Ep. 35: "You Give 'Em Israeli Eyes"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Pretty good.
Merlin, man.
You know what?
It's been a long time.
You ready?
I'm going to give it to you good.
You ready?
Sure.
John!
Ah!
Ah!
Yay!
I had to do that a little bit to call it off mic.
No, that's good.
That's exactly right.
You're learning good mic technique.
I was going to ask you about that.
Do you consider yourself someone with good mic skills?
Absolutely.
I mean, you can't sing into microphones for 20 years without learning something.
You bring something different.
You got an SM57 that smells like a butt.
That's going to be different than a Schurheil 5418 or whatever.
Yeah, Schurheil 5418.
That's a terrible mic.
Yeah, at least Hitler made the microphones run on time.
He really did.
The Germans make great microphones.
Then they put them up their butt.
But as you know, oh my god, all my things are bleeping at once here.
I sent you three different kinds of messages.
I apologize.
That's okay.
That's typical of you.
I have 700 Skype invitations.
No, no, no, no, no.
iCal invitations to Skyping.
Oh, see, that's me too.
Yeah, I know it is because it has your name right at the top of it.
Should I start over?
You should not.
If you want, I'll delete all those so we can start over.
I don't want them.
I'm trying to keep my inbox at zero.
And you are adding things to my inbox.
So the Germans make a good mic.
Yeah.
The thing about Shure microphones that smell like the bottom of the ocean is that that's how you know you're in a hell of a club, a real rock club, when you know they have never sanitized their microphones.
Can you do that?
It seems to me a man of your status with the kind of money you've got if you were going to start a club.
I don't know if they would serve alcohol.
High status, yeah.
Yeah, high status, absolutely.
Big cloud.
Would you sanitize your mics?
I personally would.
There's a club in Denver called the Lion's Lair.
Which the first time I played there, it was promoted to me by everyone as like a legendary place.
You have to play the Lion's Lair.
It's a legendary place.
And we arrived at the Lion's Lair.
And it was legendarily abysmal.
It was a club...
It was a club, kind of like the one that you took us to recently in San Francisco, where the smell of fresh paint mixed with bleach, mixed with hepatitis, mixed with... Hepatitis C. Hepatitis C, which has a terrible smell.
That's the Winona Judd kind.
Really bad.
Yuck smell.
Smells like Judd.
So you walk in there and you're like, oh, right, I wouldn't come into this place to get changed for a dollar, but I'm playing here tonight.
I'm drinking out of the glasses.
And the microphones.
So the guy that's setting up the PA, he's like, yeah, we got three mics.
You decide where you want them by way of saying we're not micing any of your instruments.
We have three microphones.
Are you talking about the place you played?
Yeah, Lions Lair.
We played there multiple times.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
But that was not your experience in San Francisco.
That place is good, right?
No, no, no.
The Great American Musical is one of the finest clubs in the world.
I just want to clarify.
The Lions Lair in Denver, however, is not on the list of the finest clubs in the world.
And in fact, the microphone that they gave me, this is the best mic they had because I am the lead vocalist.
And of course, you are going to give the best mic you have to the lead vocalist.
The microphone was A, covered with rust.
And B, actually had been thrown to the floor in a punk rock rage so many times that it had sharp cutting blades on it where the mic had broken and someone had put it back together with a hammer.
Yeah.
The screen had shards?
Yeah, the first time I touched it with my lips, I was like, oh, that just cut me.
And I'm just doing a sound check.
Like, I need to go get a tetanus shot now.
Well, isn't that like the Viet Cong where you put poop on the stick?
And then when the trap hits?
The boongy stick.
And then the poop on the stick gives you an infection, right?
Yeah, this is how the lion's lair is spreading their brand of punk rock.
Around America.
So anyway, I ended up playing there four or five times over the years because every time someone says the Lion's Lair, I go, oh, yeah, I've had such a good time there.
Legendary club.
Would you consider bringing your own?
Would you consider bringing your own?
Some guys bring their fancy ribbon mic or whatever in a special box.
Would you do that?
Here's what happens when you bring your own mic.
You leave it at the club.
Because it's the last thing you're thinking of when you leave.
Unless you have your own sound man.
If you have your own sound man, he's got mics.
But I carried around a mic in the pocket of my jacket for a tour.
Like, here's my mic.
And I left it behind like three different times.
And finally, frankly, quite frankly, this is going to sound terrible, but I left it at the Bowery Ballroom, another of the greatest clubs in the world.
And it had my name written on it.
But when I called them, they were like, oh yeah, we don't know where it went.
And that was like, oh, come on, really?
They're not hiring out of the Ivy Leagues for that kind of thing, are they?
You're not going to coax me on this podcast to say one bad word about the glorious and honorable guild of sound engineers, roadies, and technicians who make the clubs of America
Resonate like giant cellos.
They are a glorious cast.
It's kind of like taunting your proctologist.
Exactly.
I am never going to say a terrible thing about that army of men and women dressed all in black.
Super, super high.
With Leatherman multi-tools on their belts.
And a beeper.
And...
and large flashlights or small flashlights.
They have a tiny one too.
They got the tiny little, um, what are the black ones?
You've got one of those giant, those, uh, the mag lights, you got a little mag light and you got that in a holster, right?
Well, and the real pros have, have tiny mag lights with red lenses on them so that they can be on stage with their mag light and not disrupt the, the show with a, with a, with a distracting white light that has a red light so that they're, it's like, it's basically special forces stuff that those guys use.
Military grade.
I don't like to direct the show, but you've played a thousand times more rock shows than I have in a million years.
But even with my very modest amount of experience, I must tell you, playing with exactly the same setup...
at exactly the same club, God bless it, it sounded completely different every night with the same sound man.
If the guy who ran the club, two guys that I played in bands with owned this over time, technically four guys, but if they ran the board, you were in good shape because they kind of cared.
But their pal...
who was real goofy would do it.
And I was always struck.
And when we played a couple of times out of town, I was always blown away that it could sound so, so very, very different.
I understand a room being different, but, but it seems like, you know, like if you ran a restaurant and you were kind of confused about where the stove was.
Yeah.
Well, here's a, here's pro tip.
Okay.
Don't, don't let the goofy guy do the sound.
What about Colton's taciturn guy?
Is he just hauling gear and doing merch?
Oh, no.
John Colton's sound man, John Carter, he is the consummate rock and roll professional.
The young man I met and parried with in the hotel lobby?
That's a different fella.
No, no, no.
He's Jonathan Colton's Yale-educated merch lackey.
That's an old world craft, by the way.
Jonathan Colton's sound man has work.
Was that the handsome guy with the dark hair?
Well, I'm not here to judge a man's relative attractiveness.
Please continue.
I'm sorry.
But he did sound for the opener on the Michael Jackson Bad Tour.
This guy's been around.
John Carter is a sword wielder, as we say.
Actually, that's not anything anybody says.
Still gray eyes.
um the the here's here's another thing about microphones and you know i i don't like to literally sicken our listeners but we're talking we're both talking into microphones right now so yeah but this microphone as disgusting as my office is this this is a single use microphone that has never seen anything worse than my mouth by single use microphone do you mean you do one podcast and throw it away
Oh, absolutely.
And then you get another... Do you have a dispenser there in the office where you're like... Right.
It's like a toilet paper or a fast lady.
You just move on, right?
No, I mean, no offense.
I don't want to work ping pong.
But, you know, the SM57, that...
it's a workhorse right and i you know the thing is sm57s it seems to me are everywhere because they're inexpensive used well you can use them for most like all kinds of different things if you lost every other mic in the world you could still build a house with with an sm57 all day and you could make a kick drum and you could get by with it as a vocal mic right you could you could you right i mean you've you've done good shows singing into an sm57 right
I don't want to do a show where we are advertising for sure SM57s because I'm angling for a sponsorship.
I want that company to pony up.
And here we are singing the praises of the SM57 and what a punk rock mic it is.
Well, I'm going to take it in another direction if you don't mind.
All right, please do.
Because here's the thing.
You walk onto stage most places, and there's this rat king of XLRs.
You see a bunch of XLRs because they probably can afford a snake.
You've got a bunch of long XLRs in coils, and everybody's got a special way.
They like to coil the thing.
Don't touch the coils.
And then you see this pile.
of sm57s on the floor in front of where the kick drum would be because that's you know they wanted to get home and get back to more marijuana you are describing the experience of a of a young up-and-coming band in florida we were never we never got up or came
We were down and not coming.
It has been a long time since I played in a club where I walked on the stage and there was just a pile of cigar butts, a pile of SM57s stacked in front of a kick drum.
Uh-huh.
It's been a long time.
Do they keep it in a plastic box, or how does that work?
I'm a professional rock musician, and when I show up to a club, there's a selection of nice microphones that are being mastered by the master and commander on the stage who is directing his sailors and midshipmen up the rigging
He's pointing the semen in all the right directions.
To prepare the stage for my show.
Mr. Roderick, who has... I'd like to talk about writers at some point.
Do you have a dignity writer, or is that just something that's understood?
I have a writer, but here's the thing about writers.
A lot of young bands make the mistake of thinking that, oh, shit, put anything you want on a writer.
Put $3,000 worth of sushi on the writer.
And then what you don't realize is that they're taking that money out of the money they would otherwise pay you.
It's recoupable.
Well, right.
Yeah.
Immediately recoupable.
So, so, uh, don't, uh, my, my writer is fairly simple because I would rather have the money, uh, than have somebody charge me $7 for a Gatorade.
So when, when you, uh, when you rose and came just a little bit, you probably, no, see, I'm guessing you did.
I could see you though, putting cloth with bathtub on there.
And then one time, you know, fool me once.
Oh, some of that stuff, right?
Like if you're, if you say, for instance, if you say we need a shower,
They're not going to charge you for that unless they're really unscrupulous.
Well, the other part of this, and again, you have to tell me if this is a real-world experience, but bringing your own mic, having your own sound guy, I could see that being, you know, whatever.
It might be not that cool with that.
But when you bring your own mic or you have a big rider, does that also peg you as trouble?
No, no, no.
Bringing your own sound guy and your own gear, everybody loves that.
Except one time in Minneapolis...
we played a club where the sound guy, we had our own sound guy, and the sound guy did the sound.
And then at the end of the night, the house sound guy came out and pitched a fit, like a screaming fit,
That our sound guy had not zeroed out the board, which is to say he had not pushed all the faders back down to zero.
This is a thing that you can do yourself.
It is a thing that you could have a cat do.
You know what I mean?
You tear off the masking tape, pull everything down, reset all the little things to zero.
You start over.
You unhit all the buttons.
You start from zero.
Reset.
Start from zero.
Zero out.
Reset.
It's a lot of work.
And so we're standing around.
It's really not a lot of work.
In fact, it is a minuscule amount of work.
And if you are obsessive compulsive like me, there is nothing you like better.
Zero out.
Okay.
Because you sit there and you're like, zero, zero, zero.
Do you actually know if it's work or you just assume it's not work?
Well, I mean, everything that isn't sleeping is work.
That's a good point.
But this is a thing.
We're standing around after the show.
The audience is gone.
We're loading up our final guitars into the van.
And the house sound guy comes over and looks at his board, which is not zeroed out.
And he really started screaming.
Oh, not zeroing out when you're done.
Not zeroing out when you're done.
Oh, I see.
He starts screaming.
I understand.
He's screaming things at us like, I'm a professional sound man.
I've played.
I have done sound at sold out shows.
Sold out shows.
And no one has ever not zeroed out the board.
Sold out shows.
And we're like, yeah, this, in fact, tonight's show was sold out.
And what are you talking about?
Why are you screaming?
And he's like, I don't know.
And he's stomping around.
It's like, hey, man, it's fine.
We'll zero out your board.
Is that like not cleaning off his dead rubber girl?
It would be like returning her sticky.
Well, in fact, it is not like nothing.
There is nothing equivalent to how small a deal this is.
It's like somebody coming out of the bathroom and saying, I told you to turn the light off when you left the bathroom and I went in there and the light was on.
Like, oh, sorry.
The light was on.
Sorry.
No!
I told you!
It's too late.
And the fact is, I didn't tell you.
You should have just known.
All right.
Okay.
Sorry.
We'll never do it again because we won't come back here.
Well, my experience was extremely different because, as I say, there were no smaller potatoes.
We were fingerling potatoes in the rock ecosystem.
But the weird thing about living where we lived is we did get the entirely inappropriate opportunity to open for a lot of amazing bands because you play for cheap.
And really, as our friend Alex Weiss, the promoter, used to say, it's good exposure.
You know, whatever, which basically means he didn't want to pay you because he had to pay.
It's great to be a big fish in a small pond or even a small fish in a small pond.
It's nice to be a fish, no question.
I talked to a woman who was... I was on a panel one time at the Experience Music Project here in Seattle.
The EMP.
And it was a panel on groupies in rock and roll.
And I was the only man on the bill.
Or on the panel.
And also the only musician.
By the way, Bill is a phallocentric name.
Right, I'm sorry.
I was the only man on the bill or...
uh janet dais yeah on the dais on the uh yeah at the table at the head table oh boy head table i'm sorry you're so you're so deep inside the fellas entrance and you can't even think you can't erection your way out i was i was the only man on the vagina okay thank you spelled with a y and uh the the the woman who was
The chair of the event was a feminist writer from Olympia, from the hippie college there, Evergreen College.
And she kind of stacked the panel with women who were rock writers, who all kind of shared her view that being a groupie was a...
was almost the worst thing a woman could do.
And not only terrible for her, but it also degraded women all across the world.
To love a band and follow a band and to be the girlfriend of rock musicians was a kind of debasement that left a lasting scar on women everywhere.
And then on this panel of all these kind of very serious-minded young writers...
There was a woman who was now 55 years old who had written a book about her 25 years as a rock groupie.
And she started off her presentation by saying, you know, I was 14 years old and I was walking down the street in my hometown of San Antonio, Texas.
It's not Pamela DeBarge.
No, it's not Pamela DeBarge.
Because this is the point of her story.
She lived in San Antonio.
And so all the big bands came through San Antonio, but there was no competition in San Antonio to be like the hot rock girl.
It's not like in L.A.
where there's 2,500 models kind of standing there trying to talk to the band.
In San Antonio, she had no competition.
She and her little group of friends.
Anyway, her story begins.
She's like walking down the street, 14 years old, and a white limo pulls up.
It's 1973, and the door opens, and it's Rod Stewart.
And he's like, hey, climb in.
Because he's from England.
Hello, I'm from England.
Climb into the car.
I used to be from Scotland, Governor.
You know, I'm a rock star.
Come on.
Look at me here.
I'll give you some of these drinks.
And she climbs into the car and so begins like a 15-year odyssey for her.
Starting, admittedly, pretty young.
But she dated Iggy Pop for three years.
She traveled around the world.
She's been everywhere up and down.
And she said it was the greatest experience of her life.
And she wouldn't give back a second of it.
And she and I became fast friends on this panel because we were surrounded by all these very serious ladies.
You know a strong lead.
I do.
I was like, I'm with you, chicky baby.
You are pre-qualified, madam.
These other women up here in their special underwear with their mean sticks aren't going to take the fun out of this for me.
And actually, she said from the day, she was like, you're my kind of rock star.
If I was 20 years younger, I was like, baby, you don't have to be 20 years younger.
I think we got a special connection right now.
You want to do it just right here on the table?
We really, it was not, we did this, this panel went off the rails.
Did it feel, did it feel, did it feel like there were sides being taken at some point?
Oh my God, absolutely.
Well, the woman, what I found later was the, the, we were getting questions from the audience and a lot of the questions from the audience were really political, really like hyper overthought fourth generation feminist theory being thrown at us.
I don't think a lot of groupies are going to come to that.
They got other places to be.
Well, who knows who goes to these pop conferences, honestly.
But anyway, I found later that the woman who had chaired the panel, who had hand-selected me for this thing.
I mean, she's somebody I respect as a writer.
But she was calling on girls in the crowd whom she knew...
who were her students in the class she taught.
So she's hand-picking the people that she's calling on to ask questions.
Because people were raising their hands on wanting to ask questions.
And she's picking these people.
And I was just like, wow, this is amazing.
This crowd is really hostile.
And they're all asking me how I feel about mind-raping the youth of America.
And I'm like, I don't feel like I'm mind-raping anybody.
I'm just...
Well, maybe mind raping a few people.
Come on, who doesn't?
Anyway, so it was a little bit of the deck was stacked against those of us who believe that sex is not really that big of a deal.
Stacked.
Yeah.
Now wait, I would love to close this thread as soon as possible.
Yeah, I know, me too.
Was this the lady who misspelled feminism?
No, that was... Was that Bust magazine?
That was the cover, I think, of... Bust, right?
Of Bust, yeah.
Feminesium.
Which I still have a little jar of Feminesium here in my office.
In case any feminists come in in the middle of the night, I can wave the Feminesium at them and...
It repels their mean sticks.
They're like, ah!
My mean stick is melting!
That's a stick spell with a Y, by the way.
Did you notice I just used a kind of witch voice from The Wizard of Oz to describe feminists?
Wow, wow, wow, wow.
That's so ping pong.
I think you're going to get a note about that from Cough Button Boy.
A lot.
I'm going to get a lot of angry mail.
Yeah.
Because I think a lot of our listeners are feminists.
Yes.
As you and I are.
I agree.
But the thing about feminism is it's a big tent.
It's a big tent.
So you're saying they're heavy.
There's room in there for all of us with different viewpoints.
Yeah.
And different body mass indexes.
Positions.
Different positions.
Yeah.
Different costumes.
A lot of the positions are stacked.
Let's move on.
Let's move on.
Feminesium.
Do you have a 3x5 card lying around that you can pick up and just... If you'd like, I can read you everything I have on 3x5 cards at this point, if it would be useful.
I don't know.
I think that would be bad.
Okay.
Do you want me to do this real quickly?
Yeah, go ahead.
No, I'd like to hear it.
Okay, I got Lion's Lair.
Groupies.
We got to talk about cough buttons.
White limos.
I got a big problem with white limos.
Feminesium.
I'm a fan of the white limo.
Okay, you know what?
I'm going to make a small star next to that.
Would you cheat on Laurie Anderson?
And why is there never room for middle ground in an argument?
I also have other things.
I'd like to get back to Shurs, but I think we've already moved on.
I also want to tell you my Wayne story at some point.
It doesn't have to be today.
We just recently broke up.
I know, it makes me sad.
That guy's a hell of a guitar player.
I was one of the first people to know about it because I was on Twitter in the middle of the night.
Aaron had that inscrutable toot.
Yeah, and I was like, hey, look at that.
Here I am.
I'm right at the front of the bow of this boat of knowing...
Well, I don't want to upset feminists or ween, but if you were going to end a mostly – I don't want to say stalled, but let's say it slowed down a lot.
If you had a slowed down career with a very popular cult band, would you move directly to a Rob McEwen cover album personally?
No, I personally would not.
But then I am not a fan of the we're breaking up now after nobody cares.
What's the point?
Well, no, but what's the point in general?
I don't think there is a point.
I don't think REM should have broken up.
I think you just stop putting out records.
And I mean, if you can't handle the occasional fan letter going, when's your next record?
And I hope I'm not giving away too much.
I hope now I'm not going to get a bunch of tweets from people who are like, did you break up the long winners and you're just not telling us?
That's like breaking up an angry audience at a stadium.
I mean, they're going to leave once they can find the door.
yeah right now with all respect do you have a band do you have a band at this point me personally well i mean besides you personally are there other people do you have people to play instruments on a regular basis do you do that thing personally my band i'm just imagining you like like the guy in mary poppins where you got like symbols between your knees and a kick drum on my back with a couple of skin is cinnamon
In fact, I do have a band, and the thing about my band is that they're young, they're very talented.
Easy to push around.
No, no, no, no.
That's not it at all.
What the hell was that?
Shrimp salad.
Yeah.
Did you just let the air out of the pneumatic suspension of your desk chair or something?
I'm like Baron Harkonnen.
I do this kind of, I have open sores and I float and I can't actually make a hissing noise.
You know, John, I might have a fissure.
I'm going to write that down.
I wish I had a cough button.
I just coughed right in the microphone.
Well, he's getting mad about that cough button, isn't he?
He sure is.
Well, he's a... He says he's going to buy us cough.
I've never seen an actual cough button.
Should we mention this?
No, we shouldn't.
No, no, no.
It'll just be another of the inscrutable in-jokes that we have.
We have a friend of the show in a band who, wouldn't you say that he is, I don't want to say picky about sound, but he's a man with really good ears.
And he's, you know, you can hear it in the production, right?
Don't you think?
He's a legendary person.
He really is.
One of the greats.
One of my heroes.
I think one of the all-time greats, this listener, this podcast listener, definitely in the pantheon of all-time greats.
But he is offended by a great many things.
But one of those things is that I sometimes am phlegmy.
I'm a sniffer, and you're a hawker.
Yeah, you sniff, and I... I'm trying, sorry, do you notice how I'm not sniffing?
I'm trying, I'm consciously, I'm mindfully sitting here, and I'm trying not to sniff.
You hear how my nose is stuffed up, and I'm still not sniffing.
I approve of that.
I have a friend here in Seattle who thinks that his post-nasal drip is, like, such a medical condition that it excuses him from sitting at a white-tie dinner and going...
Yeah.
He is repulsive.
You got to take that person aside.
I want to hit him with a bat.
No, I've taken him aside a dozen times and he's like, I have a medical condition.
No, you're just a dick.
You just have snot in your nose and nobody ever taught you the basic tricks.
You know what you do?
You grab a Kleenex and you blow your nose like a gentleman.
You move on.
And you know what?
You leave the table.
This is one of the many things.
I would say there's at least a handful of things that must never be done at the table.
You must not speak on your phone at the table.
You should leave.
You should leave vision.
Do you remember when we step into the ante room?
Well, when we had our last fancy dinner and I needed to talk to my lady, I would need to make a phone call.
I left.
Do you remember?
I left.
I remember.
Do you remember that creepy couple?
Well, I didn't think they were that creepy.
Oh, everybody agreed.
I mean, they were pretty creepy.
They were super creepy, and she looked like Minnie Mouse, and he was real small.
Well, I mean, it's San Francisco.
Yeah.
People were asking me when we were down at... She had a broad feminist platform.
We just recently played in San Francisco, and people were saying to me, like, wow, that was a really weird crowd, like a really intensely weird group of people at that show.
Really?
And I said, it's San Francisco.
People, that's where weird people go.
Well, I mean, not to talk specifics here, but that would have to have been your first Jonathan Colton show, because that is easily the least weird audience I have ever seen at anything where Jonathan Colton is in the building.
Well, he is definitely moving away from weird.
He's taking a turn.
Yeah, but there's weird.
Are there people, John, in as much as you can say, are there people who come to the shows dressed up as nemeses?
We shouldn't talk about music.
I'm not sure I could look at someone and tell that they were dressed as a nemesis.
Maybe they'd be holding a tiny little iPhone.
Here's the thing.
But in any case.
Yes, mucus.
Well, first of all, you need to get up from the table if you're going to take a phone call.
In fact, you need to go stand out on the sidewalk or at least in the antechamber.
Do you have an opinion on using... You know I have an opinion on it.
I don't even know what you're talking about, but yes, I have an opinion.
Well, my friend Scott Simpson had a, had a toot about this.
Okay.
I mean, I'm not familiar with his work, but he had a toot about this a while back that affected me deeply.
And in the paraphrasing, he says something along the lines of, I will judge whether you are a bad person based on whether you use, you type on your phone at the table, something like that.
Hmm.
And I don't know.
I mean, that's a thing now that people do.
And I really I kind of let me put it this way.
Here's my here's my stand on this.
I try really hard to not do that until after the entree has arrived.
And then you get your phone out and start start taking pictures of it and tweeting it.
Oh, no.
Oh, you mean like my dessert with one bite out of it?
It's so nummy num.
Oblique.
This is, I think, a valid question.
You're coughing a lot, John.
Do you have a button over there that you can use?
John's going to get all pissed.
Anyway, our friend wants me to get a button.
I think he's going to send us two deluxe cough buttons.
Two cough buttons that we can push them to mute our feed so that we can clear our throats in safety without offending people's delicate ears with the sound of our head congestion.
I got the sense that he's real sensitive about the ping pong talk.
Does he want us to mute that as well?
Well, so he is a member of the generation that includes yours and mine, but is a little bit earlier.
He's a little older than us.
Not by much.
He looks a lot older.
Yeah.
Oh, no, he does not.
No, he's a very handsome man.
But anyway, he's a little bit older than us, and so I think he feels like he was really in the trenches more than we were in terms of sort of the latter part of the civil rights movement, latter part of the third-generation feminism, the real heart of it.
All that kind of 80s feeling that we are fighting to change the language and the thinking—
Maybe you want to get on the right team.
You want to get on the right team.
And I think he's just a little bit older than us.
And so although he can be ironic about those things, he also still feels like those battles are important and we need to be waging them kind of at all times.
We need to be vigilant over our language and vigilant over our thought.
And he's not, you and I are just a little bit more in the camp of, you know, people of other races should be sent back to their countries where they came from.
That would make a lot of them a lot happier.
It's a Marcus Garvey type situation.
Exactly.
Go back to Liberia and start a whole new nation.
Yeah, I mean, it's right in the name, freedom.
Freedom.
Liberia.
Liberia.
Lib, which is Latin for fun times.
You have to send women back to the moment with a Y in the name.
Well, I think just if women just kind of understood like they can't have it all.
No.
And part of not having it all.
I'm still not sure what it is.
Well, I'm about to describe it.
I'm about to define it.
You can't have it.
It's what it is.
And you should stop complaining.
Whatever it is.
You should stop complaining because you're shrill, high-pitched voices.
That's two.
Okay.
Daddy needs time to think in quiet.
He had that song, You and Your Ping-Pong Friends.
I don't know if you remember that.
I do.
I sent him some lyrics.
I saw that.
This is the best email thread I've had this week.
Because you used two of my three favorite, nobody should use that words.
So we opened for the Mekons.
We opened for Ween.
And the time we opened for Ween, because we weren't even on the totem pole.
We were like in the park.
You were local openers.
We were local openers.
That's right.
You got a hundred bucks for the show.
Maybe.
50 bucks.
Yeah.
I mean, sometimes you get, and you know, who cares?
Like we all had jobs.
It was just, it was an honor really, truly.
I mean, in retrospect, I mean, you know, I'm in my twenties and opening for these bands that are, you know, like.
Well, more importantly, now you're in your forties and you're still talking about it.
So that's why.
Well, like the, like the poster children, like, is that going to, I mean, that wouldn't have happened if I wasn't living in this cow town.
But anyway, you know, it's a dumb story.
It's a dumb story.
No, it's a dumb story.
Yeah, I gave them a present, which is creepy.
You shouldn't give people presents when they're on tour, because they've got to either pack it or throw it away.
They'll throw it away, sure, they're English, but I mean, that's... Well, now, this is an interesting thread that I just had not very long ago, which is that if someone gives you something when you're on tour, a fan gives you something, particularly something they made, either a food item or...
Or a piece of fan art.
Like a wicker chair.
Or a wicker chair or like something cast iron that they made in their forge.
If a fan gives you something on tour, you cannot throw it away.
Oh, okay.
It's probably bad luck.
I think it's extremely bad luck, and it's also bad faith.
And it's like, listen, a fan has made this for you.
There is something sacred about it.
But I was talking to sort of a crew, in a crew context, talking to a group of people which was made up of, some were musicians, but some were touring crew people.
Yeah.
And the crew people all agreed.
They all said, I mean, the solution to that is that if a fan has made something for you that spooks you, which happens, they bring something to the show and they're like, I made this for you.
And it's like, oh, that's a voodoo doll.
Is it your hair?
Or that's something that's not 100% cool.
Hey, wait a minute.
This has a microphone in it.
What you can do, and this was the crew speaking.
They were like, you gift it to a member of the crew.
And then the crew can do whatever they want.
Make a bong out of it.
Right.
So those items of fan material that you get where you're like, oh, oh, oh.
Like, I just got a bunch of cookies that all look like me, except they have big gingerbread penises on them.
And I don't want those.
I don't know why somebody would make them.
Where do you take the first bite?
I usually bite the head off, but that would be really super confusing.
I don't want to keep them, but I definitely don't want to just throw them away either.
That seems like a really bad... Is it perpendicular to the proper cookie plane?
Well, I'm not going to talk about them anymore, but if you give them to the crew, then what you have done is given a gift, which releases you from the bond.
And then the crew, of course, those people have no... They love free stuff.
They have no morals at all, most of all.
And then the penis cookies go away and everybody is fine.
You've distracted the crew for a while, which is not a bad idea.
You've given the crew something to think about and given them a present of some kind.
You can use their hands a little bit.
And if it shows up on eBay later, that's on them, that's not on you.
So, anyway, that's a little bit of rock and roll science there.
You cannot throw something away.
I don't want to make it awkward, John, but you are a...
You strike me as a very light packer, and in the sense that you literally wear the same thing every day.
And you have a very, I think, in my experience, you have a pretty, hey, have you tried that bag I gave you?
It's kind of lame, isn't it?
No, no, no, it's good.
I just, you didn't give me the strap.
No, we found the strap.
We haven't given it to you.
Next time you come, we'll send you the strap.
I'll tell you what, you throw me the cello, I throw you the strap.
Oh.
Is that a good deal?
Is that cello, was that cello thing?
Were you fronting about that, or are you going to send me a fucking cello?
Listen, the cello is worth more than the strap.
I don't think so.
You try and travel with the cello, and you're going to have to check that.
You would have to check this cello.
You ever pack a cello?
You would not be able to pack it, though, because it doesn't have a case.
It's just a free cello.
I consider you an extremely honest man, so I would never want to take you to anything like a task on this.
But you're telling me that you actually sometimes take stuff with you that people have given you that's non-perishable.
If somebody made you a Lil Jon out of hair, would you actually put that in your bag?
And then where would that go?
Do you take that home with you?
Are you being honest?
Well, yeah.
In fact, back when I had a tour van, we had a kind of... I mean, a lot of bands with tour vans, the dashboard ends up being kind of a shrine.
Where all your old backstage passes and little shit that fans have given you, it all gets, you know, Death Cab for Cutie used to have a box of peeps up there that had melted in the sun.
And so it was like a bunch of melted peeps.
Like a Tinkerbell poster.
A Tinkle Bell poster.
She did an entire tour sitting up on the dashboard of the van.
I always meant to ask you, was it rolled up the whole time?
It was rolled up.
Must have driven you nuts.
No, no.
Every time one of my bandmates would be like, what is this thing?
Can we get this off the dash?
I'd be like, get your hands off!
Don't touch it.
Don't look at it.
What is it?
It's not there.
What is it?
And I'm like, don't you matter what it is.
And I'll know if you looked at it.
This has happened with me and I got two angles on this.
There's the one angle of, oh my God, this is like the sweetest thing in the world that you've given me.
Like sometimes people are really sweet about like I go into a talk and somebody gives me like a present for my daughter or something like that.
And, you know, I feel...
If it was in town, I would absolutely bring it home.
But the problem is like if you've got to travel and like I'm already – I'm such a bad packer.
I really seriously like to quote Seinfeld.
I'm like Diana Ross.
I bring so much stuff I don't need.
It's already packed.
I'm late.
I'm hungover.
I understand.
But what I'm telling you is you cannot just – Never do it.
You cannot arbitrarily throw that stuff away.
You never consider just throwing it away in a garbage can they wouldn't say.
No, you have to give it as a gift to somebody.
You have to break the spell.
But yeah, people used to make incredible stuff for us.
I had a set of beads that said the long winters.
Oh, that's so sweet.
And do you put that somewhere in a collection at your home?
I do have them somewhere.
Remember the old penguin shirt that we had?
It was a little fat penguin in a circle that said the long winters under it.
Somebody made a stuffed penguin.
Oh.
That's so sweet.
Now, crafts.
I like crafts.
Very nice.
My friend, my friend, I think it was my friend Moxie.
She gave me like a felt finger puppet and the finger puppet had its own finger puppet.
And I love it.
See, that's a Robert Goldwasser thing right there.
She does things like that?
Well, that would be typical of her.
Hmm.
She's the best.
I should have had a cough button because I just made a little snort.
I think you did a with the follow-up.
I think you might have just done it.
I think you did the mucus double play.
Tinker the Evers.
Someone gives you a finger puppet.
Oh, and it was felt.
It was very little.
It was very little.
Okay, can I ask you just a couple quick questions about this?
And I don't mean this to turn into a lightning round.
Right.
Okay, so one that's easy to cross off is if it is food you like.
If it's food you like and it doesn't seem like there's anything weird in it, will you try it and maybe eat it?
This is the thing.
People give me food all the time.
Mm-hmm.
I have a couple of fans that I like very much who routinely give me food.
You cook cookies and cake and whatnot.
Yeah, that is really well-made stuff, and it's just delicious, and everybody loves it.
Do you anticipate it?
You come to town, you go, I'm going to get cookies and cake?
Absolutely.
In fact, we have a friend in San Francisco who always makes us black bottom brownies.
Black bottom cupcakes.
It's not ping pong, although she is an Asian person.
Oh, dear.
So you do with it what you will.
I'm doing it right now by saying nothing.
I'm going to give food a check.
But there are other times, like one time I was playing in Portland, and some Reed students, some students from Reed College, came and had a bunch of cupcakes.
Vegan.
And were like, we made you these cupcakes.
And I was like, Reed...
is the type of place where people would put LSD in cupcakes and give them to a band.
And no eggs.
I feel like, right, and no eggs, no animals were enslaved to make these LSD cupcakes.
This is made from wheatgrass and hash.
So I said to them from the stage, I was like, you don't have, there are no LSDs in these cupcakes, are they?
Oregon Cupcakes.
And they all were like, ha ha ha, no, no way, tee hee.
Oh, that's evil.
I'm giving these to the crew.
And I've never met a crew person that wouldn't eat a vegan LSD cupcake.
I think they would eat an SM-57.
A lot of them.
Okay.
So I'm going to check.
I'm going to check off food, food, comma.
Okay.
Food.
Now what I'm going to, can I, can I make it?
Oh boy.
I love it.
I love a cookie.
And that must be nice for you.
You know, I, I don't do this as much anymore.
Cause you always say no, but the one exception of the time you were desperately ill and I brought you some cold medicine.
In the past, I used to always ask, do you need anything?
You probably got the Adarios and picks, but like do you – is there anything I can bring you that would bring you comfort?
And you always say no because you're a gentleman.
But it must be – you'd want to have that comfort when you arrive somewhere.
And if you've got a cake waiting for you in a room, like you don't touch that alcohol.
I think I drank like five of your beers by the way.
You're welcome to them.
Yeah.
I think Scott and I pretty much cleaned out your hand, Jonathan.
You guys did good.
You made sure there was no brandy left.
You made sure there was no... I'm writing down Subway on a card here.
I mean, you know, the last time I saw you, we were standing on the street in front of a Subway and you were eating the last... In front of an open sewer.
In front of an open sewer and you were eating the last of four Subway sandwiches that you ordered.
Uh-huh.
And I went back.
You remember I went back for more?
No, you absolutely did.
You were like, hey, this party's really going.
I thought people were going to eat it.
And they're like, God, it stinks.
It smells like shit and piss on this sidewalk.
And you're like, I'm going for more sandwiches.
I thought you guys were going to have them with me.
So I'm standing there like a dope with this plastic bag full of crappy sandwiches at 2 in the morning.
Anyway, so if I can just – I want to make it a little – okay, so Subway, I can cross that off.
Thank you.
And I don't smoke, but thank you for tooting that.
Two more.
Okay, how about this?
So this is the one I have a problem with.
I struggle with this because everywhere you go, somebody's got a shirt.
And it's kind of – it's a super nice thing, but personally – But they give you a shirt.
Yeah.
Starting in – yeah, exactly.
Starting in 2006, I turned a corner because I used to be a rock and roll shirt guy.
Like I always wore a rock and roll shirt.
And I mean I had really, really, really good shirts.
Yeah, yeah.
I bet you did.
I might have had that Egypt – I don't remember.
Anyway.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, you know what?
You know what?
Have you seen that?
I had an iHeart Mekon shirt.
I totally did.
Yeah, yeah.
It had a bacon stain on it.
My pavement shirt, the cool one, the green one, it had a bacon stain on it.
I had a dump truck shirt.
Those were your bacon years.
Yeah, the bacon years.
I had a really cool dump truck shirt.
I had a really cool replacement shirt.
And you know what I said?
I said, this is it.
This is done.
This is silly.
At the time, I was like 50.
And I said, I got to get rid of these.
I got rid of the shirts.
Did you get rid of them?
I did.
Well, I took photos of a lot of them.
Like my Archer's a low shirt.
I knew I was going to miss that.
It was really nice, like long sleeve when they made nice shirts.
You got rid of it.
You didn't just put it in a box and put it in the attic.
The point is to stop putting things in boxes, John.
That was the point of our purge.
And I made a lot of tough decisions.
I got rid of some nice bags.
You know what a good solution to that is?
Quilts and pillows.
Yeah, quilts.
You're hip to this.
That doesn't seem creepy at all, to make a quilt out of your own shirts.
Rock and roll band shirt quilt.
Where do you put that, though?
You put it on your bed.
Like a gentleman.
You put it on your bed and you pull it up under your chin when you're cold in the winter.
You know what?
I wish I could go back.
The point is I turned a corner and I said, look...
I made white shirts that don't have yellow pits.
I need to buy new ones.
I need to have – I'm a man now.
I can't have all this stuff.
I got rid of them.
And the thing is when I did that and I made that difficult decision of getting rid of the dump truck shirt, which really was disgusting.
It was from like 1988 and it was totally gross.
And I was still wearing it, you know, and I got a family.
And so –
Excuse me.
God, I wish I had a belt button.
You were pretty gross pretty late into your 30s.
I don't think we're done with that trip yet.
I really don't.
I mean, if I can eat that many sandwiches in front of an open sewer with you, I got some things I need to think about.
Yeah, they were BMTs, too.
And meatball.
And meatball.
But you were getting extra monkey peppers on them or something?
You were like, give me a double BMT with extra monkey peppers.
I have a Subway system that if you were not so snarky, I would share with you.
Because Starbucks and Subway is all you can count on when you travel.
And I will give you advice that you will not take.
So I'm going to move on.
I bought a Subway sandwich at a Subway in Bellingham, Washington right before going into Canada.
Did it apologize?
It didn't because it was American.
But I had explosive poops.
Ha ha ha ha!
Two days afterwards.
Banana peppers.
Banana peppers, right?
Yeah, banana peppers.
And I said, I'm not going to eat there anymore.
And I didn't eat there for like eight years until standing on the street corner on market in San Francisco.
It's a totally sketchy neighborhood.
Yeah.
Standing in a sewer.
And you were the only guy in that entire group that could even conceivably handle being punched by somebody.
I was also the only guy that wasn't like swilling off of a brandy bottle on the sidewalk.
I have no recollection of any of that, John.
I don't think that happened.
It was a carpet.
So the point is like I love people and I love their companies and I love their website.
They're all good people.
But like I just – When they bring you a T-shirt that says – Getting a relatively inexpensive shirt with the logo of a company on it, here's the problem.
Now I got to carry that.
Oh, yeah.
You know what?
I feel like the exception to this is when somebody gives you swag from their company, you can put that immediately in the garbage.
Okay.
That is not fan art.
So if you get a cheap pen or a paperweight or like a bottle opener.
Garbage.
Garbage.
Okay.
All right.
Well, good.
You know what I'm saying?
Now, this does not put anything like a lie to your system.
If a fan has made something beautiful for you,
I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about... You're talking about some t-shirts?
Wait till I get to number three, because number three is going to be... I really want to hear your advice on number three.
But I feel like any kind of company swag... Like, here's something that's been happening to me recently that is really, really... That is really frying my gears.
I do not have enough oil.
I do not have enough machine oil in the world to keep my gears running smoothly.
And somebody comes up to me at a show and says, Hi, I make...
I make effects pedals or I make guitars and I would like to make a guitar for you.
And I go, wow, that's amazing.
Really?
And they're like, yes, I make guitars and I am a big fan of you and I want to make you a guitar.
And I go, wow.
Wow, I would love for you to make me a guitar.
And they go, great.
Can I have your email address?
I'll contact you and we'll talk about it.
And I'm like, that's fantastic.
Here's my email address.
And then the next day they send me an email that says, great, well, I'm going to start working on your guitar and let's talk about artist pricing.
Oh, come on.
And I'm like, artist pricing.
Here is what you said.
I'm going to make you a guitar.
That means you are going to make me a guitar and give it to me.
That does not mean that you are going to sell me a guitar.
That is not what let me make you a guitar means.
Yeah.
And that is, I think, a much more common thing now where people are like, I love you and I really want to make you something.
Great.
Get started.
Okay.
Here's my price list.
This goes straight into number three.
And if I could, at the risk of coining a neologism, that is not a gift.
That is a grift.
A grift.
That is a grift because it feels like a gift, but it's actually a little bit scroogey.
And so here's number three.
Okay, so you say yes, probably maybe to food.
That's a case-by-case basis.
Depends on a lot of factors.
You know what, you have to look into the eyes of someone who's giving you food.
Oh, you can see the pools of concern.
It's like the way the Israelis handle airport security.
They don't make every old lady take her shoes off.
They just stand out in front of the airport and they look everybody in the eye as they're walking in.
I'll bet you get good at that.
You get really good at it.
And the thing is, if you're going to blow up a plane and you're walking into an airport and some young army guy looks you in the eye, you give it all away.
I don't care how...
much of a sociopath you are, you give it all away.
You're not going to look some guy in the eye and be like, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo.
Right.
No bomb here.
Because the thing is, no eye contact, that can be sketchy.
Way too much eye contact you've been practicing.
That's right.
These guys are trained to pull you aside and say, you know whose shoes we're going to take off?
Your shoes.
And you know whose shoes we're not going to take off?
The little old lady who doesn't need... You know, we missed a fucking flight on this last tour because the TSA in goddamn Minneapolis...
seriously could not solve a simple Sudoku.
This TSA could not figure out how to get the other toilet paper roll in one of those double toilet paper roll systems in a public bathroom.
They could not figure out how to get that other toilet paper roll over when the first toilet paper roll runs out.
That's a terrible sign.
That's a terrible sign.
They are the stupidest TSA that I have ever seen, and they literally actually said to us when we complained, we're not in the customer service business.
True.
oh boy, wrong thing to say.
And I swear to God, it took everything in my power and the only reason I did not give a long lecture, the only reason I did not stand up on the conveyor belt and give a long lecture is because I knew I would be pulled down and put into a jail.
Would you be walking in place?
I would be walking in place until they turned it off.
I'd be standing there walking in place saying, people of America!
But I knew I would be put into a jail, and so I kept my mouth shut.
But you'd also inconvenience everybody, right?
You'd inconvenience everybody else on the tour because now they've got to bail you out.
I could not have been more inconvenienced than we were inconvenienced by this incompetent TSA who are fighting the last war.
But in any case, it was the only time in my whole life this has happened where I got to the gate, and they had closed the gate five minutes before because we spent an hour at TSA.
You didn't try a dive at all?
Oh, I mean, I told the woman at the gate, I was like, you know, my dad, my dad would have this, that plane back here.
And she was like, yeah, a lot of things have changed since the seventies.
And I was like, no, I'm serious.
If my dad was alive, you would open this.
You would be opening this for me.
That is the most flaccid satisfaction demand I've ever heard.
I could just see him going, you know what, Corduroy, go sit down.
Yeah.
No, they were, I mean, we were all laughing.
She was like, yeah, I mean, in the old days they would have brought it back and they probably would have given you guys free drinks.
No, but everything's, everything's changed.
Everything's changed and the plane is gone.
And she's like, she points out the window and she's like, see that?
The plane's still here.
It's still connected to the building.
I'm not going to open the door.
This door is shut and it is shut.
Ask me again.
Say all the things in the world you want to say, but this door could not be more shut.
There are none more shut.
You want to borrow the phone and call your dad?
And I was like, I was pacing back and forth.
I was thinking maybe I should go back to TSA and give that speech.
In any case, I should go back through.
My father shot a Japanese Zero out of the sky with a .45 he wasn't supposed to have.
Through the window of his goddamn airplane.
The plane was moving.
And you people, God, is it a training day?
Bits of Subway sandwich falling from your beard.
But this is the thing about taking food from people in Iraq.
You look at them in the eyes.
You give them Israeli eyes.
You look at them like a member of the Israeli airport commandos.
You give them Israeli eyes.
Thank you.
Thank you for that.
And you say, are you carrying a bomb?
Do your cupcakes have LSD?
And nine times out of ten, 99.99% of the time, you're going to get all you need to know through their eyes.
Well, this is probably covered in – first of all, this is a fantastic tip for like a million things.
But I'm guessing this is probably covered in your Special Forces book.
I think this is part of interrogation.
I think this is part of this phony baloney lie detector test.
I think the problem is you mix it up, right?
You ask them a question like, okay, look at me.
Are you at a long winter show right now?
Yes.
Yes.
Did you make your own clothes?
Yes.
Yes.
Is there LSD in my cupcakes?
Is there LSD in the cupcakes?
No.
No.
Is your mother's name Sally?
Right?
You got to mix it up and you keep them off guard.
It was a long time before you said no.
Exactly.
You took too long.
I'm not touching the cakes.
And I'll bet you that's what the Israeli guys do.
Here's the problem also with this nonsense you're talking about.
And, you know, I hate talking about travel except I hate it so much.
And the TSA thing, it's just the worst because first of all, a lot of these folks –
You know they're not actually like police officers, right?
You understand that they're basically like bank tellers with fake uniforms.
Are you asking me?
Because yes, I do know.
These people could not get jobs at a mall.
Not at all.
You're not saying just as security guards.
You're saying they couldn't be at the info booth, they couldn't be at the Orange Julius, they couldn't be at the Annie's Pretzels.
They couldn't be at the bead store.
Here's the problem.
Here's the thing.
This is the thing that pisses me off.
The Central Intelligence Agency
Will not hire you if you have smoked marijuana or said a bad thing on the internet about America or done anything other than be a total straight arrow all the way through school and go to Yale and be like a complete ramrod up your rectum.
Mm-hmm.
That's the only way you're going to get a job.
That makes sense merely on the surface.
Only on the surface does it make sense.
It makes so much less sense in the day-to-day affairs of a CIA agent.
That is such a terrible idea.
Correct.
That might be good for a minister.
That's terrible for somebody who has to think like one of the folks they're trying to defeat.
If you are in the field...
There is probably no better CIA agent than a guy who smoked a bunch of weed and has periodically trafficked in rare tortoises and was maybe a white slave trader for a while.
These are the guys.
But he quit.
He quit.
He quit because his love of America compelled him to go to work.
I like the idea that he's still a little bit of a wild card.
I'm in no position to run the CIA, and I don't want to pander.
But if it were me and I were looking at some resumes or not resumes, maybe I'm looking at something that's been written on a garbage can lid that ends up being much more effective.
This person says, you know what?
I used to have a crippling problem with alcohol and drugs.
I have made a lot of people's life hell, and I'm not afraid to blow something up if I'm in the right mood.
You know what you do?
I say fill out some forms.
Fill out some forms.
You don't exist.
We will disavow knowledge of you, but we need you, garbage boy.
How many people have you killed with scissors?
That is a question that I think should be on this.
Well, you know, here's the thing.
It's like David Allen says, right?
The worst time to train for getting jumped in an alley is when you're getting jumped in an alley.
If you've killed a lot of people with scissors, you get the confidence to start killing people with children's scissors.
Once you kill people with children's scissors, you move to... Safety scissors.
Yeah, precisely, precisely.
Left-handed safety scissors.
Oh, those are hard.
The paper gets all screwed up.
And then how about this?
You move to mechanical pencils and then you move to your fucking pinky.
Pinky in the eyeball.
No fear.
Fuck mechanical pencils.
You don't like them at all?
No.
I have these ones I really like a lot.
They're called Golden Bears.
They're really nice.
But there's that part of you that's like Japanese.
No, there's that part of you.
That's your problem.
I'm so not Japanese.
You're Japanese.
There's a little bit of you that's Japanese.
Your problem is you are deeply French in a way that you have never accepted.
That's not true at all.
Third problem.
The only part of me that's French is that when I invade France, I get a little bit of it on me.
And you give it some tongue.
I do.
Third level grift.
What's the third level of grift?
Okay, and I have a frenemy who does this.
Is he your nemesis?
No, he doesn't deserve to be my nemesis.
I have not yet met the person who deserves to be my nemesis.
The problem is being a nemesis, oh, you kidding me?
Being a nemesis must be earned.
I'm trying to think of what an evil Merlin man would look like.
I guess pretty much like me with glasses.
You wear glasses sometimes.
No, my sister-in-law threw them away.
Those beautiful, beautiful glasses you gave me.
I never told you about this?
I'm trying to blot it out, John.
You should see the shit I'm wearing now.
It's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous.
It's not some Warby Parker horse crap, is it?
Here's the thing.
The guy who gives you the gift of his chapbook.
What's a chapbook?
It's a self-published book of his poems or essays.
Oh.
Happy fucking birthday.
Ha ha ha ha ha.
Okay.
So I know a guy and this is, this is my hand, my hand, my hand to God.
He came to, to an event.
It might've been like a housewarming.
It was the flimsiest, it was the flimsiest grift I've ever seen.
Cause he shows up and, uh, if I just, to, to define this friend of me in one word, it would be squeak.
So he squeezed his way over and he hands me a hastily wrapped gift and goes, I hope you enjoy this.
And it's a signed copy of his perfect bound, like at Kinko's book of things that he's written.
Aww.
There's a lot of white space, and, of course, it's a little bit – the typefaces are a little off the skew because he basically Xeroxed it.
Oh, my God.
Thank you so much.
This is so nice.
And, of course, just to be clear here, he also, in his large coat, brought three or four extra copies in case anybody wanted to buy one.
Oh, that's thoughtful.
This is only $10 for you.
Right.
Okay, so let me ask you this.
He gave you that copy signed for free because he's a fan.
I mean, what do you say?
I mean, a man like you –
You enjoy a present, right?
It sounds to me like you're very gracious about receiving a present.
You know, a true gift.
Right.
But in that instance, the reason I ask you here for the third level grift, you're at a show, you got stuff, you're already carrying, you got a wicker basket, you got some psychedelic cupcakes, you might have a hair doll that looks like you, you got some penis cookies, and then some squee guy comes backstage and hands you the gift of his chapbook, signed or not signed, do you keep it?
Put differently, I'm sorry, I don't want to be binary.
What do you do with the chapbook?
What do you say to Squee Boy?
Well, this falls, I think, into the same category, and I hate to be revealing too much, but the same category of the person who comes and gives you their CD.
And I know, I absolutely know on the other side of the line what that feels like.
Like, God, I made this record.
I really, really, really want
John Roderick to hear it or I really want Merlin Mann to read my book because I really really admire him and I made this thing and I'm very proud of it and I really want to give it that's such a different thing from acting like it's a present for your birthday well don't you think I think the intentionality is important I know you're not a Buddhist but I think that's very important
In the end, it's a kind of... To give a CD to a guy at the merch table and to give you a hastily wrapped present of his book of poems at your birthday party, I don't think is different.
Because the CD and the book are going to end up in the same place, which is...
like basically left in the dressing room when the band, I have a solution to this.
That is extremely simple and extremely candid and extremely good for everybody.
And may I share it with you?
Yes, please do.
You know what?
I am so over packed right now.
There's no way that I could pack this.
Could you do me a favor?
I'm going to give you my email address.
Please send me a link to an MP3 of your favorite song you've done.
Oh,
That's not a bad idea.
The CD is the problem.
Do you listen to that link?
Yeah, probably.
But then the problem is you get yourself... Here's the other thing.
So with the book part, and I would never say this to Birthday Boy, but if somebody says...
And I do this with lots of stuff because people – I mean, you know, whatever.
I'm grateful that people are – I'm really grateful that people are interested in me knowing about what they do.
And a lot of times I end up loving it and following their work.
But here's what I do.
And somebody goes, check out my blog.
And to me, that's like going absorb my oeuvre.
So what I always say is, could you do me a favor?
And this goes for people who suggest a comic book.
It goes for people who like some kind of a comedian.
I'll say, could you do me a favor and email me your favorite thing you've ever written?
So I know you want me to watch this whole five-hour special by Sloppy Joe Reese or whatever, but could you send me a YouTube video of your favorite bit?
And the thing is, here's the thing.
And this goes straight to the stuff that I care a lot about with the things that aren't this show, which is that if you want me to actually do that, do you really imagine that I'm going to treasure this chapbook?
No, that's totally lame.
That's all about you.
If you really want me to enjoy this, why don't you send me something that's an easy inroad to loving you?
Rather than foisting that on me and then making me feel bad that like now I have to pack a CD.
I mean, how many CDs can you pack?
I really like that idea.
And it's honest.
I will read that.
I will actually read that and I will actually listen to that honestly.
If you give me a CD, oh, can you give me a CD player too?
I'll just pop that in my bag.
I'll put it in here with my reel-to-reel of Kraftwerk covers that somebody gave me.
People have been asking me for now decades how I discover new music.
And
I discover new music the way anybody does.
I either am at a show and I see a band that surprises me, or somebody that I like or trust says, you should listen to this.
And I have never discovered new music because somebody that I didn't know came up to me at my own merch table and handed me a CD.
And I agree with you.
Just to be clear, I don't want to sound like a dick here.
I totally get why you would do that.
I have done that.
I have foisted my music on you.
I've foisted stuff on a lot of people.
I know why you would do it too, but it doesn't work.
But this idea of saying, send me one thing that you are the proudest of.
Mm-hmm.
is it does it absolutely that i think that is a workable solution really man and i think that we should all as a group of people as a community of like-minded individuals we should all adopt that policy here forthwith send me your best thing send me one thing your best thing do not make it a five your best thing cannot be a 5 000 word document
yeah it is it should be a thing that i can digest in three minutes and if it is great then that include where i can find you know where i can follow up but one thing one thing yeah that's a that's not that's not a bad idea if it's a hair doll you know just give them your home address
If it's a hair doll... They can mail it to you.
Or deliver it.
Deliver it to your house.
No, no, no.
If somebody's going to give you a doll made of hair... Here's the thing.
Here's the thing about a doll made of hair.
If they are going to bring you a doll of hair that they've collected from your hair over the years... Look, clippings or tears.
Make room in your suitcase.
Get that thing... God damn it, John.
I wish I could believe this.
I don't believe this.
I think next time I see you... You know what?
I was about to say I want to search your bag, but that's about the last thing in the world that I want to do.
Okay.
All right.
Fine.
And so if I come to your home, and I will be coming to your home soon for the thing we're doing, which we should talk about on the show when it's time.
All right.
You're telling me I will find hair dolls and penis cakes at your house?
I'm looking around the room where I sit.
You got hats.
You got banjos.
You got a lot of old military uniforms.
Handguns.
Night goggles.
Globes.
So many globes.
Oh, you got globes?
I totally want to get my daughter a globe.
I got a globe for her.
If you don't send the cello, could I get one of your less costly globes?
You think the globes are less costly, but in fact, all my globes are vintage globes.
But I have one for your daughter.
Are all globes vintage at this point?
Are there globiers anymore?
Do people make globes?
People do make globes, but new globes are gross unless you spend a lot of money.
And they've got all those new borders that just don't fucking make any sense anymore.
All these namby-pamby new borders we've got.
I would like a pre-World War I with all the offensive names.
I would love it.
You know, I'm torn on this because you've got your different projections.
Do you have a strong feeling about projections?
Yeah.
Do I have a strong feeling about projections is your question.
Do you mind a Mercator projection?
That is your question.
Do I have a strong feeling about projections?
Can I have just one opportunity to reframe the question for you?
Go ahead.
First of all, I could apologize.
I hope you're satisfied with my apology.
I'm taking it under advisement.
Would you mind sharing with me your preference in globe projections?
Maps, too.
Maps.
I mean, you've got a wall map.
First of all, you are talking about maps because globes do not have different projections.
Now, is that true?
Are they always globular?
Well, yes.
The problem with a projection is that... There's got to be distortion.
Well, you're trying to put a round thing onto a flat surface, right?
That is the problem with a projection.
You're trying to make the Earth be a flat piece.
But isn't that accurate?
That no matter what... You're basically choosing which kind of distortion you can live with.
Right.
And the thing about a globe is that... I mean, there are globes that are like...
less geographically accurate.
That's not true of globes at all?
But it's not a problem of projection.
So Antarctica is always the same size on a globe, like mile for mile?
Yes.
I mean, if it's a geographically accurate globe, but it isn't like, oh, Antarctica has been made to look bigger in order to make North America look bigger.
That's racist.
Yeah, that is racist.
But there are...
You know, there are a lot of projections that I hate.
Could you think of one that particularly sticks in your craw?
Well, the most common one, the Mercator projection.
You don't like the Mercator.
Could you give me just a couple bullets?
I know a lot of people have a problem with the Mercator projection.
I don't know much about it.
This is the one where it splits it into, like, it looks a little bit like somebody took out, like, made an orange with, like, four pieces, right?
You know what I mean?
Like a shape of an orange slice.
It kind of looks like that.
No, the Mercator projection is the one where they have not made an orange slice.
Oh, they don't even bother with the orange slice.
It's just a big flat thing where Greenland is bigger than South America.
That is the Mercator projection.
That's the one where Alaska looks like a huge face on the top of this tiny shrinking little North America.
Is that an inaccurate face?
Alaska does look like a face, but Alaska should have its nice little area.
I mean, I like an Eckert projection.
I mean, if you're going to have it on a flat thing and not have it all exploded like an orange peel.
Mm-hmm.
I like those projections where the Earth is upside down.
I was going to ask you, do you have any of those?
Because I think that gets your mind thinking a little differently when you see the upside down.
Well, you can approximate it by taking a map and turning it upside down.
Okay, so you literally, hmm, okay.
And you can do that with any map?
You can turn any map upside down.
You sure about that?
I'm going to say right now, I'm going to go on record and say any map you can turn upside down.
Could you get it on something like a, what would that be, like a Lazy Susan?
No offense.
I like her a lot.
I like her a lot.
I don't know if she's lazy.
She's a nice girl.
Yeah, she's terrific.
She's a little lazy.
You think she's lazy?
I don't understand her Twitter.
Do you understand her Twitter?
I don't.
In fact, I don't follow it.
Can you believe that?
Bad.
It's bad, but I don't.
Not at all.
Do you look in sometimes?
Yeah, I peek in.
Okay.
You know what?
I can't get into it.
But if you had a lazy Susan on your wall, a vertical lazy Susan, it seems to me that way you get the best of both worlds, so to speak.
You get the upside-down world of a new view of the Earth, and then you can always flip it around to make sure you're reading Romania correctly.
Can you read upside-down?
I can.
You can post a map on a ceiling above your bed and then flip it around so that your feet are on your pillow and your head is at the foot of the bed and now you're looking at it.
And then all you're doing is sleeping a little different.
That's pretty good.
Well, it works except I like a little space between the mattress and the footboard.
And if you flip it around, then that's where your pillows are going to fall.
You've got to move your Shannon Tweed centerfold.
Did you ever put porno on the ceiling?
No.
That's not my style either.
No.
I did not ever have a picture of a girl in a bikini lounging on the hood of a Lamborghini.
You never said she had a bikini.
You know, the one porno-y thing I ever hung on my wall...
was in the very early days.
Tinkerbell notwithstanding.
Tinkerbell notwithstanding.
And actually, I do have a picture of a naked girl on my wall right now, but she is burnt.
It's a Playboy poster that has been shellacked to a piece of wood, and then the edges of the wood have been burned.
Is it shiny?
It's very shiny, and she's standing in a wheat field, and she's taking off her shirt.
And she's wearing white.
That's got to somehow hook up with somebody's, like three of somebody's very special things.
It's an amazing piece, and it's almost life-size.
This girl is... And it's practical.
This girl is four feet tall.
All you need is a squeegee in a couple seconds, and you're good to go.
Well, I could also put legs on it and make it a coffee drink.
Okay.
Is that good?
Please stop there.