Episode 1367 - Adrian Belew
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 thank you arizona thank you thank you arizona
Marc:I had a great time.
Marc:I went out there with Lara Bites.
Marc:We did Tucson on Friday.
Marc:We did Phoenix on Saturday.
Marc:And it was great.
Marc:It was a great time.
Marc:It's good to be out in the desert.
Marc:There's something about the Arizona desert.
Marc:That's the one.
Marc:The Arizona desert is the desert.
Marc:That's where those sequoia, soroia, what they call those those specific cacti, the classic old westy looking cacti happen only in Arizona or unless people drag them illegally out of Arizona to plant in their yards.
Marc:They only happen there and there's hundreds of them.
Marc:And they just, they have a very unique look as they ride up the bottom of a hill up towards the edge of these mountains in Arizona.
Marc:And they're stunning.
Marc:There's nothing else that looks like it.
Marc:And the air was clear and the drive was clean, man.
Marc:How you doing?
Marc:Everybody okay?
Marc:Is everyone all right out there?
Marc:I hadn't been out there in a long time.
Marc:I could not remember the last time I'd been out in Arizona.
Marc:I will tell you this, today on the show, Adrian Ballou is here.
Marc:Adrian Blue is the guitar player.
Marc:He's singular, a singular sounding guitar player that not everyone is familiar with.
Marc:But he's the shit.
Marc:He's amazing.
Marc:He's otherworldly, almost an alien.
Marc:Nobody does it like Adrian Blue.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, I talk to him about as much as I know about.
Marc:See, I'm not a huge Crimson guy, but I know enough about a couple of the Adrian Blue records, just barely enough, not to appease the full Crimson nerds, but certainly to give some context.
Marc:We talked about King Crimson.
Marc:We talked about Zappa going way back.
Marc:We talked about Bowie, Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, Nine Inch Nails, his solo career.
Marc:I'm a lone rhinoceros.
Marc:Got a lot of albums out, this guy.
Marc:Worked with a lot of great people.
Marc:We were really able to sort of chart the evolution of his sound and who he is as a musician through his history with these amazing geniuses.
Marc:It was quite a conversation.
Marc:And he was out earlier this year on his own, and now he's going to be performing with Jerry Harrison from Talking Heads here in L.A.
Marc:next week.
Marc:They're going to do stuff from the Remain in Light album, which Adrian is on, and sort of defined...
Marc:The sound of, yeah, I'll be so bold.
Marc:But I was first hipped to Adrian Blue by a guy I knew back in the day when I was in high school working at the Posh Bagel across from Yale Park, across from University of New Mexico, 15, 16 years old.
Marc:There was a record store.
Marc:This story spreads its wings a lot.
Marc:There was a record store next door called Budget.
Marc:Budget Tapes and Records owned by a couple, a biracial couple that enjoyed the club music, the disco music.
Marc:Didn't like playing anything in the store but R&B and the disco music back in the 80s, 70s actually.
Marc:And there was a couple of guys that worked there that kind of
Marc:changed the way i saw music in general informed me educated me a few things happened they gave me a box of records promo records that they didn't use it had elvis costello's first record in there george thoroghan the destroyers it had tom wait's nighthawks at the diner that box in and of itself kind of laid down the track laid down wired me up you know plugged in some stuff and
Marc:And then there's one dude, what the hell is his name with the big mustache, who once took me to his house in an innocent way.
Marc:And we made a mixtape of all his R&B records, the old stuff, Sam and Dave, Otis Redding, Etta James, I think, was on there.
Marc:What was Solomon Burke?
Marc:I mean, it was just all of the stuff, the old soul business.
Marc:What the hell was his name?
Marc:Why can't I remember Jim?
Marc:I think it was Jim.
Marc:More importantly, Steve LaRue, Steve Lash LaRue, who was in the great performance art outfit called Jungle Red, who performed once a year in surgical surgical scrubs.
Marc:But Steve was a guy to hit me to the stuff, man.
Marc:Brian Eno, the residents, Fred Frith, John Hassel, you know, the Bowie stuff.
Marc:I think he was the guy who first turned me on to Adrian Ballou.
Marc:If it weren't for Lash LaRue, Steve LaRue, I wouldn't know about Adrian Ballou, and I wouldn't know a lot about his stuff.
Marc:That budget tapes and records next to the Posh Bagel around the corner from the General Store head shop on Harvard Street across from University of New Mexico completely blew my mind and arranged it back correctly around certain music.
Marc:Now, Steve was a musician himself and sadly committed suicide a few years ago.
Marc:And it's one of those situations where a mutual friend, Clemmer, David Clemmer, he kind of pulled together a bunch of stuff he sent me on CD that I still have to go through of this guy who was kind of a mad oddball genius in his own right.
Marc:I'd fallen way out of touch with him for a long time, and I just heard about his passing.
Marc:And Clemmer's got all this stuff, and I've got to go through it.
Marc:But what happens to that stuff?
Marc:What happens to the unsung wizards of the...
Marc:oddball realm the musical astronauts who uh couldn't quite cut it and couldn't quite hack it ultimately for whatever reason rest in peace lash larue thank you for turning me on to adrian blue and that's that backstory so i was very excited to talk to adrian blue because uh man he makes that guitar sound like nothing else so
Marc:My slightly dementiaed father came out to Phoenix to hang out with me, and I was nervous.
Marc:I didn't know if he would recognize me.
Marc:I didn't know if we had crossed the line, and he certainly did recognize me, and he was quite happy to see me.
Marc:We were quite happy to see each other.
Marc:I tell you, man.
Marc:We've all done bad shit in our life.
Marc:We've all made mistakes.
Marc:We have problems with people we love.
Marc:But seeing my father over these last few years as he enters this end run with this problem, this dementia, has been pretty great.
Marc:I'm finding a lot of peace around us, around him, around me, around whatever I remembered him, however I thought he wronged me or however, whatever, man.
Marc:It just doesn't matter.
Marc:It's certainly drifting out of his head.
Marc:That's the gift of it.
Marc:If there's any way to look at it in a positive way, they don't remember.
Marc:There's no going back to that.
Marc:So you let go and you accept and you take what you can.
Marc:Enjoy those moments, man.
Marc:But, like, he was pretty present.
Marc:He turns on the juice, and his brain works a little better when he's around me, his wife said.
Marc:And I talked to him, got him going about some stuff in the old days.
Marc:I showed him some x-rays, some picture I had on my phone, and my mom's got a little issue in her neck, and that used to be a place where he used to do the surgery on.
Marc:He was orthopedic.
Marc:I showed him the x-rays and asked what he thought about the problem, and he locked right in, man.
Marc:He did the doctor thing for a few minutes.
Marc:It's all sort of still in there, and I'm just saying, man, you know,
Marc:Forgive the people you love.
Marc:Forgive yourself.
Marc:Find some peace.
Marc:Can you?
Marc:Can you do it?
Marc:Look, I, you know, whatever my issues were with my parents, they're all fading as they fade.
Marc:And I'm happy to be as present as I can be for where they're at right now.
Marc:It's a gift.
Marc:And I did that show in Phoenix to a packed house.
Marc:And I did those jokes about my dad and his condition with his wife there.
Marc:And her brother was there and his wife, I think, and their niece and my old man.
Marc:And I pointed, I did that.
Marc:I made fun of my dad in a relatively good hearted way.
Marc:And I thanked Rosie, his wife, for taking care of him, and I introduced them to the audience, and it was kind of beautiful.
Marc:They had the best time.
Marc:She was just so grateful and had so many laughs.
Marc:She loves when I make fun of them.
Marc:The last time they saw me, she said, I didn't do it enough, so I went out of my way.
Marc:I just punched away at the old man.
Marc:He loved it, and I'm sure he doesn't remember any of it today, but she will, and she's the one at the front.
Marc:She's at the front.
Marc:of his battle.
Marc:So, very grateful for her, and it was a powerful night, man.
Marc:So look, you guys, I talked to Jerry Harrison.
Marc:It was a few weeks ago.
Marc:Of the Talking Heads.
Marc:Of Talking Heads.
Marc:Not the.
Marc:I was corrected on that.
Marc:We talked about Adrian Ballou.
Marc:And then here he is.
Marc:Adrian came.
Marc:He and Jerry are performing songs from Talking Heads.
Marc:Remain in light next week at the Wiltern Theater in L.A.
Marc:You can get tickets at thewiltern.net.
Marc:And this is me covering the ground with Adrian Ballou.
Thank you.
Guest:Where'd you come from?
Guest:Northern Kentucky.
Guest:I was born in Covington, right across the Ohio River from Cincinnati.
Guest:Really?
Marc:Because it's weird.
Marc:I've listened to stuff you've played on my whole life, right, here and there.
Marc:And I always knew your name.
Marc:I remember there was a guy I knew who worked at a record store in Albuquerque, New Mexico, next door to where I worked in high school at a restaurant.
Marc:So he turned me on to, I think it must have been Lone Rhinoceros.
Marc:When did that come out?
Guest:That's 82, the first solo record.
Guest:The year after I did the Discipline record with King Crimson.
Marc:And I think he gave me that record.
Marc:It might have been after, it might not have been him, but there was a whole world of music that you were involved with.
Marc:That was like, I thought you were from outer space.
Marc:I didn't think you would.
Marc:I didn't know.
Marc:Well, I did grow up on the planet Mars, but it's a little small colony that we had there.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Just a guitar colony?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:The colony with the amps on Mars.
Marc:That's amp.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Amp Mars.
Marc:But like, I just never assumed that you were of a human upbringing.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:yeah well maybe uh there's something to be said there i've been watching a lot of ancient aliens maybe i maybe you did land kentucky itself is a little alien well what kind of what what year were you uh like you know what was there music in the house no no no one in my house no one in my family had any musical background ever anywhere um my father's side of my family were kind of uh you know uh country people
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Minor Kentucky area.
Guest:How did you get rid of your accent?
Guest:And traveling the world all my life.
Guest:And my mother was a school teacher.
Guest:I mean, a Sunday school teacher.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And home, you know, homemaker.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there was nobody there.
Guest:Brothers, sisters?
Guest:Anything.
Guest:Two brothers younger than me.
Guest:Neither of them played anything or had any interest.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it just hit me when I was about 10 years old.
Guest:I said, I want to be, I want to play drums.
Guest:Drums.
Guest:It was drums.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:drums yeah and uh we had just moved to a new part of kentucky ludlow kentucky a little further down the river yeah a river town yeah and they said yeah okay well we'll have you in the junior high school ludlow marching panthers yeah but you have to play trumpet did you learn how to read music then no i didn't no i just learned how to do a marching cadises and i said no i don't want to play trumpet i want to play i want to be in the drum
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I didn't even know what it was called.
Marc:That's so funny that despite your desire to play an instrument, they're like, well, we need a trumpet.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So like, you're not going to be anything.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Just play the trumpet.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We don't want you in the band unless you'll play trumpet.
Guest:But I, you know, I threw a proper fit and, you know, they put me on drums.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:For three years I did that.
Guest:Then we moved 10...
Guest:miles away to Florence, Kentucky.
Guest:Away from the river?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So everything was gone.
Guest:I had no friends.
Guest:I wasn't in the band anymore.
Guest:And at that time, the Beatles had come out.
Guest:And when I moved to Florence, Kentucky, before I went the freshman year,
Guest:I was just in a neighborhood.
Guest:My new neighborhood didn't know anybody, but there happened to be a lot of musicians there, and we started sort of hanging out.
Guest:Really?
Guest:And pretty soon they said, well, you've got to hear this band called The Denims.
Guest:They do all the Beatles stuff really great.
Guest:So I went to see The Denims.
Guest:The local band?
Guest:Local band.
Guest:Are you how old now?
Guest:I'm 72.
Guest:No, I mean, how old were you then?
Marc:I was 15.
Marc:When the Beatles happened, you were about 15?
Guest:14.
Guest:14 or 15?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was 14, 13, 14, but by the time I got to Florence, I was maybe 14 or 15.
Guest:Did it blow your mind, like, when the Beatles came out?
Marc:Was that the thing?
Guest:Oh, incredible.
Marc:Are you kidding?
Guest:I went upstairs, and I actually had enough hair to cut it into bangs.
Guest:You did?
Guest:I went right straight to the bathroom, cut my hair into bangs.
Marc:But you don't have recollection of, like, Elvis or any of that generation?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, my mother had a little radio that was built into the headboard of her bed in their apartment.
Guest:And I remember hearing, you ain't nothing but a hounder, and running in the bedroom and jumping up and down like a crazed little child at age five to Elvis.
Guest:It did it.
Guest:But Elvis, and there were a lot of other people in between Elvis and the Beatles that I loved.
Guest:Roy Orbison, the Everly Brothers, the Beach Boys, the Ventures.
Guest:but then it was the that's so funny because all of those that through line there's a through line to everyone you just said like you didn't go to jerry lee lewis or you know little richard there you love those guys too but there's this haunting harmony trip that goes through the ventures absolutely it was harmony for me because see even when i was five i could sing along with those kind of records and even sing the weirder harmony so i would sing for my aunts and uncles and stuff and they'd say oh
Guest:oh, he's so cute, you know, and I thought, well, this is what you want to do for a living, right?
Guest:Yeah, that's funny, the Ventures.
Guest:Did you ever do a surf record?
Guest:I've written three surf songs of my own now.
Guest:I'm going to do the third one on my next record.
Guest:Okay, just trying to make sure.
Guest:And I was friends, I am friends with the Ventures.
Guest:Well, the remaining Ventures have just recently passed.
Guest:Who just passed, yeah.
Guest:Don Wilson, and I was friends with Noki Edwards as well.
Guest:I loved those guys.
Guest:They were really old school guys, and I would see them.
Guest:I'd go to some of their shows and hang out with them, and they accepted me.
Guest:They loved me.
Guest:They were like, we don't know what the hell you're doing, Adrian, but we sure do love it.
Guest:Were they playing like state fairs and stuff?
Guest:When I saw them, it was usually at the NAMM shows.
Guest:I used to go all the NAMM shows out here in Anaheim every year, and they would almost always be playing somewhere, but I saw them other places too.
Guest:In fact, my trio opened for them in a festival somewhere.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:So they finally got to hear me, and they were scratching their heads.
Guest:Was that Dick Dale?
Guest:No, Dick Dale, he's different.
Marc:He was another guy.
Guest:He was the surf king.
Guest:He was on his own.
Guest:But the Ventures really were important too.
Guest:I wasn't even a guitar player when I heard the Ventures.
Guest:And I wasn't even when I heard the Beatles, of course.
Guest:When I was 16, I had mononucleosis, couldn't play in the denims, couldn't play drums anymore.
Marc:Oh wait, so you saw the denims and then you tried to get in the denims?
Guest:Yeah, they asked me to join them.
Marc:To be a drummer?
Guest:uh singing drummer yeah i sang i could sing any part you know and they were primarily paul's voice or john's or george or even ringo's oh really yeah they were a cover band primarily they were but you know they got so popular in the northern kentucky cincinnati area that there was a popular dj his name was dusty roads on wsai radio and he coined the phrase cincinnati's own beatles so we were cincinnati's own beatles we had the little
Guest:We had eventually had the military suits.
Guest:So you did play with them?
Guest:Yeah, I played with them for three or four years.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:All through high school?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Guest:Drums.
Guest:Until a little out of high school.
Guest:Yes, and when I was 16, I couldn't play with them for two months.
Guest:I had to stay at home with mononucleosis.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:While I was there, I had all these songs in my head.
Guest:of your own making my own making and i could hear them like it's a record playing so i said can i borrow a guitar borrowed a guitar the father's uh guitar from one of the guitar players in the denims in the denims yeah and i sat at home for two months and taught myself to play i didn't have anybody show me anything i just figured it out by okay i want this note where's my finger go for that note i want the harmony work where what finger can go there
Guest:You didn't have a chord chart?
Guest:Nothing.
Guest:Very painstaking process.
Guest:But when I came back, you know.
Guest:So you had to invent guitar.
Guest:I invented my own chords for sure.
Guest:And when I came back, you know, I had five of my songs written and played them for the denims.
Guest:And they said, what the hell are those chords?
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, because they were like my own chord shapes.
Guest:And I said, I don't know, you know, A furnished flat.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:And they still don't match up on chords.
Guest:I still didn't know chords for years after that.
Guest:Did they play the songs?
Guest:Yes, we did learn one of them.
Guest:Just one.
Marc:What about the other?
Marc:You still waiting to record those other ones?
Guest:We never got to really record and stuff.
Marc:We didn't get that far down the pike.
Marc:So how did your tenure with the denims end?
Guest:I think something else in the band happened.
Guest:Someone else left, and we decided to call it quits.
Guest:But it was at the time that, in 1967, and I was graduating from high school, it was at the time that Sergeant Pepper had come out, and we could no longer imitate the Beatles.
Guest:I mean, it was just that simple.
Guest:We said, what are we gonna do, boys?
Guest:Hey, lads, what are we gonna do?
Guest:We can't sound like the Beatles anymore.
Marc:Oh, because it was out of that sort of basic, almost old-style rock and roll.
Guest:We did try to play, you know, I read the news today, oh boy.
Guest:But where's the orchestra?
Guest:Where's, you know, this shit?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:We need to get to the big part where the orchestra swells.
Guest:It's the two guitar players going.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:It just didn't work.
Marc:You can't do it.
Marc:And you can't do it.
Marc:Like the amount of production that all the sounds that they made with that record, how are you going to do that?
Guest:Well, the one preceding is my favorite, which is Revolver, and I remember bringing that.
Guest:We were playing at a Catholic church gig, and I remember bringing the record to the other guys in the denims.
Guest:Look, here it is.
Guest:Here it is.
Guest:I'd just gotten it.
Guest:And we were just marveling over the cover and everything.
Guest:And then, you know, as we learned some of those songs, we realized, wow, some of this stuff we're not going to be able to do because, like, you can't do Love You Too, you know, the Indian song.
Guest:You can't really do... Without a sitar again?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And with all the other accoutrements.
Guest:Turn off your mind, relax, and vote downstream.
Marc:Tomorrow never knows.
Marc:That must have blown your... Were you playing guitar full-time there yet?
Marc:At that point, I was writing songs.
Marc:But the sort of strange sounds and the backward looping.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Marc:And just some of the leads on that record must have informed your brain somehow.
Marc:Totally.
Marc:Because that was the first time I think I...
Guest:That's weird guitar playing.
Guest:It is.
Guest:In fact, I remember also in the church parking lot, Sir Angie, we played a lot of churches at that point, I guess, hearing on the radio, sitting in someone's car, I didn't have a car, and hearing, I'm only sleeping.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's the first backwards guitar part I ever heard.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:But you didn't know it was backwards, right?
Guest:I had no idea what it was, but I knew it must be a guitar.
Guest:Because it seems like you figured out how to play that forwards.
Guest:And I totally, well, not at that point.
Guest:I wasn't that good.
Guest:But I totally flipped out over that sound.
Guest:Backwards guitar is still something I use a lot, and now I can play it live while I'm playing.
Guest:I can actually play live and make it sound, and make it play backwards.
Guest:With some of the toys?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, with a digital delay.
Guest:It's a technique.
Guest:It's hard to do because you have to be always playing ahead of where you want it, what you want to be because it has to record it first and then play it backwards.
Guest:So it's about a two second delay.
Marc:Oh, so it actually has to play backwards.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You can't mock the sound of backwards.
Guest:I have a pedal, so I'm playing this pedal, and when I finally push it down, it engages whatever I've been playing, turns it around backwards, and there, poof, voila, there it is.
Guest:So you've got to play it ahead of it to match it.
Guest:Two seconds ahead of it, what you want to do.
Guest:I told you from another planet I am.
Marc:Well, that's sort of incredible because you're doing that in a live environment.
Marc:And so your engagement, I mean, you got to have a lot of confidence in your rhythm section and everything else to just-
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:To stay on that.
Guest:I make a lot of loops when I'm playing with my own trio, and that's another thing.
Guest:That has to be perfectly right on.
Guest:So you're going to step on this thing, boom, right there, and then you're going to step on it again to end it, boom, right there, and it's got to be a perfect loop.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Otherwise, you have to undo it and start all over again, which is highly embarrassing.
Guest:Do you have a practice regimen now?
Guest:No.
Guest:Not at all.
Guest:I just play a lot.
Guest:I never have actually had a practice regimen.
Guest:Even when I was in King Crimson and we had all that stuff, I would just, you know.
Guest:That was Crimson in a nutshell.
Guest:Once Robert and I finished our four hours of practice every day, I'd slough off, you know, and like, you know, okay, I'll catch up tomorrow on that.
Marc:But where does it, like, so where do you sort of begin to sort of bend the possibilities?
Marc:So you go from the Denhams to what?
Guest:I got in, eventually, I got in a band.
Guest:In Kentucky.
Guest:As a guitar player.
Guest:In Kentucky.
Guest:Well, it was a Cincinnati band, in fact.
Guest:Okay, Cincy.
Guest:Part of Cincinnati.
Guest:But not the Cincinnati Beatles.
Guest:They were gone by then.
Guest:And I started, you know.
Guest:Well, around that time... What was that band?
Marc:What were they called?
Guest:The first one was called Gory Oatley.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Isn't that... How's that for a name, huh?
Guest:And this is what, 69?
Guest:Probably 68 or 69, yes.
Guest:And Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton had arrived on the scene.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so at that point, I was saying, gee, I want to do that stuff, not just be a guitar player.
Guest:So I was learning...
Marc:Oh, foxy lady.
Marc:Just by ear.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I played the record and just figured it all out.
Guest:And I figured out everything Hendrix did as well as I could.
Guest:And also, Jeff, I loved his playing.
Marc:Well, I mean, Hendrix was trying to, you know, Billy Gibbons tells a story about opening for Hendrix in Texas.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:and hendrix had a full stereo console set up in his hotel room and uh he basically said to billy said let's go try to figure out what jeff beck is doing and that was hendrix so hendrix i gotta tell jeff that one he probably already knows it was baffled by beck oh my god beck was such a lyrically beautiful guitar still is he's my buddy and my favorite now really i mean well you know jimmy hendrix
Guest:did something no one else will ever accomplish he opened all those doors and he was unique into himself at the same time however i always felt well jeff beck was doing some great stuff too and jeff has been there since so if you look at his entire career jeff has done more than jimmy has by now well right but you also like the sensibility around uh uh electronics
Marc:was different.
Marc:It felt like despite whatever Hendrix did, he was still in some sort of loop with those amps and still in the blues in a way.
Marc:But it seemed like his pedal game, and people know this, I'm not that deep a nerd, was minimal.
Marc:It was, yeah.
Marc:But Beck, even on the I Ain't Superstitious with Jeff Beck group,
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like that sound was something, you know, was beyond anything that anyone could recognize.
Guest:Unbelievable, really.
Guest:It was a wah-wah with some wonderful room delay on it.
Guest:Is that what it was?
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And he just was so great with it, though.
Marc:It's a brain changer, that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was the beginning.
Guest:He always did.
Guest:I mean, right from the beginning, for me, when I was still in the denims and wasn't playing guitar,
Guest:The Yardbirds, yeah.
Guest:On one of the Yardbirds hits, they had a flip side, which turns out to be an old Les Paul track renamed Jeff's Boogie.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:and that was that track right there from there on i was like i love this guy named jeff beck whoever that guy is you know that's incredible yeah and then he did that with him you are you guys pretty good buddies well we see each other whenever i can well there must be like there at some point you've you know you uh as a guitar player are are in that ether and
Marc:I believe.
Guest:One time I was in London in a little club.
Guest:This was back in the day of early King Crimson.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was standing on a balcony and I was looking down at the band.
Guest:I don't know what band it was.
Guest:I just wanted something to do on a night out.
Guest:And across the way on the balcony, I saw Jeff Beck.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I looked at him and he looked at me and we both sort of started walking to the corner.
Guest:We met at the corner and he goes, hey, you're that elephant guy.
Guest:And I said, hey, you're Jeff Beck.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we just kind of hugged and said, yeah, this is great.
Guest:He knew.
Guest:He was on it.
Guest:Plus, what I did later, many years later, my favorite compliment happened, which was with Jeff also.
Guest:Elephant was in referral to?
Guest:Well, he had seen the video of Elephant Talk, I think.
Guest:So he knew I was the guy that made that elephant sound stuff.
Guest:But years later, we were playing, I think, at Royal Albert Hall.
Guest:Once again, King Crimson.
Guest:And the end of the show, I did three of a perfect pair by myself as the first encore.
Guest:Just guitar and voice.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he just fell out over that.
Guest:He couldn't believe I could play that and sing that at the same time.
Guest:So I went backstage, and there he was in the green room, and he came up, and I reached my hand out to shake his hand.
Guest:He reached my hand out with his, and with his other hand, he made this motion that he was sawing my hand off.
Guest:And he said, you bastard.
Marc:Look at that.
Marc:The competition remains.
Marc:It's funny.
Marc:Because when you're an astronaut, and you've already sort of mastered space, you're kind of like, who are the other guys out here?
Guest:And you're the other guy out there.
Guest:i you know i still have i have a problem even believing any of that or thinking about myself in that way i just you know it's you just play you don't feel competitive yourself to someone that you right grew up yeah yeah loving but i don't get in awe of any of these guys you know i spent an hour as you have with paul mccartney and i just loved it i loved every minute sure joyed every second yeah he was so wonderful yeah
Guest:But I wasn't sitting around like, oh, my God, it's Paul McCoy.
Guest:I should have.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because he has also meant an extraordinary amount to me in my life.
Marc:Well, I mean, you can do that.
Marc:I mean, I have fanboyed with certain people.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like with Keith Richards.
Marc:You know, I did.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But then the second time I interviewed him, I was kind of busting his balls.
Marc:Once they become humans to you.
Guest:They do quickly.
Guest:Very quickly.
Guest:That's the thing.
Guest:When you meet these people or you work with them,
Guest:I meet David Bowie, and before I know it, me and David Bowie are joking about stuff, and he's no longer really that David Bowie.
Guest:He's a different guy to me.
Marc:Well, I keep trying to, and I think about it with you, and I think about it when I talk to any musician, the sort of magic of the ability to sort of take a stage in front of tens of thousands of people and do that job and put on the show is kind of fucking amazing.
Marc:It is.
Marc:It really is.
Marc:I can't...
Marc:But it's still a mystery to me.
Marc:Even talking to you, knowing that you were on the Remain in Light tour and on all those Bowie, I don't know how many tours you did with him, all the Crimson stuff.
Marc:Two Bowie tours.
Marc:But you're here, but do you feel a shift?
Marc:Is that zone a match?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:It's strange.
Guest:If something overtakes me, I can even be really sick.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I can walk on stage and I'm just, I'm no longer sick.
Guest:I'm so completely zoned in.
Guest:And there's an energy force, I honestly feel, it's not like a mysterious thing, but from the audience that just completely, all of your adrenaline just goes sky high and you're in the moment and you're playing.
Guest:And a lot of gigs I play
Guest:It's over almost in a flash sometimes.
Guest:Really?
Guest:You go, wow, I just barely started and that's done.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because you're so in the moment.
Guest:So, wait, okay, so you lock into Beck.
Guest:I don't see, I don't hear a lot of Clapton in you.
Guest:No, but I learned a lot of his stuff because I did love, I loved Kareem.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah, and I loved, you know, a lot of his stuff.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Jimmy Page, too.
Guest:Jimmy Page was a little later, Led Zeppelin.
Guest:By then, I was kind of on my own.
Guest:You don't strike me as a blues guy.
Guest:I did learn a little blues when I was teaching myself.
Guest:But you didn't love it, right?
Guest:Well, I figured to me that blues is kind of a great way to learn how to play soloing and stuff and show off.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Did you ever listen to Peter Green's stuff?
Guest:I did.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I love that song, Oh Well, Part 2.
Guest:Love that song.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So I had my little phase of blues.
Guest:I was listening to John Mayle.
Marc:So it was specifically sort of like, I've got to pick up a guitar at a party.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, you've got to be able to do that.
Guest:Yeah, you've got to be able to do that.
Guest:You know, I learned how to finger pick like Chet Atkins.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:I did.
Guest:I learned a few.
Guest:How'd you do that?
Guest:I just taught myself.
Marc:You didn't read nothing?
Marc:I don't read anything.
Marc:I mean, in terms of music.
Marc:No, but you didn't read anything about how he did it, like the Travis picking, or you just kind of figured it out?
Guest:No, I figured it out from records, yeah.
Guest:Everything I learned when I started, I figured it out from records.
Marc:Or did you like it?
Guest:I seemed to be pretty good at it.
Marc:Okay, so you just had that.
Guest:I had a really good detailed...
Guest:way of doing it and i would figure out like beatles but the beatles were my biggest teachers and i figured out every part yeah bass parts drum parts guitar parts i'd listen to the production what would you spend hours oh my whole life was spent in my parents basement i at the end of school year you know with everybody else that had a tan from playing baseball i'd be the pale guy that went back and still trying to figure out the next guitar riff and what was that guitar that that first one that you had the
Guest:The first one I had was a Gibson Firebird because I thought it was a pretty interesting looking guitar.
Guest:Great guitar, right?
Guest:Big, big, big.
Guest:Big and unusual, really.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Something.
Guest:They're still kind of unusual.
Guest:But, you know, eventually over time I was working with my friend Seymour Duncan who became, you know.
Guest:You know that guy?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Very well.
Guest:Back then, we knew each other.
Guest:In Kentucky?
Guest:Well, he lived in the Cincinnati area, and he was a very good guitar player at that time, too, by the way.
Guest:Anyway, long story short, I kept talking to Seymour about changing the sound of the Firebird I had.
Guest:Eventually, he said, you know what you really want here?
Guest:You want a Stratocaster.
Guest:You wouldn't get me to put strats and telepickers on it.
Guest:Oh, because the Firebird had those mini humbuckers, right?
Guest:I didn't like the sound of the guitar.
Guest:He just loved the look of it.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:So, eventually, I got a Stratocaster.
Marc:Oh, like in the late 60s?
Guest:Right around the time I joined Frank's band.
Marc:Okay, so you're in Cincinnati, Kentucky area.
Marc:You're playing with Gorey whatever.
Guest:Yeah, Gorey Oatley.
Guest:Did you record?
Guest:That was only for a year, by the way.
Marc:So how does Frank find you?
Guest:Well, I went through a lot of things over the next 10 or 12 years.
Guest:Cover bands, Elvis cover band, every kind of band.
Guest:Holiday Inn, Lounge band where I went back to playing drum.
Guest:Until you're almost 30?
Guest:Until I was 27 years old and I'm sitting there really thinking, oh my gosh, I missed the bus.
Guest:Because everyone is supposed to be famous by then or not.
Guest:And you're doing a hotel lounge gig?
Guest:I was in a Holiday Inn lounge band for two and a half years.
Guest:It was called Sound Assembly.
Guest:Two guitar players and me on drums.
Guest:We didn't even have a bass player, but we were called Sound Assembly.
Guest:Were you miserable?
Guest:I was miserable.
Guest:five hours a night yeah but then i had the rest of the day for a month the time sitting in a hotel room and a holiday in to to hone my art and and teach i'd turned to taught myself to play cello uh i played drums every night i taught myself to play flute i wrote a lot of songs with acoustic guitar i sold my firebird to get a drum kit to play that that gig because there were no shows for me anymore this was in the disco era wow
Guest:And, you know, all the gigs had kind of dried up, so there was nothing.
Guest:So I thought, well, I better keep going with my writing at least.
Guest:And so then what happened, my manager, I had a manager and he called me.
Guest:In Kentucky?
Guest:You know, in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Guest:Stan Hertzman was his name, and Stan couldn't do much for me because there wasn't much going on, and I was light years away from having a record deal of my own or anything, but he said, there's a band in Nashville called Sweetheart, and they need a new guitar player.
Guest:Strangely, the guitar player from Gorey Oatley had left Sweetheart.
Guest:Small world.
Guest:Full circle.
Guest:And so I went down to Nashville, joined Sweetheart, played in that band for about three years, one night.
Guest:Three years?
Guest:Yeah, one night.
Guest:And then I was 27, and one night we were playing in a dank, dark bar called Fanny's.
Guest:It was a biker bar.
Guest:It was actually painted flat black inside, full of bikers.
Guest:Not a great place, but...
Guest:And I looked the hallway, you could see who was coming in, and there's Frank Zappa with his crew of people, his big bodyguard, John Smothers, and Terry Bozio, the drummer, and a whole horde of people who look like Frank Zappa guys.
Guest:Came in, he listened 40 minutes.
Guest:Just by coincidence, or he'd heard about you?
Guest:He'd heard about me from the chauffeur.
Guest:He played a show,
Guest:that night, and he had a chauffeur taking him around, and he said, we want to go see a great rock band.
Guest:Who do you recommend?
Guest:The chauffeur said, this band.
Guest:He took him to see Sweetheart.
Guest:So Frank walks in.
Guest:He sits there for 40 minutes, and I remember all of a sudden he gets up.
Guest:He walks up to the stage, reaches up to me.
Guest:I'm playing Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones.
Guest:He shakes my hand and says, I'll get your name and number from the chauffeur, and when I'm done touring, I'm going to call you and audition you.
Guest:And eventually that is what happened, although it was about six months later.
Guest:And by then I thought, well, that was just a dream.
Guest:And then you flew out to L.A.?
Guest:Yep.
Guest:My first time flying ever.
Marc:And what guitar did you have?
Marc:The Strat?
Guest:I had a very simple natural wood Strat, which made it through the first two months of touring with Frank.
Guest:And then we took two weeks off before we went to Europe, and that guitar never arrived back in Nashville.
Marc:Oh, you lost it.
Guest:So I lost it or it was stolen.
Marc:So, all right.
Marc:So you fly out here, you audition for Frank over in Laurel Canyon at the house.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:In the basement.
Marc:And how, how, and this is for, this is what year we're talking?
Marc:77.
Marc:77.
Marc:So Frank is deep in Frank.
Marc:He's very Frank.
Guest:I'll be Frank about it.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And that house more Frank than that.
Marc:So you go down in the basement.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, uh, and what, what is he, what do you got to do for Frank?
Marc:What's, what's the setup?
Guest:okay so his basement was not yet the gorgeous studio would become years later it was a linoleum floor and it was full of different activity people moving around you know pianos and things it was very distracting it was the original
Marc:and then he built that whole other world.
Guest:Oh yeah, every year I would go back and see him.
Guest:Whenever I was in LA, it all goes back and he would always say, welcome to my construction project.
Guest:And it was always being, but this time it was very simple, but there was a lot of people doing things there.
Guest:And there was a little console.
Guest:He was sitting behind the console, kind of like we are here.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I'm standing in the middle of the room with a little pig nose amp in my Strat.
Guest:Pig nose.
Guest:Yeah, a little tiny pig nose amp.
Marc:I mean, that's real little for people who aren't guitar people.
Marc:We're talking, that's cigar box size-ish.
Guest:Yeah, and it can't sound like much of anything.
Guest:Did you have batteries in it?
Guest:Yeah, it ran on batteries.
Guest:That's what I could afford, ladies and gentlemen.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:And Frank would say, okay, play, you know, he'd take a puff off a cigar.
Guest:Okay, Adrian, play Andy.
Guest:And I'd play, start playing for about two minutes or whatever, and he'd stop me.
Guest:Okay, all right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then he'd start on the next one.
Guest:He'd give me 12 songs to learn.
Guest:And when I talked to him on the phone, when he called me, he said, you do read music.
Guest:I said, no, I don't.
Guest:I'm totally autodidact, self-taught.
Guest:And he said, well, okay, I'm going to give you a shot.
Guest:I never do this, but I'm going to give you a shot anyway.
Guest:I like the way you were singing and playing, so let's see what works.
Guest:So I go there, and we go through this 12 songs in no time.
Guest:They're all Zappa songs?
Guest:Oh, of course, yeah.
Guest:And we're from different records.
Guest:I had to borrow the records from friends of mine.
Guest:Long story short is I failed miserably, but I was so distracted.
Guest:Really?
Guest:I had nowhere to go, so I stayed around and watched other people do it.
Guest:How'd you fail?
Guest:What do you mean?
Guest:He didn't want you to be in the band?
Guest:No, I just knew that I just didn't do well.
Guest:I was too nervous and there was too many distractions.
Guest:I thought he said he was going to give you a shot.
Guest:He did give me.
Guest:That was my shot.
Guest:So I was standing around there because they said, okay, you're just going to stay here until 5 o'clock or 6 o'clock.
Guest:They were going to take you back to the airport and ship you back home to Nashville.
Guest:So I had nowhere to go.
Guest:And I watched some other auditions.
Guest:We're hair-raising auditions, you know, keyboard players.
Guest:And I watched a percussion audition.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then, all of a sudden, at the end of the day, it was just me and Frank standing there next to each other all of a sudden.
Guest:And I looked up and said, Frank, I'm really sorry.
Guest:I know I didn't do well in the audition, but I thought it would be different.
Guest:And he said, how so?
Guest:And I said, well, I thought it would be just you and me, quietly, and I could just show you that I can do this.
Guest:And he said...
Guest:Well, great.
Guest:Let's go upstairs.
Guest:So we went upstairs.
Guest:I took my pig nose.
Guest:I turned it as far up, all the way up, pushed it down into the cushions on his purple couch.
Guest:We sat there.
Guest:We did it again.
Guest:And we started again.
Guest:And about a third of the way through, he started singing along with me.
Guest:And I knew, okay, this is going well.
Guest:And then he stopped and...
Guest:Put his hand out.
Guest:This is typically Frank.
Guest:Shook his hand.
Guest:Okay, you got the gig.
Guest:Here's how much I pay for this.
Guest:Here's what we do.
Guest:If we do this, if we don't work, we get this retainer and so on.
Guest:Explain the whole thing to me.
Guest:And it was done.
Guest:And you did like four albums?
Yeah.
Guest:i'm on i think eight or nine records because they they keep finding things in the vault right but the record i did was chic your booty the disco record yeah and chic your booty is not many people know this out of all of his records it's the it's the biggest selling one so because it had two million copies what was that uh what was uh the uh there was a hit on there maybe uh
Guest:Baby Snakes, I don't know, it was one of those things.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:Yeah, there was a bunch of really interesting, good songs on there.
Guest:Were you a fan of his before?
Guest:I only knew- Wasn't it Dancing Fool?
Guest:Dancing Fool is on there, yes, that's it.
Guest:That was a hit.
Guest:I'm a dancing fool.
Guest:Yes, exactly.
Guest:That's the one.
Guest:Yeah, I knew some of Frank's work, but not a lot.
Guest:Actually, when I was going back to the denims when I was 16, the manager we had in the denims, we always have a manager.
Guest:And this guy came in one day and said, here, Adrian, I want to give you this record.
Guest:And he said, you're the only person I know who might really appreciate this.
Guest:And it was freak out.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, and that's early, so that's before... That was the first double album every made.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And when I was... Later on, I would stay at his house most weekends so I could learn... When you were touring with him?
Guest:No, when we were still rehearsing.
Guest:We rehearsed for three months.
Guest:So I could learn the parts ahead of time when everyone on Monday would get sheet music.
Guest:Did you find him difficult to work with?
Guest:I found Frank to be...
Guest:perfect for me.
Guest:He was very demanding, but it was also, for me, very generous, friendly.
Guest:You didn't read music, so he had to show you what he wanted.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I hung out with Frank.
Guest:The other guys in the band, bless them, they're all great guys,
Guest:They were all LA guys, so they went their way after every rehearsal.
Guest:Who was in the band at that time?
Guest:Terry Bozio, Patrick O'Harn, Tommy Mars, Ed Mann, Peter Wolfe.
Guest:That might be it.
Guest:And so, you know, they would go home.
Guest:I would go home with Frank.
Marc:Because he needed someplace to stay.
Guest:Yeah, you know, on the weekends he would show me stuff, and then when we actually went on a tour after three months of rehearsal, unbelievable amount of rehearsal, I had learned five hours by then, by rote, and I just continued to hang out with him.
Guest:It would be me,
Guest:Him, his bodyguard, John Smothers, and our road manager, Phil Kaufman, who would go to breakfast together every morning or be seated on a plane together.
Guest:So I got to be friends with him.
Guest:I would watch him write music on a plane.
Guest:He's a funny, intense guy.
Guest:He was so fun and so great to me.
Guest:But he did have this one thing.
Guest:To be in Frank's band, he demanded you just be super professional and
Guest:You know, no drugs, no hangover for the next day.
Guest:None of that.
Guest:You play things consistently and correctly.
Guest:That's what he preached.
Guest:And I needed that.
Guest:I needed that kind of mentorship.
Guest:So it was perfect for me.
Guest:Now, after that, I went right into David Bowie's band.
Guest:It was completely the opposite.
Guest:But you could do it.
Guest:But yeah, but David said, I want you to go crazy on guitar, just go wild.
Guest:That was for the Berlin records, and that was sort of like he was- Lodger, yeah.
Marc:I love Lodger.
Guest:I do too.
Marc:I think it's one of the, like, is that all you?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like, that thing is like, it's one of these records where I'm like, how is that not the best, the favorite David Bowie record?
Marc:I can tell you how.
Guest:because rca was dropping him on that record it was the last of his deal with rca so they did not promote it at all and that was was that the last of the berlin record that was the last of the berlin that was the last of the berlin trilogy oh so many great things on there we had a great time when we did it that is my first actual recording experience what i recorded with
Guest:with Frank was all culled from live performances and Baby Sakes, the movie, all those songs on Sheiky Booty.
Guest:I never got to go in the studio with him.
Guest:So the first thing I ever did in a studio was David.
Marc:So that was all live?
Marc:They culled it from live?
Guest:No shit.
Guest:That's a lot of work for somebody.
Guest:Yeah, he recorded everything live Frank did.
Guest:So my first actual time in a studio, Lake Geneva, Switzerland, Tony Viscani's the producer, along with Brian Eno and David Bowie.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:It was pretty amazing.
Guest:But Eno fascinates me.
Guest:Yeah, he is fascinating.
Marc:I mean, if you learn discipline and doing your reps from Frank, what do you learn from that crew in Switzerland?
Guest:How to do everything a different way, completely thinking out of the box.
Guest:Not that Frank didn't think out of the box, of course.
Guest:It was Frank's box.
Guest:It was Frank's.
Guest:Yeah, it was his box.
Guest:Yeah, it's a big box.
Guest:I'll give you a huge box, universal of boxes.
Guest:But I'll give you an example.
Guest:So this is what happened.
Guest:You know, we went there and the studio we were in used to be the place that burnt down.
Guest:It was a casino that burnt down.
Guest:It was what they wrote Smoke on the Water about.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:Yeah, that's the studio.
Guest:And guess who was playing there when smoke on the water, when it burnt down?
Guest:Frank Zappa.
Guest:How ironic, right?
Guest:Frank Zappa and the mother.
Guest:Yeah, that's it.
Guest:There's that song.
Guest:So when they rebuilt it, they built it into a concrete bunker, literally.
Guest:Totally out of concrete.
Guest:So the first floor had this fairly small control room, and that's where David and Brian and Tony would be.
Guest:And then I would walk up these concrete stairs to the room above, and they had a one-way TV camera that could see me.
Guest:So they could talk to me and look at me.
Guest:But you couldn't see them?
Guest:I couldn't see them.
Guest:So here's Brian's big idea.
Guest:First of all, they told me, well, this record is going to be called...
Guest:Planned accidents.
Guest:Planned accidents.
Guest:That's Brian telling you that.
Guest:We have 20 songs here, and we want you to just play what comes to your mind.
Guest:So what we're gonna do, we want you to go upstairs,
Guest:put your headphones on, you'll hear the drummer count off, one, two, three, four, and then start playing.
Guest:No key, no nothing.
Guest:I said, playing what?
Guest:Can I hear the song first?
Guest:No, no, you can't hear the song.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, can you tell me what key it's in?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:Come on, really?
Guest:Really?
Guest:So all those songs, Red Sails, I'm a DJ, Boys Keep Swinging, all those guitar romps that are in there, those were me playing initially whatever I could think of to play throughout a song I'd never heard before.
Guest:But you're not hearing anything coming into your cans?
Guest:No, I heard the song, but I had no idea.
Guest:I mean, it would go to, I wouldn't know the first thing about it.
Guest:There's a chorus coming up, I wouldn't know.
Guest:So they'd let me do that maybe twice through.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I'd start maybe the third time and they'd say, wait, wait, wait.
Guest:Sounds like you know where the chorus is.
Guest:Forget it.
Guest:We're done.
Guest:No shit.
Guest:You're done with that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then what they would do is they would do a composite track of their favorite bits from that.
Guest:And that's why those guitar things are so outrageous.
Guest:But, you know, later I had to relearn them and play them myself anyway.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there was another story connected with that.
Guest:So one day I come down from the control room, and I go in the studio control room, and they're laughing together.
Guest:And I say, what's so funny?
Guest:And they say, well, we've got to tell you something.
Guest:We did this with Robert, and we made sure we thought that these parts were impossible to play, but no one told you you're so stupid you figured out how to play them.
Guest:Because I had just been playing all that stuff on tour with David.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So whose idea was all that?
Guest:That was Eno?
Guest:Ah, that was Eno, yeah, I'm sure.
Guest:But David probably agreed with it, too.
Guest:And you toured with David?
Guest:Then I toured with David for 78 and 79.
Guest:With Pedro, too?
Guest:Carlos, you mean.
Guest:Carlos Almovar.
Guest:Carlos was the band leader.
Marc:How do you pronounce his last name?
Marc:Almovar, what's his last name?
Marc:Carlos Alomar.
Guest:He was the band leader and he had been with David and played songs like Fame, co-wrote some stuff with him.
Guest:Yeah, he's a good player.
Guest:Yeah, he's good, yeah.
Guest:So that was, you know, who was in that band.
Guest:And then it was down to me to try to do all the stuff that was on those records.
Guest:And it was a lot of fun.
Guest:Now, the next time I did was 1990.
Guest:David came back to me and said, I want you to be the music director of this much larger tour.
Guest:We're going to do 108 shows, 27 countries, Sound and Vision.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And so you can bring your own band, and I want you to figure out the arrangements and do all that stuff.
Guest:So that was a whole new level for me of touring.
Marc:You had to put together a band?
Guest:Well, I had a band already that we were touring at that time, a trio.
Guest:Yeah, okay.
Guest:Backing my record called Mr. Music Head.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Just a keyboard player and a drummer.
Guest:I would say just that.
Guest:We didn't have a bass player yet because the keyboard player would play keyboard bass.
Guest:So all David wanted to do was...
Guest:insert a bass player he liked from Switzerland, and away we went.
Guest:We had a small little band playing all of his 35 or 40 hits.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Because he advertised it as being the last time I'm ever going to play these songs live.
Guest:So we went around the world, 27 countries, and played everything.
Guest:And how we did it is we had samplers that the keyboard player would trigger.
Guest:So the orchestra would come in for Space Oddity, and we'd sound like the record, but it would only be four of us.
Guest:And on top of that...
Guest:The show had big, huge opera scrims and videos and stuff.
Guest:Very, very amazing show.
Guest:And they put the rest of the band, the other guys, three guys in the band, behind an opera scrim in the back of the stage.
Guest:Huge 60 by 60 foot stage that they carried everywhere.
Guest:And only I was on stage with David.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Just me and him.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Which was scary as heck.
Guest:Well, you do some stage antics.
Guest:I did then.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:We even have a runway we go on, you know.
Guest:And it was fun.
Guest:You go from there to Crimson?
Guest:Talking Heads, next.
Guest:Next up, folks, is Talking Heads, yeah.
Guest:They saw me at Madison Square Garden with David, and then I came to a couple of their shows when they were out on tour, and then finally they asked me to sit in and play Psycho Killer, and then the next thing I know, they asked me to play on Remain in Light.
Marc:Yeah, see, like, that record is, for a lot of heads of people, the record.
Marc:And in terms of, like, that's their peak to some people.
Guest:To me, too.
Guest:It is.
Guest:I just say, you know, for me, it was.
Marc:And in a lot of it, a lot of people... I like a lot of their stuff, but... A lot of people attribute it to you.
Marc:So when you say that's the peak for them, in your eyes, too, what makes you say that?
Marc:Why?
Guest:I just think it's a record unlike any other record.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Period.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I mean, it's not just a head, Stu.
Guest:I mean, it's Brian Eno, and it's, you know, it's a package of ideas and a new way to make records that no one had attempted yet at that point.
Guest:Which was how?
Guest:Layering everything.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Well, that's an Eno thing, right?
Guest:So, you know, you would...
Guest:I would say, let's say, I wasn't there for the whole thing.
Marc:It's almost like looping with a pedal.
Guest:It is.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:It's looping, and then what it is is everything is on a track, and then if you want that loop to come up, you turn that track on.
Guest:Then when you want it to go away, you turn it off.
Guest:So you're continually building these different combinations of the loops that you have.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And so everything, when I went there, there was nothing but...
Guest:the bass and drums and a few little of the guitar tracks.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so, you know, Brian Eno and David and Jerry Harrison were there in the control room and they say, okay, here's what we want you to do.
Guest:We want you to go out and in the control room, I could see me big glass between us,
Guest:uh put your headphones listen listen to this song this it's not going to change keys nothing yeah there's no vocals nothing yeah and kind of imagine where a solo would be and then play a guitar solo yeah so that's what i did i went out and i stood around tapping my foot well what a nice groovy track this is ha ha ha wonderful then i
Guest:Launched into a guitar solo.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that was the guitar solo for The Great Curve.
Guest:And so then I thought, well, they were all jumping up and down behind the glass.
Guest:I could see them just going crazy.
Guest:So I thought, well, that went pretty well.
Guest:Let me wait around another couple minutes.
Guest:I'll do a second one.
Marc:And that's how it worked.
Guest:And that's how it worked.
Guest:And you toured with that.
Guest:I did, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Toured the world with that.
Guest:And that was a big crew on stage.
Guest:Yeah, well, the only way to do that record because of the way they recorded it, which I just explained, was to bring in a lot of extra people.
Guest:I was one of them.
Guest:They had a second bass player, they had a percussionist, they had a second keyboard player.
Guest:It didn't end up being a 10-piece band.
Marc:But not the same, that wasn't Bernie Worrell.
Guest:Yeah, Bernie Worrell.
Guest:Bernie was in the band.
Guest:He was the keyboard player.
Marc:But you weren't in Stop Making Sense, though.
Guest:No, this was before Stop Making Sense.
Marc:But Bernie was on that too.
Guest:Because what happened for me right after that is we, Chris and Tina and I went down to the Bahamas to try to make a record together, which became the Tom Tom Club.
Guest:That's a good record.
Guest:Yeah, it is.
Guest:Genius and Love is still being re-recorded by people.
Guest:The last record called Latto that's out right now is Genius of Love being resampled yet again.
Guest:That's nice.
Guest:I'll be picking up a little check for that.
Guest:Do you?
Guest:Yeah, of course.
Marc:That's great.
Guest:And then I joined Ken Crimson.
Marc:Okay, but like Catherine Wheel you're on?
Guest:Catherine wheel I did with David and I also I also love that two of Jerry's solo records so all in all five records you did Jerry first Casual gods you were in the casual red and red in the black That's crazy those five records.
Guest:Yeah, and then I jumped into King Crimson did discipline and then did Lone Rhino so within like a period Yes, you start you do discipline then you do your first solo record
Marc:Yeah, I was doing it at the same time, really.
Marc:What was the shift into Crimson after they'd been established?
Marc:Did you feel some nerd pressure?
Marc:Enormous pressure.
Guest:Unbelievable pressure.
Guest:Well, you know, the funny thing was, you know, all my life- So this one, what's that, their fourth record or fifth record?
Guest:Oh, I think, I don't know how many records they had before.
Guest:Probably six, maybe.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:But it was never an actual band that went from record to record, as you know.
Guest:Robert was the only continuing figure from record to record.
Guest:Okay, okay.
Guest:So then they take a long break.
Guest:I think they stopped in 73 or 74, come back in 1981, and then it's the new band, me, Tony Levin, Bill Bruford, and Robert.
Marc:Right, right.
Guest:And what happened right off the bat was Robert sort of gave me the keys and said, okay, you're going to be the front man, you're going to be the songwriter, you're going to write the melodies, you're going to write the lyrics, and you're going to be my guitar partner.
Guest:All the things that I had been waiting to have...
Guest:All my life was suddenly handed to me, but it was actually in a band called King Crimson, which was my second favorite band after the Beatles.
Guest:So for me, it was huge pressure.
Guest:I didn't even know, well, how am I going to write a song with da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da?
Guest:We rehearsed that stuff over and over hours a day.
Guest:And I was supposed to then turn it into songs.
Marc:which was kind of... Okay, so you kind of broke it open with Bowie, and then you got into a different groove with the heads, and Zappa gave you the discipline.
Marc:But you were a Fripp Fran from way back.
Guest:Yes, I knew King Crimson very well.
Guest:When I was in the Holiday Inn band, we'd play five sets a night.
Guest:I would go back to my room, put on headphones, and put on King Crimson.
Marc:Which record?
Guest:all of them yeah all of those records learning those riffs i knew i never learned any of them i never even tried to listen to no i i didn't know how they were playing that stuff no no i didn't i didn't understand odd time signatures or anything then yet you know i hadn't played with dave with frank yeah yeah that's where i learned that so i just loved the records and i thought wow this is another level of music here yeah and then one day i wake up and i'm in that band and they're saying hey you now it's time for you to lead the band
Guest:to basically write the songs and anything.
Guest:And you're singing them too.
Guest:And sing them and play the dual guitar parts with Robert at the same time.
Guest:Plus jumping around while you're at it in a pink suit.
Guest:So how was your relationship with Fripp?
Guest:It was wonderful for a long, long time.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Because he always supported my ideas.
Guest:I mean, he was very difficult to work with in certain ways.
Guest:Things had to be his way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that was not always...
Guest:you know absolutely great but he gave me personally a lot of leeway yeah because he says you know whatever you need if you need this to change to another key if you want to do something else in here just take it make it yours so that's what i had to do i mean we started with frame by frame and i but right off the bat i added some chord changes moved it up a key and so on to be to make it so that my melody would fit yeah and then wrote the words and then we went away there we go and
Guest:And he was good with that.
Guest:Absolutely wanted that.
Guest:So when we get to something like Elephant Talk, I'm just fooling around one day in rehearsal and start playing on guitar.
Guest:And we start kind of playing along with that.
Guest:Tony's playing it.
Guest:And pretty soon it's okay.
Guest:Well, I think I can make that a song.
Guest:That's how it was always.
Wow.
Guest:framed can you make this a song or should this just be an instrumental and you you did like a million records with them yeah did a lot i did 33 years worth of records with them you and i wrote all the songs and lyrics for 33 years every one of them yeah and do you do you still are you guys still friends
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, after Robert recently, this is, I guess, 14 years ago is not recently.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Decided to go a new way with a different band.
Guest:I was hurt and, you know, I felt funny about it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The way he did it was kind of a little cold.
Guest:Which band was that?
Guest:That was the last one they had, the eight-piece band.
Guest:He started that eight-piece band.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:But anyway, I was also, at the same time, very, very engaged in my solo career again.
Guest:Yeah, you did so many records.
Guest:We hadn't done anything for a while.
Guest:And then eventually I did a movie with Pixar, and I invented something called Flux, an app that...
Guest:plays music differently every time you hear it so i was really engaged with a lot of things and even if he had asked me to be in the band i would have probably had to say i can't do it right now at least right so you know i got over it i said okay so it's king crimson without me it's okay i was there for a long time you were there i loved what i did did and what we did together so i'm happy with it
Marc:Well, I mean, I imagine that in terms of like, you know, Crimson Heads, like those first three that you did, like Discipline Beat and Three of a Perfect Pair, I would imagine that for most of them, they're like, those are the records.
Guest:Yes, that's what I always hear.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, I mean,
Guest:That's, you know, a lot of people from a different age group in particular who didn't get the first round of King Crimson.
Guest:The first thing they may have gotten was, you know, elephant talk or something off a beat or something.
Guest:That is King Crimson to them.
Guest:Like the guys in Tool, for example, they tell me that.
Guest:A lot of people.
Guest:Les Claypool told me that.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah, a lot of other players say, you know, that's it.
Marc:Your Crimson is the Crimson.
Guest:My Crimson, if you want to call it mine.
Guest:Sure.
Sure.
Guest:I don't think you can call it mine, because it really, truly is Robert's, I suppose.
Guest:I know, but he put you in charge.
Guest:Well, he kind of gave me the keys, and I didn't lose them.
Marc:But what was it like when you had to learn all the old Crimson that you never went to, that you, did you, like when you sat down with Robert?
Guest:Well, we didn't at first want to do any of the old King Crimson.
Guest:Robert refused to do 21st century or any of that stuff.
Guest:But eventually we learned, I think, Lark's Tongue in Red and that became part of our repertoire.
Marc:Was there ever a moment where he showed you something and you're like, oh, okay.
Marc:Or did you already kind of know it by the way?
Guest:No, only thing that Robert and I worked on was the really tricky interwoven gamelan kind of guitar stuff.
Guest:Now that was his idea, so I had to learn how to do that with him.
Guest:Yeah, that must be pretty exciting.
Guest:And then I had to learn how to figure out how to write songs with him.
Guest:That was the real tricky bit for me.
Marc:Yeah, but it must have been fun to get into that groove with him.
Guest:I loved that we would sit for four hours a day, always four hours, unplugged guitars, electric guitars, and sit there and just go da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
Guest:It was like exercising or something, you know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then, okay, now we're going to, let's change it this way.
Guest:And it was fascinating.
Guest:It was wonderful.
Guest:It freaked me out for a while because I didn't know how it could possibly be made into songs, but I did it.
Marc:It must have been another huge kind of building block of your skill set.
Marc:Definitely.
Marc:Definitely.
Guest:I think King Crimson, I look at it now as being, you know, really probably half of my legacy.
Guest:The other half being 25 solo records.
Guest:The other things in between, playing with all the different people, of course, are in there too.
Guest:But those are not your own makings.
Marc:What's your favorite solo record of yours?
Marc:Like, where do you think you really kind of...
Guest:just for my own knowledge so i can go you got to hear the last record elevator yeah i feel like that's i feel like i've gotten better and better and that's where i really want people to start from yeah if someone said hey you got 25 where do i start i'd say start with this one it's the last one and i feel like it's it's worthy oh great uh there are other ones you know i would say it's something like up zap to wah inner revolution uh mr music head yeah
Guest:And some people, this is what bugs me, some people say, yeah, I got your Lone Rhino record and your Twine Bar King record, and I love your solo stuff.
Guest:And I'm like, well, you're only missing 23 then.
Guest:It's a lot of music, folks.
Guest:Dude, it's hard to keep up, man.
Guest:I do understand that.
Guest:I can't keep up with other people's records now at all.
Marc:It's just it's a weird thing, too, when it must be weird for you, you know, when you've been part of such some amazing bands, you know, and defining bands and you defined the sound of some of those bands that people like don't associate you as a solo artist.
Marc:yeah so they you know early on you know when you do the beginning of crimson and then you do the first two solo records the crimson guys are like oh look at the other thing but then like eventually they just keep moving forward with crimson they don't know what you're that you're out there you're churning away you can't really expect people to keep up with everything i i can't do it myself long ago i i actually stopped mark trying to listen to much music of anyone else's because i felt like
Guest:It dilutes what I'm doing, and I've got constant creativity going on in my brain, honestly.
Guest:I've got a studio in my basement of my home, bottom floor.
Guest:I've been living for 30 years on the northeast side of Nashville in a place called Mount Juliet.
Guest:And the first thing we did was put in a studio, and it's the best thing I ever did.
Guest:I bet.
Guest:Of course, you have to.
Guest:That's how I've been able to make so many records of my own or with the Bears or even King Crimson records.
Guest:We did two of those there.
Marc:And what's your relationship with Reznor?
Guest:How did that come about?
Guest:Well, my relationship with Trent was always based on, I think, what I did in David Bowie with David.
Guest:I think he was such a fan of David.
Guest:So one day, I was in L.A.
Guest:doing something else, and I happened to have my gear...
Guest:And my manager called me from Cincinnati and said, I just got a call from this band, Nine Inch Nails.
Guest:I said, yeah, I've heard about them.
Guest:I don't know anything about them.
Guest:And he said, well, they want you to play on their record.
Guest:And I said, well, I've got my gear here.
Guest:Maybe I should.
Guest:He said, I think you really should do this.
Guest:They sell a lot of records.
Guest:But I didn't know their music.
Guest:So I ended up going and doing that first session for Downward Spiral based on that.
Guest:And I loved it.
Guest:I just loved the sounds they were making.
Guest:Trent's sounds and production was so great.
Guest:And I was, I mean, at one point I was crawling around in the back of my gear, plugging things in differently just to find new ways of doing things for him.
Guest:Because that's basically what he would do.
Guest:He would always, on all four records I've done with him, he'd say, okay, I've got this.
Guest:Now listen to it.
Guest:Now is there something you could think you could add to that?
Guest:I go, yeah, I got five things I want to do.
Guest:Okay, go.
Guest:And I go and I record them and I come back and they're like, oh my God, that was great.
Guest:Oh, that's fantastic.
Guest:And then I'll go away, and three months later, the record will come out, and I won't recognize what the heck I played, because by then, they've just done so much to it.
Guest:So that's always been my experience with him.
Marc:That record's insane.
Marc:Those two records, well, you were on four, but The Fragile and Downward Spiral, like, whoa.
Guest:And all of those were done that way, where never was it planned, here's what I want you to play, or try to play this, or anything like that.
Marc:And you were trained.
Marc:That's the Berlin system.
Guest:Yeah, I always brought my game with him, like whatever.
Guest:When Trent would call me and say, I'm going to do a new record, can you come out?
Guest:I'd say, okay, I got this new thing I'm doing, and I got this new trick, and I'm going to do this.
Guest:That's great, man.
Guest:I'd always make sure I put those on his records.
Guest:That's great.
Guest:They belong there.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you did this work.
Marc:I mean, you've done a lot of bits, I guess, with Tony Levin.
Marc:He asked you, why wouldn't you go play with Tony Levin?
Guest:Oh, of course.
Guest:He's the best.
Guest:I love Tony.
Guest:He is the best.
Guest:He's phenomenal.
Marc:And as a person, too, by the way.
Marc:But what do you see as just jobs?
Marc:You know, like Paul Simon has you on two albums.
Marc:Was that just a job?
Guest:Well, I love Paul Simon's work.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And I think he's fantastic, one of our best songwriters ever.
Guest:But it was kind of that because I was just thrown into it.
Guest:I wasn't going to be in his band or anything else.
Guest:It was kind of that.
Guest:And Paul is one of the very few people I ever worked with who was very, very specific with what he wanted me to play.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So he would say, no, I want you to play this.
Guest:Here's the harmony.
Guest:And I'd say, okay.
Guest:But the thing he wanted from me, Laurie Anderson, who I'd also done three records with.
Guest:A few records, right?
Marc:Yeah, I love those records.
Guest:Had talked to Paul and said, if you want to ever have a guitar player who's not a guitar player, you've got to hire this guy, Adrian Blue.
Guest:He does all these sounds.
Guest:So I brought in my synth stuff.
Guest:I was doing guitar synth mostly on that record.
Guest:Graceland.
Guest:This is Graceland.
Guest:Now, I walk in on the first morning and there's just Roy Haley, his engineer and producer for many years, just there and me.
Guest:And Roy said, you want to hear some of the stuff?
Guest:And he puts on some stuff.
Guest:And I thought, oh, my God, Roy is getting a little senile or something.
Guest:This is not...
Guest:Paul Simon's records it was all African stuff yeah you know yeah this isn't Paul Simon right so then Paul arrives and I said Paul you know I'm having a little trouble is you know and he goes oh well here let me show you he he like stands right next to me starts
Guest:Put up the Boy in the Bubble song.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He put up that track, and he said, I've got some of the words.
Guest:He starts singing some of the words in my ear.
Guest:I'm getting chills down my back, right?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And then I go, of course, that's Paul Simon.
Guest:How brilliant.
Guest:You've reinvented yourself, dude.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And it was so wonderful.
Marc:On the back of the sound of the African continent.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And he told me the whole story about how he spent three years there, studied the music, knew what it was all about, and then took it upon himself to make it his own.
Guest:David Byrne did that too.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:With Brazilian music, correct?
Guest:Yeah, I think so.
Guest:Yeah, I don't know.
Guest:I wasn't around for that.
Guest:So anyway, when I worked with Paul, it really was him wanting sounds and me providing the sounds.
Guest:So when you hear the...
Guest:horn section, that originally was my synthesizer guitar parts.
Guest:I had written guitar parts that sounded like a baritone sax synthesizer, a tenor alto, and I played the whole horn section.
Guest:I think they added other horns later.
Marc:So this synthesized guitar business as it evolved out of your original, you know, Jeff Beck seeds.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then you sort of like kind of rest.
Marc:There's literally solos that you do where it sounds like you're wrestling with the fucking guitar.
Yeah.
Guest:Well, I usually am, yeah.
Marc:But there's a whole sort of menu of sounds that you can now make.
Guest:Well, yeah, I call it my vocabulary.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's a go-to thing.
Guest:So throughout my records, especially my solo records, I've threaded all these themes.
Guest:Okay, I've got this sound, and now I can use that here.
Guest:I go to it as orchestration.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like a composer might look at the orchestra and say, okay, I know if I have these two bassoons, do it this way, I can get this sound.
Guest:That's me.
Marc:I've got that.
Marc:Your vocabulary of sound.
Guest:Yeah, but the thing is I'm always trying to change it.
Marc:Yeah, and do you?
Guest:I do.
Guest:I change it all the time because I can't just go back and keep doing the same thing.
Guest:That's my heart.
Guest:I'm a creative force.
Guest:Yeah, so that's exciting.
Guest:Now I'm excited.
Guest:I can't stop doing that.
Marc:Now I've got to get on it and get elevator as soon as you leave and get in it.
Guest:I brought it for you.
Guest:You did?
Guest:Of course, yeah.
Guest:Oh, great.
Guest:I brought a CD of it.
Guest:Oh, that's great.
Guest:A couple of them.
Guest:You can put them in your closet.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:I'll keep them.
Guest:And they have my artwork, so you can see my artwork in your closet.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You don't release on vinyl?
Guest:Not yet, because it's too right now.
Guest:It's just taking forever, and I couldn't wait any longer.
Guest:I started making Elevator during the COVID lockdown, and it was done two years before I could release it.
Guest:So I was saying, I'm not going to wait another year for vinyl.
Guest:I want this out now.
Marc:I wrote it.
Marc:I can get it on Apple Music, right?
Guest:Absolutely, yeah.
Guest:You can get it all over the place.
Marc:So with the Laurie Anderson record, she must have been just sort of like, go for it.
Guest:absolutely another one of those i think after a little bit of time i think people just came to me with that in mind because they're like you know you you were a guy you brought in your bag of tricks you're not asking me to come in and play rhythm guitar much so what how does william shatner happen
Guest:That was through his producer and player, Ben Folds.
Guest:They were in Nashville doing his record.
Guest:Four in the afternoon, I get a call from Ben, and he says, we're doing a late night session tonight with William Shatner, Henry Rollins, and me.
Guest:Were you interested?
Guest:I said, are you kidding?
Guest:What do I have to do?
Guest:We'll just bring your stuff over around 10 o'clock.
Guest:We went till five in the morning.
Guest:And it was the best session, and all of those guys were just going wild.
Guest:At five in the morning, William and Henry were running around like little kids, riffing off of each other.
Guest:Oh, that's hilarious.
Guest:And it was just amazing, man.
Guest:I just had the best time.
Guest:Oh, that's fun, man.
Guest:So all I did was, you know, hey, can you make up this kind of thing?
Guest:Sure, okay.
Yeah.
Guest:And I'm going to watch these guys run around.
Marc:I loved it.
Marc:So fun.
Marc:So now playing with Jerry on these gigs.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You're going to be here in LA at the Wiltern?
Marc:Wiltern, yeah.
Marc:How much prep did you have to do with Jerry?
Marc:It's just the two years and a band.
Marc:It's a full band.
Marc:Oh, okay.
Guest:Yeah, it's a 10 or 11-piece band.
Guest:I mean, it used to be a band called Turquoise.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Jerry told me about it.
Guest:Two of the members left.
Guest:And my bass player from my trio, Julie Slick, has now taken the place of the bass player.
Guest:But, yeah, we've got a three-piece horn section, two backup girl singers.
Guest:It's a big deal.
Guest:It's a big deal.
Guest:We've got at least three or four keyboards.
Guest:You do on most of the singing?
Guest:Like three or four guys who play...
Guest:We share it because we don't really want to appear to be, oh, I'm trying to be David Byrne.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So Jerry will do some, I'll do some.
Guest:The baritone saxophone player, Josh, does some.
Marc:But you do a couple of Baloo songs too, no?
Guest:We only do Thala Hoon Jinjit from King Crimson.
Guest:I thought that was more appropriate for that band because of the size, and I wanted to use the horn sections and the percussion and stuff.
Guest:It really fits that song well.
Guest:We do a real cool version of it.
Guest:It's more almost Talking Heads meets King Crimson version, really, truly.
Guest:But yeah, I think I sing out of 15 or 16 songs, I think five.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And Jerry seems great.
Marc:I've had a great time with him.
Marc:Oh, I love Jerry.
Guest:Great guy.
Guest:He's great.
Guest:Jerry has really been helpful in my career a lot of times.
Guest:He's the one who really got me on Remain in Light and really got me on the tour, Talking Heads Tour.
Guest:And we've kept in touch over the years and seen each other a lot of times.
Guest:He produced the record, for example, God Shuffled His Feet, that record, and called me in to play on that song, you know, so...
Guest:We've bounced ideas back and forth.
Guest:Whose record was that?
Guest:Crash Test Dummies.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:Yeah, big record.
Guest:And do you stay in touch with Eno?
Guest:A little bit, but I don't really have that kind of relationship where I feel free to just call him with nothing.
Guest:But I did talk to him a couple of years back, and it was a nice conversation.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We were trying to do something, a technical...
Guest:streaming kind of service thing fell apart before it even got started.
Marc:See, he's another guy who I love, but at some point it's like, oh my God, he's done 19 records since the last record I bought.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, what am I going to do?
Guest:Yeah, you can't keep up with it.
Guest:I understand.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:His records are great.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Another one I like is saying like that is Andy Partridge with XTC.
Guest:He's another friend of mine.
Guest:He's just prolific as heck.
Marc:Yeah, he's another guy who's mad at me for interviewing Todd Rundgren.
Guest:Oh, Todd Rundgren.
Guest:Let's talk about Todd.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:did you ever work with him yeah i just did uh uh his new solo record me and i wrote a new song together co-wrote the song called puzzle when's that coming out it's out oh it is it's it's out puzzle you got to hear it it's very good okay so todd called me one day and he said i'm doing this record where i'm gonna finish songs with other people okay co-write with people by doing it that way you have any unfinished songs yeah said i got are you kidding yeah
Guest:How many do you want?
Guest:He said, well, send me four.
Guest:I said, okay, I sent him four.
Guest:He calls me back eventually and said, okay, I want to work with this one here.
Guest:And I had already done the music and the verses of it, didn't even have a title yet.
Guest:He said, I'm going to do the rest of the, I'll do the choruses and the rest, some more of the music and produce it.
Guest:And he did.
Guest:And I loved what he did with it because the original song was kind of down.
Guest:It's, you know, people struggling and that kind of imagery.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he said, you know, it's kind of a down thing.
Guest:I'm going to make it uplifting for you.
Guest:I said, good luck, buddy.
Guest:But it's exactly what he did.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:So I was really so pleased with it.
Guest:It's great.
Guest:So it's on his new record.
Guest:Oh, that's great.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:All right, man.
Guest:It was great talking to you.
Guest:You know, you're wonderful.
Marc:I appreciate it, man.
Marc:You too.
Guest:I really are.
Guest:And I've had a lot of people, fans and friends of mine, say they've listened to you for years.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:You're a very popular man.
Marc:Well, thank you.
Marc:And I was honored to talk to you.
Marc:I was concerned about keeping up because, like, you know, I know there's some deep crimson people.
Marc:And I always worry about the deep crimson people if I'm going to talk to you.
Marc:But I think we did all right.
Guest:I must have said a million words by now about Frank and King.
Guest:It was all great.
Guest:You know, we touched on everything.
Guest:So that was great.
Guest:Well, thanks, man.
Guest:Well, thanks, Mark.
Marc:Okay, there you go.
Marc:Adrian and Jerry Harrison are performing songs from Talking Heads Remain and Write next week at the Wiltern Theater in L.A.
Marc:Get tickets at thewiltern.net.
Marc:You can get Adrian's albums at adrianbalud.net.
Marc:There's a lot of them.
Marc:Dig in, man.
Marc:You're never going to hear somebody else that sounds like that.
Marc:And what an influence he's had.
Marc:And what an influence has been had on him.
Marc:All right, look, you guys, hang out for a second.
Marc:Okay, look, people, on Thursday, Sam Rockwell is back on the show.
Marc:He was on back in 2016, episode 695.
Marc:You can go listen to that now for free.
Marc:It's available in the free feed.
Marc:Richard Linklater was also on that episode.
Marc:There was actually a lot for me and Sam to talk about since the last time he was on.
Marc:He won an Oscar.
Marc:He was in American Buffalo on Broadway, which I saw.
Marc:We made The Bad Guys Together, a number one box office movie.
Marc:So it was good reconnecting with Sammy.
Marc:This week, I'm in Boulder, Colorado at the Boulder Theater on Thursday, September 22nd, and Fort Collins, Colorado at the Lincoln Center on Friday, September 23rd.
Marc:I'm in Toronto, Ontario at the Queen Elizabeth Theater on September 30th and October 1st.
Marc:Then I'm in Livermore, California at the Bankhead Theater on October 6th.
Marc:And Carmel by the Sea, California at the Sunset Center on October 7th.
Marc:I'll be in London, England at the Bloomsbury Theater Saturday and Sunday, October 22nd and 23rd.
Marc:And I'll be in Dublin, Ireland at Vicar Street Wednesday, October 26th.
Marc:Then in November and December in Oklahoma City.
Marc:Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Long Beach, California, Eugene, Oregon, Bend, Oregon, Asheville, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee.
Marc:And my HBO special taping at Town Hall in New York City is on Thursday, December 8th.
Marc:Go to wtfpod.com slash tour for all dates and ticket info.
Marc:And before we go, friends, here's some familiar guitar.
Guest:Music
guitar solo
Guest:.
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guitar solo
Marc:boomer lives monkey and la fonda cat ams everywhere