Ep. 207: "Spectacularly, She Schleps"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Good.
Yeah?
Yeah, super.
Sorry I'm late.
Oh, you know, it happens every week.
Well, you know... Literally every week.
The thing about...
Being late is... Yeah, I would love to hear this.
It's just, you know, it's time is a flat circle.
Oh, I see.
Yeah, time is a bubble.
Is that what it is?
Why is my bubble always here at 9.59?
Time begets time.
Oh, man.
You help a lot of people.
How you doing?
Time after time.
Did you have to do stuff or is it just the usual?
No, no, I had stuff to do.
That's the worst.
Yeah, there was just a little bit of stuff.
This is an exciting episode.
This is episode 207 of the show.
207.
207 was my laundry number when I was in military school.
Do you remember the mailbox number when you were in college?
I think so.
Yeah.
Oh, gosh.
You know, you get these certain three-digit numbers that just float around.
I want to say, actually, you know what?
I've got the door from it right here.
I stole it when I left school.
Roof?
Yeah, I stole the door off my, yeah.
It still has a sticker.
You saw it.
It's got a little old-timey door with the window.
Oh, yeah.
It's still got the J.R.
Bob Dobbs sticker on it, and I think it still has the Columbia House sticker for U2's war.
So what number was it?
I'll find out.
Hang on.
Yeah, yeah.
Do, do, do.
Okay.
The lesson of this, listeners, is to steal the things that mean something to you.
Yeah, it'll mean more to me.
You know what?
I should have said it because I was right.
289.
289.
Yep.
289, also a great Ford engine.
Is that right?
Yeah, the 289 was a hot rod Ford motor.
Oh, hot rod 289.
The 289.
Is that cubic inches, John?
Yeah.
It doesn't seem like a big motor compared to like a 350.
Or a 456.
Or a 456, but a 289, 455, 456, whatever it takes.
Double barrel Hemings.
Yeah, Heming.
You got to want to bore your Hemings.
You got a Hemi and a Hemings.
A Hemings is where you would sell a Hemi.
Yeah, you put some thrush on the transmission.
Yeah, you put a little thrush, put some armor all on the tires.
Got a dose of thrush from licking railings.
Were you a big Bell and Sebastian fan?
I remember when Bell and Sebastian took over the world.
The first, I would call them the first twee.
Aren't they the first twee?
I would call them more mopey.
When I think twee, I think of Cub or I think of maybe the raincoats a little bit.
Oh boy, Cub and the raincoats.
You know what Cub is?
Cub is everyone's your friend in New York City.
Now, I don't know why I would sing a Cub song as John Flansburg, but they're the ones who originally did that song.
It's virtually tuneless.
It's delightful.
Well, you know, that's a John Flansburg feature.
Oh, which part?
The tuneless?
Well, no, no, no, no.
But that song is a big feature for him in their set.
I can't imagine anybody else having written that song but him.
And alas, it was not.
No, it's a good-ass song.
It's a really good-ass song.
Yeah, the ass of that song is good.
That's a good-ass song.
Let me go back in the stack.
Bell and Sebastian.
Yeah, Bell and Sebastian.
I got into them on their second or third.
I think I got in on the Green album.
Yeah.
It wasn't the gray one or the red one, but I came to love the gray one and the red one.
But that doesn't really seem like your kind of music.
I...
I was, you know, I was, let's say I was Belle and Sebastian adjacent.
Oh, sure.
You were in the room where it happens, yeah.
Yeah, so I was, you know, I was feeling that.
I was feeling that.
There's songs, they do a thing that I love.
You know I love a mid-tempo power pop song?
I do.
I do.
I do know that.
Where if you do it too much above mid-tempo, it now becomes like a Cheap Trick song.
Well, some Cheap Trick has those, too.
But what a reason I love a good Teenage Fan Club song that's like a mid-tempo song.
That's exactly what I was about to say, Teenage Fan Club.
Yeah, you take something like Everything Flows.
A good mid-tempo pop song.
If Everything Flows were any faster, it would not be my first favorite song in the 90s.
Now with Bell and Sebastian, they do something different where they're like, they've got this kind of like propulsive.
It's really, it's like downbeat Arthur Lee's love in some ways.
Like that song, if you're feeling sinister, it's basically alone again or, you know.
Wow.
You are dropping some pop music vocabulary.
I think I had too much coffee.
I cannot keep up with it all.
You have mentioned 42 pop culture references and it all has just sound like made up words.
Let's get this guy in front of the crowd.
Yeah, totally.
When I got the parking lot lines, that was my favorite.
Anthony went to a Catholic church because... But if it was any faster... You know the song, Again Alone Again?
No, I don't.
I don't know anything that you're saying.
no idea what you're talking about does it really just sound like word salad yeah i'm sure that i'm sure that i was in some places where these musics were happening but i do not remember them by name have you ever heard the band love uh of course okay well they do that their famous song their famous song which i which i but you're the famous song donk to donk
You're referencing that song in reference to another song.
It's like songs I don't know all the way down.
I lily padded a little hard there.
Yes.
Yes.
Okay, never mind.
It's not important.
No, we came out of the gate and you were like, music episode.
And I was like, it was like you were waving a dildo in my face.
And I was like, I can't be in this music episode.
It's only three minutes long.
And I'm already just like, wow, talk about Led Zeppelin.
They're funny and literate.
Now, see, I'm going to guess that that's a band Sean liked.
That seems like a very Sean kind of band.
Well, that... Bell and Sebastian, not Arthur Lee's Love.
Early 2000s, there was a lot going on that it wasn't over my head or above my pay grade.
It was just that I was... There was a moment where I suddenly felt behind the curve and everything got way softer and prettier.
Mm-hmm.
But the soft prettiness wasn't, it didn't convey like either softness or prettiest.
It was like a prettiness.
It was aggressively quiet and aggressively soft and pretty, I felt.
I didn't know where to go with it.
That's me and what they call post-rock.
I've never understood...
post-rock, and I tried, because I really felt like that was the jazz of the late 90s.
Yeah, post-rock was the jazz of the late 90s.
Post-rock is going to make indie rock look like college rock.
Yeah, no, post-rock.
I didn't get it.
I mean, I tried the tortoise.
I tried the car band.
What was the other band?
But there were all those bands, and it was just a bunch of, I don't know, it was like vibes.
Vibes and brushed drums and motor noises.
I mean, you're describing American Analog Set, except minus the motor noises.
Hmm.
American Analog Set.
Actually, the Vibes player for American Analog Set plays the Vibes on the Long Winters album, or the Long Winters song, Nora.
Nora.
Bing bong.
Bing bong.
Bing bong said the Vibes.
Bing bong.
Vibes looks hard to play, because you got two mallets in each hand, and you're playing octaves mostly, right?
No.
No.
No, I don't think so.
You're playing different intervals with two mallets in each hand?
Yes.
Do they call them hammers or mallets?
What do they call it?
I think they call them bongers.
Bongers.
I thought it was always an octave.
I thought it was like a Mac from Superchunk kind of octave thing.
No, I think you can do octaves, but it's like playing the piano.
A vibe is set up like a piano.
But it's between your fingers?
That must be so hard to do.
Well, it is hard to do.
This is the thing about being good at a musical instrument.
It's almost universally hard to do.
And no matter which one you pick and you just pick one and go for it.
There's a woman here in Seattle named Erin Jorgensen, and she is a very small human.
Right.
Like she's small in stature and also small in in all dimensions.
Little redheaded.
Oh, she's cool looking.
Girl.
Yeah.
And she has.
She's got cool tattoos.
She has very short hair and very good tattoos.
And she plays the vibes spectacularly.
And she schleps her.
I'm saying a lot of words that are hard to say.
And it's early in the morning for me.
Spectacularly, she schleps her vibes, which are a gigantic thing.
She slaps them all over town, and she's one of those musicians that will play a show with somebody and then schlep her vibes over and play another show.
That must take such commitment.
But she's spectacular, and she has marimbas, which are vibes.
I'm going to just throw this out there.
I don't know what I'm actually saying, but I think they are vibes made out of wood.
Marimba.
You got glockenspiel, you got the xylophone, you got the marimba, and you got the vibes.
And the vibes have pipes, I think.
Don't they have big pipes?
Vibes have actually an electrical component, which is something that is spinning underneath.
Like a Leslie?
Yeah, you can turn on and off.
And as the sound travels down the pipe, this little spinning flap will make it go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Like a Leslie speaker, basically.
That's so badass.
But it's an analog Leslie.
And you get a foot pedal for that.
Yeah.
At one point in the 1980s, my dad, who had always been a huge fan of Lionel Hampton,
Dad decided that his new instrument was going to be the Vibes.
That seems like quite a commitment.
A little bit of backstory.
He had no prior instrument.
So he decided it was going to be his new instrument absent a former instrument.
And he was, what, 70?
70?
Let's say 70.
70.
And maybe he was 67, let's say that.
And he's like, I'm going to get some vibes.
This was before he talked like this.
It was when he talked like this.
He said, I'm going to get some vibes.
I was like, I'm not sure where we're going to put him, Dad.
And where he put him was in the TV watching room, behind the TV watching couch,
I think imagining that he was going to play the vibes while watching the TV.
On the face of it, it makes so much sense.
You could just be watching your stories or looking at Price is Right, and you just bust a Little Hampton.
He only watched TV at night, so there were no stories, there was no Price of Right.
He could watch Magnum.
I don't think he watched Magnum, but he liked to watch war movies, right?
He liked to watch classic movies.
So all of a sudden, behind the couch appeared this enormous, shiny set of vibraphones, which he never again touched.
It's like a treadmill.
He touched them to bring them in the house, never touched them again.
So, of course, I would sit there and play the vibes.
Wow.
To everyone's massive annoyance.
And I would sit and, you know, like I have, like I've always done with every instrument, I refused any instruction or any information about them and just sat at them and made my own.
Blink, blink, blink.
Well, because it had this electricity and they were, you know, they were fairly loud.
You're right.
I'm thinking about it.
I'm thinking that wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah kind of sound.
Yeah.
And so I would play these things.
I never got the two mallets per hand business at all.
I just had one mallet per hand.
But I would do the rapid like do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do
since i never play the vibes but you're getting pretty good at it i've always been intrigued by the steel drum and there was a brief moment where he was you mean like the thing that the guys play like at a beach bar yeah that's right the tune does the like it's like a 55 gallon drum that's been tuned that's been tuned hammered the face has been hammered in such a way that it can play multiple notes and
That must be quite a conversation piece.
Well, the thing is, there was briefly a moment where I was super excited that I was going to get a set of steel drums behind the couch because short of the bagpipes,
There's only one instrument.
I mean, that is the instrument that if you don't know how to play it, you cannot imagine how annoying it is.
I'd put violin up there.
Oh, yeah.
Maybe French horn.
There's certain instruments you don't want to listen to somebody learn to play.
The more you mention that, I think that also is true of every instrument.
Okay, that's number two.
That's good.
Right?
So, oh my God, the potential of the vibes...
Because late 80s, right?
I mean, there was a lot of reggae music.
Yeah, reggae music, man.
And I love Kokomo.
That's right.
Ja Rastafari.
And so reggae music was happening in a big way.
Reggae rock music.
Reggae rock music.
Roots rock reggae.
Roots rock reggae.
And the idea that maybe I could find an entrance.
I love the idea of you and your father having a reggae band.
You know, like I'd get into that scene through the back door by being the one guy, the one white guy.
Sheriff John Brown always hated me.
Oh, yeah, and some rototoms.
But then he abandoned the steel drums idea, and it was never spoken of again.
And I think he abandoned it because you could not find steel drums in Alaska without considerable work, more work than he was prepared to do.
And then one day gave the vibes, I think, to my niece.
The vibes just disappeared one day.
And that's no small feat because they weighed as much as a Honda Civic.
But yeah, we have a long history.
And I think Dad realized at that point that what he needed to do to satisfy, to scratch that itch,
what he needed to do was just listen to Lionel Hampton tapes, which is what he'd been doing before.
Think about like Modern Jazz Quartet.
Modern Jazz Quartet.
Just so gorgeous.
Also, Modern Jazz Quartet was one of my favorite indie rock bands of the late 90s.
That's right.
They didn't realize it was too late.
I like the Brown album, but not as much as the Gray album, but sort of... Oh, yeah, yeah, right, right, right.
Yeah, sort of like Jimmy's Chicken Shack was the like...
version of... Oh, yeah, right.
You know, like Martin's First Wheel, which was... Martin's First Wheel.
I can't believe you know them.
I had their EP.
Yeah, I know.
It was printed right onto his shirt.
I never knew Martin, but I knew his first wheel pretty much.
No, I think Martin wasn't ever actually in the band.
I mean, that's one of those funny things.
It's like a Ned's Atomic Dust Band.
There wasn't an actual Dust Band in the band.
Was Ned's Atomic Dust Band an emo band?
Here's everything I know about Ned's Atomic Dust Band.
Ready, go.
Okay, number two, I would always turn it off when they came on 120 Minutes.
Number one, I remember Dave Kendall saying, Ned's Atomic Dust Band.
And that would be my signal to move to number two and turn it off.
Fast forward, fast forward, fast forward, fast forward.
In our dorm, in our house, the three of us would wake every Sunday.
No, every Monday, I guess.
After we got back from class, we'd watch 120 minutes, which we taped the night before.
And there were rules.
Now, wait a minute.
Who is Nigel Dormer?
Nigel Dormer invented the window.
What?
Oh, Nigel Dormer did.
Sure.
Oh, sure.
Nigel Dormer.
Oh, Nigel Dormer, the one from Cambridge.
Nigel Dormer invented the Dormer.
That's why it's called the Dormer.
That's right.
And John Crapper invented the floor.
And so Michael and Dan and I, we get home from our classes on Monday.
We get back to our house and we watch 120 minutes.
But there were rules.
This is not Nam.
This is bowling.
There are rules.
What are the rules of watching 120 minutes?
The rules of 120 minutes are there are certain things you can and must fast forward over and other things you don't.
Oh, you taped it on VHS.
It's the only way to fly.
I see.
You can never go back.
This is 1989.
And boy, was that show pretty good.
Yeah, it was good then.
I mean, it didn't hurt that there was just so much good music.
There was great music.
It's funny because when you said that, we were talking about like the quiet bands.
I'm just thinking about, in my head, this is a slight derail, but I'm thinking in my head, I wonder if it was just the late 80s and the late 90s.
I felt like there was such an explosion of music that felt like it was for me.
So you're saying it might have something to do with the lates.
Yeah.
It could be the lates, but it could also be just like what I'm ready for, what I'm into, what's available.
Wait a minute.
Let's trace this for a second.
The late 60s?
The late 70s?
Awesome.
Wait a minute.
It's the lates.
This is your time.
Put it out.
The lates.
Put out a record.
You should put out your next record that does okay, and I think in 2008,
18, that's when you drop the banger.
So you put out something in the 16s that's like, it kind of presages the new movement.
This is your beach slang EP.
This is where you put out the EP that gets people excited.
Have you listened to beach slang?
Oh, so much.
And what was the EP that My Bloody Valentine put out before... Before Loveless.
Before the good one.
Though they had Is Anything was one.
Is Anything, I think, was the record before that.
Oh, no, the one with... Is it Not When You Sleep?
But they had the one Glider...
i might have been glider i think it was the glider ep but i mean is anything is still like you could just listen is anything go holy shit like this holy this is head and shoulders above most i mean i like i like a fair amount of shoegaze but like i mean obviously level this is on a different level sure a totally different level and that's eight that's uh what that's 91
Yeah.
Okay, I might not have a point here, but all I was going to say was when we watch 120 minutes, I don't know why I'm telling you this.
207 is my laundry number.
Arthur Lee's love.
207 is... Now, I don't want to derail this.
No.
Shit, I'm looking back through my note cards here.
207.
So the area code of Seattle is 206.
That was last week's episode.
And 207...
is a number an area code that periodically comes up on my phone when somebody is phone spamming me oh interesting i do i could not tell you what that area code is it's just close enough to 206 as you can imagine what's one away main it's main and i'm periodically fooled oh yeah
to at least to almost answer it.
You know it's spam.
As soon as I realize what it is, I'm like, ah!
Could be your daughter in a well, though.
Better pick up.
I pick it up and I'm like, did my daughter go to Maine?
Is she in a well?
You want us to follow you, Lassie?
What?
The coffee's done brewing?
207.
So the rule was you could skip past.
We usually watch the beginning because they'd say who the guests are going to be and stuff like that.
I thought that 120 Minutes had the kid with the mullet.
His name was like Frankie or something.
First you had Kevin Seals.
Then you had Dave Kendall.
And then I think later you had Matt Pinfield, I want to say.
Did I ever tell you that I was in a play with Kevin Seals?
I saw Kevin Seals in the audience of Torch Song Trilogy.
What play were you in?
I don't remember.
It was a play, some play, some alternative nation play back in the day where there was like some fire breathing and there was a funicular in the play.
My goodness.
It was a musical.
And I played the harmonica at one point.
I think I might have been... I did quite a few plays in the 90s where I was kind of the guy in Seattle that you would stunt cast.
Oh, nice.
Like, oh, the guy from the Long... No, I wasn't in the Long Winters then.
The guy from... You know, I was just a hanger-on.
And they would put me in roles where I kind of would walk on.
Play a character named Tiny.
Yeah, or I would...
At one point, I was Cool Hand Luke.
Oh, man, really?
Yeah, where it's like, here comes Cool Hand Luke.
You were the titular Luke or you were Dragline?
I was Luke.
You were the guy who ate 50 eggs.
I was the guy that could, well, yeah, you can't.
Ain't no man can eat 50 eggs.
But I came out and was cool hand Luke-ing for a while.
But in this play, I played the harmonica and I maybe sang a song about a funicular.
Funiculi, funicular?
Funiculi.
Funiculum.
That's funny to three people.
And Kevin Seals, he was in Seattle at the time doing some plays.
Romans who are here go to their house?
No.
Conjugate that.
Oh, sorry.
Finiculate, finiculas, finiculatus.
Finiculatum.
Finicula.
So don't do it.
Don't do it.
I am lost.
Kevin Seals was in the play.
And Kevin Seals, we've talked about him before, haven't we?
I think we did.
Kevin Seal was such a hero to me.
Really?
He was perpetually stony.
He was very stony.
His sense of humor was so great.
He was the first person that appeared on television that I was like, oh my God, that guy would be my friend.
Like, oh, my God, Joel Hodgson, like he comes along and you're like, who is this guy?
There's nobody on TV like this person.
And I was so thrilled by him.
If he was on TV, I would drop everything and just watch him because he was such a he just seemed like such a such a friend.
And I'd never had that experience before that.
And I had never had that experience since then.
And I didn't want him to do anything else.
Right.
I didn't want him to go into film.
I didn't want him to.
I just wanted him to stay on MTV and continue to play.
We're the kids in America and have funny things to say about it.
I didn't want him to, I think I never wanted anything about that moment to change.
Except I wanted to stop looking like an uncooked scallop.
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All the great shows.
Other than that, he was perfect.
And then so I'm in this play with him.
And what?
He's like two years older than me.
He wasn't that old.
That's sickening.
And he's like he had a wife and kids.
He moved to Seattle.
He's still super nice.
He's exactly like he's exactly in person like he was on TV.
Oh, that's so nice to hear.
Yeah.
But he wasn't on TV.
You know, now a lot of those people that were on TV in the 90s.
They continue to have careers as like comedians or people.
You know what I mean?
Like Michael Ian Black was on TV in the 90s, but now he continues to just sort of be he's a character in the world.
Yeah.
Right.
And Kevin Seal didn't, I don't think, make that transition.
He's a stay-at-home dad.
Stay-at-home dad.
I'm reading it right now on the Wikipedia.
He lives there with his wife.
He does voiceover work and is a stay-at-home dad to his son.
Can you imagine?
Isn't that nice?
I mean, you're almost a stay-at-home dad.
Well, I don't really work.
I think you're nine one-hundredths.
Yeah, I'm a phoned in dad.
Aww.
And the rule was...
That if it was a song we had not heard, even if it was something that we were not into, even if it was Ned's Atomic Dustbin, you had to listen, you had to stay, and this may be where I got the habit.
You had to listen through the first chorus.
So you basically had to listen to a verse or two and the chorus.
And then by consent, the three of us would vote on whether to listen to the rest of the song.
And it was almost always like a skip it.
uh but that was was this yet the era of the super long intro or did that come in the early 90s that feels a little more like a 90s thing this is this is to me the heyday of mtv this is when i mean i don't know this i mean obviously there's the like totally just a coincidence that you were 19 well that when mtv first came along it was you
it was for hobbyists you had to really sit there and wait for a video you like to come on because they had like 200 videos period yeah and you know they all seem to be the motels only the lonely well or i ran you know there were the same videos you'd see over oliver's army the same videos you'd see over and over and over what was the band from new zealand that was fronted by the brother of the young kid that ended up being the crowded house guy uh split ends
Split ends.
I would wait for hours for a split ends.
Their videos are so weird.
Yeah, they were one of the ones that were, they were not in heavy rotation.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But boy, by the time a split ends video would come along, I would have seen I Ran like six times.
Yeah, but you would see, so like split ends, you'd see I Got You, you'd see Six Months in a Leaky Boat.
I got you.
And they're all in the painting in the background.
Oh, I love that video.
But by 1989, MTV was absolutely a thing.
By 85, MTV was a thing.
Oh, totally a thing.
But they were still showing videos.
They had good shows about music videos.
They had Headbangers Ball.
Oh, that's the one with Ricky Frankie.
Ricky Jay.
Ricky Savage.
Not Ricky J. He's the one that can... Where are these cards coming from?
I can't get rid of these cards.
Your card is a jack of hearts.
Ricky Rocket.
Ricky Rocket, that's it.
Is that right?
I'm guessing.
And then you also had, but you also had my favorite, MTV Raps, which is amazing.
So I'm going to call 1989 the banner year for MTV.
Although I have to say Fab Five Freddy did not have a lot of telegenic presence.
No, he didn't.
Yeah, that's a legendary character.
Fab Five Freddy.
Was he the Fab Five Freddy of the Blondie song?
Oh yeah, that's Fab Five Freddy.
Then it was hosted by Ed Lover and Dr. Dre, except it's a different Dr. Dre than the Dr. Dre.
But the thing is, I think there are a lot of Dr. Dre's.
Dr. Dre.
Dr. Dre, thank you.
Because Dre is short for Dreyfus.
It's not short for Dreyfus.
And that's a very, very popular name in the African-American community.
A lot of them, when they came to LSI only changed it because they didn't want to sound Jewish.
So they changed it to Dreyfusowitz.
It's not Dreyfus anymore.
It's Dreyfus.
No.
Richard Andre.
So that's what Dr. Dre is showing.
Okay.
And a lot of people were like, I'm the doctor of the rockers.
I'm not a real doctor, but I am a real Dre.
Exactly.
So Dr. Dre was popular, but how are you going to have a second Fab Five Freddy?
There's no way somebody else could be like, I'm also Fab Five Freddy.
see no matt matt finfield was doing it i think in the 90s when i was still taping it when i'd moved to tallahassee i i always liked how interested he seemed in the music but he didn't have the kind of like uh glitzy showbiz feeling but like dave kendall used to drive me a little bit crazy there's a tumbler that's just uh just what dave kendall was wearing on 120 minutes it's tremendous
I also wanted to share something that I don't know if I've talked about much, but reminds me of your vibe story.
For some reason, I think in 1980, my mom, who had taken piano lessons as a kid, she could sit down and play some piano.
She thought, oh, I'd like to get one of those organ, like a Sears organ.
I don't know if she bought it or was gifted it, but it was a very cheap Sears-ish organ at our house.
It had the two keyboards and it had the drums.
It had a foxtrot.
It had the little button keyboard that played chords.
This is the key.
It had the buttons.
So we got this, and she didn't actually play it very much, but it came with an electric organ with a bench, and the bench
Had some songbooks in it.
Including, like, basically, she didn't do it much, but I had absolutely nothing to do to fill my time.
This is in the Hall & Oates era.
And I would just sit down and try to play songs from the Fiddler on the Roof book.
But it's also, I would write little songs using the buttons.
Because you didn't need to know how to play an E minor.
You just needed to know what button hit.
And I learned stuff like G, E minor, C, D. I learned C, F, G, A minor.
This is two, three years before I had a guitar.
I never really think about this.
But we had a book of spiritual, like a Reader's Digest religious music book.
We had American classic songs.
And I would just sit...
And play terribly on this organ.
And turn the rock and roll beat up really fast.
So it's not a kind of punk rock.
So it turns out... That's how I learned.
That's basically how I learned.
I've been through accordion lessons.
I've been through trombone lessons.
I've been through so many different things.
Accordion lessons?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, that's right.
You were from Ohio.
That's right.
That's right.
None of it stuck.
I hated it all.
It wasn't until I was on my own with the organ that I would sit there and beat out some little tunes.
We had the same organ, and my mom bought it for the same reason.
He turned it on, and it sounded like... Yeah, exactly.
The fan wound up.
Yeah.
But my game on it was every once in a while, and not infrequently...
I would go in, turn the organ on.
The fan would come up.
I would turn on the marimba beat.
Or whatever.
I would set the tempo mid-tempo because that's the greatest tempo.
Yes.
And then I would start at the top of the button series.
And I would play.
I would just go down the row.
I would play each, I would push each button for like 16 bars while on the piano I would play some like little two or three note melody and then I would change to the next button and do the same thing and I would go all the way through three rows of buttons
With each row had, what, eight?
Were you looking to see what fit?
No, I was just playing a song.
Whoa.
That was every chord and playing this little sort of, and the melody would change depending on what chord I went to.
And it would change just by one note generally because you would hear like, oh, that note doesn't fit anymore.
Now I have to play that note, play this little thing.
And playing the entire song probably took 15 minutes because I had to make it, you know, I gave every chord.
It's almost like exercise, like running a circuit.
Yeah, right.
Every chord I would give 16 bars and I would just find in the little three notes, I would find the little melody and just work my way all the way through it.
And my sister would hear me doing it and come in and dance.
And this was like a thing.
And then I would get to the end and I would turn off the organ and I would be done.
Sometimes if Susan was really dancing and I was really having a jam in time, I would start over at the top again and I would work my way back through the buttons.
Isn't that amazing?
Yeah.
And it was, I don't know what I was learning.
I was just learning some kind of like, here's how little melodies change when you move from, I'm not even sure I understood what was happening.
that but that was to me that was part of the fun there's nothing about it like to me it was actually embarrassing what i was doing was not anything that i would ever do in front of people because it was so dorky but i mean you know and again this is one of those like this should be in my biopic but like that's one of those stories where like yeah you know that actually was the probably the single biggest thing that got me to figure out enough about music to fumble my way around
Well, like, well, no, no, because here's the problem.
I mean, we talked so much in the past about, like, learning guitar and how you and I both, like, never got that good at guitar.
But, like, but eventually you power through it to where you know the patterns.
Yeah.
To where you know these, like, you know, the 1, 4, 5 for wherever you go, because you eventually learn bar chords.
But you don't figure that out eventually.
At first, you just have to learn all these open chords and then figure out how they fit together.
Yes.
And the thing is, I'm not putting this well, but...
your body and your brain are not able to process the music part of it.
You're thinking about the mechanics of moving your hands around and trying to fret properly and keep in tune and all that kind of stuff.
But with the organ and with the buttons, I could just figure out pure chord changes.
And I would make these really fruity, psychedelic, blue sky, sunshine kind of chord changes.
And it delighted me, but it was so dorky, I would never do that in front of somebody.
Well, that's one of the things about having a sibling
is that your sibling is close enough to you that you cannot, excuse me, you cannot avoid doing dorky things in front of your sibling.
And so, like, the idea that I would, I mean, I'm sure there arrived a time when I would do my little organ jam and my sister would come in to dance and I was like, get out of here!
I'm doing my own jam!
I'm not even sure that ever happened.
I feel like that's one thing where... That's a nice story and a nice image.
Yeah, it's a little bit of a thing that you and your sister share that no one could be embarrassed by because it's never occurred to you that this is happening outside of your small world.
But yeah, the guitar still is a mystery to me.
the way all the music overlaps itself and interacts with itself.
And I still routinely discover something where I'm like, oh, whoa, wait a minute.
That thing is that thing?
Oh, it's still occurring to you.
It still happens all the time.
I will have been playing something for years, and I'll stop...
doing it for a second and try and figure out what it is, this thing that I've been doing for years.
Oh, because you've been doing it and it's in your hands, but you haven't really logically processed it or put it on a grid or something like that.
Yeah, it's not only in my hands, it's in my songs.
It's on my albums.
For a long time, I couldn't have told you what the actual chords were.
to the song Stupid Were.
If you'd asked me, I'd be like, I don't know.
It's almost like key commands.
I mean, that sounds silly, but when I try to explain to somebody how to do something that I've done on the computer, I have to change to a completely different mode of thinking because I'm so used to just doing this thing with my fingers.
I've never verbalized anything about what I'm doing, and I sound like a complete idiot.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, me too.
I don't know how to play it.
I mean, I don't know how to tell you how to do it.
Somebody asked me on the internet the other day.
They were like, how do you...
Like, what's the strum pattern to your song, It'll Be a Breeze?
And I was like, what?
Put the pick in your hand and strum the chords.
It's weird.
It's erratic.
It's one of your erratic sounding songs.
Well, so my initial response to him was like, yeah, put a pick in your hand and strum it.
I don't know.
Listen to it and strum it like it sounds.
And he wrote back and was like, okay, thanks.
And I kind of walked around for a couple of days kind of feeling bad.
Like, did I, that was, was I mean?
I mean, I don't understand even the question.
So I listened to the song and I was like, oh, I guess I see, you know, I guess I see what you're saying.
It's, you know, it's...
I don't even know the chords.
And so I started to play it.
It feels so natural, but I'm sitting here and counting it out.
It sounds a little weird.
So I don't know who this person was, but I turned my phone on myself and strummed it into a little video.
And sent it to the guy like, oh, that's so cool.
Here's how it is.
I mean, I don't, I'm not sure.
You know, what I realized is that there's a real up stroke, you know, strum, strum, you know, there's a, there's a very much a, a swing to the arm.
And as I started to do it, I realized there are a few songs that I have where I, where the arm does this kind of almost like a, a gesture of,
that you would do if you were pretending to be the conductor of an orchestra, like the kind of fake fluidity of a hand that's kind of swinging around with an imaginary baton going like... Right.
And as I'm strumming, my hand is actually kind of swinging around.
That's kind of a trademark move of yours.
The swinging around hand?
Well, after a strum up...
There's like kind of a flourish, a little bit of Townsend-y kind of flourish.
Yeah, a little flourish.
But the flourish is – I'm not conscious of it as a decorative element.
The flourish is there to give my hand something to do in the air before it comes down because there's a rhythmic, you know, and the hand's got to do something.
in those little zip but um and so it kind of goes up and spins or spins around a little bit like a like a little hummingbird like wee whoop and i don't i don't think about it it's just what's and i didn't think about it it just ended up like it just feels like a very natural strum and and then the hand you know the hand just naturally did that
Uh, but it's that type of thing that I couldn't describe it.
I don't know that I'm doing it and I did not learn it.
What do you do?
What do you call that?
I know.
And then you discover it and you're like, oh shit, you know, don't, I don't want to know about that.
Like if I started thinking about it, I'm going to get, I might get all screwed up.
Well, yeah.
And I mean, is that how it is with key commands?
Uh, it could be, it could be, but I'm thinking like, I mean, I was never very good at music theory.
I mean, I learned just enough to be dangerous, but you know, there are people, actually people who listen to the show who are very gifted in music theory and they can do stuff like, I still, I can't tell you the difference between six, eight and three, four time.
Cause I think it's got, just go to lowest common denominator.
It's all three, four.
Other people have very strong feelings.
I wouldn't know how to count that to know the difference.
You probably can, but like there's, um, but there are, there are people out there who would think about, and their head, I think they're probably thinking along the lines of like, how would I notate this?
You know, and you get those little, like even in the Beatles, think about something like, we can work it out.
Think about the time signatures on we can work it out.
It's not a super complex song.
Life is very short and there's a time for fussing and five, three, four, boom, boom, boom.
I have always thought, you know, and obviously bands like Rush.
So I think sometimes people are like counting in their head.
If you've ever been a serious like band nerd, you have to learn how to conduct.
You have to learn how to count.
And I don't know, I think that's probably part of it.
We never do that because we're like, ah, it's just a rock song.
Well, there's a lot of 3, 4 in The Long Winters.
Oh, I know.
Cinnamon.
And 6, 8.
And some of it is not where you kind of expect it to be.
Or, you know, the time signature stuff flips around.
Well, give me a kick.
School me.
What's the difference?
Well, see, this is the thing.
For years and years, I would just, when other musicians would be playing on that stuff with me or I'd be trying to explain it, I would just say, waltz.
It's waltzy.
Do a waltz time.
It's a boom, boom, boom song.
Boom, boom, boom, boom.
For anybody out there who doesn't know or care, the two general kinds of time singers, you've got four, four, which is almost all music we listen to in the West, which could basically be described as boom, boom, boom, boom, four, one, two, three, four.
Wow.
And then you know a waltz when you hear it because it goes one, two, three, one, two, three.
And that's three, four time, right?
But now six, eight, you got me.
I mean, 6.8, I know it when I feel it.
It feels different than 3.4, and I don't know how to talk about it.
And I ride things in 6.8 also, and I feel the difference, and it swings differently.
And I'm sure it has something to do with something where the math of it and the counting, you know, because music is math and math is science and science is nature.
And nature is love.
Right.
So I started love and I get to music, but I but it's like chutes and ladders.
Right.
Some people some days it's ladders, but it is it shoots.
That's right, and sometimes I just shoot down to the song without passing through science, math, and nature.
Just pure love.
I go from love to song on a shoot while the guys in Rush are climbing up the ladder.
Oh, sure, Jacob's Ladder.
Right, and I start at the top of the shoot where they start at the bottom of the ladder, and who knows what happens.
They arrive at 2112, and I get somewhere where I can't tell other musicians how my songs go.
I'm looking at the Wikipedia page.
I know you're a fan of Turn It On Again, right?
We talked about this.
Turn It On Again.
Turn It On Again.
6474-134-138.
Blarg!
The main part, all I want is a TV show.
I think that's 13-8.
That's nice.
Isn't that crazy?
13-8.
13-8.
And it's such a pop song.
Oh, it's so good.
My new song.
I can listen to that song on repeat.
Well, sure.
Oh, it's such a good song.
That's how you know a song.
Yeah, sure.
I don't know what has happened this week.
I've had too much coffee, but you are bringing so much fucking folk wisdom to our audience.
So all these things that seem really obvious, they're not obvious though.
That's why they need to be said.
I have this new song that hasn't been really properly recorded yet called Not Moving to Portland, and it's about not moving to Portland.
That song's been around for a pretty long time.
Well, it has.
It's been around for a really long time, but it's never been.
I get letters.
Sure.
On Scented Station.
Right.
Asking me where that song can be found because people want to listen to it.
And I say, I don't know.
It's somewhere.
You look for it on the Internet.
And they're like, no, no, no.
I want the recording of it.
And I go, that's it.
I'm sorry.
That's just what's there.
But I've been thinking seriously about recording it properly so that all the people that don't listen to Long Winter songs on YouTube.
That's such a good idea for so many reasons.
You know how the song goes.
All you got to do is get through the mechanics.
No, no.
I'm not saying it's easy or simple, but you get through the mechanics of recording that and shit, man, your juices are going again.
Shit, man.
Yeah.
Shit, dog.
Shit, dog.
Shit, butt.
So that song goes 4-4-5-4-7-4-6-8.
4-4-5-4-7-4-6-8.
You weren't consciously going like, I want to make a Rush song.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
I was just like, I wrote the 5-4 part first.
I really liked it.
And, you know, was jamming along on it.
And then if you if you stay in five four, that's fine.
But you need you need something to jazz it a little bit.
And five four to seven four feels amazing because it's just two more.
Right?
When you get into the longer ones, when you get into the higher numerators, you notice the weirdness less.
Like 5-4, when you sit there and listen to Take 5, the official song of white people everywhere, the official jazz song of the whites, like that really feels like a little wonky.
But when you get into the higher ones, you don't notice, like turn it on again, you would not notice that that is such a crazy time signature.
Well, here's the thing about 13-8.
Okay.
Right?
Yeah, yeah.
13-8 is... 13-8 is 6-4 twice plus one.
Well, I mean, most obviously, I think... Most obviously, it's 4-4 three times plus one.
Well, see if you're going to be like that.
Oh, no.
It's basically play three bars of a rock song and then add a beat.
Yeah, just add one beat.
So that added beat...
feels like that's how that's five four you know that's uh i mean the the extra beat is just is easy to throw in and the the rest just feels like four four the 99 of the tune if that's how you're playing it or if you're playing it six like you know you you do the pattern you do it three times and then you hit a little like but up
uh that's like that i feel like that's pretty county like everybody's kind of counting it until they until they're just feeling it and they're following the vocal yes um but that stuff is super fun and then you throw then then you go into like sound garden land and that's my least favorite part of disneyland sound garden land sound garden land sund garden land
See, that's the other band.
Soundgarden is... What was I singing?
You were singing the Pearl Jam band.
Oh, but I'm doing pretty news to the tune of Eddie Vedder.
And I don't like what you got.
And then he goes...
firm firm has anything backup on that yeah yeah because that was uh because they're both in the uh green river band that was the band when well eddie vetter was never in the green river band oh and either either was chris cornell so the guy with the hat and the bass was in green river
got the hat in the base was in green river and stone gossard was stone gossard see green river was pearl jam plus mud honey genius plus love equals jackie rogers jr but you're thinking of temple of the dog
I'm gonna reach down and pick the crowd up.
Which one is that?
That's... That's what that is.
And that was the one...
So that song... Boy, it's confusing.
It's like a Rat King.
It is a Rat King.
Very difficult to figure out all these bands.
That was the introduction that the world had to Eddie Vedder.
They'd never heard of him before.
And that music video of them, I guess, standing on a beach around a campfire.
The Hungry Song?
Yeah.
Oh, I thought it was the one before Jeremy.
Oh, yeah, but even Flo... So, my understanding... My understanding of that era, which, let me just jump out and say, is pretty comprehensive, is that Temple of the Dog...
came out that was chris court now any for anybody following along at home who doesn't care uh you need to start caring uh stop not caring is one of my that's one of my paunches right so wise right stop not caring stop not caring
So there was a guy in Seattle named Andrew Wood who fronted a band called, what the fuck were they called?
Mother Love Bone?
Mother Love Bone.
Mother Love Bone.
Mother Love Bone.
What about Mudhoney?
Is Mudhoney from Seattle?
Oh, yeah.
Keep it out of my face.
Keep it out of my face.
That's right.
Touch me, I'm sick.
Touch me, I'm sick.
See, they're in a whole different place.
But they got lumped in with all that.
You know, the lead singer of Mudhoney, he works at Sub Pop Records.
Huh.
He's still around.
That makes sense.
And, you know, they're all still around because Seattle.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Everybody's down with the cause here.
It's like a college town.
Those guys are definitely down.
They're down with the struggle.
But Andrew Wood was a very flamboyant lead singer of Mother Love Bone during the era where it was unclear whether Seattle was going to be...
Like a hair metal town or whether it was going to be something else like a shitty grungy town, which is what it ended up that ended up being popular.
Oh, there we go.
Mother Love Bone.
So Mother Love Bone was they were hair farmers and they were wearing scarves and eye makeup.
It's kind of glam.
Very super glam.
And it was coming out of the like poison, put a cherry on it, whatever L.A.
scene.
Oh, look at that.
They do.
I had no idea.
They look a little bit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Or like, you know, jellyfish minus pop.
They've got a kind of like a 60s throwback kind of thing.
Yeah, but that was what was happening in 89, right?
Everybody's wearing Paisley shirts with big poofy sleeves and type of guitars and like put a – look what the cat dragged in style like teased up hair.
And so that band also had – I mean they were like one of the big bands here.
Yeah.
At the time.
And Stone Gossard was also in that band.
And Jeff Ament was in the band.
So they went from the one band with Mudhoney.
Got it.
Where they were pulled in different directions.
Because if you look at Green River...
So it's half Mudhoney.
Steve Turner, the guitar player of Mudhoney, is in Green River.
There was also a band called Green Apple Quick Step, and I keep stumbling over them.
But so those guys were punk.
And then Stone and Jeff were like glam.
And in Seattle at the time, you could just do that.
You know what I mean?
You could just do that.
You could just have a band that was like half punk, half glam.
But then it turned into Mother Love Bone, which was all glam all the time.
All glam, no sham is what we used to not say.
Mm-hmm.
and and andrew wood was one of these guys that was like can i get the ladies up here you know he was like a david lee rothy kind of yeah yeah right and he was wait a minute wait for it wait for it chris cornell's roommate and best friend turns out turns out chris cornell's roommate and best friend
And Chris Cornell was in?
Soundgarten.
Her Sundgartenstein.
But Soundgarten was not especially glam.
They were much more, they weren't like punk either.
They were more metal.
They were Zeppelin-y metal.
Zeppelin-y metal, yeah.
But were the Melvins from Seattle?
The Melvins were from Olympia, Washington.
Okay, sorry.
All right.
And they repped South Sound pretty hard.
But the Melvins were, again, the Rat King.
For me, Melvins are more like Sabbath-y.
Well, yeah, like Punky Sabbath.
Punky Sabbath.
The Melvins were very influential because the Melvins were the band that Kurt Cobain wanted to be in.
They were the cool band that Nirvana was always sort of like, hey, you guys, can we carry your amps?
They were seriously, they were like the godfathers of that vibe.
But the Melvins had no time for any of this bullshit.
They weren't into glam.
They were doing their own South Olympia style.
That's the shit where they had moss growing in their nostrils and stuff.
That part of Washington...
is just, what is the equivalent?
There is no equivalent in California.
There are definitely equivalents in Oregon to this, it's like a college town full of anarcho-hippie.
Kind of like Santa Cruz?
No, because Santa Cruz is too clean and too surfer.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
Santa Cruz is oriented toward the water.
And in the sort of Olympia-Aberdeen nexus, it is also oriented to the water.
But it's like oriented to... More like a drag in the river for bodies kind of way.
Exactly.
Like you go out there, you're harvesting sea life.
And then you're bringing it back and selling it in order to pump up the tires on your mobile home because you keep thinking that you're going to put it behind the truck and trail it somewhere.
That's a Springsteen song.
You know what I mean?
Like, you know what, honey?
I need to get my tires filled.
And for my 19th birthday, I got a fishing license and a bag of pills.
One day, sweetheart, we're going to get out of this town as soon as I can get the tires on this thing pumped up.
And that means I go out to sea one more time.
Baby, this town rips the veins from your shrimp.
And I'm going to, you know what?
I'm going to get a license to harvest geoduck.
And when I get 14 geoduck, I'm going to sell them to Japan.
I'm going to get new tires on this rig.
And we're getting out of here.
We're going all the way to Squim.
It's Gordon's Fisherman meets Of Mice and Men.
Yeah, okay, right, except there aren't... Tell me about the rabbits, George.
Except there aren't even, like, the colorful characters.
It's kind of like Old Greg from The Mighty Boosh.
Wow, nice pull.
I'm Old Greg!
You know about Old Greg?
I'm Old Greg!
Like, he comes up out of the sea, and it turns out he's Kurt Cobain's uncle, or whatever.
I'm Kurt Cobain's uncle, I'm Old Greg!
I get a mossy.
A mossy.
So Temple of the Dog was Chris Cornell's record that he wrote in tribute to his best friend Andy Wood, who had recently died of a heroin overdose.
He was the first big rock star of the Seattle scene to die of heroin.
Was he the last, John?
He was not the last, my friend.
In some ways, he set the tone, which was, hey, if you're going to be a big deal in this town, you're going to have to die of heroin.
But so Temple of the Dog was the big tribute record that Chris Cornell wrote.
And then right at the last minute,
Uh, his pals were starting this new band with this kid from California named Eddie Vedder.
And very generously, I like to think it was a very generous move on Chris Cornell's part.
He was like, well, why don't you sing on my tribute record to Andy Wood?
Wow, he sang lead on that song.
A guy you never met, right?
I mean, if Eddie Vedder met Andy Wood, it was not.
This is behind the music, my friend.
I did not know these things.
Yeah, whoa.
No, Eddie Vedder wouldn't really have met Andy Wood because the reason that Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament even met Eddie Vedder was because their band with Andy Wood had just broken up because Andy Wood died.
And so they were like, well, we want to do this.
Let's form a new band and we'll put out a call for singers.
Right.
So Eddie, so Chris Cornell's like, yeah, man, why don't you sing on this tribute to my old best pal that was the singer of your bandmates old band.
And like, here you go.
Why don't you take the lead on this tune?
That becomes the big MTV smash that really touched off the whole Pearl Jam Soundgarden metal side of MTV grunge.
Ta-da!
Boom!
Stick the landing!
Seattle rock history!
Kapow!
Kaboom!
There it is.
And all those bros...
All those bros knew each other and were all bro pals back in the day.
And your good friend Jason Finn also knew all those bros.
Look at that.
Again, it always comes back to Jason Finn.
Jason Finn, he was there in his band Love Battery.
Right.
Who were not very good, let's be honest.
But Jason Finn, did I ever tell you the story?
We were walking down the street one time.
It seems like now many years ago, but he was probably already 33 years old.
And he's like, God, I'm going to get a tattoo.
I was like, do you have any tattoos now?
No.
Well, you're in your 30s.
Why are you getting a tattoo?
I'm going to get a tattoo of love battery.
I was like, Love Battery, your band that broke up 10 years ago.
He's like, that's right.
And so we walked into a tattoo parlor.
I don't even know why.
I don't know why I was there.
You just encounter him on the streets a lot.
You run into him a lot.
Yeah.
Many of your anecdotes involving Jason Finn involve you running into him on the street.
Yeah.
You run into it.
Well, you guys go have a little adventure.
That's what you do with Jason.
Oh, you have certain questions about what he's doing in that neighborhood.
Or he has questions about what I'm doing in that neighborhood.
But so we went into this tattoo parlor that was back behind the hair salon, kind of up above the Taqueria Express.
And he sits in the chair and he's like, here's what I want.
And he pulls out the cover art to his sub-pop release from 1990 or something like that.
And he's like, put that on my arm.
And it's the only tattoo he has.
Wow.
Wow.
Yeah.
And it was some kind of retro.
At the time, I was like, is this revisionist?
Are you putting this tattoo on you as though you had it on then?
Oh, I see.
I've had this shirt all along.
Yeah, exactly.
You know what I mean?
Like, this is your band, but you didn't get a tattoo of your band when it was a band.
Now you're getting it.
as post-band.
It would almost be like you'd have to Instagram it a little bit.
I mean, you know what I mean?
Add a filter.
Like, you wouldn't want the... Because he could afford some pretty good ink at this point.
You'd want to get the kind of shitty tattoo he would have had in 1990 to have it be legit.
But he said, no, it's not revisionist.
I just, you know, that band was very important to me and I want to commemorate it.
Good for him.
And what's really sad is that when Love Battery gets together now to play shows, I don't think they... I think they get a different drummer.
Not because Jason isn't a fantastic drummer, but just because Seattle music politics is weird, and I think maybe Jason left.
That's horrible.
That's like the world's least interesting O'Henry story.
Well, except Jason left Love Battery in a lurch when he got cherry-picked to be in the presence of the USA.
And that band he's still playing in.
Yeah, well, no, he's not anymore because the singer of the Presidents of the USA.
He does kids music now.
Decided he wanted to do kids music exclusively.
Casper Baby Pants.
That's right, Casper Baby Pants.
I follow him on the Twitter.
He's a very big deal and his music is very spectacular.
And he was like, you know what?
Being in a rock band full of people that are playing for grownups all the time means that I have to travel all around and play these shows for dummies and everybody's drunk.
I'll be flown in to make five or six figures in the studio for the weekend.
Yeah, but he's, you know, it's honestly like.
No, dude, dude.
He doesn't need the money anymore.
I'm no Casper Babypants, but believe me, I understand.
Yeah.
He's a guy that's like, I don't want to stay up until midnight to wait to play for a bunch of drunks.
I want to sleep in my own bed and I can make music for kids who really love it.
That's nice.
What are you going to do with Jason?
You got to put that guy to work.
Is he playing in a different band now?
This is the thing.
Jason needs a job now.
You should have him play with you.
Well, Jason thinks so too.
And I, you know, I love Jason.
John, he's a very good drummer.
He's a very good drummer, but that's not the issue, Jason.
That's not the issue.
The issue is that Jason was the band manager of the presidency of the USA.
He was the thing that kind of kept that machine rolling.
Oh, he was at DePaul.
Yeah, because Dave Minert, who used to be the president of the USA manager, they fired him for something because they were all too close to each other.
They were all in bed with each other.
And then Dave Minert signed the Lumineers and now is a million billionaire.
So Dave Minert got the last laugh on everybody in this town.
Because he just was like, you know what?
I'm band manager.
Let's see.
How about if I sign these guys?
Stomp, stomp, stomp.
As far as I can tell, did no work at all.
And all of a sudden they had sold like a million records.
A lot of money in that cell phone commercial music.
I was sitting with Dave and he was trying to figure out what his next project was going to be.
And at one point he said, well, you know, one of these days very soon,
A check is going to literally arrive in my mailbox for a million dollars.
And so I'm sitting here right now talking to you in a certain state, which is the state of someone who is working and has X amount of dollars, like the small amount that you would have if you owned a business.
But I've already earned this million dollars.
It just hasn't arrived in my mailbox yet.
And I was like, wow, this is a pregnant moment.
Yeah.
And like in that kind of situation, you get paid last, but there's a lot of other a lot of a lot of different monies have to move through different pipes, then be processed with apportionments made to different other people's monies.
And it might be quite a while before you see any of that.
Well, except he's the manager.
So he's the pipes.
Oh, he's the pipes.
He's the pipes, right?
The money moved into his pipes first.
He piped it out to everybody, but this was his personal cut of the money pipe.
I get it.
And so he knew he had earned it because he watched it go by the first time.
Anyway, the problem with having Jason Finn in the Long Winters is that we've talked about it many times, and Jason's played with the Long Winters.
But here's how the conversation goes.
Hey, Jason, do you want to be in the Long Winters?
Yes.
Okay, well, let's start talking about tour.
And he's like, all right, well, what kind of brand of cables do you use?
And I'm like, huh?
I don't know.
Smith brand?
No, no, no, no, no.
You can't use Smith brand.
Those are bullshit.
Tell you what, I'll handle that.
And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
You've been in the band like 11 seconds.
You've got to quit using those bi-directional cables.
You know, those are directional.
And so right away, he's managing the band.
And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, settle down.
I like those Smith cables.
He's like, no, no, no, no.
So it's not a musical problem.
It's just that he can't not manage me and I cannot be managed.
He's a border collie.
Yeah, that's right.
He's an Australian shepherd.
It's in his breeding.
The first thing he thinks to do is grab people by their pants and drag them through the yard.
Yeah, he's trying to get me to go through the gate and then turn and go through the second gate and then go up over the hill, go through a third gate and then have everybody like whatever, go into a corral.
And I am an eagle.
who does not want to work with the turkeys right uh and so you know i'm i'm in my cubicle and i have that sign posted on the outside of the door which is a real slap in the face to everyone i work with how can you soar with eagles if you're flying with turkeys yeah yeah god you're wise see that's serious business
and so what so and what we end up doing is going to dim sum and talking about something else that's smart but up until now i haven't there's not what you know what what band what band could i could i even have him be the drummer in yeah but i got an interesting text message the other day from the bass player of pretty girls make graves
who said, who was, as you know, the former bass player of the Murder City Devils.
Oh, yeah, right.
Okay.
I did not know that.
He texted me and said, hey, why don't we play some music?
That's a nice text message.
Right?
And I was like, whoa, like the Murder City Devils into Pretty Girls Make Graves.
That's a pretty cool kid music lineage.
Yeah.
that was like parallel lines with my music lineage, but sort of never intersecting.
I feel like I've seen the Murder City.
I feel like I've seen them at Bottom of the Hill.
Yeah, probably did.
Did they set their piano on fire?
Yeah, I'm looking at pictures here.
I don't remember piano fire.
That was kind of one of their signature moves later on.
They hired a piano player, a young woman who was very rock and roll,
and one of the things they did was set their piano on fire.
Oh, that's nice.
It's, you know, like you set your guitar on fire, that's been done a bunch of times.
But you don't have to move it, right?
I mean, it's the thing.
When you were talking about the lady who plays the vibes, I instantly thought of Ben Folds 5,
And the story goes that on their first tour, they actually toured with a baby grand piano.
So they would have to go think about the places you've gone and go like, oh, I got to take my amp up there.
And they would have a baby grand piano that they would have to carry up steps.
Idiots.
It's ridiculous.
Idiots.
You know, Keen, my good pals from Inglang...
They have a very, very special piano that confusingly no one else uses, which is the Yamaha CP70, I think.
which is an electric piano that has strings.
Oh, but it doesn't sound like Rhodes.
No, that's the thing.
The Rhodes is actually kind of a vibraphone.
That's a very different sound.
It's like it's hitting bars.
It is, yeah.
It's hitting little bars that go... Boy, are they ever heavy.
These things are so heavy.
Well, you think those are heavy?
Look up a CP7.
It's a piano.
Yes.
It's an infant grand.
But it's collapsible.
It collapses into like... Wait, this has strings and hammers in it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, but it's an electric piano.
How does it stay in tune?
Like if you're like going through Florida, how would it stay in tune?
This is the thing.
So Keen, this is their signature piano.
Okay.
It's on all their things.
Tim Rice Oxley plays it at every show and they arrive in a town and then a piano tuner comes and tunes their piano every night before the show.
Okay.
Which is not a small operation.
Sounds like a euphemism.
That's right.
You show up before the show.
You know what?
Tune my piano, baby.
Hit that low C. Lower.
That is an incredible deal, right?
Touring with one of those.
Talking about privilege.
My goodness.
I got home.
Well, this is the trick.
I got home and was talking to my brother, Bart.
And I was like, yeah, I just did this tour with Keen and they're playing this piano called CP70.
Because, you know, my brother's a professional piano player.
And Bart said, oh yeah, I used to tour with the CP70.
Well, Bart...
when he says tour he means travel in a ford van with no back seat like a like a like a black flag van and play at ramada inns across the northwest and i was like you play you tour with a cp70 that's insane and he's like yeah i used to tour with the hammond b3 with a row with a speaker a rotating speaker and
And he said we'd show up to the thing and I'd get my hand truck out and the other guys wouldn't even help me.
I would just load – I'd load the B3 and the Leslie in myself every night and load it out at the end of the night.
So I'm like, I got to see your CP70.
Yeah.
So he takes me down in his basement in Yakima.
Here's this piano, completely shredded, right?
All the Tolexes ripped.
It looks like it's been dropped off of a building.
It looks like the Toyota Hilux that was in the TV show...
What's the English car TV show?
Top Gear?
Top Gear.
There's that Toyota Hilux that they tried to destroy.
Oh, is that where they drive a yucky car?
No, it's not that.
They bought a new Toyota and they tried to destroy it so that the engine wouldn't start.
Okay.
And they actually dropped it from a crane...
And they drove it into a lake.
I mean, they destroyed this truck, and then they would get in it, and they'd turn the key, and the motor would start.
It was kind of like a running game.
Oh, to show how durable it was.
To show how durable it was.
Got it.
Okay.
Anyway, so Bart's like, yeah, I don't want that fucking thing.
It's taken up my basement, and he gave it to me.
Wow.
And right now, I have a totally trashed Yamaha CP70 in the closet of my back bedroom.
Oh, God.
And I don't know what to do with it, but I can't throw it away.
You could get rid of it.
Well, I could.
Yeah.
Shit.
Shit, dog.