if you do it a couple times, from then on out, rumor circulates that you're about to do it tonight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I've done that before. | ||
| And there's a place in Toronto that I used to do where I used to do this. | ||
| It's a weed bar. | ||
| And they had weird laws in Toronto. | ||
| I forget what the law was, but it was almost like it was some sort of a club. | ||
| I don't know if it was legal or not, but they had bongs in the front, literally like a head shop. | ||
| Then you go in the back room and there's like 150 seats and a stage. | ||
| And you go in there and everyone's barbecued. | ||
| Like they're smoking so much pot that there's no more air in the room. | ||
| It's all just pot smoke. | ||
| So you're just breathing pot smoke. | ||
| So I would do a gig at like a big place and then go there after the gig and do like a late night spot there. | ||
| Are those easy laughs? | ||
| I mean, everybody's already high. | ||
| No, man, it's bizarre. | ||
| Pacing's a little slow for everybody? | ||
| You're so high. | ||
| The moment you get in there, there's no air. | ||
| It's all just pot smoke. | ||
| So you're basically in some weird altered state trying to interact. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's the spot. | ||
| There's a video of me on stage there with the Iron Sheik. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's closed now. | |
| It's a ridiculous spot. | ||
| I think it's called the Comedy Underground, is that what it's called? | ||
| It's closed now. | ||
| It's closed? | ||
| COVID took it out? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| But yeah, that's one of those things that comics like to do. | ||
| I was in Denver once, just randomly. | ||
| I was doing shows, and I get off stage and Dave Chappelle's in the green room. | ||
| And I go, what are you doing, Dave? | ||
| And he goes, oh, I just decided to fly to Denver! | ||
| And I go, do you want to go on stage? | ||
| He goes, well, should I? I go, fuck yeah, hold on a second. | ||
| So I go back to the audience, and I go, hey, come back, sit down. | ||
| I go, Dave Chappelle's here. | ||
| So everybody's calling people from outside that already made it to the street. | ||
| Come down, and Dave does another hour. | ||
| And then he takes me out on the town. | ||
| Dave Chappelle knows these little speakeasies, Where there's these weird bars. | ||
| You go down an alleyway. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| And then a guy's waiting with a suit and he puts his hand up and they open up a door with no sign on it. | ||
| And you go in and there's this beautiful bar that seats like 30 people. | ||
| It's like one of those weird things. | ||
| He's that guy. | ||
| You know, he's that guy that he'll show up anywhere and do a show at 1 o'clock in the morning. | ||
| He'll show up at bars on his birthday. | ||
| He'll just show up. | ||
| And then by the time he's offstage, the place is packed. | ||
| Do you intentionally try out new material when you do something like that? | ||
| Would Chappelle do that? | ||
| Or you don't do your normal bits, would you? | ||
| I think he just does it to just do stand-up. | ||
| I think he would do his normal bets. | ||
| But open mic nights are a great place to stop in to do new material. | ||
| It's good to do new material at a place where the audience doesn't exactly know that you're going to be there. | ||
| So they may not be your fans. | ||
| Do you ever just jump up and do that with no material? | ||
| Or is that not wise? | ||
| The only time I ever do that is they have shows like that. | ||
| Like they have a show in Austin called The Riff. | ||
| And there's a wheel. | ||
| And they have all these subjects that the audience members will fill out forms. | ||
| And they'll fill out like an index card with like a subject. | ||
| And they throw it into the bucket. | ||
| And then they stick the subjects on the wheel. | ||
| And you just spin the wheel. | ||
| And whatever it lands on, then you start talking about it. | ||
| What might it be? | ||
| Like what would... | ||
| What? | ||
| Music? | ||
| Pharmaceutical drugs. | ||
| It could be music. | ||
| It could be premarital sex. | ||
| It could be whatever. | ||
| That's high-flying. | ||
| That's on the wire. | ||
| That's pretty good. | ||
| But the audience knows you're doing it, so it's a safety net. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| They know. | ||
| They're coming to see that. | ||
| Yeah, and if it's not awesome, well, nobody can be too disappointed. | ||
| It's not like you didn't take the gig seriously. | ||
| You just showed up. | ||
| We used to do that in L.A. too. | ||
| It used to be called Thunder Pussy, and they changed it to Stand Up on the Spot, which is a much more tame version of it. | ||
| Hey, wait a second. | ||
| I've got to ask you. | ||
| What about that? | ||
| Is it Byron Allen? | ||
| Byron Allen. | ||
| That show? | ||
| That show. | ||
| That's not on anymore, is it? | ||
| It's on at like 3 in the morning, weird hours. | ||
| That guy's made a billion dollars from that fucking show. | ||
| But what's up with that show? | ||
| Because he doesn't do it anymore, right? | ||
| I don't know, he might. | ||
| But it might be still around. | ||
| It's a really strange show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, hey Jacob, I understand that you like guitars. | |
| Well, exactly. | ||
| It's just like, So you just flew. | ||
| You're like Hawaii. | ||
| It's like there's no... | ||
| It makes no sense going from one thing to the other. | ||
| And obviously, like, it's a strange format, which is, like, they have to act natural. | ||
| But it's so obvious. | ||
| I mean, when you do any show, when you go to Letterman, yeah, you do an interview with somebody, and they'd have some things you're going to talk about, and it would feel kind of natural. | ||
| But that is, like, one person is going off hysterically about, you know, this car that he bought, and then it just goes right into skiing. | ||
| And, like, there's no... | ||
| There's nothing... | ||
| Natural about any of it. | ||
| Right, and Adam Carolla's talking about grilled cheese sandwiches, and then this guy's Gabriel Iglesias. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, that's the weirdest. | |
| So you don't like grilled cheese sandwiches, do you? | ||
| But I wonder if it's not on it. | ||
| They don't film it anymore. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think they might. | |
| They might. | ||
| They might still film it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can we look that up? | |
| It's one of the clunkiest shows that's ever existed. | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
| It's not good. | ||
| I've seen some really funny... | ||
| Everyone's talking over each other. | ||
| You can't... | ||
| It's strange. | ||
| But I wonder if he's not doing that anymore. | ||
| I mean, if you're a young comic. | ||
| That must have been a big arrival moment if you were cast to be on that show. | ||
| Not really. | ||
| Not really? | ||
| Ten years ago, you were nobody and they let you be on that show? | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| A big arrival moment is Letterman. | ||
| Not quite that. | ||
| Those are the big shows. | ||
| But that's a unique thing, that it was four comedians in one moment. | ||
| Yeah, but it was on at one in the morning. | ||
| Was it always? | ||
| I think it was a syndicated show, so I think it was very profitable for him. | ||
| You should do one. | ||
| The same version of it? | ||
| Like a version? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| Not a good model. | ||
| I think you should leave all this behind. | ||
| It's not like this is going well for you anyway. | ||
| We're comedians. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cut loose. | |
| There was only tape for one season. | ||
| It says they added more shows in 2014, which was seven years later, and they haven't... | ||
| No updates. | ||
| Wait, so there's only two seasons of it? | ||
| Yeah, and they're like 15 years old. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah, that's according to the Wikipedia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Because he went on to, like, his company just bought the Weather Channel a couple years ago. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm telling you, Byron Allen is one of, like, the most undercover billionaire characters in all of show business. | ||
| Yeah, he's made a shitload of money, and he made a lot of money off of that show. | ||
| Because it's a syndicated show, so you could sell it, and they always needed something. | ||
| But you don't think there's a spot for updating that format and having somebody do it? | ||
| It's a terrible way to do jokes. | ||
| Yeah, it's terrible. | ||
| Yes, I agree. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| Are you secretly harbored ideas about doing stand-up? | ||
| Am I selling it? | ||
| How well have I sold this idea? | ||
| Pretty good. | ||
| I'm getting sweaty. | ||
| Are you in? | ||
| I'm in, man. | ||
| I've got goosebumps. | ||
| Yeah, alright, bad idea. | ||
| You just can't. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| You can pull it off. | ||
| If you're a good comic, you can pull it off and be funny in those little chunks. | ||
| But it's so obvious that this is set up. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| It's like a bad acting gig. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's obvious you're acting. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You like that. | ||
| Why do you like that? | ||
| Look at your smile. | ||
| What about the rap battles? | ||
| Those ones, when they insult each other, it's kind of a similar thing. | ||
| There's no other natural format for this. | ||
| I'm not going to go down the road of telling you I know what is happening in that world, but it's kind of similar. | ||
| It's an unnatural environment to have people doing their Whatever it is that they like doing in competition, basically. | ||
| Yeah, but rap battling is kind of an art in and of itself. | ||
| That's a different thing. | ||
| Have you seen Roast Battle? | ||
| Do you know about Roast Battle? | ||
| No. | ||
| Roast Battle is one of the best shows at the Comedy Store. | ||
| And it became a show on Comedy Central, but they kind of fucked it up because they watered it down. | ||
| Roast Battle is a show that's at the Comedy Store that is... | ||
| It's my friend Brian Moses' show. | ||
| Him and Jeff Ross is a part of it, too. | ||
| And what it is is they'll have comics, and they'll let them know in advance they're gonna duke it out. | ||
| So, like, say if you and Jamie were gonna duke it out, you would know, like, hey, on the 14th, you guys are gonna have your night. | ||
| And so you would write jokes about Jamie for weeks. | ||
| And Jamie would write jokes about you for weeks. | ||
| And then you'd stand next to each other, and Jamie would be like, Jacob is Bob Dylan's son. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think I've seen that. | |
| Yeah, it's fucking great. | ||
| But then it's not happening anymore. | ||
| Oh, it still happens, yeah. | ||
| Oh, but you mean live, not a show. | ||
| It's live. | ||
| It's not a show. | ||
| It's better live anyway. | ||
| It's one of those things where they fucked it up turning into a show. | ||
| Look, I'm glad they did it as a show because I'm glad those guys made money and Comedy Central, you know, put a highlight. | ||
| It just... | ||
| Maybe, do they do that anymore? | ||
| Roast Battle's not a show anymore, right? | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is. | |
| Not on Comedy Central, I don't believe, no, but they're doing it online now from the Comedy Store, so it's sort of, yeah. | ||
| Perfect. | ||
| As long as they just leave it alone and broadcast it live. | ||
| The problem is Comedy Central, they wanted to get their greasy little PC fingers all over it and fuck it up, because it is literally the most ruthless show I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Brian Moses, who's the host of it, is one of the nicest guys ever. | ||
| And one of his things is everybody's got a hug at the end. | ||
| You talk shit about each other and then hug it out. | ||
| Well, most often I imagine those comedians are friends going into it, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| So did you see some at the end of it they weren't friends? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Really? | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Yeah, you see some of the lines that people would hit people with that hurt so bad. | ||
| And they would be talking about it like weeks later. | ||
| Can you believe that motherfucker said that about me, man? | ||
| Like... | ||
| But obviously you know going into this that's probably what's going to happen. | ||
| That is what's going to happen 100% of the time. | ||
| I've seen some of those, you know, the roast that Jeffrey Ross does. | ||
| What do you call it? | ||
| What roast? | ||
| What roast is that? | ||
| Yeah, like just roast. | ||
| The roast? | ||
| Yeah, like the roast of Rob Lowe or something like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, exactly. | |
| I mean, that's like, I'm happy you guys have that format and you guys deserve to always have that to just say whatever the hell you want. | ||
| But some of it is like, I can't imagine those two people are going to be friends again after. | ||
| I'm not a roaster. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| It's not my style. | ||
| I'm not interested. | ||
| I don't like being mean like that. | ||
| I definitely want to be mean while someone's sitting right there. | ||
| It's just like, if I don't like someone, I don't want to be around them. | ||
| And if I like them, I don't want to say mean shit to them. | ||
| And if you don't say mean, it's not going to be as funny. | ||
| The people that are willing to go hard in the paint, they're the best at it. | ||
| Tony Hinchcliffe's probably the best at it ever. | ||
| He's the most vicious. | ||
| Yeah, but I guess also if you allow yourself to be roasted, I mean, I don't care how invincible you think you are, nobody's bulletproof. | ||
| Some of that's got to hurt. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, for sure. | ||
| But, you know, if you can take it, it could be a fun time. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| They're not calling me anyway, but no, I don't think I can take it. | ||
| It's not fun. | ||
| It's not for everybody. | ||
| But it's a style of comedy, you know? | ||
| It's like the dozens. | ||
| You're talking shit about people, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've seen, of course, some wild ones. | ||
| Sometimes you cringe and feel terrible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that is one of the things that brought me back to the Comedy Store. | ||
| When I went to the Comedy Store in 2014, the first time I saw that, I hadn't been in the Comedy Store in like seven years, and I saw that and I was like, wow. | ||
| It's really a joke-writing show. | ||
| Obviously, you're insulting each other, but it's all new stuff. | ||
| And one of the things that I told comics, I'm like, there's so many guys that are doing this, that are writing, and girls and whatever, that are writing these bits. | ||
| That they're doing such a good job crafting this material, but then when you watch the regular act, they're not taking any chances. | ||
| They're not writing any new things. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because they've known that there's this deadline, this looming date of doom that's on two weeks from now. | ||
| Did the internet change that for acts, for music acts? | ||
| The internet, being filmed every night, changed their ability to do the same shtick every night and set up songs at the same stores. | ||
| I mean, they can still do it, but I would think there's some amount of self-conscious, I wouldn't say embarrassment, that... | ||
| Your fans who have been watching every show of this tour, they're watching you introduce this song with the same story. | ||
| It's an act. | ||
| Now you know. | ||
| I mean, you always kind of thought so, but now you know because you just watched this person set up the song the same way the last ten nights. | ||
| Because there's great storytellers who set up songs. | ||
| Bono would tell. | ||
| He would like to talk a lot. | ||
| And then what happens when suddenly the magic of I know for bands, a lot of people brought that back a little bit. | ||
| They curtailed that because it's just not a good look. | ||
| You've basically scripted your bits to set up songs. | ||
| But it's been fascinating to me Watching you guys do that, that I watch... | ||
| For me, it's the first time watching, but you've got friends on the side of the stage, and you're telling jokes you've told before, and they'll come up to you afterwards and say, you killed it tonight. | ||
| But you're telling a joke you know they've heard 20 times, but it's kind of like a singer, songwriter, or anybody in a band who had a great performance of that song tonight. | ||
| You know the song, but you killed it tonight. | ||
| It seems so interesting to me that you can do that with comedians. | ||
| You'll tell your friend, even though you knew those jokes, boy, you nailed it tonight. | ||
| And you, the person telling the jokes, is not self-conscious that my friends are over here having heard me tell this bit 20 times. | ||
| No, they know that we know. | ||
| So it's like they're fine with that. | ||
| If the audience had seen the bits, that would be a real problem. | ||
| But you're not self-conscious telling this joke for the 20th time with your friend over here. | ||
| No, not at all. | ||
| That's interesting to me. | ||
| No, because the comics will tell you, I like how you're setting that up this way. | ||
| I like how you cut that part out. | ||
| I like this new tag you added. | ||
| And that's part of the reason you probably do it, too. | ||
| Some feedback from other joke tellers. | ||
| For sure, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, it helps a lot when someone's there and they could say, you know, last night you said it this way, but tonight you said it that way, and that way's better. | ||
| Or it's also, there's a thing that happens with comedy where you really don't know what works until you do it in front of an audience. | ||
| Like, I would imagine you could write a song completely without any audience member, just you and the band members, and you guys could put it together and record it and not have any feedback from anybody else other than you guys, and then it would be an amazing song. | ||
| That's impossible. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's no gratification to tell a joke and just, you know it's funny. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, not just that. | ||
| It won't be done. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It needs to be performed. | ||
| But you can write a song, like you just said. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it is better to share it with somebody, because that is a lot of the motivation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't write songs for me to just listen to my mixtape of my own music in my bedroom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So you do want... | ||
| It doesn't matter who you are. | ||
| Anybody tells you that they don't, they're not into that, there's lying. | ||
| People want... | ||
| Positive feedback. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And that's part of the exchange is I wrote it, I created it, and now I want to see how people react to it. | ||
| Even Prince. | ||
| But I can record in the studio. | ||
| Yeah, of course, even Prince. | ||
| We can record it, and I can hear it come out of the speakers, and I can get a rush of how that's what we wanted to do, and that sounds good. | ||
| You don't get any rush unless you tell the joke. | ||
| No rush unless it's in front of an audience. | ||
| And you don't know. | ||
| There's many times where I wrote a bit and I've got it set up. | ||
| I've got like the beats. | ||
| I've got the concept. | ||
| I've got a point I'm trying to make. | ||
| But then I go on stage and parts that I didn't think are going to be funny at all are the funniest part. | ||
| I'm like, wow. | ||
| And then you realize, like, oh, they're seeing it for the first time in a different way. | ||
| They don't know what's coming next, so they're seeing it. | ||
| It's almost like you don't have the ability to see the joke. | ||
| You're constructing it blind. | ||
| You're putting it together, and you kind of know how it's going to go out, but you don't really know until you're performing in front of people, and then when they see it for the first time, they decide. | ||
| And then you have bits you thought were going to be the strongest part of the set and nobody getting it. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And the thing you thought was just one joke to get to the next joke was actually... | ||
| But those stories are countless for people. | ||
| I would say almost every record I've done, my favorite song I thought was going to be the best that nobody noticed. | ||
| And then the songs are like, really? | ||
| That one? | ||
| That's the one that surprised me. | ||
| Because you don't know. | ||
| How could you know? | ||
| Yeah, you don't know what it's going to be like to hear that song for the first time when you have no idea what the lyrics are. | ||
| And you don't know what kind of... | ||
| The people who are listening don't know what kind of work you put into it. | ||
| They don't know if it was easy or hard. | ||
| Warren Zevon's Where Was London is apparently like that. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, that was like an afterthought of the session, and it's his signature song. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| If I'm wrong, forgive me on that, but that's a story I've heard. | ||
| And there's other stories like that. | ||
| People have countless stories of the song that got over was the last one anybody really cared about. | ||
| Is there any one of yours like that, that you thought were going to be giant and they didn't pop? | ||
| I thought they were all going to be giant. | ||
| I'm still surprised they're not all giant. | ||
| I wouldn't say so. | ||
| I mean, I don't get too involved. | ||
| I never have gotten too involved with that, like going to record companies and telling them I think this should be a single. | ||
| I can tell you what my favorite song is, but that's what they do for jobs. | ||
| They have hopefully good experience in knowing how to do that. | ||
| I'm hopefully gonna like all of them. | ||
| So if somebody wants to promote one or the other, it's never mattered to me too much which one. | ||
| So what is the process when you bring an album to the record company and they hear it for the first time? | ||
| They're not involved at all until you slap it down on wax and you bring it to them, right? | ||
| For me, that's how it's all. | ||
| I've never had a record company with their hands in a record. | ||
| I've never been uncomfortable or been told to do one thing or the other. | ||
| And I've worked with lots of different people, different labels. | ||
| And you hear those stories of people who feel like the record company made them do this or that, or they went more commercial. | ||
| No one's ever been in my business making records like that, from a record label, no. | ||
| So when you bring it to them, it's a completed project? | ||
| Mostly. | ||
| I mean, usually you have an A&R person who hopefully you like who comes around the sessions and work together. | ||
| So they know what's going on. | ||
| And so they give you some feedback or they talk to you about it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And from my experience, it's always if I disagreed with the feedback, that was fine. | ||
| Sometimes they have good ideas. | ||
| It's better off to see them as an asset in a team rather than anything else. | ||
| Otherwise, it's bad for everybody. | ||
| That's what authors say about editors, that you have to have some sort of a working relationship where you trust that person and appreciate them. | ||
| Yeah, and hopefully they can be really helpful to you. | ||
| And people in your student studio are not different than editors really in a way too. | ||
| That's what record producers maybe could do for you. | ||
| I use record producers. | ||
| I don't really need one because I know how to make records on my own, but it's somebody else, the different set of ears that can help you edit and be honest with you. | ||
| And so you bring the music to them, and then they will say, hey, Jacob, this is a single. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I call them focus tracks now. | ||
| Focus tracks? | ||
| I mean, I'm not in the world of singles. | ||
| When does that shift? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It just happened recently, I think. | ||
| Focus tracks? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, because a single, you know, doesn't that bring up the picture of like a 45 and go on radio stations and like, I got some wax, I got to play this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, and then videos and all that. | ||
| That's... | ||
| I think they just call them focus tracks now. | ||
| I like that term. | ||
| That's a cool term. | ||
| It's really passive aggressive and it's really not here nor there. | ||
| How's it passive aggressive? | ||
| Just like it's a single because you think you're making singles, but we don't really do singles anymore. | ||
| So we're not going to look at it that way. | ||
| We'll call it a focus track. | ||
| And then you wonder, well, who's focusing on what? | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| I'm confused. | ||
| So how does it work now? | ||
| What's important? | ||
| Radio exists, but is it important? | ||
| Well, it's not the same. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Than what you and I grew up with. | ||
| And that's okay. | ||
| Is serious still? | ||
| I mean, is that valuable? | ||
| What's valuable? | ||
| Streaming? | ||
| Streaming. | ||
| Streaming. | ||
| And is it because... | ||
| Because you make so much money when they stream your songs. | ||
| You're lying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah, man. | |
| Well, you know, that talk about something happened. | ||
| Somebody's making a lot of money. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know how that happened. | ||
| Somehow they figured that out. | ||
| These motherfuckers are clever. | ||
| You know, and some of the people who, like, I mean, put anybody in this chair does what I do. | ||
| Like, they can probably explain to you, like, how it happened, but we don't know when it happened and how it stuck. | ||
| That, like, we're just going to take your music and, you know, you're going to make zero, zero, like, 0.5 cents per 50 streams. | ||
| I mean, like... | ||
| That's really affected a lot of people greatly. | ||
| It's got to. | ||
| But when you say, you ask, what does count? | ||
| What does matter? | ||
| Streaming. | ||
| But in that world... | ||
| But it doesn't count in the same sense that record sales counted 20 years ago. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I mean, honestly, like... | ||
| 20 years is wrong, too, right? | ||
| It's more like 25, right? | ||
| Since what? | ||
| Since people were selling loads of records? | ||
| Napster. | ||
| Like, that was the... | ||
| Like, 2000? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, that changed everything. | ||
| Record company had a chance to really not screw that up. | ||
| You know, those guys at Napster, they wanted to, like, party together. | ||
| They wanted to, like, do business together. | ||
| Record business said no. | ||
| And don't ask me how the film business, you know, figured that out and protected themselves better, but... | ||
| I remember being around and hearing those conversations about the Napster stuff, and record business put the finger to them. | ||
| I mean, nobody could see what was coming, except the Napster people. | ||
| It was just gonna all dissipate, and the record business never recovered. | ||
| I remember finding out about it that you could just download almost any album You just hit that button. | ||
| Hopefully you don't get interrupted for the next three days and you got that right. | ||
| Yeah, I was like, this is the craziest shit I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| And I had them all on one of them old wheel-style iPods. | ||
| Yeah, remember like your friend would like, you know, hey, you want to download my hard drive? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| And you'd borrow it and like... | ||
| Yeah, I saw that. | ||
| I mean, I wasn't that defiant about it. | ||
| I wasn't going to, you know... | ||
| I just thought... | ||
| I wasn't maybe the size of an artist that could really object or, you know... | ||
| I saw it happening and if... | ||
| If Metallica can't shut it down, I don't think I'm going to be able to shut it down. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And in trying to shut it down, they really developed... | ||
| It's a very bad taste they put in everybody's mouth. | ||
| Yeah, they recovered, but I don't think they were totally wrong, to be honest. | ||
| They weren't wrong, but I think Lars, the tone that he had about it was incorrect. | ||
| Well, they seem to be drawing a line between the artists and the fans, and that's what was upsetting to people. | ||
| And everybody was really just... | ||
| No one had any idea. | ||
| And Metallica, I think, themselves have... | ||
| I don't know how they word it, but they're not proud of that moment. | ||
| But they weren't wrong for trying to stop the avalanche. | ||
| They saw where it was coming. | ||
| And to some degree, they couldn't stop it. | ||
| And then you have loads of artists who can't work. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| People like to say they don't want to hear about art and commerce being connected. | ||
| But young bands don't make a living. | ||
| They've got to go get jobs. | ||
| They can't play for you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For a lot of acts, you know, selling CDs out of your car or whatever, that was enough to make a nice little living for themselves. | ||
| And with that gone, those people have regular jobs now. | ||
| Do you think it's possible for someone to develop a YouTube-style streaming service where the artist can upload directly to it and then they can profit off of it and they can maybe split the profits? | ||
| You know, the way YouTube does it with content creators, like say if you decide to be a content creator and you want to make some videos, you're splitting the revenue with YouTube, but you can make a tremendous amount of money. | ||
| That doesn't exist with streaming, right? | ||
| It's not the same kind of situation. | ||
| I think, you know, again, I'm not an expert in this, but you're talking about such a small little file. | ||
| Like, yeah, in concept, what you're saying makes sense, but how are they not just going to steal that and it'll be up somewhere else for free within five minutes? | ||
| But doesn't YouTube have a music service? | ||
| They have YouTube music. | ||
| Do they do that with YouTube music? | ||
| Do they share revenue with the artists? | ||
| The way they do it with video? | ||
| What they do with video is... | ||
| But is that exclusive? | ||
| A lot of people give YouTube shit about their censorship, and they deserve that shit. | ||
| But they also deserve accolades for the way they've allowed content creators to make money. | ||
| They've kind of said, look, we'll work with you. | ||
| We have this crazy platform, the biggest video platform in the world. | ||
| You can upload your videos, and you can make a considerable amount of money off of this YouTube platform. | ||
| It's pretty nice that they do that. | ||
| If they could have something similar with music, and then people just adopt it, because I know a lot of people, they're using, there's a YouTube music app now. | ||
| You know, they can have that sort of same sort of similar situation. | ||
| Artists can become very popular inside of that world. | ||
| But is that exclusive? | ||
| Would that be exclusive with that artist? | ||
| The only way it could be is if you would have a copyright on that. | ||
| Like if you have a copyright on a video, like say if you upload a video on YouTube and then someone else puts it on their channel, you could have that struck. | ||
| You have a copyright strike, you can take it down. | ||
| I think at the end, you know, you're talking about... | ||
| Asking a younger people today specifically to go pay for stuff maybe getting for free for a long time I don't think but that's not what it is You don't ask them to pay the revenue comes from advertising So you you you ask people to pay for the service the same way they pay for Spotify the same way they pay for Apple music It's not an exorbitant amount of money. | ||
| It's a small amount of money per month, but in that you get an unlimited amount of music or I'm for any experiment. | ||
| I think that's a good experiment. | ||
| Because it's free-falling right now. | ||
| And I'm okay. | ||
| If I was coming up today, I don't know how you'd get started. | ||
| Well, I have friends that are artists that are musicians today, and it's a fucking grind. | ||
| Like, really talented ones that are barely getting by. | ||
| And it drives me crazy. | ||
| And I don't understand it. | ||
| And we're all missing out. | ||
| Yeah, we are. | ||
| We're missing out on great talent. | ||
| Yes, we're missing out on their work. | ||
| Yeah, because they... | ||
| First of all, record labels don't... | ||
| I came up with the days where the record label wasn't expecting your first record to do anything. | ||
| Maybe the second one would, but it's the third one they really want. | ||
| They're building you. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that might take seven years. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that's unheard of now. | ||
| So again, we miss out just because a lot of those people that need that time to develop, need the support, need the funding, they've got to have jobs and they can't devote all their time to doing it for us. | ||
| So we're the ones who miss out on the end. | ||
| There's always been that situation, too, where you have these really hungry, talented artists and they get taken advantage of by whether it's executives or whoever is the money people that figure out how to lock these people into some long-term contract where the lion's share of all their work and creativity is going to be enjoyed by the company and not by the artists themselves. | ||
| You always have these crazy... | ||
| That part of the models, I mean, hopefully there's enough pie to go around everybody. | ||
| It's kind of okay with that. | ||
| I mean, there's a certain number you get to where you probably don't care anymore how much they're making because you're making so much also, you know. | ||
| But... | ||
| But that model, that's not a mystery, especially if you're coming up the times when I came up. | ||
| We already knew all that. | ||
| If you got locked into a bad record contract or somebody screwed you over, it's kind of on you a little bit. | ||
| It's not the 50s or the 60s where we stepped into things and didn't know. | ||
| And it has nothing to do with my background. | ||
| I never got screwed over, though. | ||
| The worst people I've ever met in this business were in the bands. | ||
| They were not the labels because you know who they are. | ||
| You know what they're doing. | ||
| They don't really change. | ||
| You won't be fooled. | ||
| It's the people that you have camaraderie with that you think are in the trenches with you that you find out. | ||
| Those are the people that let you down more, that you get hoodwinked by. | ||
| The business people, there's no secret what they're doing. | ||
| Have you been hoodwinked by other artists? | ||
| Well, everybody has. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, I just, I'm not making a point about artists are shitty. | ||
| I'm just saying the big bad record business, like, not for me, not my days. | ||
| I've worked with some great people. | ||
| You know, some really supportive, positive people who've been a great part of my career. | ||
| You know, I actually can't, I can only name, like, I can name out of 30 years, maybe like one or two people I came across who I hope I never see again in that end of the business. | ||
| Otherwise, like, that's a pretty good ratio. | ||
| That is a very good ratio. | ||
| So, essentially, there's always going to be people that take advantage of people that don't really understand or are too eager and accept a bad contract. | ||
| Yeah, but there's no excuses for not reading that. | ||
| We're just too far along. | ||
| It shouldn't be that easy to fool someone today. | ||
| I've been offered a lot of bad contracts, but I didn't sign them either. | ||
| It's that same kind of situation. | ||
| And I've been in situations where I've looked at a contract, and that's the nature of most business deals is someone's going to do better than somebody else. | ||
| So when you look at that and you realize it looks like you're, no matter what, going to do better. | ||
| This isn't a good situation. | ||
| I don't take that as a personal attacker. | ||
| Okay, well, this isn't good for me. | ||
| I'll go find somewhere else to do this. | ||
| They're just establishing shitty rules for the game for you. | ||
| But there's no connection. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But they're in business. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's like, again, Prince, what did he say? | ||
| They owned his name, right? | ||
| I think it was something, I'm going to get the quote wrong, but somewhere around the time where he changed his, just the symbol. | ||
| Somebody said something to him about the record business. | ||
| He said, no, I'm not in the record business. | ||
| You're in the record business. | ||
| I make music. | ||
| And that's kind of it. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| But there's no similarities to them. | ||
| There's no reason that you're a great talent that you should also have a great understanding of the business side of things. | ||
| You're not really interconnected for most people. | ||
| But we are far enough along now where hopefully you have somebody with you and things are more transparent that you shouldn't get locked into these horrible deals anymore. | ||
| Do you remember when Courtney Love wrote that piece where she was explaining the music, I think it was in Spin Magazine, where she was explaining the music business in terms of where the money goes and how they fuck over artists? | ||
| Do you remember that? | ||
| I don't remember that, but then don't get in the music business. | ||
| That's not new. | ||
| I mean, is that a revelation? | ||
| Did you read that? | ||
| You're like, wow. | ||
| It was shocking to me because I'm not in the music business. | ||
| So to me, I was like, wow, so that's how they do it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was confused when it went into how much- You know, if you're a band, bands don't do this anymore. | |
| If your band sells two million records, everybody in that band's probably making a lot of money buying houses, right? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| And that CD cost $18. | ||
| You're making your money, you're pretty happy. | ||
| It's only down the road where someone says, okay, you guys, you did buy a house. | ||
| Did you see how much that they made? | ||
| And you are shocked for a second to realize you take that CD and divide it up between yourselves, your band, and with the record. | ||
| Yeah, they make a lot more than you. | ||
| That's why they're in the record business. | ||
| And some of them are too smart to be in the bands. | ||
| Or not smart enough. | ||
| Well, it depends on what you can handle. | ||
| I couldn't handle that kind of lifestyle myself. | ||
| I invent things out of nothing. | ||
| My whole livelihood is reactionary to other people creating something that I can now work with. | ||
| I want to make it from scratch. | ||
| Yeah, that's a weird situation to be in, relying upon other people's creativity for you to make a living. | ||
| Yeah, but you can do that when you don't have a creative bone in your body. | ||
| Some people are really good at numbers and math. | ||
| Some people are really creative. | ||
| And if you recognize early on, well, I would like to be... | ||
| I mean, that's a lot of the great people who work outside of bands once wanted to be in a band, but realized, like, I don't have it. | ||
| I love music, but I want to be a part of it anyway. | ||
| I want to help someone else do great things. | ||
| But I'm not the guy to be in the band or the girl. | ||
| If you have your own music and you own your music, what does a record label do for you in 2021? | ||
| Well, what do you mean? | ||
| If you own your own music? | ||
| If you create your own music, right? | ||
| Say you hire... | ||
| What could a record label do for you? | ||
| Well, they have money that you don't have to promote and spend and put you on tour. | ||
| You know, young bands need... | ||
| They can't... | ||
| Van or no van. | ||
| It costs money to tour. | ||
| A lot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So they basically loan you the money. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| That's how they can be good for a young band, really. | ||
| Or any band. | ||
| You don't have the tools, the assets to get your music in lots of places. | ||
| I mean, there's more opportunities with social media, of course. | ||
| The good news is anybody can do it now, and the bad news is anybody can do it now. | ||
| It just means it's crowded, and it's hard to know what anybody's up to. | ||
| But record labels, they have a great purpose, of course. | ||
| Some people say they're banks. | ||
| They're just funding your trip, and you have a big bill at the end. | ||
| And they have a connection to streaming services. | ||
| Yeah, they have all those contacts that you wouldn't have on your own. | ||
| Now, when a person is like, say if you're a new band, and you get signed by a record company, how does someone find out about you? | ||
| I mean, what is the primary way they find out about you? | ||
| If it's not the radio, which it always used to be, do they find out about you through streaming services? | ||
| Like, are there channels that are sponsored that people get excited about because they know that this channel is where new interesting music gets broken? | ||
| We're both gonna do some homework after this, and if I find out, I'll let you know. | ||
| I mean, really, that's the question. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, because it's just jammed up everywhere. | ||
| So a lot of great things about the way things work now. | ||
| The models that we had before were really effective, too, and at least you could put yourself on a path that if you did X, Y, and Z, maybe your band would get a shot. | ||
| Play your clubs, get your demo tape together, maybe a rec company wants to work with you, and they're gonna give you some money to practice. | ||
| You know, you make that record, you make a video, and they give you some money to go on tour. | ||
| Like, this was a path to maybe being a band that was successful. | ||
| So you take that away, you know, it is just every man and woman for themselves just, you know, trying to find a way to quote-unquote kind of get lucky. | ||
| If you're an established act, you got opportunities. | ||
| If you're doing it the other way, it's really everybody who's trying to get lucky. | ||
| And when someone sees what that person did, by the time you figure it out, it's too late. | ||
| It's got to do something else. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| I mean, as far as I know. | ||
| But I'm also not brand new. | ||
| If I was 21 years old, I'd probably understand this better than I do. | ||
| The way I came up was just a different... | ||
| It was just a different model. | ||
| And that's okay that a lot of that's gone. | ||
| I mean, it's changed so drastically. | ||
| I mean, you remember in the late, like, 90s, you know what the Diamond Award was? | ||
| No. | ||
| That's when they had to invent it. | ||
| It was, you know, gold record, platinum record. | ||
| It wasn't enough. | ||
| People were going, like, 12 times platinum. | ||
| So they invented the Diamond Award, which was 10 million. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| The Diamond Award, yeah. | ||
| That's how much money was going around in those days before the internet, really. | ||
| How many people buy CDs today? | ||
| Do they still sell? | ||
| I don't know where you buy one. | ||
| Online, I guess? | ||
| I guess. | ||
| Amazon? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I guess where are you going to play it? | ||
| I mean, let's find- Laptops don't even have hard drives. | ||
| I think vinyl sells more than CDs right now, but I'm going to get a breakdown real quick. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| No, no, it actually flopped. | ||
| It was for a while like a bonus if your company wanted to spend some money to make vinyl with you. | ||
| Now it's kind of like, you can throw in CDs, but the production of that is like, you know, it's the cardboard you put around it. | ||
| It's cool now to have vinyl. | ||
| CDs, they don't seem cool. | ||
| But why would you have CDs? | ||
| I mean, streaming is one thing. | ||
| I mean, CDs are... | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Streaming's 83% of music industry venue. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Sync. | ||
| What is sync? | ||
| That's getting your songs in TV and commercials and you get licenses. | ||
| That's 2%. | ||
| Physical. | ||
| 9% is physical. | ||
| So that's live performances? | ||
| No, physical is a combination of CDs and LPs. | ||
| Oh, physical things. | ||
| Oh, I get it. | ||
| And then digital downloads are 6%. | ||
| So physical copies are just 9%. | ||
| So it's taking up the bulk of that pie right there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Streaming. | |
| Streaming takes up the bulk of the pie. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| So CDs, and it's kind of in 2020. What is happening in 2020, it says what? | ||
| It's more vinyl than it is CD. What are we looking at? | ||
| The green and the blue, that's CD, vinyl. | ||
| The green is vinyl, which is the largest amount. | ||
| Vinyl's not like blowing up. | ||
| Anybody who tells you it's back, it's not buying Kiss records in those days. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's a boutique-y kind of thing, and it's cool. | ||
| And what's cool, it costs a lot. | ||
| Some people buy it from Urban Outfitters and just put the thing on the wall, like decorations. | ||
| I guess you could do that. | ||
| But vinyl's like $28. | ||
| Do you enjoy the sound of vinyl better? | ||
| It's absolutely better. | ||
| But at the end of the day, I don't really care. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| That question, like, what's your, is it vinyl, mp3s, or, you know, CDs? | ||
| Well, no, yeah, vinyl sounds the best. | ||
| But I don't have a vinyl player in my car. | ||
| I can't take it hiking, so, like, I'll listen to an mp3. | ||
| Like, yeah, I just want to hear the song at the end of the day. | ||
| I'm caught up in that. | ||
| I bought this digital machine thing that attaches to your iPod. | ||
| I never fucking used it. | ||
| Digital machine thing. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know the name of it. | ||
| I'm trying to describe it. | ||
| I guess not. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| But it attached. | ||
| It was like a brick that attached. | ||
| It was as large, if not larger, than my iPod. | ||
| And it attached to the iPod. | ||
| And what it did was it changed the sound and tried to make it more true to what the actual vinyl recording was like. | ||
| What year is this? | ||
| Is it recently or this is like 20 years ago? | ||
| No, at least 15 years ago. | ||
| And I remember holding this stupid fucking thing in my hand and going, why did I buy this? | ||
| And you're listening to it on what? | ||
| Listening to it with a nice set of earbuds? | ||
| No, I had it over the ears. | ||
| Well, it does, yeah. | ||
| It's just, you know, look, you ever go online, you want him to go crazy, you ever go look at like, you know, turntables that cost $20,000. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, and the speakers and the cables, I mean, that's... | ||
| You know, different kinds of gram for your vinyl. | ||
| What are you going to use? | ||
| But, you know, then you ask yourself, whatever you were listening to with that gadget, like the record you were listening to, was it even made analog? | ||
| Was it made on digital equipment to begin with? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because a lot of people do... | ||
| I mean, what's... | ||
| People are... | ||
| They make digital records on Pro Tools and then they put them on vinyl. | ||
| Like, it's... | ||
| Isn't that a little peculiar? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Holy shit, a $50,000 turn. | ||
| That's fucking dope as shit. | ||
| Isn't it? | ||
| Oh, you get lost looking at these things. | ||
| God, that's so pretty. | ||
| You could buy that for $50,000. | ||
| What a bargain. | ||
| But then you have to have your room tuned. | ||
| You have to have somebody set the acoustics in your room, put baffles. | ||
| I mean, you'll never be done. | ||
| Well, Henry Rollins, who's a gigantic record collector, showed us his setup and he has these enormous towers in his living room that are like six feet tall and they're a quarter million dollars plus of just- Where those are speakers? | ||
| Just the speakers, yeah. | ||
| Oh, it's awesome if you got the bread and you got the room because it takes up a lot of space. | ||
| I mean, you can't have your cables on the floor. | ||
| Yeah, that's what he's got. | ||
| That's his setup. | ||
| Oh, he's got ATM machines. | ||
| It looks like a robot. | ||
| Oh, well, you see, he's good. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's pretty awesome. | ||
| Yeah, well, he's a freak. | ||
| He's got a lot of CDs over there, too, though. | ||
| Is that him? | ||
| That's his setup. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| But he just loves the sound. | ||
| But it's all in. | ||
| You have to go all in. | ||
| See those cables? | ||
| I mean, the speakers are off. | ||
| You don't just take your desk and throw a turntable on it. | ||
| You have to do all this. | ||
| Those speakers are out of control. | ||
| I can't even imagine what's going on with those. | ||
| I think those are, like I said, I think they're a quarter million dollars, right? | ||
| Isn't that something? | ||
| Something like that, yeah. | ||
| Look at that fucking thing. | ||
| Hold on, scroll down, what does it say? | ||
| 200k. | ||
| 200 grand, yeah. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Wild shit, man. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| It looks like exercise equipment. | ||
| Yeah, you gotta be really into sitting there and listen to that stuff. | ||
| And look at what's on the front of the amps there. | ||
| Yeah, what are those things? | ||
| I think you have to turn them on, you do like the superhero three finger. | ||
| That's pretty wild. | ||
| Yeah, well he doesn't do music anymore, he just listens to it. | ||
| Most of what he does when he performs, he does spoken word tours. | ||
| He's sort of shifted into his own version of stand-up comedy. | ||
| It's very humorous stuff and interesting takes on things, but he's not imprisoned by that format where he has to get... | ||
| If you're doing stand-up, people want it to be funny, funny, funny, funny. | ||
| They want to leave laughs. | ||
| Yeah, he does spoken word stuff. | ||
| He's got memoirs. | ||
| He's very smart. | ||
| It's really good, though. | ||
| Yeah, he's very smart. | ||
| Very interesting stuff. | ||
| I've always liked his stuff. | ||
| I like him as a person. | ||
| He's a fascinating cat. | ||
| The way he's managed his life. | ||
| He has no relationships. | ||
| He's like, it's too hard. | ||
| It's too much work. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| It is funny. | ||
| But when you talk to him and you realize how nuts he is in a good way. | ||
| I don't know when last time he did do an actual music. | ||
| I don't think he could put his body through that. | ||
| That's a young man's game when he was doing it. | ||
| Oh yeah, like that song, Liar. | ||
| Yeah, when he would get red in the neck. | ||
| That was also back in his powerlifting days, too. | ||
| We had this fucking neck that started at the top of his head and came straight down to his shoulders. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that's a very physically... | ||
| It's hard to age, we'll say, when so much of your show is physical. | ||
| I mean, Iggy Pop does that. | ||
| He still gets around, but... | ||
| Well, my friend John Joseph from the Cro-Mags, John's gotta be 60 years old, or close to it, and he still performs. | ||
| He wraps up his ankles and warms up like he's about to get into a fight. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| But he also does Ironmans. | ||
| He's constantly training for Ironmans, and he's very strict with his diet. | ||
| Look, there's guys my age who are getting their knees replaced and hips replaced. | ||
| They jump around a lot on stage. | ||
| 25 years later, it's like any athlete that's wear and tear. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maynard blew his hip out that way. | ||
| He's got a fake hip. | ||
| Well, I mean, just the simple jumping off the riser. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| 20 times a night. | ||
| Oh, fuck yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so you have to find a way to, if you want to keep doing it. | ||
| Some people just age out. | ||
| They don't want to do it anymore. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's okay, too. | ||
| You can change your mind to go do something else. | ||
| No one says you had to be in a band on stage your whole life. | ||
| There's no contract you ever made that I'm aware of. | ||
| That said so. | ||
| You can do something else. | ||
| But if you want to keep going, you have to adapt. | ||
| But I think for many people, and it's the same in the world of comedy too, the thrill of performing, it just makes everything else seem so boring. | ||
| Any other kind of job that you would have, even if it's satisfying and you enjoy it. | ||
| There's many times where I've come off stage with my friends where we're like, can you imagine if you could never kill? | ||
| There's people out there in this world who've never gone on stage and killed. | ||
| They don't even know what this is like. | ||
| They don't get it. | ||
| They're missing Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's right. | ||
| And you deserve that. | ||
| I mean, the people who don't allow themselves to figure out what that is are obviously missing out. | ||
| But the world won't work if everybody figures that out. | ||
| There's going to be a lot of things that don't get done. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| But the point is, once you've already experienced that, for many of these people, you've been a rock star. | ||
| It's got to be really hard to not be a rock star anymore. | ||
| Well, you just don't want your life to be just about getting it done and just having a... | ||
| I mean, that's like, what kind of life is that? | ||
| And live for the summers or when you can get a few weeks to go skiing or something. | ||
| I think most people wouldn't like that. | ||
| And most people don't have the opportunity to not have those kinds of jobs and go to a high-rise. | ||
| But like, you know, I won't say the lucky people, but if you do what you do, yeah, it's impossible to imagine that kind of life. | ||
| Yeah, I just imagine a guy like Mick Jagger that is pushing 80 years old, who is still, like, we played a video the other day of him doing his, like, dance routine, like, at a dance studio, going over his stuff and dancing, and still got the moves! | ||
| I mean, can you imagine? | ||
| And what you thought, like, go ahead and picture yourself at 25 years old and someone says, you know, gonna come go see a show. | ||
| It's this guy, he's 80. I mean, even like the Vegas crowd was done by 80. You know what I mean? | ||
| Like the Rat Pack, they weren't doing that kind of stuff at 80. Well, they were always drunk. | ||
| But it's a different, yeah, but at 80 is not what it was. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I mean, 80 is like, I don't know, what's 80? | ||
| Maybe 80 is the new 65? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But even then, at 65, who the fuck is dancing like Mick Jagger is? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's what's crazy. | ||
| Well, that's one of the few. | ||
| They can pull it off because he's still fit and he loves doing it, obviously. | ||
| But that's a big part of the show. | ||
| Nobody really wants to go see the Rolling Stones sitting in chairs. | ||
| I would still go, but it's not the show that the reputation is. | ||
| And it's amazing that... | ||
| It's pretty astonishing to do that. | ||
| It's hugely astonishing. | ||
| I mean, he is the canary in the coal mine. | ||
| But if he couldn't, they'd be done. | ||
| Because it's a touring band now. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's not a record-making band, really. | ||
| That's the thing, right? | ||
| And I wanted to get into that. | ||
| With a lot of bands, especially classic bands like The Stones, people don't necessarily want to hear their new stuff. | ||
| They really want to hear this entire catalog of amazing songs that goes back decades. | ||
| So what is that like when a band stops making new music and they just sing the old music? | ||
| That's got to be a very different feeling as an artist because isn't part of being an artist creating and isn't that part of the thrill of being an artist? | ||
| You can't name anybody that's not true of. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| Even the Rolling Stones. | ||
| They want to hear your hits. | ||
| And even they are disappointed that there's not a lot of enthusiasm for a new record. | ||
| Nobody is free of that. | ||
| You cannot name anybody who's been around for any amount of time. | ||
| The 30 or 40 years into their career, people are as amped up as the quote-unquote glory days. | ||
| That's just part of the arc. | ||
| And hopefully your ego accepts that so that you can be a performer and put stock in that you have a catalog that people like, even if you're disappointed that it's from 20, 30 years ago. | ||
| But there's an alternative. | ||
| There's nobody who's been hot for like 40 years. | ||
| Well, they had an album that came out. | ||
| I guess the last one that people wanted to hear their new stuff was in the 80s. | ||
| It's Tattoo You. | ||
| It's 1981. But I think after that... | ||
| I like Voodoo Lounge. | ||
| There's been records, but you want to talk about going into the stadium, that's tattooed. | ||
| It's a long time. | ||
| But what was in the 80s? | ||
| What did they have in the late 80s? | ||
| Steel Wheels. | ||
| Steel Wheels. | ||
| Even the Stones, that's how it works. | ||
| Has anybody dodged that? | ||
| I couldn't tell you. | ||
| It's the nature of it. | ||
| If you're lucky, you burn hard and fast. | ||
| That's your ride. | ||
| And then maybe you can have a career because of it. | ||
| And that's that intoxication that a lot of people just can't get out of their mouth is just being the center of attention and the prom king. | ||
| You can't for your whole life. | ||
| You get one graduating class, this is your turn, and you're going to make room for somebody else and move on down and have a good career. | ||
| But you can't sustain that. | ||
| I can't think of anybody who has it. | ||
| Yeah, I can't think of anybody who has seen that. | ||
| You might have your favorite artist that you think continue to do great things after people stop listening. | ||
| But in reality, as far as their popularity, it's a pretty predictable arc. | ||
| But it also seems that there's a point in time where they just stop producing new stuff. | ||
| Almost all of them. | ||
| It's hard making records. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Well, it can be. | ||
| And right now, a lot of them don't want to make records because what's the point? | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's no money in it anymore. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| Stevie Nicks has said that. | ||
| And I get it. | ||
| She's like, it takes a lot. | ||
| I got to work really hard. | ||
| And it's expensive. | ||
| And nobody buys them. | ||
| Why would I go do one of those? | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| But that's a different era that she's maybe speaking from. | ||
| But I do get that feeling that nobody wants to feel like they're working really hard and turning themselves inside out. | ||
| And there's no opportunity for anybody to get this. | ||
| And the attention span is so little. | ||
| I don't think she's saying she doesn't want to do it again if she can't do rumors again. | ||
| I don't think that's what she's saying. | ||
| She's just saying, like, I put everything I got into this. | ||
| And I want it to be noticed. | ||
| And that's... | ||
| I want to go do a show and I want people to care about the new songs, but they don't buy records, and I get it. | ||
| So why did a lot of the more established, older acts just not do it so much anymore? | ||
| There's no bigger budget for them than it is for anybody else in the record business. | ||
| Because nobody's selling records, you know what I mean? | ||
| And Paul Simon, I love one of his most recent records, his wristband song. | ||
| I thought that was just fantastic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
When was that? | |
| We looked that up a year. | ||
| It's maybe six, seven years ago or so. | ||
| But the point is, it was great. | ||
| If you like Paul Simon, this is Paul Simon. | ||
| It sounds great. | ||
| These songs, he's never going to let you down as a songwriter. | ||
| But did it react in the way that the earlier stuff did? | ||
| Like, no, of course it didn't. | ||
| It's not his fault. | ||
| It's just not the world we live in anymore. | ||
| Yeah, it's unavoidable. | ||
| And there's also a thing, there's a limitation in time, right? | ||
| If you go to see a band, go to see Bruce Springsteen, that guy's got so many fucking hits. | ||
| Even though he does like four-hour concerts, it's going to take four hours to get through half the hits. | ||
| Yeah, he makes records people still really care about, I think. | ||
| But he's got a very large audience, even if a small portion of them are coming to the table. | ||
| He's, I think, stayed relevant. | ||
| He's one of the rare ones, right? | ||
| He is. | ||
| I only thought of that because you mentioned him. | ||
| But that's not easy. | ||
| And part of his, you know, I think that what works for him is that he is willing to do whatever it takes to make a record regardless of who it's meant for or the popularity. | ||
| I mean, he's got one of the biggest rock records of all time. | ||
| I mean, you don't have to do that twice. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| How many times can you reinvent rock and roll? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And is it your job to do that for everybody again? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, so... | ||
| But his shows are so dynamic and exciting. | ||
| And those songs, unlike most acts, when we're going to Bruce's shows, people do want to hear the new songs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Interesting. | |
| They really do. | ||
| So we found the exception. | ||
| Yeah, but how prevalent are the records? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I couldn't answer that. | ||
| But I do know he's very unique as a performer. | ||
| I mean, the difference, too, with him and other people is... | ||
| He writes songs in his career is really about a relationship with his audience. | ||
| He keeps them in mind, I think, when he writes these songs. | ||
| He doesn't want to let them down. | ||
| But it's this really nice line that he rides of pleasing himself, but also respecting the relationship he's built with these people for many years. | ||
| He's not one of the guys who says, or artists in general, who says, I'm doing what I'm doing and I don't care who does or doesn't like it. | ||
| I think he really respects his audience very much. | ||
| And he's found a way to make the records he really wants to make. | ||
| It's some kind of sleight of hand trick that he pulled. | ||
| Well, he's authentic, right? | ||
| That's the thing that's always come through about Bruce Springsteen. | ||
| He's very authentic. | ||
| Everything he does, the way he talks about things, it's very thoughtful. | ||
| You can tell he's being genuine. | ||
| He's really thinking about what he's saying. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| Yeah, you too, man. | ||
| As long as you're buying what we're selling and think it's real. | ||
| You too, man. | ||
| You too. | ||
| When was the last time Bruce put out an album? | ||
| He had a Western... | ||
| No, he has his most recent one. | ||
| For you, what's it called? | ||
| Letter to You? | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Am I saying it right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, letter T. How long ago was that? | ||
| October 2020. Oh, wow. | ||
| Yeah, that was during the pandemic, I think, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| And it was great. | ||
| I'm sure it's great. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It's always great. | ||
| Yeah, no, he's one of the most prolific guys ever in terms of high-quality stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's got a song on There's a Ghost. | ||
| It's as good as any song he's written. | ||
| Really? | ||
| He has very few people that can keep that level of quality high. | ||
| Most people have a shitty record. | ||
| They just do. | ||
| Expect it. | ||
| Plan on it. | ||
| Nobody gets out for free. | ||
| You can't be inspired every year. | ||
| You just can't be. | ||
| You can't be your best every year. | ||
| Now, having this gap of nine years, has it been about nine years since your last album? | ||
| Uh, yeah. | ||
| But, you know, I was done. | ||
| We could have had it out before, in the shutdown, we waited. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so it would have been eight years. | ||
| But this, uh, during this gap, was it always in the back of your mind to put something else out? | ||
| Or did you have to accumulate enough ideas where you felt like you could... | ||
| Well, you're always accumulating. | ||
| Always. | ||
| But, you know, like I said, we... | ||
| Record 2012, I tour every summer, minus these times where you just can't right now. | ||
| Um... | ||
| So there's a point when you're starting out that you just feel like if you're not touring, then you better be writing. | ||
| And when you're done writing, you better be making that record. | ||
| And you can get off that ride for a minute. | ||
| But I never made records that speedily. | ||
| I mean, in the 1960s, people made two records a year. | ||
| We don't do that anymore. | ||
| Typically, it's like a record every three years. | ||
| But I've had longer gaps than that. | ||
| Two records a year seems insane. | ||
| It's totally insane. | ||
| And they were great. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Look at the Beatles. | ||
| Their whole career is eight years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| It took me nine to get this record out. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So isn't that crazy? | ||
| But nobody should beat themselves up for that. | ||
| There's something in the air. | ||
| It was a totally different thing. | ||
| It does not relate. | ||
| No one can look at that model and think, should we be doing that, too? | ||
| You're not the Beatles, for starters. | ||
| And take some time. | ||
| Don't give me every song you wrote this year either, by the way. | ||
| Just pick your 10 favorite ones. | ||
| I don't need 18 songs. | ||
| Pick the 10 best ones. | ||
| What do you listen to when you're... | ||
| I mean, do you have a range of kind of music that you listen to? | ||
| Do you have particular genres that you enjoy only? | ||
| No. | ||
| Anybody would say the best of any genre. | ||
| I like songs the best. | ||
| And I feel that same way when I was younger. | ||
| We were talking earlier about the lifestyle music. | ||
| I never really... | ||
| Anybody who had a great song, it didn't bother me what kind of jacket they were wearing or what shit they put in their hair. | ||
| I like the song, and I still like music that has the best songs. | ||
| That's what moves me the most. | ||
| It's not the beats, it's not the vibes, it's not the stage diving, it's none of the peripheral stuff that can be pretty cool. | ||
| It's really just, I like good songs. | ||
| And you like them in all genres? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Do you listen to country? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, sure. | ||
| What are you into? | ||
| Well, you say country, that's a very broad term now. | ||
| It is now, right? | ||
| I don't know what it is now, but when you say country, to me, I still think of George Jones and Johnny Cash. | ||
| So the newer stuff, I'm not saying it is or isn't country, but I don't identify so much. | ||
| I don't think most people do. | ||
| Well, it's kind of corporate country, a lot of it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is. | |
| It's just continuing to sell you what you already like. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They found a formula and they just keep hammering it. | ||
| Most businesses do that anyway. | ||
| They just keep selling you what they know you already like. | ||
| Why mix it up? | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it's interesting. | ||
| I did hear a couple songs just maybe yesterday flying out here. | ||
| I came across just two different times countries. | ||
| And it was interesting that the two songs I heard seemed so... | ||
| Typical of a lot of it, which is no one's really singing about themselves. | ||
| They're singing to you, the listener. | ||
| They're talking about your life. | ||
| You've got very wealthy people talking about all they need is a pickup truck and a shack and you. | ||
| And everything's awesome. | ||
| It's like, well, I don't think you're living in a shack and I don't think your pickup truck's probably pretty tricked out. | ||
| It's kind of telling you about your life and maybe that's what they like about it. | ||
| Maybe there is something that is similar to country music that's always done that, but I'd rather have Merle Haggard or Carter Family or any of those. | ||
| I'm not the first one to... | ||
| It's not my revelation, it's pop music. | ||
| You can't just put a fiddle on it and call it country. | ||
| Right, but there's guys out there like Jason Isbell and Sturgill Simpson. | ||
| There's people that are doing... | ||
| There's country elements to those things. | ||
| That's almost more like Tom Petty rock. | ||
| Some of it. | ||
| And actually, Tom Petty's music, that world bit his music pretty good, and they turned that into, particularly his Wildflowers record. | ||
| That's like a model for new country music, which I don't think he had any say in one way or the other. | ||
| That is true if you really think about a lot of his music. | ||
| It is kind of almost like American Girl. | ||
| That's kind of almost a country song. | ||
| Yeah, it's no mystery that they identify and they've kind of shortened that gap, the close in the distance, because it's rock, essentially. | ||
| And then the Eagles, are they country? | ||
| They're not country music either, but there's country elements. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I have no problem with any of it. | ||
| You like it, you like it. | ||
| I just mentioned it because you asked me, do I like country music? | ||
| So it's important to solidify what is the different kinds of country music. | ||
| A lot of these genres are kind of open-ended, right? | ||
| Yeah, well, country and rock certainly is very blurred. | ||
| But there's lots of different kinds of rock, so it's easy to put those two pretty close together. | ||
| But do you take time to just sit down and listen to music? | ||
| Or do you just listen to music? | ||
| Do you consume music while you're doing other things? | ||
| Yeah, unfortunately, like most people do, even if you thought you were hanging on to that thing for long, over time it's just slipped away. | ||
| You just showed us Henry Rollins' studio. | ||
| Like, yeah, if I had that studio, that situation, and I had it, yeah, I'd go in there and just shut the door and listen to music. | ||
| And I can't shed a new light on that experience with music, how it is different with vinyl. | ||
| It is something about it that's different. | ||
| And we all know what that is. | ||
| No one needs to hear me say what the difference is. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| I don't have a situation. | ||
| But you don't do that anymore when you get older as much anyhow. | ||
| Records cost a lot. | ||
| I used to buy records we did when you liked one song and you might like the rest. | ||
| If you bought it for $6.99 and it sucked, you just didn't care. | ||
| Sorry, I think your band's pretty cool, but I'm not spending $28 to help you out. | ||
| It's a lot. | ||
| You're going to come home with four records for over $150, $125 or something. | ||
| It doesn't matter how much money you have. | ||
| I just don't think the format is worth it. | ||
| It's difficult. | ||
| Because you can just get it in a digital format. | ||
| Unless you have that connection to the experience of putting on a turntable, that's worth the money. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because that's an admission to a theme park almost. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You're getting something out of that. | ||
| And bands, they do, when they make vinyl, they really care a lot now. | ||
| We do honor whoever's going to bother to spend money on these things. | ||
| Give them everything you've got. | ||
| Think about it. | ||
| Work hard and make this something special for whoever does decide that they want it. | ||
| And appreciate that instead of streaming it, they're gonna go have the experience of buying a piece of vinyl. | ||
| Part of the process of Tarantino writing, he was explaining, was that he goes into his record room. | ||
| He has a record room in his house. | ||
| He goes in there and just locks himself in there and starts playing songs and playing actual physical records. | ||
| And then through that, he gets inspiration for scenes and inspiration for moments and characters. | ||
| It means something to a lot of people to put that needle down on that record. | ||
| Well, the investment's different, obviously. | ||
| But it goes deeper than that. | ||
| You're talking about vinyl. | ||
| Vinyl had very important parts of that vinyl. | ||
| There was the first song you're going to start your record with, and then there was how you're going to close out side one, right? | ||
| And then how you're going to open side two, and then what's the last song on the record? | ||
| There's like four out of ten spots that were really crucial. | ||
| It wasn't just a collection of your best songs first, like CDs. | ||
| When we started sequencing for CDs, it was just typically your best song first, your shittiest song goes last, because that's all anybody's going to do. | ||
| They're going to listen to it in one straight order. | ||
| They're probably going to leave the room within three songs. | ||
| So they may never even get to the end of the CD. Do they still have... | ||
| Sorry, go ahead. | ||
| No, records you can live with one side or the other. | ||
| It's not just that they sound better. | ||
| And I still make records... | ||
| Recordings with that in mind. | ||
| Because we used to make records, when you listen to records, your favorite records, sometimes there's purposely a shitty song on the record. | ||
| Because you can't have 10 singles on a record. | ||
| I mean, thriller maybe. | ||
| There was an arc to it. | ||
| And sometimes you'd throw in a waltz to kind of clear the palette for the next song. | ||
| You'd set up the next one with something here. | ||
| It was like a show. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Right, hills and valleys. | ||
| Yeah, and that's why a lot of what they call deep cuts or something on records. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A deep cut to me when I was younger meant like, that's for me. | ||
| That's not going to be a hit song. | ||
| That's going to be something that the artists work really hard on. | ||
| It's not going to be a hit. | ||
| That's going to be for me. | ||
| Now a deep cut means nobody heard your song. | ||
| Nobody cares. | ||
| Do they still have those record players where you stack records on top of each other? | ||
| That was a good few records. | ||
| Terrible, right? | ||
| That's a good few records. | ||
| That was a thing that they did for a while, though, right? | ||
| Yeah, but you also know how when your needle went to the end of the record and then picked up and came back? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was a sign of, like, you don't have a good turntable. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I didn't know that too long ago. | ||
| So the turntable's not, the needle's not supposed to do anything other than play? | ||
| Yeah, it just goes to the end and it's just going to sit there and make that skipping. | ||
| And then you pick it up. | ||
| So if it does it for you? | ||
| Piece of shit. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Because I remember being a kid at parties and they would stack records on these things and like, this is the wildest shit ever. | ||
| You don't even have to touch it. | ||
| It'll just keep playing a new record. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But then they're sitting on top of each other, chewing each other up. | ||
| Yeah, it was shitty vinyl, too, though. | ||
| The vinyl you were buying as a kid was garbage. | ||
| Oh, it's a different vinyl? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| The real good vinyl, you know, was, like, I think that ended, like, maybe mid-60s, 70s. | ||
| Take your records when you were a kid, and they'd go like this, and you could, like, fan yourself, and, like, you know, you could make a noise. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's not great vinyl. | ||
| Oh, what's it like? | ||
| It's like shaking a book, yeah. | ||
| Oh, so it's stiff. | ||
| Yeah, it's just more gram vinyl. | ||
| It's just better. | ||
| But it wasn't a problem listening to those records when we were kids. | ||
| I had no problem with it. | ||
| They sounded great. | ||
| No, they did. | ||
| Well, there was also the experience that people don't get today, where you open up that album, and a lot of them, especially a double, like Kiss Alive 2, or Kiss Double Platinum, like, ooh. | ||
| You open it up, and it was a book. | ||
| It was like there was images in there. | ||
| There was pictures of them on tour. | ||
| There was all kinds of stuff that would draw you into the band. | ||
| Long gone. | ||
| Long gone. | ||
| But, you know, I don't hold a torch for it. | ||
| No? | ||
| I mean, you miss it. | ||
| That's nostalgia. | ||
| But, you know, I don't like being in conversation with people who just dislike how it is now. | ||
| Like, whatever, man. | ||
| Let's move on. | ||
| There's other stuff. | ||
| I mean, what are you going to do? | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Just going to be that unhappy guy just sitting around talking about how things were better when you were a kid? | ||
| You're right. | ||
| They probably were. | ||
| But, like, nobody cares. | ||
| Move on. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| Because what's the alternative is you don't do anything. | ||
| You don't buy anything anymore. | ||
| You don't listen to anything. | ||
| You don't enjoy anything. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And there is still plenty to enjoy. | ||
| It's just we're getting it in a different way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But there is more of it. | ||
| And you're a cliche, by the way. | ||
| Every generation said the same thing. | ||
| Of course, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Every generation's saying that the good old days were better. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And they're going to do that about this generation because, oh, before you fuckers with your holograms, we used to actually watch music videos. | ||
| Now you're inside of them. | ||
| Have you seen a hologram show? | ||
| I have not. | ||
| I have not. | ||
| I mean, like... | ||
| Well, I'm thinking about really... | ||
| I should have said augmented reality more than holograms. | ||
| I'm back at, you know, the tent where there's 30,000 people jumping up and down to a guy with a laptop. | ||
| I'm still trying to figure that one out. | ||
| So the hologram... | ||
| You need to get more ecstasy. | ||
| Maybe, I don't know. | ||
| That's all it is. | ||
| Yeah, if you go to those shows... | ||
| Those shows, if you go to an electronic music show... | ||
| There's no amount of ecstasy... | ||
| There's some people that love to dance, and that's why they're doing that. | ||
| And some people just love to be out and partying. | ||
| But a lot of those fucking people are tripping balls. | ||
| I would say 100% of them. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| Not a lot of people sit around listening to reggae music if they're not high either. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| The interesting thing about these electronic music concerts is that that's one of the things that revitalized Vegas. | ||
| It's because people could go to these electronic music concerts and this guy was just pressing play on a laptop and doing this shit. | ||
| Everybody was going crazy. | ||
| Millie Vanilli helps everybody. | ||
| That guy, what a life those guys had. | ||
| Until they got busted. | ||
| Isn't that funny to you though? | ||
| This is okay. | ||
| Hit the button. | ||
| This guy makes like $50 million a year being a DJ hitting the space bar. | ||
| And then Milli Vanilli, they danced, they worked their ass off, they tried. | ||
| You bought a real record. | ||
| There were real people singing on that record. | ||
| It wasn't them. | ||
| But they humiliated those guys. | ||
| Okay, they got caught. | ||
| But now, I mean, I watch a little bit of the 4th of July stuff. | ||
| Nobody was singing or playing. | ||
| Nobody. | ||
| Nobody cares anymore. | ||
| And we shouldn't care. | ||
| Technically, it's too big of a feat to pull that off at times, like Super Bowl. | ||
| No one's ever going to sing. | ||
| It's just too big. | ||
| Too many things can go wrong. | ||
| But go back for a minute and think about how everybody's minds were blown and they were angry burning Milli Vanilli records. | ||
| Because they found out that those were not the two guys who sang on the record. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| Somebody did sing on the record. | ||
| You were buying a record that people wrote and sang. | ||
| Whereas today, you're often not buying anybody's anything. | ||
| And you're okay with that. | ||
| I wonder what happened to those dudes. | ||
| Well, one of them, I believe, killed himself. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oof. | |
| Yeah, no, I found it really sad. | ||
| And I found the irony totally crazy that like... | ||
| You still bought the record, you liked it, and somebody was singing on it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, you feel a little fooled that it wasn't them, but should these guys be sent out to pasture for their whole lives and be humiliated because you still got something that was pretty good that you liked? | ||
| I feel like one of them put out an album where he did sing. | ||
| They did. | ||
| They went out... | ||
| Yes, I know a lot of stuff, you might be surprised. | ||
| I think they did go out, and they wanted to dance, and they wanted to sing. | ||
| They had very heavy accents. | ||
| And they learned to sing, and they tried. | ||
| And I don't think it was even possible that they could turn that thing around. | ||
| And they had these accents that were really heavy, but it's a terrible story. | ||
| Well, it used to be a thing if you got caught lip-syncing at a concert, people were pissed off, but now they don't give a fuck anymore. | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, it's a lot of what happens. | ||
| And then you put, unfortunately, the tables have turned where bands have to tell you, you know, we play live, we don't use tapes. | ||
| It's like, you have to defend that. | ||
| You want people to know that we're not doing that, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, you know, it has a... | ||
| A lot of bands do that. | ||
| And, you know, whatever moves you should do, but remember when people do that, when they play with tapes on it, they're restricted by these tapes. | ||
| So they can't go off the script at all. | ||
| And imagine yourself as a comedian. | ||
| What if you just had to do that? | ||
| You could not go off script. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which is when you play with tapes, I'm sorry, when you go see, you know, Def Leppard, they do not use tapes. | ||
| You know those stacked vocals you hear on those famous records? | ||
| They're not young men and they go out there and they insist on, from what I understand, insist on It'd be so easy to have just fly in those walls of background vocals. | ||
| But from the time they came up and from their integrity, they seemed to refuse to do that. | ||
| But they're alone in doing that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Most bands do... | ||
| No, I'm not gonna... | ||
| I mean, I just watched this Fourth of July thing and it was just like... | ||
| You got like four people playing guitars and I'm hearing like a million sounds. | ||
| It's just like there's nobody here. | ||
| And I'm not surprised, but then my mind just goes back to this was so... | ||
| 20 years ago, this was so insulting and you want to destroy these bands for how dare you? | ||
| The only justification that I've ever heard for using the lip sync is some artists do a lot of physical shit on stage where they're like dancing and jumping around and doing... | ||
| That's the first time. | ||
| That's right away you can tell. | ||
| In those award shows, when people have this big dance thing, By the second verse, if they're not huffing and puffing, there you go. | ||
| It was limited before. | ||
| You had to maximize and minimize your dance routine to what you could sing. | ||
| People have been dancing and singing for a long time. | ||
| It's not a new thing. | ||
| Tina Turner. | ||
| James Brown. | ||
| They had to work together with You're singing and you're dancing and you had to know, well, if I do that stuff, I'm probably going to be winded and can't sing. | ||
| So they had to work balance. | ||
| Now it's just like, don't worry about the singing. | ||
| We got that. | ||
| We got the record. | ||
| Let's get a good dance routine together. | ||
| But if someone does sing and dance together, the impact of watching them pull it off, like James Brown when he was in Zaire opening up for the Muhammad Ali fight, holy shit. | ||
| That video is one of the most iconic videos of a person performing ever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Pink does that. | ||
| She flies around upside down and sings. | ||
| And when you see that, you can see things next, you can feel it, and it's moving. | ||
| That's what separates some people from other people. | ||
| If you can't sing and dance, then just pick one or the other, but don't pretend you can do both, because some people can. | ||
| And she really does hang from those fucking things, and she fell once and really fucked herself up. | ||
| But you've got a superior voice, and you've got somebody who really can trapeze-style maneuvers. | ||
| It's just interesting when you just think about how people were so punished 20 years ago when you found out there was one little tambourine in the background that wasn't live and real and people just felt like you fooled them and they were pissed. | ||
| And you might still feel like that and I might because you were around them, but if you're young today, you wouldn't know the difference. | ||
| You're not expecting the act to just give you what they're able to do. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, at some point they just let it slip out, just let it go. | ||
| At some point, everyone just collectively thought, like, I don't care. | ||
| They accepted some fakeness. | ||
| Yeah, but it is showbiz. | ||
| It's not surprising. | ||
| And there are parts of it where it's technically just not possible. | ||
| Have you been paying attention to this Britney Spears conservatorship thing? | ||
| I know of it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's very bizarre. | ||
| I just started paying attention to it this past weekend because a bunch of artists started hashtag Free Britney. | ||
| And I was like, okay, what's the story here? | ||
| And apparently her father has a conservatorship over her where she's not even allowed to get pregnant. | ||
| Like, she can't take her IUD out, allegedly. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I want to make sure this is true. | ||
| Allegedly. | ||
| I've heard that. | ||
| I've also heard that's not true. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Well, I hope it's not true. | ||
| But the other thing is that... | ||
| You still think... | ||
| What? | ||
| I think she has a partner. | ||
| I think you should back off that one. | ||
| She has a partner? | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Wait. | ||
| Did I lose? | ||
| I just lost. | ||
| Did you lose me? | ||
| No, I didn't lose you at all. | ||
| I hear you. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know much about that. | ||
| I know what it means, but I don't know why she can't get out of it. | ||
| I don't understand it, because the judge just denied her to be free of this conservatorship. | ||
| Her father has control over her finances, and her father is in control of her career, but she's 36 years old. | ||
| I would need a lot more information just on... | ||
| I mean, how much time has to go by before you can prove that she can take care of yourself? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, why... | ||
| She's clearly... | ||
| How long has it been? | ||
| She's clearly loony, but there's a lot of male artists that are loony, too. | ||
| Like, they're not in control by their father. | ||
| Like, just because you're loony doesn't mean... | ||
| I mean, we have a long history of loony people. | ||
| We can make a list right now of some loony guys out there who, like, hope they probably could use it. | ||
| But, yeah... | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| Looney's got nothing. | ||
| Looney's great. | ||
| We love Looney. | ||
| The idea is that it's to protect her. | ||
| This is the idea, is that if you don't have some sort of control over her life, she'll go nuts. | ||
| Isn't that part of being a person? | ||
| That's growing up, right? | ||
| How does a grown adult have a conservatorship over someone who... | ||
| Obviously, she's not incapacitated. | ||
| How is she going to hurt herself or lose money? | ||
| She's just going to go nutty and spend all her money, but it's her fucking money. | ||
| Isn't it? | ||
| Yeah, if you're a band and you want to go to Vegas and gamble all your money away, you're 100% allowed to do that. | ||
| You talked to MC Hammer? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a lot of guys. | ||
| Mike Tyson, that's your prerogative. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You make a dollar, it's your prerogative to blow it. | ||
| Yeah, that's why I don't understand this. | ||
| If it's physically going to hurt yourself, that's a different story, of course. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But I haven't heard that. | ||
| But she could do that. | ||
| Yeah, you could do that anytime you're alone. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah, this has something to do with her finances. | ||
| It has something to do with control over her life. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I know enough to know that it sounds really crazy, and I know she just recently tried to end it and it was denied. | ||
| Well, the judge denied it, which is crazy. | ||
| I don't know what case you'd have to prove about somebody to have them stay in that situation. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, if you can talk and you can eat and you can go on stage and kick ass like she does, she still performs on a regular basis. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It seems to me like if she wants to go throw all her money off a cliff tomorrow, she should be allowed to do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That's what's weird. | ||
| Who gets to say she can't do that? | ||
| I've never heard of a situation like this before. | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, that's a money-making machine, right? | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| They want that cash to keep coming in. | ||
| Whatever it is, it begins with that. | ||
| She hasn't performed since January of 2019. I saw that today. | ||
| She's retiring because she can't get out of the conservatorship? | ||
| She's been trying to get out of it for a long time, right? | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I'm trying to read through it to see if there's anything that makes sense that we haven't said, but I can't find anything that makes sense. | ||
| So this is just pre-COVID, just a couple months before the pandemic hit and everything locked down. | ||
| No, a year before. | ||
| 2019. January of 2019. Okay. | ||
| Yeah, so that full year, right. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know much about that, but nobody ever retires anyway. | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, not if they're having a good time. | ||
| How many rock stars? | ||
| You know what's a great story? | ||
| Is that Searching for Sugar Man story. | ||
| What's that guy's name? | ||
| Rodriguez? | ||
| Yeah, Rodriguez. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| What if it was just made up? | ||
| It'd be crazy if it was. | ||
| What are you saying? | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| What are you saying? | ||
| I don't think about that movie. | ||
| Well, I have a friend from South Africa who told me he was injured over there. | ||
| That would be the way you'd know. | ||
| Otherwise, plenty of people, it could have been, it was this close to being maybe Spinal Tap. | ||
| I saw Spinal Tap when it came out, and I fell asleep because I didn't get it, and I thought these guys were assholes. | ||
| So maybe it was that good. | ||
| No offense to the artist, because I learned about him from that documentary, but it did occur to me at some point, like, wait a minute. | ||
| How would I know? | ||
| This is, you know, maybe it's... | ||
| Is this a real... | ||
| Because we never heard of him here. | ||
| We never heard of him here. | ||
| But the stories that were most compelling is people in South... | ||
| He was like Van Morrison to them. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| I knew a guy from South Africa who told me when he was a kid... | ||
| They had heard all these crazy rumors about him, that he died in a car accident, that he committed suicide, this conflicting story, but he was a huge hit over there. | ||
| Well, that's interesting. | ||
| You can't do that now. | ||
| No. | ||
| If you're big anywhere, you're big all over. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because it's just a universal radio system, which is streaming, and we're all listening to the same thing. | ||
| But isn't that amazing? | ||
| You could be that size of an artist in South Africa, right? | ||
| It was South Africa. | ||
| And then the rest of the world really hasn't heard you. | ||
| Not only is the rest of the world not heard of you, but you don't know you're a big artist in South Africa. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Was he painting houses? | ||
| He was a construction worker. | ||
| He was living in poverty. | ||
| And then he goes over there and performs in front of sold-out arenas. | ||
| You saw the documentary, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a wild documentary, man. | ||
| There's a lot of us sitting around wondering. | ||
| I wonder how I would do in South Africa. | ||
| Maybe I don't know. | ||
| Maybe no one's telling me. | ||
| Maybe there's a huge thing on it. | ||
| But today, no. | ||
| You'd know today. | ||
| Well, that's the thing, right? | ||
| There's always some artists that do really well overseas. | ||
| There's a guy named Arge Barker, who is one of the biggest stand-up comics in all of Australia. | ||
| He's fucking huge in Australia. | ||
| Sells out theaters multiple nights in a row. | ||
| But in America, he's just a regular comic. | ||
| But in Australia, he's like their top dog. | ||
| It's just weird. | ||
| Yeah, I'm surprised, just because the internet connects everybody. | ||
| But maybe he's there playing his act more there, physically. | ||
| Well, he is, definitely. | ||
| But it's just, for whatever reason, he caught fire over there. | ||
| But the live experience has a lot to do with it. | ||
| You can still have a large presence in America if you don't go to Europe as an act, as a band, and put that time in. | ||
| The songs being streamed, that's not going to be enough to translate to a show. | ||
| If that's the case, why did Rodriguez take off in South Africa when he'd never been there? | ||
| Well, that's a fluke. | ||
| Yeah, but it can happen. | ||
| It did happen. | ||
| You know he gave all his money away? | ||
| Talk about Looney, right? | ||
| You're going back to Looney. | ||
| Yeah, he likes being... | ||
| They should have locked him up, right? | ||
| You can't do that. | ||
| Give him a concert or shit. | ||
| His kids should have locked him up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Keep singing. | ||
| How dare you give away your own money? | ||
| That album is good, though, man. | ||
| I bought the album. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is. | |
| Well... | ||
| It is good, but Spinal Tap was good too. | ||
| Was it? | ||
| That's what made it so believable and good was the songs were really good. | ||
| So when you hear the story about Rodriguez and you hear the songs, I do believe that. | ||
| You seem incredulous. | ||
| No, but I hear the songs and I'm like, no, these are good. | ||
| I do believe the story because the songs are good. | ||
| That makes it believable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's just so crazy to think that this guy lived his whole life not knowing that he was a gigantic star on another continent. | ||
| Well, if I remember correctly, the story itself wasn't that unique, just in terms of getting that record deal, getting your songs in the late 60s, whenever he was starting, and that dream doesn't work for most people. | ||
| And then you go back to your life and not knowing, quietly over here, something just took off. | ||
| It's kind of wild. | ||
| And if they hadn't made the documentary, it would have been a great movie with a script, also, because... | ||
| This parallel universe, you're a giant and you would never know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just, yeah, if it was a movie, it would be hard to buy. | ||
| If it was just a fiction, it would be hard to buy. | ||
| But as a documentary, it made me cry. | ||
| No, it was good. | ||
| It was good. | ||
| And that did get the music documentary ball rolling, that film. | ||
| And then I guess the streaming thing, everybody's... | ||
| There's a lot of people. | ||
| I mean, I haven't seen it. | ||
| I don't think it's out. | ||
| There's Sparks. | ||
| They have a documentary. | ||
| And that's what that medium is really good for. | ||
| Because a lot of people are going to learn about Sparks now that didn't know much about them. | ||
| Because I've seen the trailers. | ||
| Yeah, Sparks. | ||
| They were the two brothers, male brothers. | ||
| Do you know who that... | ||
| Do you know that? | ||
| Mostly late 70s, 80s. | ||
| Cult kind of band. | ||
| Oh yeah? | ||
| Two brothers, yeah. | ||
| You'll recognize them. | ||
| Yeah, the Sparks. | ||
| You'll recognize it as soon as you bring up a picture. | ||
| You'll be like, I know who that is. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| But anyway, it's going to work. | ||
| I have no idea who those guys are. | ||
| Jamie? | ||
| See, the one on the middle left, that one, and this side, middle left, that right there, that's more the typical image that you might recall. | ||
| Well, they were kind of art house. | ||
| There was nowhere to put them. | ||
| But they made a documentary, and I think what I've seen in the trailer looks like it's going to be good. | ||
| But, boy, a lot of patience, and then they will gain a much larger, I think, audience from it. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| Because that's how people hear their music and they learn things now from, obviously, television. | ||
| They could never really be on the radio, so this will bring a new audience. | ||
| There's a documentary about Leonard Skinner that is fucking phenomenal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a couple. | ||
| Which one is it? | ||
| I don't know which one I saw. | ||
| I watched a couple. | ||
| I forget which channel. | ||
| There's one of those streaming channels that has tons of documentaries and they're just not good. | ||
| Oh, was it that? | ||
| Because you've got to get the rights to the music. | ||
| You've got to get real interviews. | ||
| And if it's just... | ||
| They have bands who just kind of sound like Skinner playing in the background. | ||
| Like, that doesn't work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, no. | |
| Oh, they do that all the time. | ||
| It's expensive. | ||
| Because they don't have the rights to the music? | ||
| That's terrible. | ||
| And they get, like, the brother of a guitar tech, he's in it. | ||
| Like, it's not really... | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| But the one you're talking about, no, their history is amazing. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| I mean, what about the album cover itself? | ||
| There it is. | ||
| If I leave here tomorrow, it's fucking phenomenal. | ||
| Yeah, that's the one from 2018. It's so good. | ||
| It's so good. | ||
| It's like they're the greatest fucking thing that ever came out of Florida by a long shot. | ||
| Tom Petty. | ||
| That's true too. | ||
| Damn it. | ||
| Damn it. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I forgot Tom Petty came from fucking Florida. | ||
| Both from Gainesville. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I used to live there. | ||
| Lived in Gainesville for a little bit. | ||
| I teach you about your hometown heroes. | ||
| I was only there for three years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, that band, Leonard Skinner to this day, they still have some songs where you just go, oh, I forgot about Curtis Blow. | ||
| Curtis Lowe, that song, Sing Me a Song, Curtis Lowe. | ||
| People forget about that song. | ||
| Well, they have their staples. | ||
| Yeah, well, their history is amazing. | ||
| I'm facing from Blackfoot, the guitar player who's back in the group right now, Can we bring that up real quick? | ||
| Blackfoot, that band. | ||
| He's one of the original... | ||
| There's nobody left in the group. | ||
| I think they retired. | ||
| Maybe they're coming back. | ||
| Yeah, Ricky Medlock. | ||
| He was the original... | ||
| Do you know the story? | ||
| It was probably in that film. | ||
| He was the original guitar player. | ||
| Then he comes back Yeah, he left, and then after the plane crashed. | ||
| But he's not a part of the lineup that made those records that people really are aware of. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, if you look at this, only Gary Rossington left. | ||
| I mean, from the original lineup, we should say. | ||
| Well, some guys survived the plane crash, right? | ||
| Yeah, I think it was four people who died. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Ed King just passed. | ||
| He wrote, I believe, Sweet Home Alabama. | ||
| That was his riff. | ||
| Ed King. | ||
| He was only in it for a minute. | ||
| They didn't get along. | ||
| Oh really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a long history band. | ||
| That documentary was good. | ||
| By the time that band was really popular, people were already come and gone. | ||
| It already evolved from different members. | ||
| That's gotta be one of the hardest things about a band is getting all the personalities to sync up and get along with each other while you're touring, while you're making albums, while you're putting music together. | ||
| That's not easy. | ||
| And your chances of really sustaining that for very long are not very good. | ||
| Because generally bands are put together when you're kids. | ||
| It's kind of a young person's dream being a rock band at 21. But you don't really have any experience and you don't have any needs yet other than Rent or something. | ||
| So to be together by the time you guys are now 41 or 42, 20 years later, that's not really a normal arc. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| And the things that bind you when you're starting, you don't even know who you are yet. | ||
| Music, that's what's binding you right now. | ||
| But over the next couple years, you're just going to start going, you can't help it. | ||
| It usually doesn't work. | ||
| The best ones, that's why people don't start great groups in their 40s or 30s. | ||
| No one knows? | ||
| I mean, what great group really... | ||
| You can do side projects, but not the all for one, one for all thing in your 30s, because you all know too much now. | ||
| You know that this model's not going to really work. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you might have kids, and you might have wives. | ||
| Yeah, it's naturally looking out for your own self a little bit more. | ||
| But when you're starting out, the music is the most important thing to you, and reality hasn't really shaped anybody yet. | ||
| In that way, it's very similar to comedy that when you're starting out, all you want to do is just go out there and do it. | ||
| You just want to make it. | ||
| You want to somehow or another make a living. | ||
| You want to somehow or another be able to figure out how to, this is my job. | ||
| I tell jokes or I sing songs. | ||
| How can I do this? | ||
| Is this possible? | ||
| It seems impossible. | ||
| And your overhead's very low. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You don't need much, right? | ||
| You don't need much. | ||
| And you're just... | ||
| You're running... | ||
| And that's how... | ||
| It's very similar to how bands start. | ||
| You know? | ||
| But then... | ||
| How many guys from your early days are you with today? | ||
| None. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Good for you. | ||
| Yeah, well... | ||
| You know? | ||
| Somebody... | ||
| I had the same conversation a couple years ago with a producer who just... | ||
| I've made solo records also, and he asked, I think I had to go do shows with my band, and he was like, you still have the band? | ||
| And I said, yeah, in the summertime we do go and do some shows, and he kind of was stumped. | ||
| He goes, bands are for kids. | ||
| He didn't mean for kids to come to the show. | ||
| He meant being in a band? | ||
| You still want to be in a band? | ||
| You didn't grow out of that yet? | ||
| Because it really is for kids. | ||
| It's a sustained immaturity level that just travels across the country and has two hours a night that they get a lot of affection. | ||
| And it's not really a normal course of life, really. | ||
| So it hits a wall at some point. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But sometimes when artists are in a band and then they leave to do a solo project, it's just never the same. | ||
| They're not the same thing without the band. | ||
| No. | ||
| Mine was never that kind of band. | ||
| There are bands like what you're talking about. | ||
| Nobody wants to see The Edge leave U2, it just won't be U2 without them. | ||
| But you did put up with a couple of changes in the Rolling Stones. | ||
| Brian Jones died, or he was fired, and then McTaylor came in, and now you've got Ron Wood. | ||
| Some bands, if we do it a little bit at a time, it's like, don't steal all the money at once, just take a dollar at a time, no one's gonna notice. | ||
| That might work. | ||
| But those groups, you know, they're far and few between. | ||
| The ones that really matter, you take one person out, it doesn't work. | ||
| There's not that many, really. | ||
| Really, like, you can do it. | ||
| It's not that hard to do. | ||
| And then he has some, like you mentioned, Led Zeppelin. | ||
| They refuse to ever go on without John Bonham, understanding that there is no Led Zeppelin without him. | ||
| But, you know, they lost Keith Moon and they put in Kenny Jones. | ||
| I like that record. | ||
| It wasn't the same. | ||
| You know, you can't replace Keith Moon. | ||
| But Kenny Jones was pretty good, too. | ||
| I like that record. | ||
| You know, so it can work. | ||
| You can do both. | ||
| I mean, but there are some groups. | ||
| Undoubtedly, you take one personality. | ||
| It's just never the same. | ||
| Yeah, with Kiss, it's got to be Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley. | ||
| With the Stones, it's got to be Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. | ||
| Yeah, well, and now, well, you've had Ron Wood for, what, 45 years? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| And Charlie Watts, of course. | ||
| But you've seen, there's like 40 people on that stage. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of people up there, right? | ||
| Yeah, so, but what used to work doesn't work all, you know, you can't, like with Zeppelin we're around, I'd like to think they wouldn't have... | ||
| You know, auxiliary members. | ||
| But, you know, if you have a long career, like the Stones, and you've got your disco records from the 70s, and you've got a lot of percussion, yeah, people kind of want that full show, as long as the core people are up there. | ||
| Bill Wyman's been gone. | ||
| Do you know how long he's been gone already? | ||
| How long? | ||
| Like 35 years or something. | ||
| He's been gone forever. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you get together with other rock stars and just have a conversation about the business? | ||
| Well, you're a rock star. | ||
| We're doing that. | ||
| I'm a comedian. | ||
| It's the same thing, isn't it? | ||
| Sort of. | ||
| You're funnier than most guys in bands. | ||
| You know what's nice about you? | ||
| You don't play guitar better than me. | ||
| Ah, that's nice. | ||
| That's refreshing for me. | ||
| Well, yeah, I have friends who are musicians. | ||
| One of the things about comedy is we all get together and we talk about the art form a lot. | ||
| One of the beautiful things about podcasts is we've had so many conversations with comics where we talk about how you do it, what's the process. | ||
| Do you guys do that? | ||
| Do you get together with other musicians? | ||
| Yeah, we do, but there's a certain amount of it that you can have a dialogue about and then there's a certain amount of it that none of us know what the hell we're doing. | ||
| Yeah, just going by feel. | ||
| Well, yeah, and you just, you know, if anybody ever asks me, like, well, any advice on how to write songs? | ||
| Like, no, I don't, no. | ||
| Do you have inspiration that comes out of nowhere, or do you have specific times where you sit down and write? | ||
| Your best ideas come out of nowhere when you're not ready for it. | ||
| That's the stuff that's gonna be your song. | ||
| But the rest of it, you gotta go home, you gotta go to work. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You might have an idea for a bit. | ||
| Ooh, that's funny, but you just heard something came to you. | ||
| But now you can already, immediately, you're aware of how much work it's gonna take to surround this thing and make it your bit. | ||
| And that's what songs are like. | ||
| You get this idea, and it's thrill. | ||
| Of like, that could be a great song. | ||
| But the rest of it's not gonna just fall on your head. | ||
| The rest of it, you gotta go home and now you gotta put it all together, make it become something. | ||
| But do you ever just sit down and try to have a writing session with just a blank piece of paper? | ||
| Yeah, it's the worst. | ||
| Well, right, we're just like, you know, hey, listen, you got that flight in two hours, here's some paper, you need some jokes. | ||
| Like, it's hard, isn't it? | ||
| I mean, it's forced, it's difficult. | ||
| I can do that, I have to do this sometimes. | ||
| But the stuff that's lasted longer for me or been more enjoyed, we'd say, is the stuff that was not like that. | ||
| I used to hear that when I was younger. | ||
| Keith Richard would say that he doesn't write songs, he's an antenna. | ||
| And I was just like, what are you talking about? | ||
| Or some people receive them as gifts like maybe God, I don't know. | ||
| I don't think God's writing songs for anybody in a pop band anytime soon. | ||
| I don't think that's how it works. | ||
| I had more of a cynical idea about it. | ||
| I do kind of get the receptor antenna bit now a little bit more. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because that part of your brain that your automatic writing is? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Have you heard of that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You have to be in a certain state to do it, and I've done it when I didn't expect it. | ||
| It's crazy that you actually just shut down. | ||
| You could be so inside that these things will come out, you'll write them down, and like, They literally will make you into some kind of zombie phase and it happened. | ||
| It's real. | ||
| It's a real thing. | ||
| I believe it. | ||
| I'd heard about it for a long time and then it happened to me. | ||
| The best songs are kind of like that. | ||
| If you're open, you kind of leave your brain clear. | ||
| These ideas will come to you and they're going to come to only you probably. | ||
| So that in itself makes it a unique idea. | ||
| And then hopefully you've got some level of ability and skill set to put that together in the song that you or yourself or someone else might want to listen to for three and a half minutes. | ||
| Like they're coming out of something that's not your conscious mind. | ||
| They're coming out of some form. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Well, those ideas. | ||
| Connecting these thoughts. | ||
| Maybe the germ, the idea. | ||
| I mean, most songwriters you talk to will tell you the same thing. | ||
| When you have to sit down and really focus on it, you can do that. | ||
| We all have to at times. | ||
| But the better ones are the ones you just can't explain why you got that. | ||
| But don't over-intellectualize it that it's a gift from anybody. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| It's just a song. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| That's all it is. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Don't make a big deal out of it. | ||
| You're not special. | ||
| Let's leave it with that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's end with that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Don't make a big deal out of it. | ||
| You're not special. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, thanks, man. | |
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Likewise. | ||
| Hey, real quick before I go, is this a Stormtrooper or is it just- It's a lighter. | ||
| I know, but is this supposed to be a Stormtrooper? | ||
| It could be. | ||
| Has no one else mentioned that before? | ||
| No, but I thought it does. | ||
| Definitely Stormtrooper-esque. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I think that new Lamborghini, is it a Lamborghini that has the SUV? Yes. | ||
| That looks like a Stormtrooper too. | ||
| It does a little bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you get a white and black one. | ||
| That's what I'm talking about. | ||
| That's what I'm talking about. | ||
| Do you drive anything crazy like that? | ||
| No. | ||
| What do you drive? | ||
| You seem like maybe an old Volkswagen type guy or maybe something cool. | ||
| Like an old BMW or something like that. | ||
| No, I have a 67 Firebird. | ||
| Ooh, now you're talking my lingo. | ||
| A show car. | ||
| You don't drive it? | ||
| No, I mean, it's not a jacked up car. | ||
| There's no, like, you know, there's no, like, eight ball gear shifting. | ||
| It's a show car, meaning it's all original. | ||
| They're all original and restored. | ||
| Yeah, and then when I actually want to go places and also go home, I have a Jeep. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| It was vintage cars. | ||
| Yeah, because when you were talking about Lamborghinis, I'm like, there's no way Jacob Dillon drives a fucking Lamborghini. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, there's... | ||
| I mean, a cool car is a cool car. | ||
| I got no problem with them. | ||
| I just... | ||
| More practical than that. | ||
| If it moved me, I'd get one. | ||
| Did you ever get a Rockstar car? | ||
| Something crazy? | ||
| My 67 Firebird. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| That's a Rockstar car, isn't it? | ||
| It is a Rockstar car. | ||
| I used to actually... | ||
| I had another 67 Firebird. | ||
| You've had more than one? | ||
| Well, yeah, I had one 20-something years ago, a red one that I'd... | ||
| Wasn't the best one, and then a couple years ago got another one. | ||
| It's a great fucking car. | ||
| It's cool. | ||
| I mean, you know those cars? | ||
| Oh, fuck yeah. | ||
| Oh my God, I'm a collector. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| But that car, the Firebird, obviously you know you could have the Camaro, but isn't the guy who noticed that the Firebird is the one you want? | ||
| That's the guy. | ||
| Because that's like... | ||
| When we drive it, if somebody says, you know, nice Mustang, it's like, okay, thank you. | ||
| Or if they say, nice Camaro, right on. | ||
| And if somebody says, nice Firebird, it's like, oh, you're in the know. | ||
| You know, yeah. | ||
| It's cool, because it just kind of slipped right through those muscle cars, but it's the one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, it's a great car. | ||
| Yeah, it's cool. | ||
| It's one of many. | ||
| It's not the one, though. | ||
| Which would be yours from that era. | ||
| I'm talking the muscle cars, you know, not the jacked-up ones. | ||
| Because that's that sweet year right in there, the late 60s. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The 67 stuff I always liked because they were messing with the future. | ||
| Everything had a Jetsons vibe. | ||
| I have a 1965 Corvette convertible. | ||
| That's the shit. | ||
| I like those. | ||
| I like the early 70s ones too. | ||
| Those are great. | ||
| That's a great shape. | ||
| It was like 68, I think they changed over to the third body shape. | ||
| It might have been 67. You know what's the one I really like? | ||
| I wish they made a convertible. | ||
| Some people have chopped them, but I wouldn't do that. | ||
| It's the Riviera, like the 65. Oh, yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's a beautiful car. | ||
| That's a beautiful car. | ||
| And they did not make a convertible. | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, if they did, it would be so floppy anyway. | ||
| It wouldn't have any agility. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, if you look them up, you'll see one and you'll think they did, but those are modded. | ||
| Somebody cut the top off. | ||
| Yeah, that era of cars was, in a lot of ways, like that era of music. | ||
| It was beautiful and wild and so different than anything that came before it. | ||
| Yeah, and you know what I did not know is John DeLorean had a lot to do. | ||
| You know, he designed the Firebird. | ||
| Did he really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| DeLorean did? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, you can look that up. | ||
| Actually, the coolest car is what he designed, I forget what it was called, late 60s, and it didn't take off. | ||
| They did make like maybe six of them, and it looks exactly like a Firebird and a Corvette combined. | ||
| What's it called? | ||
| Can we look that up? | ||
| Because I want you to see that. | ||
| If you look up DeLorean, like his first... | ||
| It's like late 60s. | ||
| Let's see what we can get on that. | ||
| You should see this car. | ||
| I mean, it looks like a fake car. | ||
| Because it's just like, how come I never saw that before? | ||
| And why didn't they make that? | ||
| But then there was... | ||
| Well, this had nothing to do with his ultimate demise, John DeLorean. | ||
| But if we could find that car, are you seeing anything? | ||
| I was looking through an article. | ||
| I thought it was going to have it. | ||
| It didn't. | ||
| How would you look that up? | ||
| John DeLorean 60s... | ||
| And there's the Firebird, but... | ||
| No, that's... | ||
| There's the Firebird... | ||
| Oh, look, bottom right... | ||
| What's that? | ||
| This thing? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| Oh, what is that? | ||
| That's it? | ||
| That's not it. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| High output? | ||
| What the fuck is that thing? | ||
| That looks weird. | ||
| 69 Pontiac Farago. | ||
| Oh, it's right there. | ||
| The Banshee. | ||
| 64 Banshee. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| That's not a Corvette? | ||
| No. | ||
| 64 Pontiac Banshee. | ||
| Isn't that cool? | ||
| Oh, so it's a concept car. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think the... | ||
| No, but there are like... | ||
| God, that's so pretty. | ||
| Isn't that cool? | ||
| That's beautiful. | ||
| It actually looks like a fiber in a Corvette. | ||
| Is it a metal Corvette looking? | ||
| I mean, it's a metal shape. | ||
| It's not fiberglass, right? | ||
| I don't know, though. | ||
| God, it's so similar to the Corvette. | ||
| Look, it's real. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Isn't that cool? | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty sweet. | ||
| Look at how it opens up. | ||
| And it has kind of like Firebird-esque rear, what is it looking like from the rear? | ||
| The tail lights, yeah. | ||
| If you can see those, those are like the Firebird. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| That's fucking beautiful. | ||
| Wild that they never made that. | ||
| Yeah, Joey, you make some money, you should try to track one down. | ||
| No. | ||
| There are a handful. | ||
| Yeah, but those are... | ||
| I don't like old cars with old brakes and old engines. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| I like restobots. | ||
| Yeah, I'm with you on that. | ||
| You want like a 54 pickup truck with a laptop under the hood. | ||
| I want something where there's brakes that work and a suspension that turns. | ||
| No, I'm with you on that. | ||
| Look at the back of a Firebird. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I'm with you on that. | ||
| There's certain things, but we got better at some things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Our brakes got better. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| They're still tricky to drive because they're not really designed for it, but there's some companies now that take old cars like that and they do a different chassis. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they'll put on a different frame and a different modern suspension. | ||
| I mean, I get it, but something cool about driving an original one, it's a pain in the ass to maintain at times, that's for sure. | ||
| $750,000, woo! | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It was whack to save Corvette. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| It's a Corvette killer. | ||
| Because Chevrolet threatened Chevrolet with performance potential. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it looks a little bit too much like a Corvette, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Quite honestly. | ||
| Let's not get one. | ||
| Let's not. | ||
| Jacob, thank you very much for being here, man. | ||
| I really enjoyed it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Likewise. | |
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| And your new album is out. | ||
| It is July... | ||
| What's this Friday? | ||
| Is this Friday? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So is that the 8th or the 9th? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Today's the 6th. | ||
| We're recording this in the 6th. | ||
| Yeah, and I should say that we are... | ||
| I'm not going to be getting in the bus doing the full summer touring, but we are out there playing in August. | ||
| You have a list, though. | ||
| You do have a list. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not going to sit here to read this. | ||
| They wanted me, but... | ||
| They wanted you to? | ||
| Look, I mean, can you even read that? | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look. | ||
| Can you even read that? | ||
| I can't without glasses. | ||
| I don't know if I could with glasses. | ||
| Anyway, we are going to be playing. | ||
| The record's out this Friday. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There you go. | |
| Jamie's found it. | ||
| Oh, I'll have to read over it. | ||
| Okay, so you're in Huntington, New York, Lexington, Massachusetts, East Greenwich, Rhode Island, Alexandria, Virginia, Brooklyn, New York, a lot of places. | ||
| Is there a website? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It wasn't on and whatnot I could find. | ||
| How'd you find this? | ||
| I got sent that in an email. | ||
| Oh, the email. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, we got a street team. | ||
| Street team will holler at you folks. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right, buddy. | ||
| Thanks, brother. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Appreciate it. |
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