Episode 1330 - The Doobie Brothers / Steven Jenkins
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fuck nicks what's happening i'm mark maron this is my podcast welcome to it how's it going are you all right you okay i've been traveling i just i left tulsa
Marc:on Tuesday morning, arrived in Pittsburgh.
Marc:I'm going to be tonight, I'll be just outside Pittsburgh at the Carnegie of Homestead, that haunted place.
Marc:Then tomorrow on Friday, I'm in Cleveland, Ohio at the Mimi Ohio Theater.
Marc:Then on Saturday, I'm in Royal Oak, Michigan at the Music Theater.
Marc:Next week, Washington, D.C.
Marc:at the Kennedy Center on May 20th.
Marc:Red Bank, New Jersey at the Count Basie Center on May 21st.
Marc:And Philadelphia at the Keswick Theater on May 22nd.
Marc:I know...
Marc:You can go to wtfpod.com slash tour for information on these dates.
Marc:I know that Detroit and Philly are getting tight.
Marc:Let's talk about the world.
Marc:Look, I understand I've been rambling on and aggravated and trying to stand firm in the face of a fascist momentum in this country.
Marc:I know that a tremendous blow has been dealt to the women of this country.
Marc:with this seemingly unavoidable overturning of roe v wade i get it to the degree that i can get it i think it's fucking terrible i don't really know what to do because it is a tremendously shameless and thorough authoritarian move a a christian
Marc:fascist move that makes it clear what this future will be it becomes difficult and sad figuring out how to fight it there's never been something as definitive in terms of where we're going as a country in terms of the theocratic authoritarianism I mean it's happening on top of that the state I live in has no water and fires are coming
Marc:i know what's happening i'm trying to to handle it i don't know what to tell you i don't know what my job is right now other than to you know comfort a dying patient but uh but the doobie brothers are here today and the guy who's a the director of the uh of the bob dylan center
Marc:These are nourishing things.
Marc:The Bob Dylan Center was very mentally and soulfully nourishing in terms of just standing in the shadow of one of the greatest sort of literary and songwriting and musical artists of all time and trying to relate on some level because you want to feel like you're kind of like Bob Dylan, right?
Marc:So getting to look at those notebooks, I'm like, I carry around notebooks and scribble in them too.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I'm just like Bob Dylan.
Marc:I got little notebooks.
Marc:Maybe one day all my little notebooks will be open in a museum and everybody will look at them and go like, how did he even understand what he wrote?
Marc:I could read Dylan's writing.
Marc:I can't read mine.
Marc:So I guess that makes me more expressive in some ways, more challenging than Bob.
Marc:Because I challenge myself to try to read what I've written on a post-it.
Marc:But look, it's true.
Marc:I am talking to Tom Johnston and Pat Simmons of the Doobie Brothers.
Marc:They're two of the original, original members, both on guitar and vocals.
Marc:And they've been with the band for its entire existence.
Marc:They have a new memoir out called Long Train Runnin'.
Marc:our story of the Doobie Brothers.
Marc:But before, as I said, I talked to the Doobies, I'm going to talk to Stephen Jenkins.
Marc:But before that, what I'd like to do is talk a little bit about Reservation Dogs and my experience on that set.
Marc:Because I missed, you know, I canceled my dates at Dynasty Typewriter because I knew that if Sterling Harjo was going to ask me to do this show or cast me on this show, I would do anything to do it because I do think it is one of the best shows ever made.
Marc:for a lot of reasons primarily the reason that it is uh you know native owned and operated to a degree obviously fx is the is the network but this is a native operation and through this show we see and feel the point of view the way of life the humor the spirituality the
Marc:the uh the the cultural sort of influences and impact that come in and go out of the native community and it's never been seen like this before this is a completely groundbreaking affair
Marc:And I was thrilled to be part of it.
Marc:And to be on the set was great because it was totally collaborative, completely diverse, and interesting.
Marc:I'm in Oklahoma with a bunch of native people getting that point of view and being part of executing those stories.
Marc:And I was thrilled.
Marc:And I just wanted to give some props.
Marc:to the people that were involved, obviously Sterling Harjo, but the writer Bobby Wilson of the episode I was on, which was great.
Marc:Stay gold, cheesy boy.
Marc:That's the name of the episode.
Marc:Stay gold, cheesy boy by Bobby Wilson.
Marc:So he was around and it was fun talking to that guy and working with that guy because we were doing a lot of improvising.
Marc:And the director, Black Horse Lowe, was also very open to improvising, as was Sterling.
Marc:And the other actors were great.
Marc:I was working with a bunch of kids.
Marc:I play the guy who runs sort of a recovery halfway house.
Marc:for these kids and cheese played by lane factor has been put in there.
Marc:And I'm the guy running the place.
Marc:And the other, the other kids were great too.
Marc:Ronaldo Piniella was, played this guy, Julio, Travis Thompson played Tino.
Marc:He's a rapper from Seattle, native guy.
Marc:Cameron Alexander played James.
Marc:A.J.
Marc:Volton played Jed Thro.
Marc:And those are the kids I worked with.
Marc:I always wonder, like, what am I supposed to be doing?
Marc:What is this character?
Marc:But then when I get there, I'm like, well, he's going to be me.
Marc:And then when we were just riffing this guy.
Marc:who's this kind of quirky... It wasn't really written for me, per se.
Marc:It was written sort of more as a kind of drill sergeant-y kind of guy.
Marc:But I just played him as this kind of weirdo who had this life experience, this cranky weirdo.
Marc:And we were just improvising our balls off.
Marc:And they would encourage it, which is rare and fun.
Marc:And I tell you, no matter how...
Marc:How good the episode comes out or when anybody thinks of the episode itself, the experience of making these guys, especially the director, especially Black Horse Lowe.
Marc:I had him laughing so hard.
Marc:I'm like, my job is done.
Marc:I don't even care how this thing comes out.
Marc:This guy is laughing so hard.
Marc:It is so fucking beautiful that I'm like, that's enough for me.
Marc:They could do whatever they want with this thing.
Marc:We got some laughs going, man.
Marc:It was just a great time.
Marc:Tulsa was really, as I said before, I saw all those concerts and stuff and the Bob Dylan Center.
Marc:Oh, and the real surprise for me, which I didn't know if it was going to happen or not, because I'm a big fan of his, is I got to work with Zahn McLarenan, who plays Big, the cop on Reservation Dogs.
Marc:He's also been in a couple of other Sterling Harjo movies.
Marc:You know him from Westworld and some other stuff.
Marc:He's a very definitive person, a one-of-a-kind dude.
Marc:And I didn't know if I was going to get to work with him, but not only did I get to work with him, but we hung out for quite a bit.
Marc:on the set and talked about stuff about uh you know sober life stuff being of a certain age and whatnot i i hope i can get him into the uh into the garage back in glendale i think we're going to make it happen we talked about it but uh that was just another um great uh you know part of doing reservation dogs we're getting to hang out with that guy
Marc:And kind of get to know him.
Marc:So I hope we get to talk.
Marc:But he's funny and amazing.
Marc:Great actor.
Marc:But so the Bob Dylan center all sort of fell into a weird place for me.
Marc:I got wind of it through Peter Shore, who hooked me up with Jesse Dillon, who hooked me up with Bob Dylan's guy.
Marc:Larry Jenkins, who then hooked me up with his brother, Stephen, who is the director of the place.
Marc:And I went in and I looked at it and I had a great, it's a completely immersive experience.
Marc:There's a lot of amazing bits of ephemera, is that what you call it?
Marc:Artifacts, manuscripts, notebooks, the original tambourine that the Hey Mr. Tambourine Man was based on.
Marc:Artifacts from his wallet, Johnny Cash's phone number, three little spiral notebooks that he was doodling and writing the lyrics to What on the Tracks.
Marc:I mean, it's all there.
Marc:Just recordings of things that have never been heard before.
Marc:And look, it's Bob Dylan.
Marc:And Stephen, as you'll hear when I talked to him, said there's like 100,000 things that they have.
Marc:The Woody Guthrie Center is right next door.
Marc:It's in the same building.
Marc:And Kane's Ballroom.
Marc:Tulsa is...
Marc:its own thing and it was pretty great and the bob dylan center i just lucked out on on being there so i talked i just had to jump at the opportunity to talk to stephen jenkins the director of the bob dylan center in tulsa just had its grand opening on tuesday and you can go to bob dylan center.com for info if you want to visit it and this is me talking to uh stephen jenkins oh
Marc:So, there's some questions I have, you know, leading up to talking about the archive.
Marc:Like, the Kaiser family, like, I know, because I think Tim Blake Nielsen is related to the Kaiser family.
Guest:He could be.
Guest:I know he's got Tolson roots.
Marc:Oh, no, he's from.
Marc:here yeah i was doing a lot of it's a real motley crew of folks who it's interesting because he's of like the there was a there was he's from a jewish family he's a jewish guy and there was a movement of like you know after i think after the holocaust they spread out a lot of jews came from europe and they were like uh yeah we got to get you spread out because we can't let that happen again yes right so like they scatter yeah we can't you can't get all of us if we do that
Marc:But the Kaiser family is an oil family and they're old school Oklahoma.
Guest:It's very true.
Guest:George Kaiser, who I finally have the pleasure of meeting.
Guest:I hadn't been able to do so through the whole months, months long interview process.
Guest:But I met him at our opening night dinner just the other night.
Guest:I've been getting to know very well the executive director there at the George Kaiser Foundation, just a mensch of a guy named Ken Levitt.
Guest:and all these other folks.
Guest:But George, to his, you know, deserves all credit as what I'm gathering a couple months in.
Guest:He's really sort of the patron saint of the city.
Guest:You know, I've jumped into Ubers, and the driver first thing says, you know, are you new to Tulsa?
Guest:Hey, have you heard about George Kaiser?
Guest:I mean, this is a guy, there is so much civic pride here.
Guest:And what he's been able to do for the city, first investing in early childhood education with an eye on, you know, equity across cities,
Guest:So every line here and then doing a lot of civic enhancement.
Guest:So we've got this beautiful park, 64 acres right along the Arkansas River.
Guest:That's the gathering place.
Guest:A really, really lovely spot.
Guest:Bike trails all through the city.
Guest:You know, it's very outdoorsy.
Guest:And then there's a rich arts and culture ecosystem here.
Guest:And the Dillon Center will be a part of that.
Marc:Yeah, I was at the Keynes Ballroom three nights in a row, and it was unbelievable.
Marc:Yeah, that's a storied space.
Marc:You can feel the history there.
Marc:Oh, no, you definitely can't.
Marc:So did he also buy the Guthrie archive?
Guest:So Kaiser acquired the Guthrie archives, and the Guthrie Center opened in 2013.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And has done very well, you know, with a whole range of programming, looking at Guthrie's life and work.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Really with an eye towards sort of the social conscience, social justice aspect of what Guthrie has stood for.
Guest:And if I can make a sort of a contrast, the Dillon Center, which we're just about to open to the public, is focused more on that kind of unfettered creativity.
Marc:Yeah, I like the way that was framed in the thing.
Marc:It really is compelling to me, the idea of restless creativity.
Marc:Like, I never really thought of him like that, because that's a great current to kind of label it.
Guest:Yeah, it struck a chord, and as we were— Who came up with that?
Guest:You know, digging through the archives, and the archival materials themselves were suggesting narratives and suggesting context.
Guest:And because we have the Guthrie Center here, and we had established the strong focus on, again, the social justice component—
Guest:of what an artist who's committed with three chords and the truth can do.
Guest:Dylan, of course, who does the same to this day, even 60 years on from the Fouquet day, we thought, wouldn't it be fun to really highlight the creative instinct and the creative impulse and the process
Guest:And when we found that we had, say, 40 pages of lyrics for the song Dignity.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, rewriting, revising, doodles in the margins of the manuscript pages.
Guest:When you see 10 plus versions of different stanzas from Joker Man.
Guest:that you can now, in a sense, scroll through using interactive elements.
Guest:It tapped into this idea that Dylan, who we all, the royal we, tend to think of as this hallowed genius who somehow operates in this lofty realm where these songs spring fully formed and perfect.
Guest:Well, it's heartening to see that even someone of this caliber, who, let's face it, stands alone,
Marc:is is it caught in the grip of a song that he can't get right oh yeah it's like a math equation like it just becomes uh you know the poetry of yeah it was it's fascinating because of course of course he's like puts that much work yes but somehow um despite say the bootleg
Guest:series where we've now over the years heard earlier versions of songs.
Guest:Seeing the handwritten lyrics and the crossed out X's across a typewritten line.
Guest:So many pages.
Guest:So many pages, so many lines.
Guest:Things that look brilliant but obviously didn't pass muster for him.
Guest:And so through all these interactive ways I think visitors are going to be able to pour through materials and get a sense of the application of craft.
Guest:And of getting the word right, getting the phrase right.
Guest:But has he come here?
Guest:He has not.
Guest:So, you know, here's what we know.
Guest:Bob Dylan was very, very happy for his archives to be acquired by, again, the Kaiser Foundation and to find their permanent home here in Tulsa.
Guest:Next to Woody.
Guest:Next to Woody.
Guest:So that had to figure in, knowing everything that we know about the...
Guest:debt he's paid in a way to Woody, especially in the early years.
Guest:There was sort of a handing over a mantle from the elder statesman to the new coffeehouse kid.
Guest:And of course, then he went on to explore so many other different musical idioms.
Guest:But there's definitely a through line there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think as well, by all accounts, Dylan responded very positively just to the vibe of the city.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He liked the folks he was meeting.
Guest:He also acknowledged that... So he was around.
Guest:He was in town.
Guest:He came to the Guthrie Center at one point.
Guest:He had entered into conversations with the decision makers around all of this.
Guest:He responded very positively.
Guest:We have a wonderful museum here with a very historically important collection called the Gilcrease.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:And the gill crease is strong in documents of Americana.
Guest:The Emancipation Proclamation is right here in Tulsa.
Guest:Who knew?
Guest:As is a copy of the Declaration of Independence.
Guest:And very strong in Native American art and culture.
Guest:And of course, we're on Native American land.
Guest:And Dylan felt that the city as a whole was recognizing that lineage properly.
Guest:And it resonated with him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so once the deal was done, and Dylan did agree to make the towering gate that greets visitors when they walked in.
Guest:I had no idea that he was an ironwork artist.
Guest:He toiled away in his studio on this metalwork, and it's fantastic.
Marc:So he made it specifically for this place?
Guest:He did.
Guest:It's site-specific.
Guest:I was just looking at it a few minutes ago.
Guest:Yeah, it's a pretty fascinating piece.
Guest:I mean, we could go into a whole thing on what that might represent.
Guest:It's salvage pieces and bits of metal, of iron stuff that he welds together into a frame.
Guest:Yes, into this wonderful abstract form.
Guest:I happen to think it references American industry, and you can see maybe the dying out of tradition there.
Guest:You can also see an honoring of hand history.
Marc:Yeah, and also his childhood.
Marc:Apparently, Minnesota was a big iron mine place.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:But walking through the museum, it's very manageable.
Marc:So it's overwhelming to a degree, but it's still that primary space, which I imagine is going to stay relatively permanent, right?
Guest:Some will, but there will be a lot of switching in and out of material.
Guest:Upstairs or both.
Guest:On both floors?
Guest:On both floors.
Guest:The chronology that Sean Wilentz, the brilliant Dylan scholar and essayist and historian, has put together for us that separates key moments in Dylan's life out into nine eras.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And you can read it as a chronology, but you can also go backwards to forwards or you can jump into the middle.
Guest:That, I think, provides a good framework for...
Guest:You know the the the air is in the decades and of course we'll add to that because don't forget This is an archive in the center devoted to a living artist, right?
Guest:Who will always be outrunning us and we will forever be chasing after how much do you have?
Guest:I mean because I mean how much stuff is there all in between physical objects and pieces that have been digitized particularly the Recordings that we've broken out into individual tracks also known as stems.
Guest:We're talking about give or take a hundred thousand items.
Guest:That's crazy and obviously that
Guest:Not all that's on the bootleg series.
Guest:No, correct.
Guest:There's much more here.
Guest:You know, again, it's the notebooks that he kept.
Marc:I know, all the notebooks.
Guest:Pocket sketch pad.
Marc:The little spiral notebook, because now you've got these moleskin books.
Marc:But back then, it was those little spiral.
Marc:Absolutely.
Guest:Picked up at a drugstore, a corner store.
Marc:Like three or four of just all the Tangled Up and Woo sketches.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Or Blood on the Track stuff.
Guest:Yes, that's pivotal.
Guest:This is sort of the holy grail, I think, for the hardcore Dylanologists.
Guest:Is it?
Guest:There had been whispered rumors all these years.
Guest:Dylan kept these small notebooks and he was working and reworking and revising and crossing out, you know, that suite of songs that became blood on the tracks.
Guest:They're known as the blood notebooks.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Well, sure enough, once we got the archives, we found the two other notebooks.
Guest:But who had, where were these in, like a house in Minnesota?
Guest:At the farm or what?
Guest:A desk drawer, a cardboard box.
Guest:Dylan, for all his espousal of don't look back, did think enough to keep this stuff, which I find an interesting paradox.
Guest:was most of it he was keeping it and occasionally he'd hand it over to you know his manager and folks in the office to say yeah I suppose I'm paraphrasing badly I don't mean to put words in his mouth we should do something with us at some point and the time came in 2016 to find a home for all this material
Marc:And here we are in Tulsa spread out over.
Marc:Like, I mean, I know he had that farm up in Minnesota and then there's a house in L.A.
Marc:and there's an apartment in New York.
Guest:It's just everywhere.
Guest:It was everywhere.
Guest:It was collecting and stacking up and occasionally, you know, shipments of things would would sort of arrive in the New York office.
Marc:With jackets and outfits, like, you know, harmonica holders.
Marc:Like, it's crazy.
Marc:The tambourine from the tambourine man song.
Marc:Yep.
Guest:Bruce Langhorne's tambourine held together with a band-aid.
Guest:And of course, you know, we retain all of that.
Guest:That's the beauty of this historical object.
Guest:That is in the archive.
Guest:All of this came to us.
Guest:And it was just this really unprecedented trove, I must say.
Guest:For you, like when you got the gig, you know, what was the most exciting thing?
Guest:You know, I'm still discovering the treasures, and I hope to be surprised daily, as I think our visitors will be as they come in.
Guest:But, you know, seeing a letter handwritten from Johnny Cash to Bob Finley,
Guest:filled with all this wordplay and puns, and you get a sense of the friendship that they had, the mutual respect.
Guest:And there's a reverence there.
Guest:And there are aspects of the archive that show a kind of, whether they're from Dylan himself or from his compatriots and friends,
Guest:You know, this is a guy who we do take seriously and we treat with the utmost respect.
Guest:But there's a lot of irreverence and wit in there.
Guest:And I think sometimes we forget that.
Guest:But, you know, this is the shapeshifter.
Guest:This is the jokester.
Guest:Is he the Joker man of which he speaks?
Guest:You know, that's a whole other conversation.
Marc:But even the stuff, the phone numbers in his wallet, Otis Redding's business card, that's crazy that that stuff is still around.
Guest:It's here.
Guest:It was in his wallet, in his back pocket.
Guest:The letter he wrote to Hendrix about All Along the Watchtower.
Guest:It's beautiful.
Guest:He said, you know, it's hard enough to see into one's own soul.
Guest:I feel that with your version of All Along the Watchtower, you've actually seen into mine.
Guest:This is typed in one long paragraph on a kind of onion skin piece of paper.
Guest:It's so great to see.
Marc:I just don't like, where was this stuff?
Marc:Somebody, I don't know.
Marc:It's very interestingly.
Guest:Well, either Dylan himself was keeping things that he was in receipt of, for example, get well cards after his motorcycle accident.
Guest:We might keep our own get well cards, but they're probably not from the Harrison family and the McCartney family.
Guest:So we have that stuff.
Guest:Fan mail by the volume, by the bag, an incredibly moving letter that a soldier wrote when he was in Vietnam.
Guest:Telling Bob, if I can use a first name in this context, Bob, I heard your songs on the radio.
Guest:I'm out here in hell in Vietnam.
Guest:I just want to get back home and touch my family.
Guest:And you're helping me because I'm hearing these songs on the radio.
Guest:There's so many of those sorts of reminders of the very personal connection that all of us have to one degree or another to this relationship.
Guest:This body of work, but to the man behind it, too.
Marc:Yeah, to what we know.
Marc:But what's also just like striking me now is that through all these different phases, even periods where, you know, he kind of fell out of like, you know, what's going on with Bob Dylan?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:The born again years.
Marc:Well, yeah, but those were good records.
Marc:But I mean, but there were periods where, you know, his relevance was sort of diminishing in a way.
Guest:Mm hmm.
Marc:But the through line, no matter what he's presenting on stage, whether he's wearing this white face makeup for the Rolling Thunder or he's Christian or whatever, is it's just that writing.
Marc:It's always the song.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:You know, like because when you watch some of the concert footage of what was clearly a Christian performance.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:You know, he's not doing anything other than being Bob Dylan, but it's just the context changes, but he there's something that remains constant So when people are always asking like who what's he so elusive?
Marc:Who is this guy?
Marc:It's all right there.
Guest:It really is yet yet We keep asking for more, you know, and that the guy gives it gives yet There's something about again.
Guest:There's this elusive nature at the core and
Guest:And this center is, you know, our intention is not to say, look, we finally got a hold of the stuff.
Guest:We have 100,000 items here.
Guest:But you did.
Guest:And if we just look hard enough.
Guest:Yes, but we have it.
Guest:But we're not trying to say, hey, Bob, we got you figured out.
Guest:We got your number.
Guest:First of all, what's the fun in that?
Guest:Who wants to reduce the man who contains multitudes to some easy, simple answer?
Marc:And also something he's really put a boundary up to being.
Marc:That's the one thing that he's been able to do.
Marc:is not be reduced culturally.
Marc:I mean, people make fun of his voice or they can parody his song.
Marc:It's all surface.
Marc:Sure, because it doesn't even stick.
Marc:That's the great thing about the interactive element, which you did very effectively with the little iPods or whatever.
Marc:Yes, the audio guides.
Marc:Right, but they're audio guides, but they're really just, most of it's songs.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, there's some interviews, but they're just songs and they kind of put you in the place of it.
Guest:That's the intention.
Guest:And, you know, if we can set you in Greenwich Village in 1963 for a moment.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If you feel like you're a little closer to being on stage during the Rolling Thunder review tour.
Guest:If you can, you know, step into his shoes, if you will, looking at the uniform, the costume that he wore in the film Masked and Anonymous.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which is a great little hidden gem that not a lot of people have seen.
Guest:You know, we have this stuff, but it's more than memorabilia.
Guest:It has to be.
Guest:Otherwise, we're the Hard Rock Cafe.
Guest:And no knock on that.
Guest:That's a fun experience.
Guest:I want to see little Stevie's guitar.
Guest:That's great.
Guest:But you kind of move on and you go get your french fries.
Guest:Here, it's storytelling, it's narrative, it's context, and it's what you as a visitor bring to the experience.
Marc:Your emotional connection.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:If we're doing our job well, we're presenting the information and the materials in a way that's both rigorously researched, as any archive and center must be, but also accessible and open-ended.
Marc:And how did you... I read something about that there might be controversy about the six songs that were selected as...
Marc:These songs of these eras that that there's gonna be pushback like and I keep I keep picturing this sort of weird community of Dylan nerds that are good.
Marc:Has there been?
Guest:I love those Dylan nerds and I am one.
Guest:Thank you very much Listen
Guest:Bring it on.
Guest:Good nature debate.
Guest:You know, why the man in me?
Guest:You know, why not lay lady lay?
Guest:We're talking about the six songs that we go very deep into at the center of the Columbia Records Gallery, where you have these quadrants.
Guest:You can walk around and you get all this information and material around the writing of the song.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:then the recording and producing of it, the performances of the song, the way Dylan changes and rearranges so often on stage throughout the years.
Guest:And then what's fun, too, is you look at and can consider how the songs have second, third, fourth lives.
Guest:Let's talk about the man in me for a moment.
Guest:You know, what would have maybe been thought of as a deep cut from New Morning, just a lovely kind of
Guest:Sunday morning afternoon, as the album title suggests, with The Man in Me.
Guest:And T-Bone Burnett then plucked that out and put it on the soundtrack to The Big Lebowski.
Guest:And it sort of took on a whole different life.
Guest:It found a different audience.
Guest:So we have a film clip from The Big Lebowski, and there's the dude, and he's abiding.
Guest:And it's the great Jeff
Guest:And you can sort of think about, well, how does the song change in that context?
Guest:And maybe if you skipped New Morning in the early 70s, you'll go back to that one.
Guest:So, yes, we have these six songs.
Guest:If you don't like those six, first of all, something's wrong with you.
Guest:But, you know, come back in a few months and we'll have new exhibition displays for six different songs.
Guest:Is that how you can do it?
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:So there's such an embarrassment of riches here.
Guest:We can come up with, you know, another six.
Guest:And upstairs you had the paintings, some paintings.
Guest:we've got we've got dylan's oldest uh known oil painting from 1968 yeah you know and in ensuing years he's become a really he applies himself quite seriously to painting these wonderful landscapes we have a suite of pastels that he's done uh in 2012 that i think will really take people by surprise there's a cinema in which we're starting with a 45 minute program of dylan videos and films
Guest:So now do you have appointments on the books of scholars that want to come?
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:And even before the center proper opened, you know, since we've had the materials in Tulsa, they've been in an archival space over near the Skilcrease Museum, which I mentioned earlier.
Guest:And we've already seen a couple books and dissertations and studies and essays come out of the materials.
Guest:And yes, actually.
Guest:Academics and scholars are lining up for the opportunity to come in.
Guest:You need to be accredited.
Guest:We have a vetting process.
Guest:But of course, we want to make this as accessible to folks as possible.
Guest:We don't want to keep precious objects in locked boxes.
Guest:The idea is to make this material available.
Guest:That happens in 15,000 square feet of public exhibition space.
Guest:And it'll happen in a quieter library-like setting for scholars.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Well, thank you for talking.
Marc:It was great.
Marc:Mark, it's my pleasure.
Marc:And also, what do you think is going to happen in this city?
Marc:Because it seems like as the West Coast burns and runs out of water, that a lot of these cities within these states are going to have this influx.
Guest:I think we're about to have a boom.
Guest:I really do.
Guest:I would love to think that the Dillon Center will play a role in that.
Guest:I have to think this will help put Tulsa on the map in a different way.
Guest:And folks will come here, and I really hope they stick around because there's a lot else going on here.
Guest:There's an artist fellowship program that's bringing in really cutting-edge folks from all around the country.
Guest:There's a program called Tulsa Remote, where if you are a digital nomad and can work from anywhere, come out here.
Guest:guess what?
Guest:You get a $10,000 payment to come and essentially bring your intellectual capital to the city.
Guest:We've got it going.
Guest:Come to Tulsa.
Guest:There you go.
Guest:Big promotion for Tulsa.
Guest:Thanks a lot, Steven.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:That guy is on it.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:He's just like rolling, that dude, Stephen Jenkins.
Marc:BobDillonCenter.com is where you can go for information.
Marc:I think that's the lowdown.
Marc:He did make it clear to me after the interview because I didn't seem to ask him, but it must have stuck in his head that he didn't get the job through knowing his brother who's been working for Bob Dylan for 30 years.
Marc:He got it on the level.
Marc:He wanted me to know that.
Marc:I believe him.
Marc:Seems like a very on top of it fellow, that guy.
Marc:uh so now i got an opportunity to talk to the doobie brothers i thought every fucking doobie brother songs i remember singing black water in the miniature school bus that i used to take to fifth grade manzano day school and we would just sit there with the radio on and all the kids singing black water i remember that china grove come on jesus is just all right minute by minute uh there's a lot of hits and i thought like sure man
Marc:i'll talk to the doobies oh what a fool believes listen to the music long train running uh taking it to the streets it keeps you running you know these songs don't you you know you get it man you get it the doobie brothers so i i thought like i'll talk to um pat and tom pat simmons tom johnson the memoir is called long train running our story of the doobie brothers and
Marc:It's available wherever you get books.
Marc:And I got to text with Tom a bit because he left his Harley jean jacket, his Harley Davidson jean jacket at my house.
Marc:So we're kind of texting buddies now.
Marc:And he had great things to say about sort of trust.
Marc:He loves the movie, the Lynn Shelton film, the last Lynn Shelton film that I acted in.
Marc:He's a big fan of that.
Marc:But here they are, the Doobie Brothers, Pat and Tom.
Marc:Which one's Tom?
Marc:You're Tom.
Marc:You're Pat.
Marc:It's weird because I know you guys.
Marc:I know your faces.
Marc:I feel like I've known you my whole life.
Marc:I do.
Marc:I was trying to figure out when did Blackwater come out?
Marc:What year?
Marc:75.
Marc:75?
Marc:Something like that, yeah.
Marc:Because I remember being in a little school bus, singing it with a bunch of other kids.
Marc:I do.
Marc:Because I grew up in New Mexico, but I guess anywhere you grow up, the Doobie Brothers songs were just everywhere.
Marc:China Grove was everywhere.
Marc:Blackwater was everywhere.
Marc:It was crazy.
Marc:Because when they asked me, you want to talk to these guys, I'm like, I guess I better.
Marc:And I'd say they sing...
Marc:quick before they got I mean they're like I can name like every one of their hits I can sing most of them which is crazy because you know they're just in there man they're in there but uh so what made you what made you finally uh you know do the book who talked you into that a guy named Chris yeah talked us into doing that
Marc:What was the deal?
Marc:He just said, you guys, you got to have a story.
Marc:I met Chris.
Guest:He knows you much better than I do.
Guest:Well, I met Chris.
Guest:He was and still does write for the Huffington Post.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I do these occasionally motorcycle events, antique motorcycle events where we ride cross country on early motorcycles.
Guest:And that year was 1916 and earlier motorcycles.
Marc:And is it your hobby, riding old motorcycles?
Guest:You know, the old motorcycles have been a hobby, and the riding has been something more recent.
Marc:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Past 10 years.
Marc:Oh, that's something you want to pick up when you're older.
Guest:A lot with a bike when it goes down.
Guest:Well, you know, they don't go that fast.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:It's like being on a carnival ride for hours and hours.
Marc:You're not doing motocross.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:But it's a competition.
Guest:But anyhow, so he came out to do a little interview about that.
Guest:And then soon after that, we were doing a gig in San Diego four or five years ago, maybe.
Guest:And then he came to a gig.
Guest:He lives in San Diego.
Guest:So he came to a gig and I was sitting around talking with him.
Guest:He says, have you guys ever done a biography?
Guest:Has anybody ever written a book?
Guest:And I go, I don't think so.
Guest:But I think there was something years ago.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:But it was junkie, you know.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so he said, well, you guys should do something.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so he kind of came up with this idea.
Guest:Why don't you and Tommy...
Guest:write a book together because you guys started the band and uh it would be interesting to have it from your perspective because you've been there all these years and kind of started it and here you are still doing it it's crazy and so he said i can help you he's done he had just done a book with uh we're doing it with john john oates sure and uh so what happened to hall he wasn't he didn't want to be part of it uh
Marc:I don't know.
Guest:He became friends with John, and so it was John's take on things.
Marc:It's always interesting to me to... I've never talked to anybody in a band that there weren't fucking problems.
Guest:That's part of the deal, I think.
Marc:Well, yeah, I mean, sometimes I can't understand it, you know, because sometimes you hear about guys, they break up right after they do their big record, and it's like, what the fuck happened?
Marc:But I mean, look, man, I guess if they're annoying, they're annoying.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:You guys okay?
Marc:Yeah, we're fine.
Guest:You know, human relationships are complicated.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They are.
Guest:It's kind of like a big family.
Guest:I mean, sometimes you go at it, sometimes you don't.
Guest:Sometimes, and most, you know, on the stage, everything just works.
Guest:So that's the part that matters.
Marc:Well, yeah, I guess at this point, like, I don't know how many guys were, like, where did it start originally?
Marc:How many guys were in the original band?
Marc:Every album cover, I always remember, they're like, how many are there?
Marc:There are 12, nine, six?
Guest:Depends on what year it is.
Guest:I know, but like at the beginning.
Guest:We started out with...
Guest:Originally for, I mean, the actual Dewey Brothers band.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, there was a band that fed into that.
Guest:Pat was in a different band.
Guest:Where was this?
Guest:This is in San Jose.
Guest:The whole thing started in San Jose.
Marc:San Jose.
Marc:Is that where you grew up?
Guest:I did.
Guest:Really?
Guest:I did.
Guest:I grew up in the valley in Visalia.
Guest:Right here?
Guest:Little north of Bakersfield.
Guest:Oh, really?
Marc:So that's like- Great place to be from.
Marc:Yeah, it sounds like it.
Marc:Yeah, because I guess everyone says what I just said.
Marc:Where?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I don't mind that.
That's okay.
Marc:But Bakersfield, there's some music going on in Bakersfield, right?
Guest:There used to be country.
Guest:I don't know what's going on in the Valley these days.
Marc:So you moved to the Bay Area?
Guest:I did.
Guest:I went to college up San Jose State.
Guest:So how do you guys meet?
Guest:Well, we were in that music scene that was around the area, which was actually pretty active.
Guest:Playing a club with different... He was in a band.
Guest:I was playing with another guy.
Guest:What year was this?
Guest:69.
Guest:69.
Marc:So this is like, it's all.
Guest:Yeah, we're not 30.
Marc:I know that.
Marc:But I mean, this is like, you know, but that's like the peak of it, right?
Marc:It's crazy, right?
Marc:It was jumping.
Marc:It was.
Marc:It was very active.
Marc:Who were the people that were around when you were there in San Jose?
Marc:Were there people that we would know now?
Guest:Maybe not in San Jose so much.
Guest:Most of them were in San Francisco, as you said.
Marc:When you guys put the band together, how'd you find the other guys?
Guest:Well, John Hartman and I started a band together in San Jose.
Guest:He came out from Washington, D.C.
Guest:He came out with a bass player, a friend of his, and he wanted to meet Skip Spence.
Guest:A lot of things kind of revolved around the whole Moby Grape scene, and I knew Skip at the time.
Guest:You did?
Guest:Yeah, I was hanging around with him a little bit.
Guest:And Skip introduced us.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you guys knew the Moby Grape guys?
Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because Skip, that album, Orr, has been reissued, and I have it, and it's almost disturbing.
Guest:Well, I'm not going to get deep about this.
Guest:He was a little out there himself.
Marc:Yeah, what was the story with that guy?
Marc:Because he listened to that record, and it's got its own time zone.
Marc:And I thought initially, is he strung out?
Marc:But I think he was just a little mental, right?
Guest:he was diagnosed schizophrenic but they didn't get around to diagnosing it until much later we all had fun and did whatever and then they decided to diagnose it i i think skip you know uh it wasn't a good time to for his condition you know he was doing substance abuse and so on and i i think that really triggered him into a worse state than he might have normally right well that happened with a few guys like you know i think uh peter green was like that from flitwood mac like but i i don't know you know you fuck
Guest:with acid and it could have happened to any of us you know yeah so okay so skip and you at that time moby grape's pretty big their big act when you start it already happened actually to be honest with you we're talking 60 they were big for like you talked about a band they put out the big album and right that was what they were kind of i mean they put out another album after that and i liked it
Guest:But they didn't last very long.
Guest:And then if you read about them anywhere, you can see why.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I think that first album came out somewhere around 66, 67.
Marc:It's a good record.
Marc:And then there's the two covers, the one with him flipping people off and the one with him not.
Marc:Right.
Guest:That was all done in San Rafael, right down on 4th Street.
Marc:It was?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That's crazy.
Marc:So, all right.
Marc:So you guys, the bass player, he comes out from D.C.
Marc:?
Guest:No, that was the drummer, John Harmon.
Guest:He came out with a friend of his who was a bass player.
Guest:And they ended up living in the house on 12th Street, which is where everything kind of happened.
Guest:But he and I started a band, which was, well, the three of us, excuse me, started a band that was alternately metal.
Guest:Well, not metal, heavy rock, excuse me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And R&B with a horn section, or the next night it might have chick singers, and it'll be... We kind of just... Mixed it up?
Guest:Yeah, we were all over the map, and we were just playing wherever we could find a place to put something down and plug it in.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, sure.
Guest:And then we played a gig with the Skip.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:a couple of guys that he was gonna play a gig with canceled on him or whatever, and he got John and I to come in and take their place, and we played at a place called, I guess, the Gaslight Theater, is that right?
Guest:Yeah, the Gaslight Theater.
Guest:It was actually the old Campbell movie theater in Campbell.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Pat was on the bill.
Marc:A suburb.
Marc:And that's how you met him.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you just quit your band?
Guest:No, we just kind of got to be friends and hung out.
Guest:And I used to go over and jam with the guys, Tom and John.
Guest:How old were you guys?
Guest:Not very.
Guest:21, 22.
Guest:Yeah, about that.
Marc:And when did you start, when does it start to gel?
Marc:Like when do you, because I mean there's so much competition.
Marc:Did you think of it that way?
Guest:I don't think anybody, no.
Guest:It was just, we were having fun doing it.
Guest:It was a great thing to be doing.
Marc:But mostly covers, right?
Guest:Not really.
Guest:We wrote a lot of songs.
Guest:Early on?
Guest:Early on we started writing songs.
Guest:Yeah, we just seemed to, like many things in this band, it just happened.
Guest:There's no rhyme or reason, it's just whatever was going to happen did.
Guest:We did some covers, but a lot of our material was self-penned, and then we'd just extend the songs to fill the time that we needed to fill.
Marc:Sure, sure.
Marc:A lot of solos.
Marc:Yeah, a lot of jamming.
Marc:Yeah, a lot of that.
Marc:And did you... Were people coming around?
Marc:Did they take to you?
Guest:After a while, I mean, right off the bat, we were playing... I can't remember some of the illustrious places.
Guest:We played, like, golf courses.
Guest:You know, good stuff.
Guest:But we ended up at the Chateau, and that's when things started to pop.
Guest:When we played venues where it was a music venue that people came to hear music, then it was always a very good response.
Guest:But, you know, we played stuff where we were just, you know...
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Pizza parlors.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You know, Ricardo's pizza parlors.
Guest:Ricardo's pizza parlors.
Guest:I don't remember anything about it.
Guest:I just know it was there.
Guest:Places just to make noise, to make people.
Marc:But like at the beginning, like, because it evolved in sort of, it has this, you guys sound like the Doobie Brothers, but in the beginning, did you, like, how, what was the, what was the sound when you first started?
Marc:Were you harder or less?
Marc:What is the target sound?
Marc:Well, I mean, like.
Marc:I would say, you know,
Guest:it was always kind of who we are oh yeah yeah yeah musical background not real diverse but i mean sort of diverse yeah pat does a lot of finger picking yeah he was with a band called scratch and they were really really good was that like a country folk place uh it was just an oddball you know yeah eclectic thing yeah bass player drummer violin player okay yeah and i came from like r&b and rock and roll and all right so it starts to mix up you stick all that together yeah that's what you get were you guys going to shows back then
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Who'd you see?
Guest:I used... Well, I was still living in Visalia.
Guest:I would drive up for the weekend and crash at my sister's pet in Santa Clara, and I would go hang out in the hate all day long.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:And I saw Albert King.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I was there for Cream.
Guest:A little incident prevented me from seeing that, but... What was that?
Marc:That sounds like a good story.
Guest:Oh, it was.
Marc:The acid incident?
Guest:What was the... No, it wasn't that.
Guest:I got kicked out, but it was... Oh, the Fillmore.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I saw Butterfield there a lot.
Guest:I saw...
Guest:You know, Jefferson Airplane would play, The Dead would play.
Marc:So all that stuff's going on.
Marc:I can't, like every time I talk to dudes who have lived through that, I would think that those kind of things stick in your head forever, some of those shows.
Guest:They were pretty amazing, especially at that age.
Guest:I mean, I was 18, I guess.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And very impressionable.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:If you were in the hate at that time, and it was another universe, man.
Guest:It was crazy.
Marc:Was it like, did it feel fun?
Marc:I enjoyed it.
Marc:Yeah, because I mean, it did kind of go bad at some point, right?
Guest:About a year later.
Guest:It only lasted for a year.
Guest:I mean, as far as the summer I love.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then speed hit and ruined everything.
Marc:Is that the story?
Guest:That was a story.
Guest:I wasn't around to watch that, but that's what I heard.
Guest:Did you know any of those Grateful Dead guys?
Guest:I didn't really know them well.
Guest:Oddly enough, I just met and spoke with Bob Weir a little bit last year.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:That was the first time I'd ever really spoken to him.
Guest:Jerry I'd run into a couple of times.
Guest:He played with another friend of mine, Merle Saunders, who was an organ player and stuff.
Guest:But I didn't really know any of them really well.
Marc:Because they were over in the Bay Area too, right?
Marc:Palo Alto area way back, like Jerry was when he was doing folk music.
Marc:It's all from that same area.
Marc:All right, so what happens?
Marc:How do you get the record deal?
Guest:Actually, we can sort of thank Skip.
Guest:Skip Spence.
Guest:Yeah, he got us into a studio in San Mateo, and we just went up there and cut some demos of songs we'd written.
Guest:And that was it?
Guest:Well, they tell us we got signed on the strength of that.
Guest:Ted Templeman was working in the A&R department.
Guest:He had gotten a gig as a listener doing various odd jobs around.
Guest:That was his first position.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:He wrote a little biography recently that's really a good read.
Guest:Of him?
Guest:Yeah, about his life.
Guest:Very interesting.
Guest:so he was he was working there uh he had been in a band called harper's bazaar and uh they had done a rec of couple records i guess for warner's and then he kind of uh went to work for lenny mournker yeah lenny was a producer there and i've heard that name he's like a big producer right for years he ended up as yeah i don't know how active he is at this point he's still around
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Lenny Warrinker.
Guest:Yeah, he produced, you know, got James Taylor.
Guest:He produced all the Gordon Lightfoot stuff, all the big hits.
Marc:It's weird about Gordon Lightfoot.
Marc:I was thinking about him the other day.
Marc:Like, if I could read your mind.
Marc:Like, if that was the only song he wrote, it would be enough.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Great song.
Guest:I think Lenny produced that, I'm pretty sure.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:But anyway...
Guest:So Teddy was, you know, just kind of, they would, people would send in demos and he had a big pile and they put them on his, you know, in his box.
Guest:He would go pick them up and go into the office and sit there and listen to tapes.
Guest:And he heard our tape.
Guest:And according to, you know, his description, he listened to hundreds of tapes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Very little was impressed and he liked what he heard.
Guest:So he went to the big guys and they said, yeah, we like that too.
Guest:And so Lenny and Teddy, it was kind of one of his very first productions.
Guest:It may have been his first production was our record.
Marc:Oh yeah.
Guest:And he did it in conjunction with Lenny and they produced that first album.
Guest:And how did that think so?
Guest:Not very well.
Marc:I'm looking at the cover right now, and I don't think I've ever seen that record in my life.
Guest:10,000 copies, I think, initially.
Marc:Is that it?
Guest:Great Testament.
Guest:But actually, 10,000 copies.
Marc:I've seen all the other ones a lot.
Guest:You didn't see that for a reason.
Guest:It didn't sell.
Marc:Who's that?
Marc:Look at you guys, man.
Guest:The big guy in the front is Little John, so now you know what Little John looked like at least back then.
Marc:That's that dude, is he still around?
Marc:He just passed away.
Marc:Just passed, yeah.
Marc:Sorry.
Marc:You guys all stayed in touch, all 90 of you, over the years?
Marc:A little bit.
Guest:You know, we tried.
Guest:As much as possible.
Guest:Yeah?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So, okay, so the first album goes, and it does what it does, and then you still get another shot.
Marc:I guess that was the time, you had someone who believed in you.
Guest:Ted was, yeah.
Marc:That was it.
Guest:A Warners, I guess, because we started working on another album at Wally Heider's in San Francisco,
Guest:with some of the people that we were involved with, even previous to getting involved on the first one.
Guest:And we kinda weren't headed in the right direction, and I think we probably knew it, but- What's that mean, though?
Guest:Well, that means that Warner's heard the stuff that we were into doing at that point, or not into, but we had traded, and they weren't that excited.
Guest:And so they set Ted back up, and that's when we really started working with Ted, because the first one really was produced by Lenny.
Marc:When that happens, though, is it your sound?
Marc:What are they looking for?
Marc:Hits?
Marc:That's it, though.
Guest:That is it.
Guest:I mean, they stood behind bands more than a lot of labels did.
Guest:They weren't really good with bands.
Guest:I think initially, as you say, with Lenny being more of a roots kind of folky-oriented guy,
Guest:I think they saw us that way.
Guest:And that really wasn't who we were.
Guest:We wanted to be, you know, aspired to be a rock and roll band.
Guest:And so Ted came in and he recognized, you know, what we were looking for.
Guest:And he felt the same way that we had more than just, you know, folk music.
Guest:right blues you weren't right yeah yeah yeah and uh so we you know then then we really kind of blossomed we ended up uh our bass player left and we after the first record after the first record yeah and he knew success when he saw it
Guest:And so I had a friend that I had been playing with prior to working with him.
Guest:The first bass player was, I went to high school with him.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The guy who quit?
Guest:The guy who quit.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And then, so Tyran Porter was the guy who came in, and Tyran was a killer bass player.
Marc:And he was with you for how many records?
Guest:A lot.
Marc:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's wild.
Guest:8, 10 records.
Marc:So the second record, boom, you got hits.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:And we brought in another drummer also.
Marc:A second drummer or a new drummer?
Guest:He was a guy that we had known from another band who kind of got up to jam with us one night at the club we were playing at.
Guest:And we hired him to be a second drummer.
Marc:Huh.
Marc:Wow, so that's a big, were you inspired by the Allman Brothers or something?
Guest:Yeah, that's what everybody wonders.
Guest:I don't think we thought about it that way so much as it sounded good.
Marc:Yeah, well, to me, it always seems odd, but I guess it's cool to have two drummers.
Guest:It was, very powerful.
Guest:For me, it was, I love the Allman Brothers, so speaking for myself, I saw that and liked it.
Marc:And The Dead does it too, right?
Guest:I can't think of too many other ones, can you?
Guest:No, as a matter of fact, I can't think of any.
Guest:Doesn't mean there isn't.
Marc:I just haven't heard about them.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And the big hit was which one?
Marc:On Jesus' Just Alright?
Marc:Was that the big hit on there?
Marc:Listen to the Music.
Marc:Listen to the Music was the opening one.
Guest:That's kind of what opened the door.
Guest:And then hearing that on...
Guest:at that time in my Volkswagen Beetle, driving down the road and hearing it on the radio.
Guest:It's like, holy shit, we're on the fucking radio, man.
Marc:It's great.
Marc:It's great, right?
Guest:Yeah, it was a big deal.
Guest:It really was.
Guest:And then that got followed up with, I think, the song you mentioned and maybe Rockin' Down the Highway.
Guest:I'm not really sure what came out after that.
Marc:Oh, yeah, Rockin' Down the Highway.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:Yeah, it's crazy.
Marc:So this is a big record.
Marc:It's so funny because I once talked to Fogarty and I asked him about production.
Marc:But I mean, they're a little before you guys, right?
Marc:Yeah, they were.
Marc:So it's funny because I said, well, how do you, because those Credence songs, they held up, you know, in a weird way.
Marc:If you listen to the records, they're very simple, but they held up.
Marc:They're catchy.
Marc:Yeah, they're catchy.
Marc:Simplistic and catchy.
Marc:And clean, you know, the production.
Marc:I said, what are you thinking of when you produce a record?
Marc:He goes, I think about an AM speaker and a dashboard of a car.
Yeah.
Guest:You know, I've seen people mix that way, so I totally believe that.
Marc:Like when you sing, you put that up front.
Marc:When you play guitar, you put that up front.
Marc:Makes sense, right?
Marc:Yeah, it does.
Marc:But that was post what you guys, I mean, you guys did pretty kind of a bigger production.
Guest:It got bigger as each album went on.
Guest:Not huge, but I mean, it got added to it.
Guest:The sound, yeah.
Guest:It was the advent of FM radio.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Oh, that's right.
Guest:And suddenly stereo sound became relevant.
Guest:People had stereophonic systems they'd listened to.
Guest:And prior to that, it had been just basically mono, monaural listening.
Marc:That's right, the FM radio trip.
Marc:You guys are right at the beginning of it.
Guest:So now you'd be driving in your car and you'd be listening to stereo.
Marc:That was a big deal.
Marc:It was a big deal.
Guest:They kind of spawned all that, basically.
Marc:That's right, yeah.
Guest:Tom, whatever, Donahue, and Dusty Streets, and all those people, man.
Marc:Well, it was the difference between, hey, these guys, and what's going on, you guys?
Guest:Hey, man.
Guest:AM radio was still certainly a prevalent format, but FM and albums...
Guest:You know, in other words, when your album came out, they played the whole album on the radio and people bought more albums than they did singles after a while.
Guest:That was the shift.
Guest:It had been the other way.
Guest:You know, people were buying singles and not so much albums.
Guest:And then suddenly people are buying albums and less singles.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Did you guys think in terms of albums when you recorded?
Guest:I mean, was that... We thought in terms of songs.
Marc:Yeah, that's right.
Marc:We learned a concept then.
Guest:I think we were thinking in terms of, we wanted every song to be, you know.
Guest:As good as it could be.
Guest:As good as it could be.
Marc:And when did you start adding guys?
Marc:This one, this album, The Captain and Me, that was another big record, the third record.
Guest:Same lineup.
Marc:Same lineup.
Marc:Guys.
Marc:Four guys.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:Five guys.
Marc:Of the two drummers.
Guest:Can't forget that.
Guest:We tried some synth stuff and everything.
Guest:We kind of grew, you know, and also the touring thing had kind of started to blow up.
Marc:And China Grove, that was the one.
Marc:That's the song that I just remember pounding.
Marc:It was ubiquitous when I was like, what year was that?
Marc:75?
Marc:73.
Marc:73, so I was like 11, and it was like everywhere.
Guest:Are you trying to make this feel better?
Marc:Yeah, a little bit.
Marc:Because it's still going.
Marc:But China Grove, when you came up with that song, you were sitting like, oh, fuck yeah, because that guitar thing.
Guest:You know, some people may hear that and say, the only song I ever wrote that I thought this is a single was listening to music.
Guest:Really?
Guest:China Grove, it's a great rock tune, cool.
Guest:But I didn't think it was a single.
Guest:It's like Long Train Runner.
Guest:I didn't think that was a single, because it was.
Guest:It was a jam.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Don Landy, I give credit for putting the echo on that.
Guest:It wasn't my idea.
Guest:It was a neat thing.
Marc:He's the producer?
Guest:He was the engineer.
Guest:Teddy was great helping all of us on all songs.
Guest:Vocals, drums, harmonies, all of it.
Marc:So the touring starts?
Marc:When do you become a huge act?
Marc:When do you know holy shit?
Guest:I, you know, it started in 72, but I'd say 73 is when we really started really, you know, we never saw home.
Marc:Yeah?
Guest:No, you were out all the time.
Guest:And if you weren't out, you were in L.A.
Guest:doing another album every year.
Guest:And did you like it?
Guest:Yeah, it was fun.
Guest:I mean, it was kind of a blur, but it was fun.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Did you end up managing to have a family and whatnot?
Marc:No.
Marc:No?
Marc:No.
Marc:No, at least I sure did, man.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's a little crazy for having a family.
Marc:I guess.
Marc:I mean, you know, guys do it.
Marc:I mean, I don't know how they turn out, but yeah.
Marc:So when does things start to sort of shift?
Marc:Like, how come, like on Stampede, when do you add Baxter or why?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:What happened?
Guest:Well, you know, it's been just, you know, it's an ever-evolving thing.
Guest:We added the other drummer, and then the guy that we added left.
Guest:Oh, back to one?
Guest:It would have been one, but the day he left, we added another drummer.
Guest:Because he was around, and we liked the... He was a really good drummer as well.
Guest:At that point, we liked the two drummer thing.
Guest:And so we had a friend that was a great drummer and a singer, which was really an additional thing.
Guest:So that was Keith Knutson.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he came in and took Michael Hossack's place.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And we continued on and then went on to do... Stampede?
Guest:What did we do?
Guest:What Were Once Vices or Now Habits was the next record, I think, after The Captain and Me.
Guest:And then we went on.
Marc:And that's Blackwater.
Marc:That's one of the Blackwater on it, yeah.
Marc:Was that the biggest one for you up to that point?
Marc:Biggest single?
Marc:Yeah, biggest single.
Guest:They were all pretty much sustaining.
Guest:They had a lot of top 10 records, but that was the first number one.
Guest:Then Jeff was not really a part of the band for a long time.
Guest:He was a friend of ours by virtue of just coming around.
Guest:We had done a lot of touring with Steely Dan early on in our career.
Guest:Gosh, and...
Guest:1971 yeah we were out on the road with uh here's the lineup the doobie let's see who opened uh marshall tucker sure opened the shows yeah then we then steely dan played yeah after them then the doobie brothers and then savoy brown and that was the wow that was the bill and we traveled around doing you know eight or ten shows with that with that crew with that thing and we go we were driving on a um winnebago winnebago
Guest:doing this tour.
Marc:Each van had their own Winnebago or you were all in Winnebago?
Guest:I don't know how the other guys, some of the guys flew, some of the guys were in cars.
Guest:But that's how you went.
Guest:Savoy Brown was the headliner?
Guest:They were the headliner, yeah.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Eight to ten shows, that goes by pretty fast.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They had a song.
Marc:I love them.
Guest:I like that group.
Guest:Tell Mama.
Marc:Oh, Tell Mama.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, no, they have some good... There's some good... That was kind of a hit for them at the time.
Marc:They're British, aren't they?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, there's a couple of... And they were great.
Marc:They were really good.
Marc:A couple of good records, yeah.
Guest:But that was a great show, you know?
Guest:And that's where you met all those guys.
Guest:And so we met guys in Steely Dan.
Guest:And then, you know, right after that, they started having, you know...
Guest:differences of opinion what was a back uh back jack do it do it again yeah yeah was a first hit and then really in the years but anyway um we became friends with all those guys and jeff uh just kind of stayed in touch and i had him in to play on a steel guitar on the captain and me okay yeah yeah yeah that album and um
Guest:So then he just would show up.
Guest:We'd be playing around town and he would show up and come in.
Guest:We'd say, you want to sit in on something?
Guest:So he'd come in and he'd play.
Guest:Amazing guitar player?
Guest:Yes, he was.
Guest:Incredible guitar player.
Guest:And it was neat because Moby Grape fans.
Guest:You'd be surprised at the legions of Moby Grape fans.
Guest:Suddenly had three guitar players like Moby Grape.
Guest:We didn't know whether we were the Allman Brothers or Moby Grape.
Marc:And the Moby Grape fans came around because they were just excited?
Marc:No, I don't know about that.
Guest:I'm just saying everybody, even Michael McDonald was a fan of Moby Grape.
Guest:And I don't mean it that way it sounds, but I mean it's just diverse kinds of musical styles that people have.
Guest:And they all know about Moby Grape.
Marc:Well, I think, well, because I think that Moby Grape was like, you know, for most mortals who, you know, most people who aren't civilians, most civilians who aren't musicians, like, I think they really defined that fucking sound of that time.
Marc:They did.
Marc:Like, you know, and it all gets put on the dead and a couple other people and they kind of get lost.
Marc:But you listen to that big Moby Grape album.
Guest:It's like, holy shit.
Guest:That was it, man.
Guest:Everybody I knew played the grooves off that dance.
Marc:Yeah, man.
Guest:Myself included.
Marc:Yeah, it was great.
Marc:It was a great record.
Marc:So anyway, Jeff was that third guitar player that we- That's great, and he was around for a few records, huh?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He would go on the road with us as well.
Guest:Again, he wasn't really a member of the band for a while, and then we went in to do Stampede, and then we sort of
Guest:brought him in made it official yeah and and he participated in the making of that record and then that was kind of his advent into full as full uh full steely or full uh doobie brother right now like you guys all managing no one got uh all fucked up on drugs and shit
Guest:Everybody did something.
Guest:Some people did more than others.
Marc:How's that for big?
Marc:But it didn't seem like, it wasn't a tragic band.
Marc:It all seemed, you know what I mean?
Marc:Like, I don't remember dark stories about the Doobie Brothers.
Marc:Well, you know.
Guest:Define dark, I guess.
Guest:I think any band, I don't care who it is, that goes out on the road and
Guest:There's a lot of different personalities in the band, a lot of different players.
Guest:But when you're on the road all the time, there's a release that you need to seek someplace, man, to get away.
Guest:Because after a while, you don't have a home.
Guest:In essence, you have a house someplace, but that's your home.
Marc:Yeah, I guess so, yeah.
Guest:It gets a little nuts.
Marc:Now, was there any major point where the band was about to fall apart?
Guest:Well, in 75, I left the band not because I wanted to.
Guest:I left the band because I had a bleeding ulcer, and I got shipped out to a hospital in L.A.
Guest:to get over that, and that caused a big... Which album was that after?
Guest:That was Stampede.
Guest:That was the first tour for Stampede, I want to say.
Guest:So, you know, I was a bad guy.
Guest:You were out?
Guest:I was out for that tour, for sure.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was out for, God, I don't know, a year, I guess.
Marc:Oh, God, yeah.
Guest:And then they brought Mike in to, or not they, actually, Jeff called Mike.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:They had been in Steely Dandy.
Guest:Baxter, yeah.
Guest:Mike McDonald.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And...
Marc:brought him in to play keys and do backgrounds and it turns out he had this treasure trophy i should let him tell you this treasure trove of the songs and uh that's when they ended up with it with the album uh take it to the streets again that changed the whole sound in a way didn't it it did and you guys still pals he's in the board touring right with him yeah how democratic is the thing when did you come back on which record did you come back on
Guest:I came back and toured on Taken to the Streets tour in the spring tour in 76.
Guest:We had a ball.
Guest:We had the Memphis Horns out and everybody.
Guest:It was just a great tour.
Marc:It was a lot of fun.
Marc:When somebody like Mike comes in, it changes the dynamic of the band.
Marc:But is it a democracy or who's leading the thing?
Guest:I don't know if there ever was a real true leader.
Guest:In some sense, it really never has been structured that way.
Guest:It's more just a natural evolvement of how things go.
Marc:Yeah, the phrase whatever works comes to mind.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And you just have good road managers and you guys just do what you do.
Guest:We had some road managers.
Yeah.
Guest:We burn out a number.
Guest:Good, bad, and otherwise, yeah.
Guest:That's the worst position.
Guest:It is?
Marc:Why?
Guest:They're in the hot seat all the time.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:They got to deal with all these different personalities.
Guest:That's really hard.
Marc:A hard gig.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then you did which record?
Marc:Minute by Minute, I remember that record being everywhere.
Marc:It was a big record.
Marc:Was that the biggest one?
Yeah.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Yeah, probably sold.
Guest:I don't know what it sold, but I think it probably sold more than previous albums.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Most of our albums that were, you know, successful albums have sold probably equally give or take.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:More or less, you know.
Marc:Like a lot of them are like double platinum.
Guest:What happens is, you know, you get a certain record that gets played in the radio a lot and then boom, you sell a lot of records.
Guest:And then over time, you know, people revisit the end and they go, well, I love that record, but I don't have this one and they'll buy that record.
Guest:So...
Guest:Suddenly, Toulouse Street, which was arguably our first successful record, it sells quite a bit more.
Marc:It's funny how things- When you get a new hit record, it kind of livens up the catalog.
Guest:We just put out an album last October, and suddenly a couple of other albums were back on the charts.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, just how that feeds that.
Guest:And things are very different now as far as how things go with sales and all that, so that's...
Guest:I think people pay... I think it's a good thing.
Guest:I know people in the music industry pay as much attention to the Apple chart or the Amazon chart as they do to Billboard these days.
Guest:Yeah, certainly.
Guest:Any streaming platforms.
Marc:But after minute by minute, did you feel like... Was there a period where... I mean, you could always go out and play, I imagine, because you had such a great catalog, but was there a period there where you didn't feel like the records were doing as well or that...
Guest:We never worried about that.
Guest:I mean, if there's a place you can play and people are gonna come and see you.
Marc:If there's 500 or 5,000, who cares?
Marc:And you could always sell tickets.
Guest:Yeah, the band always sold tickets.
Guest:I left the band in 77 and took off, did a couple of solo albums.
Guest:How'd they do?
Guest:first one did okay the second one i might as well not have bothered but um not because it wasn't good they said that sounds stupid if i say this is what i got told anyway yeah it sounds too much like the doobie brothers yeah i said well what do you want i'm a doobie brother at any rate and then we all got back together for a benefit keith knutson sort of organized us all and uh that was for the vietnam vets and we did that at the hollywood bowl and
Guest:Everybody that ever played in the band that was still breathing was on stage.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:Just about.
Guest:What year was that?
Guest:That was 87.
Marc:How many people was that?
Guest:You got four drummers.
Guest:You got four guitar players.
Guest:You got two keyboard players.
Guest:Only one bass player.
Guest:That's crazy.
Guest:Yeah, Willie didn't join me.
Guest:15 or 16 people probably.
Guest:And then we took that on the road for about 10 shows or something.
Guest:And then some of us went to Russia and played at that Glassnose thing.
Marc:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:and another couple of guys went off and did a country album thing, and by the time 89 rolled around, we made another album, which was Cycles, and it just started everything up again, and we haven't quit since.
Marc:Who was the members in Cycles?
Guest:Close to the same band that was on Toulouse Street, essentially.
Guest:It was Pat and myself, Tyron, John Hartman, and Mike Cossack.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:So you just come full circle every time.
Marc:It's sort of like in spirals.
Guest:You just end up... It was something fun to kind of revisit that.
Marc:And when you make records now, I mean...
Marc:what's the process of writing and everything?
Marc:Is it the same as it ever was or do you just do it because you can or do you like still making new music?
Guest:I would say the most recent one we did that Pat referred to which is called Liberté.
Guest:Liberté, yeah.
Guest:It's probably the most different
Guest:way of going about writing that we've ever done.
Guest:In essence, every song was co-written.
Guest:It used to be that everybody wrote their own songs and everybody would come in and come up with parts and stuff, but this was all co-written with John Shanks.
Guest:And he produced it.
Guest:And it was done really rapidly.
Guest:Not in a bad way.
Guest:I don't mean in a bad way, it's just a whole new way of doing things.
Marc:Do you like the record?
Guest:I do, I thought it came out pretty good.
Guest:Nowadays records are kind of, who told me this?
Guest:They're like posters for tours.
Guest:Unless you're blowing up really huge, a gigantic one.
Guest:But I mean, it's like, it used to be that the tour was to pump the record and get everybody out buying and stuff.
Guest:Now the record is to pump the tour.
Guest:So it's 180 degree change.
Marc:Interesting, so the tour, you'd make money, but it was primarily to sell the record.
Guest:In the old days, yes.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Who were like your opening acts as you kind of evolved that have gone on to big things?
Guest:We kind of were all over the map.
Marc:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Huey Lewis.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:T-Rex.
Guest:Really?
Guest:When did you tour T-Rex?
Marc:72.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How was that?
Guest:It was interesting.
Guest:Talk about bands that were different from each other, but we learned something from it.
Guest:What'd you learn from them?
Guest:Well, it was a different style of music.
Guest:It was kind of glam rock, I guess is the name for it.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And we were more of a- We got more glamorous.
Guest:Did you?
Guest:We started dressing a little wilder.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Got to do something with our hair, fellas.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:No glitter on the face or anything.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But-
Guest:They were fun to hang out with.
Guest:They're good guys.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's sad that guy died so young.
Guest:So I started to say who grew to get really big that opened for us.
Guest:Hughie was one.
Guest:Leonard Skinner opened shows for us.
Marc:Well, that seems to be the time.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Do you like those guys?
Guest:Steely Dan opened for us.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:Keb Moe opened for us.
Marc:Keb Moe, sure.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:You probably don't even remember that.
Guest:Do you remember Keb Moe opening for us?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't remember Catmullo.
Guest:All by himself.
Guest:Just went out there?
Guest:I remember playing with him at the Memphis Invade thing, but I don't remember that.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:He was so good.
Guest:Who is this guy?
Guest:I don't even think he had a record yet.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:Did you do a lot of those stadium things with the nine bands, ten bands, like those huge?
Guest:Oh, yeah, sure.
Marc:I went to one.
Marc:I don't think you were on it, though.
Marc:I went to one up in Mile High Stadium.
Marc:I think it was like the Cars, Ted Nugent, UFO, the Rockets, and Hart.
Yeah.
Guest:So that would have been a little later.
Guest:That's a pretty wild combo.
Guest:That's up-tempo.
Guest:No, not up-tempo.
Guest:Energy-wise.
Guest:The cars opened for us.
Guest:It was hard to follow some of the bands, to be honest with you.
Marc:I bet.
Guest:Because they were Little Feet.
Guest:Following Little Feet was not great.
Guest:Or Tower of Power, somebody like that.
Guest:Tower of Power is a lot of horns.
Guest:Those guys are powerful.
Guest:Those bands had hits that were pretty monumental, even at that time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Yeah, we did a whole year before.
Guest:Cold as ice, you know, when that first song came out.
Marc:They were opening for you on their first tour?
Guest:Yeah, and Heart.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, big songs that they're opening for us, and we didn't really, you know, maybe we had some hits at that time, I don't know.
Guest:Sure you did.
Guest:But...
Marc:They were big bands.
Marc:But were you guys backstage going, ah, fuck.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:You want to get out there?
Guest:We got to rock.
Guest:You've heard about the riot house, right?
Guest:You know all about that.
Guest:What's that?
Guest:The riot house.
Marc:Yeah, sure.
Guest:Just think of that on the road.
Guest:Yeah, that's it.
Guest:In those days?
Guest:Yeah, that's the way it was.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:It's crazy.
Marc:what about like did you ever like did you ever do his shows like with zeppelin or anything i don't know not well i was in play with the stones oh yeah would it add like a big thing the stones was that fun most when you when you hear big names like that generally it's a large venue sure yeah huge but that's so it's so wild that like you know that i can't imagine what it'd be like to be backstage waiting to go on and just see somebody like just
Marc:blow the place up you're like let's just give it an hour let's just take a rest queen the palette and let them wait for me did you change your set list ever to to to sort of follow people oh yeah okay we've had all the power stuff and end up front exactly better open up with china grove right yeah
Guest:And a few others I can think of, yeah.
Guest:Like one of the other ones that you'd be like, oh, without you.
Guest:Move those closers up top.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:Did it work generally?
Guest:It helped.
Guest:It helped, yeah.
Guest:At least it wasn't a big drop-off when you got out on the stage.
Guest:You didn't want that.
Marc:Oh my God.
Marc:So now who's touring now?
Marc:Who's in the band now?
Marc:Like who's the gang?
Marc:Mike's with you.
Marc:Myself, Tom, Mike.
Marc:You guys are the only.
Guest:John McPhee.
Guest:Yeah, we're the only original original.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But you know, John was with us from what?
Guest:80s what?
Guest:79?
Guest:Is that when he came in?
Guest:John joined in 78.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then played with us until we kind of went on hiatus around 82, 83.
Guest:And then when we got back together in 89, we went on for a couple years.
Guest:And I think John came in around the early 90s.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he's been with us ever since.
Marc:And what are the... So how are the audiences?
Marc:What kind of rooms are you playing?
Guest:We're playing...
Guest:Mostly sheds, what they call sheds, like 25,000 people.
Marc:25,000?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's a lot.
Guest:Well, not every night.
Guest:And we're also playing arenas.
Guest:Some are 10,000, some are 15.
Marc:Wait, 25,000?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Not that many.
Guest:Not every night, but yeah.
Guest:That's called a shed?
Guest:That's the name they use, yeah.
Guest:Well, what it is is they're amphitheaters, indoor-outdoor amphitheaters.
Marc:Oh, I see.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So some of them are, oh, yeah.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:I get it.
Guest:You got the first part is covered, and then it's open long.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:That's a lot.
Marc:And who's opening for you now?
Marc:No one.
Guest:No one.
Guest:We're playing two and a half hours.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And what's the crowds like?
Marc:They've been great.
Guest:And you've got the whole spectrum of this band.
Guest:You've got from almost the front end.
Guest:There's one song on that first album.
Guest:After that, that's gone.
Guest:But it's like every album is kind of represented from that period all the way through Michael's period.
Guest:And Michael's playing on everything, singing on everything, and we're playing on everything that he did.
Guest:And it works.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And I guess you see a multi-generation audience?
Marc:Oh, yeah, definitely.
Guest:Yeah, you see some kids, you see some parents, and you see some grandparents.
Marc:Three generations.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:Isn't unusual, really.
Marc:Do you take time off?
Marc:Do you have fun and shit?
Yeah.
Guest:We're not touring like we did back in the 70s.
Guest:Let's put it that way.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:We've been off for five months right now, but that was due to a lot of stuff.
Guest:This is a pretty intensive touring schedule this time around.
Guest:Simply because we had to postpone a lot of shows during this pandemic.
Guest:So we're back to revisiting those venues and...
Marc:Yeah, and you have a nicer Winnebago now?
Guest:Matter of fact, now that you mention it, yeah.
Marc:It's even longer.
Marc:Big bus.
Marc:Big bus.
Marc:Is that how you do it, the bus?
Guest:Yeah, we're busing.
Marc:And what kind of guitars you playing?
Guest:I've got kind of these...
Guest:I put together Stratocasters mostly that I'm playing, yeah.
Guest:From parts, from Schecter parts?
Marc:From parts, yeah, parts guitars.
Marc:You got a guy that does that for you?
Guest:Yeah, well, I've been playing these guitars that actually my old tech back in the 70s,
Guest:built three guitars for me and I'm still playing them.
Guest:Really?
Guest:And my present tech also is a guitar builder.
Guest:I'm playing a couple of his guitars.
Guest:Oh, that's cool.
Guest:So they're all really handmade guitars.
Marc:You like that Strat sound?
Guest:But I like the Strat sound.
Guest:What about you?
Guest:What are you playing?
Guest:I was a Gibson guy for the longest time.
Guest:Any model, every shape and size, and played Les Pauls and SGs.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Did you have one of those triple pickup Les Pauls?
Guest:No.
Marc:None of those?
Guest:I never even wanted one.
Good.
Guest:For some reason, I associated that with the Platters, and somehow, and as much as I thought they were a great singing group, I just didn't, and the Chick used to play all night.
Marc:A triple pickup one?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Frampton played one.
Marc:He does, yeah.
Marc:The black triple pickup West Paul.
Marc:The Phoenix.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you just, I'm a PRS guy now.
Guest:That's pretty much all I play.
Marc:Oh, yeah?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:What'd you do with all your Gibsons?
Marc:Got them in a...
Guest:Some of them are still around.
Guest:I've still got the one I cut Listen to Music with, and I played that thing for years on the road.
Guest:It's still with me.
Marc:What about China Grove?
Marc:Who's that at the beginning of that?
Guest:That's me.
Guest:That was on an SG.
Marc:You like those P90s?
Marc:I like P90s.
Marc:I like really dirty.
Guest:P90s are on Les Paul, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:But I also like Firebirds, and that was another great guitar.
Marc:I know.
Guest:Really great.
Guest:And you look around, if you look through pictures of people, even you see, I don't care if you're on Instagram or something, you'll find a lot of people playing those.
Marc:They're back with the Mini Hubbuckers?
Guest:Some are.
Guest:I got turned on to them by Johnny Winters.
Guest:He was all about those.
Guest:And I actually had one that I got from Johnny Winters.
Marc:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Unfortunately, it got stolen.
Guest:It was a great guitar.
Marc:Damn.
Marc:I had it for years.
Marc:Was it one of the wood ones?
Marc:They made some white ones that are kind of cool.
Guest:Was it one of just- This was the wood tone, yeah.
Guest:With those small pickups you mentioned.
Marc:So he went into, Johnny just ended up doing a lot of acoustic blues, like that steel guitar stuff, right?
Marc:Like dobro shit later on.
Guest:He might have.
Guest:I kind of missed out on that.
Guest:Oh yeah?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He was a good player.
Guest:He was a killer player.
Marc:He was wild.
Guest:He was a wild killer player.
Marc:So the book goes all through the stuff and all through the whole career.
Marc:Ends up where we ended up today.
Marc:Pretty much, yeah.
Marc:Are you happy with it?
Guest:I am, yeah.
Guest:We had fun doing it.
Guest:We didn't anticipate having to write quite as much.
Guest:We ended up having to go in and rewrite.
Guest:Yeah, do some homework?
Guest:Not on the last one.
Guest:I would read things.
Guest:We kind of tell the story to Chris and he would help us put it together.
Marc:Oh, you're talking about the book.
Marc:Yeah, the book, yeah.
Guest:I would read it and I'd go, well, that's not exactly the story, number one, and that's not the way I would have said it.
Guest:So then I would go in and...
Marc:Oh, you were on top of it.
Guest:Yeah, just rewrite pretty much everything and then send it to him and he'd go, well, that works.
Guest:There was a little filter that it went through.
Marc:You guys?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:The nah filter?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:More than anything, he was a great catalyst for remembering things.
Guest:Very helpful in that.
Marc:just getting the ball moving sure and he did write you know help us write some of the stories and stuff sure what's a high point do you think when when you look at this book when it was the the well you got in the rock and roll hall of fame that must have been amazing that was uh it was you know it would have been even more amazing if we could have been there to play live like everybody else got to do you didn't get to no because of covid nobody could do it oh it was just this last year 2020 is when it happened so
Guest:Oh, they got to bring you back.
Guest:I agree.
Guest:What would you play?
Guest:Something good.
Marc:I don't know, man.
Marc:Something gets a reaction.
Marc:You got to open strong there.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You follow the whole history of rock and roll.
Guest:We did a virtual version.
Guest:We did it all.
Guest:We didn't zoom in or anything, but we did tape, not tape, but you know.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:Recorded stuff at the houses.
Guest:Yeah, I would love to go back and play.
Marc:I think that'd be awesome.
Marc:I wonder how many people didn't get to play.
Marc:They should have them back.
Marc:Everybody that was nominated.
Marc:Everybody that was nominated.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:For two years or just the one year?
Marc:Just the one year.
Guest:Just the one year.
Guest:Yeah, they started it up again the next year.
Marc:All right, fellas.
Marc:Well, I hope the book sells and have fun on the road.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:It's good talking to you, man.
Marc:Likewise.
Marc:I appreciate it.
Guest:Thanks for taking the time.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:What a show.
Marc:What a music show.
Marc:Long Train Runnin', Our Story of the Doobie Brothers is now available wherever you get books.
Marc:It keeps you runnin'.
Marc:It keeps you runnin'.
Marc:Give me the beat, boy, and burn my soul when you wanna get lost in your ride.
Marc:Down out, chicka chicka pound out, chicka chicka pound, chicka pound, ca pound, ca pound out, ba do do do round out, chicka
Marc:.
Marc:.
Marc:.
Marc:.
Marc:.
Marc:.
Marc:Oh, black water, keep on rolling.
Marc:Mississippi moon, she keep on shining on me.
Marc:By the hand, take me by the hand.
Marc:Boomer lives!
Marc:Monkey, LaFonda, cat angels everywhere.
Marc:Boomer lives!