Episode 1188 - David Ritz
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuck nicks?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:What the fuckettes?
Marc:How's it going?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast, WTF.
Marc:Welcome to it.
Marc:Today is Thursday.
Marc:If you're downloading and listening on the day it comes out.
Marc:Today is New Year's Eve.
Marc:Tomorrow, Friday, the beginning of a new year.
Marc:It doesn't feel like it usually does, does it?
Marc:Yeah, I don't know.
Marc:You know, I spent a few hours today, a little time yesterday trying to figure out, you know, what to say.
Marc:do i have a list is there a a top 10 of 2020 is there a a countdown of bullshit this fuck that that this or that what's trending now what are my thoughts on
Marc:What are my likes and dislikes 2020?
Marc:What do we do with it?
Marc:I think for a lot of us, there's no reason to necessarily get involved with the pop culture.
Marc:rationalization or distraction or relief attempts at contextualizing this last year on an entertainment level on a recipe level on a pop culture level at all is there really I mean a lot of it helped us get by but all of it seems like a blur like a smear like a haze I'm exhausted
Marc:I'm exhausted from 2020.
Marc:I mean, I've never felt like I feel now for a lot of different reasons.
Marc:And I assume many of us have had probably the worst year of our life.
Marc:My body and brain is exhausted from distributing cortisol.
Marc:I'm worn out on a thyroid level from four years of the pig king, chaos master, and everything that came along with that.
Marc:I'm exhausted from
Marc:From almost a year of COVID and belligerent irresponsibility on behalf of so many people.
Marc:Childishness.
Marc:I'm exhausted by the fact that now after four years and a plague, I know exactly who my fellow Americans are and what many of them are made of.
Marc:I'm exhausted because I know who I am more clearly now because of grief, COVID, isolation, Trump, panic, wildfires.
Marc:It's been a fucked up year, man.
Marc:I mean, I know tangibly what happened to me.
Marc:I know that I had to put two cats down this year.
Marc:I know that someone I loved a lot basically died in my house.
Marc:I mean, I know those things happened.
Marc:I know the plague came.
Marc:I know how it was handled from the top down, from my neighbor down, from across the street down.
Marc:And I know all of us have had a difficult time.
Marc:And I want to feel optimistic.
Marc:I want to feel hopeful.
Marc:I want to take this opportunity like we do every year to lie to ourselves that this one's going to be a good one.
Marc:I don't know about you, but you know what I'm hoping for?
Marc:Some fucking relief.
Marc:Just a little relief would be great.
Marc:Sure, we got a little relief in early November.
Marc:But I mean tangible.
Marc:You know, walk outside, look around kind of relief.
Marc:That's my hope for a new year.
Marc:I'm sorry you've all gone through what you're going through and what you've went through this year.
Marc:I am.
Marc:My empathy can only reach so much, but I do get a sense some people had a much worse time than me.
Marc:A lot of people still having a bad time.
Marc:I'm grateful that I have some things in place that enabled me not to lose my mind or wallow in a sadness that could have proven, you know, chronic pain.
Marc:I'm grateful for my friends.
Marc:I'm grateful for the audience.
Marc:I'm grateful for the people who reached out to me during this last year.
Marc:I've said this before.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I guess I'll say it again.
Marc:I have a lot to be grateful for and a lot to be sad about.
Marc:And not unlike anybody else, a lot to be afraid of.
Marc:And we move forward.
Marc:I want you to have a better new year.
Marc:I'd love it if you had a happy one.
Marc:But I don't know what you're hoping for.
Marc:But I'm hoping for relief.
Marc:Just a little bit of relief would be so welcome.
Marc:Just a little bit of... Okay.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:It's okay.
Marc:It's going to be okay.
Marc:That's my hope.
Marc:For this new year.
Marc:For some relief.
Marc:And that it's going to be okay.
Marc:Not great.
Marc:Not even necessarily better.
Marc:I just want some relief and I want things to be okay.
Marc:And I'd like us to be able to see past right now again, a little bit with a little bit of excitement, hope.
Marc:I don't know, man, that's a stretch.
Marc:A lot of things have been laid bare, but my hope for us all is that if you can find some gratitude, find it.
Marc:If you can find some gratitude,
Marc:Way to frame the last year positively, maybe because of what you now know about yourself, about your family, the connections you made, the love that you found, how you took care of people, how you took care of yourself, how people took care of you.
Marc:You can find it good.
Marc:Be grateful for that.
Marc:I hope for a little relief for us all, a little relief.
Marc:And maybe just occasionally the ability to go like, tomorrow's going to be okay.
Marc:Tomorrow's going to be good.
Marc:I can't wait till tomorrow.
Marc:So today on the show, David Ritz, I talked to David Ritz.
Marc:Now, David Ritz is one of the most prolific biographers of music industry stars.
Marc:He's the guy.
Marc:He wrote biographies on Marvin Gaye, Jimmy Scott, Aretha Franklin.
Marc:He's co-written or ghostwritten biographies for dozens more.
Marc:Ray Charles, B.B.
Marc:King, Etta James, Janet Jackson, Buddy Guy, Don Rickles.
Marc:He co-wrote the autobiography of Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler, which is how I got hooked up with him when I played Wexler in the movie Respect.
Marc:He's also written his own interesting autobiography called The God Groove, A Boo's Journey to Faith.
Marc:This is not your average Jewish guy's story.
Marc:I just found him to be an interesting guy who's been through some interesting things and he's met a lot of amazing people and he's gone through a journey of his own.
Marc:And I thought I would talk to him.
Marc:So talking to David Ritz is a bit of a musical history.
Marc:And he definitely has some insight through all his experience into some of the great artists of our times.
Marc:You can find links to all of his work at Ritz, R-I-T-Z, rights.com.
Marc:Ritz, rights.com.
Marc:This is me talking to David Ritz.
Ritz.
Marc:Nice to see you, David.
Marc:I know we talked once a while back and you helped me out a bit with Jerry Wexler, your friend.
Guest:How did that go, by the way?
Guest:I sort of meant to call you and ask you and I didn't ever.
Guest:Did you enjoy the process?
Marc:Yeah, I did.
Marc:And having read your book about Jerry was very helpful.
Marc:And then talking to you a bit about Aretha and a bit about Wexler was helpful.
Marc:And I think the director was very happy with my performance.
Marc:But I think that ultimately, the Wexler you described in the book that you wrote with him and also in your book, The God Groove, was probably a deeper dude than the one you're going to see in the movie.
Guest:Well, because it isn't his movie, it's hers.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:You can't go that deep.
Guest:I mean, you don't have time, and he's incredibly complicated.
Marc:You're incredibly complicated.
Marc:I've got to be honest with you.
Marc:I had this book of yours sitting around for a long time.
Marc:And I know you've written books about a lot of different people.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But just the other day, I'm like, I'm going to talk to him.
Marc:I don't like really...
Marc:than reading books that people have written before I talk to them because it makes me lead too much.
Marc:So that being said, I read most of it.
Marc:So I did not read the end.
Marc:So we're going to have to get to that naturally.
Marc:But The God Groove, your book, A Blue's Journey to Faith, is a great book.
Marc:It's a ballsy book.
Marc:And I don't say this about much, but I think a lot of it has to do with the things we have in common.
Marc:Mm hmm.
Marc:I found not just a Jewish thing, not just a narcissistic father thing, not just the black culture, black music thing.
Marc:But maybe that's well, there's a lot of things that we have in common.
Marc:But but like I said, I don't know how it ends.
Marc:I assume that you have Jesus in your heart now.
Marc:I think it was that where we were going.
Guest:Well, yeah, no, I am definitely, I definitely believe in Jesus.
Guest:And that's interesting, because that's the other thing we have in common.
Guest:I don't mean we have in common that particular word, Jesus, but I think we both come out of the 12 steps.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that's how I got into Christianity through the 12 steps.
Guest:And the irony is that when I first went into one of three different 12 step programs that I've been in for the last 30 years, if they had told me you had to be leaving Jesus, I would have gone the other way.
Guest:So part of the genius of the program to me is to re-language Christianity to take the Christian part out of it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It's structural Christianity without Jesus.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Right.
Marc:I get it.
Marc:It's the deeds without the dude.
Guest:Yeah, but the deeds, to me, are the dudes.
Guest:I mean, in other words, the deeds are the dude in that...
Guest:First of all, I don't care what anybody calls anything.
Guest:I think our job as we communicate with other people is to be sensitive to their cultural history with certain words.
Guest:So I won't use certain words with certain people because I know it will kind of
Guest:trigger them.
Guest:Therefore, it's only out of ego that I have to tell you, you have to use the word Jesus.
Guest:You don't have to use any word.
Guest:I mean, to me, it's about the brotherhood and the sisterhood of the 12 Steps program is all about sort of
Guest:allowing a spirit to wash over us, to hear it from each other, and to heal us as a result of embracing the spirit, period.
Guest:What you go on and call that spirit, how you, what ideology or theology you adapt, I don't care.
Guest:I am not at all evangelical, and I don't like...
Guest:I'm proselytizing because I believe that proselytizing comes out of ego.
Guest:You've got to use my language.
Guest:I get it.
Marc:So you're saying that what you've got to get hip to is God consciousness and either you're going to tap in or you're not.
Guest:Or don't even call it God consciousness if the word God is abhorrent to you.
Guest:If the spirit moves you, whatever.
Marc:Yeah, I get it.
Marc:But what's interesting to me is that, you know, you're about as Jewish as you can be.
Marc:I agree.
Marc:And, you know, I mean, it seems to me that you were born.
Marc:Where were you born?
Guest:I was born in New York and lived there until I was...
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Eastern European, the traditional thing.
Marc:What part?
Marc:Did you ever track it?
Marc:Nope.
Marc:You never did it?
Marc:You don't know where?
Marc:They're not from behind the pale or pale of settlement?
Guest:Generally, I know the territory, but I've never done.
Guest:And in a weird way...
Guest:I mean, I don't care in a certain way because I kind of knew them very, very well and they were not articulate in English.
Guest:And I don't know.
Guest:What did they speak?
Guest:Well, my old man's parents spoke English, very broken English with a heavy Yiddish accent.
Guest:But their first language was Yiddish.
Guest:Do you speak Yiddish?
Guest:No, I don't.
Guest:I only know what the usual curse words are.
Guest:Did your parents?
Marc:Did your father?
Guest:Yes, he did.
Guest:And he was good at it.
Guest:And he was proud of it.
Guest:And I enjoyed hearing him speak it.
Guest:But again, I never bothered to learn it.
Guest:It never even occurred to me.
Marc:So your memories of New York when you were very young, it seems very clear.
Guest:Very clear, because it had to do with jazz.
Guest:I mean, in other words, my first passion as a child, because my old man loved jazz, my first passion as a child was jazz.
Guest:And I was born in 1943, so I still got to hear...
Guest:the Titans, you know, Charlie Parker and Billy Holiday and so on and so forth.
Guest:And that's what really kind of marked my early life.
Guest:And by the way, going back to Christianity without trying to kill it here, is that the two things, and we don't ever have to talk about it again in this interview, so I'm not trying to push it, but the two things that led me to Christianity were both the 12-step program and African-American music.
Marc:No, I mean, that's clear, you know,
Marc:And it's like, but when you were a kid, so you were in New York until you were five and then you're in Newark, New Jersey.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, from seven to 11.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But, and your father, it wasn't, you weren't a religious family, were you?
Guest:No, he was...
Guest:He was one of the reasons I got along so well with Jerry Wexler is that Jerry was my fantasy father.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He was rich.
Guest:My old man was not.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He produced Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, which my old man did not do.
Guest:He hung out with Wilson Pickett.
Guest:which my old man did not do, but he talked like my old man.
Guest:I mean, my old man, and Jerry was an intellectual.
Guest:He was a literary intellectual.
Guest:And your father was too?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And, you know, they read high-powered books.
Guest:They knew Einstein and Freud well.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They knew they read, you know, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud.
Marc:It's interesting that that generation, right, of Jews that, you know, your father was a traveling salesman, but the but the premium put on education.
Marc:by first generation, second generation Jews to define us as a culture.
Marc:Knowledge is power, education is how you get ahead, because they're not gonna let you do a lot of things.
Marc:So you better be smart, right?
Guest:And also, they were killers.
Guest:I mean, they were intellectual killers.
Guest:In other words, part of why I understood Jerry as well as I did is because he was like my father.
Guest:And if you got into an argument with him about whether Sonny Rollins was a better tenor player than Sonny Stitt, or whether T-Bone Walker was a better guitarist than Buh-Utty Guy...
Guest:his argumentation style was to sort of destroy you if he could uh i mean on those important subjects exactly i mean he had to and so there was a passionate um antagonism as a conversationalist now it doesn't mean underneath there wasn't you know love and affection there positively was but
Guest:But he beat you down.
Guest:Is that what you're saying?
Guest:He just beat the shit out of you down.
Guest:And that's one of the reasons why I could tiptoe through his tulips and become his ghostwriter.
Marc:Oh, who's Jerry?
Marc:But your father?
Marc:What about your father?
Guest:Did he like... Well, we had a falling out pretty early on because I understood... He was an intellectual...
Guest:A bully, as was Jerry.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I had to take him on.
Guest:I didn't have to take him on, but my personality.
Marc:You have to.
Marc:When you're a son of a narcissistic father, at some point, you're going to have to push him over the edge.
Guest:You got to kill him off at a certain point.
Guest:And I know that sounds like kind of straight ahead, eat a bullshit.
Guest:But in my case, it was true because because they will eat you up.
Marc:Well, they deny you a sense of self.
Marc:exactly because because they only my dad only saw me as an extension of him exactly that's exactly something we share and that's deep shit and you know realizing that is is it's a weird and deep thing that you know that you're you're just seen as an appendage and you know when the it's hard to see you as an appendage when you're the it starts hitting you
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And even in my own career, once it got off and I was doing okay and I was writing these books, he was never happy that I was a ghost writer because he wanted me to be, you know, Philip Roth or Saul Bellow or one of these guys.
Marc:Yeah, but he would undermine you no matter what you did.
Guest:Probably so.
Guest:I think so.
Guest:Yeah, I think that's probably true.
Guest:He was proud, but he could never tell me that.
Guest:And also he could never stop criticizing my work as being superficial as opposed to doing things.
Marc:But either way, it sends us out into the world sort of like, you know, having they implant a self-consciousness and a self-loathing in us.
Marc:Because of our own judgment of ourselves.
Marc:And then you're kind of wandering around, you know, emotionally untethered, looking for guidance, you know, from a very early age because your parents are incapable of it.
Marc:What did your mother do?
Sure.
Guest:She was strong.
Guest:She was a seamstress.
Guest:She sewed.
Guest:Ultimately, she became one of these people.
Guest:She worked for Sears or J.C.
Guest:Penney is one of the two where she would get in the truck and come to your house and sort of
Guest:measure your windows for the drapes, and she sold drapes, and she was a great salesperson, and totally unintellectual, but very, very intelligent, and very kind of practical, and cold.
Guest:My dad was very emotional, and warm, and huggy, and my mother was rather kind of distant, and...
Guest:But, you know, I'm kind of one of these idiots who believes that we get the parents that we should get.
Guest:Or at least in my case, I got exactly the parents who I needed.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But, David, I mean, like, look, I understand.
Marc:You know, I do that, too, because, you know, honestly, that idea of, you know, nothing happens in God's world that isn't whatever.
Marc:But the truth is, is that you gain nothing from not seeing it that way.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:You know, without it being, you know, a regret.
Marc:You have to frame it like that way at some point or else you're just going to, you know, you're going to have a regret.
Guest:Well, but it's also helpful to frame it that way in that my my goal is to live in gratitude because I think I get it.
Guest:Yeah, no, no.
Guest:The only way we don't go crazy doesn't mean they weren't shitty.
Guest:And in very important ways, they were shitty, and I can look at that.
Guest:And in other ways, they were great.
Guest:But in any event, because I'm happy with who I am now, I sort of needed them to go through whatever I went through.
Guest:No, I appreciate that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so if you can get the gratitude, however the hell you get the gratitude—
Guest:Whether it is sort of a ploy like you suggest that I need to frame it that way, which I don't disagree with.
Guest:But in the end, as I sit here talking to you now, I am grateful to my mom.
Guest:I am grateful to my dad for being who they are.
Marc:I feel that way.
Marc:So your connection with with jazz and, you know, African-American music, black music at the time, you know, is something that, you know, I identify with as well.
Marc:And this was something that your father loved and it was the jazz age.
Marc:And you were did you get to see a lot of live stuff when you were very young?
Guest:Yeah, I did.
Guest:I saw the Titans, or to me, the Titans.
Marc:How old were you?
Marc:Your father took you?
Marc:How did you do that?
Guest:Yeah, he took me.
Guest:He took me to Carnegie Hall.
Guest:He took me to jazz clubs in Newark.
Guest:I saw little Jimmy Scott, who...
Guest:Later on, became a guy whose biography I wrote.
Guest:I saw Byrd and Billie Holiday and Max Roach and Clifford Brown.
Guest:And also, sort of getting back to the religious part of it, as I look back, these were religious epiphanies.
Guest:At the time, I couldn't call it that, but I was so...
Guest:So moved and so amazed and so shook and so transformed.
Guest:By this early music.
Guest:By this early music, it made me fucking crazy.
Marc:I know that you frame this as your journey towards the Godhead, but when you're a kid, you're just excited, right?
Guest:Yeah, but you're also transformed.
Guest:In other words, you are ecstatic.
Guest:I guess that's the word I was going for, like ecstasy.
Guest:So it is kind of like going.
Guest:I remember I got a scene in the book where I go to an African-American church, and it looks great in there.
Guest:There's kind of music.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I can't go in the church because I'm Jewish, and Jesus is kind of creepy, and
Guest:I've been told it's creepy, and everything in my culture tells me that's not me, and yet everything is drawing me into that church.
Guest:The people are happy, the music's jamming.
Guest:And what it's taken me forever to understand is when I went to hear Charlie Parker say,
Guest:at uh birdland or count base whoever it was i was entering into a church and i was an experience in ecstasy that was transformative and that was lifting my heart and exciting me and taking me beyond what is the normal human condition and i didn't know what to call that except i had to go out and i had to buy
Guest:Every Billie Holiday album and every Lester Young.
Guest:And then when I moved to Texas, the big deal that happened to me was moving to Texas when I was 12 and a half because New York was all jazz and Texas was the blues.
Guest:And I didn't know anything about the blues.
Yeah.
Marc:So you went to the source.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And so when I heard Abbie Bland and B.B.
Guest:King and Lightning Hopkins, I understood it all comes out of the blues.
Guest:And it's a blues experience.
Guest:And again, it's a transformative experience.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The cliche is you play the blues to lose the blues, but you also listen to the blues to lose the blues.
Guest:And then even sort of deeper than all that, we are in the human condition, at least for me, is the blues condition.
Guest:We are born to die.
Guest:So we've all got the blues.
Marc:What was it that B.B.
Marc:King told you?
Marc:about his conception of jesus he didn't say that much his um no he wasn't it wasn't he the one that told you that god had the blues yes yeah yeah yeah no he did definitely tell me god had the blue he sent his son his human son down you know and and that that in some ways jesus was a personification of what the blues yeah man and then i guess you asked
Marc:You know, when Jesus was resurrected, were the blues gone?
Marc:And Bebe said, no, of course not.
Marc:The blues don't go away.
Marc:It's just communicated differently, right?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I believe that is true, that I think once we embrace the blues sensibility of life,
Guest:I think we are seeing reality.
Marc:Well, that's also a great point.
Marc:Another point in the book with the Jimmy Reed story, which I mean, I would encourage anybody to read these books for these.
Marc:I mean, you're like Zelig.
Marc:You just sort of lucked into these fucking moments because of your passion for something.
Guest:Yeah, but I don't think it was luck.
Guest:Lots of people tell me that, but my feeling about it, I chased after Jimmy.
Guest:I chased after Marvin Gaye.
Guest:And Ray Charles.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I was rejected a lot by people who didn't want to hang out with me.
Guest:So, I mean, I just made it a point like, hey, man.
Guest:I want to know who you are.
Marc:Well, I guess luck is not the right.
Marc:I mean, I think what was lucky is not that you got in that car with Jimmy Reed, but that, you know, he happened to pull out a razor and you guys and cut his girlfriend and you guys end up at the fucking emergency room.
Marc:And he tells you that in order to understand the blues, you got to live the blues.
Marc:I mean, that was a gift, dude.
Guest:I mean, no, no.
Marc:I agree.
Marc:No amount of persistence was going to deliver that to you.
Guest:No, no, no, no, no, no.
Guest:I agree.
Guest:And that's always been it's like chase after Marvin Gaye the way I chase after him and getting together with him.
Guest:But let's talk about that for a minute.
Marc:Let's talk about the arc of it.
Marc:You know that this music gets you going.
Marc:You know that you love this music.
Marc:You love all of it.
Marc:You love the entire spectrum.
Marc:The blues and the gospel are what sort of come together to make the R&B and make the jazz.
Marc:And the jazz comes full circle and pulls the Jesus all the way out of it and creates a new spirituality.
Marc:I get all that.
Marc:Now, a couple of questions I have before I go into the arc of your career is like, how much thought have you put into I was just talking to my producer about this before we started talking that there is a type of Jew that is completely compelled and immersed in black culture.
Marc:I don't know if it goes both ways.
Marc:I don't feel like it does.
Marc:But there's certainly, you know, Jewish blues players and then also Jewish blues and Jewish music intellectuals and Jewish civil rights proponents.
Marc:I mean, the Jews have been
Marc:you know, enmeshed with the black experience for a long time in America.
Marc:And where do you think that comes from?
Marc:Have you put serious thought into that?
Marc:No.
Guest:And the reason I haven't is, no, honestly.
Marc:Am I wrong?
Guest:No.
Guest:You can make a great argument and you can show historical evidence for it.
Guest:I mean, no, it's a highly intelligent argument.
Guest:I have never put myself in.
Guest:I mean, there are other Jewish people I know.
Guest:You know, there's Peter who's Jewish, who's a great scholar and a great writer.
Guest:I mean, so I can name a lot of other Jewish people.
Guest:Mike Bluefield.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Peter Green.
Guest:And Paul Schaeffer, whose book I wrote and who's a great, great musician and a scholar of R&B and blues.
Marc:And then you get the great exploiters of the black people in the Jewish religion.
Guest:Right, the chess and, you know, so it goes on and on and on.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So, yes, there are books that have been.
Guest:I think one book was called Rhythm and the Jews.
Guest:I mean, there's been a whole... There's got to be a hundred PhD... But it's not just music.
Marc:It's politics as well.
Marc:It's politics as well.
Marc:And social, you know, the kind of... I guess it comes from social activism and from the initial kind of like Marxist sort of social activists and... Exactly.
Guest:But again, the...
Guest:Reason I have not that that is of not kind of primary interest to me is because my own experience with it rests in mystery.
Guest:I don't know why when I heard Louis Armstrong for the first time when my father took me to Carnegie Hall or when I heard Charlie Parker or Coltrane or whoever it is.
Guest:I don't know why.
Guest:My heart started beating.
Guest:I felt this connection.
Guest:It didn't have to do with politics.
Guest:It didn't have to do with... It was a visceral, emotional experience.
Guest:When we moved to Charleston, I was 12, I think, or about 11 1⁄2.
Guest:And I didn't... My parents really didn't prepare me for...
Guest:segregation this is uh i was born 43 and 12 1955 so i got on the bus and i sort of naturally went to the back of the bus to sit with the african-american people because they i was more comfortable and i i didn't have any attitude i was just they were more comfortable they and you know the bus driver yells at me what are you doing i didn't
Guest:understand yeah I didn't understand and more than politics it wasn't just music it was sports because I was an incredibly passionate Brooklyn Dodger fan when I was a kid and that was the Dodgers of Roy Campanella and Jackie Robinson so in my mind African Americans were a superior
Guest:Because the two things I was interested in, which was the Dodgers and jazz, they were they excelled at all.
Guest:All my heroes were black.
Marc:So and also you brought up in a house where your father was, you know, incredibly embracing.
Marc:There was not judgment.
Marc:There was not separation.
Marc:There was respect and appreciation.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And also, I'm not particularly political.
Guest:So, I mean, you know, I'm a liberal Democrat, but I am not.
Guest:I was never an activist.
Guest:I've been, you know, writing forever.
Guest:And so anyway.
Marc:What did you set out to do, though?
Marc:I mean, the writing seemed to, you know, kind of overtake you.
Guest:Well, I began, you know, I've got kind of a weird history.
Guest:In the beginning, I went to graduate school at the State University of New York at Buffalo with this guy, Leslie Fiedler, who is kind of a well-known critic and a famous guy in the world of Jungian criticism.
Guest:And I sort of wanted to become him.
Guest:So I got an MA and I went through a PhD program and I
Guest:passed my PhD, but I never wrote my dissertation.
Guest:I got tired of academics.
Guest:I didn't feel like I was a true academic, and I moved to Dallas, and I began an ad agency because I wanted to make a lot of bread.
Marc:You moved to Dallas with your family, and you grew up there, and that's when you started.
Guest:And I began this ad agency because I kind of said, okay, I'm going to make a lot of money, and I had worked my way through college programs,
Guest:writing ads, and I was good at writing commercials and shit.
Guest:And I did that, and some pals of mine and I began an agency, and we did that for about five years, and I got sort of bored.
Guest:I didn't care about the products that I was selling.
Guest:And so that's when I began to think about chasing after Ray Charles.
Guest:I went to the library.
Guest:I saw there was no...
Guest:There was no biography or autobiography.
Marc:But what was that moment, though?
Marc:I mean, it's like it was there that you decided.
Marc:I mean, at some point, you're tired, you're bored with your life as an advertising agent.
Marc:Then out of nowhere, you're like, Ray Charles is my ticket.
Guest:Well, here's why.
Guest:And that's why, again, I'm kind of grateful for everything.
Guest:I'm a good salesman and I can hustle and advertising showed me that I could hustle.
Guest:So I just looked at him as a potential client.
Guest:But you loved him.
Guest:I loved him.
Guest:I loved him.
Guest:And I didn't love the products I was advertising.
Marc:But you decided you wanted to write about what did you want to be his friend?
Marc:Did you want to meet him?
Guest:I wanted to write his biography and win the Pulitzer Prize.
Guest:But then I met an agent who told me his biography is not as commercial as his autobiography.
Guest:And I told him, I don't care.
Guest:I've got to win the Pulitzer Prize and be a biographer because I didn't know what the fuck... Because you wanted your dad to be proud of you.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And then the agent asked me a question, a question that changed my life.
Guest:And the question was...
Guest:what book would you rather read?
Guest:A book about his life written by an egghead like you or a book in his own voice telling you about his life?
Guest:And I said, oh, I would much rather read the book in his own voice.
Guest:So then the agent said to me, write the book you want to read, not the book that you believe you should write.
Guest:And that changed everything.
Guest:And even today, I continue to write the books I want to read.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But this whole compulsive kind of process of chasing down Ray Charles.
Guest:Very compulsive.
Marc:Yeah, but it was like, you know, it became the main object of your life.
Guest:And high on pot.
Guest:And I was nuts.
Guest:I mean, I checked into the Hot Sheet Motel on Washington Boulevard across the street from his office.
Guest:He's stalking him.
Guest:I'm stalking him.
Guest:I'm going to the office and there's this tough guy named Joe Adams who's his manager who tells him you can't have anything to do with him.
Guest:So then I call Western Union.
Guest:I say, can you send telegrams in Braille?
Guest:And they said yes.
Guest:So then I start sending him telegrams in Braille every day about how I was crazy about him and I loved him and I knew everything about him and I wanted to...
Guest:And ultimately he calls me up and he says, who are you?
Guest:And I said, I'm a guy across the street in the motel.
Marc:I'm the annoying Jew that keeps coming around the office.
Guest:Just come over.
Guest:And I knew once I got in a room with him, he would feel me.
Guest:And he did.
Guest:He could really feel my heart.
Guest:He could feel my spirit.
Guest:And I did love him.
Guest:I mean, he was the artist.
Guest:He was the earliest artist who had that kind of impact on me.
Guest:Early Ray Charles...
Guest:fucked me up as much as any artist.
Guest:And so it just happened.
Guest:And I could talk to him.
Guest:I wasn't intimidated.
Guest:I mean, I was intimidated, but I could hang in there.
Guest:I mean, I could ask him tough questions.
Guest:When did you lose?
Guest:I mean, I discovered I was good at it.
Guest:And once I knew that it was his book and that my own book, everything changed because I gave him the power and
Guest:And once you give away power in a creative collaboration, you turn out to have more power because power is off the table.
Guest:And people are more willing to give and take and be free in the discussion space.
Marc:I get that.
Marc:But like, you know, in that moment, you know, where you finally sit down with Ray Charles and you sit down, you know, as you as you got the hang of it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, you Smokey Robbins and B.B.
Marc:King at a James Aretha, all these people all the way.
Marc:You know, you buddy guy.
Marc:You wrote about everybody.
Marc:But but I have to assume in that moment, a guy like you who's got, you know, your boundaries probably weren't great.
Marc:Your sense of self not great.
Marc:You know, so your ability to kind of almost in a innately symbiotic and codependent way to lock into somebody who is, you know, a self-centered but amazingly giving artist was probably almost innate.
Marc:Like you probably became an appendage fairly quickly.
Marc:No.
Guest:Yes, and also helped again by advertising because in advertising where I did them well, you have a client.
Guest:And the client's in charge.
Guest:And you learn the job is to please the client.
Guest:So I'm coming out of advertising.
Guest:Now, the academic part was helpful in that I knew literature to an extent.
Guest:I mean, you know.
Guest:Right.
Marc:But you wanted to be close to Ray Charles.
Guest:I wanted to be close to him.
Guest:And I also wanted him to know he didn't have to be scared of me because these people have been interviewed a zillion times.
Guest:I know by journalists who twist your words and they're angry at the press.
Guest:And I kept on telling him, man, this is your book.
Guest:And and the truth is, we translated it into Braille and he put his hands over the Braille and he made changes.
Guest:And he was a great editor because he was a brilliant guy.
Guest:He was a brilliant, brilliant guy.
Marc:But he was like one that he was willing, not unlike I mean, there's different degrees of caginess on behalf of people, public people.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But it sounds like Ray, you know, was willing to engage you and trust you.
Marc:And when you did, you know, present him with a book that was written in his voice by him with you, you know, he was OK with it, even with the darker elements.
Guest:exactly because he didn't give a shit in other words he was a guy who was so confident about who he was right and arrogant i mean to a degree i he knew he was great and he was the most confident guy i've ever met as opposed to you know uh marvin gay was the opposite he was completely insecure but the first book brother ray that was a big book right and you know it did well did they base the movie on it
Guest:Yeah, they did, but it's a whole long story.
Marc:You mean they screwed you?
Guest:It's just a long story that doesn't have a happy, that's not a particularly interesting Hollywood story that you've heard a zillion of them.
Marc:But, all right, so you do Ray, and then you think you're going to start just, you know, you're going to be the guy.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:That helps these guys ghostwrite their stories.
Marc:Nothing happens.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's where the hustle has to kick in.
Guest:Because at a certain point, and you're exactly right, I thought everyone was going to call me.
Guest:I had done Ray Charles' autobiography, and nobody calls me.
Guest:And that's when I understand that I am in the advertising business again.
Guest:I have to chase after clients.
Guest:I have to get some work done.
Guest:I got a chase after Marvin Gaye.
Guest:I got a chase after the Neville brothers.
Guest:I got a chase after this one and that one.
Guest:And I, at a certain point, Mark, I also realized I enjoyed the chase.
Guest:I mean, you are the honorable in that you don't like to be rejected.
Guest:But I can take the rejection, you know.
Guest:I mean, it ain't going to kill me.
Guest:And also, I knew Ray gave me a lot of confidence.
Guest:Because he's a tough, you know, he was a tough cookie.
Guest:I mean, really tough guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And not particularly cordial.
Guest:And so, you know, when I finally got Marvin Gaye, who happened after Ray, it was the opposite.
Guest:Like...
Guest:Ray was sort of the tough uncle who was very sort of demanding, and you have to be on your toes.
Guest:Marvin was your relaxed older brother.
Marc:But it was weird, though, you know, the way you kind of characterize what you're saying to me now, but it seems to me that out of the 50 books you wrote,
Marc:or however many it is, about all these different artists that, you know, you spend some time in the book talking about Buddy Guy, you know, you talk about Bebe, you talk about, you know, there's a good story about, you know, Lightning Hopkins and the song about the stuttering kid that helped you sort of frame your own stutter differently.
Marc:But it seems to me
Marc:That Ray Charles, for the reasons you just said, was impactful, but that once you got into this skin and the life of Marvin Gaye, that your mind was fucking blown for light and dark.
Marc:Like you were in, I have to assume initially, way over your head.
Guest:Well, I'm not sure.
Guest:Tell me what you mean by way over my head.
Marc:Well, I mean, like, you know, you know who you are.
Marc:You know, you get a sense of who you are.
Marc:But so, like, all of a sudden, you're with Marvin Gaye, who, like you're saying, is fundamentally insecure.
Marc:Like, you know, Ray knew who he was.
Marc:And he accepted who he was.
Marc:And, you know, and I think that comes from...
Marc:You know, a lot of things, you know, getting through life blind, you know, and having, you know, I mean, it plants you and yourself in a way that you're not going to have otherwise.
Marc:But and also being a great artist.
Marc:But Marvin being fundamentally shattered, insecure, a broken person, you know, with with deep, you know, deep seated conflicts around sexuality, around his parents, around his relationship with his parents.
Marc:With Jesus and with his mother and with his father.
Marc:I mean, I'm just saying that over your head in the sense that you had similar problems.
Marc:But through Marvin, through Marvin's journey, which was ultimately tragic and horrible.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You know, you were able to come to grips with some of your own stuff that was sort of hard won.
Marc:But initially must have been terrifying.
Guest:I was never terrified with Marvin because he was such – I got to do this right because it's really kind of a precious thing.
Guest:But Marvin Gaye was – I just did a book with Lenny Kravitz who's an enormously charming man and a very sweet, loving man.
Guest:And Marvin was in that category.
Guest:I mean, now, again, Lenny doesn't have nearly the turmoil and the kind of mishagas of Marvin Gaye.
Guest:Marvin was – you just wanted to be with him all the time because he was so cool.
Guest:He was relaxed.
Guest:And now again, we were high most of the time, smoking dope and snorting cocaine.
Guest:So, I mean, that was part of it.
Guest:And I also think – I didn't get –
Guest:Sober till 1990.
Guest:Marvin was killed in 1984.
Guest:So our whole experience together involved not just listening to music and talking about theology and literature, but it also involved being high.
Marc:Yeah, but this guy was going down hard, man.
Guest:Well, when I met him, he was not going down hard.
Guest:When I met him, he had just done Hear My Dear, which is a great sort of masterwork.
Guest:And I was thrilled with that album.
Guest:This is the album about his divorce from Anna Gordy Gay.
Guest:And I was a champion of that album.
Guest:And I wrote a letter to the LA Times saying,
Guest:comparing it to Charlie Mingus and Ellington and Stevie Wonder.
Guest:So, I mean, this album was, and again, I adored his music.
Guest:I adored his music.
Guest:And then I adored him.
Guest:So it was not, and the other thing about Marvin, which was interesting, even when I went to
Guest:And we had our last meetings when we wrote sexual healing together.
Guest:Marvin was always able to stay, keep me away from him when he was really in the kind of darkest periods of his life.
Guest:For example, he told me, don't touch the pipe.
Guest:When he began fooling with the pipe, he told me, don't touch it.
Guest:And he would never tell me anything.
Guest:I mean, that wasn't typical of him.
Guest:So he was very protective of me.
Guest:And when he did have these extremely dark periods, he kept me...
Guest:Away from him.
Guest:Because I think he saw me as someone with the chops to write his story.
Marc:And also maybe vulnerable to not being able to handle the pipe.
Guest:Positively.
Guest:And chances are, if he had offered it to me, I probably, you know, because, you know, now, recently, I've done books with Willie Nelson, and I'm doing a book with Snoop Dogg.
Guest:And I'm a recovering marijuana addict.
Guest:I mean, marijuana to me was my main drug.
Guest:and I had to go to MA I didn't even know there was MA Marijuana Anonymous to get straight but I can be with Willie or Snoop and not worry about getting high but back in 1982 being with Marvin Gaye and the idea of
Guest:turning down a joint from him wasn't even remotely possible.
Guest:Wasn't even remotely possible.
Marc:But you didn't get involved with smoke and coke?
Guest:No, no, no.
Marc:You did it once though, right?
Guest:I did it one time and it was so good.
Guest:And so every green light went on in my brain.
Guest:I wanted to get on the roof and tell the neighbors the good news.
Guest:And it turned out that the person who got me the stuff was killed after he left my house in some drug deal.
Guest:And that got me so scared that I never kind of touch it again.
Guest:But that didn't keep me from smoking...
Guest:Pot, I mean, because that happened in 85 or 86.
Guest:I continued to get high for another four years until I got sober in 1990.
Marc:But I think what you really characterized in the book for me, you know, and that we're not leaning on too much in this conversation is that, you know, the through line of the God Groove of your book and in talking about working with these these artists.
Marc:was sort of like, you know, seeing your path to spirituality and belief.
Marc:And it seemed to me that Marvin Gaye, you know, and his struggle with himself, with drugs.
Marc:And I mean, this is a guy that, you know, lost his fucking mind from cocaine psychosis and pushed his father to shoot him.
Marc:And, you know, and, you know, you talk about the aftermath of that and about his father kind of like not, you know, forcefully, you know, intentionally not remembering killing his own son.
Marc:But my I guess my question is, it seemed that the reason I said over your head was that it seemed that the way that Marvin framed his relationship with Jesus in the midst of everything that he was going through in the midst of what, you know, was seemingly someone surrendering to the devil, you know,
Marc:you know, was inspirational to you or some sort of cautionary tale or somehow strengthened retroactively your idea of what belief was.
Guest:I totally agree, because when you are with him, when I was with him, I could see the Jesus in him.
Guest:I could see that.
Guest:And when I listen to his music, particularly, you know, what's going on is a Christian album.
Mm hmm.
Guest:So that he was a gospel artist to me.
Guest:And there's an old D.H.
Guest:Lawrence thing that he said, trust the story, don't trust the storyteller.
Guest:And Marvin's story, as it's expressed in his music, is filled with hope and light and love.
Guest:Now, it's also filled with turmoil because he's a blues artist and blues artists have to work their way through the blues.
Guest:But because he was a gospel artist, I am inspired by Marvin and continue to be.
Guest:I probably listen to Marvin more than any artist.
Guest:And I listen to music all day long.
Guest:Which album do you go back to?
Guest:Well, you know, I love what's going on.
Guest:I love... I love... You know, I love them all.
Guest:I mean, I like the concept album more than the singles, though I do love Heard It Through the Grape Sound.
Guest:But, you know, I love...
Guest:A Trouble Man.
Guest:I love What's Going On.
Guest:I love Let's Get It On.
Guest:I love I Want You.
Guest:And I particularly love Here, My Dear, because it spoke to me so powerfully that I had to meet him.
Guest:And my hustle Marvin story, I don't know if I put it in the book or not, is that...
Guest:When it was attacked, because the album was attacked when it came out as being kind of personal and who cares about his divorce and why isn't Marvin talking about what he talked about what's going on.
Guest:So he was attacked by a guy in the LA Times.
Guest:And I thought to myself, if I answer the attack and I write a...
Guest:Letter to the editor, diff, ending the album, Marvin will read the letter, get in touch with me and I'll get to meet him.
Guest:And that's exactly what happened.
Guest:He called me up and he went, who are you?
Guest:And I said, well, this guy, I've written a book on radio.
Guest:And he said, well, come on over, man, let's talk.
Guest:I really appreciate your understanding of this album.
Guest:So, now again, I was completely genuine.
Guest:I mean, but I was also wanted to meet him.
Marc:But it seemed like through him, you were able to sort of like, you know, find...
Marc:Like he became the barometer of your ability to accept yourself because of your own sexual identity, you know, issues or discomfort, you know, through him, you know, and his proclivities around cross-dressing and his father, the preacher's cross-dressing, which, you know, which almost ultimately damaged Marvin a bit.
Marc:And, you know, it just seemed that he, not unlike Jesus,
Marc:Was the guy that, you know, you look to and said, well, if this guy can rise above this and and and still have God in his life, that there's some pathway for me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I believe that's true.
Guest:And what's also true is that we'll just take sexual healing, which is an interesting sort of metaphor for the whole thing.
Guest:We're together in Austin in April of 1982.
Marc:But this is him.
Marc:He ran away because he was so fucked up, right?
Guest:Yeah, the IRS is after him.
Guest:He owes his wife's alimony.
Guest:He's depressed.
Guest:He was in England.
Guest:He was in Hawaii.
Guest:He hasn't had a hit since got to give it up.
Guest:I mean, he's at the lowest date of his life.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he winds up in this beautifully quaint town in northern Belgium, looking at the North Sea.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And again, me being the hustler, I'm chasing after him.
Guest:We got to do the book.
Guest:We got to do the book.
Guest:We got to do the book.
Guest:And I don't, you know, I've got two young kids.
Guest:I don't have any bread.
Guest:I don't care.
Guest:I'm going to go see a fucking Beethoven or Mozart, which is what Marvin was to me, you know, do anything to hang out with.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:So I get there and on the coffee table, uh,
Guest:is this kind of S&M book of cartoons, which is very kind of, you know, kind of disturbing.
Guest:And this music track is playing on the boom box and he needs a story to go with it.
Guest:And I'm not really thinking about the music track.
Guest:I'm thinking about this book.
Guest:And I say, Marvin, this is some sick shit.
Guest:What you need is sexual healing.
Guest:And he says, what's that?
Guest:And I said, well, you know, you kind of love a person for who they are and it doesn't involve pain and you're healed from all the complexities and you accept blah, blah, blah.
Guest:And he said, well, you know, just write some poetry to that.
Guest:How would that work as a poem?
Guest:So, you know, I'm glib and I write when blue cheer drops, you know.
Guest:And he takes these words and he puts them to the track, which was written by his keyboardist, Odell Brown, and the song is written.
Guest:And in my mind, and this is what's so interesting to me and where I think you've kind of hit the nail on the head.
Guest:In my mind, I'm working as a ghost.
Guest:In other words, I am ghost writing for Marvin Gaye, his script.
Marc:Right.
Guest:But it turns out to be...
Guest:My own script.
Guest:What I needed was sexual healing and acceptance of the complexity of my own actuality because one of my primary addictions is sexual.
Guest:So it took me forever to understand that what I thought...
Guest:was a song written for him, which was also a song that became kind of a mantra of my own life.
Marc:And what is the spiritual component of that?
Guest:That the resolution of my sexual compulsivity and my sexual neurosis
Guest:happened at 12-step meetings that had to be brought into the church of the 12-steps that needed a spiritual
Guest:resolution because I had tried to go to shrinks and, you know, as I did with cocaine and marijuana as well.
Guest:I don't want to go to public meetings and admit I'm a sex addict or admit I'm an alcoholic.
Guest:I wanted to go as an upper middle class Jew.
Guest:I wanted to go to the privacy of a shrink, pay him $150 an hour and get cured.
Guest:It just didn't work.
Guest:It just didn't work.
Marc:But, you know, that somehow Marvin was able to sort of balance, you know, your message with something that, you know, he believed that sex and Jesus, you know, that there was not...
Marc:Yeah, that you talk a bit in the book about a few of the artists who, you know, that initially there was something about gospel being sexualized by Ray Charles and it was seen as the devil's music.
Marc:And then there was an evolution where it wasn't the devil's music.
Marc:You know, all music is God music.
Marc:And that that Marvin sort of exemplified this guy who was able to hold both of those worlds together.
Marc:in each of his hands until he, you know, went out of his mind and decided that the devil was winning.
Marc:So what impact did that have on you?
Marc:I don't believe it.
Guest:I mean, in other words, that's where the Jew in me...
Guest:was great because I had at least what I call, I don't mean this couldn't have happened if you were a Hindu or Christian, but I had the critical acumen to argue with him and go, that is crazy.
Guest:you know, that Charlie Parker or Max Roach or Ornette Coleman is just as much a spiritual instrument as God as you are, or Lightning Hopkins or Charlie Patton or whoever.
Guest:And this kind of binary thing is crazy.
Guest:It's an old superstition.
Guest:I understand where it's coming from.
Guest:But I reject it.
Guest:And by the way, intellectually, Marvin rejected it.
Guest:But from an emotional point of view, given his upbringing in his dance church, he couldn't reject it.
Marc:Well, it was convoluted because of child abuse.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But I mean, we argued about that.
Guest:And I remember one of the last nights we were together in Belgium and
Guest:There was a documentary on Coltrane, and we were watching Coltrane, and this was Coltrane's kind of spiritual period after Love Supreme.
Guest:He's really preaching, and Marvin going, wow.
Marc:And he's really out there, dude.
Guest:And he's really out there, and Marvin got it.
Guest:I mean, he completely understood that we were in the church of John Coltrane.
Guest:And so he didn't say, this is, you know, the devil's music.
Guest:But...
Guest:His childhood conditioning and his kind of trauma.
Guest:He was traumatized as a child.
Guest:And so was Risa and so was Ray.
Guest:And when you have childhood trauma and you don't have the means to...
Guest:You just need help.
Marc:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:Yeah, but also, like, in that community, that's not something that happens a lot, dude.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:You know, you keep it at home.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, in the case of Ray, he was so strong that... I mean, but, you know, losing your brother and then losing your eyesight.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:But that's not the same as, like, a Pentecostal minister father fucking your brain up.
Guest:No, but it's... Well, I don't know how you compare trauma.
Guest:I mean, that's a hell of a trauma to go blind and watch it.
Marc:But it's not, you know, it's not abuse.
Marc:It's not gaslighting.
Guest:It's not, you know... That's an important distinction.
Guest:I agree with you.
Guest:It is not abuse at the hands of a parent.
Guest:And I... Right.
Guest:And I think that's an important distinction.
Guest:And that may be why...
Guest:Ray was able to live a relatively long life, but it's also important to remember about Ray, and this is a story that was not told in the movie, but I think it's an important story, that Ray died of alcoholic liver disease.
Guest:He drank himself to death.
Marc:Yeah, those junkies, it's hard.
Marc:A lot of them switch to the weird booze.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:He gave up heroin, and that's the triumphant thing in the movie.
Guest:But every day he mixed gin and coffee and five tablespoons of sugar and drank it from morning till night.
Guest:And now, again, he was operative.
Guest:So he would argue with you when you would tell him he was alcoholic.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But it's funny that it's hard to get that monkey off your back.
Marc:Like Keith Richards, William Burroughs, they all did that thing with the vodka or whatever.
Marc:They had to figure out how to keep tamping it down.
Guest:And I, by the way, I'm not sure I'm not in that category.
Guest:I mean, again, I don't drink or drug or, you know, but I'm extremely compulsive person in in my work.
Guest:I'm compulsive about clothes.
Guest:All right.
Marc:So if it's not making your life unmanageable, David.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But no, I just don't want anyone to get the idea that I'm cured.
Guest:I mean, I am... I'm pretty... You know, but the other thing I want to say... No, we just put it out.
Marc:You're still fucked up.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And...
Guest:And also, I accept the fact that I'm a mess.
Guest:And one of the things I like about jazz and funk particularly, I love funk.
Guest:I like the Ohio players.
Marc:I just talked to Bootsy.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Bootsy's a genius.
Guest:One of the reasons I love funk, and it is because it's a mess, and it's raw, and it's wrong in some ways.
Guest:You know what I'm saying?
Guest:And I think that is I'm just going to be that way till I die.
Guest:I think I am a mess.
Guest:I think the human condition is a mess.
Guest:And I think that's why we relate so much to the blues, because the blues is a kind of messy music.
Marc:Yeah, but the blues, the magic of it and also like, you know, the magic of comedy.
Marc:You know, having, you know, you've done a couple of books with Don Rickles as well, is that, you know, they are able to there's a catharsis in the simplicity of the blues and of a good joke.
Marc:And that, you know, if you can take the pain and the chaos away.
Marc:of what it is to exist in the human world and kind of render it down to a phrase or a one, four, five or, you know, a few good runs of, you know, well-timed jokes.
Marc:You know, the relief afforded the heart by those things is magic.
Guest:I agree with you more.
Guest:And, you know, I am so glad that you mentioned that because, you know,
Guest:One of my, because every day I write a thousand words, you know, I read a lot and every day I write, every single day.
Guest:I don't take off times because I'm juggling four books at once because of my compulsive nature and my love of my work.
Guest:And I like to sit and I like to type.
Guest:But one of the things that keeps me going is going on YouTube and listening to
Guest:Coltrane or Carmen McRae or whoever it is but also comics I'll go and watch a George Carlin thing for half an hour and it's like Charlie Parker I mean Carlin is just a crazy genius it's funny I never it's like I don't go to Carlin like so much if I'm going down the rabbit hole like lately I've been doing some Rodney
Guest:I feel that way about him.
Guest:I've actually kind of rediscovered him in the last four or five months.
Marc:He's the king of pain, dude.
Marc:The king of pain.
Guest:I underestimated him when he first came out.
Guest:Everyone did.
Guest:I'm going back and I'm seeing he's a blues artist, man.
Guest:Oh, for sure.
Guest:But I'm also getting off on, you know, they got all the old Johnny Carson stuff.
Guest:So I've been watching Carson with Buddy Hackett.
Marc:Sure, Buddy is great.
Guest:Telling old-time Jewish stories and Catskill stuff.
Guest:And that's a kind of blues genius.
Guest:For sure, man.
Guest:You know, and then a prior, of course, without –
Guest:And so comedy to me, I agree with you.
Guest:I mean, comedy to me, these are sort of nutrients.
Guest:You know, we live in, it's this toxic world that we live in.
Guest:And we're always breathing in toxics.
Guest:You know, we're kind of watching TV and this guy is toxic and he's poisoned our culture so that we need sort of nutrients to be healthy and not go crazy.
Guest:And to me, the nutrients are Nancy Wilson and Richard Pryor and Buddy Hackett and Rodney Dangerfield.
Marc:And yeah, what I've been saying is you use whatever means at your disposal to maintain your sanity without hurting yourself or others.
Guest:Well, and also I put it, you know, I think we kind of see things basically the I put it a tiny bit differently, which is my job.
Guest:I got two jobs.
Guest:One is not to go crazy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And one is to make a living, because if I if I go crazy, I won't be able to make a living.
Marc:But hey, man, you might have to go crazy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:What if you have to be crazy to make a living, though?
Guest:And I think it's a it's it's it's a controlled kind of craziness.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Of course.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:After a certain point, once you once you get the hang out of how to work your own crazy, you can fucking do it.
Marc:What was your take?
Marc:You know, spending time with Don Rickles.
Marc:What was your like?
Marc:How did you assess his heart?
Guest:Well, I caught up with Don after he had lost his fastball.
Guest:So it was challenging.
Guest:I mean, you know, he was great.
Guest:And, you know, he's one of the kings in the Jackie Leonard Milton Berle tradition.
Guest:You know, I was honored to do it.
Guest:It's hard.
Guest:You know, I have worked with three comics.
Guest:The hardest thing for me to do is to voice a comic.
Guest:I'm not sure why.
Marc:Well, I mean, because like, you know, they've got they've they've got to like I imagine it's a little easier to but not with Aretha, but it's probably a little easier to chip away at a musician by blowing a little smoke up their ass.
Marc:You could probably get an easier route to their heart, maybe, whereas a comic is pretty well guarded all the way down.
Guest:Guarded and also lots of comics, and you know more about this, so I should be asking you this question.
Marc:I don't know if that's true.
Guest:Comics have sort of a mean streak.
Guest:I mean, I kind of think meanness is an important ingredient to comedy.
Guest:It's the same thing.
Guest:It's the same, yeah.
Guest:And I don't see that as anything wrong or sort of negative.
Guest:I think the expression of anger is important for our culture.
Guest:And that's why Rodney is great and Rickles is great.
Guest:Milton Berle was great.
Marc:Who were the other ones?
Marc:Who did you do?
Guest:Don Rickles?
Guest:Groucho is the angriest of them all.
Guest:And Groucho was a crazy genius.
Marc:Yeah, you've got to layer that charm on top of that rage, buddy.
Guest:Right, but...
Guest:But under the rage, there is a kind of a meanness and a sort of a nastiness that's difficult for me because under Marvin Gaye or Aretha even, there is a love and a sweetness and a kind of, again, a kind of a godliness.
Yeah.
Guest:Childlike childlike.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But so in Don's case, he had he didn't have his fastball, which is very important to him.
Marc:The funny thing about Don and compared to like Rodney is like almost none of Don Rickles jokes were great or written.
Marc:He was it was all driven by timing.
Guest:and and and beats and rage but like you know like rodney wrote jokes i mean don you know most of the things he says don't even make sense no no no no exactly and it's all the vibe of his rhythm and the vibe of of this kind of perpetual thing and so that i didn't have that because he was older and not well and
Guest:So anyway, I mean, it was a great experience.
Guest:You know, I was honored to do it.
Guest:I had to go through four or five drafts until I got the voice right.
Guest:And it's like you were talking about there.
Guest:There aren't jokes.
Guest:There's just this kind of rhythmic compulsive stream of consciousness.
Guest:And on on.
Guest:paper, it's not as funny as it is out loud.
Guest:But it turned out it was a hit book.
Guest:I was happy with the whole thing.
Guest:We did two books and I would love to do more comics.
Marc:Who are the other two?
Guest:Andrew Dice Clay.
Guest:and um sin bad oh he's a good he's a he's a sweet guy right and that was an easy book to do he's he's like he knows how to talk about his heart andrew was tough dice was tough and there was a lot of heat between us and it was tough but by the way if you watch that bad tv show vinyl yeah and you see andrew's part in it yeah
Guest:He's a hell of an actor, man.
Guest:No, he's good, man.
Marc:I've talked to him.
Marc:I know Dice.
Guest:He's a really, really, really talented, brilliant guy in a certain way.
Guest:But as a collaboration, it was not easy.
Marc:But also, if your trick works, you get these people to present a well-rounded portrait of themselves.
Marc:But a lot of people don't have the equipment to get into their hearts or the courage to speak openly about their bisexuality like you do or your struggle with spirituality.
Marc:And as a Jew, kind of like landing on Jesus or sexual abuse or sexual trauma as a child.
Marc:So, you know.
Marc:There are just some people that you're never going to get there.
Marc:And I thought that was sort of interesting about, you know, again, with Aretha, that you had this persistence and this not unlike originally with Ray, that, you know, this was this was the godhead for you was to talk to her.
Marc:And you talked to everybody around her and everybody that knew her about everything.
Marc:And they all told you she ain't going to give you anything.
Marc:And that's a dark tunnel, dude.
Marc:And did you ever because I remember talking to you about respect and you said, well, look, you know, because they you originally were involved and you're not involved in the estate is protective.
Marc:I mean, in retrospect, you know, what was that experience for you?
Marc:I mean, you wrote a book with her and then you wrote a book about her.
Marc:Do you feel like you got to where you needed to be with her?
Guest:Well, let me go back to me as a hustler, because I hustled that book harder than any book.
Guest:You know, I chased after for 18 or 19 or 20 years.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Because, again, to me, it was Ray, Marvin and Risa.
Guest:And I just I just had to do it.
Guest:And ultimately, I caught up with her.
Guest:And when I caught up with her, it was one of the happiest moments of my profession.
Guest:professional life when she told me, yes, you can do this.
Guest:I was jumping out of my skin, man.
Guest:I was up for nights.
Guest:I was just giddy.
Guest:And I remember the first time I went to her house, I went there the night before just to make sure when I went there the next day, I wouldn't get lost and lose my way.
Guest:And then everybody told me like Jerry and her
Guest:And so they all told me you aren't going to sort of get anywhere.
Guest:She's got this wall built around her.
Guest:But I was arrogant and I was happy I was arrogant because my arrogance allowed me to do this autobiography.
Guest:But my arrogance was I'm going to be so charming and so sweet.
Guest:I am going to kind of melt her and I'm going to get the intimacy because to me, these books are all about intimacy.
Yeah.
Guest:You know, they're all about intimacy.
Guest:And I did not make a dent in her armor.
Guest:I mean, we had some good times in the kitchen, eating food.
Guest:And she's a wonderful cook and listening to gospel music and listening to Nancy Wills.
Marc:I mean, it isn't that she was trying to hustle you, man.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But there was I didn't get to the heart of the story.
Guest:I don't think so.
Guest:In either book.
Guest:No, I think, again, this is my ego talking, but I think Respect is a good biography of her.
Guest:I think it represents, because it isn't just my point of view, it's a lot of people's point of view.
Guest:I think if you read Respect, you get a pretty deep understanding of Arisa.
Guest:And I'm proud of the book.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Well, what was your relationship with the production that I was in?
Guest:I didn't have anything to do with it.
Guest:Why?
Guest:They optioned my book.
Guest:And also Hollywood, let me be sort of candid.
Guest:Hollywood is not particularly interesting to me.
Guest:I mean, it's interesting to me and I love to watch movies.
Guest:But as a participant, I don't have any control.
Guest:I'm just a guy at home on a computer.
Guest:I have no juice.
Guest:Usually people, if they option a book, they option the book and they go off and they make it.
Guest:And there's a director and a producer and no one's calling me to say, ask me anything.
Guest:So I knew I was grateful to Harvey Mason Jr., who was one of the producers, for having optioned the book.
Guest:And I know he had a high regard for the book.
Guest:And I hope the book was useful to the screenwriters.
Guest:But I have had nothing to do with the screenplay and have had no input.
Guest:And I wish it well.
Guest:I hope it's a great movie.
Guest:I hope you're great in it.
Guest:I hope Jennifer's great.
Guest:And I hope it helps.
Marc:Well, she can fucking sing, dude.
Guest:I know.
Guest:I mean, she is crazy good.
Guest:So I hope it helps the...
Guest:Legacy of Aretha.
Guest:I hope that the television movie on Aretha is great, too.
Guest:So, I mean, I hope they're all great.
Guest:But all I could control, well, I couldn't control the autobiography.
Guest:So the autobiography comes out.
Guest:She takes it over.
Guest:She keeps me around, but she's really rewriting everything.
Guest:The book is that and I'm not happy with it because I think it's very superficial.
Marc:Takes out the dark parts.
Guest:Takes out the dark parts, really doesn't own up to her childhood traumas.
Guest:Then 15 years go by and I just can't.
Guest:Live with myself because I feel like I know the story.
Guest:I knew John Hammond and Jerry Wexler.
Guest:I knew her brothers and sisters.
Guest:I did a million interviews.
Guest:And I kind of feel if I die, who else is going to tell this story with the intimate knowledge that I have?
Guest:And again, there isn't anybody else.
Guest:And I know her.
Guest:I worked with her for two years.
Guest:So I made up my mind, I'm going to go out of my comfort zone.
Guest:I'm not going to be a ghostwriter.
Guest:And I'm going to write a biography.
Guest:And I knew it would make her unhappy.
Guest:And that's what took me so long to do it, because I don't like making people unhappy.
Guest:Going back to my advertising client orientation, keep the client happy.
Guest:But I just knew...
Guest:that I had to tell her story according to my understanding of the story and utilize all my intimate relationships with people who are close to her.
Guest:So consequently, I'm proud of the book, and I'm happy I wrote the book.
Guest:I'm not interested in doing another biography.
Guest:I'm still, you know, ghostwriting is my main thing.
Marc:Yeah, but after that, she didn't talk to you anymore.
Guest:Nope.
Guest:She was angry and understandably.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And then also the other thing that it seems in the book that, you know, Marvin Gaye cuts you out of the loop on the royalties on sexual healing and that that was friction up until he died.
Marc:What happened with that?
Marc:How did that resolve itself?
Guest:I won the case because I had a tape of us writing the song together.
Marc:Posthumously?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I won the case and have been a copyright, a co-owner of the song since...
Guest:1989 or 1990.
Guest:But that was an instance where Marvin was not well at the end of his life.
Guest:He was not well.
Guest:And he was angry and, you know, there was litigation, but...
Marc:And Wexler told you to do it.
Marc:You were fighting Wexler.
Guest:Wexler said, sue him!
Guest:Sue him!
Guest:And I said, I can't sue Marvin Gaye.
Guest:Sue him!
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:So, I mean, looking back, you know, obviously you've got the hang of this and it's what you do, this ghostwriting thing, and you're sought out now by a lot of different types of people.
Marc:It seems that there are people that you loved doing and did because of your own need to do them.
Marc:And then there's people that you do because you can.
Marc:Like, you know, you know, it runs the gamut.
Marc:Jerry Lieber, Mike Stoller.
Marc:You've done, you know, Natalie Cole, Joe Perry, buddy guy.
Marc:You know, on top of, you know, Willie Nelson, you talked about on top of the original ones that you were compelled to do, like Ray and Smokey and BB and.
Marc:Now, I guess my question, you know, kind of landing this thing is that what do you find in creating these symbiotic, intimate relationships with all these different types of artists, primarily in music?
Marc:What is the thread between them?
Guest:I think learning to listen.
Guest:You know, I grew up in a household where you waited for a pause in the conversation so you could interrupt the person and make your own point and win the argument.
Marc:Yeah, I have that too.
Marc:You learn how to empathetically listen.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And listen with your heart.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You know what helps with that?
Guest:What?
Marc:Fucking meetings.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, that's where one of the first places I learned to listen.
Guest:Because you only get to talk for two and a half minutes to three and a half minutes.
Guest:And the other thing, you just have to shut up and listen to people.
Guest:So I think as I look back over the whole career...
Guest:What I've learned is to listen to people with my heart, be curious, inject humor is incredibly important.
Guest:I think, you know, I'm 77 years old.
Guest:I'm going to be... Next week is my birthday.
Guest:I'm going to be 77.
Guest:And as I look at... And I'm enjoying old age.
Guest:I love old age and I feel, you know, energetic.
Guest:But to me...
Guest:All this ghostwriting and I'm doing more and more and I'm loving it more and more.
Guest:The thing that keeps me going is loving to listen.
Guest:loving to be curious, and loving to inject humor, and not taking it all that seriously.
Marc:Yeah, I think that's what we share.
Marc:I'm coming upon that very same thing with what I did.
Guest:You know, Mark, most people who struggle...
Guest:with writing books and people ask me, why are you so prolific?
Guest:I'm having a good time.
Guest:I don't take it all that seriously.
Guest:It's a book.
Guest:Maybe it's good.
Guest:Maybe it's bad.
Guest:I'm kind of playing.
Marc:What do you find all the artists as well?
Marc:What do you find in common that there, what do they all share?
Guest:they are driven and and and that's the other thing that keeps me going i am driven you are driven uh and i'm intrigued by what is the origin of the drive what is the nature of the drive and the answer is i don't know and i love the fact that i don't know because i keep on trying to understand it
Marc:Isn't that interesting?
Marc:You're willing to accept the mystery of God.
Guest:That's it.
Guest:But you're compelled to find out what drives people.
Guest:But I'm also willing to accept the fact that I may never know.
Guest:I mean, just take you.
Guest:I mean, you've done all sorts of things in your life.
Guest:You continue to be driven.
Guest:You continue to hustle your way through Hollywood and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Guest:Why?
Guest:I mean, why didn't you drive sort of...
Marc:Into a ditch?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:As opposed to keep going down a highway.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I don't know either.
Guest:I mean, the idea of – How long have you sat with yourself?
Marc:It's difficult.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:So all I can tell you is that I am grateful.
Guest:I am driven towards other people who are driven because I relate to them and I'm intrigued by them.
Guest:And in this world where it's so easy to be depressed and drive off the cliff and give up and not do shit, people like Philip Roth, I'm going through the complete novels, 10 volumes.
Guest:Oh, that's great.
Marc:Where are you at?
Guest:Just driven, driven, driven.
Guest:I've actually read a lot of the books earlier, but now I'm beginning at the beginning.
Guest:I'm at Portnoy's Complaint.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:Which I just loved it more this time than I did the first time.
Guest:But the whole thing about Philip Roth, he never stops writing.
Guest:I can't stop writing.
Guest:Why?
Marc:Sometimes I ask that question in two ways.
Marc:It's not the curious question like I want answers.
Marc:It's like, really, do we need more?
Marc:Why?
Why?
Marc:I'm glad the guy's got enough momentum and he's famous enough to keep working.
Marc:But Jesus, not getting any better, is it?
Guest:Well, but also I think stimulation, I want to be stimulated.
Guest:And I'm really grateful that I love Louis Armstrong as much today as I did when I heard him when I was eight years old.
Marc:Well, that shit's magic.
Marc:You hear music, dude, and you hear music when you're eight years old, and a lot of music just grows with you.
Marc:It gets deeper.
Marc:It gets different.
Marc:It means different things over your whole life.
Guest:you know I agree it's quite an amazing thing look it was great talking to you David hey man I enjoyed it I had a great time and here's a hug through virtuality thanks man I think this was one of the better interviews I've ever had but I was pretty sure that it would be thanks David see you soon okay great bye
Marc:That was David Ritz.
Marc:Many books.
Marc:The one that I last read was The God Groove.
Marc:A Blues Journey to Faith is his memoir, but he's also written books with or about Marvin Gaye, Jimmy Scott, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, B.B.
Marc:King, Etta James, Janet Jackson, Buddy Guy, Don Rickles.
Marc:Jerry Wexler.
Marc:It's all at RitzWrites.com.
Marc:R-I-T-Z-W-R-I-T-E-S.com.
Marc:Again, find gratitude if you can.
Marc:If you can't find hope, let's just hang on for a little bit of relief.
Marc:Maybe things will get back to something we are familiar with.
Marc:Something comfortable.
Marc:Or at least, at least okay.
Marc:I'm hoping for okay, people.
Marc:Happy New Year.
Marc:Here's some guitar.
Guest:guitar solo
Guest:guitar solo
guitar solo
Marc:Boomer lives.
Marc:Monkey lives.
Guest:La Fonda lives.
Guest:guitar solo
Marc:I miss you, Lynn Shelton.