Charley Crockett reveals his shock over River Phoenix’s death at the Viper Room and critiques the music industry’s exploitation, from $50 gigs in Austin to corporate attempts like Sony’s Nell Muldary to mold him into a marketable artist. His 2019 heart valve surgery exposed medical profit motives, while street performing in Europe—earning more than in the U.S.—highlighted cultural commodification. Partnering with Shooter Jennings on the Sagebrush Trilogy (following Dollar a Day, released August 8, 2024) underscores his rejection of imitation, embracing raw Texas authenticity over Nashville’s sanitized trends. Both dismiss AI as a threat to art but warn of systemic risks—whether in unchecked fame, data-driven media, or civilization’s self-destructive trajectory—tying personal resilience to broader existential warnings. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, Bart Sabrell, he's this researcher that's been doing these documentaries on the moon landing, and he's been saying it's fake since, like, I met him sometime in the early 2000s, I believe.
And he put out this documentary called The Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon, and he's got a great quote.
And he says, there's not a single thing that's not easier.
Faster and cheaper to reproduce today from 1969, except the moon landing.
It's the one thing.
And everybody would go, oh, but they spent so much money.
Why would they spend the money on that again?
Why would they spend money on all the things they spend money on?
Like, what are you talking about?
It doesn't make any sense.
The moon has trillions of dollars in rare minerals on it.
There's all sorts of shit on the moon that would be very beneficial to society.
And it was always going to be that we're going to have a base on the moon, and we're going to use that to go to other places.
I don't think so.
I mean, if you look at just the way they filmed it, like when you watched it on television, the people that watched it on television, it was the first time ever where there was a news thing where the news stations, the networks didn't have a direct feed.
What they had was they filmed the moon landing, they showed it on a projection screen, and then the networks pointed their camera at the projection screen.
It seems like a stupid thing to say, but I don't think it is.
And then after COVID, realizing how much stuff they can lie about, how much stuff the government can hide, how much stuff that people will just accept as being true despite...
How much experts will go along with things.
How easy it is to keep a secret.
It's not that hard to keep a secret.
Especially a secret that is essentially set up to let us think, sir.
It's Coke and Pepsi, you know, because I was thinking, like, you know, that's the one thing that they did that everybody liked, and then they've kept that, as long as they keep that flavor.
It's about this lady who's getting older and someone approaches her with this new experimental drug that allows you to live as a young person for seven days and then you have to switch back to the old person for seven days.
I don't want to spoil it for anybody, but...
I was like, I gotta watch something stupid on YouTube for a couple hours before I go to bed because I'm weirded out by this movie.
What I just thought about, Joe, when I was on the street in New York, you know, I played up there, and I'm sure you know, but I'd play on the street all day, and at first I was playing in the parks.
And then I moved downtown.
I was trying to play on street corners in the villages and all that.
And you're dealing with traffic and cops.
And that's what drove me down into the subway platforms.
And those were really competitive, too.
So even there, I started playing at the stations that nobody wanted or, you know, weren't desirable or, you know, nobody's really competing for the spots or whatever.
And I would do that all day, and then I would hit open mics all over the...
And the comedy guys were always the coolest, all of them, because we weren't in competition.
I know comedians can be really competitive on the circuit, and obviously same thing on the music side.
But I ended up playing a lot of Oh, cool.
Open guys up with two or three songs or play their breaks or whatever.
And, you know, all the comedy folks like me, I think, because, you know, I wasn't one of them.
Shout out to my friend John Reeves from the Boneyard in Alaska.
I got a buddy of mine who has this spot in Alaska where they just pull all kinds of crazy mastodon, woolly mammoth, fucking cave bear, all kinds of skulls, all kinds of wild shit out of this one piece of property where a lot of animals died.
And then the next time anybody believed in me wasn't until I started hitchhiking.
And I remember because I've been out in California a bunch recently.
And it was, I had caught a ride with this guy.
We were playing at this place called The Shanty up in Farmer's Branch, Dallas-Fort Worth area, years ago.
And there was this witch lady.
I mean, they called her a witch.
This kind of magic woman who had a barn out behind her house, and they called it the shanty.
And she would have people over on the weekends and just kind of any random night, travelers, misfits, whatever, back there in the barn, and everybody would be telling stories and trading songs and, you know, taking potions.
Stuff like that.
Long story short, this guy I met one night, his parents had, like, worked, they worked for, like, Texas Instruments, and he had disowned them, you know, because his parents were, like, scientists, and he woke up one day as a young man and realized they were, like, his parents were manufacturing, like, weapons, you know, and I never saw this guy again, but that was his whole deal, why he left Texas.
And I had done a little bit of hitching before, like around the south, Texas and Louisiana, but I'd never really been way out there.
Anyway, I started hitchhiking around because I had to, but I remember it was in California the first time anybody besides my mama ever looked at me playing guitar as it having any kind of value.
Like, any economic value or, like, it was a trade of, you know, recognition, you know?
I was playing outside because our place was so small.
I wasn't playing outside to, like, make money or anything like that.
I would go to this park, had, like, a baseball diamond on it.
Sit on these bleachers or whatever.
And I'll never forget, the first time anybody threw, like, just a pocket full of change in my case, I'm sure it's because they, you know, were worried about me and felt bad for me or whatever, you know?
And it wasn't like that money hit the case and then, like, a light went off or anything, you know?
It was a slow, gradual deal.
Like, I was playing outside.
Because there wasn't enough room to play in the house or whatever.
And then I got in a lot of trouble with the law, which kind of put me on the run, put me on the road.
You know, I've said it a lot, and it's funny, I'm a lot better known than I used to be, so it's like you say stuff about your family and they hear about it.
But that's so funny because it's all over the internet and they're the ones that had the government on their ass, not me.
But anyways, yeah, we just kind of, you know, shit hit the fan, got up in the newspapers.
My brother didn't go to high school.
You know, neither of my sister, neither of them went to high school.
They both dropped out, you know, because I'm from South Texas.
I was born in the Rio Grande Valley.
They were born up in Dallas, but my mama had moved down there to South Padre Island area, McAllen, Harlingen area there.
Anyway, it's poor and pretty hard living down there.
Hell, I didn't wear shoes until I was probably 9 or 10 years old, playing outside.
My brother and sister, they're 10 years older than me, half-brother and sister, and we have different daddies.
They really lived wild.
Things were pretty tough back then or whatever.
I'm telling you that background because my brother became a hustler because he had to.
Because of a lack of education, lack of access, you know, because of poverty.
And I've honestly always respected him for that, you know.
He used to take me around door-to-door selling newspapers when I was 11, right?
And you want to know why?
Because I had broken my arm, and he realized if you carted that young boy out in front of those apartments when that lady answered the door, and it's these two brothers, and one of them's got a broken arm, she's going to go ahead and subscribe.
Yeah, and in a nutshell, man, he, you know, through all that stuff, you know, he started out as a door-to-door salesman, you know, hustling newspaper subscriptions, right?
Then he started like selling neckties and like men's clothing door to door in downtown Dallas office buildings, you know, and as a very young man.
And eventually he graduated.
I did And he got in with some big old wolves, you know, and eventually it, it knocked everybody out and a lot of people died.
A lot of people went to prison and, um, you know, we were in the paper and, uh, I couldn't So it ended up being like a Bob Marley type of thing.
He said, if you're not living good, travel wide.
And I literally just walked out of town because we had scarlet letters on our chest.
That's when I really started learning how to stand behind that guitar and write songs and slowly but surely start.
I learned how to play basically in front of people, and people just were giving me money kind of over time.
That and, you know, food and shelter in exchange for my story at their back door.
But before I ever left Texas, I moved in with his sister.
And I remember, and she was just my friend.
I was never in a relationship with her or anything.
She was working at Silver City in West Dallas, the Gentleman's Club at 18, and making more money than anybody I'd ever seen.
The girl was 18, you know, and just making crazy, crazy money, and she let me rent a room from her and kind of gave me a deal and all that, and I ended up writing a song kind of about it more recently called Easy Money that I did with Shooter on the Lonesome Drifter record.
And that's kind of a thing, you know, if you're a poor kid from Texas, there's no such thing, you know, as easy money.
But I can't remember why I was telling you that, but it was hard on, I just remember like seeing, you'd see like young women working in strip clubs, making big money.
And the ones that I was around and have been around.
Very, very hard for that line of work, my line of work, your line of work, not to become addicted.
And for my brother, for all the trouble that he's been in, in a way, I think he also was trying to help me.
You know, and so, you know, his hustle and his work ethic, in another sense, you know, was, that's been helpful to me too, you know, because I remember he used to hand out flyers and shit all over the place.
And when I'd be like a teenager, he'd be like, he'd be like, listen to me now.
If you leave an event at the other day that you're handing out flyers and you're flooding it with promotion, if you can even see that pavement underneath the, you know, pamphlets that you're handing out, you didn't promote it.
How they, you know, they introduced that concept of looking at the data to like maximize the It's kind of a pumping
dump.
The thing about that, it works.
Like if somebody has a, you know, if somebody, like some of these guys, you mentioned Oliver Anthony and some of these guys, they have a viral hit out of nowhere.
They've never played a venue or anything in their life.
You know, it can happen really fast.
And then obviously there's tremendous challenges, you know, down the line trying to keep that, you know, astronomical.
You know, quick rise up there.
But back in the day, the business deals weren't any good.
You know that.
They were terrible.
What they were good about, though, in a lot of cases, was developing these artists on these rosters, even if they were taking advantage of these poor farm boys, taking advantage, you know, of, you know, poor black artists from the South or women or whatever.
In being neglected or misunderstood by the business when I was first dealing with it, it was really a blessing because I ended up making so many records, you know?
If I was on the road and I didn't get to pick my opening acts, like if I was working at a club and they had some local act in Florida or something like that and the guy was fucking terrible, I would literally have to not listen.
I'd have to leave the room and just sort of time when I was going to go on stage so I could go on stage.
With a fresh mindset, I couldn't think that this audience had been poisoned by this guy's shitty comedy.
That strong an effect on the audience like that that quick I mean somebody can be up there fucking it up like crazy musically Yeah, and you kind of get a pass, you know, right, you know poetic license or whatever Well, you know people it's tolerable if the guy's into it, you know He could be into his own music and you're like I'm not into it, but he's into it at least he's like doing his song if you're not indie if you're Doing comedy and the audience is not into it, you're fucked.
It's crazy, and they're just fucking shuffling people in and out, trying to prescribe them as many things, and they're financially incentivized to prescribe things.
And then they have extreme overhead because they have liability insurance, they have student loan debt, and they have, you know, a high overhead to keep their practice running.
Well, no, see, so I had open heart surgery right here in Austin to fix a valve here.
What was wrong with your heart?
Well, I was born with Parkinson's white disease.
It's an electrical issue in your heart.
Basically, like...
All this electricity is moving through it all the time.
You know, like a semiconductor or whatever.
And there was like a section of it that was like misfiring and it would cause an arrhythmia with me.
And when I was a kid in South Texas, we were told that was all I knew about.
And we were told that it was an annoyance.
Because I almost died a couple times when I was really, really young from it.
And, you know, my mama noticed and saved my life a couple times by getting, driving in, you know, into the city there in the San Benito and them hooking me up to all the wires and saving me.
Anyways, they told me as I got older that it would just, I could get, you know, an ablation for it where they apply heat basically and close this electrical.
Channel that's stuck in a loop or whatever But it but it wasn't life-threatening And then I got out here, you know, I was on the street for years And then when I was coming off the street Through kind of blues jams and I had been you know,
I was working on Gondra farms and it started selling, you know Weed in the mail and all that to kind of get off street buy myself some better clothes Get myself a good guitar and amp and all that started showing up at blues jams and then I could like you know because everything takes money you know like Problem with being a street player was even go play the open mics that have a two damn drink minimum And they'd see my crazy ass come in and knew knew that I was You know pretty wild and they didn't have any money and it didn't smell and I didn't smell good So
they really didn't like me for the longest time or whatever.
But through blues jams, I started leading bands and bars.
Deep Ellum, first gig I ever got.
And Austin was right there at Darwin's Pub, you know, on 6th Street, playing kind of solo in the afternoon.
It was the only guy, CJ was the only guy that gave me a gig, even on 6th Street.
I always owed him for that.
He was giving me 50 bucks.
He wanted me to get paid out of the well whiskey and those...
Those gyros or whatever the hell he's got over there.
Anyway, I get on the road.
I get an agent.
I was standing out of Green Hall handing CDs out on a street corner because I couldn't get into the show.
Handed a guy a CD.
His name's Evan Felker.
I didn't know who he was at the time, but he's the front man for Turnpike Troubadours.
I gave him a CD.
Well, he took it home and he listened to it with his then girlfriend and now wife.
And lo and behold, his agent, John Folk, called me up and started booking me.
And then that's when I started playing the old Red Dirt, I like to call it the Hank Williams circuit, you know, the kind of old country chitlin circuit.
John Folk had kind of inherited it from like Buddy Lee attractions from an earlier generation.
It goes all the way back to Lucky Moeller and that old South Circuit that all the...
And then they, you know, then Coke and Pepsi came in, you know, CAA and William Morris and Wazerman and bought it all off, you know, bought it all out.
And you had no choice.
I mean, they were going to part it out no matter what.
And that's the way that it works, right?
When you get Coca-Cola's attention, right?
And they show up and they're like, good job.
You're taking some of our money away from us.
We're going to buy you out, son.
I think you can refuse them once or twice, and they'll come back with a better deal, right?
After that, if you keep turning them down, then they put all their energy into knocking you out.
That's what I mean.
As long as Coke doesn't change the flavor of Coca-Cola, right, they can...
200 and whatever shows a year for a bunch of years in a row, playing all over the place.
Seems like sometimes we play 21 nights in a row out there, you know, for shit kickers at Bonita Creek Hall and punk rock clubs in New Jersey and shit, you know?
Playing at the fucking, you know, Saint?
That little club, the Saint in Asbury Park?
It's like a 40 cap, man.
It's a badass place.
Anyway, I was like blacking out.
I moved up to a bus and shit, and I was like, I was getting really lightheaded.
And I'd be sitting in the back of the bus, and I would be so lightheaded.
I'd be blacking out a lot, right?
Just sitting there.
Short of breath, but I just thought, you know, I'm grinding.
I'm playing all these shows.
I'm going as hard as you can go.
Taking potions.
Just doing all this dumb shit.
Working hard.
And I was playing at the old Shady Grove here in town that's now closed down.
It was the KGSR radio thing.
Marsha Millam put it on or whatever and then it turned into ACL radio and then Shady Grove closed down there on Barton Springs or wherever.
But I played it a handful of times.
First time I played it, there was nobody there.
Second time I played it, it was packed and I had Willie's old There it is.
somehow this guy gets it.
I shouldn't call him a shyster, but he definitely shits at me.
On the other side, it says, driven only by the finest bass players.
Wow.
Because somebody in the band always drove those old buses.
I had that bus.
I used that bus exclusively for about a year or whatever.
And we get off the stage at Shady Grove, and my heart had gone out of rhythm.
How do I just say this?
I almost died in the back of that bus.
I end up finding because it won't go...
My arrhythmia is out.
It's going out, and it's getting harder and harder to get back in, to shock it back into normal rhythm.
And I just kept ignoring it because somebody told me in South Texas in the 80s not to worry about it.
Anyway.
Anyway, And I had to get surgery.
The point, long round point that I'm making to you about medical industry that I learned the hard way, man, is like, no one's advocating for you.
Only you.
You have to be your own advocate.
They don't give a fuck.
You know?
They don't.
Like, they were just going to automatically put a mechanical valve in my heart, right?
Automatically.
Didn't present any other options.
Anything.
Right?
And I get there on the American Heart Association webpage or whatever because I didn't have insurance at the time or anything.
Nothing.
The only reason that they covered me at the time was the Affordable Care Act and I had the right window where they could not deny me.
Otherwise, I don't know what I would have done.
And that is absolutely an imperfect system.
Right?
I just didn't have health insurance.
So here they are covering me, and probably because I don't have money and they're dealing with, you know, how it is, you know, American business practices or whatever.
They're like, here's this mechanical valve.
And I go and look it up, Joe, and it's like, you know, if you have a mechanical valve, you automatically are on blood thinner the rest of your life.
Automatically.
No matter what.
And that's just how it's going to be.
It lasts twice as long as a prosthetic valve, which I had not heard of at that point.
But that was the whole thing.
This can last up to 20 years.
But guess what?
You have like 300% higher risk of a stroke with a mechanical valve as a bioprosthetic cow valve.
And then the third thing was that you can hear that thing clicking.
The medical industry is, I think, really fucked up and really predatory, totally profit-driven, and people's health and preventative well-being and all that, we don't give a fuck about that in this country.
There's no money to be made off of people taking care of themselves and eating right and being preventative.
There's nothing in that.
The part about it that is amazing, though, even in the kind of insanity of all the land of cheap traders, is the technological advancements.
The technological advancements in the medical field, though not really, you know, available to the common person, they are incredible advancements.
Right.
So it's like they're moving so quickly that by the time I need to get another one, I don't think they'll.
They could do it at that time.
It was just more experimental and they didn't want to do it.
They were only doing it on really high-risk older patients.
But I think it's already kind of gone more mainstream from where when they cut me open to if I did it right now, I could probably get around cutting it.
Well, so with me, what was happening was is I had to get the ablation first before I could deal with aortic valve disease is what it's called.
And what it basically is is that over your aorta, there's these three valves that sit over the top of your aorta that they look like a Mercedes symbol is what they look like.
It's like the best example.
It really looks like a Mercedes symbol.
And some people...
Some people are born with two of the three fused together or just one missing altogether.
And it turned out that I was missing one.
It's like a leaky carburetor, you know?
So as the time goes, that old carburetor in that truck over time, it's just leaking more and more and more.
There was this guy, there was a video going around.
He drove us around for a little bit.
And there was this video passing around the industry, this guy they called Jimbo.
And it was this bus driver that was like, you know, just a speed freak.
And it was like this video of him where he was like on whatever he was on.
Somebody had recorded him and they'd put a phone up or something because they knew it was nuts and he was having one of those fucking methamphetamine freakouts driving the bus down the road and it was getting all passed around the industry and I saw it because he was driving us at the time.
I remember we woke up somewhere in New Mexico one morning because we were going on this road all of a sudden and I get up and I go to the front of the bus and we're like on some Fucking two-track, you know, Caliche fucking dirt road that was like behind a gate in a bus, that bus, right?
And I get up there, and he's looking all crazy, and the door handle, the inside door handle, the bus had been pulled off and shit.
It was crazy, man.
When we got back down here in Texas, man, I never saw a fool again.
Wood making or your buddy with this ancient tooth that he's carving into this beautiful piece of art You know?
90s radio just Blasting my brain as a kid.
that like it's like so much programming is so hard for me to watch because you know that it's only a vehicle for the commercials right right so whenever i'm watching something and as soon as i think that it's not that good
I feel like I killed a lot of the false version of me that I was becoming that I only realized when I walked away from Crystal City.
I remember, I won't tell you the whole thing, but I was playing on the street in Europe when I was younger.
I'd met a guy down on the Lower East Side.
He's a Danish jazz singer.
And he would show up over in the States a couple times a year, and he was doing really well there in Denmark, and the state really sponsors the arts there in a big way, and it's a small country, high quality of life.
He really had it made over there, and when he was coming over to the States to play music, it was almost more of a leisure thing for him.
Benjamin Agerbach is his name.
Great singer.
great jazz singer.
And he'd show up at the open mics and all this shit.
And he, I think he really, And he eventually helped me get over to Europe.
And I played the club circuit in Copenhagen for like six weeks or whatever.
And I was really rough around the edges.
And the American novelty in the folk, in blues clubs around Copenhagen wore off really quick.
And I wound up back on the street, but this time in Europe.
And as soon as I started playing on the street in Copenhagen, man, then being a real Texan in Europe in front of tourists on the street, man, that's when I started making money.
It was crazy.
My money, like, quadrupled.
Because all of a sudden, I was like a truly exotic.
Texas is exotic.
And everywhere you go in the world, it means something, right?
They either want to shake your hand or they step back.
And it doesn't matter where you go in the world.
There's not an inch of the world that hadn't heard of Texas.
And so musically, I think culturally it means something, no matter what.
And to play music and be a Texan is worth a lot on its own.
You know what I mean?
It's a big part of it, is just being a Texan.
Gary Clark Jr. learning how to hold his own.
Under the tradition of Austin blues players in Texas, guitar slingers, I mean, it's second to none in the world, you know?
So if you've seen them live, you know what it is.
But I remember seeing, like, there were no self-checkouts at grocery stores and shit in the United States back then.
I'm glad I didn't think about it, man, because the language barrier was really difficult.
And I didn't really realize it until I was pulling into the city, you know?
And actually, there was an Algerian guy who spoke English that was like, man, go to Montmartre.
Go to Les Sacré-Cœur.
Go to Les Sacré-Cœur.
That's where the tourists are, whatever.
And I kind of learned how to hustle tourists with gypsies, kind of, that were using me kind of as a decoy on the steps.
And I thought, this is great.
These gypsies love me.
And I'm sitting there playing.
And while I'm playing, I realize that I'm just a distraction while they're pickpocketing these tourists.
It was a good trip.
Of course, I didn't say anything.
Also, I didn't stick with them too much.
But the automation thing, you know?
Europe is way ahead of us on all of that because in a lot of ways America when you try to like analyze America against Europe and But we're more similar to Latin or South America in a lot of ways, with just how big the country is.
You know, and, you know, the, you know.
Because the country's so big, we got the states that are divided up, all that type of shit, those kind of technologies to hit the people and become mainstream, it's a slower process here, right?
And one of the things about the pandemic that is obvious to me now is a lot of people realized that they could speed that up.
I think they'd been trying to eliminate the risks.
And what's the word?
Externalizing costs, right?
How do we get these machines in here and these people out?
And we've probably jumped ahead in that process in America a decade or more in just a couple of years.
And I just remember, this was probably 2010.
You'd go into a grocery store in Paris, and there was only one person.
Working there and everything else was self-checkout.
And that was years before I saw it here.
And then you think about the way that that's hitting in every single industry in America.
Well, it's so easy for people to be completely disconnected from other people now.
You know, you don't have to interact.
You know, and that's part of it, and if they don't have to pay people, they can maximize their profits, and then it becomes a very impersonal experience.
Yeah, you know, and I've been saying that in the music business, like in country music, you know, like Mark Twain said, history doesn't repeat, it rhymes.
It's the yin and yang of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings.
They were both on RCA.
Willie was...
Stapleton made his career as a songwriter early on, you know, and that's what catapulted.
Really, for everything, you know, that he's got going on now, there's a really great foundation there of a guy that's spent his whole life writing songs.
And that's what Willie did, you know.
So Willie actually had success pretty early when he got to Nashville with, you know, songs like Nightlife and Crazy and all that kind of stuff.
Baron Young and Patsy Cline and these kinds of really big artists were cutting his songs pretty early on, right?
But he was so weird to the establishment at the time.
So, you know, kind of had this like philosophical thing to his writing that was going over the heads of the hillbilly deal.
So he was really neglected as a...
Waylon was more favored, actually, by like Chet Atkins and them.
But like, you'd be number one on the country charts in Nashville in the mid-60s and be in debt.
Waylon was like, man, I'd be number one all the time and I was fucking dead broke.
You know, it's like, man, they got you out there seven nights a week and you're coming back and Lucky Moeller's telling them that you owe him fucking 10 grand.
You know, that was...
Willie ends up leaving RCA.
They're over him.
He leaves RCA because Jerry Wexler is coming down and A&R and Texans out of this progressive Central Texas scene of that era that was so unique.
And it happened then and just totally unique.
The whole scene, everything here, the movement, the hippies and the cowboys, where everybody could hear in the capital of Texas, It was weird, but they were in the same rooms.
We're still doing that here, you know, which is what I'm really proud of, you know, and glad that this town never turned into Nashville or LA or any of those towns.
The best thing that ever happened to us is that the business didn't grow up like that.
I really do believe that because it's allowed our unique culture to continue to grow, even if it's, like I said, and sometimes it's good to be neglected by that machine.
But so Willie leaves, Jerry Wexler pulls him out of there because RCA doesn't give a fuck about him anyway, right?
He goes to Atlantic, sells 400,000 records.
The boys up in New York don't even realize there's a country division.
After Willie sells 400,000 records, which is a lot, right?
They close the division.
And that's when Willie lands at Columbia.
And he's having success.
Well, they were starting to think that Waylon was past his prime, too.
But then Willie's blowing up on the other label.
And Willie and Waylon got the same manager at the time, Neil Reshin.
And what's Reshin doing?
Reshin's leveraging it all.
And so Waylon was about to leave RCA.
And they doubled down and matched.
Kind of Willie's deal because they didn't want to lose Waylon.
And Waylon was like, I'm only Stan.
I've got to be producing my own records.
I've got to be my band and I've got to pick the place that I'm playing.
And he manages to do that.
So it's not just Waylon.
It's Willie and Waylon together.
That's why they're so tied together, you know, is these two guys that – You know what I mean?
Because you'd be in Nashville, it's still like this now.
When I got signed to Nashville by 30 Tigers, it was purely because John Folk was my agent.
And those guys, they'd tell you this themselves.
They didn't understand what I was doing.
and they didn't get it.
I was only put...
Openly saying, I don't understand this.
Right?
which at least they're being honest about, you know?
But then what they would do that was so weird is, like, they'd give you – Like a tenth of that, you know, kind of on the independent, alt-country, Americana circuit.
But what frustrated me about it, Joe, was that they're only giving you a tenth of money, but they're behaving like major labels with these two-year record cycles.
That just kills an artist that hasn't broken through.
It just kills you.
That's a 100% Industry model because they can always get another horse.
You know what I mean?
They can always get another horse.
They bet on 10 young guys and one of those amateur realists blows up.
They're good.
But you're never going to get a Waylon Jennings out of that model.
It's not going to happen.
mean it's not it's not gonna happen you know and so how did but how did Waylon get Because Willie left, right?
Because Willie left, and all of a sudden, Waylon was really going to leave.
They gave him everything, and everything was changing.
Everything was changing in Nashville.
we're talking about when I say like 1974 here, you got to think about it.
You know, this is America in Vietnam.
I am.
This is America coming out of the 60s.
It's coming.
Everything was...
you know what I mean and then by the time we get to the 80s you know it's like this level of like pop culture and like American pop culture as a global export Kind of in the 80s and 90s.
Nashville was such an old system.
It's kind of like in country music today.
One of the reasons everybody's sprinting into it.
Right?
It's because it's like one of the only places left where there's like loyalty, long-term loyalty in the fan base compared to like, you know, what happened with pop music in the last 20 years with pop and hip-hop and all that.
I mean, every one of those guys called me at one point and were like, I want to get into country music because you got loyal fans.
I wanted to buy him a pickup truck as a gift for this.
This is why.
So he was on the roster.
I was on the roster.
And I started way down at the back of the line.
Right?
And made a lot of records.
And more and more of the labels are calling.
And each record I'm putting out is doing better than the previous one.
And there's more money and promotion going into each album.
But a lot of outside guys are calling.
All the coastal labels are calling.
New York and L.A. are all over me.
Culture ends up pulling up stakes and going to RCA.
And he didn't just go to RCA.
He took everything with him.
He took the whole catalog over there.
And I wasn't really aware of that.
I didn't know what was going on.
And RCA, they had hollered at me through one of their A&R guys or whatever.
Their big guys were never really interested in me out there, right?
So they weren't one of the ones that was really hot on me.
But David Macias at 30 Tigers, very similar to...
And when he left, all of a sudden, those guys, because he took everything with him, were about to lose me, and they fucking handed the keys over to me.
You know what I mean?
Because, and I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that Coulter had left and just took everything.
And so that ended up happening on a record cycle for me for an album called $10 Cowboy.
And I was this close to going to, you know, the New York boys.
And Macias comes in last minute and beats them all on the royalty rate, on the money, on everything.
Right?
I guess what I'm saying is culture's kind of my Willie Nelson.
And he grew up on, you know, Waylon and all that stuff, you know, and all the cowboy and all the, you know, he knows that cowboy music probably better than anybody.
Well, they want to be it, but they don't know how to get there, and they don't know how to do it, and they've never lived it, and they've been paying attention to all the polls and the focus groups, and they've been listening to the executives, and they've been taking the advances and driving the Mercedes.
They're doing all the shit that leads you down the wrong path.
And then one day you realize, like, fuck.
It's not what I want, you know?
It's interesting, because it's like, you know, there's always going to be these examples of something that pops through that's real, that people gravitate towards, and then there's always going to be these people trying to capitalize on it and make money off of it and trying to figure out how to recreate it in an inauthentic way.
It's not possible.
That's the one thing that might save us from this AI shit.
Man, you know, listening to Gary do that, and you talking about how much you love Stevie Ray Vaughan, it just, you know, it reminds me.
It's like, you know, this, to me, it's like, you know.
Because if you're in Texas, all that shit over there on the other side of Mississippi, it goes away for us.
There's a brashness, there's a boldness in any sound, whether it's coming out of honky-tonk or coming out of a blues joint.
In Texas, it's a totally different sound.
You know, it's like Billy Gibbons talked about this a lot, you know, like when those guys were trying to break through on the national scene, the idea of Texas is just a total stigma, right?
It's all hillbillies, it's all provincial, you know, and all this shit, you know, and so it's like you go to Nashville or whatever and it's all Appalachia.
It's all, you know what I mean?
And that's the thing.
But one thing you can't explain away is place, right?
Well, that party scene in LA at the time was the cocaine party scene.
It was a different party scene.
Mark Maron said that he hung out with Kennison and they did so much coke that he had voices in his head for a fucking year afterwards.
a year like literally like schizophrenic you know like hearing voices in his head for a year before they stopped talking to him yeah they were doing cocaine yeah and they were doing at the viper room everywhere yeah he was doing it everywhere yeah but kenison became almost like a caricature of himself it became sort of captured by this The perception by this character that they had created.
And Kenison is what birthed Hicks.
You know, Hicks was a great comic, but he was one of the outlaws.
It was Kenison and Hicks that sort of defined the Texas style.
And when we were living in, at the time, I was living in New York, and there was really two places in the country.
There was L.A., where you wanted to go to get on TV.
Everybody wanted to go get a fucking sitcom.
They all wanted to be Jerry Seinfeld.
And New York, which is like the club comics.
That was like the Dave Vittels and these guys that would like – And then there was this new scene, this new scene out of Houston, this new scene out of the Laugh Stop in River Oaks.
And I remember the first time I ever worked there, man, you could feel it in the building.
You could feel that they had been there.
They were both gone.
By the time I had worked there, they were both dead.
But you could feel it in the building, man.
You could feel it in the comics, the open mic scene.
You could feel it.
They were pure.
There was a Texas quality to the way they were doing comedy.
You know, he had like a, there was a social commentary to his, like a dark poetry to his comedy.
And so many people tried to emulate it that at the green room, the punchline in Atlanta, there was a, like people wrote a bunch of shit on the walls in the green room, but one of the big ones that said, quit trying to be Hicks.
Dude, you'd come, so after Stevie Ray Vaughan passed, right?
I remember, you know, we were up in Dallas-Fort Worth, and you'd come down here, we'd come down here in high school and shit, and go up and down 6th Street.
I will never forget this.
Every single guitar player in every little bar on 6th Street, every single one of them was playing like Stevie Ray Vaughan.
And then Hicks went on stage and immediately started bombing.
Immediately he opened up with saying that he's tired of performing and tired of going up and...
But the comics were dying, and there was like 300 people in the room.
By the time he was done performing, there was 50. There was 50, and there was maybe me and my friend Greg Fitzsimmons were in the back of the room just dying, laughing, and maybe 10 comics.
We had all come to see Hicks because we had heard about him.
And then I saw him.
A month later at the Comedy Connection and he fucking murdered.
Because I don't think he ever put that on anything.
It might be on an album somewhere.
But it was back when there was all this like pop mall comedy or pop mall music and he fucking hated it You know and it was and he was just Yeah, rallying against corporatism.
It was so shut down, and I knew – And I came to Texas, and Ron White was already here.
So Ron White, who's a very good friend of mine, and Gary, I knew Gary from L.A. He used to hang out at the Comedy Store, too, and that's why I became friends with him.
And he moved here, I think, 2017 or 2018, and I talked to him on the phone.
I'm like, why'd you go back to Austin?
He's like, man, I can't fuck with those people in L.A. It's just like, I'm tired of it, man.
He goes, I love Texas.
This is real, and it's like, I need to go back home.
And I was like, wow, that sounds right.
That sounds right.
And then when I talked to Ron, and Ron's the same way, Ron's a Texas boy.
And I was just working so hard, I never really thought about anything else.
But something about the California shutdown that's funny.
Not funny, but the pandemic hit, and I was unknown.
But I had just finished that record, Welcome to Hard Times, and it didn't have anything to do with – I'd had the two surgeries.
I'd gone through a relationship that crashed and burned in a tailspin.
I'd gotten rid of a management relationship that was going nowhere.
And I wrote Welcome to Hard Times just kind of out of my own personal kind of dark feelings about where I was going through and just the whole like rigged...
America is a casino.
I have thought that since I was a kid because I kind of lived in them.
You're talking about being in pool halls.
And then I cut the record in Georgia, South Georgia, with Mark Neal.
The whole thing, I cut it.
I wrote the record in November, cut it in December, got the Masters back, and a week or two later, I remember me and Taylor Grace, my now wife, Dayton, and we were at a diner in Cloudcroft, New Mexico.
And my manager at the time called me and said that South by Southwest was canceled.
And that, for us here at that time, that's when we knew the shit was real.
Nothing could stop that machine that was South by Southwest at the time.
And strangely for me, I'm not, I knew a lot of people that have known a lot of people that have, But for me, my career trajectory totally changed early on in the pandemic because no one was putting out records.
No one had any interest in putting out records.
And for that reason, David Macias, because I was riding his ass, actually thanks to John Folk at the time, was like, don't let him shelve your record.
Put that record out right now.
We're talking about July of 2020.
Wow.
And I demanded more money.
No one had ever put a dollar into marketing my records.
I'm talking about nothing.
Before the shit hit the fan, these guys were talking about spending like 10, 15 grand total marketing Welcome to Hard Times.
I remember a publicist told me once, you should spend at least double the money marketing your record that it costs you to make it and at least match it.
And here I was.
That's what I mean.
I was caught on this broke-dick Americana scene on these two-year record cycles with no money.
I was on a broke dick deal just like Waylon was talking about.
You know, I mean, I'm glad I showed up on the map somewhere.
But we went ahead and put it out in July of 2020.
And I'd been wanting to buy billboards, and it just so happened, especially in California, but even in New York.
I mean, everything was shut down.
I mean, totally shut down.
So I remember we bought a billboard in Silver Lake and in Times Square, right?
Static, traditional static billboards for like $80.
Not a single other billboard over the course of like nine months or a year, and those neighborhoods changed.
And I bought all those billboards, I bought like one month billboards, and some of those motherfuckers stayed up over six months.
You know what I mean?
At like 75% off.
And, you know, sometimes you write a song that, get lucky, I was writing about personal experience.
And it spoke, for me, it wasn't a big record, but it changed my trajectory because Welcome to Hard Times, the song, really spoke to what was happening in America.
It's like, and then I did all those records and Welcome to Hard Times and Music City USA coming like kind of right for the...
And then the man from Waco that I made down in Lockhart with Bruce Robinson, which was like the first time really that I'd made a studio record with my guys, you know, with more money.
And Bruce Robinson, a songwriting friend that was not stopping me from being me, you know?
And then that one was my first one to hit the Billboard 200.
And then $10 Cowboy.
Really took off another big step from there.
And then I got hooked back up with Shooter.
See, I used to open up for Shooter because Shooter was getting booked by John Folk too, right?
And the two guys that took a liking to me early on, like pretty much nobody else did, was Evan Felker and the Turnpike Troubadours and Shooter Jennings.
You know, a shooter would take me out and, like, I mean, he's fucking Waylon's son.
Like, when he saw how hard I was working out there, he's like, it says you can't park behind the Nashville Palace, but between me and you, you fucking camp there and nobody's going to say shit.
And I lived in that fucking parking lot.
That's the kind of shit you get by on, you know what I mean?
And we, I've got this movie that I funded, you know, how slow the movie business is.
That I was going to be called $10 Cowboy.
And it's this thing I put together.
I finished my touring season at the rodeo finals in Vegas.
And then I get back to Texas.
And all the pressure of the business is mounting on me.
And I'm just trying to get away from my manager and the machine and my phone and all that shit.
And I decide to leave the phone at the house.
And I had heard from a journalist about this secret shrine in a liquor store.
Dedicated to Waylon Jennings in his hometown of Littlefield, Texas, there on 84. I'd known about it, but in the movie, I'm playing like I've never heard of it, and I'm going on this pilgrimage to find out if this little museum really exists, which it does.
It's run by his youngest brother, James D., Waylon's youngest brother.
And so to get the movie going, I needed to get on the phone with Shooter, you know, to get hooked up with James D and them, and we got the idea to get his mama, Jesse Coulter, involved, and all that.
And I wanted to use some of Waylon's music for the film, and I was scared to death to ask for it.
But Shooter had always been good to me, and so we ended up having the conversation.
We caught up on a lot of stuff, because, see, I'd been hearing that he was producing, right?
But I couldn't make heads or tails of it, where he was going with it.
And truthfully, I was, like, avoiding producers altogether.
Because a lot of these guys, it's like, you know, they're such big names, it overshadows the artist.
You know what I mean?
And then they have the deal.
Like, they have the artist deal.
then the artist just kind of, in a lot of ways, gets limited to acting talent, showing up at the fucking...
But I kept hearing records that he was making by people I knew, like Jamie Wyatt.
And I said, man, this is the best thing she's ever done.
Shooter Jennings.
Vincent Neal Emerson.
This is the best thing he's ever done.
Shooter Jennings.
Like, over and over.
And I had been noticing that.
And so we're on the phone, and he's all about the movie.
Yeah, I'm going to help you license the songs.
We'd love that.
You know, my mama loves your music and all that.
You know, she decided she's in the movie.
He just was helpful with everything.
And I had almost made a record at Sunset Sound there in old downtown Hollywood, the old Sunset Sound studio.
I'd wanted to go in there because Mark Neal had told me about it, and I was tired of making records in Georgia and didn't want to go over to the wrong side of Mississippi.
I wanted to make a record in California.
And I told Shooter in passing on the phone that it had fallen through and, you know, did he know such a sound?
And he was like, man, Charlie's crazy.
I'm signing the lease on Studio 3, the print studio, tomorrow.
But it's that whole thing where it's like, okay, I can play the blues, I can play country music, I can play folk music, learn how to play all that shit on the street, matter of fact, right?
It's surprising to me that people would question my authenticity and point to me playing in subway cars.
as this aha moment that I'm not who I said I was.
Why don't you go try to play in those New York City train cars?
You know, like Waylon, like Shooter and like the Waylon Jennings thing for me, you know, is like, you know, I was out there, you know, we were, I did my, I debuted at the Houston Rodeo back in the spring.
And for me, that was like my career goal, you know, because of Selena and George Strait and everybody.
Hell, Elvis played there twice.
I mean, it doesn't matter what your background is as a Texan, any background, the Houston Rodeo.
That's the top.
Culturally, I think, as a stage for an artist to perform, I think, is the Houston Rodeo.
And it's the biggest rodeo on earth, you know, which is why you got everybody from, like I said, you know, Nowadays, you got Post Malone and Beyonce both playing it.
Anyway, I played there, and we were putting a live record out on it, and me and Shooter were mixing it there at Sunset Sound.
And then I stayed the extra night because he had the party at the Viper Room for the announcement of these three unreleased Waylon Jennings records.
And they're legit unreleased.
It's not AI bullshit.
It's not remixes.
This is truly, legitimately unreleased music by arguably the king, certainly the king of all the outlaws.
But in my opinion, when it comes to Nashville country music, whatever you want to call it, man, a buddy of mine, John Spong, a journalist here in town, a Texan, we were at the Sagebrush doing an interview a couple years back.
And he was saying that, like, if Willie Nelson to country music is like Che Guevara, right?
Waylon Jennings was the long-haired prince of darkness, right?
And, like, he's the guy that, like, he's from West Texas, right?
The guy learned, he learned how to play bass on stage.
He learned how to play bass on fucking stage, backing up Buddy Holly, right?
Who at the time, You know?
I mean, that style of rock and roll, right?
It's coming from everywhere.
I mean, nobody's just making their...
But, like, in some ways.
But these guys, whether it's Robert Johnson or B.B. King in the Delta or whatever, or Buddy Holly out in West Texas, you're influenced by the radio and all that.
But there's something to be said for how hard that earth is out there in West Texas.
People talk a lot of shit about Lubbock, right?
It smells like shit because it's cows everywhere.
It's so fucking flat.
You can stand on a fucking tin can and see 100 miles or whatever they say out there, right?
The best people to play a show for, probably anywhere in America, in many ways, in my opinion, is a show in Lubbock.
There's something about the people in that town where it's just the best place to play.
Willie Nelson is now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and he deserves it.
Dolly Parton now, too.
But Waylon Jennings was always rock and roll.
He was never traditional country.
Nothing about him.
If you know what you're listening to, even on his very first record, like, country folk, folk country, right?
There's nothing straight ahead.
Listen to anything coming out of Nashville in, like, 1965.
Anything.
Next to Waylon Jennings.
He's the long-haired prince of darkness.
You know, he is like, he is going to be their undoing of the, Because the coast had all the money and all the zeitgeist power.
And in response, Nashville walled themselves off.
You know what I mean?
That's really what they did.
And then Waylon busted through.
And I know I'm going back on that a lot, but my path that led to making records with Shooter was that when I started figuring out the map is when I cracked the code.
And realize what Waylon was doing musically.
I finally fell in love with him musically.
And it was on this specific record from 1968 called Hanging On.
And every swinging dick in this business that I ever knew coming up in Texas, if it had anything to do with Texas songwriters or country, every one of them wanted to be Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Towns Van Zandt, and Billy Joe Shaver.
Every single one.
And I naturally stepped wide of that because everybody I knew was trying to do it.
And, like, imitating an artist, like, for the advanced part of their movement in and of itself, that's worthless.
It's not that it's worthless.
It's that you will never touch it if you don't go walk your own path.
So a lot of guys I knew when I started playing all the shows with Willie, Willie called me up and got me on with his agent and shit and put me on like 50 shows.
And a lot of guys I knew were like looking at me like, man, why do you get to play with Willie?
You know?
And at first I didn't even, I didn't know.
Right?
Because I was realizing guys that I knew, like they knew Willie Nelson's shit in and out.
We're literally trying to sing like them.
So they're like, fuck you, I should have that spot.
But, like, how I think I've landed with Shooter and his family and playing all those shows with Willie and getting married on his ranch and all that stuff is because, not because I worship Willie Nelson, but because I think Willie looked at me and was like, I like what you're doing.
I like how you got where you're at.
You can play with me.
You don't ask to take your picture with Willie.
He fucking lets you know when you're going to take your picture with him.
When I was playing on the street, people knew I was different.
Artists, the hipsters, like in the Brooklyn scene and in Bushwick and Williamsburg.
All over the boroughs and shit.
To be on the street playing, there's credibility to that.
I didn't want to play in subway cars.
Actually, what it was was this young rapper, Jadon.
Jadon Woodard is his name.
He kept seeing me at the Metropolitan Avenue stop playing there at the platform for the cars coming by on the L train or whatever.
G-Train down there on Metropolitan.
G-Train sucks to ride on.
It's great for subway performers because it's the slowest train in the world, right?
So you get a huge audience between every fucking train.
So it's a goldmine for a street performer and a terrible drag for the New Yorkers waiting on it, right?
Anyways, this kid kept trying to get me.
He would always show up with a different guitar player and shit with an amp.
On his shoulder, which I copied.
I got an amp.
Ran off a 9-volt battery.
You get about 7-8 hours of it in this Telecaster.
And I learned it from this guy, Ghost, who was already doing it, that was playing with Jadon.
Who was kind of part of Citizen Coat, Clarence Greenwood's street team.
And he kept trying to get me to go on the subway cars.
And I was like, man, this kid's crazy.
He's rapping and shit.
Man, the subway cars?
I'm all right, you know.
And eventually he like kind of cornered me.
And then I was finished one day, and I get in the car.
It's on the L train.
And I'm riding in the car, and I'm just sitting there looking down the train.
And all of a sudden, I see that skinny motherfucker in a white tee walking toward me.
And he's moving, but he can't really know how the trains can be loud.
And I'm looking at him, trying to put it together.
And when he gets closer, I realize he's rapping.
And he's got that guitar player with him with the amp behind him.
And he's freestyling, like, you know, the hat you're wearing, he's rhyming to it.
The next stop, he's putting it in the verse and shit.
And he's got all these mixtapes in his hand.
And he's handing them out and shit.
And he sees me and he hands me one.
And that's how he got me.
Because I saw, like, it working.
And he was making money and, like, dropping product.
You know?
I thought, holy shit.
Right?
Because so, like, comedy scene, music scene, whatever.
Say you got a place on 6th Street.
Holds.
Right.
100 people.
And you get a residency, you play there 30 nights a month, right?
And you get 100 different people show up there every night.
What is that, 3,000 people?
It's like, dude, you could hit 3,000 people in like half a day on the train cars once we started working it.
And so it was like, it was his, and he was a spoken word poet.
This kid started fucking rapping on trains at like 15 in like Philly, which is fucking Philly's tough.
I don't have to tell you.
Philly's tough.
Train cars in Philly.
That's mind-blowing.
And then he comes to New York with that and takes that spoken word improvisational thing.
And like all the best rappers I saw in that town, they were all like spoken word poets because, you know, they just were smart and quick, you know, and like we then we got together and like.
And again, I went from making where I would make $30.
All of a sudden, we would make $300 and split it 50-50.
And we turned that into a whole really fine, pretty well-oiled machine where there started being five or six of us and we were bringing guys up and down from New Orleans and shit.
So that's where you see the trumpet players, different spoken word rappers.
We were squatting in warehouses.
Owned by Hasids that were, like, renting out space that was supposed to be for rehearsal, but really everybody was living there and selling drugs and shit.
Wiling out.
And, you know, I cranked that up.
We cranked that up and did get discovered by, like, the heart of the pop machine.
And Jadon knew who she was because he was running the trains before I was.
And he knew all those people because he'd been working it so hard.
And it was crazy.
Like, who you come in contact with on those subway cars, you know what I mean?
It's like, I saw Jake Gyllenhaal on the train one day, and then some other day on the, you know, six train, it'd be like the NBA commissioner gave us a $100 bill.
They were doing that shit you'd think they would do.
So this woman, Nell Muldary, saw us in the R-Train.
And she was in the Sony system and managing artists and kind of the star maker, that pop machine of 2010, 2011.
So they bring us up into the offices in Koreatown, right?
And on the edge of Hell's Kitchen there.
And her office was off the side of this Sony legacy.
Like, kind of catalog room.
Because at the time, she was married to Rob Santos, one of the guys at Sony Legacy.
And so she had this little office off the side of the, like, library thing, whatever.
And she brings us in there.
And they're putting us in front of these, like, computer screens and showing us, like, gym class heroes and the gorillas and Odd Future and Janelle Monae and, like, doing these focus group training.
You know, and where they're going to plug you in to the thing.
And it was like, what was so difficult about it for me, I'm not, they didn't do anything wrong.
You know, we were young, desperate men playing in public transit.
You know, be careful what you ask for, you know.
I was mad for a long time, but I've been eating off that plate forever because it...
That was the best thing that could have happened to me.
I believed that there was some deal.
I wasn't on the trains for it, but I knew we'd find it.
It was fate.
It was fate.
It's that whole thing.
I got there.
It fell apart quick.
It wrecked me, man.
That's when I got off the street and I went back to California.
Started working on the ganja farms because I realized, like Big L said or whatever, I was going to get street struck.
You can't stay out there forever.
You really can't.
That's when I looked at it and it's like, man, okay, what?
What am I willing to sell?
What is Charlie Crockett willing to sell?
And I think that that's stronger than playing it cool and letting somebody else figure it out for you.
That's where it gets dangerous.
You know, and so it's like, I know a lot of these guys in the business, they're like, oh man, you know, I don't pay attention to the business shit and all that type of stuff.
I mean, you're crazy for that.
I don't care if it was Willie Nelson or James Brown.
They were poorer than you.
They both picked cotton, and they learned the business because they had to.
Well, I got lucky in that I got on television so early and I didn't want to be on television.
It wasn't something that I wanted.
But they offered me so much money to be on TV.
I was like, what?
Okay.
But I kept growing and doing my comedy at the comedy store.
And that was the most important thing that I just kept doing comedy.
And then the money was just like fuck you money.
So it's like because I had the fuck you money, I could kind of be myself.
And, you know, there was a lot of temptation.
Like, I remember the producers of Fear Factor were like, what are you doing?
Like, because some of my comedy was just out there.
Like, you know, this gets you in trouble.
This is not network television comedy.
I was like, well, then I won't do network television anymore.
Like, once I had a certain amount in the bank, I was like, all right, this is more money than I ever thought I'd ever have in my whole fucking life.
And I never thought I'd ever be wealthy.
And then all of a sudden I have money.
So if you have fuck you money and you don't say fuck you, what's the point?
What's no one's gonna say fuck you then if you're gonna be a prisoner right to that money like you the like Everybody says just afraid to be you afraid to be yourself Like that's the only time you can really do it is when you have you know It's like the universe gives you this gift and what is the gift is a gift of freedom and you have to choose to either accept it and take it and and run with it or Be captured by it and then want more and more and more forever Forever.
And there's no end.
You know, we were talking about my friend Brian has this friend who's worth three billion dollars and he feels poor because his friend is worth 80. You know how crazy that is?
Think how crazy that is.
Like, this guy's just constantly chasing to keep up with his friend who's worth $80 billion.
Man, that's how it works.
Because he's got three.
Yep, that's how it works.
You could get trapped.
Yeah, you got to hit show.
You want to hit movie.
You got a hit movie, you want to be I want to start singing.
The manager is, in many cases, the most powerful and the least regulated.
You know?
I think that's what's wild about the music business.
There's basically no regulation.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
I think that's what makes people say it's the shadiest business.
I don't think it's the shadiest business, but a guy told me that in New York, actually when I got caught up in the Sony thing with the train robbers deal y 'all were showing on the screen, A lot of people were trying to sign us.
Actually, the guys at A&R'd Wu-Tang, like DJ Scott Free and Matty C, they were trying to get us into a deal.
Citizen Cope had a deal on the table and all that shit.
And it was like, he was the one that told me that.
He was like, man, fuck what you heard.
This is the shadiest business.
Now, I had come from a background of dealing with some pretty crazy shit in Texas, you know, with everything.
But even in that business, like people that are, if you're trying to play the stock market or whatever, Wall Street, it's a corrupt business and it is really fucked up, but it's highly regulated.
And I found it in this place, this found items place, about 10 years ago.
And I just liked it.
Actually, I thought it was native.
I didn't realize it was Egyptian.
And I've always liked this one because I felt like it was a little bit of both.
And I didn't know anything about it at first.
But the reason I never take it off anymore is when I started reading about what it meant to the Egyptians was that it meant safe passage as you journey through this world and get ready to go on to the next one.
You know what I mean?
And protect you against evil.
Protect you for health and happiness.
They call that initiation.
So it makes a lot of people tie it to stupid shit like Illuminati and all that kind of stuff.
But these guys are, they've multiple readings of these things, and they're pretty sure that they're accurate.
They've been accurate with other things, like other temples that are underground, that are 50 feet underground.
They've mapped those things out with the same technology.
So there's a precedent to it.
These people knew things, and we don't understand how they knew it or what they knew.
And we don't know if the people that lived in ancient Egypt that we considered ancient Egypt, like, you know, 2000 BC, we don't know if they found those structures or if those people built those structures.
There's so much.
Weirdness with Egypt, because the construction is so beyond anything else that exists anywhere on Earth, and especially when you're dealing with 4,500 plus years ago.
4,500 years ago is the conventional estimations.
But there's a lot of these heretic archaeologists that think, no, this is a lot older than that.
I mean, there's a king's list that goes back 30,000 plus years.
The most profound evidence is just the vastness of the Egyptian Empire and just the vastness of the construction, the way they were able to bring these stones from 500 miles away through the mountains that are 80 tons.
How?
How did they cut them perfectly?
How did they put them 120 feet in the air and put them in the ceiling?
What the fuck was going on then?
What the fuck was going on with people who were supposedly just getting out of hunter and gathering?
I mean, this is like the emergence.
Like a couple thousand years earlier, we're supposed to be like using stone tools and throwing them at animals.
And now you have these people that build this building.
A true north, south, east, and west has 2,300,000 stones in it.
What?
It's aligned with Orion stars, the stars in the Orion belt.
You know, when I was like a kid, you know, a lot of people have had this thought, but it's like, you know, I'm always like looking up here in the stars and it's like, if they're saying that the stars are basically infinite.
Then it's infinite possibility for other planets with life on it, which basically is a certainty, right?
And the more we explore in the known universe, the more we understand that it's much more likely that this is not an anomaly, that there's many, many planets out there.
Well, we definitely don't remember shit from 20,000 years ago.
It's all just speculation.
And people have been in this form.
You know, the form of homo sapiens now for 300-plus thousand years.
Like, who knows how long?
And who knows where they learned this stuff from?
I mean, who knows if they learned this stuff from visitors?
We don't know.
We don't know.
I mean, if we did get visited 20,000, 30,000 years ago, what evidence would be left?
You know?
And are we being visited now?
Well, we're about to find out because if this shit keeps popping off with Israel and Iran and they start going nuclear, That we're so close to emerging as a Type 1 civilization.
We're so close to getting out of this barbaric, you know, territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons.
We're so close to passing this stage that we're in right now, as long as we don't fuck it up.
And who knows how many times people might have fucked it up in the past.
I mean, that might be what we're looking at when we're looking at ancient Egypt.
Type 1 civilization known as a planetary civilization defined by our Kardashev scale as the one that's harnessed and controls all available energy on its planet.
This includes utilizing all forms of energy from sources like solar, wind, geothermal, and potentially even harnessing nuclear fusion.
A Type 1 civilization is also characterized by a global technologically advanced society with a high degree of interconnectedness and the ability to manage planetary scale resources and weather.
And AI, in best case scenario, helps us achieve that.
And we're close.
We're probably a lot closer to that than we think.
Type 2 civilization is stellar, meaning we populate other planets.
Type 3 is galactic.
We populate the cosmos and we explore the cosmos.
We're on our way to that.
It's inevitable.
If we used to live in caves, and now we fly in hypersonic jets, this is what's coming.
And it's whether or not we fuck it up along the way.