Ep. 42: "Your Hands Would Be Your Passport"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Merlin.
I still like yours better.
I haven't heard that in a while.
Oh, well, I'm with John Roderick and he's on the line.
That's pretty good.
Although I'm not sure like what the shit splat sounds.
Baby, baby, where did my John go?
john roderick and well you know people love is is uh new wave parodies with fart jokes i think the guy josh recently signed them i'm gonna stop saying that now oh my god i you know josh it's one of those jokes that nobody gets but us and once we're dead there will be no one left i can think of at least one and possibly two of our supposed listeners who i think will get they may not think it's funny but i think they'll get it you're right you're right i can think of at least one who will get it and think it's funny
I used to laugh at his band name.
I know.
It's not a Monty Python joke.
Who's the music guy from the Ruttles?
What's his name?
You know who I mean.
Neil Ennis.
Neil Ennis.
It's a Neil Ennis band joke, right?
Neil Ennis band joke.
Boy, that is deep catalog.
You know what's better?
A lot of people think.
Let's be honest.
A lot of people don't think, though.
You know what?
Let's circle back to that.
A lot of people think a Monty Python joke is pretty nerdy.
But I think a Neil Ennis joke is sublime.
It's very deep.
Did you like the Ruttles?
Did you ever see that Ruttles movie?
Here was the thing with the Ruttles.
I don't know about you, but in the late 70s, I got a lot of my early music from the $1 LP rack at the drugstore.
And my mom would go to the drugstore because she needed to buy some...
rubbing alcohol and some band-aids.
And, you know, the drugstore was always a thing as a kid where, I mean, even now as an adult, I walk into the drugstore and I'm like, what are all these aisles?
What are all these things?
Are they splints?
Are people buying like face masks and stuff here?
Why does the drugstore need so many aisles?
I know you go to the drugstore all the time.
Maybe you can help me with this.
Twice a day.
So I would go to the drugstore and there was a big selection of dollar LPs.
And that's where I got Frank Zappa's orchestral record as recorded by the London Philharmonic.
And that's where I got Neil Young and Crazy Horse's Reactor, a record I still listen to.
That sat quite comfortably next to the Gene Simmons solo record for about 42 years.
That's right.
99 cents.
You were never in your life, never more than a quarter mile away from a cutout copy of Reactor.
Yeah, Reactor's still out there.
That's where I got Terrapin Station by the Grateful Dead.
I think Machine Head by Deep Purple I found one time in the 99 cent rack.
So while all of my friends were buying Foreigner 4 and Billy Squire's Emotions in Motion, I was listening to Machine Head and Reactor and wondering why I was out of step with my peers.
But one of the records that I bought on the 99-cent rack at the Bartels Drugs was the Rutles album.
which I thought from the, you know, a lot of these things I just bought because of the cover.
I'd walk in and go, that looks good.
Well, it's not like you walk in there with a copy of Trouser Press.
You're going to take some chances, and it's only a buck.
It's not $8.69.
Exactly.
So I bought the Ruttles record, and I mean, I was at the beginning of what became a Lifetime Beatles obsession,
And, and, and, but you know what it was?
I discovered the Ruddles before I discovered Monty Python.
Ooh, wow.
That's weird.
I know.
So the Ruddles were, the Ruddles were the gateway to Monty Python rather than the other way around.
And so I definitely struggled at first to understand all the nuances.
And was it before you were really into the Beatles?
Yeah.
I was getting into the Beatles.
So a lot of it must have seemed a little nuanced.
It was.
Well, you know, because until I was 10 years old, my understanding of music was that Count Basie was a contemporary artist.
I can't do your dad.
April in Paris.
The only pop records that we had were eight-track tapes, and they were Jackson 5's Greatest Hits, and Studio 54, the disco compilation.
and um simon and garfunkel's bridge over troubled water and the beatles revolver those were the four pop eight track tapes we had uh so until i was 10 like that was the only exposure i had to music that was not being played on a clarinet oh my god that's brutal did you feel relieved well i had all that stuff memorized clarinets in excess can be rough
Tell you what.
But it was when I was in fifth or sixth grade and started to meet those kids that feathered their hair with a giant plastic comb that they carried in their back pocket that stuck like six inches up above their pants.
When I started to meet those kids that were a little bit rougher...
And they turned me on to the radio, basically.
They said, you don't listen to the radio?
You know, that was the heyday of album-oriented rock.
And so they said, you know, you need to listen to what was at the time in Anchorage 102.5, the...
the rock station and the first this kid was over at my house and he's like i had my i had my radio i did i did have a clock radio but it was set to the station i think maybe my mom found a radio station when she put the the clock in my room and it was just always on there i didn't i guess i didn't i was not one of those kids that looked at a radio and thought turn the knobs i was a kid that looked at the radio and went hmm
Nobs.
And you just listened to whatever came on?
Well, so she tuned it to the radio station that played like Seals and Crofts.
And that was that era of like, what, Asia?
Maybe a little bit pre-Asia.
but what was that how would you describe that music like talking about like yacht rock sort of like super soft rock yeah diamond girl or christopher cross christopher cross there was a period where there was a lot of very gentle uh so gentle so gentle it was like it was like petting a rabbit's vagina
Now that you've mentioned it, that sounds really oddly appealing.
You know what I mean?
I would find that so comforting.
Rabbit and you're just like pet.
It's good for the rabbit too.
The rabbit's happy, you're happy.
And then this friend came over, he was wearing his baseball hat on backwards before that was even a thing.
And he had a giant comb in his back pocket and feathered hair and a puka shell necklace.
And he was like, why are you listening to this crap?
And he tuned, he just went zip, zip, zip, tuned the radio.
And the first tune that came on,
I am the walrus.
Oh, man.
On the radio.
On the radio.
And I was like, what is this insane music?
And he said, are you kidding me?
It's the Beatles.
I thought that... First time I heard that, I thought it was so scary.
It was totally terrifying, particularly since I thought I understood the Beatles.
I'd been listening to Revolver.
I got... That was one of my favorite...
Records right up there with, you know, Count Basie's Jumpin' at the Woodside.
And this music comes on, this insane music.
And I just stared at the radio, like, uncomprehending.
And completely, it just transformed me in a moment, you know?
Just as it would have done to somebody 10 years earlier in 1968.
This was 1978, and I was, like...
mind blown instantly blown so did it make you did it make you curious for more well yeah then i immediately went and uh you could you could talk about you're talking about the blue album you could get the blue album and the red album uh also at the drugstore those were 5.99 those were not one dollar records that was that was a pricier but there was a double album
And I bought them immediately.
And then that was basically all I listened to until, you know.
My first two Beatles albums, which, you know, I knew my cousins were five and ten years older than me.
And so they're really into the Beatles and into Yes.
Did they ever touch you inappropriately?
Not to my mind.
It was all appropriate as far as I was concerned.
Oh, I see.
Good, good.
So that's how it is in your family.
Yeah.
So that's how it is in there.
That was a Ferris Bueller?
That's a little Ferris Bueller reference for some of the young people out there.
Do you remember her knees?
The female lead.
Sloane Peterson.
Yes.
You remember her knees?
She had really cute knees.
I have to say that we may have discussed Susanna Hoffs earlier in an episode.
We tried to be gentlemen about it.
But I always felt like Sloane...
She just wasn't my type.
She was too skinny.
Oh, my God.
She was my type because she was unattainable.
She's very cute, I have to admit.
She's in my Diane Court pile, for sure.
A little bit like the girl from the Wonder Years.
Oh, Winnie?
Winnie.
You know, she has math things now.
She teaches kids math.
Sexy, sexy math.
She has math things?
Try Googling Winnie sexy math.
I will.
Not only am I going to try Googling it, I'm going to put it in my menu bar.
I'm going to put it in my special place.
My cousins had been real into the Beatles.
I don't know if you remember this.
Were they Floridians?
No.
They were Ohioans.
No one in Florida listens to the Beatles.
Right, right, right.
But it used to be back in the day.
So my cousin, my eldest cousin, who's 10 years older than me, had an original copy of the White Album with the serial number and everything.
And he had the four photographs of them, iconic photographs on his door.
So, you know, I've been around the White Album.
Paul looks like a milk cow.
Well, I think that's maybe one of the classic John Lennon pictures.
I mean, John Lennon looks so John Lennon in that picture.
It is, but you know, I hate that look on John.
Oh, you don't like it when he's got the long hair?
I'm a Sgt.
Pepper John guy.
Everything from Rubber Soul to Sgt.
Pepper, I think he looks amazing.
And then he started growing his hair long and he just looks like a big dog.
Well, you look at those photographs when they were recording Rubber Soul and especially Revolver and Paul had the glasses.
Nobody has, man, they are up there.
Like Chet Baker, Buddy Holly, like they're up there in the, wow, you guys look so cool and you have no idea.
You have no idea how cool you look.
Well, and this was the thing about the 50s and the 60s.
Can I come back to my records when we're done?
Yes, you can.
Please go ahead.
It's very unusual that you are the one who wants to return to a story.
There's a story I've tried to tell three times, and we're finally going to get it out today one way or another.
I'm going to get a 3x5 card here.
I'm going to write it down.
We're going to circle back to that, and if it's bad, I'll cut it out.
In any case.
In the 50s and 60s, they changed car designs every year.
They changed the fashion, like men's and women's clothing fashion.
Even designers had a slide rule in their pocket.
Every year, and for a period of 20 years, every year they designed a brand new car and brand new clothes and brand new everything for a year.
And that's some of the best design in history, some of the best American industrial design, every one of those years.
Now, the Chrysler Sebring has been in production since 1989, and all they do is change the air freshener and the...
They don't even change the font.
You take cars from 52, 56, and 59, and I'll bet you could eyeball within a year what year that came out.
What about you take 92, 96, and 99?
Forget it.
No, I mean, they all look like Tylenol.
In 1985, if you had a 15-year-old car from 1970...
Right.
Now think about that.
Say you had an LTD.
It was really hard to tell, or a Continental.
It was hard to tell how old that was.
Because, I mean, Buicks and Olds, all those kinds of cars, like my mom had an early 80s car that looked pretty much like a smaller version of a car from 1973.
Well, yeah, that started happening in the mid-70s.
But, I mean, a guy like me, I can tell you the model year of every American car from 85 to 1920.
Can you do a 64 versus 65 Mustang?
Absolutely.
I can see it from across the street.
Contrast the grille.
Because the little details.
You get the hexagon versus the rectangular grille.
I had a friend with a 64.5 Mustang with pony interior.
The horses run across the seat, John.
That's very nice.
I argued with a Danish guy one time about the headlight surrounds on a 65 Cadillac Seville versus a 66 Cadillac.
Can I guess that this was a man?
It was.
A Dane.
A Dane.
That's very similar to when you start a story by saying, I was at the model train store.
You don't have to specify that you were talking to a man.
I was at the Dungeon Dice warehouse.
I was at the model train store and just talking to somebody.
Oh, was it a guy?
I was at a Steely Dan meetup.
but anyway yes there's gas in the car it's it's 2012 right now could you i mean legitimately if you saw a car from 1997 would you be able to even place it within 10 years of when it was built no and i think it started i think there's always a five-year what the fuck period around most cars and i remember this starting do you remember when the fucked up thunderbirds came out about 83 84 85 and they seriously it was like an advil
Interesting that you call them the fucked up Thunderbirds because... I hated them.
There were so many people who thought that was... I mean, the Thunderbird was the first pregnant porpoise.
It was the moment when the cars in America went from being a shoebox on top of a shoebox...
to being like a beluga whale humping a tic-tac.
The Nissan's and the Toyotas started the back.
There's one car in our neighborhood.
It looked like an ATM machine or a night deposit.
Or a doorstop, something you would kick.
Precisely, a Japanese doorstop.
Oh, you had to get ping pong.
I had to go ping pong for just a minute.
It's a big surprise.
They're very surprising people.
But then think about the way the music and the culture changed between 1960 and 1970.
And think about how the music and culture has not changed between 2002 and 2012.
Yeah.
No, it's staggering.
I mean, this is such a cliche, but it still goes through my head all the time.
If you take the whatever major label period of the Beatles, it's 1963 to 1970, which is like 2005 till now.
Right.
Which is basically the amount of time it's been since I last recorded an album.
It was a good record.
My entire, the entire Beatles career could be fit into the time between the last.
From Please Please Me to Let It Be.
Well, technically to Abbey Road's technically later, right?
It was, it was, it was, didn't they record Let It Be first?
They did, but they were done by itself.
I think it's not canonical.
I don't count Let It Be.
You don't count Let It Be.
Put it on a card.
Put a bird on it.
I was driving on the road the other day listening to the radio.
Really?
Did you lose a bet?
I thought you didn't do that.
I don't know.
I'll do it sometimes.
And a tune from Let It Be Naked came out.
Oh, so much better.
Well, better except...
Except it's basically Star Wars... Without the soundtrack.
It's basically hand shooting second.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, can we save this?
This is a big show.
You know what?
We're going to do the Paul McCartney show.
I will give you one track from that record that is surprisingly, astoundingly better.
You know the song.
I bet there's one song on there that nobody...
in the band was madder about then especially paul then one particular song because it's so fucking over the top but if you go back you know that's not long and winding road which i love the phil speck i love the phil speck it's come now if you go back and listen to the original um it's like listening to paul play yesterday or something if i'd heard that one first sure i would go oh my god like you think about yesterday and the fact that it's so unadorned is is so perfect but you know now when i go back i'm in my head i'm going bump
Absolutely.
You're like... I'm adding strings in my head.
I've got Carole Kay on bass.
To not have that in there is like, yeah, okay, play me your fucking demos.
Yeah, okay.
But to your point – okay, so there was a thing.
I think it came on – I think it came with the stupid 90s whatever when they put out the – here's everything else we had that you stopped pirating.
Buy this.
But there was like a little –
Maybe it was on the PBS thing, but there were these little featurettes.
They were kind of annoying, but there were little motion graphic featurettes for each record.
They were like 10 minutes long.
And I could watch the one for Revolver over and over just because Paul looks so fucking cool.
And just because – you've never heard the – I think I sent you this.
You've heard the two alternate takes.
Well, there's one – an alternate take of Anya Berg can sing with and without –
Background vocals.
Have you ever heard it?
Yeah, you sent it to me.
It's really different, but you can hear – there's one take when they're trying to add harmonies to it, and they're so high.
And all they do, they cackle with laughter.
John and Paul cackle with laughter through the entire take completely freely.
And I swear to God, I get sad.
I get happy and sad every time I listen to it because I get happy because it's so awesome to hear these guys having fun.
And it's so sad because you realize –
There were maybe three more times that they were in a room together and didn't want to fucking kill each other.
John was so unhappy.
Yeah.
But to hear them high and laughing recording one of my all-time favorite songs, I just think that song's astounding.
It's great.
And frankly, I have a videotape of me in 19... What would it be?
1989.
Trapped in a bathroom at my drug dealer's house with another friend and his cockatiel.
Ha ha!
Did it try to make out with you?
No, no, this was a different bird entirely.
Let me understand.
It's 1989, and you're trapped in a bathroom with a cockatiel?
Well, not strapped.
Trapped, trapped, trapped.
You can't get out.
The bird's just as stuck as you are.
Oh, it wasn't that I was trapped, but rather that I had trapped the bird in the bathroom.
We were, we were, we were there and he was, he was, it was one of those, it was like right after the harvest and the whole, every flat surface in the house was covered with marijuana.
They were sorting it and clipping it and drying it and doing it all the stuff that you do when you have a big harvest of marijuana.
And we were there and we were so incredibly stoned.
Yeah.
That at a certain point – and of course he's a drug dealer, right?
So he has birds and snakes.
Yeah, you got to have a weird pet.
With drug dealers, you got to have a snake or a pot-bellied pig.
Or a tarantula or something like that.
And he had a cockatiel.
And the bird was just flying freely through the house.
I call him Bob Gnarly.
he was a great bird but at a certain point I'm very stoned and I start trying to I want to get the bird and so I'm walking around the house and the bird's kind of staying away from me like hopping from the lamp to the table and I'm like I gotta get the bird is he clipped well no
So at a certain point, I'm like, I'm going to get this bird.
And the bird figures out that it's not going to be enough to just go from lamp to lamp, and he starts to fly.
And then he's flying around this apartment, and I'm running after him, like falling over the couches.
And my friend joins the chase, and the bird goes in the bathroom and perches on the shower curtain rod.
And I go in there, and my friend goes in there, and my friend has his video camera on.
And I shut the door because I'm trying to keep the bird.
I want to get the bird.
Not to do anything bad to it.
I just want to pet the bird.
I just want to see the bird.
And we're in the bathroom and the bird is like, oh, shit.
I did the wrong thing coming in here.
And I'm trapped in this bathroom.
And I'm trying to get it.
And he starts flying around this bathroom, which is, you know, eight by eight.
And I'm falling into the tub and I grab the shower curtain and pull the rod and the curtain down on top of myself.
And the shower goes on and the bird is flying in circles, squawking.
And we're all...
None of us can breathe me, the friend, or the bird because we're all so high.
It's the funniest thing that ever happened.
And the fact that I have that videotape, not a thing I would ever show to anyone in the world.
I can't even believe I'm describing it.
But I never have to smoke pot again.
Because I have that moment recorded.
That is as high as you ever need to be.
And if I ever feel like I need to get high or feel like I want to feel what it's like to be high, I'll just watch that.
Oh, that's right.
Am I to infer here that you serenaded the bird with a Paul McCartney song?
No, I think at that point it was everyone.
But you didn't do Anya Birkinson to the bird?
No, everyone at that party was on a strict Led Zeppelin diet at that point.
The bird included.
So no, I think the Battle of Evermore was probably playing really loud.
And eventually somebody opened the door and the bird got out and I was in the bathtub covered with shower curtain and water.
Thought it was the greatest moment of my life.
It might have been.
It might have been.
I might have peaked right then and the rest has just been an arduous slog.
A long slog and a brown Advil.
A long and winding slog.
Anyway, what I want to talk about right now is your cousin's
you
It's okay.
Talking about the Beatles.
I was just, all I was going to say was, and now it's, it's, it's, it's, it's less impactful as we used to say, but, um, well, no, I, I, uh, you know, whenever I would go to the mall, uh, like my mom and I would go to the mall cause I didn't have a car or anything.
Right.
As you do, I was, but I was 13, 14, 15, 16.
You go to the mall.
Oh, wait a minute.
16, 17, 18, 20, 35.
Still going to the mall with your mom.
Yeah.
We like to get Chick-fil-A together.
Would she buy you some kettle corn?
They didn't have kettle corn then.
Would she buy you a... Orange Julius.
Try Orange Julius.
Like a feather rudge clip earring?
No, I'd say to my mom, can I borrow $5?
Of course, I would never pay it back.
Can I borrow... Because whenever you take money from your parents, you always ask if you can borrow it.
Right.
No one's ever paid their parents back anything ever.
I once asked my dad if I could borrow some money to buy a van.
It was like... He said, borrow...
I was like, yeah, borrow.
You've never borrowed anything.
I was like, you're going to make me say it?
Let me borrow it.
The only one is a van and a little bit of dignity.
Yeah.
You're going to make me say, give me the money?
No, I'm borrowing it.
I'm going to take it out of your allowance.
But we would go to – and I think we've talked about this at length.
But when you don't have a lot of dough and you're buying records, you don't have that many chances.
You do a lot of research and stuff.
Some people do.
Other people just go to the drugstore and buy the –
Well, I'm getting to that.
So I would go to Record Bar and Camelot because those are the two stores and I'd flip, flip, flip, flip through all the albums.
But let me tell you where I bought with $3 less than it usually cost, as you say, my first two Beatles albums.
Because I was familiar with the White Album.
And so I – until like probably college, I still refer to it as the Red Album and the Blue Album.
Sure.
Sure.
Which, for those of you who don't know, shame on you, but it was the Beatles' greatest hits up to about Paperback Writer.
It was a double album of right up to, like, the break.
Like, Paperback Writer's when everything changed.
And, well, I guess some people would say – oh, shit, what's the one with the great Ringo drumbeat, the single –
Oh, Tomorrow Never Knows?
No, no.
The one with the big single where, you know, it doesn't matter.
But anyhow, the best Ringo beat ever, I think, might be Rain.
Hmm.
Interesting.
It's really colorful.
No, you know the song I mean.
The John song from when he was still writing good songs.
Are we talking about the Beatles on this podcast?
Is that what we're doing?
Anyway, my mom and I went to Albertsons and that's where I used to buy all my albums.
The end.
My God, I'm glad I don't date you.
Just on so many levels, there's the shirts, there's the birds, there's the bells, there's the candles.
That's one of my favorite Kim Novak movies.
The bells and the candles.
Bell, book, and candle.
All the things you treasure.
There are a lot of reasons that everyone who used to date me and doesn't now is glad that they don't date me now.
But there's a little taste of melancholy.
I think it's Herb Alpert.
1978, I come home from school.
There is an innocuous looking thick album shaped box on my doorstep.
You're 16 at this point.
I was 11.
And I picked it up and went inside.
Yeah.
It's album-shaped.
Walked my dog, and it was from RCA.
Wait, wait, wait.
You left the box unopened and walked your dog?
I came inside, so to speak, and I walked my dog, whatever.
The point being, there's a box.
I opened this up.
It got sent to the wrong person, and as you do, you open up other people's stuff, right?
Oh, I don't do that.
And it was somebody's six-for-a-penny
box of RCA joining up records.
And this became a very important day for me.
I've tried to explain this day to you for many, many years now.
It was Blondie and... 1978?
Oh, 78.
So what would it have been?
Best of the Beach Boys, Frampton Comes Alive, Kiss Destroyer, and Rock and Roll Over, The Monkey's Greatest Hits, and The Best of Dolly Parton.
Whoa!
Oh, my God.
That explains everything.
This is from a guy.
At this point, I owned the Star Wars soundtrack, the story of Star Wars, and the entire... Now, my mother and father were veterans of the RCA Music Club, so we also had 5,008 tracks of Montevani and Percy Faith, because they had checked off the easy listening box.
Roger Whitaker, any of that?
There's a ship of eyes looking ready in the harbor.
Ha, ha, ha.
You know, he's a good whistler.
Did you know he started out as a whistler?
Like Slim Whitman, he was Slim yodeled and whistled, and I believe he whistled, and Roger Whitaker was primarily a whistler.
You know, I'm actually not a bad whistler.
Please continue.
That was, again, very popular in the cross, the Christopher Cross period, the reformed America period.
Right, right, right.
Well, you know, I was listening to some of my dad's old records the other day,
And I am really looking forward to the vocal style, the male vocal style of coming back because that tremulous crooner.
You're talking about like really like old, like big band singer stuff?
Yeah.
Yeah.
it is it's such an unappealing vocal style i cannot believe well it explains why so much of the big band music was instrumental because when somebody started to sing maybe in the swing era but in the big band era there were some really i mean it's where sinatra started you know he was with tommy dorsey and there was a lot of because apparently i'm your father anyway you're explaining to me where sinatra got his start let me get a fucking three by five card here
Oh, you tell me you know more about Frank Sinatra than me.
Write this down.
Merlin knows about Frank Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey.
In any case.
So here's the thing.
You understand that at this point, I don't own a lot of LPs.
You know what I have mostly?
Do you remember, what was it called?
Did you have Sesame Street Fever?
No, John, this is the 1970s.
What the fuck are you talking about?
I had Show & Tell.
I had a Show & Tell.
Do you remember Show & Tell?
It was kind of like an audiovisual version of a Viewmaster.
You got this little thing.
It had a little screen and a record player.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And you put me in like a little slideshow and you learn about Evan Hillary or whatever.
Sure.
I don't think I had one.
I think a friend had one.
That's what I played my records on.
So you have to understand, seriously, like for Christmas of 1977, I want to say I was a Star Wars Christmas.
You know, I got like, I got the soundtrack.
So that's the records that I had.
Then I came home.
Suddenly there was six...
Well, discounting, I guess, Dolly Parton.
Six rock and roll records.
Yeah, I mean, I know you're not a giant Kiss fan, but imagine being 11 and suddenly you own two Kiss records.
Unheard of.
An 11-year-old boy in Florida is absolutely... Ohio, Ohio.
Oh, Ohio, right.
They don't listen to Kiss in Florida.
That is right in Kiss's wheelhouse.
Two in particular.
I mean, I was kind of scared of Kiss.
Even though I had friends that were into Kiss, I still thought they were kind of scary.
They were kids in Satan's service.
You know, it's true.
I was in at nights.
I like kids in Satan's service.
Oh, that's even better.
That's so much better.
Kids in Satan's service.
Rawr.
Uh, but there were two in particular.
I mean, I was familiar.
Now, now in your case, like you're talking about the clock radio, I used to just listen to AM radio all day long.
I mean, I knew every song, but like the, and I'd watch the monkeys of course.
So the monkeys greatest hits and the best of the beach boys, which is a really good best of, but those two in particular, like I just, I would just play those front and comes alive.
Even then wasn't that into it.
Because you know what?
It's not that good.
It's arguably one of the most overrated records of all time.
I think close to, if not the most overrated record of all time.
Here's what you do.
Go get your copy of Frampton Comes Alive and go trade it for a copy of Odyssey and Oracle.
Everything will change.
Everything will change.
What people like about Frampton Comes Alive is that
It sounds like the smell of marijuana.
Yeah.
It sounds like a one-hitter.
I think people should trade their Frampton Comes Alive for Judas Priest's live album Unleashed in the East.
Is that the one with the Long Green Manalishi solo?
Yes.
Yeah.
Now, Unleashed in the East is going to take you... If you are not a Judas Priest fan, or you are ambivalent to Judas Priest in any way, if you listen to Unleashed in the East, which is one of those live albums which is arguably just a bunch of overdubs over the sound of... Kiss inspired a lot of people.
People screaming in Japanese.
If you don't mind this sound for 46 minutes...
It sounds like somebody left a steam valve open.
But this album is absolutely phenomenal.
Grindr!
No, no, it's earlier than that.
This is when he still had hair and stuff, right?
This is before British Steel, right?
Yes, it is.
And it's effectively a greatest hits of Judas Priest up to 1979 or whenever it came out.
And all those albums that Judas Priest did in the early to mid-70s, they were all concept albums.
They all had like side two was just one giant song and six movements.
Well, if you watch the old videos of him when he was bald but had long hair, when he looked like the Rocky Horror guy, they were much closer to Prague in a lot of ways at first.
Absolutely.
They were coming at it from Queen...
Rocky horror very much.
Uh, but, but it wasn't until the new wave of British heavy metal that people understood what heavy metal should really look like.
I mean, between like, I know, I know you don't wouldn't count motorhead in that, but between like to an extent motorhead, but definitely what like Saxon iron maiden, um,
But those bands with the spikes, that's when people figured out what heavy metal should look like.
He looked like a leathery gay man is what he looked like.
It just happened to fit in with what metal became.
But people used to look more – don't you think?
People used to look – well, they call them Heschers.
They used to just look more like stoners in heavy metal unless you were Richie Blackmore or running James Dio.
I think that there was a time, and this may be just because we were kids then, and so adults, some adults seemed especially scary anyway.
But we were alive in a time when the net amount of male scariness...
like the mean scariness of adult men was much higher than it is now.
Oh, astoundingly higher.
Everything was scarier then.
You did not have to, and it's not just because we were kids, because I remember being a teenager and feeling this way too, that adult men were not to be trifled with, and they did not need to advertise that they were scary by wearing clown makeup or by going, ah!
I mean, if just a man in a denim jacket with a cigarette in one hand and a wrench in the other hand was an unpredictable and dangerous animal that if you could avoid, you did avoid.
And now, like adult men...
are so defanged they are not scary and so you have this cart these these men and you see them all over even just among the hipsters guys who have tried to replace their lack of of uh like adultness or their the the lack of like actual masculine
That should be in them.
And isn't.
They mask it with tattoos.
Or they have.
They try and be weird.
A lot of them are deliberately dirty.
Deliberately dirty.
Thank you.
There's something.
Every time I see somebody.
With a really old Timbuktu bag.
And a bunch of tattoos.
And a mustache on a fixie.
Looking all mad.
With a leather cuff on their wrist.
You live in a city where it costs $100,000 a year to live here.
I understand you live with your friends and you make $50,000 a year, but it's like you're not living in fucking West Virginia cooking meth.
You live in fucking San Francisco.
Dial it down.
They have a jar of beard conditioner that they paid $42 for that's made out of beeswax from the Himalayas or something like that.
Hey man, Kiehl's hires lesbians, asshole.
And when I was, you know, certainly that generation of British heavy metal that spawned that
look that became a cartoon.
I mean, the guys in Saxon just looked like they were guys that were rebuilding a Camaro.
You know, like four guys rebuilding a Camaro and they were like wiped their hands off on a dirty rag.
They weren't like costumes.
They weren't costumes.
They were just, I mean, like you look at ACDC, certainly ACDC had their costumes, but Bon Scott.
No, they looked like they'd all been fired from a garage.
Yeah, Bon Scott, who was five feet tall,
looked even if he was just wearing jeans and no shirt he looked like the scariest motherfucker you ever saw and a great guy somebody you totally want to party with and hang out with but also like somebody who i mean i'm six foot three and and uh and uh you know and an eighth
Bon Scott looks like somebody who would climb up my pant leg to bite me on the neck.
You know what I mean?
Like, the fact that I am twice as tall as he is would not, like, stop him for a second.
Like, he would climb me in order to, like, he would mount me, basically.
And that whole generation of guys, like, they were just, they were harder, they were scarier.
They were creepier.
There was, there was just a cultural creepiness and whether, I mean, there's a whole kind of key party looking shit.
I mean, I've seen some pictures.
You're making me enjoy, not making me, you've led me to Jerry Rafferty and I'm enjoying it.
I haven't seen a picture of Jerry Rafferty yet where he didn't look like a child molester.
Well, yeah.
And Jerry Rafferty was obviously like, he enjoyed a drink.
He was also drinking himself to death.
I told you this story.
I didn't know when my dad showed up at a wobblies meeting.
Have I told you this story?
Are they like wigs?
No, the Wobblies, they were the original hardcore sort of unionized – Oh, I'm sorry.
Yes, yes.
Okay.
Sorry.
Yes.
So it's a union.
Okay.
I got it.
Yeah.
And my dad shows up and the Wobblies were the industrial –
Workers of the World, the IWW, they were tough.
They were thugs.
Nice logo.
This is like dock workers.
And my dad, he became the lawyer for the Longshoremen's Union in Washington in the 50s.
But in the 30s, when he was 18...
He and some buddies went down to the docks late at night to go to this Wobblies meeting.
And it was seriously the type of thing where I think the parking lot was lit by torchlight.
And there were guys just sitting there rhythmically slapping a giant pipe wrench into the palm of their hand.
And these kids walk up to the door of the, my dad and his friends, they walk up to the door of this warehouse and inside it's just like, you know, they're just, and there's a guy standing at the door and he grabs the kids by the shirt and he goes, show me your hands.
Oh, see how rough they are?
And all four of them show the palms of their hands.
And he points to the three that are my dad's friends.
And he's like, you three have never worked a day in your life.
Get the fuck out of here.
And he looks at my dad and he goes, you're all right, kid.
And it's because my dad was on the crew team.
Oh, he's a rower.
His hands were covered with calluses.
From the oars.
And the guy goes, you can come in.
And so my dad goes into this meeting by himself.
What year is this?
1938.
Holy shit.
And went into this meeting and became sort of a lifelong labor organizer.
But, you know, the preppiest of all sports, really.
The crew.
Yeah, like a lacrosse callus.
But this was an era when a guy would stand at the door and your hands would be your passport.
Yeah.
That's a thing that does not exist anymore or not in any world I live in.
I just sent you a photograph that – you won't believe the year when you look at it.
It's from 1981, but it's from an IWW picket in – I guess in Australia, home of Bon Scott.
And wow.
These guys either look like they're in the band or some kind of a violent pederasty club.
Yeah.
You like that look?
The thing about 1981 is that it was such an in-between time.
Pivotal time.
The fact that the labor union guys would look like hippies at that point, and yet there's also a guy in a leather blazer.
He looks like Kevin from the Rens.
He really does, yeah.
Kevin is not a pederast to my knowledge.
He looks like a newscaster.
Times were really changing in 1980.
Your hands would be your passport.
That sounds like a fortune cookie.
I like that.
Somebody tweeted me some weird fortune the other day in the voice of a soothsayer, like a dwarf soothsayer from Leonardo da Vinci's town.
And he said the crows are going to visit...
pain upon you or something like that.
Whoa, this happened on the tutor?
Yeah.
That sounds like a curse, John.
You better watch out what you say to a guy.
You need to check yourself.
Well, you know, people are always sending you... Can I ask you a question?
We can cut this out if we need to.
Do you receive a lot of curses to your knowledge?
No, but there isn't an...
An incantatory element to things that people send me.
Like an existential serving suggestion?
Well, it's more... I don't know what it is about... Because I don't typically attract...
uh a lot of uh like people don't want to role play with me i don't think but there are some like scandinavian black metal people that just want to check stuff out run stuff by me i'm not sure what it is but i do get a lot of like weird spells which organ would you put this knife into
And I don't know why that is.
Big longtime fan, John.
Quick question.
If you had killed the singer for your band, which bone would you gnaw on first?
I think it's because I'm a recognized expert on the duchy of Lithuania.
I get a lot of Central Europeans that are like...
Lithuania?
Well, you know, okay, I'm just saying, for example, just for what it's worth, it's something I've been thinking about for a while.
There are lists of people who want to be on talk shows.
You can sign up to be on a list of people, and you can say what you're fucked up about, and then some Jerry Springer-esque show will have you on to throw a chair.
You can register for this, you can see people that have done it more than once.
It seems to me that given the kinds of information you have and the ways that you can help people, it might be useful for you to have some kind of a registry.
I mean, I don't know...
I don't know if that's a website.
I don't know if it's an agency of some kind.
But for example, if you wanted to find out what kind of singer bones to eat first and needed some kind of guidance from somebody who is familiar with Lithuania, I don't know how they find you.
Well, this is the problem.
And part of the problem is that I'm –
You're busy.
You're a very busy man.
I'm busy and I'm also an expert on everything.
So how would I register?
Do you need somebody that knows about it?
Ask John.
I think a lot of people think of themselves as knowing everything about everything.
How do you distinguish yourself in that crowded market apart from taking people down a peg one at a time?
That's time consuming and you're busy as we stipulated.
You know, I think a lot of the people that end up on TV are the specialists.
They're the people that know just about the Battle of Gettysburg or they know just about how aliens built the ancient pyramids.
Get a horse.
It's very hard to be a polymath anymore.
And I think it's just one of those things where you have to just enjoy the satisfaction of knowing everything.
Oh, but that must be so frustrating for you to have to – I mean first of all, the burden.
You say it's not a burden and I think it's because you're a gentleman.
But you walk around with a lot of knowledge that's sitting there and it's boiling and I don't know how you keep the lid on.
Well, here's the problem.
In America and particularly on the West Coast, nobody wants to know about Lithuania.
Nobody wants to know about the Treaty of Minnesota.
I mean have you tried?
Oh, I try all the time, but you just get glazed eyes.
The only people that care about Lithuania are Lithuanians, or not even the children of Lithuanians want to know about it.
So it's just Lithuanians and then people in Scandinavia who are trying to reanimate old golems who are living in the attics of decommissioned synagogues.
Those people are interested.
Can you give me an order of magnitude estimate on how many of those there are?
Golems in the attics of old synagogues?
No, no, the people who want to reanimate them.
Oh, I see.
People in Scandinavia.
Just as far as you know.
Is it seasonal?
I bet it changes when it gets a little warmer.
It's kind of a thing that's really actually kind of localized in Finland and Sweden.
The Norwegians are on a different trip.
Well, it's like Christians on Easter and Christmas.
I mean, when you have Golemnacht, everybody gets up and tries to reanimate shit.
Oh, Golemnacht.
It's such a time.
Bring your ex-singers bones.
The thing is, a lot of those synagogues in Eastern Europe, you know, they've been converted into rec centers, or they're video game parlors now, or internet cafes.
Well, to all appearances.
You don't even know that it's a former synagogue, except for the giant star of David Rose window.
So, you know, who knows?
This could be a thing, actually.
This could be one of those, like, Mayan calendar events.
What, you mean your Lithuanian consultancy, or are you talking about the general holiday of reanimating golems?
I think of a golem as being a Jewish thing.
A D&D thing and a Jewish thing.
It is, but when you're talking about reanimating clay automatons... I think you're thinking of dreidels.
I'm not thinking of dreidels.
When you're talking about who is the constituency for people who want to reanimate automatons...
who come back to wreak havoc, who wants to do that more than Scandinavian metalheads?
It's true.
The Jews aren't into that anymore.
No, they're all making soup.
Yeah, they're somewhere else.
And Ozzy Osbourne has not been interested in Iron Man for some time now.
He doesn't remember a thing.
No, it's all these black metal kids that are serious about black metal.
They're not the ones that are wearing cartoon lipstick, but the ones that are dressing like normal people.
Oh, they're passing.
They're passing.
I've got a book about black metal and about that whole scene with... Oh, what is the name of that band?
They're all nouns.
Like arbitrage and...
You know what?
I'm going to start working on it.
It's the genre of Scandinavian noun.
I'm going to start a list of fake Norwegian black metal bands, and the first one is going to be called arbitrage.
I'm looking at a book on my shelf right now.
The book is just called Gothic, and the title is written in Gothic lettering, and I have not looked at this book in many years.
I'm pulling it off the shelf now.
I hope it either smells like closed cigarettes or has an interesting arch.
It does kind of have a smell of pipe.
I can eyeball a gothic arch.
That's the only arch I can eyeball.
No, really?
Well, columns, you know, I didn't take that.
So many arches.
We had a class in high school called Humanities, which I'm really kind of sorry I didn't take.
It was very tedious, but it's something I could have really used.
I can't tell a Doric column from a Dority column at this point.
A Dority column?
That's a factory records joke, and it wasn't very funny.
Oh, very interesting.
This is really a book on the whole gothic movement.
I have this here.
Remember Ministry?
Remember Ministry before they were all angry?
You know, at the point at which Ministry became a thing, I had already gone a different road.
Do you remember when that song was everywhere?
I do.
It was the very first time
I was in a band with a guy who shaved the sides of his head but left the top grow long.
And it was that, I think, that made me divorce myself from ministry and everything.
Sort of like, I'm not saying Trent Reznor, but I'm saying like a young Trent Reznor still figuring it out, that kind of thing.
Sure, sure, sure.
Before it had become entrenched.
Why can't they see that just like me?
Weren't they from Chicago?
Vlad the Impaler here in this thing.
You know, there was a real Vlad.
I know there was.
I've been to Transylvania.
Is it marked in any way?
Do they go for the tourist dollars there?
uh transylvania i can see them really really saying look you know uh what i mean what kind of industries do you have in in a transylvania transylvania today i guess it's probably not called that unless it's a duchy what is what is transylvania part like romania yeah it's part of romania it was traditionally hungarian it's part of romania is this part of that fucking world war one bullshit i'm afraid so oh no what about austria-hungary what about it your play diplomacy
Is that a game?
Or is that a sex game?
You play D&D.
I've played sex diplomacy.
Diplomacy.
Diplomacy.
I don't know if you ever played – being the person you are, somewhere between a military historian and a paladin.
Actually, not a paladin.
You'd be an anti-paladin, I think.
I only seem like a military historian because that's what we ended up talking about.
You're a polymath.
You're a polymath.
The thing is you can't talk about everything at once.
Everything at once.
Was that Bengals?
Who did that?
Everywhere at once?
everything hits at once it's spoon okay i like that advanced cassette song um my thinking on this is diplomacy okay here's the thing i don't know if you're like avalon hill games stuff like that this is like risk right oh no no no no this is this is well i mean it is but you know risk feels like fucking like playing trouble or sorry compared to diplomacy diplomacy you have a board yeah
and the board is pre-world war one europe and russia and you i don't know if you there's i think maybe the only element of chance in the entire game is which country you are and i forgive me van hoot i will probably get this wrong but everything the rest you just it's a slow slog through history where you have no choices you have no idea you have no idea no no wait wait till you hear you
Everybody gets – and I'm not going to try to guess the number, but everybody gets a certain number of armies and where appropriate you get navies.
And the only different one is Russia, which I think gets one more navy.
You become a country, and here's what you do.
You try to take over Europe.
And how do you do this?
You go and you talk to everybody from the other countries, not in the presence of other people, and then you write your orders.
It's a parlor game where you go like –
It's not a parlor game.
It's a very sophisticated military strategy game.
Two people go into the bathroom and they make a plan, and then the two people go into the kitchen and make a plan type of thing?
Yeah, you trap a cockatiel and you bring a bong.
Yeah.
Jesus Christ.
I do not understand what happened.
Have I ever seen you the picture of me in Diplomacy Club?
I was in Diplomacy Club.
Did you know that?
This was a thing that they endorsed in school?
Well, it's when I was in military school, so it's a picture of me in dress blues in front of a Diplomacy game.
Send this to me now.
There's no way I can't.
I did not...
Grow up playing board games.
I hate a board game.
I'm sorry.
I don't like to go meta, but we talked about board games a lot on You Look Nice today.
And I just fucking hate board games.
I hate board game people.
I don't hate them.
I despise them, but I don't hate them.
I feel a love for everyone, especially the people that I want to help.
And here's my helping.
Stop with the board games.
I sat at a table one time watching people play Settlers of Catan, and I found it to be very soothing and very interesting.
I'm sorry, Settlers of Catan.
Settlers of Catan, which is one of what they call the German board games, which are board games that the Germans popularized.
Well, Gammenschaisen.
They're strategy games, and everybody at the board is given a certain number of natural resources, and they trade with one another, and they use those natural resources to gain territory.
Oh, so somewhere between Risk and Sims.
And they build little civilizations on the board and stuff.
I went into this situation.
I didn't actually play the game.
But I went into the situation of being an observer of the game.
You know, somewhat with the feeling like I'm going to sit here for three minutes and this is going to bore me silly and I'm going to leave.
And instead, I sat there through an entire game and found it very interesting.
It still wasn't a thing that I would do myself, but I understood.
I started to understand the board gaming culture itself.
Because it was very relaxing and everybody's got their little duplicity.
They're trying to scope out what other people are doing, but at the same time, it's calm.
You know what I like about it?
I like that everybody's into it.
I respect things where everybody there is into it because there's not that many things where everybody's into it.
and like i actually i have i have a friend and occasional business person whose sister was one of the co-creators of i think this is correct of magic the gathering so they've still got like the original like cards from magic the gathering so she just sells one of those cards every year and buys a new buys another yacht buys another helicopter aircraft carrier no but he's a really super cool guy very nerdy and like uh but uh yeah so did you look at that photograph
I knew a guy whose job, I swear to you, I've been in his house.
I've tried to remember where I met this guy.
But I've been to his house, and he has an entire floor of his house that's just full of Legos.
And his job is to sit with little Lego bits and build new Lego cars or Lego ships.
He's like an Imagineer.
He's an Imagineer, and then he sends these things off, and then Lego produces them as kits.
Okay.
That's his job.
I don't know where I met this guy.
Some guy I picked up in a bar, or he picked me up, took me home.
I don't remember.
I have no idea how this happened.
You had a Lego hookup?
But I met this guy, and he showed me all of his bins.
It was pretty hot.
All right, I'm looking at the picture that you sent.
Okay.
Here we go.
It's on Flickr, an old technology.
Oh, my goodness.
Look at you, front and center.
Yeah.
in your little dress blues uniform.
You guys look so amazing.
I was a semen apprentice, maybe a semen navigator.
And, and you gave everybody, uh, the, uh, you gave everybody the, uh, look at the smoke.
Yeah.
My favorite part is please look at my hands.
Uh,
Yeah, they're crossed in a very calm, adult way.
And the guy to your left with the eyebrows, that was, oh, was it Eric Bond?
He was my roommate.
We were roommates.
But you gave everybody the animal house, where are they now, captions.
Oh, not me.
My friend John Maltz did that because he's a smartass.
But no, but I mean, look at every person in that picture.
I mean, isn't this people that are going to be very dangerous someday?
Yeah.
All right.
You know what I'm going to have to do?
I'm going to have to go dig up a photograph of me in the Civil Air Patrol, same era.
Is this in your flight suit?
Wearing my dress blues.
Oh, brother.
And I may even be standing at attention and saluting the camera.
I was on the drill team.
Not the one with the girls with thighs.
I marched and did moves with a rifle.
You were in military school, but if I am not mistaken, these uniforms are Navy auxiliary uniforms.
We were in the, oh gosh, NJROTC.
Right.
The Naval Junior ROTC.
I had straight A's the entire year.
I had the Radford Star.
I don't know if you can see above my anchor, I have a star.
That's the Radford Star.
I had straight A's.
The Radford Star.
The Naval Junior ROTC.
The guy to my right, Glenn Luker, that guy looking tough.
Yeah, he looks scary.
Look at all that.
What do you call it?
Ham salad, chicken salad, heavenly hash?
What do you call it?
Chicken hash?
No, you call it scrambled eggs if it's on a hat.
But when it's a bunch of ribbons on the front there, it's just called, I don't know, ribbons.
A bunch of ribbons.
Ribbons, yeah.
He was a big shot.
He was the company guide on, I think it was called.
I think he was the flag carrier.
You were a very cute kid, Merlin.
You had a very cute underbite.
Had a lot of freckles.
There are a lot of kids in this whose ears are bigger than the rest of their face.
Yeah, in the back, Glenn Maggio, I think is the most distinctive.
He's the one who looks a little bit.
He's got like Wally hands.
He's got like kind of gentle touching hands.
Oh, he does.
Yeah.
Look at that board.
What do you think of that?
I know it looks really simple, but you walk around with paper for like 11 hours trying to undermine your friends.
It's a lot like a reality show, except in World War I, pre-World War I Europe.
This is where I developed my affection for pre-World War I Europe.
I never understood this type of thing, this board game playing and so forth.
It's not a board game.
I think for the most part.
When school was over, I ran home.
Because you were being chased?
No, no, because I was being chased.
Quit it!
These are prescription shoes.
With my elbows in it, my sides, and my hands laid outward.
Stop it!
Stop hitting me!
Like a giant gay bird.
Hey!
Hey!
No, I ran home because... If I were Daredevil, you wouldn't do this.
I was so consumed with my imaginary life, the life of my imagination, that interacting with other kids around the topic of World War I or who's going to take over Europe would have been so... It was...
It's unimaginable to me that that would be more fun than me just sitting alone in my room staring at the wall imagining myself taking over Europe.
Oh my gosh.
I should have peed first.
I want to hear so much about – first of all, you are – that's a word that we've all learned in the last week which is fabulous.
How true is that kind of?
It's so true.
For real?
It's so true.
How much did you know, if I could say for background, where are you now?
We're talking about when you're 11, 12, 13.
And so you had, at this point, even then, so you're steeped, as you said, you were literally, I think you said you were literally steeped in military history.
Yeah.
So you already knew your father shot a Japanese Zero out of the sky with a 45.
Right.
Right.
And so you're already surrounded with truly astounding stories.
And during that period from 4th grade to 10th grade, when they said... That very brief window from 4th grade to 10th grade.
Whenever I was assigned a research project, I would write a paper on some aspect of World War I or World War II.
And in 10th grade, I started to write about Marxism.
But from fourth grade to ninth grade, let's say, I wrote 100 reports on World War II and World War I. So I would sit and my understanding of those things was very incomplete still.
But I had the sense that Hitler had made a mistake invading Russia.
That...
that I did not fully understand, like, the Russian contribution to the war, but I understood that the Japanese had made a mistake in bombing Pearl Harbor, and I would... I just, you know, I replayed the back... A mistake beyond that wasn't very nice, but a tactical, like, waking the sleeping giant?
Well, a little bit, and particularly, like...
The idea that the Navy, the navies of all these countries in 1938 were still very battleship oriented.
You know, the battleship was the leader of the fleet.
It was the flagship of the commander of the fleet.
Partly because the planes couldn't go as far and supplies had to go somewhere.
It wasn't the same kind of air-based warfare even then that we would have today.
That hadn't happened yet.
It was still a slog in some ways, right?
Everybody's always fighting the last war.
So before the war, it was like battleship, battleship, battleship, battleship.
And there was a growing understanding that aircraft carriers were going to play a bigger role.
But still everybody was fixated on the battleships.
So they attacked Pearl Harbor and they destroyed all of our battleships.
But it ended up that aircraft carriers were the definitive, certainly in the Pacific, aircraft carriers were the definitive ship.
And when we sank four carriers at the Battle of Midway, you know, Japanese carriers, they never recovered from that.
So...
Their error was thinking that they could sink our fleet, quote unquote, and basically put us out of the war in the Pacific.
But they didn't get a single carrier at Pearl Harbor.
Oh, interesting.
They did not sink a single American carrier.
Can I ask you a general question, a serious general question?
Absolutely.
Battleship, is that a general term?
What's a destroyer?
A destroyer is a kind of battleship?
It's a small, fast ship, yeah.
A battleship is something like the USS Iowa that has giant cannons.
But is it closer to like a sea-based base of operations for other ships?
No.
I mean like if you're the command guy, if you're like an admiral and you're going to – I'm not an admiral out there I guess.
But I mean you know what I'm saying?
Like so can you – If you're an admiral, the battleship would be the center of a flotilla of books.
But it's an operation – OK.
So maybe I'll shut up for a fucking minute and will you give me just a super fast, rough – as fast as you like to – rough taxonomy of fighting at sea because I don't really understand it.
Well, in the old days, you brought your ships up to within range of your guns, and your enemy's ships would be arrayed opposite you, and you would fire fusillades of cannon shells at one another until somebody sank the other guy.
Really, just get within range of your guns and go.
Yeah.
That's the equivalent of two guys fighting with clubs.
It's just who's going to last longer before they go down.
Yeah, and two little fleets.
A battleship would never be sitting out there in the open.
It would always be surrounded by destroyers and tenders and pocket battleships and all these other little... Every different size of ship.
But at the time, you had what?
You had different sizes of cannon...
And torpedoes.
That was what you had to work with.
Oh, and mines.
I guess you'd lay mines, right?
That was naval warfare.
But you would mine like a harbor.
Mines were mostly defensive, right?
No, no, no.
You could mine the English Channel.
This is before submarines were heavily used.
You could also use mines just to take out a ship.
Mines were big for submarines eventually, right?
But I mean, this was for ships.
I thought you mined like a harbor.
You absolutely mined a harbor, but you could mine anywhere that you didn't think your own ships would go.
Like, mining, I think, mining the English Channel would be a bad idea because everybody's using it.
So that would be much more of an... Like mining a Chick-fil-A.
That would be much more of an anarchic war strategy.
Like, you know what?
Fuck everybody.
That's a Japanese 1945 kind of move.
That's just like, fuck everybody.
We're mining.
We're going to lose this shit in style.
But when you got to the point where ships had, first of all, cannons that could fire over the horizon, and then, of course, submarines and airplanes, you know, your strategy and the importance of a fleet really changed.
If you could station an aircraft carrier somewhere, you basically could... What World War II taught us is if you control the air, you control the whole game.
And, I mean, we still practice this form of aircraft carrier diplomacy.
The United States is the main practitioner of it.
In World War I, the plane thing was, tell me if I'm wrong, but the plane thing was still pretty novel and not nearly as reliable as it would be by World War II.
Yeah, in World War I, airplanes were like... Like...
The bombers in World War I, seriously, there was a guy who leaned out of the open cup and held a bomb.
Shall I drop the bomb, Captain?
Exactly.
Held a bomb at arms like it was like, arms away!
Take that, Jerry!
Was it actually like a bowling ball with a fuse?
You know, there was no... Take that, Jerry.
Like, zeppelins were a bigger factor.
I love zeppelins.
In World War I, in terms of bombing.
But in the, you know, by the time World War II came along, airplanes, that was the whole war.
But then, like, they came up with the technology to be able to, like, fire between the propeller.
I mean, wasn't that, like, a really big deal?
The ability to, like, synchronize that so you didn't shoot your propeller off?
Yeah, well, because before they had the synchronized guns, they had to either mount the machine guns on top of the other wing of the biplane.
Yeah, try aiming with that.
Yeah, so you're flying with one hand, and you reach up and grab the trigger of the gun.
Right.
Well, try this.
Try walking out.
Try holding two .38s at arm's length and try to hit something within a couple shots.
Or two .38s up above your head.
Yeah.
like like you're in like a robert rodriguez take that jerry's i'm sorry i cut you off but the fleet it's like it's like it is like the infantry in the sense that there's this big massive thing there's the outline you got the spies a lot of this for me comes from strategic stratega so forgive me but but you've got like you know like uh like kennedy like the book kennedy was in was for doing close-in attacks
A PT boat would go flying.
You told me this.
You'd go get in real close and sneak in a little attack on a big ship.
But it was a torpedo boat.
So it was basically a fast-moving... They shot torpedoes out of that little boat?
Yeah, they had torpedoes actually on the deck in tubes.
And they would zip in.
They had really powerful motors.
They were wood boats.
They'd just get up on steps.
That sounds so dangerous.
It was incredible.
They would weave in between the mines, get into a harbor...
And they're flying between these boats at night.
Guys are shooting at them in the dark, and they're unleashing torpedoes at ships that are in harbor.
It was totally ballsy game, the PT boats.
But before World War I, certainly, and even up to World War II, ships...
Like, what other way was there to assert your colonial authority over your far-flung territories than with your navy?
You know, if you had a colonial governor in Goa, you...
Took him there on a ship and you maintained your hegemony over that territory by having a navy.
And that was – so control of the seas was control of the world.
And you would have these naval battles.
But there's economies of scale also, right?
I mean ships – obviously you have different ships for different purposes.
But this is what Spain did, right?
I mean that ability to control the seas, whether that was with trade.
I mean you need – the thing is if you're going to trade with a ship, you've got to have –
You've got to have defensive ships, right?
I mean you've got to protect those ships.
There's got to be a way of making sure that this ship full of gold and spices or whatever is not going to just get hijacked by whoever comes along.
Exactly.
In fact, that's the birth of insurance.
The entire concept of the insurance industry was born in Italy during the Renaissance.
Right.
When you had all of these ships, this Italian, you know, Navy that was trading all around the world.
And people realized, like, I'm invested.
My entire fortune is in this one boat full of frankincense.
And if it goes down, I'm ruined.
Yeah.
But if I pool my money with some other guys who have their ships floating around and we all get together and kind of like decrease our risk by being partners and the concept of shared risk.
was basically invented.
God, that is so interesting and so far away from what it means today.
My God, that's unbelievable.
Yeah, yeah.
So it was just a way of people who now were trading.
Today we just assume that nobody ever gets sick.
yeah that's incredible can you imagine like i i have i've worked my entire life i've got this bag of gold and i'm going to buy these these this blue painted porcelain in china and i'm going to try and sell it for a profit here in in florence and then the ship gets uh attacked by pirates in the straits of malacca
And you're like, oh, oops, that was it.
Or, you know, I mean, so anyway, and the fact that the Spanish Armada was sunk by that freak storm.
Is that what happened?
And Elizabeth's England was preserved.
Like, talk about the tides of history.
This is some James Burke shit.
Talk about a turning point.
If God did not love England...
The Spanish Armada would have survived, and this would be a whole different world we're living in.
The fucking English, for so long, they had so many things to make them feel that they were really lucky.
They really did.
When you're going, really, they were merely lucky.
They stood on the shore, and they watched this Armada of Spanish ships approaching the coast.
They could see them coming?
see them coming and it was the largest armada ever mounted England was straight up fucked and then a freak storm destroyed the armada
How do you account for this, Merlin, if it is not that God loves England?
I'm sitting here thinking about it.
I'm not a papist.
I'm not an Anglican.
I'm trying to figure this out.
Yeah.
Now, you say the Germans.
The Germans, you know, worship berries.
Yes, they do.
Do you think in a country full of—it's Anglican, right?
Church of England?
What do you call it?
That's Anglican.
Yeah, we call it Episcopal.
Anglicans?
We call it Episcopal because we— We call it Catholic light.
We tried to make a little division between us and England at one point.
You should probably avoid that.
But, you know, I know you're a big believer in the power of prayer.
But, boy, that's unbelievable.
It is.
That's miraculous.
Okay, so my question to you.
December 7th, 1941, where were the carriers?
Were they in Seattle?
Aha!
Aha, the big question.
You bombed the wrong place, asshole.
Aha!
They were in San Francisco, and they were arrayed kind of around, but it was still unclear that carriers were so important.
Let's find out where the carriers were.
That's a great question.
They weren't in Pearl Harbor.
They were at sea.
They were everywhere but there.
This is going to be a whole other show.
And congratulations to us on keeping Hitler going.
You know what?
Somebody said to me the other day, they listened to our Hitler episode, and they were like, you guys never talked about Hitler at all.
Oh, please.
Hitler's the Austrian in the room.
Come on, Hitler.
You don't have to talk about Hitler to be talking about Hitler, if you know what I mean.
No, no.
They say when you stop talking about nuclear war, that's when everybody's worried.
I don't want to be a dick about it.
Could I also point out two syllables?
N-stuff?
N-stuff.
It's Hitler-related stuff.
There's been some question as to whether stuff has one F or two.
Well, two questions I can answer for you right now.
First of all, it is apostrophe N. And second of all, there's two Fs in stuff.
For fur and fluff and fluff and fluff.
Oh, yeah.
For fur and fluff.
Oh, you know what?
We should spell it with those cool Ss.
Yeah, there's no... Hitler and Stuss.
Hitler and Stuss.
Or maybe like in Congress, right?
We could do ligature or something.
Yeah.
You know about the whole 8-8 thing?
You know about all the 8-8 thing?
What is the 8-8 thing?
Infinity, infinity?
Um...
That's pretty good.
You took it and you turned it.
Literally, you took them and turned them.
Delta 88.
I think it is 88 white supremacy.
You know what?
This is going to have to be a whole other show.
I don't really follow the whole white supremacist numerological code system as much as I should.
One of the very first things I used my computer for when I finally bought my own computer in 1988, I had my first Mac with two floppy disks.
And one of the first things I did, I bought this book about the lunatic...
No, no.
Is that George R.R.R.
George Martin?
No, Behold the Pale Horse is like the crucial conspiracy theory book.
The one that has all the documentation that ties the trilateral commission to the... Oh, I got the trilateral commission talk around the time I was in Diplomacy Club.
Oh, I had a very interesting talk about...
Yes.
Before I knew about batshit insanity, I had a very interesting talk at my parents' steakhouse.
But I think Behold the Pale Horse, if I'm not mistaken... Pale Horse, Pale Horse, Pale Rider?
No, Pale Horse.
It ties all of the masons and everything together and then makes a very compelling case that, in fact, all of these groups are working at the behest of our extraterrestrial overlords.
Oh, that's tidy.
It is very tidy.
It's a unified field theory of bananas.
That's correct.
And I read this book at a time when I was doing a lot of recreational use of... Oh, that'll keep your mind real open to new ideas.
Yeah, exactly.
I was smoking a lot of... A lot of banana peels?
I opened my mind a lot in 1988.
Well, this was later for me.
And this was when I was making the transition from all of the nice drugs that allow one to play Frisbee for several hours without ever wondering what you're doing with your life.
All of those nice, kind drugs that make you think that you can talk to dogs.
And I was transitioning...
The kind of thing that makes you capture a cockatiel in a shower.
Yeah, exactly.
Who doesn't love that?
That's a great way to feel.
What'd you do today?
I fell down in the shower trying to catch a cockatiel.
It was awesome.
I just wanted to get with the cockatiel.
I didn't want to hurt him.
I just wanted to get with him so that we could have an understanding.
But then things subtly changed.
I was transitioning from those drugs to bad drugs.
Drugs that are made by human beings that are full of evil forces.
Oh.
You used to smoke and then get in a bathtub, and now you're getting stuff that was made in a bathtub that you smoke.
That's exactly right.
And stuff that once you smoked it, you did not want to get in a bathtub at all.
You didn't want to do anything nice.
You didn't want to play Frisbee.
You did not think you could talk to dogs.
They make you real focused and not want to play Frisbee.
Dogs are looking at you in a way that makes you very uncomfortable.
And it was during that period that I read Behold the Pale Horse.
Oh, that's bad timing.
I was obviously, you know, I did not, even doing these terrible things, it did not make me into a stupid person who believed that aliens were controlling our government through the masons.
But I did, at one point, lie in bed under a spell, let's say, of various, like, powders.
I lay in bed and I said to myself, if...
Because my apartment was right under the flight pattern for the local airport.
I said to myself, self, if aliens were transacting daily business with America, would they not disguise their spaceships as 747s?
If they disguise them...
As something like a bowl of fruit, it would seem pretty weird that the fruit was flying.
If you need something to fly and have it not seem weird, you're either going to be a bird or a football or a plane.
Maybe it could be a passenger plane.
It could be a TWA or an Eastern.
So you're not going to hover your, like, anti-gravity orb over the center of a city if you don't want them to know that you're here.
You just change your anti-gravity orb into the shape of a 747.
And you make it very loud.
And you fly it right over the top of all of the people.
If you want to drive through a factory in the middle of the night, you don't go through it in a fucking clown car.
You get in a blue van.
You drive through it like a gentleman.
Nobody even needs to wave you through.
You're not in a black Jetta.
You are in a blue van.
Brother.
I wish you hadn't said that.
I really wish you hadn't told me that.
So I'm lying in bed with various powders on my person, in my person, and I'm thinking to myself, you know, this is just a little too sensible, what I'm saying right now.
And I had to quiet the growing feeling I was having that maybe people were living in the center of the earth.
How would they disguise that?
They would pretend that they're trolls or hobbits or some kind of... What do you have in Middle Earth, John?
Who lives in Middle Earth?
Is that where the hobbits live?
Well, everybody lives in Middle Earth.
Even the humans lived there before the elves went across the ocean.
Podcast number five.
Elves and stuff.
Where is the Shire?
Is the Shire inside of the Earth?
The Shire?
Well, aren't you like a Tolkien guy?
The Shire is not inside the Earth.
No, the Shire is... So the Hobbits don't live in Middle Earth?
Middle Earth only means that it was in between the one place and the other place.
Oh, it's like Midgard is to Asgard.
Okay.
Right.
So it wasn't inside the Earth.
No, the Shire was just... The Shire was really merry old England, let's be honest.
Okay, but they have their own son there, at least theoretically.
Yeah.
I think it's the same sun.
I think it's the Battlestar Galactic cosmology.
It happened a long, long time ago.
Oh, you can cover up a lot of Earth-related inconsistencies by putting it someplace else.
It happened a long, long time ago.
For instance, a long, long time ago, it was a regular occurrence for God to come down to Earth and meddle in people's, like, what they were eating.
And he was like, kill your kid.
Oh, no, wait, wait.
Don't kill your kid.
Huh?
Oh.
Kill him.
Nope, don't.
So he was dressed up like a bush for Moses, but when he came to Abraham, so to speak, he was just a voice.
Now, the ram's in the thicket, or the thistle, thistle or the thicket, but that was just a voice of God telling him to kill his child.
And that's the guy who started three religions.
They got three religions based on the guy who thought he should kill his kid because a voice told him.
That's right.
Well, and the problem is that this God routinely said confusing things to people.
But it was a long time ago, and so it makes perfect sense because it was a long time ago.
Old Testament God's kind of a dick.
Old Testament God is a supreme asshole.
Yeah.
He's really terrible.
And you know what?
New Testament God, also very confusing.
He could be a little uneven.
My friend Dave did a very funny radio play based on Job.
It was very, very funny.
But, I mean, the closing line was, and so what is the lesson of Job?
Life's a bitch, your friends are dicks, and God's a betting man.
Yeah.
Job is a pretty rough slog if you really think about it.
It really is.
Some people find that such an inspiring thing is very, very troubling to me.
And I know that makes me part of the problem.
Like on a daily basis, like what am I going to do today?
What's on my to-do list?
I'm going to kill Job's ass.
Boy, I could really, you know, using Job as a model, I could, oh boy, I could really go a lot of different directions.
But honestly, the New Testament thing, I mean, a lot of the stuff in the New Testament is very smart.
It's wonderful.
It's a wonderful book.
I highly recommend it.
You know, I'm almost touching that third rail.
I'm very close.
I get very frustrated about the Gospels because I think it's a goddamn shame.
It's a goddamn shame.
I'm going to have to cut this out again, aren't I?
No, we're not going to do it.
Lower name vein taking.
Well, I'm just saying.
I mean, you know, you don't have to be Heraclitus to dip into the river.
You know what I'm saying?
Do hear what you're saying.
I always thought Ovid sounded like the description of an egg.
Yeah.
I'm on the Wikipedia page for 88 precepts.
Oh, okay.
What is it?
I think I sent it to you.
White supremacists.
Yeah, it's an essay or manifesto.
Let's make up our minds, white supremacists, written by David Lane, who has two first names, because of Heil Hitler HH, eighth letter of the alphabet.
Oh.
So 8-8, you see that's 8-8.
8-8 is totally code among the white supremacists.
Now, the important thing that you need to know is that I pasted this into the wrong window, and right after my wife had sent me a beautiful thing my daughter made, I sent her a link to a thing about white supremacy.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
You have to be careful.
Take that, Jerry.
You have to be careful on the internet what you send people.
You're going to send them a little diagram of you making yourself a baby horse.
Another picture of my penis?
This is awkward.
I know.
Particularly since I was sticking pins and needles in it.
Did you see my horse head?
Somebody sent me.
No.
Somebody sent you a horse head?
Well, I mean, not in the Mr. Waltz sense.
No, no, no, no, no.
Somebody, a friend of, oh man, that new tree is freaky.
I had this.
Friend of Bill?
You ever met Bill W.?
He was gone before I came around.
I would love to have a drink with that guy sometime.
Dr. Bob, too.
Those two guys, really.
Is that a Muppet thing?
What is Dr. Bob?
Is he a friend of Bill W.?
Dr. Bob was Bill W.
's first buddy.
You were friends with Bill W. on some level, right?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Did you take it one day at a time?
I still do.
That's awesome.
Oh, I almost put this on Twitter.
God damn it.
I got too much communication going on.
You know what?
You are social networking like out your yin-yang.
I was clouding my tutor.
It's so hard for me right now to social network.
I really... Oh, yes.
This is very nice.
Yeah.
So that's something I had on my Amazon wish list.
Now, you should see my daughter wear it.
My daughter, who runs around naked all the time, I walked into the room and she goes, ah!
And she was... A naked four-year-old was wearing this extreme... I would say, for a $40 product, that is an extremely realistic horse head.
It's amazing.
And I think that... Even when it sits there on a chair, it scares the shit out of me.
If you were willing, even, you know, even...
And this is a very tricky thing because as a father, there's nothing wrong with you making a short film of your naked infant daughter running around with a horse head.
How do you not?
But when you try and sell that for $10,000 to a Japanese collector, now you've crossed the line.
Well, they're going to want to sniff the horse because of Japanese laws.
Well, what if you sold it wrapped in the horse head?
How old is he?
The collector?
No, the horse.
This horse head.
You have to have a meeting of the horse minds.
I don't know.
There's horse people.
I joke about horses, but look at those nostrils.
What do you think of that?
I think that's two more entry points than a human has.
Flank us, speak at spank us.