Ep. 449: "Galaxy's End"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
You called me a minute ago, and it sounded like you were under your blankie, and then I realized it was me that sounded like he was under his blankie.
Calls coming for inside John's blanket.
Yeah, I did.
I realized that I was making a noise that might be upsetting.
Want to hear it again?
Want to hear it again?
Yeah, go ahead and do it again.
It was a little weird.
huh yeah do the other one huh is that it mostly yeah it was weird yeah yeah because like if it's you know it's early here i don't know if i assume it's early there it's early it's early here so i'm not even done blowing my nose i'm not done blowing my nose and i and i've only had part of my iced tea is that a multi-stage process blowing your nose oh yeah yeah i mean do you trim a rose bush once
No.
I can do better.
Okay.
I never learned why you had hippies.
You were lent hippies in your ravine.
But I imagine that same kind of thing, you know, wiping, crop rotation, volleyball.
All of the above.
Sack.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You got to keep it in the air.
And I got to blow my nose real good.
Yeah, I really wish I could breathe more, John.
I think if I could breathe more, a lot of things.
Hey, see, again with the breathing.
So if you're not going to use your CPAP, use your CPAP.
Can I have it?
Well, you know, I talked to my doctor.
Looked in my nose.
And he said that it was full of scar tissue from all the years that I wasn't able to breathe.
He was like, oh, it's all scarred up in there.
What?
And that's just making it harder because of all the times you've had a
upper respiratory and all the oh my god john you i mean you're a strong man you're you're you're uh you're a great man i can't land on a fraction scuttle across the yes cause cameras hacky sack but having said that comma you uh you get uh i almost said uti i don't think that's what i meant to say no you get up you get you get face uh infections and maybe chest infection you get a lot of chest right yep both of those things
Now you got scars in your nasals?
Scars.
And so what he's saying is you already had no shot at breathing because of your face architecture.
Are you like a pug?
Yeah.
You never had a chance.
Oh, man.
This is only screwed it up.
So he said, maybe you should go to somebody who can like.
The thing is, apparently, there's a way you can get it roto-rooted out.
Alex did that, and it didn't help.
Alex had that done to them.
And apparently, I can hook you guys up if you want to talk about nose.
Because I've thought about it.
Oh, I've thought about it.
I've thought about going in and saying, you know, like that thing.
I've never done this because I don't have the stomach for it.
There's a thing you can buy to suck snot out of your kid's nose.
Oh, yeah, I've seen it.
I had it.
I had it.
I guess we used to do that.
You used it on your kid, or it was used on you?
No, I think we used it on the baby.
Well, I mean, I get it.
Okay, but I'm going to out myself, as they say in the community right now.
I'm going to out myself.
There's a lot of things historically where I've gotten better at something or changed about something.
A big one is shots.
Did you not like to use shots or have you started to like it less?
No.
When I was a kid, I was a very sensitive kid in some ways.
Is that difficult to believe?
I believe that that is possible.
Do you think I'm needy?
I was pretty sensitive.
And one of the things was like, okay, first of all, I hated blowing my nose.
And I thought I could fool my mother by sucking it in.
I put Kleenex up to my nose and I'd suck it in.
That's a very different sound.
Whoa, okay.
Yeah, that's one.
But hypodermic needles were the worst for me.
I lived in constant fear of a balloon popping or having to get a shot.
A balloon popping.
Yeah, I also worried I'd close a cat in a door.
But there's lots of things.
We didn't have a cat.
We didn't have a cat, but I honestly legit would look behind me when a door closed because I had a compulsion about fearing that I would close a cat in a door.
Had you ever seen a cat closed in a door?
Nope.
So you just imagined at some point what it would be like.
Imagine a cat scurrying to catch up before the door closes.
You don't think you saw this in a comic book or saw it in a movie?
I mean, I know.
I can imagine that, too.
A priest showed me a looping video in his tent once.
Of cats getting close to the door.
Oh, can you believe that one?
That one thought he was going to get true.
Ha-ha.
Ta-ta-ta-ta.
Beep.
Were you worried that the cat's tail was going to get caught or that the cat itself, like halfway through?
Okay, let's focus for a moment because it's important that you understand this.
And I do feel like I might need to mute and blow my nose.
Okay, so imagine this.
Let's think less about cat and more about door.
Think about a door that closes automatically.
Sure.
Like a screen door is extreme because they can slam.
But a door that has some kind of a mechanism...
You know like the way when you urinate in our bathroom and the door opens slowly because you never close it all the way?
Yeah.
Remember in the new place, the Cursed, the new-er place, the Cursed Door, where you go in there and you're all together and you're standing and then I can just – my daughter would toddle up and just very slowly watch the door open.
I have a closet door like that now.
The hall closet.
Oh, I hate that.
A door should stay where it... Now, there's a difference between a door and a doorway.
I'm talking here about the rectangular plane.
The door itself.
Yes, the door itself should stay where you put it.
It's just that everything in our house is a joke and it's built on some kind of a grade.
Yeah, it's called San Francisco.
Nothing was made to be there.
No.
Oh, God.
Well, I used to live in Florida, so that's where it started.
That's where nothing should be here started.
Oh, this is great.
It's really, really hot and there's alligators, roaches, and mosquitoes.
Let's build a university.
So think about the door part.
Think about a door, and you open the door, you go through it, and then the door does some kind of an auto-closing thing on its own.
Maybe even, for the sake of this illustration, let's think about a screen door.
If it doesn't have that nice pressure thing your grandpa puts on there, right?
Right, right, right.
So you go through the door, and then the door closes on its own.
Now imagine that there's a cat...
This is, oh, I can get through while the door is open.
I'm going to sneak in.
I'm going to, as they say, as they say in Silicon Valley, piggyback.
Oh, they say that in Silicon Valley.
Yeah, yeah.
When you run your badge and then somebody comes in with or behind you, that's called piggybacking and it's frowned upon.
Isn't there a security guy that keeps that from happening?
Or gal.
Yeah, sure.
I don't know.
Sure.
I've got to blow my nose.
It says, stop right there.
Isn't there a stop right there?
Here, you need to blow your nose.
It says, stop right there.
Stop right there.
I'm very concerned about this cat now.
I know.
I never even had a cat, John.
It's not the type of thing that you would, as you were cycling through a thousand possible anxieties, it's not the type of thing you would typically settle on unless there'd been a triggering event.
Well, no, because as I say in my Wisdom Project document, we don't get to pick what we love in life.
I see.
Right.
And I think we don't get to choose –
The people or invaginations in life that we love.
Yes.
And I think we have to honor that.
And I think with compulsions, you rarely get – that's a little Freudian to think that, like, I don't know, that a cat – the priest, you know.
Yeah.
The cat, the priest, sure.
I didn't have a priest, John.
Right.
I was in Scouts.
Sure.
But anyways, I had a few compulsions as a kid.
And one of them, I had several compulsions, especially in late elementary school years.
Now, that might have been because my life was a little odd.
Actually, that was a little bit of a Pax Romana in my life.
Sixth grade was a very good year.
Fifth and sixth grade, things had sort of settled down.
And I had an anesthesiologist.
I had an anesthesiologist.
I was always afraid I closed the door.
You know, they say that's one of the most difficult jobs is anesthesiology.
You got to get it just right.
My sister was an anesthesiologist.
Wait, shut your mouth.
Not Susan, the other sister.
Oh, one of the other sisters.
Oh, the other sister.
Okay, okay.
There's the other sister, Susan, but then there's the sister, Laura.
She was an anesthesiologist for many years.
She worked with Dr. Bob.
Yeah.
With whom?
With whom?
Oh, Dr. Bob.
Dr. Bob.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
He was the indie rock doc.
I should have blown it all over your keyboard.
All right.
I'm going to, I'm going to try to mute.
Hang standby.
I want to hear about the other Susan.
Hang on.
Yeah.
Oh, God, I hate it.
Okay.
Is that all right?
Did you get it done?
No, I'm not done.
This is the thing.
It's like trimming your rose bush, you know?
And you can't go too fast.
Now, one trick a lot of folks don't know is usually, you know, your nostrils, not your nostrils, but the sides of your nasal breathing alternate every 90 minutes or so.
One is more dominant than the other for a period of time.
And the key to a good nose blow is it seems like you should start on the difficult side, but you should actually start on the easy side.
And that helps free up the difficult side.
Oh, you got to free it up.
Sure.
It turns out, John.
Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure.
uh anesthesiologist i should just rewind for a second i did the thing where i i i slightly anonymized uh the character that i was gonna that i was gonna tell a story oh that's fine uh and i called him dr bob but then i realized well his actual name is also an unknowable you know an untraceable pseudonym his real name was dr john
And we never called him Dr. Bob.
I was just doing the thing where it's like, oh, should I out him because he's a professional?
But yeah, Dr. John, he's a doctor.
He worked in Tacoma where my sister Laura was an anesthesiologist.
Famous keyboard piano player.
Dr. John, right.
And he loved indie rock.
And he would make the drive up from Tacoma to see all the bands.
He was at every show.
And he was, you know, a little older.
He's a doctor.
And so he was at every show.
But he was almost certainly younger than you are now.
Oh, younger than I am now.
And he loved rock music.
And then eventually everybody knew him.
And so he became, if you twisted your ankle, if you broke a finger.
So he's a practicing physician.
Yeah.
And you would call.
You could actually go.
Because I don't even want to pick doctors anymore.
It seems like you get assigned doctors a lot.
But in this case, you could go down to see Dr. John.
Dr. John would come see you.
He loved bands.
And he was a hotshot doctor.
And the thing is, he wasn't a Dr. Feelgood, but he would prescribe you stuff if you needed it.
Yeah, I was thinking it was going to be like a Dr. Nick.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
When you said that, because frequently I feel like, and when we say Dr. Nick, there's a funny character from The Simpsons, but it's also my aunt and uncle's former neighbor in Memphis, who was purportedly the person who gave Elvis Presley a lot, a lot, a lot of drugs.
And I think he became prominent after Elvis's death because they did an autopsy and were like, who in the hell put all these drugs in the fat man?
And it was Dr. Nick was the answer.
It was Dr. Nick.
So you hear a doctor in first name, and I think of Dr. Nick.
Now, Dr. John sounds like a pretty good egg.
He likes indie rock, all the great shows.
Yeah, and Dr. John, I think even by his own admission, would acknowledge that he was on the spectrum in a way that was...
That was apparent.
But he also... A lot of those folks are the best fans, if you ask me.
Super fans, right?
And he knew every note.
He was devoted.
He loved Death Cab.
He loved The Long Winters and a lot of other bands besides.
He was the guy... I was looking up some guy in the UK...
Who started seeing shows back in 1971, and he's written down every show he's ever been to.
That's right up our alley, huh?
He has been this guy.
He's got cigar boxes.
Cigar boxes of his mind.
He does.
He has every ticket stub.
But he's put it all in a website.
where he documents every show.
Let's see if I can find him.
I had him just here right just a second ago.
Is he a pseudonym?
Well, I don't think I should pseudonym him because I think there's nothing he would like more than for all of us to read his list of shows that he's been to.
It's his early 70s.
That's crazy.
Yeah, he saw the Sex Pistols 15 times and...
The thing is, these days, if you look at his shows that he's going to, he's not going to every show anymore.
And the shows that he's choosing are a little weird.
So it's RaysGigs, R-A-Y-S, gigs.com.
Oh, wow.
And RaysGigs, he's got shows.
Oh, man, going way back.
And I'm not going to try and navigate his thing.
Oh, he's seen Kiss a lot.
Did you say he's in the UK?
He's in the United Kingdom, yeah.
And I think at a certain point he realized he was the UK's number one gig goer.
And so then, you know, that's a thing.
So he says he's been to over 5,500 gigs since 1973.
And, you know, Dr. John's the type of guy that might rival him.
But I don't think Dr. John's ever seen Kiss.
Oh, okay.
I don't know.
You can never... He's going to more stage shows.
He's doing that, but he also is going to metal acts that are on the...
State Fair Circuit.
Mm-hmm.
You know, a lot of, like, White Lion and stuff.
Although, you know, I'm not going to denigrate the Rick, what's his name?
Ray's Giggs.
Ray's Giggs.
He's like on the Bunnymen in February.
That's cool.
See?
See?
See?
So he's still, he's got his hand in the game.
God, it's early.
We haven't recorded at 10 o'clock in the morning in so long.
It's a nonce.
It's been years.
Yeah.
Ooh, it's out of man.
Oh, man, that's cool.
It's been out of man many times.
He's still performing.
Do we know what year this is?
Is this the current year?
Yes.
He keeps it current.
He keeps it current.
He surely does.
I like his use of dashes.
I think he goes to the Hammersmith Odeon a lot.
Oh, I've heard of that.
He's a local guy.
He's a local guy.
He lives in London or is he in the home counties?
No, he's there in the London environs.
But you know, it's a large city.
It's like San Francisco.
Yeah, there's London inside of London.
Do you know about that?
Well, this is what I'm saying.
If you were in London right now, Merlin, let's say, and I know this is your worst nightmare, but let's say you're in London.
I was in London for a day.
And you're sitting there and somebody goes, oh, where are you from?
And you live, okay, this is very speculative because what if you lived in Oakland, but you were in London?
We're talking about an alternate universe.
Oh, okay.
This is going on the list of things that need a name because you don't need to know exactly where I live and you wouldn't care.
If I say San Francisco, if you want to know more, you'll ask more.
Yeah, that's right.
It's like saying you're a ceramicist.
And it's a way for people to go, oh, we're in San Francisco, thereby indicating that they know more.
And then you guys can dive down.
You know, when somebody says, when I'm in London and somebody says, oh, I'm from Seattle.
And I go, oh, where?
And they say, oh, it's a little neighborhood.
You wouldn't know it.
Oh, I love that experience.
Actually, I live in, what's it called?
Quisp.
You get that wise face.
Twisp.
Twisp.
Twisp.
Did you make that up?
Is that really a place, Twist?
No, it's a place.
It's a place.
And you're going to be a sheriff there at some point.
Yeah, one day.
Oh, one day.
Okay.
Biting my time.
Yes.
I live in Seattle.
They closed the North Road to Twist.
So in the winter, you know, even getting to Twist, you've got to go by the South.
Are you turning into an English folk song?
Ha, ha, ha.
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And all the great shows.
You know, that's really fun when somebody says, oh, I live in a neighborhood, you know, and you're like, oh, tell me which one.
Because I would never reveal, I never would reveal that I knew more.
I would always just say, no, no, no, tell me the name, you know, and they'd be like, I live in Ballard.
And I'd go, oh, Ballard, you say.
We're in Ballard.
You know.
And then it's only then that I get to say like, oh, you mean the pink house on the corner?
And they're like, what?
I love that.
You hold up your phone and it's their face on it.
Oh, yeah.
I park across the street from your house and look in the windows all the time.
Oh, yeah.
You should get better curtains.
I like your hair like that.
Speaking about hippies, I had a hippie over here yesterday.
Have I ever told you about my original Seattle band, Chautauqua?
If you have, I don't remember.
Original Seattle band.
The first band I was ever in.
Chautauqua.
Chautauqua.
The first band I was ever in was the Truly Awful Band in high school.
And I think I've told you about that.
The guitar player, Rick Garnett, Rick had learned all these early 80s new wave of British heavy metal songs by Judas Priest and so forth.
And then he would play them in practice.
But I didn't know the music well enough to recognize that they were songs by other bands.
And so I would write my own lyrics to them.
And Rick never informed me like, oh, no, that's an Iron Maiden song.
Is this the Truly Awful Band?
This is the Truly Awful Band.
You didn't realize you were writing lyrics for an existing song.
And Rick, is that right?
Yeah, Rick.
I got a lot of names to keep track of this week.
And he didn't feel the needs to say, oh, that's a brick in the law.
You just wrote brick.
We just wrote brick in the law.
Yeah.
No.
And it was always, yeah, it was right.
It was like the hellion or electric eye.
And it was, it was early enough that I didn't have, uh, I didn't have the, the, like, uh, like, you know, comprehensive knowledge of, uh, rock music that I have now.
And I would, and I just thought that life was easy like that.
And that Richard Winfield Garnett could come up with all these great riffs.
And I was like, cool, you know, and I wrote these lyrics to them.
It's so weird.
It's like a little bit like you're almost in like a the gods must be crazy kind of situation.
Like you found a Coke bottle on the savannah.
Yeah.
You know, what if I played this?
What if I played the part you're playing, but up a fifth?
This will really catch up.
And Rick was one of those high school kids.
And this is back in a time when, you know, learning guitar and being a guitar stud was one of the five ambitions that any boy in high school had.
Oh, it's like hoop dreams.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, what other options do you have?
You could go to college or you could play in a band.
I'm not going to go to college.
Yeah, right.
We're going to play in a band.
And I'd be like, come on.
And Rick was one of the kids in the school that was good.
Right?
You've got a million bands.
The phrase that I still use to this day, I always think of my friend Stephen Fox.
He could play the parts.
He could.
He knew the right.
I played in a cover band with Stephen.
It was so embarrassing.
Apart from Stephen's band, Flanders, it was the most popular band that any of us had been in, in Tallahassee, was playing 90s covers.
Long story short, the bar, the Cow House, which you've probably been to at some point.
Sure, the Cow House.
The Cow House, which was where we practiced.
It's where our friends owned it.
And the drummer from Flanders needed a band to open for Bow Wow Wow.
Whoa.
Annabella and Bow Wow Wow was coming through town.
And at the last minute, it's like, yeah, this is a last minute thing.
They have to have an opening act.
And, of course, there's no money, but, of course, there's beer.
But, so why wouldn't I spend three weeks learning like 20 people?
80s covers, most of which I already kind of knew, of course.
I could fake it.
But then I was in a band with fucking Stephen Fox, who actually tried out for Foo Fighters at one point.
He's actually really good.
He's a car player from Flanders.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
He's really good.
And Stephen always knows.
the part because he learned the part.
And to me, it's like, I don't know how you even describe it.
I was going to say it's like perfect pitch, but it's way better than that.
It's like being able to just like produce iced coffee with your eyes.
Like, I don't know how he does it.
It's a fucking gift.
But meeting the person who knows the parts.
Now, the interesting part here is, would you say his name was?
Mine's Steven.
Yours is Rick, right?
Rick, Rick, Rick.
But again, now Rick learned the parts, but he never...
So he didn't do the classics like dub you a shitty cassette so you could learn the song where you would find out that it's Iron Maiden.
That didn't happen.
So Rick was one of the rare, rare kids in school.
Because I was always the youngest kid in the class.
Rick was actually a little bit younger than I was.
But he didn't – but Rick was not immature.
Rick was raised in a large Catholic family.
They were well-to-do.
And Rick was an achiever.
And he was a handsome kid.
And he was popular.
And he had in his bedroom – he had his bed.
And then he had a drum kit.
And then a whole guitar set up.
And our friend Jim McNeil, who was a transplant from Arkansas, at some point Jim said in his distinctive Arkansas drawl, I play the drums.
Wow.
And we had no idea how Jim played the drums.
But Jim was one of these guys that could, you know, Jim could do anything.
Jim was the guy who showed up at Kevin.
Jim was working construction downtown.
And he would show up at Kevin's house after work.
to like hang out and go get a beer.
And Kevin at one point said, every time Jim shows up at my house, he's wearing his tool belt and his hard hat.
But I know in order to get in his truck and drive here, he had to take off his tool belt and hard hat.
Which means that when he... He's a full-time lifestyle construction worker.
And he can do the construction, but what it meant was when he arrived at Kevin's house, he got out of his truck and put his tool belt and hard hat back on.
Did he play drums while he was wearing these village people up?
No, this was before.
He played drums before.
But so Jim showed up, and he was the drummer, and Rick could play Hellion in an electric eye.
And of course, you know, and I got recruited as the singer because I was the only one with charisma.
And so, and we would get in there and I would write these songs about how the great Alaskan moose came down from the mountains to bestow his wisdom on all of us.
You know, like I was writing some wizard music, except it was all about, you know, Alaska because it was all I knew.
And it was – so Rick went on.
He's one of these terrible, terrible people who was great at everything, great at music.
And handsome.
And handsome.
And then – oh, and he actually was –
He was like one of the king concerns.
He was able to cross over.
He crossed over and dated a Soch, which was a scandal.
Absolute scandal.
But Rick, right now.
I bet it was a scandal to everybody.
I bet it was a regular Montague and Cabula type situation.
Well, it absolutely was because from a Soch perspective, like this guy, he's headed to the stratosphere.
Yeah, she shouldn't be dating down.
Well, or whatever.
That was one of the first examples of like, oh, wait.
we like the conserves are going to end up being the ones that you know the socias are going to look up to this was this was the moment right this was the crossover before that it was like oh the socias they run they run everything and then it was like no it's actually rick that's going to run everything right now i should say i looked it up richard winfield garnett is the paul j sherry slash fort howard corporation professor of law
And a concurrent professor of political science and the founding director of the Notre Dame program on church, state, and society at Notre Dame Law School.
Oh, now he's Richard.
He's Richard Winfield now.
I feel like you might be giving me some kind of a neurology exam.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
This is what we, in my house, this is what we call a data dump.
Because we have a rule.
We have something I learned from my friend Alex.
When you get home, it's called DND.
It's do not disturb time.
No data dumps are allowed for the first hour that I get home.
Well, this is all stuff that you should know, right?
Because we've been talking for 11 years.
I know.
Well, it's like, but it really is like, I don't know, like some kind of Meryl Streep thing where you're like trying to jam in everything that I may not know because you never know.
No, no, no.
You got to get back.
You got to get all the way back.
But Rick's not a doctor.
Rick is a Catholic law professor at a Catholic university.
Specializing in Catholic law.
He's not just a law professor.
What's the name of his chair?
He had a corporate chair.
Is that right?
What is he?
Or scholarship?
What is it?
No, no, no.
Let's see if I can find it again.
It is the... It was like the Genentech and Bob's Pete Moss Memorial Fellowship or something?
That's what it is.
No, it's the Paul J. Schieri slash Fort Howard Corporation professor of law...
Who loves that title?
Notre Dame Program on Church, State, and Society at Notre Dame Law School.
Well, whenever he sends me an email, it has all of that in his signature.
His signature.
And you know, the thing I learned quite a few years back, I used to think, oh, God, all these douchebags and their goddamn signatures, and they're totally toothless.
uh, legal warnings and threats.
There's not a, it's not a warning.
It's a threat, legal threats or, you know, the saber rattling, the bellicose signature.
And, uh, it turns out that the IT department does that a lot of times, not the person.
Yeah.
Did you know that?
Well, somebody told them that makes it legal.
If you strap that on, if you strap on this particular codicil, now you could ask, uh, uh, well, he's a JD, I suppose, Dr. Rick about this.
Yeah.
I mean, you went to Gonzaga.
That's Catholic.
Maybe you could get an in.
I know Rick really well, and it's entirely possible that he put all this in there.
You know, at the very bottom of his email signature, I'm looking now, it actually has a link.
It says, download my scholarly papers here.
Download my scholarly papers here.
Oh, no, that's definitely, I don't think IT did that.
Nope, nope, nope.
Nope, no, that's something.
And he's really something.
And he focuses on the law itself.
He's very Catholic.
And the thing is, his family converted to Catholicism.
That's the craziest thing.
Oh, interesting.
They're, you know, Catholics come lately.
Yeah, that's right.
But when that Amy Barrett got elevated to the Supreme Court.
Kind of hot.
Rick was like totally tight with her.
And he was like, no, no, no, she's the best candidate.
And I was like, Rick, she's not the best candidate.
She should not be on the Supreme Court, but she does seem very smart.
Rick was extremely offended at all the personal attacks that were levied at her during her confirmation.
Did you see this on Facebook?
No, no, no, no.
He's sending these emails to me because he and I have argued about politics since we were
Okay.
14, because he was conservative then and I was a leftist.
And, you know, he's the one that famously said something to me and he shouted down the hall at me something about Ronald Reagan.
Or no, no, no.
He was a Jack Kemp supporter.
Oh, Jack Kemp.
That guy looked like he was carved out of a solid piece of elephant tusk.
He was going to be president of the United States.
Remember how handsome that guy was?
That guy looked like a composite sketch of everybody who almost won president.
And it was at the time when conservatives still felt like you could be younger.
Talking about late 80s, like mid to late 80s.
Yeah, mid.
People were still high on the Reagan fumes, but there were so many conservatives that you wouldn't even recognize as being in the same world.
theoretical party today no no they'd be considered liberal democrats now but rick said something to me that where he was he was shouting something down the hall that i didn't you know that that uh but ron reagan yeah and it was one of these ad hominem attacks that 15 year olds do when they're arguing politics like you know sure go read the constitution and i was like you know what
You need to read up on it, I said to him.
Oh, no.
And it became, no, no, no, it became like, because all of our friends were standing somewhere in the vicinity, and it became a thing that we would all say to each other.
Like, friends would say, say it then.
It became a catchphrase.
You need to read up on it.
I was concerned.
That it was one of those, like, I'm thinking of a TV show that I like, that you lost your opportunity for a really good catchphrase.
Why don't you read up on it?
It's got kind of a Brian Regan quality.
You should go read up on it.
It's a little bit like, what, is this your first day?
Yeah.
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At least in our little circle, that actually was an effective scorching burn, but also it was funny because everybody knew that Rick had read up on it.
And I was like, read up on it.
I get it.
You had to be there.
No, no, no, no, no.
Well, the hallway helps a lot.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We're yelling down the hallway.
Yes, yes.
It's like today, you know, it's hard to job and jab with people with a mask on, for example.
I learned very early on in our ill-fated, poorly thought out trip to Rhode Island over the summer, that if you're in a room with my family, first of all, glug, glug.
and I don't know what it is about... I love my family.
I actually really love my family, mostly.
I mean, I like some more than others.
I like some more than others, but I love all of them.
I don't know what it is about my family.
They seem to really, like...
Owning houses that sound basically like the acoustics of a museum, except nobody's whispering.
It's just all stone and wood.
It's Rhode Island.
So glug, glug, everybody's screaming.
And we walk in with our masks on and say, we're going to have our masks on.
So you're looking at me, right?
And I'm wearing a mask.
Okay, here's my family.
Glug, glug, glug, glug.
Here's me.
No lip reading.
I've already been, as the chuds and thumbs and hogs like to say, it's a muscle.
But you can't talk.
And of course, everybody's glug, glug, and everybody's screaming with no mask on.
It might as well just be like spitting out of the vuvuzela.
You know what I'm saying?
I do.
I do.
We were watching Sense and Sense.
A hallway can be very loud, John.
And I think in retrospect, you in a hallway yelling that, it could have gone a lot worse.
Well, and our school had 2,700 kids in it or something like that.
So it was one of those enormous, what felt like an urban school, like from one end of the hallway to the other, you couldn't see the other end.
It disappeared into the ozone.
I forgot.
I went to a big school.
I had a nice visit with a new friend of mine the other day, my friend Sydney.
Sydney went, I think if I heard this correctly, they went to a high school with, I want to say, 4,000 people.
And I said, are you sure about that?
Because I went to what was, even at the time, regarded as a large high school.
And as it turns out, we had 666 kids in the entering 10th grade at that point.
Well, that's a lot.
600 kids just in the sophomore year.
Yeah, that's correct.
That's correct.
But 4,000?
Holy shit.
And in this case, oh my goodness, that's a lot, John.
That's four years, but you don't always get the same distribution.
That's going to be a loud hall.
Not as loud as Rhode Island glug glug, probably.
But you get points for context there.
What is it again?
Read up on it?
Yeah, read up on it.
Read up on it.
It's got a Letterkenny kind of rural Canada quality to it.
It's a little bit like that, yeah.
Read up on it.
Read up on it.
Figure it out.
We were watching Sense and Sensibility and my daughter at some point said... Which one of Tom Wom scans?
The one with the Rose... The one with the... What's his name?
The...
The guy from Succession?
No, the other one.
Oh, yeah, maybe he is in Succession.
Yeah, I think he is.
It's the one with Rose McGowan.
Oh, the one with the girl from the Pirates movie?
Yeah, Rose McGowan.
She was in Titanic, right?
Rose McGowan?
Not Rose McGowan.
Are you talking about Keira Knightley?
No, the Titanic.
Oh, I know what you're talking about.
You're talking about the girl that was in that movie with the girl from Yellow Jackets.
I know who you're talking about.
Kate Winslet.
Yeah, Kate Winslet.
Kate Winslet.
Okay, okay.
And my daughter says, why does everybody sound like they're talking to a microphone?
And I was trying to figure out what she was talking about.
And I listened to...
And it was two things.
Very echoey homes.
Oh, I see.
And everyone is enunciating.
They're talking loud.
They're all talking loud, even when they're talking loud.
I don't know if you were raised this way, John, but I was definitely in probably one of the – I don't know if it was one of the concluding areas.
I don't know if it was an Ohio thing or what thing.
But like –
We were very heavily encouraged not to – I think the phrase they used to use was mumble, that you should enunciate.
Yeah, exactly.
You should – and it's interesting.
One of the things I like to watch on YouTube is police interrogations.
I'll just watch different police interrogations for hours.
You mean real ones?
Oh, yeah.
Like where the camera is on the other side of the glass or it's up in the corner?
It's up in a corner.
Somebody handcuffed to a table and they're like.
Handcuffed to a table.
You want me to get your water?
I know all the techniques.
I can set you up.
Oh, I'll set you up with some good ones.
You can see these on the web.
I watched one the other day and I don't want to spoil it.
But there was a woman who had Munchausen by proxy her kid.
And big time.
And so this girl, this poor girl, the mother thought that she had basically everything.
Cancer, muscular dystrophy.
She had her teeth removed and her head shaved.
She forced her to sit in a wheelchair.
And again, nothing wrong with a wheelchair, but the kid didn't need it.
The kid had a minor injury when she was nine and was then kept in a... She was the special parade marshal of the Special Olympics.
Like, full situation going on here.
It turns out there was a Munchausen by proxy.
And this woman would not let her daughter, who was really mostly fine...
because that's how the Munchausen by proxy works.
Sure.
She wouldn't let her date this fella, and the fella's on this left side of the spectrum over here.
We don't say Asperger's anymore, but he definitely has a situation going on.
And so the daughter convinced the boyfriend to stab the mother to death, and then they posted a message about it on Facebook, and they got arrested.
They'd gone to Wisconsin from Missouri,
But they'd gone to Wisconsin.
She had a night.
And so there's like two hours of interrogating them separately.
That's a pretty good one.
Huh.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But what I notice is, and I think this is something they train people on.
You know, you meet somebody like me out in the world, especially in my younger years, after the pronunciation non-mumbling era, and people say, oh, do you want some sausage and biscuits?
And I'd say, yeah.
But like as I got older, like a lot of people as you get older, you learn to say yes or yes, thank you.
Yes, please.
I think they train people about this kind of thing in court things and police things to enunciate and say very clearly.
And that's why it feels – it always feels like somebody like an Elizabeth Holmes is dissembling a little bit when they say stuff like they can't remember a thing that everybody else remembers.
Yeah.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
I'll set you up with some of these videos.
I think it's a thing that you once said to our friend Asher about the video game threes.
I think you said, this is not a game for a vulnerable person.
No.
No.
It's not wholesome for a person.
It remains true.
Yeah, but I think I can handle these interrogation videos.
Oh, they're real long, too.
You can just let them run in the background.
But also, it's a very – I walked in – my wife, who you met, Madeline.
Madeline walked into the lounge, and I'm watching one of these like I do sometimes in the afternoon yesterday, Sunday.
And she comes in, and she goes, is this the same one?
I said, no, this is a different one.
And I explained what was going on in it.
It's a very low effort type of YouTube video.
So I guess this stuff comes out.
I want to come back to your anesthesiology and Rick.
But I think this is the kind of thing where that comes out and must come out in a public document.
Evidence becomes public or something.
So basically you get a video from...
It's two hours long, and you occasionally make the sound like cluck, like the sound of hitting pause, like on a cassette player, and then you make a commentary on that still, or you circle things, and you say, notice here, and then you put an asterisk up at the top and say, notice that she's changing the subject because she doesn't want to talk about this.
In that case, that was two couples in Tallahassee, and the couples had gone to college together, and then they grew apart, and then they...
They did the crossover.
And one lady went with the other man and they killed the first man.
Oh, dear.
And she wouldn't talk to the police for 16 years.
But then she got kidnapped by her new husband, the other husband, the crossover husband.
And they were getting divorced.
And that's when she went to report it to the police.
And boy, is that ever a good one.
I'm going to say you might even want to start with that one.
Okay.
All right.
All right.
You send that along.
Oh, I don't like this tone.
I'm about to send you into something that might ruin your life.
Please do not be glib about it.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Read up on it?
Yeah, read up on it.
Read up on it.
All right, well, I'll watch up on it.
The thing about Truly Awful Band is we only ever played two shows.
This is Rick.
We're talking about Dr. Richard here.
Yeah, one of them, we moved all of our kit out of Rick's bedroom and into their rec room.
And we played a rock show, you know, like five or six songs for his eight-year-old sister and her friends.
Oh!
But you had an audience.
Yeah, we were playing all these Judas Priest songs.
It's like when a little kid puts on a magic show and everybody sits around and acts like it's good.
All these loud Judas Priest songs about magical moose to the little girls.
Grindr!
And I believe at the time I actually wore... Looking for meat!
We were culture jamming enough that I wore one white glove.
Oh!
Oh, boy, they weren't expecting that, were they?
No, they weren't.
They weren't.
Oh, and I think Jim had one of those painter's caps that had the two long flaps in the back.
Oh, he had safari flaps.
A safari flap.
That was a terrific look.
It sounded like billabong or something on it.
Yeah, it was dynamite.
OP.
But then our other show, the other show we played was actually in front of teens at the tennis club party for our senior graduation, Truly Awful Band rock show.
Who asked you to do that?
That's crazy.
Even if you were good, which you probably weren't, that's a weird idea.
We were absolutely terrible.
And you can imagine the shock and awe on the faces of the other teens as they watched us completely earnestly.
rocking out these tunes um i'll send you a picture i wish you would people today i think don't understand that you know david letterman did not invent irony but he was its poster child for a long time but the effects the post letterman in the same way that people like you know uh people now make the star wars movies that they wanted to make when they were a kid or taika watiti wants to make a comic movie like i think i think they don't appreciate that people were not always ironic
It took a while for that Letterman-ish thing to become so in the culture.
But being ironic, I wanted to call my high school band Free Beer because I thought that was really funny.
Yeah, but they wouldn't have let us play at the tennis club if we'd been called Free Beer.
But they let the Truly Awful Band.
Did you call yourselves Truly Awful Band?
Well, we called ourselves Tab.
We were Tab.
Okay.
And it was a thing among my whole... Like the dietetic drink.
Yeah, tab.
My whole group of friends, we would sit in class and we would draw, and this was like lots of people, not just people in the band or even like people in the band and our girlfriends, but like lots of people.
would sit and doodle tab album covers.
No.
And then we would pass them around.
No one did that.
What are you talking about?
I have a whole stack of them.
Tab album covers.
Are you kidding me?
No, no, it was a whole thing.
Because it was like, you know, because we were all into rock music.
So it was like all these kind of metal logos.
The part of this I totally get, recognize, and...
is the pageantry around, for example, having a band.
Basically, it's a new version of a made-up club.
Like in fifth grade, I really liked the idea of Animal House, even though I hadn't seen the movie, so I started a fraternity.
And I gave titles and things like that.
We had one of those in our high school called Tap-a-Mega-Kega.
Oh, that's funny.
That's funny.
And they ended up going to the University of Colorado, and they actually kept doing it.
People in Colorado love beer.
Yeah.
And I think part of the reason is that, at least according to my friend Chris, who went to see you, he's from Boulder.
Yes.
He said they got what they call 3-2 beer.
So you can kind of grow up underage drinking some kind of beer, developing those muscles.
Watered down beer.
Watered down beer.
Correct.
3-2.
And so all I was going to say was the band, something with Rick, the music.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah, but it's like having a club.
I knew I wanted a punk rock band called Flesh Bullets, and I went so far as to make a stencil, a spray stencil, Flesh Bullets, and there was never really a band.
It was kind of my friend Alan and me, and we would tell people that was our band, and we made shirts.
That was definitely a thing in high school, and if I'm being honest, when I was 19.
Well, a stencil actually plays into this story.
No shit.
We led parallel lives, I think, John.
Yeah, there's a lot of parallels, and there always were.
That's fair.
But when I first arrived in Seattle, so that would have been November of 1990.
I hooked up with these guys.
One of them I'd gone to Gonzaga with.
He was this young... I'm sorry.
Just super quick.
This is after high school.
After TAB.
I'm here in Seattle.
Okay.
Sorry.
This friend, Brian, who had gone to Gonzaga with me, who was a drummer, and he'd played in a lot of hardcore bands in Seattle in the 80s.
Okay.
And he had decided...
independently that punk rock had run its course and that wasn't the future anymore now little did he know little did he know but at the time he was like i've been playing in hardcore bands since i was 14 this can't possibly continue to still be a thing like it's exhausted we've done it we've done it and hardcore around the country it's just been done there's no nothing new there
And this is a thing that a lot of people, when they think back at the grunge era, they don't know because the comprehensive story has not been told.
It seems like all those books about grunge, they've all told the comprehensive story, but all they're doing is telling one side of the story.
In 1990 and 91, before the Nirvana record and before the Pearl Jam record came out, there were...
So many bands in Seattle that were not grunge at all.
There were still, of course, like... More like pop, not pop bands, but indie pop was maybe... It's just, it's funny.
It's like you mentioned Oakland earlier.
It always bums me out that if Oakland was a couple miles away from any other city in America, it would be the crown jewel.
It's just that because it's near fucking San Francisco...
it's always treated as this, like, second, like, redheaded stepchild thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And, like, grunge became the thing.
And to me, like, Jangle Pop and a little bit of Paisley Underground became Athens, right?
Like, the scene becomes, or Austin, obviously, a little bit of country rockish.
But there's a whole bunch of really good, isn't that where, like, the monks are from?
Are they from Seattle?
Yeah.
Uh, no, no, no.
What's that band?
What's that band?
Uh, the, uh, the Sonics are from there, right?
The Sonics are from here.
Yes.
But there's a lot of like really good bands, but it wasn't all just like pre Melvin's, but in, yeah.
And in that moment, there were all kinds of bands, the walkabouts, the posies, they were all doing something that wasn't grunge at all.
1990s, summer of nineties when I first heard posies, young, fresh fellows, they weren't great.
And so we had that, we put this band together and we got a guy, I think it was out of the newspaper.
to play bass.
His name was Tom Roberts.
And he showed up at our first practice.
It's really rock and roll.
Tom Roberts.
He showed up and we were rehearsing in Brian's Dad's House's
tiny little basement tv room is this the rec room uh this was the rec room okay tom showed up tom was wearing uh tom had very long hair he had big gold hoop earrings and he was wearing a paisley shirt buttoned up to the top can you picture the scene oh i sure can and i think he was in red cross yeah and very tight like does that kind of look though that kind of like red cross sort of look well yes
Yes, absolutely.
But with like the curly, the mane of hair.
The big mane of curly hair, yeah.
Maybe a little bit Jellyfish was kind of like that too.
He looked like the guy that played extra guitar in Nirvana for a little while before Kirk kicked him out for being too metal.
Okay.
But he wasn't metal at all.
He was really into the posies.
He was really into jangle pop.
And we formed this band called Chautauqua.
Chautauqua.
And Chautauqua was going, we predicted that this whole sort of Mudhoney thing had all, that was all.
Like run its course.
Yeah, it was tired.
It was just like, oh, you guys playing like punk rock in a high school auditorium.
The future.
When did that Keep It Out of My Face song come out?
88 probably?
Yeah, right about then.
Yeah, right in there.
That's a great song.
Such a good song.
And, you know, we'd all been influenced by full moon fever or whatever.
You know, like, oh no, the future.
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The future is rickenbackers, man.
Are you kidding me?
Like Jingle Jangle because... Let me introduce you to a man called Benmont Tension.
everybody come it all comes back around right so it's gonna be the birds again it's gonna be the birds everybody's gonna be everybody's gonna be but these buttoned up shirts are gonna make the 60s look like the 40s that's exactly right and at this point in time of course rem had not become a huge band yet oh they still hadn't done the dum bum bum bum bum that that was 91 that that happened yeah yeah yeah so rem was still a cool yeah they were like they got their
orange crush around that time yeah you got your cure you got your you know my friday season love yes right yes right so we had this band and we practiced four times a week we made we went into a studio we made a demo tape the professional demo tape that had five or six songs on it and we made a stencil and
chautauqua and it was wait for it a two color stencil what that was designed that's crazy yeah yeah yeah that was designed by my other friend tom different tom okay okay
And we would go out at night and put this stencil.
And it was big.
It was the size of... It was bigger than a pizza box.
Oh, really?
I found stencil spraying to be a lot trickier than it looks.
Well, it was.
And we had to have three colors of paint because we did the first color, then we did the second, then we did the third.
Did you come back on different nights?
No, no, no.
It was all like, you know, we had to wait for it to dry or anything.
It was all three of us.
We had the three.
Oh, I see.
Real organized like.
But one of the things that in 1991, when grunge was exploding around the world, if you lived in Seattle, all over the place, there were these Chautauqua stencils.
Oh, my God.
We put them right on the pavement.
At the crosswalk of Broadway and John.
So everybody waiting for the light looks down and there's this orange, yellow and black.
Right.
Like today, like I'll recognize a tag or like something.
Not so much like a signature tag, but like a little, little, you know, two line drawing that somebody will do all over the area.
You were like that.
You were like an early tagger.
We were tagging everywhere.
And in fact, we were tagging a building.
At one point downtown in the middle of the night, right next to the famous Pearl Jam tag that they also spray painted a stencil of a guy with dreadlocks that was like a little stick figure holding his hands up in the air.
It was like their famous pre-fame stencil.
There was one on a building and we were stenciling ours next to it as like, take that Pearl Jam.
I think they might have even been still Mookie Blaylock.
And all of a sudden, this is two o'clock in the morning, a door opens right on the wall, right where I'm standing.
Oh, no.
The whole outside of the building is painted.
The door opens.
There's a guy standing in there.
And I look in.
It's a brightly lit warehouse full of women sitting at sewing machines.
Wow.
What?
You tagged a sweatshop?
Yeah.
And the guy opens the door and he goes, what the fuck are you doing?
And I was like, uh, and he runs after us and we keep running and we're down in bell town.
And it's like this, it's at the time it was a very, it was a very, uh, like scary neighborhood at night.
Sure.
He jumps in a car and
And starts chasing us in a car.
What the hell?
And we're running up an alley and he's coming down the alley and we're like hiding and jumping.
And we run out into the middle of 2nd Avenue and he's going the wrong way up a one-way street.
And we come up over the top of the hill and there are two cops sitting there.
And the guy comes up the wrong way street.
And, of course, they turn on their lights.
And then it's a big kerfuffle.
He says, they tagged my building.
Oh, dear.
The cops put me in the car because I was the ringleader.
I said I did it.
So the other guys left.
And the cops take me down to the building.
And the guy's like, see?
And the cop said, did you do this?
And I was like, well, yeah.
And one of the cops says, that's the best stencil I've ever seen.
And I was like, thank you.
That's high praise.
It was, but then he said, but I have to arrest you for vandalism.
Oh, I see.
And they arrested me for vandalism.
That's a consolation, though.
Is there any video of the interrogation?
Well, no, but the problem was...
Then I had to come back for my hearing, and I skipped it because I was too rock and roll.
Oh, no.
They hate that.
Which turned into a $500 bench warrant, which I ignored.
Oh, God.
Which turned into a $1,000 bench warrant, which I couldn't pay.
Oh, my God.
You must have been terrified.
And then I was riding in a car with a guy over in Bellevue.
He and I had gone to the movies, and he was black.
And the cops in Bellevue pulled him over for being black with a white guy in the car.
Oh, yeah.
They got to be up to some shenanigans, right?
Oh, yeah.
What the hell are you even doing in Bellevue?
And he was a very, like, he and I had met in college.
He was a nice guy.
But what happened was they ran our things, and then they pulled me out of the car and cuffed me and took me to Bellevue jail.
And the guy, Howard...
howard had to take uh this all started with the stencil it started with the stencil okay he had to take five hundred dollars out or whatever to bail me out of bellevue jail oh and he any and he bailed me out under his name the five hundred dollars well i paid him the five hundred dollars back but when i finally showed up for the court hearing and i was like can i get my five hundred dollars bail back they were like well that bail belongs to howard wooten
Well, I hadn't seen Howard at that point in two years.
Oh, Jesus.
This is how they get you.
What a system.
I never did get it back.
And that was at a time when $500 would have changed my mind.
$500 is a lot of money.
I have a fair number of, like, during the daylight hours, that $500 seems like a lot of money to me.
Let alone, I mean, boy, that's a real jam up, John.
How close is Bellevue to where you were living?
Well, it's Oakland.
It's the Oakland of Seattle, except that it's where... Did they have a sonic boom at some point?
No, they didn't.
But it's where Microsoft is.
So they have a totally different character.
Oh, Kirkland is Costco.
Yep.
Bellevue is Microsoft, is that right?
Well, Redmond is Microsoft.
Redmond, that's the one I know.
And that's just past Bellevue.
So all of Bellevue is just – it's just the rich people from Microsoft.
Do people from Microsoft, when they go to other places, if they go to London and somebody says, where are you from, do they say Seattle?
I bet they say Seattle.
Oh, for sure.
For sure they do.
Nobody's going to know what Redmond is unless they're a computer jockey.
Right, right, right.
But here's the worst thing about Chautauqua.
We practiced four times a week.
In the rec room.
For all of 1991.
Grunge is exploding all around us.
Even the worst band in the city is selling 400 tickets a night.
We never played a show.
We had a demo, a tape, and everything.
You had a stencil.
We had a stencil.
Everybody in the town knew our name because it was stenciled everywhere.
Even the cops are talking about it.
We never booked a show.
Shit, dog.
Is that a regret for you?
Uh, what would have happened?
I mean, I think at that point in time, there were still jangle pop bands in Seattle that were taking themselves pretty seriously.
Like, no, no, no, this is still the future.
Yeah, when I mentioned somewhere like Red Cross, they're kind of in that weird crossover from whatever Paisley Underground.
You know what I mean?
Yep.
sort of L.A.-ish, you know, Steve Wynn.
You know, the bands like that, Red on Green, stuff like that.
The crossover from, like, the mid-'80s, Paisley Underground, combined with... Another thing that I think got lost in translation outside of Seattle and Grunge Circles was, like, well, yeah, but, like, you really can't overlook...
Definitely the influence of heavy metal in grunge, but also of just the slugginess.
It wasn't just punk rock with long hair.
There was more to it than that.
But that's me.
I'm going to be like Red Cross.
To me, it's sort of like the crossover.
And actually, if memory serves, they were in a movie with Ken Stringfellow when they were all young.
Oh, yeah.
Desperate Teenage Love Dolls, I think it was called.
They all toured with each other and stuff.
You never played at all?
No Chautauqua.
That's a goddamn shame, John.
If we had 10% more Jane's Addiction in the band and 10% less international pop underground or whatever, if we had been just slightly less Brit pop.
Were you annoying?
No.
Not you, personally.
But, like, it sounds like you guys are a little, as they say in England, too clever by a half.
Do you think maybe you were annoying?
I've been in a lot of very annoying bands, believe it or not.
It wouldn't have been called annoying so much as it would have been not quite self-aware enough about the moment.
Like, I actually had a song...
That was six minutes long, about an astronaut.
What?
Yeah, but the situation of this astronaut was.
Does Adam Savage ever play it live?
He was, the astronaut was on a spaceship and he was unlikable.
And the other astronauts wanted him, wanted to put him in the airlock and put him out.
Oh, boy.
If John Carpenter had done that in the Dark Star era, oh, my God, that would be so good.
Well, yeah.
That's really good.
It came to me as a plot, right?
Like, well, wait a minute.
We've got Major Tom over here.
We've got this guy over here saying no soup.
Yeah.
And what we don't have is the actual real scenario, which is five years into a Mars mission or whatever, or five years into some space station.
Yeah, but it's like the worst roommate situation.
Everybody's really tired of this guy.
Yeah, sure.
I love this.
And they're like, you know what?
Our community is not going to survive until we get this guy out of here because he's causing all this problem.
And then so the song is from that guy's perspective.
Right.
Mm-hmm.
Wow.
Six minutes long.
Well, that is not – you put that next to Touch Me, I'm Sick.
Oh, sure.
Which is two minutes long.
And we would have just been – I think we would have gotten beer bottles thrown at us.
We would have been like rolling, rolling, rolling.
Well, of course.
I mean, let me just make the subtext text and say from one angle, the log line is similar in some ways to –
The Commander Thinks Aloud, which is a great song, and as everybody knows, but it's very meditative.
It repeats that three-chord figure most of the way.
It builds up with these different sounds.
It's almost like, not hypnotic, but it is very, that repetition becomes part of what makes you love that song, is it just keeps going back around in a circle, like a fugue or something, or a round.
This song, which was called... Yeah, how does that compare?
It was called Galaxy's End.
And it was in the style of songs I wrote at the time, which had like 14 chords.
You know, it was not... Oh, I see.
Wow, there's little tastes of the stuff that would make your music career less successful for a while.
Yeah, but it was... It was already happening in some ways.
It also, it was 14 chords, but it also had a drone.
Yeah, yeah, it was a total drone.
Anyway, the other day, because the hippies have taken over the ravines,
They have basically put a set of little flags in the ground, and they've said...
We've taken over the ravine.
It's now a critical wetland habitat.
And you're no longer allowed to go down in there and mess around.
You can walk around.
Do they have the authority to do that, John?
Well, yeah, because they put a thousand new plants down there.
And they're part of this program that's actually saved me from the city of Normandy Park shutting me down.
Oh, it sounds a little bit like some kind of local hero style jam up.
Well, but what they've done is they've filled out all the paperwork.
Oh, I see.
The hippies.
Yeah, but part of what they do when they fill out the paperwork is they say, we're going to keep him out of there and he can't monkey around and screw around.
Because it's a critical wetland.
And I'm like, you know what?
That's fine.
Because the alternative was— Well, I bet your neighbors are going to hate that.
Well, they do.
But the alternative was the Corps of Engineers was going to put me in rendition somewhere in Dubai.
They would put you in a Dick Cheney container somewhere?
They would.
That was their plan.
Because were you not in compliance?
I wasn't in compliance.
And I hadn't filled out the paperwork, and I hadn't gotten the critical wetland study done.
Oh.
Oh, and that's where the hippies come in.
That's where the hippies come in.
Well, so now the rest of my yard, what would be called the domesticated quadrant of my yard, which I had just been covering with wood chips because I wanted to kill the grass and get the moles out of there while I was down in the wetland.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, it's a bio.
There's a lot happening.
Oh, I mean, I was growing mushrooms you wouldn't believe up here in the wood chips.
And I didn't believe them.
I'm like, you can't tell me that's a mushroom.
I bet the hippies like those, huh?
I'd kick it with a shoe and it would send up black spores.
Oh, boy, I love that when it goes like cock.
It has a nice report to it.
I love to be had a mushroom.
And I had yellow spores.
I had all these mushrooms.
No shit.
That's great, man.
Yeah.
But the moles.
Did the moles eat them and die?
No, no, no.
Well, I covered the whole yard in a foot of wood chips.
I don't know what the moles are doing.
Does that mean they can't get out, John?
What do the wood chips do?
No, the moles just keep going.
No, the wood chips kill the grass because I didn't want the grass.
Oh, I see.
And the moles eat the grubs that eat the roots of the grass.
So you have basically an old lady who swallowed a fly type situation.
Exactly that.
But so now I have to turn my back on the ravine and start focusing on the yard.
I had this kind of plan.
I was going to do this neo-Chinese garden, which was mid-century Seattle style.
Oh, wow.
That sounds neat.
I like to buy my plants at the nursery on sale.
Anytime I'm at the nursery and there's a pallet of plants for $5 marked down from $50, I'm like, I'll buy them and I'll find a place for them.
I'm trying to do it with native plants, all this stuff.
What happened
I got overwhelmed because I realized, in the same way that you realize that publicity or graphic art is actually a real thing,
Like a graphic artist is a real job.
Oh, right.
Yeah.
My mom used to always, I think my mom never understood when she was saying, I wish I could get a job in public relations.
I think she thought that meant like selling things in retail at a store because you have relations with the public.
I didn't learn until like maybe late high school what that actually meant.
You're right.
And it's like a lot of those, the people in computer math, they think of that as a job.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and all the people that learned, you know, that spent six months working in a job where they used Photoshop and they're like, I'm a graphic artist.
Oh, you're talking about a graphic designer.
Yeah.
A graphic designer, right.
Oh, designer and artist.
But, you know, it's like a lot of, again, a little bit of a cock up.
It's like the whole interior designer, interior decorator.
Okay.
All right.
I think that's exactly right.
Okay.
And so I realized— Poor Chautauqua.
You guys had such good press, good public relations, as they say, but you never got out there, and you practiced four times a week but never played?
We were so good.
That's really weird, John.
So I'm looking at my yard, and I'm thinking—
I need a garden artist and also a landscape architect.
I need a consultation because this is over my head.
Like I understand.
Somebody who could do both big picture and detail.
Yeah.
A big picture of, like, here's how the biome is going to evolve, as John Siracusa says.
But also, again, we've got designer versus decorator.
But you could, yes, certainly somebody, there'll be some kind of a stout lady in Wellington boots carrying potted plants at some point.
Probably wearing a kerchief, I'm thinking.
Or maybe safari flaps.
But before we get to that, you need a mind.
You need a Frank Lloyd...
right of garden because a garden is not just not because i used to plant gardens and it was always along a fence so it was like a linear it was a two-dimensional thing but this garden needs oh it's more cattywampus it needs to be four dimensions because oh shit three dimensions but also plants grow no no no that's above your pay grade that's above your pay grade my friend you can fuck that up good
What, five years from now?
What's this going to be?
You put it in here and then five years, it's too close to that?
No, a pallet of plants on sale is not going to fix that situation.
You're doing some Christopher Nolan bending the scenery type shit.
So I'm over at a friend's house who's a great rock musician who has just started an artisanal...
uh the delivery pizza service where he makes artisanal pizzas and then he drives around in a van and drops them off to people i'm over i'm over at his house we're outside we're outside in the front yard we're talking about something music but also he's like you know if you want these pizzas and i was like i definitely you know bring me four pizzas a week or whatever artisanal pizza yes please a guy walks out of the house next door and he says hey john
And I look, and it's Tom, bass player of Chautauqua, whom I haven't seen in 20 years.
No, 30 years.
I haven't seen him since 1991.
He instantly recognized you?
Oh, yeah.
Well, because I'm in the newspapers this whole time, right?
He knows who I am because he lives in Seattle this whole time.
And so he's been following my career.
Wait, is this when you're running for office?
No, this is just recently.
Why in the paper?
And so, well, no, but, you know, he's followed me all along, right?
Oh, I see.
I get it.
I get it.
It's like when I saw Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam at the Rock and Roll McDonald's.
I get it.
And you were like, oh, I remember you from when you were playing at the first time.
No, somebody said, I think that's Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam.
I said, oh, that must be why they're signing autographs at 2 a.m.
at the Rock and Roll McDonald's.
We'll see.
There it is.
Well, so he says, so I say to him, hey, Tom, amazing.
You know, and he used to have the long hair.
And we know he reads the paper because that's how he joined the rock and roll band.
And I say, what have you been doing?
And he says, I'm a landscape architect now.
Shut your whore mouth.
What are the chances?
And I said, do tell.
I have a situation.
The hippies have taken over my ravine.
I got a yard.
I need a landscape architect.
And so yesterday he came out here and we walked around.
We spent all day walking around the garden where he was like, well, right over here you could put a tall Oregon grape and right here you could put a wax myrtle.
From your mouth to God's ear.
He sends this gentleman, he sends this basement to you.
Yeah.
This is what you needed, John.
And even if you don't end up hiring him, it seems to me that he could still guide you in the spirit of Chautauqua.
Well, and that's what I said.
I said, look, you're hired.
Did he want to be hired?
Yeah, he did.
I just think it's worth clarifying that.
He's got a job where he's landscape architecting big parking lots places.
But he's like, on the weekend, I'm going to come up with a plan for you, and it's going to be one of these plans that you and your mom can buy plants by the pallet at the discount rack of the, whatchamacallit, and I'm just going to tell you where to put them.
Wait, so he's also, such an important word as one gets older, he's integrating.
He's integrating these two things.
Setting aside the hippies just for a moment, but you can still continue your family tradition of buying cheap plants at a store?
He's integrating that into this larger space folding process.
As we're walking around, he's interviewing me.
And he said, OK, you need this for so many things.
I know.
He said, I can do a landscape architecture thing here where you would hire a crew of 15 people and it would cost $250,000 and it would all get done in the space of a month.
You know, and I say that knowing that no contractor ever gets done in the space of a month.
But he said, what I hear you saying, what I hear you saying is that you like to buy cheap plants by the pallet at the nursery and plant them yourself.
What you need is some guidance and I will provide that and then you can keep doing what you do.
See, if this guy were a doctor, I would start going to the doctor.
Right, right, right, right.
I want somebody who is solutions-oriented and is not going to get hung up on the past and doesn't have anything to fucking teach me about how to be better.
This person is an implementor, an integrator, and in some ways, the truest physician, which is the friend who listens and then finds a way to honor your family tradition of buying cheap plants and pallets.
I love this guy.
What's his name?
Paul?
Tom Roberts.
Tom Roberts.
Okay.
And so my mom is here when he gets here, and she says, Tom, I just want you to know we've never met, but for 30 years I've been listening to Galaxy's End, and I just want to compliment you on your baseline.
And Tom says, for 30 years I've been waiting for somebody that had ever heard Galaxy's End.
to tell me that they liked my baseline.
Oh, my God.
You just lived a children's book.
That's incredible.
And your mom, over 80 years of age, she just pulls that out of nowhere.
That's Tom, Baseline, Galaxy's End, Chautauqua, a band who somehow found a way to rehearse four times a week and record songs but never played.
You're like Washington Steely Dan.
Yeah.
What the fuck?
He must have been thrilled.
Had they met before?
No, they'd never met.
That makes it even better.
Yeah.
And he was like, that was, for me, the pinnacle of my rock years.
Yeah.
Making that Chautauqua tape and practicing four days a week.
I would love to be complimented on things I did in the 90s.
Yeah.
But he said, you know.
It bums me out that more people don't compliment me about that.
Because sometimes you're like, you know, that was a good baseline.
Tears and rain.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Shit.
And she could have hummed it to him.
She knows it so well.
God damn it.
Well, she's very thorough.
She is.
Yeah.
She is.
John, is this a work in progress?
I mean, is this happening?
Oh, yeah.
He was here yesterday.
He left.
Are the hippies done?
Did they take their flags?
The hippies are done, but they didn't take their flags.
Okay.
They left the flags.
And I said, hey, about all these flags.
And they were like, that's the thing.
We got to leave the flags.
And I bet you're not supposed to touch them.
No, no, no.
For the next three years, I got to look at the flags.
What?
Because it's a wetland?
They made a wetland out of your yard?
No, it was already a wetland.
I made it.
I discovered.
Oh, you're the invasive exotic is what they're saying.
But I, but my, but so mom went around yesterday and she came in here and she said, look, I know we're not supposed to touch anything, but we got to move a couple of these plants.
And she said, we'll just move the flags.
Mm-hmm.
You move a plant, move a flag.
Move a plant, move a flag.
She said they're never going to know.
No.
What, do you think they're writing all that down?
Taking photos on their phone camera?
Because they're young hippies and they planted plants.
This is the crazy thing.
They're walking along a trail that I made, and they're planting plants in the middle of the trail behind them.
It's like they're painting themselves into a corner.
I don't even know how they got back to the house.
Yeah.
You know, I haven't played D&D in a while, but one of the things I remember is that, like, as you go up and experience points and so forth, like, there are opportunities to, like, you know, it's the equivalent of a major, where you could say, well, I, you know, it's difficult to be a paladin.
You know, I might be able to go, I might be able to become, like, a fighter thief, where you can kind of fork your branch a little bit, do some different things.
You can't use spells, though.
Yeah.
Well, you got to rest a lot.
Clerics need naps.
It is known.
But for example, and you know, and they derive their magic from different things, magic such as it is.
The cleric's power comes by virtue of the fact that the god that they worship or what have you gives them that power.
A magic user, an illusionist, that's a different thing.
That's more practical, right?
Practical magic.
But here's what I know.
Most hippies reach a juncture where they decide if they're going to single major or double major.
So they're either going to become freeloaders or they're going to become bullies or possibly both.
Now, it sounds like you got some hippies that majored in bully, right?
They love that shit, John.
They love telling other people what to do.
They don't act like it.
That's the irony.
The selfishness, the basic selfishness of the hippie belies or is belied by life itself.
And then you see they've double majored.
They're the fighter thief of the ravine.
And you better not touch their flags or what.
What are you going to do, throw tempeh at me?
Oh, no, no, no.
It's all a suggestion.
But the difference is when we were— Yeah, I get it.
They're probably good hearts, good-hearted hippies.
When we were in high school, you remember how everybody wanted to be a marine biologist?
Yes.
Well, a lot of— That was an up-and-coming job.
It was like wanting to be a designer.
One year, you'd never heard of that job, and the next year, you heard about it a lot.
Okay.
A lot of the majors now in college, there are whole colleges devoted to hippie majors that didn't even exist when we were kids.
Like Habitat Restoration and Creek Hydrology and Invasive Species and Watershed.
Those – you know, you ever look at a list?
I imagine you do.
I've looked at it maybe once.
I imagine you've perused these annually.
The list of – what's the phrase?
It sounds so crass.
Highest-paying majors.
Like if you – people with this particular concentration, this degree, and this area of study make the most money full stop.
And for years, it's been geology or engineering, right?
Because they're working for the oil company.
Yes, precisely so.
And that becomes – you don't just kind of accidentally become a petroleum engineer.
No, that's right.
You studied the shit out of that.
Well, and that's these guys.
They all have – they came down into this and they're like, oh, all this work you've been doing in your ravine, I have a master's degree in it.
They have a master's degree in ravine.
I have a master's degree in restoring your backyard ravine.
And so all the stuff you're doing –
By just putting some boots and some gloves on and like throwing stuff around.
This is a thing that like I've spent years like working out the geometry of it.
And they've all been very nice and very complimentary, but they've basically gone to college.
This is the hippies, not the bass player.
No, this is the hippies.
They've gone to college precisely to wear Carhartts every day to work and have big muddy boots.
You can do drywall or ravine restoration.
Well, and it's a big job.
But I mean, like I say, you buy the dress for the Carhartts you want.
There you go.
They have all of these teenage hippies from the Civilian Conservation Corps.
Who are walking around looking for work to do.
And so these big shot hippies from up here, they grab 30 Civilian Conservation Corps kids that are wearing Healy Hansons.
And they're out there cutting trail.
Yeah.
And I don't know.
They're paying them 10 bucks an hour or whatever.
And they're all college kids that couldn't get the job sitting up in the fire watch tower in the mountains of Oregon.
Or whatever.
They wanted to be down doing this.
And so all the kids down in the ravine, and every single one of them a hippie, but they're nice.
They're nice hippies.
I'm sorry.
I reacted, John.
I overreacted very emotionally because I don't like hippies.
yeah yeah i know but you know the thing is like when you quit smoking and then you hate everybody who smokes and you're always yelling at them i i used to be a little bit of a hippie if i'm being honest you see me in a tie-dye shirt my mugshot i'm wearing a tie-dye shirt um and i have chicken grease on me and a cold sore it was really a high point 1988 um but uh but but uh but i i feel bad bad now and i i well i feel like you gotta watch out for a hippie though
You know what I'm saying?
These are like Northwestern eco-hippies.
These are the ones that go up into redwood trees and tie themselves up there.
Oh, put bike locks on monkeys or something.
Yeah, so they don't cut down the trees.
In a way, they're honorable.
They're lovely people, you know?
Yes.
They just like this.
They like to be in the creek.
And I like to be in the creek.
We're the same.
But you better not go touch those flags.
It's their ravine now.
We'll see about that.
Well, yeah, and you get your bass player on it.
You know what?
I'm glad, though, that they are not in opposition to each other.
You know what I mean?
It sounds like your guy... Now, what does he officially call what he does?
He's a landscape architect.
Landscape architect.
And I took him around the ravine, and he said...
This is my fantasy.
This is my fantasy.
And because he's a little forward.
Well, he's touching every leaf on every plant.
And he's like, oh, this is the fast.
Oh, he's saying he's a druid.
He's a druid.
He knows everything.
He knows he's a druid and a bard.
He's a I don't know if you can do that.
He's naming that.
Yeah, that's right.
He's a he's a cross member.
He's naming all the mushrooms.
Name it all the mushrooms.
This one's Phil.
Everybody that names all the mushrooms.
I was like, you know all the mushrooms?
And he was like, hey, hey.
That's where he derives his power.
He derives his power from the biome.
He says, don't eat anything because I said so.
No.
And I'm like, what the hell good is it to know every mushroom if you can't tell me which ones I can eat?
And he's like, no, no, no, no, no.
I'm not going to tell you which ones to eat.
Now I sound like a regular doctor.
Also, you know, if he's a monk, he's got that quivering palm, which is nice.
He's got a lot to do.
I'm not looking to him for mushrooms.
Touches every leaf.
He's communing.
He's communing, probably.
He knew every plant.
He's probably met your dresser before.
You know?
Hello.
Hello.
Hello, Phelium.
Holy shit, John.