True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 202: Life and Death of an American Fourtracker
Aired: 2022-01-28
Duration: 01:42:21


=== Bizarro Brace Revisited (14:47) ===

[00:00:00]  Brace.
[00:00:04]  If you okay, let's okay.
[00:00:07]  Let's revisit a character that we mentioned a long time ago, which is Bizarro Brace.
[00:00:14]  Okay, Bizarro Brace.
[00:00:15]  Don't remember this one, but yeah.
[00:00:16]  It's okay.
[00:00:17]  I do, but it's okay.
[00:00:18]  So Bizarro Brace is a like alternate version of you.
[00:00:22]  Okay.
[00:00:23]  Now, Bizarro Brace is not punk.
[00:00:26]  No.
[00:00:26]  No, that's.
[00:00:27]  Bizarro Brace is into indie rock.
[00:00:30]  That's right, baby.
[00:00:33]  Me and my girlfriend, Mindy.
[00:00:38]  Mindy, Mindy, her name is Mindy Rock.
[00:00:41]  She's Norwegian.
[00:00:43]  Well, I met her at the sweater store about seven years ago.
[00:00:48]  And, you know, this was right after, you know, I mean, young Chomsky, you remember this.
[00:00:53]  You and I started that business together where we made the fake mustache things that you could put on before they invented filters.
[00:01:01]  People used to do that for Instagram.
[00:01:02]  Or old-timey photo booths.
[00:01:05]  Well, our suspenders and fake mustache business just went belly up because we both simultaneously me too'd each other.
[00:01:11]  Kind of as a joke, but the press releases, I guess it's hard to read that in those.
[00:01:17]  And I met Mindy and she told me that she loved pavement.
[00:01:26]  And I was like, damn, damn, this hoe, this hoe digs a curb, huh?
[00:01:31]  Like, I didn't know that when she was talking about music or anything like that.
[00:01:34]  And then she told me, no, I love pavement because its singer has two sets of teeth.
[00:01:41]  We started hooking up.
[00:01:43]  And then, I don't know, I started Vice.
[00:01:46]  Everything's basically been pretty good after that.
[00:02:13]  Wait, but I was going to ask Bizarro Brace.
[00:02:16]  What?
[00:02:18]  No, that is not the indie.
[00:02:20]  That's not the indie rock sound.
[00:02:22]  Hey, hey.
[00:02:23]  What?
[00:02:24]  Because Bizarro Brace is obviously still a musician.
[00:02:28]  Of course.
[00:02:29]  What's Bizarro Brace's indie rock band name?
[00:02:35]  Oh, hold on.
[00:02:36]  Hold on.
[00:02:37]  No, I got it.
[00:02:38]  I got it.
[00:02:38]  I got it.
[00:02:39]  Milky eyeglass.
[00:02:43]  Wait, no.
[00:02:43]  Milky Spectacles.
[00:02:44]  Milky Spectacles.
[00:02:46]  What's yours, Yisi?
[00:02:49]  The Soft Fellas.
[00:02:50]  Yes.
[00:02:51]  Yes.
[00:02:51]  Liz, what's your indie rock band name?
[00:02:54]  Mine is Lucy and the Yarn Darners.
[00:02:59]  Yes.
[00:02:59]  Yes.
[00:03:00]  Another good one, Liz.
[00:03:01]  Another good one you could do if you're a girl is just name it after any like kind of thing, like haircut or like blow dryer.
[00:03:07]  Oh, yeah, or towel.
[00:03:10]  Towel is good.
[00:03:11]  Towel is really good.
[00:03:13]  Yeah, yes.
[00:03:13]  I feel like you can do animal plus like food item.
[00:03:17]  You could be like zebra jelly and then or something like that.
[00:03:22]  A quick thing: if you guys ever want to, if we ever want to do a punk band, you can just add diss in front of any word and you're good.
[00:03:29]  Oh, sure.
[00:03:30]  Yeah.
[00:03:31]  Yeah, I play like kind of D-beat indie sort of stuff.
[00:03:34]  It's like, it's like, it's like, it's like soft grind a little bit.
[00:03:39]  It's like it's got a lot of loots.
[00:03:43]  Hello, everyone.
[00:03:46]  I'm Liz.
[00:03:50]  What?
[00:03:53]  I'm the, I'm the shock to son of a bitch from pavement.
[00:03:57]  Um, and we have with us here, well, he can say his own damn name today.
[00:04:01]  This is Young Chomsky, who's actually, you know, what you're not producing this.
[00:04:06]  I'm outside producing it.
[00:04:08]  No, I'll be using the left hemisphere of my brain to produce and the right to uh speak on this episode.
[00:04:14]  So I like that.
[00:04:15]  That's called multitasking.
[00:04:17]  Yeah.
[00:04:17]  And the dexterous, this guy.
[00:04:18]  I use one of those hemispheres to tell your body to put its shirt back on.
[00:04:23]  No, that's the only way I can do it.
[00:04:25]  Well, hello, everyone.
[00:04:26]  Welcome.
[00:04:26]  It's True Nan.
[00:04:27]  We're back.
[00:04:28]  We are back.
[00:04:29]  We had a little hiatus.
[00:04:30]  Yes.
[00:04:32]  But that hiatus is now over and we are back.
[00:04:35]  Don't know.
[00:04:36]  Adoption went through and we own a baby now.
[00:04:39]  In about 18 years, this investment will mature and we'll have a free intern that people won't get mad at us not for paying.
[00:04:46]  Oh my gosh.
[00:04:47]  We are inheriting the family business.
[00:04:50]  Exactly.
[00:04:50]  Yes.
[00:04:51]  And also, you don't have to pay your kids.
[00:04:53]  That's why Mormons have a bunch of kids because they can just have them work on the damn dairy farm.
[00:04:59]  We got a little different episode for y'all, y'all, y'all today.
[00:05:02]  Y'all folks today.
[00:05:04]  Y'all folks out there today.
[00:05:06]  Oh my God.
[00:05:07]  We've gone soft.
[00:05:08]  We're saying y'all now.
[00:05:09]  No, I'm saying that in a cowboy way.
[00:05:11]  Oh, okay.
[00:05:12]  Yeah.
[00:05:14]  Original software.
[00:05:16]  Now I'm saying it.
[00:05:16]  Now I'm saying y'all folks out there today.
[00:05:19]  We have a different episode.
[00:05:20]  We're going.
[00:05:21]  We're doing a little.
[00:05:22]  This is an advertorial.
[00:05:26]  It is kind of.
[00:05:28]  You know, some people started calling that those Magalogs.
[00:05:32]  What?
[00:05:33]  Yeah.
[00:05:34]  So, okay.
[00:05:35]  This is a little secret.
[00:05:36]  Hit me with it.
[00:05:36]  There were advertorials, which would be like a one-sheet, but then companies developed MAGALogs, which would be like magazines that were catalogs.
[00:05:46]  Perhaps you remember Abercrombie and Fitch.
[00:05:49]  The, you know, the huge, I have a collection actually at home of the huge, the early Abercrombie, you know, magazines.
[00:05:57]  The original Magalog.
[00:05:58]  Yeah.
[00:05:59]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:06:00]  There's some really cool.
[00:06:01]  They were doing some cool, there was some cool stuff there.
[00:06:04]  But anyway, that's the story for another time.
[00:06:07]  Yeah, I've got to say that.
[00:06:08]  But I just told it, so it was for that this time.
[00:06:10]  Vintage Abercrombies.
[00:06:11]  That's what I'm into.
[00:06:12]  Yeah, I used to write for this magazine called Vice.
[00:06:15]  Actually, you know what?
[00:06:16]  No, Bizarro Bracewrites for Nice magazine.
[00:06:19]  No.
[00:06:20]  Yeah, but it's actually mean.
[00:06:25]  Anyways, we have with us today our Venerable.
[00:06:28]  He's 85 years old.
[00:06:30]  I don't know why I called you Venerable.
[00:06:31]  I had to justify it somehow.
[00:06:33]  Producer, Young Chomsky.
[00:06:35]  He's damn here on the hot mic.
[00:06:36]  He's been saying all kinds of crazy shit that I've told our real producer, Steve Albini, to cut out because we have a new little mini series.
[00:06:45]  I've been, you know, if you notice that I haven't been calling it a mini series, I've been just calling it a series.
[00:06:50]  Yeah.
[00:06:50]  That's because it is.
[00:06:52]  It is just a series.
[00:06:53]  But also, it's a little too indie rock to call it mini.
[00:06:56]  If it's like, oh, it's just so twee and tiny.
[00:06:59]  Here's our little series.
[00:07:02]  It's so small bean series.
[00:07:04]  So before we get into this damn interview, hit us with the facts, facts, man.
[00:07:11]  Yeah, it's called Keep the Dream Alive.
[00:07:14]  And well, I guess the fullest name is Truanon Presents Keep the Dream Alive with John Vanderslice.
[00:07:20]  So that's who else we're going to be speaking to in a moment.
[00:07:23]  And you can hear it starting next week, February 2nd, 2222, where all Truanon podcasts are sold.
[00:07:33]  Again, 2222, the tweest date in the calendar.
[00:07:38]  So we're dropping two episodes, like a couple of, like a couple of, actually, I feel like comparing them to the atomic bombings that really were a horrible thing to have done.
[00:07:50]  Horrible.
[00:07:51]  It's not a good.
[00:07:52]  What are two good things?
[00:07:54]  Like a wedding between two people.
[00:08:00]  That doesn't make any sense either.
[00:08:01]  Two birds.
[00:08:02]  Like two birds getting married.
[00:08:04]  We're putting out two episodes the first week and then like their little birdling children, one dropping each week after that for the next 96 weeks.
[00:08:17]  Just playing for three weeks after that.
[00:08:18]  It's a five episode limited series.
[00:08:22]  And so we have with us today Young Chomsky, who has been just roid raging out this entire time.
[00:08:30]  Hopefully Albini cuts most of this, but he has been just flexing his.
[00:08:35]  I can see your nerve endings.
[00:08:37]  It's all fucked up.
[00:08:38]  And with Venerable.
[00:08:40]  Why do I keep saying venerable?
[00:08:42]  Neither of you guys are venerable.
[00:08:43]  I don't know why I'm saying venerable.
[00:08:45]  Johnstown, but that's like a rude thing to say about somebody, I feel like.
[00:08:48]  I think he's rude.
[00:08:50]  It's always getting venerated.
[00:08:51]  It's like respected.
[00:08:53]  I feel like that's something that comes like at the end, though.
[00:08:56]  Yeah.
[00:08:56]  It's like a lifetime achievement award.
[00:08:58]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:08:59]  Soon to, like, not soon to be, but someday venerated.
[00:09:03]  Yes.
[00:09:04]  Well, he's, no, let's be clear.
[00:09:06]  He's venerated, but he's not venerable.
[00:09:08]  I feel like there's a distinction there.
[00:09:10]  Yeah.
[00:09:12]  He's not yet venerable.
[00:09:13]  He's not yet venerable, but he is venerating once he's, you know, once this damn series comes out.
[00:09:20]  Yeah.
[00:09:20]  All right.
[00:09:21]  So I am going to fucking turn on the damn telecaster here, play an A sharp, and let's start.
[00:09:33]  Let's, I can't, it's been a week and a half.
[00:09:34]  I forgot how we've done it.
[00:09:36]  Let's roll the damn tape!
[00:09:49]  Testing, testing, one, two, three.
[00:09:51]  All right.
[00:09:51]  Got the test results back.
[00:09:53]  And you are all, it looks like mentally ill and stupid.
[00:10:00]  Welcome to the show, guys.
[00:10:02]  How are you guys doing?
[00:10:03]  Good.
[00:10:05]  Excited to be here.
[00:10:06]  Me too.
[00:10:07]  All right.
[00:10:08]  Liz, are you excited to be here?
[00:10:10]  Yes, I am.
[00:10:11]  But I was going to say, wait a second, let's intro the voices that the listeners at home just heard.
[00:10:19]  Who do we have here?
[00:10:20]  We have Young Chomsky for the first time in a long time on mic.
[00:10:26]  This is exciting.
[00:10:27]  Longtime listener.
[00:10:28]  I love the production on this podcast.
[00:10:31]  It's one of my favorites.
[00:10:33]  And John, John Vandersleis, what's up?
[00:10:35]  Hey, how is everyone doing today?
[00:10:38]  Fantastic.
[00:10:41]  Let me first ask you guys something here.
[00:10:44]  This is something I've asked every music type person, I think, since I began my career in music back in 72 when I was touring with the Eagles.
[00:10:53]  How does this sustain?
[00:10:56]  I mean, it's if you're on like a digital wavetable synth, it's infinite.
[00:11:01]  So it's great.
[00:11:02]  That's a cool answer.
[00:11:04]  Totally understand.
[00:11:05]  Totally understand that.
[00:11:06]  So listeners might be like, well, what's going on here?
[00:11:09]  There's a couple guys on the podcast.
[00:11:11]  And we have Young Chomsky here and John Vandersleis to talk about a little upcoming series that Truanon did is putting out.
[00:11:21]  It's a Truanon thing, John Vandersleis' thing.
[00:11:25]  And it's called Keep the Dream Alive, doing the worst introduction in human history.
[00:11:29]  Keep the dream alive.
[00:11:30]  And you know what?
[00:11:31]  Let's do the most basic question that I could possibly ask you guys.
[00:11:36]  What is this thing?
[00:11:38]  Yeah, I mean, so Keep the Dream Alive.
[00:11:40]  So the name comes from a song that John wrote a long time ago.
[00:11:45]  And John, of course, I think needs no introduction.
[00:11:48]  But for those of you who aren't hip to it yet, John is a musician and record producer and studio owner, a recording studio owner.
[00:11:57]  And he had a recording studio in San Francisco called Tiny Telephone, which was very famous, renowned among certain circles, indie rock circles primarily.
[00:12:11]  So a lot of records that I know and love and have been listening to for a long time were recorded at Tiny Telephone, probably some that many listeners are familiar with, including John's records, records by bands like Death Cab for Cutie, The Mountain Goats, Magnetic Fields.
[00:12:28]  And these are all things that we talk about in the podcast.
[00:12:31]  So it's basically a history of John and also of this studio, which started in 1997.
[00:12:39]  That's when it was founded and kind of started from very humble beginnings, grew to become this really cult destination, really sought after place where it was booked, you know, like every day of the year.
[00:12:51]  And then finally was kind of clinging on for a long time in the inhospitable environment of San Francisco where rent is insanely expensive, as many of us know, and the city went through a lot of changes, better and often worse.
[00:13:08]  And finally, the studio shut down in 2020.
[00:13:11]  So we kind of start off the podcast with that.
[00:13:13]  The studio is closed.
[00:13:16]  And then we travel back through time and we look at the beginning and the middle and then we catch back up and see what the future holds.
[00:13:25]  So that's my high-level introduction to keep that.
[00:13:29]  That was great.
[00:13:30]  Thanks.
[00:13:31]  How did you guys link up on this project?
[00:13:34]  I think we linked up.
[00:13:35]  Weren't you visiting me, YC, Young Chomsky?
[00:13:40]  It's really hard for me not to call you by your name.
[00:13:44]  Call me when you want.
[00:13:46]  Call me when you need.
[00:13:47]  Call me up by your name.
[00:13:48]  I'll be on the way back.
[00:13:51]  That's all right.
[00:13:52]  You can call Mordecai once the recording's over.
[00:13:56]  Well, it's funny.
[00:13:57]  I guess the way I would tell it is I've, you know, like I alluded to a minute ago, I've been listening to John's music for a long time, like 15 years.
[00:14:07]  I'm sorry I didn't catch that part.
[00:14:08]  Could you repeat that?
[00:14:10]  Yeah, I mean, I got into John's music along with the music of a lot of these other bands that are part of this time and place in the mid-2000s.
[00:14:20]  And I, you know, have been taking a trip down memory lane for myself in the process of making this.
[00:14:25]  And I think the first time I saw John play live was like 2006.
[00:14:31]  And I have some old photos of John performing in all over the years in 2013.
[00:14:39]  I have a photo that I'll post at some point.
[00:14:41]  I visited Tiny Telephone in San Francisco in 2014.
[00:14:44]  So this is stuff that I've been into for a while.

=== Why 89 Moved to Twitch (07:17) ===

[00:14:47]  But I think we first kind of collaborated officially summer of 2020 when we were doing those True and On Twitch streams.
[00:14:56]  And if you didn't catch those, I was interviewing different musicians on the Twitch channel and doing these little synth kind of tutorials.
[00:15:03]  And I would perform and I would invite people to perform.
[00:15:05]  And so I reached out to people who I admired and hoped would come on the show.
[00:15:11]  And some of them didn't reply.
[00:15:13]  And they're dead to me now.
[00:15:14]  And I'll never listen to their records again.
[00:15:17]  Me and Stewart.
[00:15:18]  Yeah.
[00:15:18]  Others did.
[00:15:19]  And John was one of those.
[00:15:21]  So we did one of those Twitch streams and it was super fun.
[00:15:23]  And then I guess after, shortly after that, John, you reached out and you sent me something you'd recorded, a podcast that you'd recorded for your Patreon.
[00:15:33]  And it was kind of processing and kind of talking through shutting down the studio because that was right around the time that was happening.
[00:15:40]  And I remember I found the email that I sent to you.
[00:15:43]  It was in June 2020.
[00:15:45]  So that's when this project was kind of first conceived.
[00:15:47]  But I said, I think you've got something here.
[00:15:50]  This is a really compelling story, but I know there's like more to it.
[00:15:54]  And I think this needs kind of a long form explanation because there's a great arc here.
[00:15:59]  And I was, I said, do you want to work on this together?
[00:16:01]  And that's when we started, we started scheming.
[00:16:04]  Yeah.
[00:16:04]  And I was all in.
[00:16:05]  It made total sense to me.
[00:16:07]  And I think that one of the first kind of ideas that we talked about was that like running an arts business is like, it's like easy bake oven style capitalism.
[00:16:18]  Do you know what I mean?
[00:16:19]  It's like completely fake and wouldn't really stand up to like a real market.
[00:16:25]  I mean, you're, you're competing with like, first off, it's like you're mostly competing with trust funders and psychotic people.
[00:16:33]  It's not, it doesn't like really attract normal people.
[00:16:36]  Like the profit margins are so razor thin and the overhead is so like punishing that you have to have for me, the only real reason that I could dig my feet in for, I mean, you know, I'm still running studios now.
[00:16:50]  It's like, you know, it's been a long time, but like without me actually making my own records in those studios, I think it just simply doesn't make sense unless you've got an axe to grind with God or you have some just real trauma that you're expressing through like this business experience.
[00:17:08]  But I think that we kind of like wanted to see it through the lens of like capitalism.
[00:17:14]  You know, it's like I was forced to like run this business through the marketplace and the market of San Francisco where I'm paying, you know, like I'm competing with tech companies for class C real estate, which is fucking crazy if you think about it.
[00:17:30]  Think about it.
[00:17:30]  And so that was really the beginning of where it felt like, oh, this, this actually would be interesting.
[00:17:36]  Well, wait, where was Tiny Telephone?
[00:17:38]  It was right by, it was like by, right by where the farm was, right?
[00:17:41]  It was in the farm.
[00:17:42]  Actually, it was in the same, and my landlord was the, and really the only reason that Tiny Telephone existed is that my landlord was the good family who not only produced Tiger King, but also ran the farm and are like longtime art support supporter weirdo landlords.
[00:18:02]  Like, I mean, they allowed total anarchy.
[00:18:04]  I mean, they allowed Flipper to play, you know, like, you know, shows that were crazy, the fucking crazy shows, you know, and like, you know, they allowed survival research laboratories, which was my neighbor, an anarchist collective that, you know, bought a decommissioned V1 rocket from West Germany and turned it into a flamethrower.
[00:18:24]  It's like spewing so much heat that one day we were recording, Deerhoof was recording in the control room, and we felt the control room, which was maybe 50 yards away from the front door.
[00:18:35]  We felt the control room heat up.
[00:18:37]  And I was like, I was like, turn down the monitors.
[00:18:40]  We turn it down.
[00:18:41]  We hear this rumbling.
[00:18:43]  We go outside.
[00:18:44]  And as we're walking towards the door, it's just like feels like this solar kind of like flare.
[00:18:49]  We open the door and there's the V1 rocket, you know, like spitting out crazy flames.
[00:18:55]  I mean, this is a crazy.
[00:18:56]  So they allowed this stuff down there.
[00:18:59]  Yeah, we should go back and say, okay, so you, because that is a totally different time than anything that could happen in San Francisco now.
[00:19:07]  Like that is not like that is not familiar.
[00:19:12]  Anyone who's been to San Francisco in the last 10 years, I would say, that would, that's like unheard of.
[00:19:19]  Like maybe they'd be like, oh, I could imagine something like that happening, but that just, that, it's not possible anymore in that city.
[00:19:25]  And I think that, you know, the, the kind of, you know, the arc of your, of your recording studio of tiny telephone just follows so much of kind of, and is shaped by the changes that happened to the, you know, to the fabric of the city in that same time.
[00:19:44]  So when you opened it, what year was it?
[00:19:46]  Or we can even go back even further.
[00:19:48]  When did you move to San Francisco?
[00:19:49]  I moved to San Francisco in 1989, where San Francisco was the coolest, weirdest, you know, active, you know, like gayest and most interesting city in the U.S. There were actual communist bookstores where people were, you know, like in, you know, buying books.
[00:20:07]  And there were, you know, there was the naked group of men in the Castro that were just outdoor landscape.
[00:20:13]  Okay, those guys are still there.
[00:20:16]  No, they passed the city council.
[00:20:18]  I think they passed a resolution saying that it was illegal to do that.
[00:20:20]  Yes, but it was the wording of the resolution was such, I was actually just explaining it to someone the other day.
[00:20:26]  Oh, I love this.
[00:20:26]  They had to wear something over their penis.
[00:20:30]  And so that something became like Anthony Keydon style.
[00:20:37]  For some, it was the sock, but for many, they just accessorized and put on a cock ring.
[00:20:43]  Oh, my gosh.
[00:20:44]  Technically, that's solid.
[00:20:46]  And a decent troll.
[00:20:48]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:20:50]  Okay, so 89, 89, you moved there.
[00:20:52]  I moved there in 89, and I was a food worker for my entire life.
[00:20:56]  So I started working in restaurants when I was 15.
[00:20:58]  Part of the reason why I moved to San Francisco is that I knew that I could get work in restaurants.
[00:21:04]  Like, like I knew that because I'd been working in service for so long that I could like deal with the, I mean, I was dating someone who lived there.
[00:21:12]  So that was really the draw.
[00:21:14]  But, but I could stay there because I started working.
[00:21:17]  Basically, I started working in like Fisherman's Wharf tourist places that were serving frozen crab and soft serve ice cream.
[00:21:25]  Did you work at the crab shack?
[00:21:26]  Alioto's.
[00:21:27]  No one.
[00:21:27]  Close.
[00:21:28]  Acebella's, which is like really two doors down from Elioto's, right?
[00:21:32]  So I worked it, but I wasn't on the floor.
[00:21:35]  I wasn't good enough to be on the floor.
[00:21:37]  I was in the catering department where you would work on like, basically it was like Japanese tours would come in and they would Rocky the kind of the crew chief would you would be sitting down, you know, waiting for something to happen and he'd run and he'd be like 134 21A's and you'd be like, okay, that's frozen crab.
[00:21:55]  It's like barely reheated canned clam chowder, like a quarter slice of like melon with some seeds still like stuck.

=== Decks and Digital Dreams (06:30) ===

[00:22:04]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:22:06]  And some iceberg, you know, like salad.
[00:22:09]  And so I, I worked there.
[00:22:12]  I played in really bad bands, one of which was called the id.
[00:22:16]  Another one was called Cylinder.
[00:22:17]  And then another one was called MK Ultra, which some people claim to have liked, but we could draw about like six people to those shows.
[00:22:24]  So I don't believe them.
[00:22:27]  And so one day I'm looking in the San Francisco Chronicle and there was a listing for like a warehouse space and it was $660 for 2,000 square feet.
[00:22:38]  Fantastic.
[00:22:39]  So me and nine other friends rented as a, and it was like, yeah, 10 way.
[00:22:43]  I remember the 10-way spot.
[00:22:44]  I remember getting that $66 check from people was like a big deal.
[00:22:49]  Yeah.
[00:22:50]  Well, anyone who shared a practice space in the last, even to this day, it's difficult to get a $60 check from people sometimes.
[00:22:59]  So that's how I started.
[00:23:01]  So I started renting from the Good Family in 1992.
[00:23:04]  Tiny Telephone, it took so long to open because it was, you know, a rehearsal space for us.
[00:23:09]  And then we kind of like slowly transitioned into a studio that the studio opened in 1997.
[00:23:15]  And so you are, you are basically, I mean, here's the thing.
[00:23:19]  You're an analog guy, right?
[00:23:21]  And to explain, we like to, here on Truanon, usually tell our guests to like say things in basically the most like explanatory talk into a baby manner possible.
[00:23:31]  Not, dear listeners, not because we think you're stupid, but because everybody but you is stupid.
[00:23:38]  And so we have to explain it to them, not you.
[00:23:40]  But, you know, in recording, there are a couple of different kind of schools of recording, I guess.
[00:23:45]  And there is digital recording and analog recording.
[00:23:48]  And Tiny Telephone famously is an analog place.
[00:23:52]  And that kind of is important to this story.
[00:23:54]  So tell us about that.
[00:23:56]  Well, I mean, it's like full disclosure, I have been.
[00:24:00]  totally radicalized in the past couple years because I started taking a lot of MDMA and I think it started like changing the way my ears, what my ears wanted to hear.
[00:24:11]  You know what I mean?
[00:24:12]  So I know, I know.
[00:24:13]  You've been to my parties.
[00:24:15]  Yeah, true.
[00:24:16]  Fair enough.
[00:24:18]  And so I think I started wanting to hear like more like glitchy kind of digital stuff.
[00:24:23]  So I now record in my small studio in my backyard, which you've seen and Liz, you've seen.
[00:24:29]  I am like 100% like digital now, but I was radicalized to become like an analog studio for two reasons.
[00:24:39]  One, I was working at Chez Panisse when I first opened Tiny Telephone and Alice Waters really pushed me in a weird, odd way to go all in on like a, you know, flying an extreme flag.
[00:24:52]  She basically said, you have to fly a flag.
[00:24:55]  And, you know, I was an analog person then.
[00:24:58]  Digital recording was really, really bad then, like terrible.
[00:25:02]  Like people were selling tape decks, which I was buying for nothing and then buying ADATs and then putting a gun in their mouth and then like creating like a Jackson Pollock painting.
[00:25:13]  Ironically, a very analog way to go out.
[00:25:19]  And then, so I just got in this loop where I was buying discarded, you know, these machines were, they were 128 grand for like a Studer 827 when they came off the line.
[00:25:30]  And studios were selling them to me for two grand because they were all in on digital.
[00:25:35]  You know, it's like they were just like clamoring to like, you know, cook their dinner in a microwave, which to me was what the qualitative like equivalent was.
[00:25:44]  So digital's gotten better.
[00:25:46]  Analog, though, was perfected over 70 years.
[00:25:49]  Good analog decks still sound so fucking good.
[00:25:53]  Like, and they are, we chatted about this today.
[00:25:56]  Like they are human.
[00:25:57]  They like you, this is a linear format.
[00:26:00]  It is much more like it is much more knowable to us as like humans existing in space and like going through time if time is linear, which I'm not quite sure anymore.
[00:26:13]  But so yeah, like we wanted to provide the peak experience of what recording could be and no one else was doing it.
[00:26:23]  They were all too, my assessment then at that moment was that they were too lazy.
[00:26:27]  Our whole podcast actually was recorded straight to two inch tape, which is why it was really hard to edit.
[00:26:33]  It's taken me a long time with the razor blade to piece this together.
[00:26:38]  But also, I wanted to just point out too, you know, I've had a lot of time to think about this podcast and like what it is and what it's about and how I see it.
[00:26:45]  But we talk a lot about recording and a lot about music, but I feel strongly that like this is not a podcast for gearheads only.
[00:26:52]  Like we don't talk that much.
[00:26:54]  I mean, if you know what a compressor does and you know what an EQ does, you'll probably get a little bit more out of it.
[00:27:00]  But yeah, to me, it's much more of an emotional story, a human story that just happens to be about a recording studio.
[00:27:10]  Well, listen, I mean, we're all gearheads here, right?
[00:27:15]  I mean, if these people could see the kind of the kind of stuff that we're working with here, Liz practically looks like a cyborg.
[00:27:22]  She's had stuff implanted into her.
[00:27:24]  I'm an analog cyborg.
[00:27:26]  Yeah.
[00:27:27]  Yeah, Liz is recording into a 1961 Neumann microphone.
[00:27:32]  And what kind of compressor, John?
[00:27:35]  Really great kind.
[00:27:36]  1176.
[00:27:37]  Yeah, she's gotten 1176.
[00:27:39]  She's arcing up.
[00:27:41]  To any listeners who are like, what the fuck are these guys talking about?
[00:27:43]  I don't know what the fuck these guys are talking about.
[00:27:45]  1176?
[00:27:46]  You guys sound like a day in the damn Star Wars or something.
[00:27:49]  I will say, my buddy Mikey Young used to work at a fucking, I think he still might work at a pressing plant in Australia, like, you know, a record pressing plant.
[00:27:59]  And he actually recorded records there straight to, I think, acetate.
[00:28:05]  Yeah.
[00:28:06]  And I, I, there, they, I have one.
[00:28:08]  It's fucking incredible that he recorded with, you know, Kelly Stoltz?
[00:28:12]  Yeah, I love Kelly.
[00:28:13]  Yeah.
[00:28:15]  That, uh, he recorded with Kelly there.
[00:28:17]  That's just incredible.
[00:28:19]  Um, but that is slightly off topic here.
[00:28:21]  So, all right, you start this record studio up.
[00:28:24]  You're like, I'm going to be the fucking, I'm going to be the tape king.
[00:28:28]  I'm going to make Richard Nixon look like shit with how many fucking tapes I'm going to record here.

=== Starting a Tape Studio (05:30) ===

[00:28:34]  Did you know a bunch of, I mean, you're playing music, you know, it's the 1990s when I kind of, you know, indie rock is sort of like becoming its into its own as a genre, I guess, late 90s.
[00:28:46]  How did he get hooked up with a bunch of these bands that recorded there?
[00:28:50]  So I think that like the history of the studio also kind of parallels my own like record making.
[00:28:56]  So the whole cycle was, it depended on both elements, right?
[00:29:04]  So I needed to go on tour.
[00:29:05]  So I would often go on tour and then the band that I was with would just kind of through me wearing them down or exposure to records that were done at the studio or my records, they would eventually come in and record.
[00:29:20]  So there was like, there was this almost thing, this route where I, and at the time, I mean, really from like probably 2001 to 2014, I was touring at least six months a year, if not more.
[00:29:36]  And so I would go out on a record cycle.
[00:29:41]  And then in some ways, you're kind of like, it was always me and Tiny Telephone was like grouped together.
[00:29:46]  So I was like this.
[00:29:49]  Kind of like just reminder that this place existed.
[00:29:52]  And San Francisco for a while was, you know, it was a weird art haven where everyone had friends and people would let anyone crash in the studio.
[00:30:01]  You know, if we had like, sometimes we'd have like another space in, because I was the property manager down at the farm.
[00:30:09]  So if we had like a place that was unrented, I would just allow bands to like set up camp in these like warehouses that were open.
[00:30:18]  And they'd just bring sleeping bags and pads and crash and then come into the studio, record and then go back.
[00:30:23]  We had tons of bands bring vans and just sleep in the vans in front of the studio.
[00:30:28]  So it was a very like pro art, like, let's just make weird records and we were undermarket the entire time.
[00:30:38]  This was incredibly appealing to the circuit that I was like running on.
[00:30:43]  Yeah, there's something to be said for the undermarket thing.
[00:30:46]  So by that, you mean that you charged way cheaper rates than basically anybody equivalent, right?
[00:30:53]  Yeah.
[00:30:53]  Once, so there's this, this recording magazine called Tape Op and they used to have this conference.
[00:30:59]  And I went to the first Tape Op conference ever and I was like a speaker at the conference.
[00:31:06]  And at the time, I had like made it very public in interviews that a recording studio had to have publish rates on their front page and like bold font and that the idea of them like sliding rates was unethical.
[00:31:23]  And I really was like clear that I felt like you need to have rates so low that you're sold out and that like that's how you're going to survive, you know, that you're going to be working 365 days a year.
[00:31:37]  And that's how bands can come in and like afford like that's how you know where your rate is like at the at the right spot.
[00:31:46]  And so what studios would always say to me is that, no, we want to have like like sliding rates.
[00:31:51]  So if someone doesn't have money, they get a cheaper rate.
[00:31:54]  And if they're on a label, they get a higher rate.
[00:31:57]  Well, this is complete fucking fantasy because for 25 years, I've been getting hammered by managers and labels and bands that have leverage.
[00:32:07]  The winners are the ones who are confident enough or they have like people who all they do is just brutalize other people about their, about money, you know?
[00:32:17]  And so, and bands that are poor actually, they don't feel like it's their space to be pushing you on the rate.
[00:32:26]  So anyways, I was booed at this conference because I was like insisting, right?
[00:32:33]  And I think back to it, and it was like, at the time, I knew I was right.
[00:32:37]  And I was just like, bring it on, man.
[00:32:39]  Let those booz pour over me.
[00:32:41]  And I was like adamant that it was like to have like a hidden, you know, what's called a card rate, right?
[00:32:47]  So like your published rate and then every, what you're really charging is, is like unknowable, right?
[00:32:53]  To me, it's so anti-democratic.
[00:32:56]  And so the studio was really based on this, this like completely transparent rate that was unbelievably low, but through sheer volume, we made it work.
[00:33:23]  So who are we talking?
[00:33:25]  We should say, who are we talking about here?
[00:33:27]  Like when you first started, what, like, what, um, like, who are some of the bands that maybe some people, you know, might be familiar with that you start bringing in in the early days?
[00:33:38]  And from where, like, from there, where does it kind of go?
[00:33:41]  I mean, and the, some of the key first bands were Death Cab for Cutie, who were huge.
[00:33:47]  I mean, they did transatlanticism there.
[00:33:49]  They were there for over a month.
[00:33:50]  And like that for us was, was like massive because they talked about it every, you know, every show that they did.
[00:33:59]  And then they would play at the Fillmore when they came in town and then they would talk about me and the studio from stage.

=== Econ Degree Lessons (14:00) ===

[00:34:05]  So this, this kind of stuff, you know, we never placed an ad anywhere.
[00:34:09]  You know, we never bothered to have, you know, we know it's all word of mouth, right?
[00:34:14]  It's like you can't, it doesn't matter if people like know who you are, if they don't care about you.
[00:34:19]  So Deerhoof was really big.
[00:34:22]  Mountain Goats were really big.
[00:34:23]  These are people that are career, you know, I knew at that point they were careerists.
[00:34:28]  I knew that they were going to be around forever and that they're singular artists.
[00:34:31]  They're completely weird people that are involved in a lot of stuff.
[00:34:37]  And, you know, it wasn't just Death Cab.
[00:34:40]  It was Chris Walla from Death Cab as a producer would bring in tons of records, you know?
[00:34:44]  So like we had this like kind of like system outside of bands coming in, there were a lot of producers that were fans of the studio that would come in and they would bring bands that I did not know or didn't have any connection with.
[00:34:58]  And then all of a sudden we're getting phone calls from of Montreal for a month or islands for a month.
[00:35:03]  And it was, I knew that the heat was on at a point where I was like turning down like serious shit.
[00:35:10]  I mean, we've turned down way more stuff than we ever got.
[00:35:14]  You know, like Frank Ocean's manager would like pressure us for days.
[00:35:18]  And we were like, like philosophically, we would never, we've never bumped a session, which is also like that's pretty rare in studio world.
[00:35:29]  We've never bumped a session for anybody.
[00:35:32]  Um, because it's gross, and so we lost a lot of bookings.
[00:35:37]  There was one person that tried to book where I was like seriously, i'm gonna bump someone, and that was Kevin Durant.
[00:35:44]  When he was on the Warriors he wanted to do, sorry hold, why did he want?
[00:35:48]  What did he want to?
[00:35:48]  He wanted to throw down some verses and I was like I will engineer that.
[00:35:53]  I mean, I will, I will, i'm gonna make this relationship happen, i'm gonna.
[00:35:58]  He is definitely the most indie rock basketball superstar, by the way, and he's a softboy.
[00:36:04]  Oh yeah, total.
[00:36:05]  Couldn't you just tell a band like guys, is Kevin Durant wants to come on?
[00:36:11]  Please he can?
[00:36:14]  Because I feel like if you can kick another band's ass, you should be able to get their studio time.
[00:36:19]  Yeah, like if Kevin Durant could beat up whatever the lead singer of whatever band was in there.
[00:36:26]  Um yeah, I think he should be able to get the studio time.
[00:36:28]  Also, he should get a portion of the record sales, and this goes for everybody.
[00:36:31]  Yep, he should get points on the record, absolutely a hundred percent.
[00:36:35]  So one thing about making this podcast that was enjoyable to me was there.
[00:36:42]  It's made of a lot of different interviews many, I think, 18 in total different interviews and the format is pretty different from Truan just in terms of how uh, how it was made and how it it sounds, I think um, and all kind of cut together maybe a little bit more like a documentary film.
[00:36:59]  But one of the fun things was talking to these different people all separately but hearing them say the same things or similar things, or talk about the same things without having heard the other ones and one of the things and they say a lot of similar things, or there's a lot of themes in the way people talk about John, and one is that he could have made a lot more money with this studio than he did, and I think it was.
[00:37:20]  It was Ben Gibber, where he's like uh yeah, that makes John either a very dumb person or just like an incredibly Generous and giving person.
[00:37:30]  And, you know, he favors the latter interpretation.
[00:37:32]  And so do I. I'm really stupid.
[00:37:35]  But it was funny.
[00:37:36]  I mean, that comes up a lot.
[00:37:37]  And the other thing was, I swear, almost everyone, I feel like said something about cult leader or John seems like he could start a cult or there was a cult vibe.
[00:37:47]  So, yeah, I'm going to have to do some kind of like super cut where I put all those together of like 18 different people being like, Yeah, John's great.
[00:37:53]  He looks like a cult leader.
[00:37:55]  Well, I mean, literally, since you cut the mullet, not as much, but feels like yeah, it was David Krash vibes.
[00:38:01]  Well, making money and like trying to figure out how to make money is such a huge part of this story.
[00:38:09]  I mean, I think that's what's it's um, you know, it's it's so difficult.
[00:38:14]  I mean, I don't know how I have a friend who's a working dancer, which sounds like like she's like in like a jazz dancer in New York.
[00:38:23]  And the idea of being a working artist is such a like anachronistic concept in 2022.
[00:38:30]  It just seems completely and totally impossible for so many people.
[00:38:34]  It seems totally out of reach.
[00:38:36]  And part of the story is so much of that struggle of you trying to figure out how to fucking continue making that possible while still allowing, it seems like this community that you've built and this like scene, but also the tension between, you know, kind of the misgivings of also having to run a business while maintaining that, like trying to kind of keep all this whole thing going while in the midst of this huge transformation of San Francisco.
[00:39:04]  So like, how, I mean, and that's a big part of the story, right?
[00:39:08]  It goes under.
[00:39:10]  It's really hard.
[00:39:12]  I mean, how, I don't know, how did you kind of get that going?
[00:39:16]  And at what point did it become clear that it maybe wasn't going to work out?
[00:39:21]  Well, so I think there's an interesting tension with me that I definitely like want power for sure.
[00:39:28]  I definitely wanted to be more famous for sure.
[00:39:30]  Like anyone who says they don't, they're just like full of shit, you know.
[00:39:35]  But like, I really truly am ambivalent about money.
[00:39:40]  I just don't, it's just, I can't spark the nerve, the neurons.
[00:39:45]  I can't really get it like, I can't get too activated.
[00:39:49]  So the tension for me was always like, I wanted people to pay attention to my records.
[00:39:54]  I wanted people to like, you know, honor the studio as if it's like a mafia don.
[00:40:00]  But I, I really didn't care about money.
[00:40:02]  So what would happen was that we'd get into these cycles where if like I would buy gear, like for instance, like, you know, PayPal has this like stupid, you can buy something for six months and you don't have to pay for it.
[00:40:16]  So I would, you know, my credit line would be like 20 grand.
[00:40:19]  So I would just buy crazy shit and I'd be like, I have six months.
[00:40:23]  And then I would just like go on tour and forget about it.
[00:40:26]  Yeah.
[00:40:27]  You know, and then I get an email that like you have an $18,000 payment.
[00:40:30]  And, you know, I have an econ degree.
[00:40:31]  I didn't go to a good school, but I have an econ degree.
[00:40:34]  I paid attention.
[00:40:35]  So I don't fucking pay interest.
[00:40:37]  You know what I mean?
[00:40:38]  Like, I'm a scammer.
[00:40:39]  I don't pay my taxes.
[00:40:40]  Classic econ degree.
[00:40:43]  Yeah.
[00:40:44]  And let's be clear.
[00:40:45]  Usury is, I mean, it's gross.
[00:40:48]  And to be clear, what is what are taxes but usury on the working man?
[00:40:54]  Yeah, I'm not going to pay for an F-35.
[00:40:56]  It's not going to happen.
[00:40:57]  So I will, but as long as I get to drive it, which is going to be starting the lottery system.
[00:41:03]  So I think that unconsciously in the beginning, I used this almost like over constant over-leveraging to motivate me to like pay for shit and to be engaged.
[00:41:17]  And like, so then classic grind set.
[00:41:20]  Total grind set.
[00:41:21]  And then, but it gets worse because then I got addicted to the anxiety.
[00:41:25]  And then the only way to satiate this is to keep building studios.
[00:41:28]  But that's what happens.
[00:41:29]  Yeah.
[00:41:30]  You know, you are, I just should have had one ready.
[00:41:33]  Yeah.
[00:41:33]  And then all of a sudden I have three and it's like insane.
[00:41:36]  Well, I think the crazy thing about, especially in, you know, in the music world, because I spent a long time of that was basically the only thing I did was play music, go on tour, play in bands and stuff like that.
[00:41:49]  And a lot of the people you meet at recording studios and, but more than that, like show bookers or tour bookers, most of the bands I've dealt with didn't have managers, but managers too, which I've since dealt with.
[00:42:04]  You really got to be a ruthless son of a bitch who's willing to not only skim some off the top, but skim a lot off the top in order to make a profit.
[00:42:13]  Because unless you're in like basically everything else, like unless you're in the major leagues, you know, you're playing in like the killers or something, you're generally not making very much money.
[00:42:24]  And the people around you, I mean, a lot of the times, like, I mean, I probably paid more to recording studios than I ever actually made in a band over the course of over a decade.
[00:42:39]  And we weren't paying exorbitant rates or anything like that, but it's like, I remember paying, we had to pay a guy like $200 a day.
[00:42:45]  I was like, this is the fucking kidding me?
[00:42:47]  This is the craziest thing I ever heard in my life.
[00:42:51]  I'm like, $200 a day?
[00:42:56]  Don't we who gives or gives us money?
[00:43:00]  But, you know, that's the thing.
[00:43:02]  It's like, and that's something that really, I mean, listening to this show, because a little sneak peek audience is actually not a sneak peek.
[00:43:11]  We got a sneak peek.
[00:43:13]  But listening to the show, that seems to be one of the major Kind of problems that you come up against is that like you can't, and I'm not saying this, I'm not sucking your dick or nothing here, but like, I agree.
[00:43:27]  I mean, you know, I'm, I'm in, in, in agreement with Ben Gibbard here, as usual, you know, for our many conversations.
[00:43:35]  Um, you, you are not great at running a business, um, but there is something addictive about this, it seems like, because I mean, I coming from, you know, almost nobody makes money playing music, but people still do it.
[00:43:50]  And, uh, and in a way, the recording process, I really always, really enjoyed that.
[00:43:55]  Um, I mean, I was never produced anything, but it is just like it's an incredible sort of art form in its own right.
[00:44:01]  And also think about this that like the studio was solvent and profitable for 23 years.
[00:44:08]  Now, it might not have, you know, I might have left some money on the table, but maybe that was like insurance, like in case like, you know, goodwill actually has like real value.
[00:44:20]  So like if I, you know, gotten to, you know, I didn't have health insurance for 14, 15 years.
[00:44:26]  And I remember in the middle of that, I'd be like, you know what?
[00:44:29]  I'm pretty sure I could fucking pop off on a GoFundMe.
[00:44:32]  You know what I mean?
[00:44:32]  Like, I'm sure I could build this up.
[00:44:34]  You know what I mean?
[00:44:35]  Like, well, when I was living and working in San Francisco, like we called it, we, everyone just kind of like bartered with each other.
[00:44:44]  Like we called it retail mafia and everyone had each other's back.
[00:44:47]  And it would be like, oh, you know, where I worked and be like, oh, we're going to just, you know, give you this off of whatever.
[00:44:54]  And when I see you later at the bar or at the restaurant, you're going to give me that off of whatever.
[00:44:57]  And everyone kind of, you know, was back then.
[00:45:00]  I mean, this was, you know, again, right before everything changed.
[00:45:06]  You know, it was still possible back then for that kind of community to exist.
[00:45:12]  I don't know if that still exists, to be honest.
[00:45:14]  But I mean, I pay, yeah, I mean, I was living, I think I paid like $250 for rent at one point.
[00:45:20]  Yeah, that's gone.
[00:45:21]  I mean, I think that maybe some of that, that like spirit exists in Oakland.
[00:45:27]  But, but I think that like San Francisco proper, it's been, it's been, it's been eradicated.
[00:45:33]  Well, that's, that's, that's sort of what it's like from listening to this.
[00:45:36]  I mean, I, I got to tell you, this is a big trip down sort of memory lane, just the milieu that a lot of this was in.
[00:45:42]  Um, I mean, you know, Liz, your point about that, like sort of the retail mafia, I, uh, unfortunately, no one was willing to trade flowers out on 19th Avenue in the sunset for anything.
[00:45:54]  But I do remember like when I was like 18, I mean, actually, and for many years after that, I had no money.
[00:46:01]  I would go down like either to the mission or at the upper hate or something where like a large concentration of people I knew worked and be like, all right, well, I can get a free slice, couple slices of pizza for free from RingCon and R L's.
[00:46:13]  Then I can go over and get drunk at delirium for like two free drinks until the guy gets mad at me.
[00:46:19]  It's like, well, you're going to pay for the next one.
[00:46:21]  Then I can go to a different bar and get drunk.
[00:46:23]  It's like that, that worked out for a while.
[00:46:25]  And that was like very, I mean, it's kind of, it almost seems crazy looking at the city now, but like San Francisco really was like, I mean, this is this show.
[00:46:34]  I mean, listening to this, it's, it, it, it shows just how much of like an incredible place San Francisco was.
[00:46:41]  I mean, it used to be a center of like music.
[00:46:45]  I mean, unequivocally for different kinds of music.
[00:46:49]  Absolutely.
[00:46:50]  And I think that like what got me about San Francisco is that, I mean, I grew up kind of fearing for my own sanity and just wondering like, well, they say that the voices start when you're 22, you know, when you're like 21, 22.
[00:47:05]  And I was like, well, here we go.
[00:47:08]  You know, I mean, I was very sure that my mental health was going to unravel very quickly.
[00:47:15]  And when I got to San Francisco, I was 21.
[00:47:18]  I think I got there a week after I got my econ degree from University of Maryland.
[00:47:23]  And I rolled into this place and I was like, whoa, I'm absolutely not the most mentally ill person here.
[00:47:31]  In fact, no.
[00:47:33]  In fact, I feel pretty good about where I'm at.
[00:47:36]  And like, there was something deeply comfortable about that.
[00:47:39]  And it was, you know, it's, hey, San Francisco, like, like, like St. Francis, like the, the history of San Francisco and Barbary Coast and like free speech movement, Black Panthers, like the Bay Area is a fucking beast, you know?
[00:47:54]  I mean, all that shit almost feels like it's been, for all of us, has been completely wiped out by tech.
[00:48:00]  I mean, the least fuckable thing in the world, all these companies coming into your town.

=== Looking Back At The Studio (15:47) ===

[00:48:05]  You know what I mean?
[00:48:09]  But like, yeah.
[00:48:11]  So we know.
[00:48:12]  Young Chomsky, I have a question for you.
[00:48:14]  Yeah.
[00:48:15]  Are you ready?
[00:48:16]  Yeah, hit me.
[00:48:17]  What were challenges that you had to take this kind of anarchic, sprawling 23-year story and arc this into, you know, five hours?
[00:48:29]  What a, what a great question, John.
[00:48:32]  I was just kind of thinking about that.
[00:48:33]  Well, I think, like I was alluding to earlier, a little peek behind the curtain again.
[00:48:39]  This was a really interesting process for me.
[00:48:41]  It was super fun and it was kind of different from what I usually do.
[00:48:47]  But yeah, I mean, I think when I look back at that first email, right, that I sent you where we were just kicking this idea around, I think it was all kind of there, which is really satisfying to be at the end of it and say, you know, this vision I had at the beginning, it kind of came to fruition.
[00:49:00]  But yeah, like you alluded to, like, I think I recorded, so the finished product, this whole series is like five hours in change, right?
[00:49:08]  I think that I had close to 10 hours of audio from all these interviews.
[00:49:13]  So that obviously involves making a lot of choices for me making a lot of choices, right?
[00:49:18]  Like this all, none of this would have happened if not for John's story being real and then John being so good at telling it, along with all the other guests who spoke so eloquently and truthfully and passionately and all that.
[00:49:31]  But then I sit there and I've got to make choices about what story I'm trying to tell because I could have told a somewhat different story.
[00:49:38]  And there were things that I cut that were really difficult to cut because it's like, this is great.
[00:49:43]  This is entertaining to me, but you have to be kind of ruthless as an editor.
[00:49:48]  So that was maybe that was the biggest challenge, right?
[00:49:50]  Like there's a lot of stuff that's cut out of here that I think is like interesting material, but it's really trying to envision what is an arc, what is the form of this story that we're trying to sculpt out of this block of marble, so to speak.
[00:50:06]  And it wasn't as hard as it could have been because John and I spent a lot of time outlining and really plotting things out before we recorded.
[00:50:14]  But then, of course, you never know when you sit down with somebody.
[00:50:16]  I'd never talked to almost any of these people before other than John, who I interviewed.
[00:50:23]  So you hope that somebody's going to give you something really compelling, but you don't know.
[00:50:27]  But hopefully I ask them questions that led them to a place or I just find it later.
[00:50:32]  You know, I go through the audio and even if it's just a minute out of a 15 minute conversation, you got to kind of be able to hone in on the thing that really ties in and then figure out where to place it later.
[00:50:45]  So that was the fun part, but also the challenging part, I think.
[00:50:49]  Yeah, I think you did a really good job with that because this is like, you know, we sort of mentioned this earlier, but this is very different than a regular true or not episode where it's not just like some people sitting around talking because this is like an audio documentary basically with like John serving as kind of like the narrative voice and then all of these other interviews, some of them pretty long, buttressing that and like moving, I don't want to call it the plot, but essentially moving the storyline along here.
[00:51:18]  I mean, yeah, I really enjoyed listening to it.
[00:51:21]  This is, people, you gotta, you gotta be very real here.
[00:51:26]  It fucking is hard to be an editor.
[00:51:28]  Like cutting all that shit down blows.
[00:51:31]  Yeah, it's hard.
[00:51:32]  And also what's funny to me is that like, like young Chomsky sent me episode two recently just to listen to it, just to double check everything.
[00:51:41]  And I was listening and all of a sudden I was kind of like a little bit out of my own body and my own ego.
[00:51:46]  And I was like, whoa, this is really interesting.
[00:51:49]  Like, what's happening here?
[00:51:50]  Like, I was completely caught up in a story that had been in some ways upgraded by Young Chomsky and like given like kind of like rails, you know, and I was all in.
[00:52:03]  I was like, I'm stoked for the, and I'm like, hey, dummy, this is, you know, what happened.
[00:52:08]  This is your life.
[00:52:09]  Yeah.
[00:52:11]  Well, I mean, is it weird?
[00:52:12]  Is it weird to listen back to all of this and be like, oh yeah, that's like, I forgot about this.
[00:52:19]  I think I'm used to that kind of like, you know, like tension, but I, but there are, there are things.
[00:52:27]  I mean, I think that the first thing that I thought when I heard episode two was like Young Chomsky's made me like more coherent for sure.
[00:52:37]  Like there's something like that.
[00:52:39]  He's good at that.
[00:52:39]  He does that morose too.
[00:52:41]  Right.
[00:52:41]  Just like cleans you up.
[00:52:42]  You know, you're like a, like the ultimate dinner party version of yourself, you know, like not buzzed, you know?
[00:52:49]  Well, that's what, uh, what's what you do also in the studio, right?
[00:52:52]  Like I, I told you, John, I, I was laughing kind of at myself because one of the big differences, apart from how I made it versus a regular podcast episode, was I've been working on this for a really long time and nobody's heard it.
[00:53:07]  So that cycle is super long, right?
[00:53:10]  Whereas typically, if you do a podcast pretty regularly, you move on to the next one pretty quickly or you get feedback on what you did a couple days ago.
[00:53:19]  But like I've been working on this, like I mentioned earlier, for almost two years.
[00:53:22]  So I've been treating this more like making a record than I usually treat making a podcast, right?
[00:53:29]  I told you, I'm like sitting here listening to this on different sets of speakers.
[00:53:32]  It's like, that's kind of what you do when you mix a record.
[00:53:35]  Like you go and listen to it in your car and then you listen to it in your headphones and I'm making little tweaks, which feels a little insane because, you know, I have very high standards for our podcast audio and I want it to be great, but you fundamentally can't do that because you got to do the next episode pretty quickly.
[00:53:50]  But yeah, so this was this process of producing and editing.
[00:53:55]  It felt more like working on an album.
[00:53:57]  And I'm kind of playing that role that you would play for a band maybe when you're in the studio.
[00:54:02]  And I think you say some things like this where you're like, my role is just to bring out the band's kind of best self or portray them in the best, best light.
[00:54:10]  So that's kind of how I looked at it.
[00:54:13]  And you mentioned, oh, fuck.
[00:54:17]  And Jung Chomsky, you mentioned that you have a photo of yourself in front of the studio from what year was it?
[00:54:23]  So I think my first time, because I lived, I moved to San Francisco in 2015.
[00:54:28]  And so this was 2014.
[00:54:30]  I saw the photo and I was trying to place the haircut in the like chronology.
[00:54:35]  It's crazy too, because I mean, you, you're totally naked in it.
[00:54:41]  Yeah.
[00:54:41]  Well, it was.
[00:54:42]  That would be very mid-2000s mission.
[00:54:46]  Right.
[00:54:46]  Yeah.
[00:54:47]  Indie Rock.
[00:54:48]  He's like on a unicycle.
[00:54:49]  Yeah.
[00:54:50]  Where they're like, oh, my friend from Baltimore is staying here for two weeks.
[00:54:54]  He drives a cab.
[00:54:56]  I didn't know anything about San Francisco.
[00:54:58]  I just, but I'd heard of this place and I was into recording.
[00:55:01]  And John at that time, and this, this, we, we get into this story at some point in the podcast.
[00:55:07]  I forget which episode, but started giving tours of Tiny Telephone because it became not just a popular studio.
[00:55:13]  Capitalist looking for actually seeing Trinity.
[00:55:16]  No, the tours were free, right?
[00:55:18]  Little profits.
[00:55:19]  Actually, yeah, the tours were, but Liz, what's even crazier is that most of the tours I gave were strictly like tourists.
[00:55:26]  They were not musicians.
[00:55:28]  Like those were the tours that excited me because those were the people that would like, instead of looking at some console and being like, is that an E50316?
[00:55:35]  They'd be like, oh my God, this thing that I love was done here.
[00:55:39]  Super connected and like thrilled and be like, hey, let's go get tacos after this.
[00:55:44]  I'd be like, sure.
[00:55:46]  I mean, I probably gave 100 tours at least.
[00:55:48]  There's the most fun.
[00:55:49]  Wasn't that fun when I gave you a tour?
[00:55:51]  Yeah.
[00:55:52]  Yeah.
[00:55:52]  It was right.
[00:55:53]  And the thing that one of the things that we do talk about a lot, but it's, of course, a little bit hard to get across on a podcast is just how this place looked and how it felt.
[00:56:02]  And a lot of people that I talked to spoke very eloquently about this, but it had, it just had vibe.
[00:56:09]  You know, it sounds corny, but it really did.
[00:56:12]  I mean, we'll share photos at some point online or whatever, but it was just a very kind of homey place, a very handmade looking kind of place.
[00:56:21]  It was not at all, some studios are pretty sterile.
[00:56:24]  You know, I've been to different studios or like, you know, maybe they throw up a rug and it's like, oh, cool.
[00:56:29]  But this place really felt, yeah, I mean, I don't know how else to describe it, but being there was really exciting for me as somebody who loved this music.
[00:56:37]  And yeah, that was my first time.
[00:56:39]  It was 2014.
[00:56:40]  I was in the city and that was what I was most excited.
[00:56:43]  That was probably the thing most associated in my mind with San Francisco.
[00:56:45]  I was like, oh, fuck, Tiny Telephone is here.
[00:56:48]  I can't wait.
[00:56:49]  And I don't know.
[00:56:50]  I feel like I had a lot of questions to ask, but I was trying not to ask too many questions and be annoying.
[00:56:55]  Well, I think that's what I always took away was that the Tiny Telephone, because I never went there, but that the space felt like what it produced, that it had this like physical fingerprint, that it felt like an analog space, which sounds so stupid, but you know what?
[00:57:11]  You guys know what I mean.
[00:57:12]  That it feels like there's like a texture and like an imprint that the like a physical imprint that the space itself would leave in a way that like, again, it just feels like that texture has like left our world.
[00:57:28]  Yes.
[00:57:28]  Yeah.
[00:57:29]  You know, I haven't been to recording studios.
[00:57:32]  I haven't been to anything like that like ever, but I would imagine that now they have, there's a lot that feel much more like co-working spaces than anything close to what tiny telephone felt like.
[00:57:48]  Well, John kind of famously, I think, coined this term that you can see him talking about in different interviews, sloppy hi-fi, right?
[00:57:57]  And to me, that was how he described his sound.
[00:58:00]  And maybe John, you can expand on that a little bit.
[00:58:02]  But I think that is also how Tiny looked, right?
[00:58:05]  Sloppy hi-fi, in that it was, you had these great machines from classic, uh, you know, all different eras at the kind of peak of analog technology, right?
[00:58:15]  And everything was well maintained.
[00:58:16]  That's something that people talk about a lot, which is not true of every studio.
[00:58:20]  A lot of places kind of famously would put up gear on their website and then you'd show up and it would be broken.
[00:58:25]  And so Tiny had this real pride in maintaining the gear.
[00:58:29]  But at the same time, it was this very kind of rough-hewn, cobbled-together vibe.
[00:58:32]  So to me, that descriptor of sloppy hi-fi describes both the sounds coming out of the studio and what it looked and felt like being there.
[00:58:40]  I think that for me, there were like a couple tensions.
[00:58:44]  Like, one, bands, the bands that we love are so much more conservative than you think they are in a studio.
[00:58:53]  This was like the first blew me away thing that I discovered from recording bands.
[00:58:59]  Like even bands that I really consider to be radical, they're paranoid.
[00:59:05]  They don't want to get out, whatever lane they're in, whatever small little fan base they've crawled their way out of that fucking, you know, like, like, uh, that, like, hole, they don't want to give it up.
[00:59:17]  And they're really, really worried about whatever, you know, whatever stylistic, you know, things that they feel are necessary for that to retain that.
[00:59:29]  And so I wanted to create a space that like visually was more likely to make everyone like me showing up to San Francisco and realizing that I'm not the craziest person anymore in my own small little hometown here.
[00:59:44]  Like I don't have to worry.
[00:59:46]  Like that's what I wanted people to feel when they came to the studio.
[00:59:49]  So the studio was almost like this like onslaught of like sensory stuff.
[00:59:54]  You know, it was a mess.
[00:59:56]  There was, it was so burned in and there was so much memorabilia everywhere.
[01:00:00]  I mean, there was like a letter from the DEA when they like, when I bought some pills from India Pill Daddy One on the dark web and I got confiscated and I would just like tack up this like letter from the DEA to me.
[01:00:12]  I see you've dealt with India Pill Daddy One too.
[01:00:15]  Believe me.
[01:00:16]  Big part of my musical career.
[01:00:18]  I mean the prices are just unbelievably low.
[01:00:21]  Yeah, but look where it gets you.
[01:00:24]  And we'd have like postcards from bands, you know, that they sent us on tour to the studio.
[01:00:29]  And like, but also there were like really cool paintings and there were rooms within rooms within rooms.
[01:00:38]  It just had a real kind of like, like it had, it did have this like deep, dark vibe.
[01:00:46]  And I think that it did loosen up bands.
[01:00:49]  And I think that that's one reason why bands just kept, they would just, we had a lot of bands that would just record every record in their catalog.
[01:00:56]  They would just come back to the studio.
[01:00:57]  And I, I think that it was like a place where everything was permissible.
[01:01:01]  You know what I mean?
[01:01:02]  Like we, we, like there were a lot of like strange keyboards and noisemakers and like the weirdest gear that you could get a hold of.
[01:01:11]  And everything, even though it looked like anarchy, everything was clean because I'm a total neat freak.
[01:01:19]  So there'd be like really good coffee from Ritual and free weed and really good like loose leaf tea from Five Mountains and all this old shit that looks so cool, but everything worked.
[01:01:31]  And the floors were swept.
[01:01:32]  It wasn't, you know, it wasn't like the typical like anarchic space, you know, like post-punk space where there's like cigarettes.
[01:01:40]  I'm having a lot of memories blood back about very unswept spaces I record.
[01:01:45]  Yes, of course.
[01:01:46]  Well, I mean, those are the places that I recorded in too, Brace.
[01:01:49]  Like, like those, that's what kind of like radicalized me.
[01:01:52]  I was like, whoa, they've got it all wrong.
[01:01:55]  They've got gear that's broken and like shit that's just dirty and feels bad to be in.
[01:02:00]  This feels bad for me.
[01:02:02]  But it also like we do want to feel that it's a human breathing, you know, space, you know?
[01:02:09]  Well, I think that's kind of one of the most important things about making making a record.
[01:02:13]  I got to be real.
[01:02:14]  It's like not, I think a lot of people think that it's the band goes in the studio, you spend a few days in there, you track it, and then you're kind of done.
[01:02:22]  But there's a lot that like you see people's neuroses come out.
[01:02:26]  You see people's like real hidden insanities come out.
[01:02:31]  And like the actual space itself has like a big effect on it.
[01:02:35]  I've recorded full records before.
[01:02:37]  Me and Ring Console band did a record that was actually on Unreal the Real in this basement on, I think out on in the dog patch.
[01:02:49]  And it just fucking sucked.
[01:02:51]  Like it was just a, we had to scrap it.
[01:02:54]  It was bad.
[01:02:55]  Yeah.
[01:02:55]  The vibes were bad.
[01:02:57]  I felt weird.
[01:02:58]  I mean, the guy recording was about the coolest guy you could get.
[01:03:00]  He was like a Dutch meth, like full-on speed freak, like Euro, like insane guy, lived in like a psychedelic warehouse, but it was just like not us.
[01:03:12]  And then we recorded it with this, like our buddy.
[01:03:14]  And it, you know, it also reeled the real sounded fantastic at some other place in the fucking dog patch.
[01:03:21]  It's, it's, it's a real process.
[01:03:23]  Like it is an actual like artistic process to record a record.
[01:03:27]  And like the scene and setting of that is really, really fucking important.
[01:03:34]  You can really make it break a record.
[01:03:36]  Absolutely.

=== Artistic Process in Music Scene (11:18) ===

[01:03:53]  Wait, real quick for you, Young Chomsky, because you were such a fan of Johnny Telephone and all of this music.
[01:04:04]  Did you like freak out talking to some of these people?
[01:04:08]  Because, I mean, you were, because that's what I feel like that's like a bit of an untold part of this story too, is that like this music was really formative for your own, like this music scene and all of these records that were recorded at Tiny.
[01:04:22]  It wasn't just that you were a big fan of this space and you'd been there and you had this attachment.
[01:04:25]  It's like the music that came out of this space was incredibly formative to you as a person who now is recording for a living, which is like kind of a funny little cycle we have here.
[01:04:40]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:04:41]  I mean, I think and hope you can hear in my voice the way I talk about this, how passionate I am and exciting this was for me.
[01:04:49]  But yeah, I think I kept my cool talking to everybody.
[01:04:51]  And it wasn't as hard as maybe I was nervous beforehand, but then when I sat down for these interviews, it was actually pretty easy.
[01:04:58]  And the reason for that was because I wasn't asking them questions for my own benefit or like about my curiosity.
[01:05:06]  It was about their history with John and with Tiny Telephone.
[01:05:10]  And I've never talked to John Darnell from the Mountain Goats before or Meryl Garbus from Toon Yards.
[01:05:16]  But when I would talk to them, it was so genuine, like it was not hard to bring out a lot of warmth and fond recollections because I would ask them, you know, tell me, I started every interview kind of the same way.
[01:05:29]  And it was kind of like a warm up question.
[01:05:30]  I would be like, tell me when you first met John and what was that like?
[01:05:33]  And you would just see them kind of light up and talk about it.
[01:05:37]  And I should insert here that I don't want to make it sound like this is totally a hagiography.
[01:05:42]  Like everybody loves John.
[01:05:44]  We all love John, but we did get into some dark stuff in this too.
[01:05:48]  Yeah.
[01:05:49]  But, you know, we talked about like the mental health struggles and the pain.
[01:05:54]  You know, it's not all happiness and rainbows is what I'm trying to say.
[01:05:57]  And we do, that to me was really fascinating as well to hear from these people who, to hear from John about his struggles and from people who were there during those kind of difficult periods.
[01:06:06]  Because obviously there's this story doesn't, I don't know, everything ends, right?
[01:06:12]  That's kind of maybe one of the themes in this.
[01:06:14]  And I feel like this is in some ways a story about death and mortality, right?
[01:06:19]  It's like we tell you right off the bat, this thing was beautiful and now it's gone.
[01:06:25]  And what does that mean, right?
[01:06:26]  So just like somebody's life, it's like, what's the point of doing anything when we know it's going to end?
[01:06:30]  And I don't know.
[01:06:32]  Maybe I'm getting a little too in the philosophical weeds, but that was one of the things that was interesting to me to kind of explore in this story.
[01:06:39]  But all that's to say that it was easier than I thought because people were drawing on these experiences and everybody seemed to be fortunately very forthcoming and willing to talk and had a lot of fond memories of this place.
[01:06:57]  But for sure, it was a lot of fun for me as somebody who listened to these records like on repeat in my college dorm room.
[01:07:05]  And now to be here, you know, 10 or 15 years later, getting to tell this story and kind of memorialize or be a little part of the legacy of this, which is.
[01:07:16]  Yeah, now you're part of this story.
[01:07:18]  Yeah, a little bit.
[01:07:19]  Well, and I should also point out, I mean, you hear this when you listen to it, but my voice is not really on this podcast.
[01:07:25]  So if you're listening to this episode and thinking this guy's really annoying to listen to, don't worry, you might still enjoy Keep the Dream Alive because I made that decision early on, just like aesthetically, that it's, I interview these people, but it's not a dialogue.
[01:07:40]  It's more of a monologue.
[01:07:41]  I cut myself out of it just because I like the aesthetic of that.
[01:07:45]  So I introduce and outroduce, I guess, every episode, but I'm not, you don't hear me gushing to all these people.
[01:07:53]  No, it's more like a, yeah, a, you know, audio collage or an oral history.
[01:07:59]  We should make him do that for like our regular episodes.
[01:08:02]  Like we like.
[01:08:03]  But just your voice?
[01:08:04]  No, Like have have young Chopsy like interview people for like 10 hours.
[01:08:09]  Oh, yeah, but then he just cuts it out.
[01:08:11]  And then insert our voices.
[01:08:13]  At the beginning, be like, hey, y'all, we worked super hard on this.
[01:08:18]  It has been such, YC.
[01:08:21]  Yeah.
[01:08:21]  Baby doll.
[01:08:23]  What is your, what's your favorite record recorded at Tiny Telephone?
[01:08:26]  I don't think I've ever heard you call me Baby Doll before.
[01:08:29]  It's always Liz.
[01:08:30]  Oh, maybe that's, it's, yeah, you don't want to hear the kind of stuff I call you.
[01:08:36]  Hey, hey, hunk.
[01:08:39]  My favorite record recorded at Tiny Telephone.
[01:08:42]  That's the, I mean, I could name a lot that I've spent a lot of time listening to, but I think like top of head, easy answer for me is Pixel Revolt by John Vandersleis, which we do talk about some.
[01:08:59]  Boom, baby.
[01:09:00]  In the podcast.
[01:09:01]  It's such a fucking bullshit answer.
[01:09:04]  It's just like Venmo Cash App right now.
[01:09:08]  Edit this part out.
[01:09:08]  Edit this part out.
[01:09:11]  I mean, it's funny.
[01:09:11]  You know, I've been thinking about this, like, it's just such a weird coincidence that all of the best music ever made came out during like the years that I was in college and was really interested in finding music.
[01:09:21]  But I have this question because all this music, and this isn't really about, I mean, I think this is maybe a coincidence a little bit with the timing of this project for you, but like all of this music is having, and this scene in particular is having like a big renaissance right now.
[01:09:38]  Hell yeah.
[01:09:38]  Well, it's about to have a bigger renaissance once this.
[01:09:40]  No, but I'm curious what you guys think about that.
[01:09:43]  Like, like late 90s, early 2000s, indie rock and emo is having like a huge kind of, I don't know, a lot of like younger people.
[01:09:52]  Yeah, it is.
[01:09:53]  It's a huge thing right now, Brie.
[01:09:55]  And like indie sleaze is what people are saying.
[01:09:57]  That's like the aesthetic that's oh, yeah.
[01:09:59]  Yeah, it's like the like Cobra Snake.
[01:10:02]  That's like the visual.
[01:10:04]  Cobra Snakes back?
[01:10:05]  Yeah.
[01:10:06]  Cobra Snakes back vibe.
[01:10:07]  Yeah.
[01:10:07]  Yeah.
[01:10:07]  Corey Kennedy.
[01:10:08]  It's all vibe.
[01:10:09]  Yeah.
[01:10:09]  But also, but I just mean like there seems to be a lot more, like a kind of like, yeah, I think that there was like a moment after a lot of this stuff happened, like the scene, kind of this music scene where a lot of people were kind of like, okay, we're, we're, we're not doing that anymore.
[01:10:24]  Like maybe the excesses of indie rock were far too, they're too much for us.
[01:10:29]  And now we kind of want to like disavow it a little bit.
[01:10:32]  And just it's like, you know, I mean, that happens with all sorts of like artistic and yeah, musical movement or whatever, totally and scenes.
[01:10:41]  But now there seems to be like a little bit of a reevaluation happening.
[01:10:46]  From at least from my perspective, it seems like a lot of people are kind of like going back and being like, no, actually, this stuff was really good.
[01:10:53]  And like the songwriting and the production and like the stuff that people were putting out in these years that maybe, you know, like it wasn't just like fodder for like the like OC soundtrack or whatever it was later in the 2000s.
[01:11:09]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:11:10]  Yeah.
[01:11:10]  Well, and one thing I want to insert here about John, and I think this kind of goes to why this makes a lot of sense for us to have done this.
[01:11:19]  John was way ahead of the curve in terms of, I mean, so first of all, we mentioned one of his early bands was called MK Ultra.
[01:11:26]  True.
[01:11:26]  And John on Pixel Revolt and then on, so these records were coming out in the early 2000s.
[01:11:31]  And John was writing and singing about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and about essentially how Bush did 9-11 on these records.
[01:11:41]  And I didn't feel like, I'm sure there was stuff that I don't know about and didn't hear, but in my mind, like he was the only one doing that in an interesting way.
[01:11:49]  I mean, the post-9-11 music was like, you either had this kind of schlocky kind of Bruce Springs thing, like Honor the Heroes or like country music or let's not forget.
[01:12:00]  Yeah.
[01:12:01]  But I don't know who else in the world of indie rock, like it was like, didn't seem possible because either you had to be ironically detached or you just didn't touch it.
[01:12:11]  It was like a fear of being cringe or something.
[01:12:13]  I don't know.
[01:12:14]  It's like there's this pendulum, right, between bass and cringe.
[01:12:16]  And like Indie Rock kind of swung, you know, people thought of it as cringe maybe for a while and now it's swinging back to be like, oh, Indie Rock is based again.
[01:12:24]  But yeah, I just, I remember that being really drawn to that in on John's records, the way that he talked about, and I wasn't really politicized in those years.
[01:12:36]  I was kind of just, this is a cool song.
[01:12:39]  It's like we used one of John's songs in our 9-11 episodes because it was just 100% perfect fit.
[01:12:46]  And I always loved that song, but like have gained a new appreciation for it.
[01:12:50]  So I don't know.
[01:12:52]  I'm sure John has some other feelings on it.
[01:12:55]  I'm pro 9-11.
[01:13:00]  The only man, the only man with the backbone enough to say it.
[01:13:04]  I want to correct the record here, YC.
[01:13:07]  In that I was the only person with the wherewithal to put out the dumbest pro-war hardcore record in 2004 that any 14-year-old in America.
[01:13:19]  I was way ahead of the curve of that.
[01:13:21]  And it definitely has not come back to haunt me in every single day of my life.
[01:13:27]  Only like every three months or so.
[01:13:30]  Yeah, people just get mad at it.
[01:13:32]  It doesn't help.
[01:13:32]  It's the only record I've ever been on that's on Spotify, which should be a re-recorded Island.
[01:13:38]  You should re-record it as Brace's version and just like change.
[01:13:42]  John, I had a question for you about indie rock in general, actually, in specific.
[01:13:47]  I have heard that Stephen Malcmas of the band Pavement has two sets of teeth like a shark.
[01:13:52]  I was told this about 10 years ago.
[01:13:56]  I have since tried to make visual confirmation once myself at a party.
[01:14:01]  Did not work.
[01:14:04]  In where?
[01:14:05]  Portland?
[01:14:05]  In Portland?
[01:14:06]  No, it was in San Francisco.
[01:14:08]  I tried to look in his mouth and I couldn't tell.
[01:14:14]  I don't know if you even know him.
[01:14:16]  I assume you do.
[01:14:17]  Does he have two sets of teeth like a shark?
[01:14:19]  I toured with him for one month and he doesn't, he has normal teeth.
[01:14:23]  But like, doesn't even have like.
[01:14:25]  But did you look behind the normal teeth to make sure there weren't other people?
[01:14:28]  I grabbed his mouth.
[01:14:29]  I opened his jaw.
[01:14:31]  I like had a headlamp on.
[01:14:32]  Like, it's, it's, it's good.
[01:14:35]  Weird.
[01:14:35]  Why did you hear that, Brie?
[01:14:37]  I don't know.
[01:14:37]  Someone told two people.
[01:14:39]  Well, one person told me that.
[01:14:40]  And then I think I told another person and they forgot I told them.
[01:14:43]  And they told me that.
[01:14:44]  Two people.
[01:14:45]  Yeah.
[01:14:46]  It has to be.
[01:14:47]  It has to be Steve.
[01:14:50]  Yeah.
[01:14:50]  It's yeah.
[01:14:51]  He's got fucking two sets of teeth.
[01:14:53]  Well, anyways, Stephen Malchus, if you're listening to this, I know your fucking secret, dog.
[01:14:57]  You cannot hide it from me.
[01:14:59]  I will get inside those mandibles and I will extract those teeth and give them to science.
[01:15:05]  There was motherfucker.
[01:15:07]  I had another question too as a follow-up to that.
[01:15:09]  Now I can't fucking remember it.

=== Faking Letters From Microsoft (15:49) ===

[01:15:11]  Yes, now I do.
[01:15:13]  Fuck you.
[01:15:14]  JV, I don't even know if you guys talk about this on the podcast.
[01:15:18]  I don't believe you do.
[01:15:20]  Maybe you do in a later episode, but you at one point very clearly faked a letter to yourself from Microsoft.
[01:15:28]  Yes.
[01:15:30]  Telling you to not put out your record.
[01:15:33]  Yeah.
[01:15:33]  That is that, I mean, I think you would obviously do the story a little more justice, but I think that when I read that, I was like, man, this is exactly the way to actually get publicity.
[01:15:46]  Like, this is what you should be doing.
[01:15:48]  And it's a way to kind of get around things in a very scrappy way without a PR guy.
[01:15:52]  But I would appreciate if you'd let our listeners know that story.
[01:15:57]  Well, I, the last MK Ultra, no, actually, it was the, it was the first MK Ultra record had a song called Bill Gates Must Die.
[01:16:04]  And so I kind of like had, you know, I was like a absolute zero.
[01:16:10]  So I realized that if I didn't spark this shit up myself, like nothing was going to happen.
[01:16:15]  So I wrote a letter, which I thought was like a very poorly constructed Photoshop job.
[01:16:22]  It like doesn't look, I still have the letter and it doesn't look really that believable, but it's from like Microsoft Letterhead.
[01:16:31]  And it's like a like, it's like what I imagined a cease and desist letter would say.
[01:16:37]  And I faxed it into The Chronicle and The Guardian and the SF Weekly.
[01:16:44]  Right.
[01:16:45]  And the, it went so far that it was on the cover of the arts section of the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle.
[01:16:55]  No way.
[01:16:56]  This is like that's pretty big.
[01:16:58]  Yeah.
[01:16:59]  And it was got into the weekly multiple weeks.
[01:17:01]  The Guardian, Wired magazine.
[01:17:04]  Ooh.
[01:17:05]  Sent SF.
[01:17:07]  And that's when, and that's when Wired was like, cool.
[01:17:09]  Yeah.
[01:17:09]  Yeah.
[01:17:10]  It was, yeah.
[01:17:11]  They sent someone to interview me.
[01:17:15]  And at the third interview, when the story was kind of like, you know, it was probably in its like second or third week where you're just about to get busted.
[01:17:23]  Yeah.
[01:17:24]  And I remember the third interview I did with this writer who was like a cut above the other writers.
[01:17:28]  He was like a, you know, he was a little bit more connected, a little bit more savvy.
[01:17:32]  And he started asking questions where I was like, he knows I need to get the fuck out of here.
[01:17:38]  And so like a couple days later, there was, they, you know, that's when news, I don't know if newspapers do this anymore.
[01:17:44]  They maybe don't, but they had to all print retractions.
[01:17:47]  I got phone calls from writers like, how dare you do this to me?
[01:17:51]  And like, I thought it was like deeply funny the whole time.
[01:17:55]  You know, no wonder you're pro 9-11.
[01:17:58]  The man loves a false flag.
[01:18:02]  Well, you'd think one of them would like call up Microsoft and be like, hey, dude, like no one.
[01:18:08]  And also, it's like, just if you back up from the story, like, who gives a shit?
[01:18:13]  Yeah.
[01:18:14]  Microsoft sent a letter.
[01:18:15]  It doesn't even mean anything.
[01:18:16]  You know what I mean?
[01:18:17]  Like, so like a nothing local musician wrote a song that, you know what I mean?
[01:18:22]  Like the whole thing was so funny that it got any steam.
[01:18:26]  So yeah.
[01:18:27]  I mean, yeah, that was, it's just, it's kind of incredible because it's like music in San Francisco really kind of as as like as San Francisco rather as like a musical attraction as like scenes coming out of it.
[01:18:43]  That cycle really, I feel like ended seven, eight years ago.
[01:18:48]  Like finally, like there was no new scene.
[01:18:51]  I mean, I think kind of the last one, besides that, like there was kind of that like that indie pop scene.
[01:18:56]  Yeah.
[01:18:57]  One of those compilations.
[01:18:58]  I can't remember what they were called, but those like compilations came out.
[01:19:01]  We were talking about this when we were in LA with you.
[01:19:03]  We were talking about like the kind of like waves of San Francisco and how, yeah, it was like that last wave with like girls.
[01:19:11]  Yes, yeah.
[01:19:11]  Yeah.
[01:19:12]  Yeah.
[01:19:12]  And then there was like a couple of those other guys that were kind of doing like, it was like after the psych, the psych like freak folk scene exploded and the psych rock explosion that like went for like whoop and then died.
[01:19:26]  And then they all went to Austin.
[01:19:28]  And then there was the girls pop thing and like there was like a little bit of a surf moment, but then Ty moved to LA and the whole thing died.
[01:19:36]  And now there's just been nothing and nothing since, right?
[01:19:40]  Literally, they had Ty and John Dwyer moved to LA and then it just stopped.
[01:19:44]  Yeah.
[01:19:45]  I remember when John told me he was leaving and I was like, oh boy, this city's dead.
[01:19:49]  I knew it was dead.
[01:19:50]  But it's wild.
[01:19:51]  The girls thing ended in like a weird way because he basically started stealing stuff from recording studios.
[01:19:59]  And I just thought like, damn, what an, what a gnarly end to this story.
[01:20:03]  You know, like that, that would be, that's a good pod cycle right there.
[01:20:09]  Like the, the, the life and death of that band would be fascinating.
[01:20:12]  Might be a little too close to that story.
[01:20:14]  Yeah.
[01:20:14]  Really to be able to cover it.
[01:20:16]  Um, I remember that record cover they did with all those girls on it.
[01:20:19]  And I was, I was like, ladies.
[01:20:25]  I dated some of those women.
[01:20:28]  I was, yeah, I'm, I was working that day.
[01:20:32]  We dodged a bullet with you not being on the girls' record cover, baby.
[01:20:35]  Yeah.
[01:20:35]  Yeah.
[01:20:36]  I played a showcase at South by in, I think it was 2010.
[01:20:41]  This is so funny to think back on.
[01:20:43]  And the venue we played in was this church.
[01:20:46]  I don't remember the name of it, but I feel like it's like the church in that part of town.
[01:20:50]  And it was beautiful.
[01:20:51]  And then the night before my band played, the lineup was girls.
[01:20:56]  I think it was kind of like they were just breaking out.
[01:20:58]  It was girls, the grizzly bear, and the rural Alberta Advantage.
[01:21:03]  And the room was packed.
[01:21:06]  There was tons of press and it was incredible.
[01:21:10]  And the vibe was great.
[01:21:11]  And those bands sounded amazing.
[01:21:12]  And I was so excited because I was like, tomorrow night, fellas, you know, to my band.
[01:21:16]  This is going to be us.
[01:21:17]  This is what it's like.
[01:21:18]  This is us.
[01:21:19]  And we came back and played the next night.
[01:21:21]  And it was, the room was still beautiful.
[01:21:23]  The acoustics were different, given that it was like almost completely empty.
[01:21:28]  I think that at the same time as our like, you know, quote unquote official showcase, which I thought like was going to mean something, it really didn't.
[01:21:35]  I think like Kanye West was playing across town or like Metallica played.
[01:21:39]  So that's what South Buy is.
[01:21:40]  It's like when you're, I really was obviously naive at the time, but I thought maybe, you know, it's, it's your big break.
[01:21:47]  You get in front of people, some label or something.
[01:21:50]  And it was just, it was depressing.
[01:21:52]  I mean, I got to get into a bunch of shows for free, which is like, you can, you choose either they pay you like some kind of miserable amount of money, like $200, or you can get a pass and just get into all the shows.
[01:22:06]  And I was like, I guess I'll take the pass.
[01:22:07]  So like I saw all these bands.
[01:22:09]  Yeah, but we just, I think I've told you these, uh, this before.
[01:22:13]  I, um, I had a free CD.
[01:22:15]  I was giving out like my demo CD.
[01:22:17]  It seems like what you do and sitting at the table after the show where the bill I actually played on was with Steve Burns.
[01:22:24]  I couldn't think of his name recently.
[01:22:26]  Steve from Blues Clues went on to make some music with some of the guys from the Flaming Lips.
[01:22:30]  And he made a cool.
[01:22:31]  What?
[01:22:31]  Yeah.
[01:22:32]  He was super nice.
[01:22:33]  I only met him really briefly and his set was cool.
[01:22:35]  But I played.
[01:22:36]  Dave Burns brother.
[01:22:37]  Is it?
[01:22:38]  No.
[01:22:39]  Different.
[01:22:40]  Steve Burns.
[01:22:42]  Different name.
[01:22:43]  But anyway, I just remember giving this guy, giving out free CDs.
[01:22:46]  And one guy took it, I guess, thinking that it was somebody else and then threw it back at me.
[01:22:53]  Like this thing that I'd given him for free.
[01:22:54]  And just that moment stuck in my head.
[01:22:56]  Like, how depressing to have somebody like toss your free CD back at you?
[01:22:59]  I was like, brother, just.
[01:23:00]  Did he do it hard or did he kind of like underhand it?
[01:23:04]  He wasn't trying to like injure me, but he threw it.
[01:23:07]  And I felt very disrespected.
[01:23:09]  What's that actually brings me to a question I love asking.
[01:23:13]  This is, this is bringing me back to my damn rock journalist days.
[01:23:16]  What's the worst show you've ever played, Jan Chomsky?
[01:23:19]  Oof.
[01:23:20]  I mean, I went on tour.
[01:23:22]  The last time I went on tour was 10 or more years ago.
[01:23:28]  And I don't know if it's like one show that was bad.
[01:23:31]  I mean, I do enjoy telling this story now and I won't get into the whole story.
[01:23:34]  I'll give you the super condensed version.
[01:23:37]  But basically on this tour, I spent a really, I worked really hard booking this tour.
[01:23:40]  It was West Coast up and down the coast.
[01:23:42]  And it was like 19 shows.
[01:23:44]  I think three shows in.
[01:23:45]  We went from a four-piece to a three-piece because our bass player quit.
[01:23:49]  Okay.
[01:23:50]  We ended up, I forget the name of the part in the car.
[01:23:56]  Something broke down in Oregon and we had to cancel two shows.
[01:24:00]  And then the transmission died at the end.
[01:24:02]  And so we had to basically limp back from San Diego to Las Vegas to do our final show at Beauty Bar where we had a $100 guarantee.
[01:24:10]  So it's like we have to get to this fucking show because we're getting $100.
[01:24:15]  And fucking racketeering at Beauty Bar.
[01:24:18]  Yeah.
[01:24:18]  And we had to drive like 40 miles per hour.
[01:24:21]  It was the movie Speed, but in reverse.
[01:24:23]  Dude, I had to do that.
[01:24:24]  I had to do that on the very first tour I went from from fucking Arizona to San Francisco.
[01:24:28]  We had the same thing.
[01:24:29]  We only could only go 40 miles an hour.
[01:24:31]  Yeah, or like we thought the engine was going to explode.
[01:24:33]  So we were just like, we had to go on all back roads.
[01:24:36]  We could go on the highway and it took us 12 hours.
[01:24:39]  And we finished this tour down a band member, down like multiple thousands of dollars.
[01:24:45]  Oh, yeah.
[01:24:46]  But yeah, I guess maybe if the most depressing show was honestly in Seattle, because it was the only place on that tour, we either knew somebody in every city who would like put us up, let us sleep on their floor, or we just charmed our way into someone's home, except in Seattle, which was the northernmost coldest.
[01:25:01]  It was October and we had to sleep in our fucking van in Seattle, which, you know, I've lived a pretty coddled life.
[01:25:07]  I've never had to sleep in a van or on the street other than this.
[01:25:11]  And it was like, it was bad.
[01:25:12]  It was very cold out.
[01:25:13]  You were all sweaty after the show.
[01:25:14]  You just want to take a shower.
[01:25:16]  And then to sleep in a van and then have to do it again the next day was like a real morale killer.
[01:25:21]  But I don't know.
[01:25:22]  John has probably had similar stories.
[01:25:25]  I was going to say that the good chunk of the series focuses on the kind of toll that touring took like on your life and like, you know, your decision to stop touring.
[01:25:37]  I mean, I'm, you know, there's a couple stories that you talk about in the show, but I'm sure you have like plenty more of like horror stories of being on the road.
[01:25:46]  But it certainly like changed a lot of the trajectory of your life.
[01:25:49]  And keeping that up as a musician is just, it's really, really tough.
[01:25:55]  I think that, you know, touring is like, is a very extreme, it's like an extreme way to express yourself.
[01:26:03]  You know, it, it, it, it can, it can dominate so much of the flow of your relationships and your life.
[01:26:11]  And I think that it's very common for, you know, they, they call it when you get back from tour, like getting off a moving sidewalk that it's like, you know, it's like, it's a little, it's a little difficult to have like a normal social life, a normal romantic life when you're off of tour.
[01:26:34]  Like you're just a little bit weirder.
[01:26:36]  You're a little bit more like fragmented.
[01:26:42]  And you are also like, you get used to the kind of compressed imagery of being in a van or a bus.
[01:26:50]  You get used to this like, you know, I mean, think about this.
[01:26:53]  If you're touring in the East Coast, it could be like a Tuesday and you're playing in DC.
[01:27:00]  And then by that Friday, you know, you've gone through like Baltimore, Philly, you know, two Manhattan shows.
[01:27:10]  And then by maybe Sunday, maybe you're playing like Swarthmore and you're in, you know, instead of being in the middle of Manhattan, you're in a field in a private school where you're like cashing a check, but you're like playing to 30 people in like an old stone building.
[01:27:28]  And then the next day you're in Columbus.
[01:27:31]  And so just this seven days of just intense, you're seeing some of your best friends.
[01:27:35]  You're maybe seeing the crush of your life in one of these cities where you're just like, oh, this is the person that I want to like be with.
[01:27:43]  And then you're receiving disappointing or stressful phone calls from your family.
[01:27:49]  Right.
[01:27:50]  And you're having like deep financial problems that, you know, pings that are coming through you to your phone or through emails that you can't handle or deal with or solve.
[01:28:04]  And you've just gone through a week of extreme emotional intensity.
[01:28:11]  And you're supposed to just like come home, shut your door, and then you're in this like apartment that's dead quiet.
[01:28:19]  And there's no clapping.
[01:28:21]  Do you know what I mean?
[01:28:22]  There's no like hurry up and go.
[01:28:24]  There's no like eight hour drives.
[01:28:28]  And then, I mean, there's moments where you're like literally peeled out of a van at like, you know, 10, 15.
[01:28:35]  And you're like, there's no way I can play a show right now.
[01:28:38]  I just, I cannot do it.
[01:28:40]  Like, Bryce, you've been there.
[01:28:41]  Like, Young Chomsky, you've been there.
[01:28:43]  And then you're just like, all of a sudden, you're like standing out in front of people and you're playing a fucking show because that's just what you're, what you're going to do.
[01:28:53]  And all of that is fine, but a decade of that, you, it has changed your brain chemistry.
[01:29:00]  And I would argue strongly that you are not a better person after a decade of that.
[01:29:05]  And that's, that's what happened to me.
[01:29:07]  Yeah, that was, that was, that was a part of the show that I really like.
[01:29:11]  It was, that, that hit a lot of notes for me because I mean, it really, it can change the dynamic between a group of people who are really close knit together and like a real unit, maybe when you're at home.
[01:29:26]  You spend some months on the road with people, no matter how good you are as friends.
[01:29:31]  It really tests a lot of stuff, both for you, like, I don't know, mentally and personally, but like also socially with these people.
[01:29:39]  I mean, imagine if you're just with your coworkers 24, seven, but you're also making this art together.
[01:29:45]  And you also sort of have to like, I mean, even just the very nature of a band, you're all basically contributing this one part to the whole and the whole has to be basically, you want to be as perfect as possible.
[01:29:56]  And so any mistake there has these reverberations that get onto everybody else too.
[01:30:02]  It can be really difficult.
[01:30:03]  And it is like really hard also to keep like a love life at home.
[01:30:07]  Yeah.
[01:30:08]  And, you know, that's as I'm sure any person who's toured as a musician is probably familiar with.
[01:30:17]  Yeah, and it's hard to keep your head on straight.
[01:30:19]  I have no, of course you wouldn't quit doing, I mean, though, you still tour.
[01:30:24]  I still tour now.
[01:30:25]  I mean, I stopped for four years.
[01:30:27]  And then when my mom died, I kind of like lost my mind.
[01:30:30]  And like the only way back from it was to start touring again.
[01:30:34]  I mean, part of that was it connected me back to my mom.
[01:30:37]  And part of it was that I realized that some of touring, some touring, you know, like two months a year is incredibly healthy.
[01:30:46]  But I think that when you almost won't even have friendships at home, because you're basically just like have a suitcase in the corner that you're ready to, you know, you're just always, I remember I would get back from tour and I would kind of just be packing for the next tour.

=== Chasing Universal Dreams Through Specifics (04:17) ===

[01:31:01]  So I wouldn't even bother calling anyone because I'm here for nine days.
[01:31:06]  Why would I even make plans?
[01:31:07]  You know, and you become very, you guard these moments of being back from tour because you need to start writing.
[01:31:15]  So you're in this like ridiculous grind that is so, first off, you're not even making that much money from it.
[01:31:22]  You're barely surviving financially, but yet your whole life is warped.
[01:31:26]  And like I never, I never drank on tour, but like the number of like comrades that just get like, like taken out from alcohol and drugs, it is fucking crazy how many of my friends got like taken down by this stuff.
[01:31:42]  I mean, that's, that's what happens on tour.
[01:31:44]  That's how people eventually end up dealing with this stuff.
[01:31:47]  Well, also, it is like basically the one way you can really make any money as a musician, even if it's not a lot, is, is touring.
[01:31:53]  I think a lot of people.
[01:31:54]  Yeah.
[01:31:55]  Yep.
[01:31:55]  That's the only way.
[01:31:56]  You don't make any money from like even before Spotify, like you don't make money from record sales unless you're selling a million records, you know?
[01:32:02]  Yep.
[01:32:02]  100%.
[01:32:29]  Having listened to this with the executive privilege that I do have, I'm very excited for other people to hear it.
[01:32:36]  And I just wanted to hear you guys' kind of like last thoughts before we close this bitch down and then get them ready for the actual show to come out.
[01:32:44]  Yeah, this was hella fun, first of all, to talk about it.
[01:32:47]  Like I said, obviously, I'm really excited about this podcast and I'm really stoked to finally have people hear it.
[01:32:53]  But a couple things that I didn't get to yet that have been in my mind is about this podcast.
[01:33:00]  One is this idea that I used to think about with songwriting, I guess, and when I used to kind of be a little bit more of a songwriter myself, the idea that there is universality in the specific.
[01:33:13]  Maybe that makes sense to some of you.
[01:33:15]  I think these bands that some of these bands that we talk about are really great exemplars of that.
[01:33:20]  Like John's songwriting or the Mountain Goat songwriting are these kind of really vividly sketched tales of these interesting characters.
[01:33:30]  And I think as a listener, it's not that you have done these things that the characters in the songs have done or you are exactly that person.
[01:33:37]  You're not seeing yourself represented in these songs, but the texture, the emotional texture of the song or the story is what resonates with you.
[01:33:47]  And that's what I hope that people get from this podcast is that it's not about, oh, I'm also a musician.
[01:33:54]  And so I know what it's like to be on tour, but it's more about the struggle of how to make a living doing something that you believe in.
[01:34:01]  And it's about, you know, how to leave a legacy and what that means.
[01:34:06]  So that's how I hope people will hear it.
[01:34:09]  And the other thing, too, that I was thinking about is that this is a very anti-cynical or non-cynical podcast.
[01:34:18]  And I think that that comes across, I think, in the name of the podcast, Keep the Dream Alive.
[01:34:23]  Like it's right there, right?
[01:34:24]  This is about chasing your dreams.
[01:34:27]  And, you know, there's always, everybody's always afraid of maybe being too earnest.
[01:34:32]  Like it's going to be, it's going to be cringe.
[01:34:34]  Somebody's going to call you cringe or whatever, especially on the internet, right?
[01:34:38]  That there's a whole culture of that.
[01:34:40]  Like always be detached, always be ironic.
[01:34:43]  I mean, I would hope people that listen to Truanon know that I think we have a core of heart and emotion and non-cynicism.
[01:34:52]  But we like to be funny in this podcast too.
[01:34:54]  There's a lot of deeply funny moments, but really at its core, this is a really, it's anti-cynical.
[01:35:02]  It's an earnest podcast about what it means to believe in something and try to make it a reality.
[01:35:08]  So, you know, it's not going to be for everyone, I think.
[01:35:12]  But yeah, I hope that we've achieved some of that universality through these specific details.

=== Chasing Dreams Without Being Cringe (04:19) ===

[01:35:19]  That was very well said.
[01:35:21]  Oh, I'm not letting you get away with that.
[01:35:23]  Davey.
[01:35:27]  I would, do you all have a question for me?
[01:35:31]  Or do you want me to give you a mother?
[01:35:33]  You motherfucker.
[01:35:35]  I asked you.
[01:35:36]  I asked you for fucking closing thoughts.
[01:35:38]  But let me build off of what YSC just said there.
[01:35:43]  Because I will say, you know, you are one of the, at least on the surface, least cynical people that I know.
[01:35:53]  And I think that this show does a really good job of getting that across.
[01:35:57]  But I mean, is that how you feel?
[01:36:00]  Like, is that how you sort of see yourself?
[01:36:03]  I don't know if that question makes a lot of sense, but like, you know, I understand, you know, obviously people perceive other people, not necessarily how they perceive themselves.
[01:36:13]  So I just kind of want to throw that to you is how do you see yourself and all that?
[01:36:18]  That makes total sense to me.
[01:36:19]  I mean, I really don't feel any different.
[01:36:27]  Okay, so when I, so I mentioned that I saw an ad in the SF Chronicle that was placed by Marilyn Good, who is still alive and still like deeply important to me.
[01:36:40]  She's almost 90.
[01:36:42]  And I reluctantly got her to meet me.
[01:36:48]  She said that the space was already rented, this, you know, 2,000 square foot warehouse.
[01:36:53]  She showed up and I she told me, listen, I'll show you the space, but it's already rented.
[01:37:01]  And I just wanted to like do you the courtesy of like actually saying to this to your face.
[01:37:06]  So I said, what, what did they rent it for?
[01:37:09]  And she said, they're going to park classic cars here.
[01:37:12]  And so I basically just told her that I wanted to like make art in this space and that I wanted to create a space for other people to make art safely and considerately and like, you know, with like love, you know?
[01:37:32]  And then she was like, yeah, yeah, okay.
[01:37:35]  I mean, she was cool, but she was kind of like, we're good.
[01:37:38]  Why, why would I put a bunch of like young ruffians in this space when I could just have some chump park a car and then we can just lock the door, you know?
[01:37:47]  So then I wrote her a letter.
[01:37:49]  I sent her music.
[01:37:50]  I worked on her for like a month and then she rented it to me.
[01:37:55]  She must have backed out.
[01:37:56]  You know, she probably backed out of this other, you know, lease or whatever with this person.
[01:38:01]  And I think back to that person, I am definitely the same exact person that I was then.
[01:38:06]  I meant it.
[01:38:07]  You know, I wasn't like trying to just like control this like dupe.
[01:38:12]  You know what I mean?
[01:38:13]  Like she was a cynical, strong and highly leveraged person.
[01:38:17]  Like she did not need me in her life, you know?
[01:38:20]  And I meant it.
[01:38:22]  And I, when I look back on the whole story, the arc of tiny telephone and the bruises and getting and the wins and the fucking L's, like I, I'm this, I'm totally, like, totally happy with what happened.
[01:38:41]  You know what I mean?
[01:38:41]  Like, like, it didn't, it didn't show me how dark the world is or how difficult it is to deal with other humans or landlords or whatever.
[01:38:50]  Like, I, I feel more gentle about the whole planet than I did when I was like whatever 23, you know, like I don't feel.
[01:39:03]  I feel like that everything I set out to do was true, that you can actually, you know, create an environment that is like, that is like a safe, lovely and creative space for other people to make art, and that that art will be better because of of your like, tenderness.
[01:39:25]  I believe all that.
[01:39:27]  Oh my God, John, you're going to make me cry.
[01:39:30]  Aw.
[01:39:32]  No, well, now people are going to like listen to this fucking mini series and I'll be like, this guy's like charming.

=== John And Liz Talk Music (02:42) ===

[01:39:39]  He's got like a strong voice.
[01:39:42]  What if they don't?
[01:39:43]  We can't put this thing out.
[01:39:44]  Just AI me saying like pro-Trump shit.
[01:39:47]  Yeah, okay.
[01:39:48]  Oh, we don't need AI for that.
[01:39:49]  Come on.
[01:39:50]  Are you kidding me?
[01:39:51]  Do you remember what you told me the other night?
[01:39:53]  Yeah, we have that all.
[01:39:55]  We record everyone at all times.
[01:39:57]  Epstein style.
[01:39:59]  You said they should just close the border unless people are racist.
[01:40:05]  Well, all right.
[01:40:06]  Keep the dream alive.
[01:40:07]  Actually, you know what?
[01:40:07]  Fuck it.
[01:40:08]  Why am I giving the Young Chomsky?
[01:40:10]  You give them the details.
[01:40:11]  You tell them the details.
[01:40:12]  Yeah, so we dropped a video trailer online that was fun with some kind of behind the scenes studio footage.
[01:40:21]  Although, to be clear, some people seem confused.
[01:40:23]  This is a podcast series that we're doing.
[01:40:25]  It's not that people maybe thought it was a film.
[01:40:28]  We made a fun video trailer.
[01:40:29]  So if you haven't seen that, go check it out.
[01:40:31]  It's got some cool stuff in it.
[01:40:33]  But yeah, the podcast will be dropping next week on February 2nd, 2222, which is a fun date.
[01:40:41]  And it's going to be on the True Non feed.
[01:40:43]  And we're also going to be doing our regular TrueNON episodes, but this is kind of its own series.
[01:40:48]  So the first two episodes are going to come out next week.
[01:40:52]  And then for the next few weeks, we'll have weekly episodes.
[01:40:55]  i'm excited for people to hear it and um can't wait to see what you all think well with that being said my name is uh well y'all might have heard of me You know, I've been in this industry for quite a long time.
[01:41:10]  I was with Gene Outry and then I was with, you know, I haven't heard that name in so long.
[01:41:17]  Well, me either.
[01:41:18]  I mean, stores I can tell you about that, man.
[01:41:23]  And then, of course, I was with Moses Carfinkel up in Vegas for a while doing, well, we were doing some cocaine selling.
[01:41:32]  And now I just work down here at LA and I record.
[01:41:37]  I record mostly young men with curly hair on the top, but not a lot of hair on the sides, wearing large wide hoodies, play what appears to me to be ethnic music, although they themselves appear to be possibly of mixed Anglo heritage.
[01:41:55]  And that's mostly what I do.
[01:41:57]  My name is Michael Stand, aka Bracebilt.
[01:42:02]  Mike Stand.
[01:42:05]  And I'm joined here by, well, what are your names?
[01:42:08]  My name is John Vanderslice.
[01:42:10]  And the music in this episode was also by John Vanderslice.
[01:42:13]  And I'm Young Chomsky.
[01:42:15]  Thanks for having me.
[01:42:16]  I'll see you next episode.
[01:42:17]  And I'm Liz.
[01:42:18]  And this has been Trunon.
[01:42:20]  And we will see you next time.