True Anon Truth Feed - Keep the Dream Alive: One Year Later w/ John Vanderslice
Aired: 2023-03-21
Duration: 22:46


=== Ad for Keep the Dream Alive (04:48) ===

[00:00:00]  Ladies and gentlemen, we're doing some sponsored content sponsored by us.
[00:00:05]  I almost just opened this being like, hey, Liz, Brace here.
[00:00:10]  Well, you know what?
[00:00:11]  We could switch it up a little bit.
[00:00:12]  My name is Liz.
[00:00:13]  I'm Brace.
[00:00:14]  Oh, my God.
[00:00:16]  No, I'm not going to say it.
[00:00:17]  We're, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:00:20]  And the podcast is called Truinon.
[00:00:23]  And this episode of Truanon is sponsored by Truanon.
[00:00:27]  We are joined by John Vandersleis.
[00:00:31]  We're doing a little ad for our own series that came out about a year ago.
[00:00:36]  A little Young Chomsky joint called Keep the Dream Alive about Tiny Televon Studios.
[00:00:42]  Yeah, it's been a year since that project came up.
[00:00:44]  And you know, we've had a ton of new subscribers.
[00:00:46]  Thank you very much in the past year.
[00:00:48]  Very cool.
[00:00:49]  We love you.
[00:00:50]  Brace actually, Capital L loves you.
[00:00:52]  I don't.
[00:00:53]  And we just thought it would be nice to check in with John, check in with Young Chomsky and intro you guys who are new to us and to what we do here to this little mini series that he did because it's real special.
[00:01:08]  And, well, we want you guys to listen to it.
[00:01:11]  So let's get into it.
[00:01:14]  She was back from the babe.
[00:01:17]  100 tabs on the way.
[00:01:19]  Now delivered on the table.
[00:01:22]  Came down to check the paper.
[00:01:24]  100 purple sunshine.
[00:01:31]  John, is that a perfect A?
[00:01:37]  It actually is.
[00:01:38]  That's pure voice right there.
[00:01:39]  That's pure voice right there.
[00:01:41]  We are in the studio, not the actor's studio, not even the singer's studio, but in fact, the musician's studio with John Vandersleis, of course, of the band Vander Graaff Generator.
[00:01:56]  John, how you doing?
[00:01:58]  I'm doing great.
[00:02:00]  I think you're extremely funny, to be honest.
[00:02:03]  Don't tell him that.
[00:02:04]  Don't give him that.
[00:02:05]  I really do.
[00:02:06]  They can see my head visibly.
[00:02:09]  John, of course, John not of Vandergraaff Generator, John of John Vandersleis.
[00:02:14]  Yeah, I've actually never heard that before.
[00:02:17]  You know, I haven't heard of VanderGrafs.
[00:02:19]  Never been there.
[00:02:20]  It's like Krautrock, right?
[00:02:23]  I think it sounds progie to me.
[00:02:25]  You know what?
[00:02:26]  I might just be saying that because it sounds German, but it's probably Dutch.
[00:02:29]  It's probably Dutch.
[00:02:30]  Anyways, John, we've got you back in the, well, in the hole, which is what we call our studio.
[00:02:38]  And we're talking, it's been about a year since Keep the Dream Alive has come out.
[00:02:43]  What happened?
[00:02:44]  What was that?
[00:02:45]  Tell me about that.
[00:02:46]  I never heard it.
[00:02:47]  So this is going to be my first time.
[00:02:50]  It's a five-episode subpod about a crazy person starting a business in San Francisco, of which we all know very, very well.
[00:03:02]  Oh, yeah.
[00:03:03]  A seven by seven dystopian beautiful slash hellish and complicated place that unfortunately has been touched with tech money a few too many times.
[00:03:18]  And it's a story of a business blossoming and then getting snuffed out.
[00:03:23]  And that business was tiny telephone recording.
[00:03:26]  Yeah, I mean, I, this is Jung Chomsky here.
[00:03:29]  Hello.
[00:03:30]  You know, I made this thing with John.
[00:03:33]  And to me, it's like a, it's a love story, really.
[00:03:35]  I mean, it's about music, but that just kind of is almost not 100% incidental, but I think it's a little bit incidental.
[00:03:42]  It's about an insane person named John Vandersliker.
[00:03:47]  Can we stop calling him insane?
[00:03:49]  He's here with us.
[00:03:51]  Well, he knows I mean it lovingly.
[00:03:53]  I mean, because you have to be insane to do something like this, would you?
[00:03:56]  I think John would agree with that.
[00:03:58]  So it's about a guy who's a little bit crazy and he has this crazy idea that he like will go to any length to see through and that is to open this studio.
[00:04:08]  But then there's actual love story within it.
[00:04:10]  It's about falling in and out of love with another person and it's about loss.
[00:04:16]  And I just think there's a lot of human drama.
[00:04:19]  And I think if you didn't get a chance to listen to it when we put it out last year, I think it's still really relevant today.
[00:04:27]  Well, like Priest said, I mean, it's been about a year since we did put it out.
[00:04:32]  And in that time, I mean, a lot has happened in that time, right?
[00:04:35]  I mean, what can you tell us about what's been going on with you, John, in that, in the kind of aftermath of putting out this subpod, as you called it, which I think is very cute and we should keep that term?

=== Touring Anxieties (13:37) ===

[00:04:48]  What was very interesting for me is that it actually gave me tons of closure like thinking about my life in San Francisco and really a 20-year odyssey of building an extremely low profit margin business,
[00:05:06]  totally illegal, non-permitted, never paid taxes, barely kind of like visible legally and yet something that did have a wider impact in music.
[00:05:22]  Like the number, sheer number of records, some of which had a lot of, you know, got a lot of like traction in our own little corner of the music world.
[00:05:32]  And there was something about the process of making, you know, this, like kind of like defining the story, I guess, and like looking back at it that really helped me resolve some feelings of like maybe failing.
[00:05:48]  When you build something and it failed, I mean, we went in there with sledgehammers and knocked down all the walls because our landlord, that was the only way we could really, you know, under the terms of what we did in that space, it was basically like what you did is just like, as far as a commercial real estate developer is concerned, is worthless.
[00:06:11]  And so now just like, just knock all of it out and like, you know, like clean up this like mess that you made.
[00:06:19]  And at the time, it felt like failure.
[00:06:21]  And now it felt like, wow, we, I mean, we, you know, we existed there for 20 years in the mission, probably one of the most expensive and fragile parts of San Francisco.
[00:06:33]  And it felt celebratory at the end of it in the sense that when we were just like taking the U-Haul trucks up the driveway, it felt like a disaster.
[00:06:42]  And now it feels like a gift.
[00:06:44]  I'm very, very happy about the experience now.
[00:06:48]  And it feels like it unwound maybe some like existential problems I had with the whole mess.
[00:06:56]  And I just don't feel that anymore.
[00:06:58]  And thanks to Young Chomsky for that.
[00:07:01]  You're welcome.
[00:07:02]  How much is that tied up in also your like, I don't know, we've talked about this not on the podcast, but just our own kind of like unresolved anxieties about leaving San Francisco?
[00:07:14]  100%.
[00:07:15]  Like it was, it was such a big deal for me to, you know, I had a lot of ties in Sonoma County.
[00:07:20]  So I was really like anchored in Northern California.
[00:07:24]  And I think that coming to LA, it wasn't, I don't still don't feel that it's necessarily permanent.
[00:07:33]  So in a way, I was like unmoored from like a home.
[00:07:38]  And I feel like I'm just going to be kind of bouncing around for a little bit.
[00:07:42]  And, you know, San Francisco has definitely further devolved since we left.
[00:07:49]  Absolutely.
[00:07:50]  Yeah.
[00:07:51]  Which is wild and so American.
[00:07:53]  It's just like, how do you, how does this place of all places just become, you know, it has the emptiest downtown of any city in America.
[00:08:01]  And it's, there'll be, you know, books written about what happened to Market Street.
[00:08:05]  I mean, it's insane.
[00:08:07]  It's, you know, I think about too, how like San Francisco was really one of the last, like that whole like San Francisco sound thing.
[00:08:15]  You remember that?
[00:08:16]  Yeah.
[00:08:16]  Yeah.
[00:08:17]  That was really like the last, one of the last, I guess, rock and roll kind of like scenes that really packaged itself as that to kind of come out before whatever's going on with the modern musical landscape happened, right?
[00:08:30]  Yeah, it was like pre-Spotify, pre-all that stuff.
[00:08:34]  And that really just like, I mean, of all those bands, I think only like Ty and the OCs are still around.
[00:08:41]  But it was really like that, that was kind of it.
[00:08:44]  That was like the last like moment of that kind of music.
[00:08:48]  Kind of records were back and people were playing music and it was like, you know, there's the internet and it was like 2011, 2010, 2012 or whatever.
[00:08:56]  But after that, it just completely, like the entire musical landscape changed, especially bands like that really would, I think, have a hard time making it as big as they did in today with the way essentially music is marketed.
[00:09:09]  Yeah, 100%.
[00:09:11]  Definitely.
[00:09:12]  And they were located.
[00:09:13]  Those were San Francisco bands.
[00:09:15]  Like it read to people as, you know, it was a regional thing.
[00:09:20]  And I don't, I don't even know if that would even resonate now.
[00:09:23]  No, no, not at all.
[00:09:25]  It's kind of glow.
[00:09:26]  It's globalized now, as you always say.
[00:09:29]  I mean, it's crazy because you always do talk about the globalist record industry.
[00:09:35]  And it's just like, I finally get what you're saying.
[00:09:37]  John, I'm kidding, of course.
[00:09:39]  But John, it's been about a year since the, since this series came out.
[00:09:43]  What has changed?
[00:09:43]  What's new?
[00:09:44]  What's going on?
[00:09:45]  Well, I live in Los Angeles.
[00:09:47]  I am now just, I just make my own records.
[00:09:50]  I almost really don't travel up to the Bay Area.
[00:09:52]  I still own Tiny Telephone Oakland, and that's really how I live because I'm definitely would have to be probably working more.
[00:10:02]  I mean, I don't really work.
[00:10:04]  So, you know, the studio also is really important to me for that.
[00:10:09]  But I just make my own records.
[00:10:10]  I have a record coming out in April, April 14th.
[00:10:13]  I'm doing three tours this year.
[00:10:15]  I've been really just focused on my own music.
[00:10:18]  And that was another wonderful kind of like thing that happened with the studio closing is that so much of my time and energy was being like drained out by like really just running a business.
[00:10:29]  And like, I knew so much about like light bulbs and like paper towels.
[00:10:35]  And like, you know, like I, I, I had a whole like corner of my tech room that had like screws.
[00:10:42]  So I had like all these metric screws.
[00:10:44]  I mean, I just knew all this like small, like kind of like janitorial and, you know, like plant stuff.
[00:10:51]  And it was amazing to let all of that stuff go.
[00:10:54]  John, one of the kind of subplots of the series was about your relationship with live performance, right?
[00:11:00]  So you, you kind of started very modestly and then rose to some success traveling the world, playing shows.
[00:11:07]  And then there's kind of a climactic moment that I won't spoil, but I think is a, is a fun story.
[00:11:12]  And then you kind of totally gave up on touring and then you had another kind of epiphany later and you came back to it in a different way.
[00:11:20]  And so now you're going back on the road again.
[00:11:22]  And I think it's been a little while since you've done a real tour.
[00:11:26]  So like, what are your feelings about going on tour right now?
[00:11:30]  And how, how does that compare to how you used to approach it?
[00:11:34]  It's interesting because I think that, you know, someone, I think there's, there's some really interesting stuff to mine in what's happening with live performance.
[00:11:45]  I mean, you've basically had companies like Live Nation that have like, they've been trying to like vertically, vertically integrate clubs.
[00:11:53]  So they've been buying up super small rooms.
[00:11:56]  So like, you know, you drive down Sunset and you pass the Echo and you think it's insane.
[00:12:01]  It's owned by Live Nation.
[00:12:03]  And we there's a fucking, there's a metal detector out front.
[00:12:06]  It's crazy.
[00:12:07]  And they search your shoes at L Ray.
[00:12:09]  It's like there's, there's like been a bummerfocation that's happened along every single step of like club life.
[00:12:16]  And also with that, every single touring band I know, their margins just fall.
[00:12:24]  Every single tour, their margins fall.
[00:12:26]  So they're touring, they're either bleeding a trust fund out or they are the 0.1% and they just blew the fuck up, you know, and there's no other way around this.
[00:12:37]  And so for me, like I stopped really club touring in 2013, 2014 because it was just simply impossible to make.
[00:12:45]  This is when I was scamming hotels for $45 hotel rooms because I was like an, you know, like an influencer.
[00:12:51]  I had this great scam going forever.
[00:12:53]  It was amazing.
[00:12:54]  But that's over.
[00:12:56]  Gas is way more expensive.
[00:12:57]  Insurance for touring now, like you have to actually have like proper insurance, insurance if you tour because it's such a weird gray area.
[00:13:07]  You know, people get sued.
[00:13:09]  There's like five people in a van.
[00:13:10]  No one's wearing seatbelts because two of them are sleeping.
[00:13:13]  So I just don't really know how any, any like Akano line or Chevy Express is like driving across the 80 without losing 20 grand.
[00:13:24]  Like there's just no way.
[00:13:25]  So I had to recast touring as like, I mean, at first my friends would make fun of me.
[00:13:30]  I was like, oh, I'm just going to play living rooms.
[00:13:32]  You know, it just, it just sounds ridiculous.
[00:13:34]  And then I kind of leaned into it.
[00:13:36]  Like, yeah, I, I'm, every artist gets smaller in time.
[00:13:39]  That's just going to happen.
[00:13:41]  And how are you going to deal with it?
[00:13:43]  Is this simply vanity?
[00:13:45]  Are you actually like working class person that has to make money?
[00:13:49]  I don't have parents.
[00:13:50]  I don't, not only do I not have parents that have money, I don't have parents.
[00:13:53]  Like I don't have anything.
[00:13:54]  So I have to like find a way to actually go out there and make you know Middle-class money touring.
[00:14:00]  And the only way is like taking your own Subaru out there and playing living rooms.
[00:14:04]  That's it.
[00:14:05]  And taking clubs and Live Nation out.
[00:14:08]  It's funny.
[00:14:09]  Like Brace and I were just talking this week about how we should do an episode on the like radical changes that have occurred in the music industry over the past like 20 years.
[00:14:18]  I mean, you could take it from, I mean, really like at any level of the industry, whether it's like at you know, streaming, if it's at, you know, record deals, if it's at performing, if it's at any other kind of at just like the, I mean, I hate saying it, but like the quality and like availability of like actual like new music.
[00:14:37]  Like all of it has completely and totally degraded and become really, really impossible, not just for like anyone like to make a living.
[00:14:46]  I mean, making a living as a working artist, whether that's as a, you know, a musician, a painter, an artist, a dancer, you know, whatever it is, is like, has been impossible for a very long time.
[00:14:59]  Although it's like increasingly, it's just even on the margins now, it's impossible, it seems like.
[00:15:06]  And so people, it's funny, people complain about the art that gets produced.
[00:15:09]  They get, they complain about the films that get produced.
[00:15:11]  They complain about the music that gets produced.
[00:15:13]  It's all just like TikTok algorithm songs or, you know, whatever it is, even for small bands, when that's like literally the only way for any musician to make any money.
[00:15:22]  You know what I mean?
[00:15:24]  You know, whereas like to even just go out and play music for, you know, five, six, 700 people, just 200 people is taking a massive loss.
[00:15:37]  How is anyone going to do it?
[00:15:38]  And then how is the music even going to get created in the first place then?
[00:15:41]  Right.
[00:15:42]  It's, it's crazy.
[00:15:43]  And the fuel, it's just an MLM.
[00:15:46]  Like the fuel is, it is, it is trust funds.
[00:15:49]  Like that's what's that's that's like if we if you were to walk in like in Brooklyn and just you know, just like go stand outside like of a rehearsal place and watch bands come in and out, you'd be like, these, these kids all went to like nice schools.
[00:16:05]  Like, you know what I mean?
[00:16:06]  These, this is a moneyed class.
[00:16:08]  Well, if you ever did that, I would love to be like the back end person that I would open my books and I would show you what's crazy is I would show you what's happened since like, let's say 2004 to today.
[00:16:21]  Like in 2004, the standard support act was getting $250 a show.
[00:16:27]  That was like standard.
[00:16:28]  So if Billions or like High Road or, you know, even CAA, if you were like asked by a big booking agency to open up for a huge band on tour, you would get $250 flat.
[00:16:39]  It's the same exact rate as today.
[00:16:42]  That's what you get today.
[00:16:44]  So we're talking like 15, 17 years, 18 years of flat wages.
[00:16:50]  And every expenses of touring.
[00:16:52]  Sorry, there's a cat that just broke in here.
[00:16:54]  Do you want me to get rich?
[00:16:55]  No, no, it's fine.
[00:16:57]  You can hear, listeners, if you can hear the little jingle, that's the bell on the cat's neck.
[00:17:02]  So it's remarkable.
[00:17:04]  So whoever is standing now in this kind of like field is either monomaniacal beyond belief, or they are just simply, you know, they're losing, you know, $50,000 to $100,000 a year for the pleasure of saying that they do music.
[00:17:23]  You know, it's really unreasonable.
[00:17:26]  Yeah, what you say about the pay for opening bands is I remember when friends of mine would play these like giant shows, you know, with like thousands and thousands and thousands of people for there opening up for these bands.
[00:17:40]  And they'd be like, yeah, we got like equivalent of like $50 a person.
[00:17:44]  Yeah.
[00:17:45]  Before expenses.
[00:17:47]  Before expenses.
[00:17:49]  It's so crazy.
[00:17:50]  Yeah.
[00:17:50]  But even, you know, I, you know, just coming from, I guess, the music world, I knowing people who tour for a living, like even just the margins of like a headlining act, like even a decently big headlining act has just like plummeted.
[00:18:07]  Yeah, like the OCs, it's not easy for any band.
[00:18:10]  That's what's crazy is that even the winners are getting like pinched.
[00:18:14]  And, you know, you look at it like how much like, let's say a sprinter van costs.
[00:18:18]  You know, if it's really modified to be a touring vehicle, it might be 70 or 80 grand.
[00:18:22]  This is insane.

=== Instagram's Favorite Acid Vendor (04:20) ===

[00:18:25]  Well, ladies and gentlemen, you heard it here first.
[00:18:28]  It's insane.
[00:18:29]  We're also, so you're going on tour.
[00:18:31]  Where can people find out about the tour?
[00:18:33]  I only really post on Instagram.
[00:18:37]  Which, by the way, never stop posting on Instagram.
[00:18:40]  John's Instagram is like.
[00:18:42]  Great Instagram stories.
[00:18:44]  Great finder of memes.
[00:18:47]  Curious.
[00:18:49]  I'm a motivated shit poster.
[00:18:51]  I've been really obsessed with TikTok now, and I just feel like I'm just kind of like dumping good TikTok stuff.
[00:18:56]  But yeah, thank you for that.
[00:18:58]  I really enjoy it.
[00:19:00]  And I've kind of embraced the idiocy of being on Instagram.
[00:19:05]  So they can find it there.
[00:19:07]  John Vandersleys is the Instagram.
[00:19:08]  Yeah.
[00:19:09]  Yeah.
[00:19:10]  What's the new album called?
[00:19:11]  It's called Crystals 3.0, and that is my favorite acid vendor on the dark web called Instrument.
[00:19:23]  And he had devised this genius method of making ultra-pure acid that he called, well, his first version was Crystals 2.0.
[00:19:32]  And then after a couple of years, he graduated to graduated to Crystals 3.0.
[00:19:36]  And the first time I saw that on drug listing, I was like, that's the name of my new record.
[00:19:44]  Well, ladies and gentlemen, you heard it here first.
[00:19:47]  You can catch Keep the Dream Alive actually on the Truan feed.
[00:19:54]  And you can catch John's new album.
[00:19:56]  When's it come out?
[00:19:58]  April 14th, Ruination Day.
[00:20:00]  Ruination Day?
[00:20:01]  Yeah, it's when the Titanic sank, Lincoln got shot.
[00:20:03]  Like, there's like a hundred horrible things that happened on this day.
[00:20:06]  Good God.
[00:20:07]  And Truanon, if you want to see us, we are at April 15th at the Far Out Lounge in Texas.
[00:20:13]  John, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:20:17]  Absolutely my pleasure.
[00:20:19]  I love all of you.
[00:20:29]  Well, we've got the link to the series in the description.
[00:20:47]  Link in bio, Classico style.
[00:20:50]  And it's five parts, and we think you should really check it out.
[00:20:53]  So here's a little taste of it.
[00:20:55]  And we'll see you next time.
[00:20:57]  I was at a friend's house when I was in seventh grade, and my friend played me a kinks record.
[00:21:05]  I remember flipping the back of the record over and seeing Ray Davies from the kinks leaning over a Neve console.
[00:21:14]  That's when I first started thinking that recording studios were potentially very, very important to artists.
[00:21:22]  And that was the beginning for me.
[00:21:25]  I started playing in my first band when I was 24.
[00:21:28]  I'd never been in a band before.
[00:21:30]  So I was working in restaurants and I eventually decided that I needed to get a warehouse with my friends and make it like a rehearsal place.
[00:21:42]  I basically said that art is sacred and art needs patrons.
[00:21:48]  And she said, I've decided to rent you the space.
[00:21:51]  Well, that was like, if you give me like an open door, I'm in.
[00:21:54]  I'm fucking there.
[00:21:55]  And so we slowly started building the infrastructure of a recording studio.
[00:21:59]  I remember thinking, I can do this.
[00:22:01]  This can actually be a business.
[00:22:04]  I was asked by a Noise Pop, which is like a local San Francisco festival.
[00:22:09]  So I said yes.
[00:22:10]  And the Mountain Goats were the third band.
[00:22:14]  I had a promo copy of Mass Suicide Occult Vicarines.
[00:22:17]  There was a song on it called Bill Gates Must Die, which, by the way, he actually must die.
[00:22:22]  After the show, Darneo came up to me from Mountain Goats and he was like, hey, that was really good.
[00:22:26]  He said, hi, this is John Vandersleis in San Francisco.
[00:22:29]  I said, okay, look, that is not your real name.
[00:22:33]  But that was the beginning.
[00:22:35]  But yeah, so we went out on a pretty punishing tour.
[00:22:38]  And those punishing tours are places where people Please keep the dream alive.