Ep. 249: "Blank Knobs"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
I'm Murbles.
How's it going?
Good.
Do I detect in your voice a tone?
World weariness.
No.
Yes.
I stayed up a little too late watching TV, but I'm good.
Were you watching Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade?
No, but I like that one.
Were you?
No.
Oh.
No.
Nope.
I like it better than the second one.
Everything is better than the second one.
Well, and then there's the other one we don't talk about.
There's a third one that's even worse.
It's kind of a Godfather 3 type situation.
Let's say you had to watch that or Matrix 3 for all eternity.
You know, I've never seen the other two Matrix movies.
And it seems like there is a strong consensus that they are not very good.
And then there's a diehard group that thinks one of them is really pretty good.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
How do you stand?
I haven't seen the other two Matrix movies either.
You know, it's in that category of like, why listen to another My Bloody Valentine record?
No, I know.
I know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's frustrating sometimes.
I mean, Matrix is good, but yeah, I was a little bit old.
I was a little bit old for it.
Did I ever tell you the story of how I saw The Matrix?
No, how?
This came out in 1998.
1998, that's right.
I was walking down the street in Seattle, just boop-a-doop-a-dooping.
Come out in 98 or 99?
It might have been mainly in theaters in 99, but I think officially, let me look.
Oh, you know what?
99.
I stand corrected.
There it is, 99.
Yep.
No, you know what?
That's right.
That's right.
March 31st, 1999.
Oh, March 31st.
See, there it is.
And I had just learned that the Western State Hurricanes were breaking up because we'd gotten back from our South by Southwest trip, and I'd written a bunch of new songs, and I was really excited, and we met for our first band practice.
after we got back from the tour you know we got back and we we relaxed and didn't you know didn't get together for a week or two a couple of weeks and then it's like let's get back together band practice and we all show up and we've got some shows booked including our first ever headlining of the show box a really big deal in seattle wow and uh we're in the practice space and we get in there and we
And I'm like, oh my God, you guys, I've got like four new songs.
This is going to be amazing.
And the drummer and bass player have been meeting in secret and they say, and I, let me, let me, let me put this all in my head because I honestly think that we put our shit on and practiced.
We played and then took a break.
And during the break,
They said, we're quitting the band.
Well, kind of buried the lead a little bit there.
Yeah, it wasn't even, you know, they didn't like call and leave a voicemail or something.
It was just like...
And I said, what are we doing?
Why are we why did you why did we just practice for an hour and a half?
And they're like, oh, well, you know, who knows why they who knows why they were like they were.
But it turned out that they didn't because we'd gone on this week long tour, 10 day tour.
They they decided they didn't like touring and being in a band because they didn't have their own pillow every night.
And they had a job.
Their jobs lined up.
The drummer was going to be a copywriter for like a sports equipment company.
And the bass player was going to go work at Microsoft or something.
And I was pretty mad.
But exceptionally sad because I had.
I had staked my hopes on this.
You guys had a bullet.
You were going places.
That's right.
When they brought it to you, their reluctance to bring it up before practice was not indicative.
They felt strongly about this.
This was not something you could negotiate or talk them out of.
No, they were pretty smug dudes and thought that they had it all figured out.
I mean, they always acted like they had it all figured out, but they had it all figured out here, too.
They just, you know, this has been a factor...
A lot lately for me where you feel like your reality and someone else's reality just aren't sharing the same parameters.
Yeah.
Like the two realities don't have a hard time coexisting.
And of course they do.
They are able to coexist.
They're here in the world at the same time together.
It's June for me and it's June for you.
But in their cosmology, somehow, this breaking up the band didn't preclude continuing to practice.
And I think it was because, you know, we did have a show coming up.
I see.
That makes sense.
Well, except for, except to me, like, the show coming up.
is the whole point of the show coming up is that it continue our career in the job of playing shows like the show itself isn't isn't you know like it's not that we throw ourselves on the sword and make a sacrifice in order to play this show for itself there's only one reason to play the show and that is to continue to play shows although we did end up playing our final show
But I didn't want to, suffice to say, after they said we were breaking up the band, I didn't want to go back in and practice more.
That's understandable.
Let's just call it that.
Yeah.
But this whole, like, why is your reality so far from mine a thing is really, you know, it's really a moment where you have to
Break down your reality and say, where am I missing the piece?
Because they're, you know, I can't just be them.
Right.
There's got to I'm contributing some.
insanity to this too have to be still can't figure that one out it makes you wonder if if maybe we mostly got lucky for a long time and seeming to have the same reality and that the venn diagrams just happened to be like sailing over the same little area of the pool for a long time you know what i mean it makes you kind of wonder like i wonder if it's always been this way and i just never realized it yeah right well and and and and it makes you wonder like
How is it that I seem to be successfully sharing a single reality with a lot of people?
Is that also untrue?
Is it just that in most cases I haven't stumbled into the little hole in the ground where all of a sudden the vast reality
difference between our realities is revealed?
Do you see the same green, Merlin?
I know.
Could it be in a giant thumbnail?
If only there was some kind of a movie that you could have gone to around that time that would help clarify the idea that maybe reality isn't what it seems.
So, I'm walking down the street in downtown Seattle.
I have no idea why I'm downtown.
And I'm just, like, bummed.
I'd had an opportunity to go to South Africa and
uh that spring with the university of washington comparative history of ideas class and we were going to study the truth and reconciliation committee and my advisor jim klaus had said i don't want i don't want you down there as a as a student i want you to watch the students and then write a book about what happens like it was very thrilling it felt like a super secret spy mission to go do some world historical
college work and if I'd done it I would be very collegey right now probably and I went to the band and I said I have this opportunity to go down there and they said I swear to you this was in October or November of the following year they were like you can't leave dude the band is blowing up you can't just go for go to South Africa and expect to come back and the band will still be here waiting for you how long before the breakup was this
Well, we broke up in March and they were saying this to me in October, November.
And so I looked at my life at that moment, that crossroads where I was like, if I go left, I'm going to South Africa to write a book about the Truth and Reconciliation Committee.
That seems really heavy and cool and like what I've been aiming toward in my college life for a long time.
Something like cool.
Yeah.
But if I go right, I'm finally in a successful popular band that might have a shot at being rock and roll.
And I went to my professor and he was like, well, you know, this is one of those things you've got to choose.
And I said, I made the decision based on the fact that which thing is less likely to be available to you
Which thing is more strike while the iron's hot?
Like the shot of being a rock star or the shot of being a university professor?
And it seemed like if you don't take the rock and roll shot when it comes, it's never going to come again.
And so I said I couldn't go to South Africa and I was super bummed.
And then we went down to South by Southwest and we came back and the band broke up.
Because they got jobs as copywriters and they didn't like to be in the van.
Anyway, I'm walking down the street.
I'm super bummed.
I'm dragging my feet.
And I hear beep beep.
And I turn around and there's Death Cab for Cutie, the entire band.
all in their van, and my recollection is that it was like the Scooby-Doo van.
Hey, guys.
It's like a root beer brown...
like eighties Ford van.
And, and, and in my memory, they're all four of them hanging out the windows.
Like, Hey, like the Cosby kids.
Yeah, exactly.
Like they're all, they don't fit in the van because they're, they have cartoon heads, right?
They're so big that they, that they drive with their heads out of the van.
Like here we come walking down your street.
And they're like, what are you doing, man?
And you know, they live in Bellingham, right?
So, so,
So I'm like, hey, guys, the Western State hurricane breaking up.
And they were like, what?
Get in the van.
And so I got in the van and they drove me to Bellingham.
Because there was just nothing, you know, I didn't have anything going on.
Drove me to Bellingham and we all went to see The Matrix, which was a movie that I had not even heard of at that point because I hadn't been following the trades.
We got to the movie theater and they were like, come on, we're going to go see a movie.
You know, I was 29 at this point and they were all 22, 23.
So I always felt a little bit like, okay, you guys, I'll go to the movies with you.
And it was great.
And it was great, not necessarily because The Matrix was great, but because...
There wasn't anything like that before, and I didn't have any foreshadowing.
And I just went into this movie and was... Oh, that's such a good feeling.
Yeah, yeah, it was.
It was neat.
So I still have a lot of sentimentality around the first Matrix movie, and I can't separate it from whether or not I think it's a good movie, because I suspect that it doesn't acquit with my normal desire for...
Movie narratives to line up.
You know what I mean?
I do, yeah.
I watched it again not too long ago, partly to figure out when it's going to be appropriate to show this to my kid.
Answer, not yet.
But, man, it still looks really good.
It still feels...
Really good.
I mean, for being as quote unquote old as it is, it still feels pretty fresh.
And it's I mean, maybe again, maybe I'm just reliving my first, you know, watching of it.
But it also it just it still feels like this is one of those movies.
I don't know what, like 2001 or Star Wars or.
I don't know, there's lots of movies like that where, like, it's so difficult to, when you go back and watch movies that were made after this, you know how, like, every phone looks like an iPhone now?
It's like, that movie wasn't just the bullet time.
I mean, you know, everything being green had already been going on for a while.
But it was just so audacious.
The two of them, the Wachowskis, are so audacious about how they present things.
And they're not above, like, a superhero shot of the team coming out the door.
And, like, it's just thrilling.
I think it's still really good.
I mean, my question to you is, are all of the Matrix tropes, does it have that effect where you watch it and you're like, it feels cheap because everything that's come subsequently stole from it?
Does it feel like tripe?
Right, right, right.
I don't think so.
I mean, you know, bullet time filming became kind of a fad, but it doesn't hurt that it was used in the service of the story so well.
Like that in the sort of like pre-credits scene when they're about to find Carrie Moss and she's just standing in that room like staring.
And then, you know, she just starts kicking the shit out of everybody.
And like, I think it still looks...
Fantastic.
It's a weird, audacious movie.
I mean, maybe a little bit, I mean, in a different way, sort of like Guardians of the Galaxy, where you're like, you know, if you told somebody this story, you go, hmm, all right, whatever.
But it's the implementation.
It's just, it's so well implemented.
I don't think it feels dated at all.
I think there's a lot of, like...
mumblecore from the last 10 years that has aged a lot more poorly.
You're talking about mumblecore, which is a Seattle invention, and we take that very personally.
Sorry.
I did not mean to culturally appropriate your mumbling.
Tell me very briefly, with no spoiler alerts, because I know how passionately people feel about spoilers,
Tell me how you feel about the most recent Guardians of the Galaxy movie, which I have to assume you saw on opening day.
We saw it pretty early on.
Well, you know, I went in with... As much as I tried to mute my expectations, they were still impossibly high because of how thoroughly I enjoyed the first one.
I remember you talking about it.
I remember, what, two, three years ago when you mentioned you saw it and I didn't even want to hear what you thought because I was scared you wouldn't like it and I'd be sad.
Yeah.
You know, it's one of those, I feel like there's, I've been struggling for a while now to come up with a name for certain kinds of media properties you can't even really discuss rationally or intellectually where you're like, for an obvious example, the Smiths, right?
Or it's like, you know, just give me that one.
Like, I'm not gonna, I'm not trying to persuade you to like this, but this is a thing that I like and that's just how it is.
You tried to persuade me to like the Smiths for a long time.
I don't think I, I think I tried to correct you on how wrong you are about the Smiths, but I don't think I wanted you to like become a super fan.
But, uh, I went into it and I thought, you know, it, um, there's, there's, there's several things about it on several levels that I didn't love.
One of which was like the team being split up, like a lot of the fun for most of the movie, the team's not together, which works sometimes like in like a rogue one, like that makes sense.
But like, you know, I, um, or, you know, any of the star Wars movies, you go off and have your little side adventures and stuff, but you eventually get back together and,
Yeah, get the team together.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of what, I mean, they have their reasons for making it the way they did, but it had a lot of the Pixie Dust that made the first one special, like the whole opening sequence with Groot dancing around is really cute.
I think Groot's cuteness is a little bit overused, and I'm a big Groot fan.
No, by and large, I thought it was good.
I thought it was good, but I'm damning it with faint praise because I liked the first one so much.
And the basic test for all these kinds of things, this goes for Pixar, this goes for Miyazaki, this goes for any of these Marvel movies, especially with genre movies.
It really comes down to how much I think about it after I leave the theater.
And I can't even remember a lot of what happened in the movie.
And I was absolutely paying attention.
It didn't feel...
You know, there's this irony, especially in superhero movies, about, like, the bigness of the adventure is not always, you know, the big highness of the stakes does not always pay off in how it gets rolled out.
And so, like, for example, the Netflix shows, like Daredevil, the stakes are smaller, but you're way more invested.
So, I don't know, I'm kind of rambling, but, like, I wanted to love it as much as I loved the first one, which is such a high bar, but I thought it was merely good.
What about you?
Mm-hmm.
Well, you know, my experience of the first one was going in again with some, you know, some group of 22 year olds in a van pulled up and said, let's go to the movies.
I don't remember which band it was.
And I was like, all right, I'll go to the movies with you.
Some kind of superhero movie.
And I had never, here's the thing, right?
I don't, I'm such a, such a non-participator in Marvel comics.
Yeah.
culture that i had never heard of guardians of the galaxy i had never heard of any of the characters in it or any of the tangential characters i did not have any i had nothing i was like guardians of the galaxy okay whatever you say and i honestly even after i left the theater and for maybe a couple of weeks afterwards i thought it was a completely discreet creation and
Like they had invented those characters for the purposes of this movie only.
I didn't realize it preexisted.
Right, right, right.
As a comic book, I guess, right?
I think even a fairly ardent reader of comics over the years would describe them as probably at best obscure.
It's definitely not like an Iron Man kind of A-level...
set of characters but i mean and the team's changed over time and like i don't think it's one of those things like alpha flight like how many people besides you know wolverine can people name from alpha fight but just in the sense that like it was not it was it really felt like a um like a hail mary in terms of bringing up these characters that the garden variety comic fan is not familiar with and the garden variety comic movie fan has probably never heard of and couldn't pick out of a lineup
Yeah, and, you know, where is the, on paper, like how is this going to be?
How is anybody going to identify with this?
Or, you know, like, where is the how is this a franchise?
Right.
And I want and the movie starts out and here the guy comes with his goggles and he and he puts his cassette player on and starts dancing.
And initially I was like, oh, this is going to be this, huh?
This here's where we are.
Well, the open the kind of cold open is the flashback, which was brutal.
I mean, I was like, oh, my gosh, I hope the rest of the movie isn't going to be this rough.
Right, that's right.
Okay, so I guess that did, that cold open got me in.
It was like the cold open of Inglourious Bastards.
Oh, gosh.
Where I really did feel like this movie is going to be really hardcore and good.
Because both cold opens, fantastic, right?
Just like, what am I watching?
Yeah.
And then the cassette thing, and I was like, okay, okay, okay.
But then even that scene...
By three quarters of the way through, I was like, oh, this is not bad.
This is good.
And Guardians of the Galaxy was such a thrill ride for me because I couldn't believe that there were people this smart and funny that were making movies.
It just didn't seem possible.
It's like they got the wrong room assignment.
Like, wait a minute.
You sure you're supposed to be in here?
Shouldn't you be in, like, French New Wave or something?
There are hundreds of thousands of people in Hollywood making movies all the time, and none of them come up with anything close to this in terms of script, in terms of whoever the continuity people were.
That's the thing about continuity, right?
They're so unsung because if they're doing their job, you don't notice them.
It's only the ones that are not doing it.
It's only the script doctors that are not thinking about whether or not their shit makes sense that stand out.
So this is just like, I fell in love with the raccoon.
I didn't even understand Groot.
I didn't understand the whole, like, why is this tree even in this?
But it was, he's wonderful.
He's a really sweet tree who occasionally becomes incredibly violent.
Yeah.
And I identified with everybody in the movie.
And so when Guardians of the Galaxy 2 started coming out, when they started to roll it out,
I did that.
I got spooked.
I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
How are you going to do this?
You're going to screw this up, I bet, Hollywood, aren't you?
Aren't you, Hollywood?
Yeah.
And then as it got closer and closer and everybody was so hyped up, I was like, I've seen this before.
I remember when you were waiting in line for the Phantom Menace, you dumb people.
Don't do this to yourselves.
My friend Dan Morin tells the story about how he'd wondered if he'd ever see, he's maybe 10 years younger than me, maybe more.
But he had wondered if there'd ever be another Star Wars in his lifetime.
And he saw it like three times in one weekend.
And each time he was like, that was good, right?
He's trying to figure it out.
Yeah, you go through that thing where you're like, it must be me.
I mean, this is George Lucas.
George Lucas is the force, man.
I must be missing something.
I should keep going back to this movie until I get it right.
That was good, right?
That was good, right?
You guys, right?
And everybody's like, yeah.
I was like that when I went to see Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy because it had everything.
It had Sam Rockwell, who I think is the greatest.
He's the greatest living actor.
We watched Iron Man 2 a couple times in the last week, which I think is a highly underrated movie.
It's weird that they bring his character in so late in that movie, but everything he's in, the moment he appears on screen, the movie just comes alive.
Sam Rockwell is so entertaining.
He's so great.
He's the one Hollywood actor... I'm pretty confident when I say he is the one single Hollywood actor that I would actually want to meet.
That I would be like... If somebody said...
we're going to go meet Sam Rockwell, I would be like, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, okay.
I'm cool.
You know, like I would be... I'm not going.
I would be weird, right?
He's the one guy I would be weird.
And my sense is he's not one of those dumb, intense Hollywood actors where he's out crashing his car or swanning around being intense.
But he does feel like somebody who...
who uh i just i feel like he's probably a pretty intense dude i i'm maybe one day fate the fates will bring us together and sam rockwell and i will be able to carry on a conversation because i would be i would look forward to it because i just love i just love him i love his face i love his voice i love everything every time he's in a movie whenever he's in the movie he's really in the movie without hamming it up
but he is such a presence.
Somebody, I mean, on a completely different angle, like Melissa McCarthy, where, like, whatever material she has given, and it is certainly not always great, like, I feel like she just brings it alive, and I just want to watch what she does next.
And I think he's like that.
In a movie like Moon, I mean, how many people could pull off a movie that crazy?
It's such a, well, no spoilers, but it's a very strange movie.
But I totally agree.
But he, okay, so we're on, oh, Hitchhiker's Guide, and you got Tim from The Office.
Tim from The Office, who's the best guy in The Office, I thought.
Oh, absolutely.
And you get Severus Snape as the voice of Marvin, right?
Yep, yep, Marvin.
Is Alan Rickman the Marvin?
Alan Rickman is in the movie, isn't he?
As a face character?
I don't know.
Or am I thinking of... I think he's Marvin.
I'm looking it up.
There is a superhero movie or some kind of movie where he's in a space suit.
He's in Galaxy Quest.
Galaxy Quest, that's it.
Which is a very amusing movie.
That's it, that's it.
2005.
Another high concept movie, that Galaxy Quest, where it's like, you guys came up with an idea.
That's good.
Boy, this is a heck of a... You got Zooey Deschanel in it.
You got Martin from Stephen Fry.
Richard Griffiths, that's Vernon Dursley, is in it.
Because, of course, I judge everything by who they were in a Harry Potter movie.
Looks like you got some Malkovich.
I've never seen it.
I love the book.
My daughter and I have read the book.
Oh, you've never seen Hitchhiker's Guide, the movie?
No, I've heard some of the radio play from back in the day, but I just, the movie, I don't know, I was scared.
You know the feeling.
Well, the book, yeah, the book has such a tenor, right?
It just has such a, like... Anything can happen.
He just describes it so well, and you're like, you know, I don't even want to see what a vogun looks like.
Just keep describing all of that stuff.
Yeah, and there have been attempts made to adapt it for a long time, as you know, radio play and everything, right?
TV show, the cereal box, and it's never 100% succeeded.
And here was this movie with all these, just the perfect cast.
I couldn't have done a better job of putting this movie together.
And no spoilers, but it is like just a turn in a punch bowl.
Is it pretty leaden?
Yeah, that's exactly what happens.
There's no... Where's the lightness?
This is supposed to be hilarious, and everybody's just walking around mugging, and there's no joy in Mudville.
And that was one where I did go in with pretty high expectations, and halfway through the movie I said, this is no good.
This is no good.
This is like...
This is like every Quentin Tarantino movie of the last 10 years.
No good.
I have a friend who is a comic writer, and one of his comics, have you seen that trailer for Atomic Blonde?
Was she released there on?
No, I like Charlize Theron.
Oh, yeah.
And he has some interesting thoughts on it.
I'm always interested to hear this kind of stuff from someone who actually does it versus somebody who just reckons how it should go.
So, like, you know, don't ask most comic fans how you would make that into a movie.
You have no you have no context for that.
You have your I mean, you may, but you mainly have your very strong, you know, emotional feelings like what to leave in, what to leave out like a Bob Seger song.
Yeah.
Against the wind.
Still running against the wind.
But, you know, one of the interesting thoughts he has is that he's not, this sounds obvious, but it's so important, he's not against changing the story.
Like, you've got to adapt...
to this medium there's all kinds of stuff that you have to there may be characters you have to add there may be characters you have to combine there may be things and like it's it's such an artful thing and look no further uh than our friend uh coppola the godfather the first godfather book which i read most of is fine
It's fine.
It's not the movie that you see on screen.
It's the result of a fantastic collaboration adaptation.
Obviously, the town, I mean, it's, you know, what they say, success has a thousand fathers and failures and orphan.
It's but, you know, it takes so many people to take something from one medium into another.
And if it isn't just a naked cash grab, we're trying to cash in on, you know, like, oh, the popularity of Bratz dolls.
Let's make a movie.
you know there's something very artful and special and then on top of it it's not even like you're like an up-and-coming indie director who wants to make something like like primer like let's say you've got or primer as you say like if you've if you've got to this god people in comics suffer from this you go in with all this weight of expectations i mean can you imagine being joss whedon and going into like the troubled avengers project and then like taking over
It's incredibly difficult.
There's so many requirements and so many boxes to tick.
And then, on top of all that, you have to make it, even if you had, like I said, with an indie film, there's a chance you could get it through a small version of the machine intact.
But imagine that extra level of difficulty of having to make it an adaptation that survives all that stuff, where you've very carefully put together this thing that's almost like a house of cards of character and plot, and we have this much budget.
Like in the Hulk movie, we can only show the Hulk this much because we don't have that much money, etc., etc.
So I have a lot of admiration for people who pull it off, because like you said, if it worked well, you don't notice why it was great.
And if it doesn't work well, all you can do is obsess about what they should have done differently.
Yeah, and I feel like you touched on two things, right?
And one of them is the classic thing that we learned in the music recording business, which is that the more people from the head office that come down to your recording session, the more they are going to destroy what you're doing.
It's all they can do is destroy what you're doing.
All they have is the power of subtraction.
Yeah, right.
And so on mixing boards in studios all over the world...
There are, and I swear this is both done for comedic effect and also absolutely true.
There are little sections of mixing boards where things are, like, disconnected.
And when an A&R guy or somebody from the label comes and wants to contribute...
a really good producer will say hey here there's this section you know they're like why don't we bring the bass up why don't we take the tambourine down why don't we change the and he'll actually put his hands on some knobs and say here you know like as the mix is going by can you make those adjustments here on these four knobs let me demonstrate for you yeah
The knobs are not connected to anything.
And the ANR guy will sit there and make these minor adjustments on blank knobs and be like, there, like that.
And everybody's like, whoa, yes, thank you.
Really sweetens up the sound.
Yeah, you did it, man.
You found the sweet spot.
Anyway, thanks for stopping by.
And I think to be in Hollywood and to keep your thing alive, you have to be very good at that type of thing, where you're a little bit of misdirection of the A&R guy, where there's all these people from the studio that are like, you know what would be great is if there was like a little kid, like a precocious little kid that wears glasses that like says funny stuff.
And you go, that is a great idea here.
You know, like, what if we made that kid a full grown adult who didn't ever say anything funny?
What about that?
That was your idea.
And the guy's like, amazing.
So I think you've got to be able to do that.
and not do what I do, which is like, what?
Get the fuck out of here.
Because that's the way that you lose.
That's the way you lose.
You've got to give them some kind of a... Like when you've got a computer, you have something called the heat sink.
You need to give them an input sink.
You need to give them some kind of a way to have input without...
unintentionally, you know, doing something destructive, but you also need to not, it seems to me, you also need to not make it like, wow, keep coming back.
Cause we could sure use lots of tips and tricks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know how you do it, particularly when you've got people in Hollywood or in business who really think they're, they're hot.
And who are smart enough that they have gotten where they've gotten.
So they're not just you can't just misdirect them, like throw a tennis ball down the hall and like, hey, go get it, boy.
You know, you've got to it's it's these guys that we're always talking about.
Right.
The the like.
the middle-aged dude who never thought who thinks he's amazing and that's right that's who you have to find a way to like give him something real that they know because they're on the lookout for you to give them a button that doesn't work right they they're they that's how they that that's part of their identity is like they're nobody's fool so how you contend with them in a Hollywood situation I don't know but I
That's less interesting to me than the other thing that you were touching on, which is somehow to maintain, and the word outsider is so overused that we forget that it originally had a meaning, but like how to maintain the perspective of a child.
through a massive undertaking like this, how to maintain that the simplicity of like, does this work or not?
Does this make me laugh or not?
Do I understand this or not?
And not get broken up into all these sort of like, here's a vignette.
We're working on this vignette.
And how it fits into the rest of the movie, we don't care.
We've got a team working on this vignette, and they're honing it.
And everything they add or take away is actually screwing up how it fits into the film.
But no one is coordinating it.
There's no executive here.
Because this has all been balkanized by someone up higher who's like, you know what we need?
We need to bring in an action guy for this scene.
We need to bring in the script writers from this action film to put more action into this scene in this comedy.
And I've hit on this in other topics, too, talking to you, which is that at a certain point, expertise can be the enemy.
We...
we are so, you know, we fetishize expertise in this culture.
And so all of our teachers are people who have pursued like an education trajectory in their own education.
And all of our designers have pursued designing extensively, exclusively,
And we have eliminated so much the sense that what the world needs is people educated broadly.
And in a film especially, I feel like there should be someone else.
And working on a film that doesn't know anything about film, that hasn't read the book, you know, that's just a reader and a knowledgeable person who you run things by and go, what is this?
How does this?
I mean, it's basically like running it by your dad or, you know, or like in my case, your mom, where you're like, mom, does this scan?
And mom's like, who's the one in the hat?
I'm like, oh, right.
Because when I wrote it, I put in all this explication about the one in the hat, and then I took it out in a subsequent edit, but the one in the hat is still in the movie.
It doesn't make any sense, because the backstory got edited out.
Thanks, Mom!
Like a little bit of a sanity check.
Yeah, but how do you go into a business situation and say...
And make a case for someone who isn't an expert.
Make a case for the input of someone where all you're saying about them is, I trust this person.
I bet you a lot of directors and showrunners in TV have their own kind of brain trust that they can run stuff by.
That you wouldn't need necessarily somebody who's just like an absolute beginner.
But I take your point.
One other challenge of expertise...
Uh, that can be, I like that absolute beginners, uh, drop in there.
That was like that.
The, uh, the other thing with expertise is though there's so many levels to expertise, like starting at the end of there's on the one end you start out not knowing what you don't even know you need to know or not know.
Like there's this, there's the, you know, the total zero.
I don't even know anything about this thing.
And of course you move up and up and up, but even if you become very, very good at something, I think it's still important to understand where your expertise is appropriate.
Where your expertise applies, where your expertise can be useful, or where your confidence, conversely, where your confidence in your own expertise might be a cataract that causes you to start trying to solve a problem that you've been comfortable solving before, to where you're almost like somebody who...
let's say you're a tv critic who's watched thousands of hours of reality cooking shows and like you know them backwards and forwards and so what do you do you like walk into the kitchen and like here's the name of a pasta that you know that you say they should throw in the soup or you know what i mean like oh one time they went on top chef with this the part of expertise is also knowing when to say like no i don't really know about this like you know what i mean that that i don't have to have
You know, I don't need to put my fingers on the faders in order to have an influence on how this works, that there should be a way that I can adjust what I know and what I've learned to deploy that in a way that's useful and positive rather than something that's just there for you to be able to put a mark on it.
And this is something that I think you're at the crux, right?
Where if you have tremendous accomplishment and you have made your bones and you are already a hero in your craft.
And then you can be a character that sits in the back of the room with sunglasses on, maybe asleep, maybe not.
While the whole thing goes and you are thinking to yourself, this is all going well, it does not need my intervention.
And you can get away with it because people are like, well, it's the master.
Right.
And so so that hands offness.
is, I mean, Quincy Jones presumably does not sit in a chair and doesn't jump up out of his chair and go move the 57 on the snare.
Yeah, he's the producer.
He's not the engineer.
Right.
But, you know, you'd be surprised, right, at the number of... And so there are those people that you understand, right, that Carole King is not going to say... She's not going to be down in the...
deep in the weeds if something's going well, right?
She's not going to screw up something.
Um, but then there's the vast majority of people in the middle of their profession who in a lot of ways, you know, people are gunning for their job.
There's a lot of, there's competition.
They're in the mix and they're at a stage in their career where people are like, are you the, are you a genius?
Are you the next genius?
And there's gotta be so much pressure on them.
to look like they're working, basically, right?
It's got to be so hard for somebody in the middle of a creative career.
Business, business, business.
Yeah, right?
Just to be like, no, this is going well.
And what I need, you know, what a great director does is not mess with success or, you know, like,
And so that accounts, I think, for the giant jumble of garbage that's like, you know, the gyre, the gyre of plastic that's rotating around the Pacific that we call our mainstream culture.
But it's those creatives.
I just used the word creatives.
Right now, it's okay, you get a freebie, you get one.
It's the people that from a very young age have the confidence to be sparing, right?
from, you know, throughout their career, like if when I think about Prince being a teenager walking around Minneapolis, here's teenage Prince walking around Minneapolis and he's going to like open mics and he's in his high school band and he's, you know, like he was a high schooler, right?
Prince didn't fall from the sky.
He was just another weird kid with pimples.
He's a weird kid with pimples who's like practicing the guitar on his bed
Nobody sees Prince coming.
But from the very beginning, he had the confidence to be Prince because there aren't like seven Prince albums where he's trying to figure it out.
He hit the ground pretty running.
And doing all these things, like I was listening to a Prince track yesterday where he has pre-delay
right when i forget i'm blanking on the tune but like the vocal melody oh it's a little red corvette um where there's where there's oh it's on the bridge yeah there's a pre-echo yeah on the verge of being obscene that part on the verge on the verge of being obscene yeah and it's like what i mean that's so natural and so beautiful and so wonderful and i'm
I'm sure Prince didn't invent it, but... Let me see.
What is the explanation for it?
I remember hearing it described how it was discovered, which was that when the tape reel... When the tune is being wound back on the tape reel, there's a little bleed...
there's a little bleed through the tape or on the tape where you get this pre delay because the you know the part actually is like sort of ghosts into the track I think that's true on old recording media but this is not this isn't bleed this was an intentional thing where he was like I'm gonna do this and and
He was young enough then, I guess, and there weren't as many eyes on him that he could get away with it.
There wasn't somebody like, wait, wait, wait, Prince, that's a little crazy.
Those people, the people that don't second-guess themselves, or if they do, there's a voice of confidence in them.
Maybe kind of Neil Young to an extent.
Because he's like, whatever he's doing in the past, he's pot committed on whatever that album is.
My God, have you seen that footage of him on German television or whatever it is, Dutch television?
Have I sent you those links?
It's just him playing solo?
Him playing solo?
I've seen ones from around the time between... Not Comes a Time.
What's the one?
What's my favorite album?
After the Gold Rush?
But before Harvest, where he's playing songs from Harvest.
I've seen a bunch of footage from that era that's pretty stunning.
Is that what you're talking about?
Yeah.
Yeah, he's 22 years old and he's sitting on a chair and he's like... He looks like he's from The Young Ones.
He's got long hair and just... And he's like, this is a new one I wrote.
It's called Old Man.
It's about a guy that lives in my farm.
And he plays it on the acoustic guitar and it's complete.
Right?
It is a complete work.
It's not like he's... It's not like he's working on it.
And that record's not out.
And just him and a guitar...
It's all there.
You know, you don't there.
There isn't a banjo part.
There isn't a backing vocal, but it doesn't matter because.
And, you know, and I'm I'm not just in awe.
I'm not just watching this and going like, whoa, because I know this song backwards and forwards and I and I don't have the ability to distinguish my own love of the thing from the actual thing.
Like I'm I am capable of looking at that and saying that is actually phenomenal.
And his parts are simple.
This is the wonderful thing about about truly great stuff.
It's just simple.
It'd be easy to play.
But there it is.
It's a it's a it's a it's a masterpiece.
And he's just this young like dirt in his hair Canadian.
That's the least likely part.
with his bowl haircut, driving around Hollywood in a Cadillac hearse.
Like, what the hell?
So that,
Those people, and then on the far, far end of the spectrum, you've got Neil Young now, who's 75, who, in a way, the fact that he has never answered to anybody and doesn't have to answer to anybody, maybe is acting now slightly as a little bit of a deficit on him, just because if he decided he was going to wear clown shoes now, everybody would be like, amazing, amazing, Neil.
And he'd be like, yeah.
But it's for those of us in the broad middle, the giant pile of us in the middle who are like, I'm working here.
I'm working.
When I listen to the Long Winters records, I put everything on them.
Because if I came up with a shaker part, I would want it on there.
And then it's like, you know what this track doesn't have?
A harpsichord.
It's not like, what does this track need?
A harpsichord.
It's like, what does this track not have?
a harpsichord and so there are a lot of melodies going on in tunes that are all very i think satisfying and when you listen to them on headphones it's fun but it doesn't have that um maybe that doesn't always serve the song as much as you would hope
Well, or what five melodies do is not five times better than one great melody.
That's a good way to put it.
Well, like we had with Sgt.
Pepper, once you start stripping the layers away, you appreciate so much more of what's actually there.
And a lot of those decisions seem probably simple at the time, which is George Harrison went, and they were like, it's done.
And you listen to it now and you're like, that's the part?
Yeah.
What, what, what was, how did they decide?
They've only got four tracks.
There's a lot of, there's a lot of things like that.
When you listen to those, the raw tracks, there's a lot of stuff you're like, wow, can't believe that's what they went with.
And it totally worked.
I was listening the other day to, so, um,
Still trying to figure out the Chris Cornell situation.
Still spending some not inconsiderable amount of time in the middle of the night staring at the ceiling above my bathtub and going, what now?
What's my takeaway here?
So I was listening to Burden in My Hand, which is a really wonderful song.
And Burden in My Hand has a
has the feeling in the pre-chorus and chorus of this bass part that is just...
phenomenal and it's not when you're listening to the entire track you can't quite pick out exactly what the bass is doing but it sounds like a super duper grunge bass like and there's a lot of like guitar and stuff going on and there's this sound garden-y polyrhythms but ben shepherd the bass player of uh
of sound garden is a local legend here he's uh you know he's legendarily like intense guy i've uh known him tangentially for many years uh and he's one of the very few people who scares the shit out of me he just scares just
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Scares the shit out of me.
He's a big guy, and his intensity is up there to the point of, like, hello, scary guy.
I had a good friend who worked, who was, oh, you know, Mike Squires.
You know Mike Squires.
All our listeners know Mike Squires, guitar player of Duff McKagan's Loaded.
They were on tour at a certain point a long time ago, and he met Zach Wild for the first time.
And Mike was in the Marines.
Mike is somebody who grew up in an intense environment where, you know, you had to really be on your toes.
And he met Zach Wild and, you know, and tried to, like, josh with him.
Like, hey, you know, what's up, ding-a-linger?
I don't know.
Tried to be like Mike Squires about it.
And Mike reported back to me.
That the one guy that scares the shit out of him is Zach Wilde.
And he didn't want a monkey with Zach Wilde.
Which seemed like a reasonable approach to take to Zach Wilde.
He's also a very big man and impressive.
Now, my good friend Andrew McKaig, who now is the tour manager of the Experience Hendrix show...
which tours the world with like an all-star cast, like Ringo Starr's all-star band, except playing Jimi Hendrix music.
Wow.
And Zach Wilde is in that band.
And he, Zach and Andrew now are thick as thieves.
They like post videos of each other on Instagram, like cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo.
Like it's pretty great, pretty rock and roll great.
So I'm no longer worried about meeting Zach Wilde because I feel like I have an in.
I can say I'm good friends with Andrew.
Also, Merlin, this may surprise you to know, but my understanding, I'm just remembering now, is that Zach Wild's manager maybe listens to this program.
Get out of town.
I'm not 100% sure, but I think it's true.
Or at least at one point was.
Huh.
Anyway, Ben Shepard has always scared the shit out of me.
And he's one of those guys that would just stare at you from across a room.
That's not good.
You're like, hi.
And he just keeps just like staring.
But anyway, so there's this bass line in the song Burden in My Hand that for years I wanted to tease out, wanted to figure out what's going on.
And so the other day I was like, I bet you there's something on the internet about this.
And I'm surprised often when there is not something on the internet about a thing.
It feels like you're doing it wrong.
This has got to happen to you.
In my neighborhood, I feel like I'm about to talk about a dream.
But it's not a dream.
In my neighborhood, there is someone.
And I'm going to say...
I'm pretty confident that it's a guy, this someone, who late, late at night walks around setting off sticks of dynamite.
Have I talked about this before?
I don't think so.
I mean, they're not cherry bombs.
They are... There's like some significant boomy bottom end.
So... Because I'm up late at night.
I'm lying in bed.
And some nights I'll hear it all the way across the neighborhood.
Like on the far, far, far side of the neighborhood.
Three o'clock in the morning.
Boom!
And it's loud.
But you can tell it's also very distant.
And then other times I will hear it nearby.
Boom!
So that the windows rattle.
My God.
Middle of the night.
And some nights I hear two and maybe once even heard three.
of these explosions in a single night and heard them at a distance but moving like there was one and then 45 minutes later there was another one over there and then you know an hour later there was another one way over there were you awake the whole time or were they waking you up no i'm i'm up i'm up okay all right oh that's even weirder and this person that i think is probably a guy is also a plate but one time i was sitting in my bedroom
in my house, and a stick of dynamite went out off in the street in front of my house.
And I saw the flash through the windows.
It rattled the entire house.
It rattled my teeth.
It rattled, it was like a stick, well, a stick of dynamite in front of your house.
Yeah, yeah.
boom you know just like and you're not expecting it no right there's no like five four it's just like and so i typically you give a fella a fire in the hole before you do something like that yeah and it's the middle of the goddamn night you know 3 a.m and it's only that i'm just sitting here um sorting my cufflinks into boxes that i was awake and saw the flash and
And so, of course, I sprinted downstairs in my underpants, sprinted out the front door.
The entire street is full of black powder smoke.
There's like shit floating in the air, like paper and shit floating in the air.
And I run out into the middle and there's, you know, this big black spot on the pavement.
And I'm in the middle of the street and I'm in my like
I didn't even have the forethought to take a fencing saber with me.
I'm just like, I am ready to fight whatever mountain lion, whatever human or mountain lion in human shape just thinks that this is a good plan.
And I'm out in the middle of the street and there's no one.
And I'm looking and I'm looking and then nobody else is running out in their underwear.
No, but there's definitely smoke.
Oh, the street is full of smoke.
I mean, and the smoke cloud is 30 feet high.
I mean, it's like a, well, it's like a bomb went off.
And two blocks down, there is a solitary figure dressed in black.
And just before, and he's at the corner two blocks down.
And just before he turns, he turns and stops and looks back at me.
And I'm standing in my underwear in the middle of his smoke cloud.
So this bomb had to have been on a long fuse.
Because he's not running.
He's fully two blocks away and lit this either with a fuse, a lit fuse, or...
on some kind of timer or, I don't think, a remote detonator of some kind.
But, like, to put a thing, to set off something like this in front of, in just a neighborhood street is one thing, but to light it and walk away two blocks away, you have no idea who's going to come along.
Right?
You could be a block and a half away and all of a sudden a family of five drives up in a super, in a, like a Griswold machine.
So,
And I stand in the street and he stands in the street and we look at each other across this long distance.
I can't see his face.
He's just a shadow.
And I'm like, I'm in my bare feet, but I just wanted to sprint after this guy.
But I just knew that it was not, it wasn't doable.
And so he turned the corner and there was something in his body language, something in his energy that was just like very much like, fuck you.
Like just super.
It felt like they felt like getting a glimpse of a serial killer to me because I've been listening to these bombs go off for a decade.
And then one other time, a bomb went off in my neighborhood, like about two blocks away.
But close enough that I knew where it happened and I jumped out, put on my shoes and ran the two blocks to that location.
Again, huge cloud of smoke, stuff still floating in the air.
And I was hoping that I was coming the direction that he was going, but I saw no one.
And in that situation, there was somebody else that came out of their house and we stood there and looked at each other in the street like, what the fuck?
But I go on the Internet and say, you know, like, who's setting off fucking bombs?
And, you know, there's so many NIMBYs and neighborhood activists and people that are on the Internet.
Like, there's a barking dog in my neighborhood.
But I can find nothing about the mad bomber of South Seattle.
Nothing.
That's so strange when that happens.
I feel like I'm a crazy person.
Like, is no one else hearing these massive explosions?
I mean, I don't think that he's ever, it doesn't seem like he's ever hurt anybody.
I've never heard a police car.
It never feels like I should call the police because it's like, well, fait accompli.
The thing went off.
It's a guy in a black hoodies.
Who knows?
Just pranking everybody.
Just pranking.
And where does he get these amazing bombs is another thing I want to know.
So I went on the internet and I googled soloed bass line of Burden in My Hand.
I wanted to hear the bass part because I felt like it was really the secret to the song.
And of course it's there.
It pops up and I listen to it.
And it is really hard to understand what is happening.
Because soloed
It sounds very bad.
It doesn't sound well played, and it doesn't sound well thought out.
It sounds kind of like Ben Shepard threw a bass down a flight of stairs.
I'm listening right now.
It's got a kind of meandering, grungy feeling.
The song or the bass line?
The bass line.
By itself.
Yeah.
It's got a great tone.
Well, even, you know, yeah, sort of.
But there are a bunch of comments afterwards on the YouTubes.
His sloppiness is part of his brilliance.
Yeah, exactly.
And then a lot of other people are like, this is an amateur garbage performance.
Well, so then somebody in that comment thread posted a thing where they said, you need to listen to this in the context.
And they posted a thing where the band is in the right channel and the bass is soloed in the left channel.
Okay.
And listening to that even, I mean, at least I think I get what he's doing.
I get the bass part now.
I understand where it lives.
But I'm just surprised he didn't take another take.
I'm surprised that he didn't just try and go and get it a little better.
And this was a record that they recorded at Bad Animals Studio.
It must have been $1,500 a day in the studio.
This is a major, major professional rock album.
So it had to be intentional.
Everything about it was intentional.
And when you listen to the track...
It not only works, it works amazingly.
But there's nothing about the part that would suggest it.
If you were sitting in the studio and you soloed that bass part...
he's kind of i mean he sounds i don't want to get in trouble with this guy because he sounds like a tough guy it sounds a little bit like a uh guitar player playing a bass part yeah and they're like weird hammer offs that just sort of you know they're like like a root and a fifth the root root and an octave and a lot of sliding around but it's sliding around yeah yeah hammering and like just sort of
Fret noise and clanks and clonks.
There are a lot of clanks and clonks.
It's not a clean take.
And I've really been chewing on that bass part for the last few weeks.
Sort of like if you walk out of Guardians of the Galaxy, are you thinking about...
the movie afterwards i'm still thinking about guardians of the galaxy where do you stand as of now do you wish he'd done another take do i wish he had done another take yeah uh no because i think the track is perfect when i listen to burden in my hand i do not think oh i wish that this song was better like i do feel within at least the sound garden style it's um it's a high watermark for sound garden
And yet I cannot, as a recordist and a person that's making rock albums, I cannot picture myself in the studio as the guy, as the star of the band, listening to that bass take and saying, great, print it.
And so it's another example, another piece of evidence that I'm...
missing something or you know that i that that there is a that that's a form of perfection
But I mean, if it works for the song, it works, right?
Well, but that's exactly right.
And that's what we're saying about George Harrison.
But if you solo things, which is what you do in a studio, like you record the bass part live with the band, and then you go and you solo things to hear how they sound, to make sure that they all line up and they work.
Well, contrary to what you might imagine listening to a song or an album, for the early stages of that song, you're doing nothing but listening to soloed or grouped instruments.
You don't get to hear what the song really sounds like, really, for a long time.
You've probably heard that bass line numerous, numerous times by itself.
Yeah, and you're listening to it with the drums, right?
And you're saying, does this...
does this work?
And even if it was working with the drums, when you soloed it and you heard all the noise and the chaos, I cannot imagine that the people who were getting paid big, big dollars to do this had the
the cleverness, I guess, to say that's done.
Oh, I see.
You know, because I would assume that they would be trying to justify their enormous salaries by saying, let's do this 50 times until you get it right.
And that's the, somewhere in the chain, either Ben Shepard was like, that's perfect, I'm not doing it again, which requires either tremendous confidence from him or tremendous fuck you-etude.
Or the producer heard it and was like, I wouldn't change a thing, which is super smart or like crazy smart.
Or Chris Cornell is like, nope, that's our sound.
I mean, somewhere somebody made a stand for that bass line, I guess is what I'm saying.
Yeah, I see.
And I don't see how you could make a stand about that particular part.
So all these little breadcrumbs that the world leaves behind...
That if you find them, you're walking through the forest and you find this and you pick it up and you look at it and you go, what's the story here?
How does this equip with my theory of how good things get made?
One of the reasons I was up late, I've been watching a lot of videos from this guy, Adam Neely, who has a really, I think, a really good YouTube channel.
He's a bass player, a multi-instrumentalist, but mainly a bass player, and he's a teacher.
He teaches music.
And he did this thing.
I think this is the right one.
Are you familiar with the notion of Hockett?
No.
H-O-C-K-E-T.
And basically he lays out, with music and with showing you the notation, it's where basically you break up the rhythm across multiple voices or instruments, where there's sort of a continuation and a coverage, and you give this kind of strange magical quality to passing off the melody to different instruments.
You might hear it a lot in, I'm guessing, I want to say, bebop.
where somebody will continue the line or something like that, but this is also by design.
You write this in such a way that this voice starts, it hands off to this voice.
Maybe there's a harmony, but it completes.
But it's one of those things where I have never given that much thought to something like this even existing, but once it's explained to you, it's kind of a mind-blower.
And you go back and you listen to stuff, and you're like, wow, you would have to be so trusting of the people in this corral to attempt something like this.
I don't know if I'm describing it very well, but it's maybe a little bit, I want to say a little bit like a canon, but something where there might be some repetition, but you're like handing off.
In music, Hockett is the rhythmic linear technique using the alternation of notes, pitches, or chords.
It's a single melody shared between two or occasionally more voices, such that alternately one voice sounds while the other rests.
Right.
And one example he gives is, you know, that Daft Punk song.
Faster, make it better, faster, stronger.
You know, like where you're like passing, you're like, which you can do more easily electronically, I guess.
But like, I don't know.
I'm still so interested in learning about this kind of stuff because then you go back and you listen to stuff again.
You're just like, this is like triply amazing to me now that somebody pulled this off.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I changed the subject a little on you there.
No, not at all.
Not at all.
I think that that is that reality.
That's real realities.
Right.
Well, well, and you say you say collaboration a lot.
And I think it is it's important to hear the word collaboration over and over.
It's important for me to think about collaboration.
I am now I don't want to give too much away.
I don't want to spoiler alert.
Oh, no, I do want a spoiler alert.
I don't want a spoiler.
Okay, thank you.
I don't want to alert.
But I am embarking upon a new thing.
in multiple different venues where I am intentionally collaborating.
That's been good for you in the past, hasn't it?
It has, and I forget it over and over, because I think that what I want is to be left alone, and I think that it's hard to collaborate, and it is.
But that track that I sent to Amy...
that ended up on her record it wasn't exactly a pure collaboration in the sense that i wrote a thing and i sent it to her there wasn't a bunch of back and forth i sent it to her she added her parts it was a completed thing and and so but it did feel like i had to surrender this thing i had written it i was proud of it i thought it was good i had a very strong idea about where it should go
I handed it to her.
She went where she wanted it to go.
And it became an Amy Mann song because you don't give a song to Amy Mann and then have it be anything other, right?
If she's going to use it, it becomes hers.
And she did amazing work, right?
She wrote the bridge, which I think is a great bridge.
She made it hers.
And I had to say...
Goodbye thing that I made.
Right.
Have a new life somewhere else.
Go to college in a different town.
But it was it.
And it wasn't easy because it's like, but I wanted to be the one that did everything.
Right.
That's that's what I do.
Yeah.
But it turned out great.
And it lives in the world right now.
And I and it was a reminder.
Don't be precious.
Make your thing.
Hand it off.
Everything is a collaboration in that when you hand it off to the world, they add their two cents, right?
Like somebody else loving a thing and loving it in their own way, it adds to what the thing is.
That's a good way to put it.
So I'm collaborating now with two different people more broadly where I'm like, let's do this together.
Let's do this project together.
And boy, Merlin, is it hard just to say that over and over because the person comes back and they're like, great.
Well, I was thinking that I would put I would, you know, I would call it Connecticut and put whipped cream on it.
And I'm like, I don't.
That's not what I had in mind.
I don't even know what you just said.
And they're like, no, no, no, no, no.
It's going to be great.
Connecticut.
That's what we're calling it now.
And but.
So far, I've picked a couple of collaborators, or they've picked me, who are exciting and we're doing something that I wouldn't do otherwise.
So, boy, every day I'm trying to wake up and say, you can't do this by yourself.
Nothing good is going to come of you doing it by yourself.
You have to live in the world.
An interesting analog that jumps straight to mind, as I read more stuff in New York Times and Washington Post, I've subscribed to those and I read them a lot, is I think about, there's a writer I like a lot at the New York Times, Maggie Haberman.
I like her Twitter, I like when she's interviewed on shows, and I enjoy when she is...
on the byline and frequently she's not alone on the byline these days you know with this fast news cycle and all this crazy stuff coming out and the leaks and everything you know she might be one of often two uh occasionally three and sometimes many more people and for some reason that that leaps to mind for me or maybe it's a little bit like the wu-tang clan i don't know but
But with her, I know that because I like the stuff that she does, I could not tell you which sentence she wrote in this particular article.
But I know that I like her work even when I can't identify which part it was that she made.
And I'm not saying that works across the board for collaborations.
You can tell John wrote that bridge.
That was not a Paul bridge.
That was a John bridge.
You can tell those kinds of things.
But I guess I'm just saying maybe that's one model to think about.
because there's a little hidden part in that that I think is interesting.
Maggie Haberman is not going to spend four years to write one article.
She's got to put stuff out every day, sometimes more than once a day.
So it seems to me that the idea of having to produce, and I realize a rock album is not the same thing as a news article, but I am saying that the pressure to release often, combined with the need to have ad hoc short-term relationships with other people who do what you do,
must make you pretty cool about you would have to get okay with how you collaborate with people.
You couldn't spend five years at that job saying, no, I want the only byline on this.
And I'm like, well, no, that's not how this works.
In this economy and in this environment, this is how we produce news stories.
But again, that pressure of somebody... Actually, I would love to be a fly on the wall for figuring out who gets assigned to what or who chooses what.
But can you take my meaning a little bit?
Yeah.
It seems like you would have to get less precious about whether it's good enough and ready enough.
You have to get less precious about putting your own ego aside.
And I guess ultimately, maybe it could be an editor who's going to make those kinds of decisions.
But did you see any analogy there?
Well, yeah.
Yeah.
And honestly, when you put it that way, the way that they have to be thinking is that it's about the work.
It's about this thing we'll eventually put out.
We know there's going to be a story that's mostly about this topic or topics.
It needs to come out in the next few hours, so how do we collapse on that?
Yeah, right.
And they're just not thinking about the credit.
They're not thinking about their solo.
Right.
They're just like, my job is to put this out, not to...
be remembered and then consequently they get remembered so difficult to do so difficult i know i know oh the bastards but i mean also just further on to music though um i'm trying to think like i don't know that much about like the personalities of the various jazz musicians but i mean you think about somebody like
Max Roach, for example, is one that comes to mind.
I can't always identify every drummer on every bop album, but often as not, I am unsurprised to find out that was totally Max Roach playing on that.
Because he does have a certain style.
But in jazz, when you're in a small combo...
Uh, it's, it seems like, like just to even get noticed, to get noticed, to get invited up, like all the kinds of things that you would hope for when you're starting out.
A huge piece of that is how well you play with others.
And like, if you go up there your first day, is this your first day?
You show up and you start.
when nobody else is even playing yet like you're gonna you're gonna kind of get clocked as a loser like collegiality and listening and that kind of as i say collaboration the the the maybe the ironic turns out part is that would make you very desirable to other people like you've got chops when you get your eight bars but you're not stepping on everybody's stuff and you're not you know what i mean you know how to be classy on stage with other people be supportive and then like respond to what they're doing in a way where you don't like wave your arms around and say okay everybody stop this wasn't what i intended
I have a friend here in Seattle who is making a TV show.
And she's the head writer and also the showrunner.
And she has a writing staff that she has compiled from the ranks, right?
People that wrote for...
Gracie and Frank or people that wrote for my own private Idaho or people that I don't know writers all the great shows that have that have their own that have you know that have credits yeah and she said I was talking to her the other day we went to a baseball game and she said you know normally what happens a person in my position they have this team of writers that have been put together to write their show and everybody writes and writes and writes and we all write script and then I would put my name on it
And they would be being paid to do this work.
Like, Lena Dunham and...
Is it Joss Whedon?
Who's her collaborator?
I don't know.
Like another writer on Girls?
Yeah, well, a producer of Girls.
Oh, yeah, there's a dude, right?
Yeah, a famous guy, a film person.
Okay.
Movie person.
Maybe he made Superbad or 40-Year-Old Virgin or something.
Oh, is it Judd Apatow?
Apatow.
Yeah.
Apatow.
Mm-hmm.
If you look at the entire season, all the seasons of those shows, those two, I think, maybe with one other person, are credited with having written all the shows.
I've heard that they wrote almost all of them.
But there is a writing staff, right?
There are people that are writers that are working on the show.
And those writers are writing, but they don't take the ultimate credit for the script.
Right.
And and my friend who is making this TV show said, you know what I did?
I ended up just giving each one of my writers a script.
You know, they're going to we're all going to write just like a normal TV show, but I'm going to give each one of them the credit for it because I don't need that.
Like I'm a successful person.
I don't need to also own all the scripts.
Even though that person, as the showrunner, will have a heavy influence on how it gets edited and implemented.
Oh, for shizzle.
And she'll have the final edit, the final writing.
She will do that work.
She just won't take the credit.
And she said, you know, if you get a script, it's an extra $50,000 to this person.
That's really cool.
Yeah, why be greedy?
But she said one of the writers, you know, everybody on this show,
on this show has multiple credits of tv shows except for this one young playwright that she hired who was you know some fresh out of college gal from you know some college who's a talented young playwright and and she's on the writing staff and i and and by this description i imagine that she's pretty young right early early to mid 20s
Not having worked in television before, not having been a part of a writing staff, but just somebody that was writing plays.
And my friend described her as like, she knows exactly what to do in the writing room, which is to not say anything until...
There is a time for her to say something.
And then when she says something, it's brilliant.
She waits for a shot.
And I was like, well done.
And so my friend said, I'm giving her a script to which no one can believe.
Right.
That's because this person is such a noob in this medium.
Yeah, it's just not done.
You know, like this person's 25.
You don't give them a script.
But
She earned it by knowing her job, right?
By not being the one that was standing on the table like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no!
Right, right.
But by being consistently good and also knowing how to be patient.
So, I mean, that show is in development, and I have my fingers crossed about it, but that kind of glimpse into a world where it also requires that
that my friend who is not, you know, above like wanting to be known and make money and, and, uh, and be a famous person is able to say like the collaborative nature of this is important enough to it getting done that there should also be some acknowledgement and some reward.
Um, that's also like spooned out to everybody.
Because these people are working their butts off.
And even though they're lucky to be here, it doesn't mean that they should have to pay to play.
What kind of show is it, just generally?
Is it like a drama?
Oh, you know what?
I don't know why I'm being so coy about it.
My friend is Maria Semple.
Mm-hmm.
who wrote Where'd You Go Bernadette.
And two things are currently in development.
One of them is a film being made of Where'd You Go Bernadette, which is being made.
And I think that Maria has sort of had, she had her input into it and now has sort of stepped away from the making of the film.
She's not like,
A daily presence on the film.
But there's also a television show that is being developed.
So it's look at that.
It is.
I don't know.
Listening to Maria talk about it.
It is like until the show is on the air, you cannot be confident.
Oh, yeah.
They'll spend $100 million making a show and then at the last minute just decide to pull it and put on ABC's Wide World of Sports.
What in the Wide World of Sports?
Quite a cash.
For the movie, you've got Cate Blanchett, Kristen Wiig, Judy Greer, Billy Crudup.
You've got Dr. Manhattan.
Yes, right.
Big Penis Man.
Big Penis, Big Blue Penis Man.
Big Blue Penis Man.
Yeah.
Yes, it's a great cast, and then the TV show also is pretty extraordinary.
But I'm guessing that there's nothing... Oh, well, there's the article right there, so it's something I don't have to... It's in The Hollywood Reporter.
Julia Roberts is playing Maria Semple in the television show that they are developing.
And...
And it's about her second book, or her follow-up to Where'd You Go, Bernadette, called Today Will Be Different, which is at your local bookstore on sale now.
So Julia Roberts, it's very unusual, I mean, even for me, to have a friend who is
being played by julia roberts on a tv show you don't get that more than maybe four or five times in your life right right like sitting in a baseball game talking about a tv show that is where julia roberts is is the you know the star um but maria is show running the show in addition to having uh
written the book and in addition to being the kid the main character of the tv show and god am i getting some lessons about collaboration um it's just really heavy to watch how much work has to go into making this thing and how much self effacement has to happen how much like stepping back and saying um in order to make this big thing work
I have to let people do their job.
Oh, God.
I can only imagine.
I can only imagine.
There must be so much stuff where you have to make a pretty fast decision about, well, am I going to make a big deal out of this?
Would be one.
Another one would be, if this does happen, how likely is this thing to happen?
Right.
And if it does happen, like what are the like the consequences?
And you start doing a little bit of like thinking, you know, chess style a little bit ahead.
But I just I can't even imagine.
And you got the whole time you got to stay cool and keep your powder dry.
Yeah.
Are you acquainted with the writer Elizabeth Gilbert?
You've met her, haven't you?
I have met Elizabeth Gilbert.
She and I have spent some time together.
Okay, so now you know two people portrayed by Julia Roberts in a film.
Holy shit.
Yeah, that's two.
We should probably look into this, see if there's any others you know.
There could be tons more.
Do you think this is a situation where in the rest of my life there will be two more people that I know who are portrayed by Julia Roberts?
I think there will be at least...
I think there will be at least one more.
Clearly.
Wow.
Do you think maybe I will ever be portrayed by Julia Roberts in a film?
Probably.
Like a fictionalized version of me?
I think it would probably be Tilda Swinton playing Julia Roberts playing you.
I think it might have some layers.
It might be a South Korean movie.
I think it's going to have a lot of layers to it.
And yeah, there's no question.
I think that still counts.
You think it might be like a Bing Jong-Malkovich situation where people are just like, Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich?
I never saw that whole movie.
I own it on DVD and I've still never seen the whole thing.
Who else do we know here?
She wants a full frontal.
Boy, she's been in a lot of movies.
Look at that.
She has.
She's a good actress and Maria speaks highly of her, you know.
Um...
You know, who knows?
Maybe we'll all go to a baseball game.
Or a movie.
Maybe they'll come by in their van and pick you up.
But it's such a whole different set of skills.
It's one reason I am so reluctant to utterly poo-poo the experience one gets from team sports and being in the military.
Because, you know, if you've made it through film school, for example, you've almost certainly had to collaborate with people.
But, you know, you're collaborating probably mostly with other students.
But the skills that made you good at what you are as a musician, a rock musician, as a stand-up comic, there's all kinds of things where you can hone elements of what you do, even publicly, kind of mostly by yourself.
Not always true.
Comedians have people write jokes for them.
Obviously, if you're the director, you also can have a cinematographer, etc., etc., etc.
But it's...
Like so many jobs, the full weight of what's involved in what you're doing may not be fully upon you until you're getting ready to go into production, like you may realize.
And again, you get that because you've had successes in the past, but it's kind of weird.
You think about somebody like Herb Alpert.
Like Herb Albert, I think, started primarily as a trumpet player.
And then he became like a trumpet player with a band and then became a trumpet player with a band who would sometimes sing not very well.
And then fast forward just a little bit.
And he's the guy who started A&M Records.
And there's that kind of classic celebrity refusenic idea of the person who's always taking every job to get the next higher-up level job.
But some people just want to be implementers.
Some people, I don't want to say just be a cinematographer, because there's a lot to that, but there's a lot of practitioners who like the pieces of the puzzle that they're responsible for.
They don't want to be the showrunner necessarily.
I wonder...
I don't know.
But there's people skills at the heart of all of those kinds of jobs.
And it seems like there's always this potential disaster if you try to move into an increasingly people-centric job when you are primarily a gifted and mercurial practitioner.
I'm starting to get it a little bit that, you know, for years and years, right, we've talked about intelligence and
being not a single thing, right?
The first time somebody said, oh, that person has emotional intelligence.
I remember thinking that it was a kind of a revolutionary thought technology like, oh, right.
Yeah, that had no one had ever spoken that idea before.
And now we have the concept of emotional intelligence to work with.
Yeah.
You know, we had street smarts, but street smarts, you know, didn't
It clearly wasn't being discussed as a kind of intelligence as much as it was a kind of smarts.
Just the use of the word smarts took some of the power away.
But now we think of intelligence as being this, you know, this multifaceted thing.
And you can have...
the mathematical intelligence or you can have a lot of different kinds of intelligence well like if you if you observe people in your life whose skill with something seems not only impossibly easy they seem impossibly competent but like it's if it feels like magic to you that somebody is capable of that there's probably some chance that they have an x fill-in-the-blank intelligence that you lack
And and and I think my maybe this is from my era or just maybe this is natural, but I always think of them as being smarter somehow.
How is Joss Wheaton capable of all this?
Got to be smarter somehow.
And so I don't know if we talked about this last week, but I just met Tavi Gevinson.
Yeah, he mentioned that.
And what stood out about her was that she was very smart, like clearly a very, very smart person.
But over time, I've met a lot of people who are very accomplished.
And it isn't their smartness that stands out, right?
I mean, John Hodgman is smart.
Maria Semple is smart.
They're very smart.
But it's not like they are unnaturally smart, right?
or smart to a point where their accomplishment can be attributed to their smartness.
And Tavi is young and she can't possibly have the experiences that an older person has had, and she's very smart, clearly.
But there's something else, and it is this quality of being
It's the self-possession or whatever that young Neil Young feeling is where they just are following their own star, but without a lot of Jim Morrison trappings.
It's just when something comes onto their desk, they have a skill of being able to say, this isn't what I'm doing.
This just isn't what I'm doing, this thing.
And I didn't have that.
Everything came on my desk and I was like, maybe I'll be a Shakespearean actor.
And there wasn't a thing in my head that was like, no, that's not what you're doing.
You're not doing a Shakespeare thing in life.
And so I spent however many hours, however many daydream hours,
imagining that I would do Shakespeare and, you know, maybe burned a lot of time.
Yeah.
Did I lose you?
No, no, I'm thinking about it.
I don't know.
I mean, this is one of those things that is, it's a little bit of an obsession for me.
I don't know.
I've said so much about this so many places, but it still continues to dog me, is the incredible gulf between how it feels like, in your terms, when you put your hands around it.
The incredible gulf between the idea of doing something and what happens when you actually have to do that thing.
And when we say have to, you're committed to that.
There's a budget and there's a timeline and all that kind of stuff.
But it can sometimes be so shocking.
I hate to repeat myself, but no, I do still really obsess.
And like you, I think, I want to be left alone.
But it's beneficial to be...
I mean, it's not my natural impulse at all.
And given the varying intelligences of other people, I look at somebody or you meet somebody and you're like, wow.
I can feel like I can tell a little bit why you're so good at your job.
You really get this in a way.
You get this on a molecular level because you've done this a lot and because you understand that people are part of the process.
And I admire that and I'm stunned by that.
Well, I've said it before and I'll say it again.
I mean, the fact that
You reached out to me however many years ago and explained to me what the internet was.
And then after explaining to me what the internet was, you explained that there were other people on the other side of the internet.
And after I asked a few questions about that, that you patiently answered, then you said, and I said, why would a band want to be on the internet?
And you were very patient with me and explained some of the reasons why a band might want to be on the internet.
And then you said, I want to do a podcast and
And then you patiently explained what that was.
A lot of layers.
And I was like, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
And now we've been doing this podcast for 40 years.
Mm-hmm, 40 years.
And it really has... There have been times when this podcast was the thing that kept me...
in the world it was the one thing i was doing that that was collaborative and interactive and and outside of myself dependent dependent on someone else not just doing work but on that someone else being into it right like bringing their own
Not just their participation, but their... I mean, like the love of doing it.
Enough to do it.
And I never would have thought.
You know what I mean?
I mean, we knew a lot of people ten years ago that we still know, but we don't know very well anymore.
And we knew those people as well as we knew each other then.
But you and I know each other now still...
because we do this yeah i mean i wish it wasn't as depressing to say this out loud as depressing as it sounds and actually is but like a lot of this is this is an opportunity for me to have regular meetings with friends of mine i mean honestly this this show in particular that was kind of you know i don't talk about the show on the show but it is kind of legitimately how it started was that this you know whatever's in the show is in the show it wasn't like we had to say well let's come up with a topic list and hope we can figure out something to say
And, yeah, I don't know.
I know I don't do it enough and I don't do it well, but I admire the people who do.
I love other people's intelligence.
Maybe we should start a band.
Oh, my dad's got a barn.
My dad's got a killer set of tools.
You going to play the chainsaw?
No, I'm going to set off.
My job is going to be to set off one stick of dynamite every 14 days.
And then skulk around the corner.
See you, bitches.
That's my role in the band.
Out of here.
Oh, we laughed.