Ep. 48: "Wherever Trail Needs to Be Built"
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Hello?
Hello?
Hello, this is a test.
This is a test.
Hello?
Hello?
Hello, this is a test call.
Why are you calling me?
I don't like it.
How did you get this number?
I don't like it.
How does my voice sound?
Oh, my God.
It's never sounded so clear.
Really?
I feel like you are sitting here on my lap, which would be very awkward.
I'm ready for my paddling, Santa.
Considering that I am in the all together.
Oh, come on.
It would be so sad if you were sitting here right now.
Because it would cause you to question all those things that you think you've already figured out.
Would it?
Yeah.
Like, do I want to be on a naked man's lap?
I bet that's a question you didn't think you were going to have to ask yourself today.
I woke up, I don't know what, three or four hours ago, and I have to be honest with you, there were a lot of questions I had, as you do.
First thing in the morning.
Yeah.
You know, when I went in the room with that chair, I was super cautious about it.
I never got real near the chair.
Yeah.
I like to use an intermediary layer, like a towel.
You're going to make me bring up Howard Hughes again, aren't you?
Don't bring up Howard Hughes.
He put paper towels and toilet paper on everything.
You know what?
I live in the Northwest and I conserve paper towels.
I use washable towels between me and everything.
Is that?
Oh, ew, ew, ew.
Do you know how much disease could be carried on those?
But I would just be carrying it right down to the washing machine.
It's your disease, for one, right?
As far as you know.
As far as I know.
This is starting to sound like Billy Corgan lyrics.
what do you think of that drummer uh who cares yeah smashing bumpkins who cares man you know do you remember how serious they were oh they were so serious i had there was a guy when i was i i just went down this list i was about to say he was my mental list like in terminator or say fuck you asshole
I went to this list.
I was about to say he was my roommate.
And then I was like, oh, actually, I didn't live in that house.
I was just crashing on the couch.
And then I realized, oh, he didn't live in that house either.
He was just crashing on the couch too.
So neither of us were.
We weren't actually roommates, but we lived in the same house for a long time.
There should be a sniglet for that.
The two guys.
Co-hosts.
The two guys that did live in the house, I'm sure if they were listening to this podcast, they'd be like, God, those two guys.
Fuck those guys.
But this guy, David, and I both were crashing in this house for a time.
And I was starting to play music, you know, just then, you know, early 90s.
And he was playing the Smashing Pumpkins Gish at one point.
And I walked in to, I mean, it wasn't his room.
It was another guy's room.
I walked into the room where he was and I was like, hmm, this music, I don't know, not that good.
And he said, he turned to me and very seriously, he was like,
Never in your life will you ever make a thing as wonderful, as true as Smashing Pumpkins Gish.
And I was like, well, consider that a challenge.
Is that something you had to live with?
Yeah, I'm still not sure if I have.
I'm still not sure if I have accomplished anything.
Smashing Pumpkins' gish level of artistic greatness.
I like that one part of that one song.
Where it goes... And it's mostly the bend.
I like the bend.
Yeah, and then his voice is like... He's extraordinary.
He's a classic example of an 80s or 90s singer who made his career... Michael Stipe is another one.
Who made his career having unintelligible vocals mixed really low...
And then at a certain point he got famous and people were telling him how great he was.
And then he started going into the studio and saying, mix my vocals up.
And, ooh, yeah.
And also, you know, about the time the vocals came up and mixed, shaved their head.
thank you hello and so the vocals come up the head gets shaved and then all of a sudden the fans are like wait a minute you're not saying anything you're just reading the ingredients off the back of a cereal box or this is meaningless like Michael Stipe's lyrics were so enigmatic to me through the 80s and then as soon as he started as soon as you could hear them I was like these aren't enigmatic these are dumb ass and then Billy Corgan was never enigmatic to me but as soon as I could hear him better I realized he's a bad singer
He – I think he – boy, I hate to speak ill of somebody from Illinois, but I think he really appeals to a certain type.
I do.
I do.
What type?
Well, I don't know.
Here's the thing.
LARPers?
Hmm?
LARPers.
Dude, you remember he had that shirt that said zero?
He did, and he had a star.
He became like Charlie Brown, though.
I mean, in addition to being bald, he kind of always wore the same shirt and was always a little bit sad.
He was a tall guy, I think.
Oh, are you sure about that?
I think that the sad lady on the base was tall.
I thought she was small.
What about the twink?
What about the little guy?
He seemed pretty sad, too.
He had a solo record, I remember, the little guy.
Yeah, one of those guys died of heroin.
No, heroin?
Well, somebody did.
Are you sure?
I think so.
I have an interesting story about him.
No, no, no.
Somebody from every band died of heroin, but I'm pretty sure somebody from this band died of heroin.
That's not funny.
No, heroin's never funny.
Heroin is in the category of rape and American heroes.
Anyway, are you talking about the William Catt program from the early 80s?
I'm sorry I even brought it up.
But there's a great story of Billy Corgan in the studio, and he was auditioning drummers after, I guess, maybe his drummer died of heroin.
Or maybe his drummer got kicked out.
I'm going to look this up.
But anyway, he was auditioning drummers and he was auditioning like famous drummers.
And when they would sit, he would come into the room, they'd be there at their kit, like ready to rehearse or ready to audition.
And he would refer to them as drummer.
Oh, really?
Drummer, let's play that one more time.
Drummer, can you do that a little bit slower next time?
Like the way you refer to your chauffeur as driver?
I believe so.
I think it's okay to refer to someone who's not in the room with the definite article.
It is not cool to remove the definite article when you're speaking to the person.
I don't think that's not appropriate.
Somebody's painting your house, you don't go outside and say, painter, I want you to, I mean, I don't know.
There are a couple of people in Northwest bands who might do that.
Water border, my flight boards, so to speak, in 35 minutes.
Just give me a light boarding.
We're getting very close to Colombo territory now.
God.
Opener?
Did he ever refer to you as opener?
He never referred to me as opener, but I think it was because even through all of his condescension to me, there was enough just native fear that I was going to eat his face.
Yeah.
Summer of 1996, according to this very old webpage, it's the keyboardist from the band Smashing Pumpkins who do not have, like Foo Fighters, do not have a definite article on their name.
Keyboardist.
Keyboardist.
Don't die of heroin.
You know, the keyboardist is almost never a real member of the band.
After about 19—I'm going to say after—what was his name?
Jonathan Cain, I'm going to say.
After Journey, there weren't that many people, unless it was the primary instrumentalist like the great Billy Joel.
There aren't that many people.
I kid, I kid, I kid.
I'm coming around.
I'm coming around a little bit.
Yeah, the guy—
Who played his keyboard literally fastened to the outside of a warehouse building in that famous video.
Oh, no.
You're talking about where they're shaking their fists at the camera?
Yeah, the fist shakers.
Boy, that video was tough to watch.
And they had sleeveless shirts.
of the time.
But, you know, Jonathan Cain, I think he's got the writing credit, a big writing credit on open arms, if memory serves.
Oh, well, I think he's a great musician.
Yeah.
You know who has a lot of dead keyboard players is the Grateful Dead.
Is that right?
Oh, they got the Pigpen.
Pigpen.
Right.
And then... Also a Peanuts character.
I'll mention in passing.
Yeah.
He did not make it all the way.
And then their keyboard player later, from the 70s and 80s,
Also died of the heroin.
Speaking of REM, didn't they briefly have an undead keyboard player?
Brent Midland was the keyboard player of the Grateful Dead, and he died right at the time.
There was a brief moment in my life when I socialized, interacted with, socially, deadheads.
Really?
And I'm going to say that this was the summer of 1990.
Oh, God.
The summer of 1990, I was living in Washington, D.C., and I went through a brief period where I was socializing with Grateful Dead people because I was working for Ralph Nader at the time in Washington, D.C.
And a lot of his volunteers...
Anyway, and right at that time, Brent Midland died of heroin.
And he was, I mean, and I had understood the Grateful Dead for many years.
I knew a lot about them.
But he was not a canonical, for me, member of the band.
Like, he was like, oh, who?
Like, the bearded guy over?
Like, sure.
But he died.
And all these people, like these girls that I kind of was wondering about whether maybe, you know, maybe we could have a thing.
Maybe we would take a long motorcycle ride or whatever.
And they were all crying, like crying real tears.
Yeah.
of sorrow at the death of brent midland and um and i realized that i could never i could never be a full grateful dead person because i i didn't have those i didn't my feelings were not that strong about about the about noodley keyboard parts well i mean and he never i mean that guy as far as i could tell he never said a word in interviews he was just like cypher and
I'm doing a little bit of last minute research here because I think I may have found something a little bit troubling.
And there's a pretty good chance we're probably going to have to cut this out.
It seems to me, first of all, the Grateful Dead, part of the problem is their songs have never ended.
They're all going on somewhere.
That's probably a separate topic.
It seems to me the keyboard players are usually the one who dies.
In the Grateful Dead...
they have had at least this is this is this an old joke like drummers are dumb like is it just me or do keyboard players just fucking die i every keyboard play the dreadful dead had a lot of keyboard players including i might add bruce hornsby but who is not dead as far as i know no but um i you know i imagined having been a keyboard player in a band i was the keyboard player in harvey danger before uh before my my big base you better watch your ass buddy
well but this is the thing you sit behind the keyboard it's a thankless job you can't you can't get up there's nothing exciting about it right i mean the band is even in the moment even in the band's peak moment at the top of the set where you're just like flying and you're you guys are just playing the playing your absolute playing your number one hit you are sitting behind a desk
There's no other way to look at it.
And so all the attempts that a keyboard player might make, like standing up or kicking over his chair or being Billy Joel or fastening your keyboard to the side of a warehouse, none of those things can take away the...
So incontrovertible truth that you are a man behind a desk.
Even if you have, if I may say, a keytar, that's really more of a desktar.
It's a desktar.
You're just a guy standing up at a desk.
And I don't know if you saw the Queens of the Stone Age when they had a female keyboard player who had worked up a keyboard stand where the keyboard was actually like...
teetering forward oh so you could see her licks you could see her licks and she was playing like like over the top of this thing it was the weirdest looking keyboard stand and she was a cute gothy girl and they were a hard rock band i never saw this i like that standing at a desk i'll be damned and you know the thing is i think you're onto something here i think there are now what about what about drummers do you think do you think drumming is a desk
Oh, interesting.
Because here's why.
I'm going to give you some examples here.
Well, first of all, let's cover the obvious ground here.
It's a desk of cans.
It's a desk of cans.
Now, the thing is, there have been many people who have tried to address this problem.
I'm trying to remember some specifics here.
Now, as you say, this Queens of the Stone Age lady had a forward-leaning one.
I feel like, yes, I've seen keytars.
I just don't understand, I mean, the indignity of a keytar.
I mean, that's like a tar and feathering when it comes to being in a band.
I mean, how do you choose?
Could you say, please hand me the keytar?
I don't... I think... Jan Hammer.
Jan Hammer, big on the keytar.
If you and I were younger, if we were 23 years old and we were both right now, let's say I was wearing white Varnese and you were wearing some sunglasses that you got for free from a bank.
Check.
Check.
and we were uh starting a band that was a pastiche of 80s uh disco pop and uh 90s indie rock and i don't know what the kids and hip-hop hip-hop here's our band and uh one of and there's there's one keytar and you and i have to flip for who plays it okay i think is it is it a fixed coin or is it a fair coin
I think it's a fair coin.
And I think we would be – I think the person who didn't get the keytar would be disappointed if we were 23.
Oh, you're saying 23 in period.
I'm thinking especially – let's be honest.
Especially – and I don't know how – I couldn't – I do this thing.
I know you're not familiar with comics, but I do this thing.
I call it the Wolverine chord because Wolverine has got these three claws.
I can play – I think I told you about this at your home.
I can play – snicked.
I can play almost any – I can –
Half bell.
You know what you get?
You get an angry bell.
But no, I showed you this.
I showed you this.
I can play almost any major, minor, or suspended fourth chord as long as it's in C with my three fingers on my right hand.
So any suspended chord as long as it's in C. Well, like everyone, as you know, I prefer a D suspended fourth.
But I would need to have – I think it's called – I think it's what Jonathan Colton calls concert tuning.
I would have to have a concert tune down to D or drop D as you say.
Jonathan Colton also prefers that chord.
He explained that tuning to me and I still don't really understand it.
You are a much better guitar player than you let on.
Hmm.
My gosh, that's such a nice thing to say, John.
I taught you that little country thing, right?
Yeah, but watching you play the guitar, you have that quality that I see kind of very seldom, where a person with an artistic impulse picks up an instrument, teaches it to themselves, and they come up with something that no one else would have thought of.
Oh, like you mean like playing my D's backwards because I learned from fake books.
Yeah, or just kind of your approach to the instrument.
It's like, oh, this is interesting.
I am watching this now and I'm seeing something I haven't seen before.
You think it's a different approach than yours?
You have memory serves.
You started on tennis rackets playing along to British Steel.
I started on tennis rackets and then I've told you this story.
I went to a punk rock show and it was one of those shows in Anchorage in the early 80s where there were five bands on the bill and between all five bands, there was one person who had ever seen an instrument before or could do anything with it.
It was just a DIY.
It was at the youth center and it was just a pure racket.
But one of the bands came out on stage and the guitar player smashed his guitar all over the place.
And I ran up after their set and grabbed the neck of his guitar.
And honestly, it was like Eric Clapton had given me his prized black Stratocaster.
How much I prized this broken neck from an Arbor Explorer copy or something like that.
And I took this neck home.
And now I had a real guitar neck.
And this was the first kind of guitar anything I had.
This is like one of those Holocaust keyboards.
It doesn't make any sound.
You practice on it, but it doesn't make a noise.
Right.
Here it was, this neck.
It was a real neck.
Oh, man.
And so I tried for a while to air guitar just with the neck of the guitar, but I found it insufficient.
That's like masturbating with just your balls.
Hang, you know what?
I'm going to write that down.
I haven't tried that.
I'm ready for a change.
Wait a minute.
Anyway, so I went out to the garage at one point, and I found an old chessboard, and I took the chessboard, and I attached the guitar neck to the chessboard.
Like a thick, wooden, heavy chessboard.
Yeah, chessboard, right?
And I took the screwdriver, and I screwed this guitar neck into the chessboard.
Except, because you remember, this is the early 80s, where checkerboard
Was a very popular motif.
And so I screwed the neck of the guitar into this checker chessboard.
But I put it at an angle so that the guitar was actually a diamond shape.
Oh, man.
Right?
Right?
And then I had a homemade air guitar.
It was better than a tennis racket because no one had one that looked like this.
And I air-guitared to many, many, many Azizi Top songs with that thing before I decided that it was time to learn how to play the guitar.
You know what?
In its own really twisted way, I think that's kind of healthy and interesting.
Don't you think?
I mean more so than if you just stuck with a tennis racket, you know what I mean?
You would be doing a pretty standard like John Hughes movie way to learn guitar.
In your case, I think you're going a little bit more backwoods and I really respect that.
I made my first instrument even though it was not actually an instrument.
It was a fake instrument.
That's probably how Les Paul started.
Maybe Les Paul's guitars didn't make sound at first.
Interesting thought.
Well, you've got to start somewhere, right?
Right.
I like that idea.
Well, I mean, this guitar had heft.
It had a real neck so that I could run my hands up and down and feel the frets underneath it.
And, you know, it felt very individual.
Let's see.
My top air guitar records were Lynyrd Skynyrd's Golden Platinum.
That's a Greatest Hits double album.
I don't know that.
These were vinyl records, of course.
Let's see.
What else did I air guitar a lot to?
Billy Squire's Emotions in Motion, of course.
Van Halen, Women and Children First.
Oh, man.
Great air guitar record.
Is that the one with Unchained?
Yes.
Oh, my God.
And you know what?
I'm not afraid to say The Scorpions Worldwide Live.
Oh, well, why would you be afraid to say that?
You know what I mean?
That's a record that a lot of people don't listen to now.
I was in a bar the other night and heard Can't Live Without You, and I just preternaturally, unconsciously, I couldn't help it.
I just started singing along with the chorus.
You have to, because The Scorpions are great.
The Scorpions, as you have said, are the great working men of metal.
The great working men of metal and...
And they're Germans to boot.
They came to Alaska and they gave – what's that?
Not Klaus Mina.
Not Schenker.
Oh, yeah.
Marius Jobs.
He gave you the eye.
He gave you the eye.
That's right.
The Scorps.
The Scorps.
I think – you know what?
I did – this is a lot of overlap here.
I was scared of Judas Priest.
Yeah, right.
As you would.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, like British Steel, that was something like the bad kids in denim jackets wrote on their folders.
If they had folders.
A lot of them didn't have folders.
They lived in trailer homes.
You know who I met the other day?
I met the guitar tech for Iron Maiden.
No way.
Yeah, I met him out on the street in Seattle during bumper shoot.
What do you think they play?
Do you think they play like eights or nines?
They're probably pretty small.
Although, who knows?
Maybe they play 13s.
And these guys have hands like oak trees.
I love that Steve Harris boy.
I could listen to that guy play bass all day.
He's amazing.
This guy, this guitar tech, I have met a lot of English touring sound men, guitar tech people.
Yes, I have.
And they all share a similar character.
Which is to say that they're like very working class.
They're very no-nonsense.
And they give off the air that they're like tough guys.
Like fuck you, kind of tough dudes, tough English guys.
But when you really get to meet them, you realize that they're guitar techs.
You find out they could probably be very gentle with a young girl.
Yeah, they're functionally pussies.
But they live in this rough and tumble world where they're touring around.
They adopt a manner of interstate truckers.
But in fact, they're just tuning guitars all day.
It's not like...
There are no knife fights.
But as you've learned from, I think, probably 42% of all ACDC songs, it's very hard to be in a touring rock band.
Oh, hello.
Boy, have they got a lot of songs about how hard it is to be in a successful band.
Well, because they were getting new and more virulent strains of herpes every night.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's why it was so hard to be in ACDC.
Can you imagine how hard it would be to travel with herpes?
Well, or just like every night, like, oh, my herpes is killing me.
And then you play another show.
Because you know what happens?
If you get a stress bump on your wangus, as they call it in Australia, you know what that does?
That opens you up to another infection.
It's like you get a wound, you get a meta wound.
All right.
Now this is, I'm sorry to take it here.
Yeah.
But the conversation has naturally arrived here.
Okay.
This is not a thing that I am introducing unnaturally.
I didn't kiss anybody bad.
But my understanding, I just learned this last night, is that in certain Orthodox Jewish communities, the rabbi who performs the circumcision, the mule, actually performs the last, he uses a knife to cut the foreskin, and he actually performs the last portion of that ceremony with his mouth.
Are you sure this isn't one of those making babies into matzo bread things?
Because this could cause us a lot of trouble.
Are you saying that this is a protocol of the elders of Zion problem?
No, I heard this.
You heard this?
Did you hear this from the English roadie?
I heard this from the source.
It is a problem.
Them guys with the...
He puts his mouth right on the penis.
I can't even do an accent anymore.
But in any case, the problem is that in New York City, 70% of all men have herpes.
Oh, come on.
Jesus.
Jonah Lehrer.
What the fuck?
Where did you come up with that?
They've had to outlaw this practice, or they're trying to outlaw this practice.
That is a long walk through a discredited university, my friend.
Rabbis are giving newborn babies herpes from their mouth bumps.
I don't want to make this about Howard Hughes, but this is the problem with contagion.
Contagion is contagious.
This is the problem with contagion.
It's also the problem of hearing stuff from somebody and then saying it on the interwebs.
But you know what?
I'm going to have to do – first I'm going to clean my keyboard and then I'm going to do a lot of research and probably cut almost all of this out.
But that's remarkable.
You see 77 out of 10 men in – now is this in the metropolitan New York area?
I'm going to say that it's all of New York including Staten Island, all the boroughs.
Does Jonathan Colton know this or does he know this too well?
I don't know.
He travels a lot, John.
He does, but these are people in New York who are getting herpes in New York.
And they're still getting herpes.
Are people still getting herpes, John?
I think they are.
They ride those subways.
They're all close to each other.
Oh, God.
You know what?
Herpes is probably going through there like electricity through a Tesla coil.
Ugh.
Just from one end of the train to the other.
That's just miserable.
Now, do you have any sense of the ladies in the metropolitan area?
Are they aware?
A, are they aware of this fact?
And B, are they taking precautions?
Are they staying off the subways and the Tesla coils?
My sense is that girls in New York don't really make themselves available for sex.
Can women get herpes?
Do we know?
I think.
Okay.
Legitimate herpes.
It's much easier to get pregnant if you're a woman than it is to get herpes.
Okay.
I would say... 70%.
70%.
John, that is a lot of percent.
That's even more than a plurality.
That's a lot.
That's enough to overcome a filibuster.
You know what?
That would be a great new name for cold sores.
What would?
Filibuster.
You're going to say I want to try and break this filibuster.
I like that.
Eh, it's something.
Okay, well, moving on.
So we've got... So I think we've covered a lot of ground already.
This is terrific.
I made a joke the other day that storming your embassy was going to be my new euphemism for having sex with someone.
My computer broke again.
And then somebody on Facebook was like, gave me a lecture about American heroes dying overseas and how it wasn't funny.
Yeah, well, why don't we take this up over on the Proana Forum?
You're looking at Proana Forum?
That's a rough, rough ride.
Oh, God, I wish I had a cough button.
Yeah, cough button.
Mine were, I'm going to say, probably Breakout by Scorpions, which I got through the Columbia Music Organization.
I got, let's see, I would say definitely Blizzard of Oz.
Blizzard of Oz.
You know, I went to the Washington State Fair the other day, and everywhere I went, like all the different fair things where you throw the darts at the balloons or you throw the hoops at the bottles or whatever, they were all playing different Aussie tracks.
To attract people.
I guess.
I mean, they were playing Ozzy at the State Fair in 1980.
And I'm just wondering, it's been a long time since I've been to a State Fair.
Is Ozzy just like State Fair music?
You might be in a wormhole.
Oh, you might, you might be in a Washington wormhole.
You know, I, it is weird.
It is weird that the, these kinds of these horrible, horrible events just full of terrible, bad people have been around for centuries, right?
You got the seventh seal, right?
You come to town, you got your, you got your Max von Sydow's and you go around and play chess and shit.
Like that's been around forever coming to town and fucking shit up.
But it is a funny thing that everything that happens at one of these traveling fairs feels like it's happening somewhere between 1972 and 1981.
Maybe.
Right.
Like carnies are stuck there forever.
Like what did they give away before Coke mirror?
If we covered this in a previous visit, but it seems to me that a lot of the prices you've got, you got stuffed animals that are extremely hard.
Yeah.
Have you ever felt a stuffed animal from a fair?
It's not real.
It's not real cushy.
I think, I think it's stuffed with like sawdust and, and, you know, like counterfeit money or something.
Yeah.
Well, here, here are the things that a lot of them have drugs.
I bet, I bet, I bet a surprising number of them have an amount of drugs in the people forgot about.
They have, I don't think the drugs are inside, but there's definitely drugs on the fur.
Yeah.
But here are the things that I saw for the first time at a state fair.
I saw a Coke bottle that had been heated up and pulled so that it was like four feet tall.
Spooky.
Remember that?
I so remember that.
It had a little twist.
How did they do that?
That's right.
And then I saw the invisible dog where you have the dog leash and then there's a harness, but there's no dog in it.
You know what I'm talking about?
I do.
It's called the invisible dog.
The invisible dog.
Mm-hmm.
I saw my first Coke mirror.
I saw my first feathered earring slash roach clip.
Teehee roach clip.
Roach clip earring.
And these are before you could buy dream catchers on the open market.
Boy, there really is.
The Venn diagram is really exhaustive, I think, when it comes to dream catchers.
I think you move straight from feathered roach clip into dream catcher.
And just for what it's worth, John, I think dream catchers don't work.
Can you know that for sure?
Well, you ever seen the car that most dreamcatchers are in?
That's true.
Dreamcatchers are supposed to be like worry dolls.
They're supposed to be something where it lets you catch your dreams and lets all the bad thoughts go through.
Oh.
I'm with you, though.
When I would go to those places, I always felt, because I am, what was the word you used about English pussies?
What did you call them?
Roadies?
Yeah.
I'm going to get so many angry letters.
Yeah.
Written with a quill pen, governor.
But no, I would always feel a little bit menaced at those.
I saw all kinds of things.
Obviously, you get a lot of fried foods.
You get a lot of corn dogs.
You get a lot of – you know what I first saw?
I take it back.
Excuse me.
Cough button.
I remember on one occasion, my best friend John and I went to Disney World when I was about – I would have to be about 13 or 14.
In age when this was entirely inappropriate, we had matching airbrushed shirts with the cover of Wolverine No.
1 on it.
They didn't say Merlin and John on them, did they?
They might have.
But like on each other's BFF.
No, no.
We were two really awkward guys in matching airbrush T-shirts, and we each went to the magic shop and bought a plastic faucet with a suction cup on it and wore it on our foreheads for the whole day.
I had that.
I never wore it on my forehead, but I had it.
John, I know you're not a physiologist, but do you have a pretty good idea?
Can you just guess what happens when you wear a very, very powerful suction cup on your forehead for nine hours?
You get a black and blue giant circle on your forehead.
It's like a faucet hickey, like a plumbing.
Seriously, my hand to God, really bad for one day, but for close to three days, it looked like somebody had hit me on the head with extreme precision and made an exact circle of purple on my head.
Oh, at that exact same age.
Yeah.
I was sitting in the lunchroom at one point, and I had a cup, a plastic cup, and I put it around my mouth and was sucking all the air out of it to create a vacuum so that this cup was around my nose and mouth, I guess.
Right.
You wanted to push it, right?
I wanted to push it.
I pushed it all the way, and then I had this black and blue circle around my face.
It was the equivalent, really, of sticking your tongue to a frozen pole.
I felt like such a duel.
For four days after that, I just had this, like, there's nothing you can do.
You can't stay home from school.
You know, it's not a thing.
I mean, you know, well, you remember the trick.
If you give somebody a hickey, supposedly you could run a comb over it.
You remember that trick?
No.
I was a pretty big hickey giver.
I didn't even realize I was doing it.
I think I might have been possessed or something.
I never gave a hickey, and I wouldn't allow somebody to give me a hickey.
In fact, to this day, if somebody starts sucking on my neck, I'm like, hey, hey.
Hey, easy, easy.
Is that because of your perimeter or because your body's a temple?
What's the thinking?
You just don't enjoy it.
All right.
So I was at a civil air patrol encampment in about 1981.
And this was a co-ed encampment, although I have to say there were not that many girls in the Civil Air Patrol, but there were some.
And it was a two-week-long encampment at Eilson Air Force Base in Fairbanks, Alaska.
And we were all staying in the old barracks that had been built during World War II.
And at one point, one of the guys got a hickey from one of the girls.
And it was this terrible purple welt.
And there was no disguising it.
Because we're in uniform.
We're wearing our dress blue uniforms.
You can't accessorize that with a scarf.
They hadn't gone to Queen Elizabeth I camp.
No, no, no.
We weren't in Elizabethan Air Force camp.
Dickie camp.
And so he had to, like, stand there at inspection in his blues, or I guess inspection he would have been in his fatigues, but with this giant pulsating purple mess on his neck.
Oh, no.
And the sergeant, who, of course, was also 13 years old...
This is the inspecting uncommissioned officer.
Yeah, the non-commissioned officer.
I mean, I was 11, and the guy with the hickey was probably 13.
Let's say the sergeant was 15.
Just dressed him down in front of everybody, unprofessional, unmilitary, out of uniform, all this type of thing.
And it left a lasting impression on me that if you got a hickey, you would be out of uniform.
There was no... You could not be in uniform with a hickey.
What an unusual angle.
It's like they don't let you get neck tattoos in the Navy because you're out of uniform.
Mm-hmm.
So that stuck with me until this day.
It's a distraction to esprit de corps.
That's exactly right.
And I don't like to be out of uniform.
You know that about me.
No.
No, it seems to me that as eclectic as your wardrobe is, you have an innate sense of what the uniform, as we used to call it in military school, the uniform of the day is.
Precisely.
They would announce that every day at our school.
It was almost always the same thing, but you'd have to be ready.
You might have to put your blues on just because they said so.
And when I wake up in the morning, I have a series of questions that I ask right away, as you do.
But also, I listen for the uniform of the day announcement, and sometimes it says, Space Cowboy.
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In any case.
And sometimes it says – And you say, yes, sir, I can do that.
Yes, sir.
Sometimes it says preppy asshole.
Sometimes it says like, you know, coke fiend.
I never did much of anything on a team and when I did things on a team, I didn't do it well.
But there are certain things I picked up in military school, including my cold sore, that I'm really glad I've kept with me and that I think about a lot.
If somebody says about face, you know how to do about face.
Oh, man.
I can still do it all.
I was talking about doing the rifle drills last.
I was on drill team.
So, I mean, I was pretty good.
I was pretty good.
But, you know, one I always like, I have to tell you, I don't know if this could find any place in your life.
But, you know, you have the – most of the time, you're in a pseudo –
official environment like you're in uniform right and uh you know there's no um oh gosh what was the great there's no no skylarking you know no smoking no spitting like there's all the rules that are you know tacit in being a pseudo military paramilitary teenager right but then you're in like the official capacity when you're not at ease
right and if you're in a situation like turn your hat on backwards oh shit no oh my god no oh geez louise your belt buckle better be polished in your shoes and then don't use mop and glow that's cheaty your line had better be straight if you know what i'm saying if you're if you're really in a hurry you could use mop and glow but it's gonna be pretty obvious and you might get a demerit did you blouse your pants i i don't know what that means and i guess i want to know what is what is busting your pants
Blousing your pants is a thing that we used to do in the military, which they don't do anymore, which is that the bottom hem of your pants is like tucked into the top of your boots.
Ah, such a cool look.
And then bloused out so that it's like your boots are tight on your ankles.
That's a little tactical for what we were doing.
But I love that look.
It's super cool.
It's a little bit, you know, it's a little bit, yeah, a little bit 1943, but like pretty cool.
So our fatigue uniform, even for PT, had bloused pants.
We weren't kidding around in the Alaska Civil Air Patrol.
You didn't have something a little less formal that was still a uniform in those situations?
We had dress blues.
Yeah.
We addressed blues.
One of my favorites was salt and pepper, which is when you have a white shirt with epaulettes with your rank on it and black pants.
I thought that was a sharp look.
That was a sharp look.
We had – I forget what they called it, but our everyday was – gosh, this is coming back to me just a little bit.
It was khaki pants and a short-sleeve shirt, short-sleeve khaki shirt.
And then sometimes there's a term they used –
like with lids or something there was some term for when you had to wear your hat which kind of sucked and then we had uh we had like i'm trying to remember there was a slightly more informal one that was a little bit a little bit even gayer which i think was like a white t-shirt with khakis it was a little bit like you know toms of maine is that the one toms of finland yeah toms of finland that's that's where you're one's a toothpaste and the other ones yeah toms of maine makes toothpaste and toms of finland makes uh sexy drawings
Yeah, and even our gym uniforms were highly prescribed.
That was for swabbing the deck, right?
The khakis with the – I mean this is the thing and this is getting to this deeper point, which is that when we were dressed – you would dress out for whatever and it was – whatever the name of the uniform was.
This is 30-some years ago.
But you'd wear these – the Admiral Farragut Academy shorts and then you would either wear the white Admiral Farragut Academy shorts.
Or more often, you would wear the shirt for your company.
And, of course, I was in fourth company and had a purple shirt.
So it was – I mean everybody showed up.
And you didn't show up in a different shirt.
You just didn't do that.
No.
And you certainly didn't show up with a hickey.
A couple of guys got thrown out for that kind of stuff.
Oh, you would get – you should have been thrown out of this encampment at Isles and Air Force Base, but they stuck around somehow.
Were you secretly or unsecretly disappointed that that guy didn't get a blanket party, didn't get a – Absolutely.
I thought they should have killed him.
Code red.
Code red.
Yeah.
And in fact, that was where I learned how to short sheet beds.
That's frustrating for a minute.
It really is.
And I try and apply it all the time, but nobody makes their bed anymore.
I'll never forget.
One day at Christian camp, I got the skunk bunk.
You ever have that?
You remember skunk bunk?
What's the skunk bunk?
So humiliating.
At breakfast, they do all the announcements, and they announce, like, whose cabin is this?
Oh, the worst bed.
I had the worst bed in the whole camp.
I was a skunk punk, and I've never been so humiliated by a man in my life.
It was awful.
I learned hospital corners.
You could bounce a quarter off my bed.
The beds that I made when I was finally in actual military school, when I moved on from Christianity to paramilitary gear, I made the fuck out of a bed.
I got 9s and 10s every day, me and Brian Bond.
I bet you could make a hell of a bed.
I'd make a hell of a bed if I want to.
I can tuck that shit in.
Quarters bounce, buddy.
You can bounce a pound off that shit.
My most embarrassing moment was when I was playing rugby for Gonzaga University.
LAUGHTER
And I decided... You were there for like two months?
How long were you there?
I was at Gonzaga for two years.
Before you were asked to leave.
Before I was escorted off the campus.
Mr. Roderick, we've had a series of meetings, and we just can't make this work.
Before I was escorted off the campus for the last time, I should clarify, because I was escorted off the campus a few times.
But I was on the rugby team, and I felt...
Somehow, you know, rugby shirts are very expensive, particularly the... The real ones with the rubber buttons.
Yeah, the pro ones are not cheap.
And I had come to college with my own selection of rugby shirts because it was the 80s and rugby shirts were what guys like me wore.
And Gonzaga's colors were navy blue and white.
And I had a...
I had a sky blue and pale yellow rugby shirt.
Oh, John.
That's like being off a quarter tone.
Exactly.
That's like, you know what it is?
That's your G. That's your G string being just a little bit flat.
That's exactly what it was.
And I showed up.
I was wearing this thing.
And, you know, the older guys, I was a freshman, of course.
The older guys did not approve that.
But, you know, I was a big kid or whatever, and everybody just kind of looked askance at it.
But to my eternal shame, I showed up for our group picture wearing this shirt.
Oh, no.
And so there's a picture still hanging in the hallway of the main building at Gonzaga University, the Hall of Fame or whatever.
There's a picture of that 1987 Gonzaga rugby squad and me in an off-color...
like light yellow of all the of all the things if it had been light blue if that had been yearbook day and each of you had had a separate photo in uniform that would be merely horribly embarrassing but you know you did you fucked it up a for the rest of the team and b for posterity now an old guy who gave a gave a few thousand dollars to the school he walks down that hall and he goes who the fuck was this guy in 1986 exactly that's exactly right
That's a real Billy Corgan move.
I'll be dead 100 years, and somebody will be walking through Gonzaga University, looking at the dusty photographs, and they'll go, look at this jackass.
I think they should find the technology to fix that, with all due respect to you.
Well, you know what?
It is an accurate record of the moment.
It is an accurate record of the time I was a jackass.
Oh, yeah, and Trotsky was never in any photos.
I think a big part of super training should be making things right.
I mean, no, it's your train.
Retroactively.
Well, I'm just saying, retroactively, this is the beauty part.
I mean, you know, Orwell was not riding in a vacuum.
The beauty part about Stalin is that he was so able, capable, and willing to change things over and over and over.
You need to look no further than our friend Mao.
He was always changing his mind.
And then when he changes his mind, everybody changes their mind.
It's like the captain in WALL-E when he wakes up late and he makes it become breakfast time again.
Same deal.
Mm-hmm.
Well, Stalin would paint a guy out of the picture, and then three years later, he'd paint another guy out of the picture, and pretty soon he painted all the guys out of the picture, and somebody had to draw like a horizon line in it.
Then he puts in like Totoro or Goofy or whoever.
This is the problem with tattoos.
Some happy little trees.
See, this is the problem with tattoos.
Wow.
You know?
You're going to have to live with that forever.
You put Trotsky on your ass, and you're going to be sitting on Leon for the rest of you.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
I feel like when we start talking about tattoos, you and I, we are alienating a great number of our listeners who are right now looking at their tattoos and feeling very proud about the choices that they made.
Good for them.
Yeah.
And I don't want to make those, particularly if they got like a My Little Pony tattoo or they have a tattoo of themselves dressed as a Civil War reenactor.
You know what else we're doing?
What?
Somebody who is about two days away from getting a tattoo is going to think twice about it.
And that's why it's worth saying.
Interesting.
Hmm.
Because if I can make you feel bad about your tattoo, I'm just saying, that's why it should be a t-shirt.
You wear that t-shirt for one year, you don't even take it off.
Whatever it is.
You want to put a bird on it?
Put a bird on a t-shirt.
You wear it every day.
I got a wedding coming.
No, fuck you.
Wear your bird shirt.
There you go.
After a year, maybe you get a tattoo.
My high school girlfriend was a redheaded girl.
Yeah, this is the mulatto Irish... That's right.
Yeah, yeah.
And after high school...
This was the very dawn of people who were not, like, active sailors getting tattoos.
I'm talking about 1986.
Like, it was not a thing yet.
That's still pretty young.
Really early in the, like, I'm not...
i'm not i'm not actually i don't even think research books were widely read at that point i am not carving scrimshaw i am a normal person and i'm gonna get a tattoo and she got a tattoo of a little red-haired witch riding a broom and she got it in her bikini area and she was so proud of this thing was it flying away from it or toward it
It was flying above it.
It was next to it and flying as though to go over.
Okay, like a cow.
It was the witch that jumped over the bush.
And the little red-haired witch was, I guess it was her spirit animal.
She actually was a witch.
And I don't mean a spellcasting witch.
Like a Wiccan?
no she was a witch like a terrible girl and she got this tattoo and she was so proud of it she was like you know there it is for all the world to see and i was like it's not for all the world to see it's just for people who get your panties off to see yeah and presumably by the time someone has your panties off they already know what a little witch you are that's like socks for christmas joan
You know, you see the box, you open it up, and it's eight pair of gold toes.
You go, shit.
I thought this was going to be Star Wars jammies.
You know what I'm saying?
If I got a box with eight pairs of gold toes in it right now, I'd be pretty glad, actually.
Well, you know, I told you this is how I was able to give Hodgman a fresh pair of socks.
I just bought 16 pair of gold toe socks.
I never looked back.
Never looked back.
You know, that's the thing.
That's the thing.
If you are able to give a friend a fresh pair of socks and say, you know what?
Keep them.
Presence of mind.
Bring extra socks.
You're never going to not need more socks.
That's so nice.
Yeah.
Richard Manuel from the band.
Dead.
Dead.
Suicide in Florida.
The keyboard player from Springsteen's keyboard player.
Dead.
Oh, that's right.
He did die.
Yeah.
I'm just saying of all the people in bands, it appears to be the keyboard player.
I don't want to make a big deal about it.
You're sitting behind a desk and there's really nothing to do but do heroin.
Yeah.
Because there's a lot of times where you're just vamping.
You're vamping.
Presumably by the time that you are the keyboard player in a very successful band, you're probably a great pianist.
You could be sitting at a grand piano at one of the elevator lobbies of a Nordstrom somewhere playing Montevani or whatever it is they play at Nordstrom's.
Mm-hmm.
We were having dinner this weekend with the Nordstrom sisters.
And yet you're back there going... And maybe twice in the set... One day, love will find you.
Twice in the set, the singer turns around, points at you, and you get to go... You get to change the envelope and the filter.
Or if you're in heart...
Or the Steve Miller band, you get to play the Moog for a second and go... Or you get to turn up your arp chord on the quiet part before the last chorus.
But then the rest of the time you're just sitting back there and it's like, I could do crossword puzzles or I could do some heroin.
Think about how much of it is via things like triggering and sequencers nowadays.
I'm not saying there's no role for these folks in it, but it's not like you're Howard Jones out there with your little fucking one-man band and the cymbals between your knees.
LAUGHTER
Howard Jones.
Man, that hair.
Paul Young.
He had hair, too.
Paul Young.
You know, his version of Level Terrace Apart was the version I heard before I heard Joy Division's version.
Isn't it odd how you can do that?
Yeah.
I've got a lot of things to wrap up.
Please continue.
That doesn't happen anymore, of course, because people now have access to all music from all time instantly.
Yeah, it's easier than ever to be over something.
You know, you can't be over something if you went down to the Albertsons and spent $5.69 on it.
You're going to fucking listen to Cheap Tricks one-on-one until you love it, period.
We don't have to go over this again.
I know.
I know.
But the thing is, here's one thing I like, though, in military school.
I didn't like it at the time, but I'm starting to understand the appeal.
If you are in that official – kind of an official formation, if something happens –
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Oh, gosh, no.
Boy, group showers.
Haven't we learned enough from history, John?
Don't go in a room where they say everybody takes a shower.
Can we just all agree that's a bad idea?
In my junior high, the coach
stood at the doorway of the shower with a clipboard, and he checked your name off if he saw you take a shower.
And if you did not go past him, standing at the door, take your towel off and take a shower so that he could see that you had wetted yourself from top to bottom.
If you didn't do that, it was impossible to get an A in Jim.
Oh, so hang on a minute because you're saying something very important here, which is it's one thing to say that you're going to get like a point off of your weekly whatever with that.
But you're saying something quite different.
You're saying the biggest faggots in the class, which are the people who want straight A's like me, right?
He's going to withhold your A, right?
That would give you the straight A's.
That's right.
So you, Poindexter, better get in there and get that little wangus of yours wet.
Right.
That's right.
Oh, John, that is dark as hell.
It was super psychological.
Do you think he kept all those records?
I don't know.
There's probably a file cabinet somewhere at the basement of Wendler Junior High School in Anchorage that still has his handwritten notes of whose daily dingus he saw.
I bet you Mr. Finnell still has a lot of those broken stars, too.
God bless him.
There are the kids in seventh grade who are already men.
Oh, it's the worst!
And then there are the little skinny kids that are still very much boys.
And he's standing there at the doorway
And he actually had a little chant that he said.
He said, shower down to get an A. That's the worst chant I've ever heard.
Shower down to get an A. And we're coming in from the playing fields or whatever, and he's standing there at the door.
Shower down to get an A. It doesn't even rhyme.
Shower down to get an A. He'd say it over and over.
Shower down to get an A. I can't currently pull to mind a better one, but I mean that's a really miserable chant.
Shower down to get an A. Shower down to get an A. Boy, that's miserable.
Oh, it was a terrible time.
Oh, the showers, the showers.
No, no.
Here's what I liked.
If you were in this official – this is not even that interesting.
I don't know why I'm pursuing this.
But if somebody came up to you in an official capacity, if you were – let's say you were in formation and you were standing at attention during something like an inspection.
Right.
Eyes front.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Did you, do you know about this?
There's exactly three permissible answers to any question.
Yes, sir.
No, sir.
I don't know, sir.
Nope.
Ours was, well, that may be yours.
Ours was yes, sir.
No, sir.
No excuse, sir.
Oh,
Oh, no excuse, sir.
Think about that one for a minute.
I believe I did say no excuse, sir.
So there are some, there are some, and the thing is you learn this.
Like whether you like it or not, the whole point of military school is not to help you bloom as a special flower.
It's to take you at the point when you are most, it's most possible that you could become an interesting person and then try to make you a miserable brain dead.
Not an interesting person.
Oh, absolutely.
And then throw you in a shower.
Yeah.
What do you think of that?
Isn't that kind of interesting?
You say to somebody, why isn't your belt buckle shinier?
No excuse, sir.
You don't get to say because I was busy watching Buck Rogers.
Right.
You say no excuse, sir.
No excuse, sir.
But it's a very interesting idea.
It's a very interesting idea because for somebody like me who's – I don't know if you noticed this.
I'm a bit of a talker.
And because of my extensive liberal arts background, I got a reason for everything.
That's right.
You want to justify why your belt buckle is not shiny.
Go shower if you want an A. What is it?
Shower down to get an A. Shower down to get an A. It scans nicely, but I... Shower down to get an A. And he had a weird accent, like a weird Oklahoma accent.
Shower down to get an A.
Oh, God.
This is miserable.
Shower down.
Shower down.
Literally, in the entire United States, in our history, there's literally only one thing worse than junior high, and that's middle school.
Junior high is disgusting because it's got this problem on one level of, like you say, some of the people look like they're retirees and others look like toddlers.
But 6th, 7th, and 8th grade, I think it's even worse.
Because you've got 6th graders.
6th graders belong in...
Elementary school.
No, I was.
I didn't have middle school.
I had junior high.
But I've heard of people – when I learned about middle school, it gave me the shakes.
Some of the girls in sixth grade looked like supermodels.
Other ones looked like they probably needed to change their nappy, right?
But then you've got guys, even in seventh grade, and these are the really stinky guys with the weird mustaches who didn't know how awkward they were, those poor bastards.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, you get those guys and then you grow really fast and you're kind of uncoordinated.
I don't know if you went through this.
I've told you my plan.
No, what's your plan?
Well, my plan is that no one learns anything in junior high.
Not a single bit of useful information is communicated or retained.
Point of information.
Nothing will be taught or by design, nothing will be permitted to be learned.
It is impossible to learn.
It is an unlearning-able environment.
Okay, super trained junior high, you come in as an empty vessel and leave potentially even more empty than you came in.
So here's what happens.
Here's my plan for junior high.
I'm sure I've told you this.
Not at all.
From 7th and 8th grade, all those kids are building trail in national parks.
And this is a national program.
Do they get sunscreened?
Well, you're building trails, so... Get a hat.
Get a fucking hat.
You get a hat or you're under cover of trees.
I mean, I guess if you're building trail in Arizona, you do need sunscreen.
Building trail.
But so we have a lot of national parks.
A lot of those trails need a tremendous amount of upkeep.
Some of them are in treacherous locations.
For older people to go up there and haul logs and fix that trail, that's a lot of work for people.
young people, particularly 7th and 8th graders, who are incapable of learning anything and are useless to society in every way, except as haulers.
They are just old enough that they can drag logs and they should be employed as donkeys throughout our national park system.
And if we used kids this way,
So sixth grade, you're learning stuff.
You're still, you're like engaged.
You're learning about art and music.
You learn all the bones in the body and how they connect to one another.
And then you graduate from sixth grade and you are immediately sent to a works progress administration office.
style camp on the side of Mount Rainier or perhaps out in Death Valley, California, wherever it is that trail needs to be built.
And you are employed in this capacity for two straight years.
And you come out the other side and you have clear skin.
You have a clear sense of purpose.
Your body is strong.
Your youth has been employed in the service of your great country.
And then you enter ninth grade and again begin to learn things from books.
And at night, these kids will all sleep in these Depression-era bunkhouses.
Like babies, they'll sleep.
And they will sleep like babies.
They will read for a half an hour by lantern light.
Someone will tell them a ghost story, perhaps, on weekends.
And they will be contributing to America.
In a way that there's no substitute for.
And they will be not not contributing because that's part of the problem I think that you're addressing with this is the utter lack of contribution, the vacuum of contribution that we get from these fucking pubescent leeches.
Yeah.
These are terrible people.
Bad people.
Seventh and eighth graders are terrible people.
They're the worst that humanity has to offer.
And right now, we are placating them so that they're dressing like those Bratz dolls.
And they're listening to hip-hop music.
And they are joining gangs or whatever it is that young people do these days.
And they're wearing white Varnays.
They are being Lolitas for their next-door neighbors.
Whatever it is.
Building keytars.
They are causing problems.
They're causing problems for their families.
They're causing problems for each other.
They have terrible skin.
John, this is a comprehensive fucking solution.
Because here's the other thing, and I'm sure this is something you've already covered in any of your plans for this.
But what is the primary problem I am identifying here about middle school is the terrible bell curve, beyond a bell curve, really a Liberty bell curve of differences.
You've got some kids that look like linebackers.
right they're like nine feet tall and they're all they're all mean and glandular and you got other kids over here with thin bones the thing is you there is work for everybody when you're fucking building trail right so right so somebody has somebody's making the signs that say you know that you're an artist you want to be an artist make a fucking sign
Here's the sign.
Here's a little wood carving kit.
This sign needs to say the upper loop is 2.4 kilometers and the lower loop is 1.8 kilometers.
But it's leveling.
The linebacker guy is going to be pulling some very large logs.
He's not going to be so cocky anymore.
And that little guy with the small fingers, he might be able to get a wasp nest out of that log if we had to.
But everybody, it's going to be to each his ability, to each his disability.
Precisely.
You're going to send the runty ones into the holes?
Here's the thing.
Yesterday.
Let me tell you something.
Yesterday.
My daughter had school in the morning.
She had half a day of school and then went directly to ballet, and I joined her at her ballet class, and she tore ass in ballet for 45 minutes.
She ran at school, right?
She goes to ballet.
She's four.
She mostly runs with a scarf.
She runs and runs and runs and runs and runs, and you know what?
She is good and tired when it is time for bed.
I think part of the problem is we are not tiring out our children enough.
That's exactly right.
It's like Gibson.
Look at Gibson.
Gibson seems like he's mostly happy.
It was so nice to see Gibson.
But what would make Gibson happier is if the world would allow him to be exhausted.
When's the last time Gibson was really satisfyingly exhausted?
This is a problem you've addressed.
If Gibson had a place where there were rabbits who needed to be chased.
Mm-hmm.
Gibson would have a job.
Gibson would find his duck.
And the thing is, I drive around the city of Seattle and all over the place, you look through plate glass windows at perfectly healthy adult people on treadmills and elliptical machines and stationary bicycles.
And they're powering nothing with all that wattage.
Yeah, that's right.
They are creating electricity.
It's going nowhere.
They're sitting there.
They're watching television.
They're using electricity rather than generating electricity.
They're not doing a fucking job.
Well, they are creating heat.
Ugh.
listening to the black eyed peas give me a fucking break then the heat needs to be dissipated and we're using more air conditioning and fans to blow this heat that they're making instead of using that heat to power their buildings or instead of using that heat to lift logs up trail these people are just burning they're just burning food it's like we live in a quote unquote country with fucking 300 million little duchies
It's just – it's a goddamn shame that there's not somebody who can come together and bring together all of these sources of energy and non-energy into one place.
And I'm just going to say, you know what?
You're opening my eyes to all of this.
There needs to be a lot more fucking exhaustion in this country.
There does.
That's exactly right.
And the problem with this is that anymore, if you say, all right, here's the proposal, national program, all kids have to do this, all kids.
Oh, my God.
You're going to hear from every... Can you imagine?
You're going to hear from both sides.
You're going to hear from the people... We just bought a minivan.
We just bought a minivan.
It's so special.
He's such a little flower.
He can't do it.
And then you're going to hear from the people who are like, our kids are being... We're homeschooling our kids to believe that God made the universe in four and a half days.
And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Everybody's...
Every kid is a fucking special flower in this country.
And what you need is somebody with the will to say, your kids are useless, stupid little fucks, just like every other kid.
And they need to be tethered to some kind of...
some kind of old that they need to be yoked to usefulness that's exactly right they need to be yoked to to some kind of water wheel they want that they want that duck and they don't know it you know the kids our age our kids are you know a few years apart but they they want limits they don't know it and if they don't want limits we're going to make them want limits
For the first three weeks, there'd be so much crying.
Oh, God.
So much crying.
So much whimpering and whining, and people would be saying, where's my PlayStation?
And people would be saying... And you'd be saying, thank you for contributing to the saltwater slurry.
That's right.
You'd be saying, lights out in 15 minutes.
Let me capture your delicious early tears.
At first, they would be rapping to each other.
They'd be like, yo, here's my rap and shit.
They'd be talking to each other in their youthful patois.
But by the end...
By the end of the first year, they would all be speaking like Walt Whitman, and they would have woodsman skills.
They would be so strong.
They would have interesting stories, but they wouldn't tell them.
That's exactly right.
Keep them to yourself.
They'd stare into the distance, and they would seem wiser than they were.
And then they would start ninth grade, and you would say...
US history.
And they would open their books with their pencils at the ready.
Hungry.
Hungry for history.
Hungry for history.
And you know what?
If you can't pull up those fucking pants, maybe we will suture them to your midsection like a fucking gentleman.
Pull up those pants.
You know what?
You know what?
You lose pants privileges.
You're going to go make trail with no pants for a week.
This wouldn't even be a problem because they'd start off that first month at the National Park and their pants would be hanging down.
You could see their underpants.
And then they would realize that the first time
The first time a wolverine came out of a pool.
That this was not some downtown thing.
You don't pull up your pants with one hand and hold your fucking energy drink with the other and do that kind of waddle.
No, you make a belt out of rope that you wove yourself and you hold your pants up.
You're saying, you know what it is?
Here's your extracurricular activity.
You go out and cut a little bit of jute.
maybe if you're lucky and you can make a belt or here's the other thing you get those wrappy pants that are down around your down around your ass you if you go out i understand that arizona is warm but they're certainly going to need to build trail and a lot of places with humidity have you ever had maybe at camp have you ever had a really really really bad heat rash
Oh, I get heat rash like you wouldn't believe.
You and me both, buddy.
And I'm just saying, if you're 13 or 14 and there's not a goddamn unguent in sight, you're going to think twice about rolling hip-hop while you're making a trail.
You're going to pull up those pants, you're going to stick your little fingers into that log and pull out a goddamn wasp nest, and you're going to be grateful, you're going to be quiet, and you're going to keep all those stories to yourself.
Every one of the bunkhouses, at the end of the bunkhouse, there's going to be a tin can full of baby powder.
That you have to share and you got to make it last.
That's right.
There's a tin can of baby powder and there's a little bit of hydrogen peroxide and that is the entirety of your medical kit.
Oh, that is good.
If it can't be cured with baby powder and hydrogen peroxide, then...
If you discover some roots, berries, and twigs along the way to the worksite that might help you, and I don't see you bend down to get them, and you could make those into a simple poultice, good on you.
But you know what?
Here's the thing, Tyler Heraclitus.
I understand that you want to go to violin camp.
We'll worry about that when you come back from the trail and you've fixed your rash.
John, I think you're onto something very important here.
Give me five things that have been useful to society that anyone that age has done.
Maybe Mozart.
Yeah.
Maybe Mozart, but Mozart probably could have made some trail too.
He wouldn't have been such a fuck up in his 30s if he had gone ahead and made some Viennese trail.
That's true.
I mean, it is debatable whether Rambeau actually helped or hurt the progression of society.
But I would put him in the class of somebody that, okay, good.
Like he was able to write some books.
He was very relaxed, very relaxed.
He ruined some people's lives.
You know, even even he in his 15 minutes at the end of the day where he could write in his on his yellow legal pad that are handed out, you know, like I think every kid would get a legal pad.
Would you get a certain amount of paper and like a golf pencil?
Yeah.
You get a golf pencil and a legal pad and you keep it in your foot locker and you can write your, you can write your memoirs.
You can, you can write like teary letters to home.
But of course, after the first month or two, those teary letters to home would, would, would stop.
And you'd start to, you'd start to get letters.
Uh, the kids would start writing letters like dear mother and father.
Today we summited Mount Adams.
And, uh, while, while we were there, we improved the trail.
Love your son forever.
You know, I got two big problems in addition to all these other problems with these young people.
And that is that they get too much stuff to themselves and they got too many things they can rely on other people to do.
If I may say, John, and I don't mean to give you a note on this, but I think your WPA project, it should require a lot of awkward sharing and constant uncertainty.
Yeah.
Right?
So first of all, yes, there is some baby powder in there.
At first, some days there might be a tablespoon full.
And then there might not be any for a month.
Well, no, wait a minute.
You're getting very psychological about this.
Am I?
Sharing and uncertainty.
So here's the thing.
You come back and you want to get your – now what?
Half sheet of paper.
That's right.
And half a golf pencil.
That's right.
You know what?
Now there is one footlocker for everybody.
While you were out making trail, there's one footlocker, right?
Also, you write a letter to your parents.
Maybe we don't send it sometimes.
I see.
So today at lunch, everybody gets a peanut butter sandwich.
Tonight at dinner, everybody arrives in the mess hall.
There's one live chicken.
Right?
If you want continuity in your life, enjoy that in ninth grade.
I think you should gaslight the shit out of these kids, especially the first year.
I was not thinking that this was going to be like Terror Dome.
It's a little like The Prisoner.
We want to get good, solid work out of these kids.
I don't want to terrorize them.
Oh, come on.
Really?
But I think that the extent of their media should be 16mm films that were produced between 1950 and 1965.
And at night, everybody spends a little time.
Let's say on the weekend, you get to watch a film.
And it's...
It's like a film about what to do in the event of a nuclear attack.
Or it's a film about the dangers of marijuana.
Because that might still be relevant.
You're not reading the news.
You're not aware of what's happening in the quote-unquote outside world, the extra trail world.
Everybody should sit and watch the same film strip.
Crisscross applesauce.
There's no electricity there except as generated by a coal-burning...
Or maybe it's Tyler Heraclitus on a goddamn treadmill that he had to make out of jute.
Oh, my God.
Okay, here's one more thing, John.
Again, I really – in no way do I want to give you a note on this, but here's my only thought.
How are guys able to break – I'm not saying this is prison, but how are guys able to break out of prison?
They're there for so long that they learn.
all of the patterns.
They learn which guards are certain ways.
They learn when people walk by.
They learn when the towels get delivered.
They learn when the new shivs are handed out.
They learn enough about these patterns that they can know it inside and out, right?
The pattern never changes.
And that's when they're able to capitalize on it.
That's when you're able to, what do they call it, ganking, right?
You stab a fish or something like that.
Stab a fish, yes.
So here's all I'm saying to you.
I feel like Paul Schaefer all of a sudden.
Yes, you stab a fish.
Actually, I have a note on Paul Schaefer here that I would love to come back to in just a second.
But no, you're giving these young people too much credit because – Am I?
Well, in the sense that in sixth grade, I believe that most minds, most young people's minds are still malleable enough that you can create an entire reality.
All the more reason to malleate it.
Well, but you create this reality in which the idea of escape is not – it does not even occur to them because it is their new – this is their new life.
There is no – I mean for that first month, yes, they are trying to make it over the wire.
John, I don't think you've been – Because they want to get back to their Bratz dolls.
You sound like a man with all due respect who has not been around that many seventh graders because here's how life works with a seventh grader.
Okay, Tyler Heraclitus.
Now listen.
You have to be home early tonight.
Okay.
Okay.
They come in at 10.30.
You go, that wasn't early.
You say you have to be here at 7.
They step their foot onto the grounds at 7 and then walk away.
These kids are weasels.
They're like little lawyers.
And they will pick up on any part of the pattern.
And you know what?
They will look for your weakness.
The reason they act that way is that no one has basically put them into a yoke and encouraged them to pull a 500-pound log up the side of a mountain.
And do you start them out maybe on a log you're pretty sure they can't actually pull?
Well, they go to a boot camp, certainly, where it starts out potentially as like, these are kind of fun activities.
You're going to have to learn how the camp works.
Yeah.
These are fun activities at first.
Like, hey, let's all jump in the mud.
Let's make our own bed out of straw.
Yeah, let's like do some fun.
And there are going to be a lot of people that are grousing and like, ah, this sucks.
I hate this.
And, you know, the food is pretty good at first.
And then, you know, it's not boot camp like in the military where they try and break you.
Oh, you don't want them to get to the point where they immediately try to kill themselves.
You want to give them just enough of a soak in that warm water that the pores start to open a little bit.
And that's when John gets in.
It's camp at first.
It's fun camp, summer camp.
Oh, my God, John.
Oh, my God.
This is it.
It's camp.
And they don't realize.
This is how we get – you know what?
Maybe avoid – until people in our culture and society understand and embrace what this is bringing to our wider Weltanschauung, maybe it is just camp.
Maybe it's free camp.
Maybe it's Obama WPA camp at first, and you come.
You're going to have some fun.
Get outdoors and get some fresh air.
Right.
And this is going to be good for your kids.
It's a weight reducer.
Or if your kid is depressed, send them to happy camp.
ADD and the Asperger's.
ADD and Asperger's.
These camps will nurture your child.
Organic food.
That's right.
Very organic food.
And then after a certain point of time, it's like, okay, now we're going to do the log toss.
Now we're going to do the log carry.
Now we're going to do the log drag.
And it becomes like a ropes course or something, right?
Where you're going to go out and it's like, trust, trust, trust exercises.
And then suddenly one day you come back, the cabin is not gone and you're ordered to sleep on a rail.
And they say, what do you mean?
They say, figure it out.
You say, figure it out.
What's amazing about our national parks is that they're actually very fun.
eventually this is the thing that i would like even adults to know that there you that you can have fun there and in ninth grade when you return to your parents you can ask them to take you there although probably you should you should probably keep it to yourself when you're ninth grade you'll bring your parents there and you'll say you see that zip line i built that zip line and i'm sorry for everything i'm sorry for all the pain i caused you mother and father then you get a greeting card let's read my report on william henry harrison that i wrote by lamplight
Was he the 30-day president?
Wasn't he the 30-day president?
Was that Harrison?
William Henry Harrison.
But there was one president.
He got sick.
I think like Kennedy, he didn't wear a hat during his parade, and then he got sick, and his entire presidency, he was sick, and then he died.
He was like the Pope John Paul I of American presidents.
That's correct.
See, now back in Ohio and Cincinnati, my friends went to William Henry Harrison High School.
Did they really?
For a month.
Then they were killed.
They were given like some kind of pneumonia?
Do you remember that when Pope John Paul I – do you remember like because the previous pope was a Pope John?
I forget which one.
But anyway – There was John Paul I, right?
Yeah, but I mean before him because that guy – was that like the Vatican II guy?
This guy had been pope fucking forever, remember?
Vatican II pope was –
I think.
Or Paul?
George?
Might have been Pope Ringo.
Pope Ringo.
Pope Ringo had been around forever.
I remember this.
It was about 1970, what?
78, 79.
And it was such a huge deal.
It goes, oh, we're going to have the smoke and everything.
And he died like a month later.
And they had to start all over again.
It was crazy.
And that's how we got Pope John Paul, too.
And then he, again, now he was like Pope George Martin.
He was just around forever.
A, just in passing, I have a friend who tried out for the Foo Fighters.
Excuse me.
Tried out for Foo Fighters.
And he said it was a great experience.
He said he enjoyed it a lot.
Who was this guy?
My friend Stephen Fox, the guy I played in that 80s cover band with.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Stephen Fox.
Yeah, good man.
And he – good man in the corner and a fantastic guitar player.
The only one in the band who would ever learn the parts.
Very, very gifted guitar player.
like like like colton he can basically what's the opposite of sight reading hear play he could hear play pretty much anything play by ear thank you like like like mozart uh but my other story was i've been watching this uh video over and over of uh foo fighters when they were on letterman in 2000 right after he came back from surgery i don't know if you're a fan but i think they're a great band i think the drummer's just mind-blowing he's a great drummer he's amazing and you know again drugs
Drugs.
Drugs.
Drugs, really?
Drugs.
Yes, he overdosed a year after that performance.
But then Dave sat by his bed.
Sat by his bed until he got better.
Oh, what a nice thing.
I've found Dave Grohl to be one of the nicest people in the rock music business.
He seems real weird, but like a real guy.
Yeah, he's a weird guy who got super rich, and he recognizes that that is weird.
But also, he doesn't seem like he makes an attempt to cover up.
He isn't deliberately peculiar like fucking Jimmy Corrigan, but he also... Is that his name, Jimmy Corrigan?
Yeah, the world's smartest boy.
Smartest boy in the world, yeah.
And the drummer with the heroin, Rusty Brown.
Rusty Trombone?
Anyway... Did you know Grover Cleveland was president of the United States two non-consecutive times?
There's a funny joke about that I heard.
What's the joke?
I can't remember.
Was he the one that was killed by the Eastern European guy?
I might think of McKinley.
Most presidents come from Ohio, it turns out.
That is true.
More presidents from Ohio than any other state except maybe Virginia?
Land of Lincoln.
Ohio.
A lot of people live in Ohio.
You don't realize that.
That's right.
I live in Cincinnati, which is almost in Ohio.
I grew up in Cleveland.
I was from New York.
This is the kind of thing I would learn in ninth grade.
Whoa, easy there.
So here's the thing.
And this is – I've noticed this for years, and I'm curious about this.
So it looks like you guys did not deal with this on – oh, shit.
What was it on?
Oh, when you were in Harvey Danger.
What were you on?
Were you on – was it Craig Kilborn or Conan or what were you guys on?
Yeah, Craig Kilborn.
Craig Kilborn.
Not a nice guy.
Kind of a dude.
He seems like a homemade dick.
Yeah.
Yeah.
yes exactly so i think he's gonna go to mike love camp if i get my tall guy good for him okay so here's the thing they get out david letterman has just almost died from like super duper heart surgery and he makes you can go read about this on the internet it's another nice dave girl story uh is that is that when he came back for the first time to do his first show after coming back he had one request he says i want the food fighters my favorite band to come and play my favorite song and the story goes who says this letterman
This is 2000 after his heart attack.
He came back from his quintuple bypass.
I don't even understand how you can have a fifth chamber.
He comes back and he says, I really wish my favorite band could come and play my favorite song on the show.
Story goes, the Foo Fighters were in fucking Brazil at the time.
i think this is correct and came back and played everlong on his show and it's really really good but there's that part when they go into you know there's the open and there's a part like you know three quarters of the way through where it kind of goes into that vamping on that and the part with all the voices right and of course they're playing on letterman so at that awesome tense part of the song what do you hear
Paul Schaefer.
Because fucking Paul Schaefer plays on every goddamn song.
I mean, you see, they might be giants.
Actually, you know, they might be giants playing along with Johnny Carson's band.
I can highly recommend it.
So it's a beautiful they play Birdhouse in your soul with a very under under rehearsed Doc Severinsen's orchestra.
But it's still glorious.
It's glorious.
You could see Flansburg's eyes are lit up that he's playing along with this giant band on TV.
This is on the Internet.
oh yeah i think it's birdhouse in your soul on johnny carson um anyway i'm just saying now now you if you were to show up and on letterman's uh on letterman's show and boy i still love that guy but but but how do you think it works i mean it seems like it's gonna come up at some point they're gonna say oh hey you know you and your band are gonna come out or you know you by yourself you can understand if they wanted to if will lee i don't know if you still want the band want to play all
No, my understanding is that the assumption is... The assumption used to be that Paul and the band were going to play with you unless you either said... Unless you had enough authority to say, no, thank you.
I think nowadays, Paul and the band are... They're probably checking Twitter on their phones.
I don't get the sense that they play with young bands.
Boy, that always used to grin on my nerves.
When Robin Hitchcock was on there doing Last for Dawn of the Wasps, and...
and the world's most dangerous band is jamming along and they're good they're really i mean the thing is you know what's his name the guy with the yellow guitar like he's he's great like they're all they're great but then paul schaefer his his keyboards are so fucking loud now how is he still alive paul schaefer he's the keyboard player in the band how is he still alive first of all he's canadian and so that exempts him from a lot of the ways that people die from thunder island
Is that an Elton John song?
Thunder Bay?
That's the one.
Thunder Island.
Okay.
But also Paul Schaefer, well, first of all, he was a blues brother.
Paul Schaefer also... I think he was an adjunct blues brother.
Actually, the truth is he was the musical director for that, I think.
He was the musical director of the Blues Brothers, yeah.
I mean, Paul Schaefer, who knows?
Paul Schaefer probably has an aluminum heart.
I'm up to pie on Katie bars.