Episode 1597 - Dwight Yoakam
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck, buddies?
Marc:What the fuck, Knicks?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I'm Marc Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast.
Marc:Welcome to it.
Marc:Looks like, I don't know what happens every year.
Marc:I guess it's an end-of-the-year thing, but I get these...
Marc:Little sort of message requests and DM sort of things from random people, fans, showing me the listings of their ranked favorite podcasts.
Marc:And we're still up there, at least for some people, which is nice.
Marc:It's a long time.
Marc:We've been doing this a long time.
Marc:I don't even know how many.
Marc:I just know it's a lot.
Marc:And we keep churning them out for you, for your enjoyment.
Marc:Every Monday and Thursday, a new show for you.
Marc:And we're doing even more stuff for bonus stuff.
Marc:On the A-Cast there, it's a lot of talking for a lot of years to a lot of different people and just out of my own brain.
Marc:And today on the show, I talked to Dwight Yoakam.
Marc:Now, most people know who Dwight Yoakam is.
Marc:He's a singer, songwriter and actor.
Marc:But he also turns out to be quite the music historian and raconteur.
Marc:He's had multiple number one albums and number one singles, multiple Grammy wins.
Marc:He's also an actor who's been in movies like Sling Blade, Panic Room, Logan Lucky.
Marc:We talked about none of those.
Marc:But he's got a new album out called Brighter Days.
Marc:And I never know.
Marc:Sometimes people come around and I have opportunities to talk to them.
Marc:And if I have interest, I'll talk to them.
Marc:But when you're dealing with a musician...
Marc:A lot of times, guys have been around a long time, and maybe they were part of other musical outfits, musical bands, whatever.
Marc:They're still working away.
Marc:All this to say...
Marc:That Dwight's new record, I listened to it and right out of the gate, I was like, holy fuck.
Marc:Every song on there is a banger, as they say.
Marc:Just really fully realized.
Marc:Songwriting is good.
Marc:The guitar sound is great.
Marc:The band is great.
Marc:It's called Brighter Days.
Marc:And I was so excited to just turn that record on or listen to it on my phone and
Marc:And just be like, holy fuck, he's really still doing it.
Marc:So it was a pleasure to talk to him.
Marc:And it wasn't, you know, usually I can sort of find a way in through the new work.
Marc:But with Dwight, this dude likes to talk.
Marc:This is one of those rare episodes where I had to interject just to make sure I was still in the fucking room.
Marc:Because it was very engaging.
Marc:There was a lot of stuff kind of...
Marc:A lot of things I didn't know.
Marc:He was very sort of involved in sort of really kind of exploring and validating the California country scene and sound.
Marc:It was a great conversation.
Marc:Then later in the conversation, we got to talking about Credence.
Marc:And actually, after the talk, we sat on my couch in my house and listened to a Cosmos factory.
Marc:on my fancy system.
Marc:I don't know what I'm thinking.
Marc:I mean, he's Dwight Yoakam.
Marc:He spends his life in a studio and in music.
Marc:And I'm like, oh, you got to hear my speakers.
Marc:You got to hear my speakers, man.
Marc:And we listened to Up Around the Bend.
Marc:Great guy.
Marc:Good conversation.
Marc:Also, Brian Jones, the mug maker, the potter, still has some cap mugs for sale that you can get at wtfmugs.co.
Marc:These are the mugs I give to my guests, handmade by Brian Jones.
Marc:Get them as gifts for WTF fans in your life or as a treat for yourself.
Marc:Again, that's at wtfmugs.co.
Marc:Let's run down some dates.
Marc:I'm back at Largo in L.A.
Marc:on Friday, December 13th for a comedy and music show, Me and the Band.
Marc:Sacramento, California, Crest Theater, Friday, January 10th.
Marc:Napa, California at the Uptown Theater on Saturday, January 11th.
Marc:I'm in Fort Collins, Colorado at Lincoln Center Performance Hall.
Marc:on Friday, January 17th.
Marc:Then Boulder, Colorado at Boulder Theater on Saturday, January 18th.
Marc:I'll be in Santa Barbara, California at the Libero Theater on Thursday, January 30th.
Marc:Then San Luis Obispo, California at the Fremont Center on Friday, January 31st.
Marc:Monterey, California at the Golden State Theater on Saturday, February 1st.
Marc:You can go to wtfpod.com.
Marc:for all my dates and tickets.
Marc:And there's a lot of other stuff coming up.
Marc:I mean, I'm going to be, yeah, I mean, I'm going out there to some interesting markets that I didn't do with this hour yet.
Marc:I mean, I'm going to like Iowa city, Des Moines, Kansas city, Asheville, North Carolina, Nashville, Tennessee, Louisville, Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, Oklahoma city, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Durham, Charlotte, Charleston,
Marc:skokie joliet i'll be in grand rapids i'll be at the traverse city uh comedy festival i believe in april and this is all moving towards a uh a special taping that it looks like we're going to do in may here in new york city i won't announce exactly we're still working out the details on that but i did go check out a venue and
Marc:So that's all.
Marc:That's what we're converging on.
Marc:Like, as you remember, I was doing this new hour and then I got kind of sidelined by the TV gigs and the movie gig.
Marc:And now I'm back at it, picking up places that that hasn't seen this work.
Marc:And certainly it's different than what I was doing whenever I started doing it.
Marc:But the the point we're moving towards is another HBO special.
Marc:And, you know, that'll be it.
Marc:That'll be it.
Marc:There comes a point in one's like, well, that's what I think.
Marc:You know, I don't know why I put this on myself, why I think that way.
Marc:I mean, I am old.
Marc:I've done all right.
Marc:I'm happy about where I'm at and what I've achieved.
Marc:And there's some part of me that thinks like, you know, what do I got to keep going for?
Marc:You know, I've never been really a money guy.
Marc:Turned out I did all right.
Marc:I don't know why I'm talking in the past tense here, but I think about it a lot.
Marc:My audience is getting older with me, and I don't know what the future holds, but I know this is what is happening.
Marc:Next year is going to be a busy year.
Marc:There's a lot of things going on.
Marc:A lot of changes are happening in the world and perhaps in myself.
Marc:So we'll see.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I don't know why I bother thinking about this.
Marc:Why can't I just be in the present in this room?
Marc:Huh?
Marc:Why do I choose my head and projections and my phone and speculation and distractions over just sitting with me?
Marc:Huh?
Marc:Come on.
Marc:What is it?
Marc:I'm going to play a show tonight here in New York.
Marc:It's a sort of...
Marc:I don't know how this works, but it's going to be one of these music comedy shows that I do, like the ones I do at Largo.
Marc:And I just, you know, I should be thrilled.
Marc:And I am to a degree, but I want to do a good job.
Marc:It's going to be me and Favino.
Marc:Maddie Wiener is going to do a set.
Marc:And Namesh Patel is going to do a set.
Marc:And I'm going to do some comedy.
Marc:We're going to do about, I guess, four songs, me and Jimmy and his guys.
Marc:Adam Menkoff on bass, he was a genius.
Marc:Sean Pelton, the great drummer.
Marc:And so we're going to do, I think we're going to do Steppin' Out.
Marc:And then we're going to do Going, Going, Gone, the Dylan song.
Marc:Then we're going to do What Goes On, the Velvet Underground song.
Marc:Then Jimmy wants to do Run, Run, Rudolph.
Marc:And then Kingfish is coming out.
Marc:He's going to do a couple.
Marc:The Thrill is Gone and Hey Joe.
Marc:And then we're all going to play Killing for the Hell and Wolf song.
Marc:And it's going to be in a room with like 150 people.
Marc:It's like this small event space.
Marc:It's mostly invitation only.
Marc:It's going to be pretty exciting.
Marc:There was a point there where they showed me the lineup and they put Kingfish in the middle.
Marc:I was like, why would I even play after Kingfish?
Marc:I'm trying to get by on the guitar here and do a little singing.
Marc:You can put Kingfish in the middle of the show.
Marc:What's the point of even picking up a guitar after that?
Marc:So now he's going to close big.
Marc:But I'm nervous.
Marc:I'm excited.
Marc:I want it to be a good time.
Marc:I'd like my brain to be able to just think, hey, this will be a good time, not, oh, fuck.
Marc:Man, I hope I nail this.
Marc:Jesus, I hope I nail this.
Marc:What's wrong with my brain?
Marc:So podcasts, so filling your head.
Marc:So what about reading?
Marc:I guess if you were listening at the beginning here, I...
Marc:I brought that up.
Marc:I was talking, you know, I come to New York, not so much these days.
Marc:And I went out last night with my buddy, the brilliant novelist, Sam Lipsight, my dear friend, Sam.
Marc:And he was doing a part in a reading.
Marc:He was part of a group that was reading pieces from a book, a collection by Mark Lehner.
Marc:Now, Mark Lehner is one of the great satirists, one of the great envelope pushers of language and ideas.
Marc:He's got this new book out, A Shimmering Serrated Monster.
Marc:It's like it's the Mark Lehner reader.
Marc:My buddy Sam wrote the introduction.
Marc:But, you know, Lehner's done some amazing books.
Marc:My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, Et Tu Babe is a great book.
Marc:Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit, Sugar Frosted Nutsack, which is a novel.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Like, I just think that if you read him, you're going to get a fucking kick out of him because he's just, you know, he's hardcore, raw, transgressive,
Marc:you know, envelope pushing satire, you know, both in ideas and language.
Marc:And the thing was, is like, we do this thing and there was, you know, it was a nicely attended event, friends, family, other writers read from the book and we all went out and I talked to Lehner a bit.
Marc:I hadn't talked to him in a long time.
Marc:I interviewed him years ago on, uh, on air America.
Marc:Cause I always like at two babe was sort of a, a mind blowing book for me, but this is one of the great writers.
Marc:And, and, and I got talking to Sam and,
Marc:And a publisher who was there just about, you know, how do you get people's attention to focus on books?
Marc:How do you get them to focus on anything when there's so much around?
Marc:And then I believe maybe the publisher said that people are listening to podcasts more than they're reading books.
Marc:And I thought to myself, oh, fuck, I guess I guess I'm partially to blame for that.
Marc:But I guess this is just a pitch.
Marc:You know, read a book.
Marc:Will you read a Mark Lehner book?
Marc:Read a Sam Whipsight book.
Marc:Pick up a book.
Marc:I'll do it if you do it.
Marc:What do you say?
Marc:Deal?
Marc:All right, look, Dwight Yoakam is here, and we had a great conversation.
Marc:I enjoyed it immensely.
Marc:He just released his first album of new music in nine years.
Marc:It's called Brighter Days, and you can get it wherever you get your music, and it's a great record.
Marc:This is me talking to Dwight Yoakam.
Marc:I've lived here a while.
Marc:I'm from New Mexico, Jersey genetically, but I grew up in New Mexico.
Guest:Grew up out in New Mexico.
Guest:Your family moved out there when you were a kid?
Guest:Yeah, you know, I was there.
Marc:Were they at university?
Marc:No, my dad was in the Air Force in Alaska.
Marc:I was going to tell you.
Marc:Oh, see.
Marc:In Anchorage.
Marc:And then when he got out, he's a doc, so it was kind of a boom town.
Marc:And a buddy of his had moved to Albuquerque.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:So I moved there.
Marc:I was about third grade through high school.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:He's still there.
Guest:Were you in Alaska before that?
Marc:Yeah, two years.
Marc:That's wild.
Marc:In Anchorage.
Guest:That's insane.
Guest:What was that?
Guest:I mean, you were probably six, seven years old.
Guest:That's right.
Marc:But, you know, you have memories.
Guest:Oh, no, no, no, no.
Guest:Six or seven.
Guest:That's a big imprint.
Guest:Yeah, it's happening.
Marc:Well, you feel the weight of that sky up there.
Marc:I feel like you get closer to the top of the world, you can kind of feel it.
Marc:Oh, no, the curve, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, and I feel— Northern lights, all of it.
Marc:There was that, but I remember mostly there was a huge earthquake in 63.
Marc:There was a big tsunami that hit up there, right?
Marc:Well, I don't know when that happened, but there was a massive earthquake.
Marc:In the late 50s, anyway.
Marc:Yeah, and they hadn't quite pulled it all together.
Marc:We could walk out to the inlet, and if you walked along the inlet, you'd get to where it hits the sea.
Marc:And I just remember those ice flows, just chunks of ice.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:This was Anchorage?
Marc:Yeah, Anchorage.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:I remember a few things.
Marc:You ever go to Fairbanks?
Marc:I went to Fairbanks to do a show as a grown-up, and it's interesting when you fly into Alaska because you're like, holy fuck, there's nothing up here.
Marc:No, there's nothing.
Guest:I've never been to Alaska.
Guest:I've been to the Northwest Territory of Canada, which is also— Same.
Guest:There's no roads.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The roads stop when you get in northern Alberta.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There is a dirt road and then there's no road.
Marc:It's like, yeah, tundra.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like it's going like I've gone.
Marc:I've done shows in Winnipeg.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you fly into Winnipeg.
Marc:You're like, what the fuck?
Marc:There's nothing out here.
Marc:I've got a shot of of the exterior temperature.
Guest:I forget what it was.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What amount below one day when we were touring up and we're in Winnipeg.
Guest:But I'm fascinated with Alaska, you know, in terms of just the edge of the earth.
Guest:Never been there.
Guest:Someday.
Guest:Because they've offered shows.
Guest:It just didn't work out, you know, in the moment.
Marc:Where would you go?
Marc:Fairbanks, Anchorage, or Juneau?
Guest:I mean, what are the options?
Guest:Well, usually Anchorage is where it's been.
Marc:I have no concept of what it's like now.
Marc:Fairbanks.
Guest:It's pretty small, Fairbanks.
Guest:As a kid, I was infatuated with Johnny Horton.
Guest:My first hit ever was a remake of a Johnny Horton song, Honky Tonk Man.
Guest:Honky Tonk Man, yeah.
Guest:He was a history major in college or whatever.
Guest:Johnny Horton wrote the theme song to a movie that John Wayne did, North to Alaska.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Big Sam left Seattle in the year of 92 with George Pratt, his partner.
Guest:And he would do this yodel break.
Guest:And his brother Billy too, they crossed the Yukon River, found the bonanza gold about the whole Yukon's for all the gold rush.
Guest:It's a gold rush song, yeah.
Guest:In Alaska.
Guest:Beneath that old white mountain, just a little southeast.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So I started listening to this.
Guest:And then when I was older, I became infatuated with maps.
Guest:My dad decided, and he was a master mechanic, not an academic in any way.
Guest:Cars?
Guest:Yep.
Guest:But he had been in the Army.
Guest:He had a half a career done, like 10 years, right at.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was a sergeant in the Army.
Guest:I came along, he used to blame me for getting out of the Army.
Guest:But I'd say, he goes, you know, I'd have been retired.
Guest:But now he look at me, hadn't been because like you, because he couldn't take my mother and myself to Korea, even though the war was still, it was still, you know, to this day, the Korean War is not officially over.
Guest:It's a truce.
Guest:That's why the DMZ up there.
Marc:So like mid-late 50s?
Guest:I was born in 56, so by 57.
Guest:The act of war had stopped at the end of 53, early 54.
Guest:You don't hear about it much.
Guest:It was a pretty bloody mess.
Guest:Oh, it was a nightmare.
Guest:John Prine wrote a great song called Hello in There.
Marc:Oh, yeah, it's the best.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You've heard that.
Guest:Oh, yeah, of course.
Guest:Then the guy on the bench talking about we lost, I forget the son's name, in the Korean War.
Guest:We still don't know what for.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because that was the beginning of wars that had no meaning.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:No end.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then the next was, of course, Vietnam.
Guest:Vietnam, yeah.
Guest:The precursor was Korea.
Guest:And so my dad ended up there.
Guest:He met my mom, thank God, because otherwise there's no me.
Guest:Met my mother.
Guest:Where, in Kentucky?
Guest:No.
Guest:And by that point in Ohio, because funny enough, politics aside, J.D.
Guest:Vance wrote a book called Hillbilly Elegy that he...
Guest:He flattered me by using a song that I wrote called Read and Write in Route 23 about the cultural exchange that happened post-World War II.
Guest:It was happening before that, but really when the coal mines began shutting down in southeast Kentucky, West Virginia, deep southern Virginia and western Virginia, and they were mined out a lot of places, though they didn't have work.
Guest:Your mom comes from?
Guest:Coal mining down the hills.
Guest:I was born there.
Guest:Her folks?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Generations back.
Guest:I mean, you know, hundreds of years.
Guest:Lumber before that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And my dad's side, actually, my great-grandfather came out of Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, into the Ohio Valley.
Guest:But that river valley spawned, you know, the Ohio River Valley next to the Mississippi and the Missouri.
Guest:It's one of the largest rivers, you know, in North America.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it really spawned a lot of culture, you know, Cincinnati, the river towns that were there of industry and so forth.
Guest:So I was at church one day and this fellow who was also a Kentuckian, I used to say we ran out of gas and didn't make it to Detroit, where Iggy, who I'm sitting on is from, the cats up in Detroit, there were all these transplanted
Guest:You know, hillbillies, they were calling.
Guest:And there was huge country music out of Detroit.
Guest:And my original producer, Pete Anderson, came out of there.
Guest:And his father had come from Western Kentucky because they would go look for jobs there.
Guest:John Prine's family, he wrote Paradise about his family returning to their home place on the weekends in Western Kentucky because they'd moved to Chicago looking for jobs.
Guest:They'd looked for work.
Marc:So what kind of—who were the big country acts out of Detroit and Chicago at the time?
Well—
Guest:I'm trying to think, well, recently Billy Strings came out of Michigan.
Marc:I know, yeah, he's great.
Marc:I had him on.
Guest:Fantastic.
Marc:Unbelievable.
Guest:But again...
Guest:His legacy, the lineage, if you read Malcolm McDowell's great book, Outliers, he talks about this in a chapter, that they did a double-blind test at the University of Michigan, setting up a, quote, psych experiment that you could get paid as a student to go participate in, in what the experiment started in the hallway, where they had a big lineman from the football team out there with a file cabinet blocking your way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, if you pull out a drawer like, oh, I'm sorry, man.
Guest:And, you know, just to see if they got a reaction out of these young guys who had a background that was even two generations or so more removed from the South.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the behavior, the psychological behavior, they would ask them a series of questions.
Guest:To prove what?
Guest:To prove how they reacted to social circumstances and what they took umbrage to.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And he talks in a chapter about the feuding culture in Southeast Kentucky and where around the world that the feuding culture goes on, right?
Guest:And it's usually where the topography or the geography is not conducive to agrarian culture, where it's herding culture.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Scotland, Ireland, Wales, the Mediterranean crest, Greece, you get clandestine behavior because it's a herd culture and you can't let the smallest umbrage kind of go on unaddressed.
Guest:Like a guy bumps you at a bar and
Guest:It may be a perimeter kind of probe to see if you're vulnerable to him coming and stealing your sheep that night.
Marc:Territorial.
Guest:Yeah, with taking what's yours.
Marc:And that's where Billy comes from?
Guest:Billy Bob.
Guest:Billy Strings.
Guest:Billy Strings comes out of southeast Kentucky, his stepdad.
Guest:I mean, I heard that album, and it was like—
Guest:there's pure Eastern Kentucky in this.
Guest:And then I started reading about his background and how they'd moved back, I think, to Moorhead, Kentucky, that area, which is Route 23, which I was born on, Pikeville, which is the furthest city down that road.
Marc:So when you're coming up, like where your folks settled in Kentucky... Well, we moved to Ohio.
Guest:We moved across the river.
Guest:My dad came back.
Guest:And after I was born, he...
Guest:jettisoned his military career, which he lamented the rest of my life.
Guest:I would have been retired.
Guest:And I said, you'd have been in Vietnam.
Guest:He goes, well, maybe, maybe.
Guest:You had a lot of stripes.
Guest:They're going to send you first.
Guest:Anyway, I mean, it was all a bit of teasing.
Guest:But then Columbus, which is South Central Ohio.
Guest:That's where you grew up?
Guest:Yeah, principally, yeah.
Guest:But I used to say we were taillight babies.
Guest:So my mother...
Guest:She was a key punch operator.
Guest:She ended up running a data center for a manufacturing company that would fire parts up the road to Detroit.
Guest:In Columbus.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Auto parts?
Guest:Yeah, a large manufacturing factory.
Guest:But she had worked her way up being a key punch operator, a computer operator, 50s and 60s, right?
Guest:You know, big old UNIVAC things from a James Bond movie.
Sure.
Guest:And there was a guy that worked with her that went to our church, another Kentucky transplant, because the whole, this migratory kind of move that, and Billy Strings' family comes into Michigan out of that.
Guest:I used to joke and say, we ran out of gas halfway to Detroit.
Guest:You know, it's like, we actually had some earlier family there that they would land, you know, the girls in my mother's family.
Guest:My aunt,
Guest:was married to my father's older brother, my mother's older sister.
Guest:That's how they met.
Guest:So it's a pretty tight family.
Guest:Well, that part, and they never had children.
Guest:So my sister and brother and I were, and I'm the oldest, and I kind of had to find my own way.
Guest:So where does music start?
Guest:The earliest memory I have, singing toward a record player with my aunt and my mom, wedged between them on a little couch, singing to Hank Lachlan's Send Me the Pillars You Dream On.
Guest:That's the first musical memory I have.
Guest:And we were literally hollering it back at the record player.
Guest:Split stereo, earliest snap-off thing.
Guest:And they were playing that record.
Guest:That band, that wasn't even stereo.
Guest:That was mono, actually.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Because it was late 50s, maybe 1960s.
Guest:Wasn't a console?
Guest:No, not at that point.
Guest:They had the color TV consoles later.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That piece of... Yeah.
Guest:Mike Nesmith told me one time from the Monkees.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was a friend, and he said something really, you know, sentiently funny.
Guest:He said...
Guest:Well, you know, Dwight, what they say, because he was film producer in the 80s and he did Repo Man.
Guest:And he said, you know what they say?
Guest:They say theater is life, film is art, and television is furniture.
Guest:This is in the 90s when it was still furniture.
Marc:Well, he's an interesting character that kind of factors into the new country.
Guest:Well, all of it, yes.
Marc:What was those albums?
Guest:First National Band.
Guest:First National Band.
Guest:He had the full-on nudie suits.
Guest:Chris Hillman from The Birds and I, who's a friend.
Guest:You did one of his songs on the new record.
Guest:Yes, he's a co-conspirator.
Guest:He does the burrito stand on my channel, The Bakersfield Beat, on Sirius Channel.
Marc:Well, he was a burritos guy and then the birds guy.
Guest:Well, he was birds first.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was a bluegrass kid out of Southern California.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Out of down north San Diego County.
Guest:Rancho Santa Fe, way down when it was just this outpost down there along the coast.
Marc:But so you start, though, like when you start playing your first, like when did you start to learn guitar?
Marc:Where was that happening?
Marc:I was...
Guest:Well, first shots of me, my dad brought back from Korea, which is what we were talking about earlier.
Guest:I said, I digress.
Guest:I took you off on tangents.
Guest:I started with you in Alaska.
Marc:Alaska.
Marc:We went to Alaska through Michigan, through Kentucky, the Ohio River, Cincinnati.
Guest:Well, we started with... Yeah.
Marc:Why you like Alaska.
Marc:Or why you're fascinated with it.
Guest:No, we started with you coming from New Mexico.
Guest:So that's like Tom T. Hall had a great song title, That's How I Got to Memphis.
Guest:It's sort of what this interview is like.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And that's how I got to Memphis.
Guest:Tom T. Hall.
Guest:Tom T. Hall.
Guest:He's a good one.
Guest:He's a great writer.
Guest:A Kentuckian.
Guest:And his...
Guest:Weird connection.
Guest:His brother worked at the factory my mother ran the data center for.
Guest:What was that big hit he had?
Guest:Well, he had... Well, Harbor Valley PTA he wrote.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah, but then he had one, a slow one.
Guest:Well, he wrote, I love little baby ducks, old pickup trucks, slow-moving trains, and rain.
Guest:Great writer.
Guest:Great storyteller writer.
Guest:He...
Guest:Do you know him?
Guest:No, I never met Tom.
Guest:In passing, once.
Guest:So you're growing up in Columbus.
Guest:By that point, yeah.
Guest:And when do you start playing?
Guest:Well...
Guest:Two years old, I'm trying.
Guest:I'm carrying this.
Marc:Oh, you got the guitar from Korea?
Guest:I got a K guitar that my dad brings home from the service.
Guest:Are they made in Korea?
Guest:No, no, but he ended up with it vis-a-vis somebody that probably owed a gambling debt or whatever, you know.
Guest:Like one of those ones with the painted on pick guard?
Guest:No, no, no, no.
Guest:It was a real guitar, F-hole, you know, F-hole K. Like my dad had a Harmony with the F-holes.
Guest:Well, yeah, Harmony, but K's, maybe slightly better than Harmony.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:K guitar.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I had that, and all I wanted to do was, you know,
Guest:I emulate everything I was hearing, and I've got a shot of me in my box set from years ago.
Guest:My granny, Earlene Tibbs, holding the top of it because I could barely hold it.
Guest:And I eventually, when I was about three or four years, tripped and fell and crushed it.
Guest:Broke it.
Guest:So the next time that I actually get a real guitar, and I really didn't play it.
Guest:I was just banging around trying to.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I was in third grade, and all I wanted, I had, you know, pestered him that whole summer and the fall.
Guest:Who, your dad?
Guest:Guitar for Christmas.
Guest:Guitar for Christmas.
Guest:What'd you get?
Guest:Santa Claus.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He pawned a shotgun, the only good gun he ever really had, and bought me a guitar.
Guest:Because he ran a Texaco station at that point.
Guest:But he had been a master mechanic, trained in the Army.
Guest:So that's a big deal.
Marc:Big deal to let go of the shotgun.
Guest:Huge deal, actually.
Guest:As I looked back, it gets to me.
Guest:You know, as a kid, my mom would say to me at one point when I was, you know, maybe—
Guest:you know, bucking my dad or doing whatever, she'd say, you know, she would bring that up to me.
Guest:The shotgun.
Guest:That you have a guitar only because your father, you know, wanted you... As an adult...
Guest:When I think about it and my heart, you know, you know, cause who he was and the kind of guy was, he was not, you know, uh, he was a good guy.
Guest:Neither of my parents, thank God for me, were malicious.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:And I realized as an adult how lucky that part of my life was.
Guest:They weren't geniuses, weren't rocket scientists.
Guest:But decent people.
Guest:Really decent.
Guest:I really, really, really thank fate for delivering me there and not somewhere else as I grew to know other people and their experiences today.
Guest:As a young adult, you start... Oh, you're hearing stuff.
Guest:You start to know, and especially over the years.
Guest:Yeah, anyway.
Marc:Well, so that's a touching thing.
Marc:He made that sacrifice.
Guest:Well, so anyway... Where's that song?
Guest:Eight years old.
Guest:Well, I... I haven't actually written about that.
Marc:It seems like a natural country tag.
Marc:My dad pawned a shotgun.
Guest:I never really literally did...
Guest:I wrote something – the first thing I ever wrote when I was about eight years old was called How Far Is Heaven?
Guest:And the first line – because we were watching every evening when we'd sit down to supper.
Guest:Walter Cronkite would be on in the living room still doing the nightly news.
Guest:And the first images of the Vietnam War were coming in on night.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:rice paddies, helicopters, and guys dying.
Guest:And I wrote this song, a fictitious account, and I didn't really finish it.
Guest:It was a verse and a bit of a chorus.
Guest:It was called, How Far Is Heaven?
Guest:And it started with, my daddy got killed over in Vietnam.
Guest:And here's just a few things that I don't know.
Guest:So hillbilly waltz.
Guest:And so I began, and my father was a little disturbed.
Guest:I would write something about a father.
Guest:He'd sit in my, he'd say,
Guest:What do you think?
Guest:He wanted me to get killed?
Guest:I didn't go.
Guest:You're a songwriter.
Guest:The concept of that was a little evasive for him to grasp.
Guest:At that point, looking at me at eight, just learning a few chords.
Guest:What music inspired you to write that?
Guest:The hillbilly stuff that I grew up hearing...
Guest:A lot of dead people in Hillbilly Stone.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Darkness in the hollers down there.
Guest:But when we crossed one of the covers that Billy Strings did, I think we stepped down, was Stonewalls and Steel Bars and You on My Mind.
Guest:It's on that album that they did together.
Guest:And the first time I ever heard that was Keith Whitley singing it with Ralph Stanley and his band.
Guest:He and Ricky Skaggs were young teenage members of the Ralph Stanley Clinch Mountain Boys.
Guest:And it's a haunted song about a guy in prison.
Guest:Anyway.
Marc:It's interesting that you can, if you just change a tone or a tempo, sometimes the difference between haunting and upbeat is just a beat.
Guest:Well, and in bluegrass music, you have both going on simultaneously often.
Guest:You'll have something, a very dark subject matter with an up-tempo, you know, go down, you Knoxville girl, where a guy murders this woman because she's, you know, been no good to him or something, you know, treated him badly or betrayed him.
Guest:And it's up-tempo.
Guest:Go down, go down, you knock the girl.
Guest:It's like they murder her.
Guest:It's kind of a happy dance tune until you start listening to what goes on.
Guest:It's like, damn, you killed that woman, didn't you?
Guest:It's like down by the banks of the Ohio is a famous folk.
Guest:I asked my love to take a walk, to take a walk, just a little walk.
Guest:Down by where the waters flow, down by the banks of the Ohio.
Guest:Did he kill her?
Guest:Yeah, he kills her.
Guest:Dead.
Guest:Kills are deader than dead, actually.
Guest:But anyway, so there's this, it's Irish, Scottish, Welsh folk music.
Guest:This is where it's handed down from, and it's all there.
Marc:It's like the band's version of Long Black Veil.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:It kills me, man.
Guest:Oh.
Guest:It kills me.
Guest:Well, that's LeVon bringing that stuff to the band.
Guest:It just kills me.
Guest:I mean, that, you point to one of the great
Guest:you know, classic examples of that.
Guest:That, you know, that I guess it's cathartic.
Guest:You know, you get the catharsis of this out.
Marc:Well, it's interesting because the weight of it, you know, like when you think about Irish music or Celtic music, that the weight of history that Ireland has had to bear is not dissimilar to Kentucky the way you're describing it.
Marc:Well, yeah, they're under the boot heel, right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:And they had the buck revolt finally.
Guest:You know, the South becomes a republic.
Guest:The North is still, you know, up until recent history.
Marc:So when did you start to find your voice on the guitar?
Guest:At eight.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:You know, but it was alone in my, you know, my bedroom.
Guest:And people like at junior high, high school didn't know.
Guest:I was not.
Guest:I mean, I played drums.
Guest:What are you listening to, though?
Guest:Well, I'm listening to my dad.
Guest:My dad had a great album by Stonewall Jackson.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And he had, he bought it for my mom after an argument because it had a hit song called Don't Be Angry.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Anyway, he gave it to her as an apology.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's the kind of guy, he came in and was like, I got you something.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In her album.
Guest:And it had Stonewall's hit, Don't be angry with me, darling, if I fail to understand.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Anyway.
Guest:But I had this album.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I started listening to it.
Guest:And there's a great George Jones song on that album.
Guest:Which one?
Guest:Called Life to Go.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Stonewall, that was the only version I knew of it.
Guest:I didn't know that George wrote it until later when I was looking at writing credits.
Guest:And I'll get back to Mike Nesmith in a moment.
Guest:I know that's where we started.
Guest:We'll get to California eventually.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:what nesmith will bring us to that yeah but uh stonewall jackson his hit yeah uh life to go which is not unlike what we were talking about you know the darkness of songs and the hillbilly culture george jones wrote and it goes i've got a sad sad story friends that i don't like to tell but he's going to tell you anyway sure
Guest:I had a wife and family.
Guest:It's like, what a way to start.
Guest:I wrote one years ago.
Guest:Good setup.
Guest:Sort of that.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:About a guy who goes, you'll be sorry you asked me the reason.
Guest:It's like the whole song is my, the voice singing it, telling the guy.
Guest:But that was sourced in a tradition.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:So he says, I've got a sad, sad story of friends that I don't like to tell.
Guest:I had a wife and family when they locked me in the cell.
Guest:I've been in here 18 years, a long, long time I know.
Guest:But time don't mean a thing to me because I got life to go.
Guest:And he tells a story about, I went out one night where the lights were bright just to see what I could see.
Guest:I met up with an old friend who thought the world of me.
Guest:Bought me drinks and he took me to every honky-tonk in town.
Marc:Sounds like a shitty friend already.
Guest:But then words were said and now he's dead.
Guest:I just had to bring him down.
Guest:Killed the guy that was buying the drinks.
Guest:Yep.
Guest:Anyway, it was really poignant.
Guest:Now I've dragged you into that deep part of that.
Guest:So I got to finish with the thing that got to me, even at 9, 10, 11 years old listening to that album, I was fascinated with it.
Guest:There's a weight to it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, the verse that got me was he said, I had a wife and family when they locked me in the cell, but I'll be here in this prison now till my body's just a shell.
Guest:And I bet that little girl of mine doesn't realize or know that her daddy's been here 18 years and still got life to go.
Guest:Because the loss, you know, when that happens, when somebody gets incarcerated and when somebody goes away to deep time, you know, the ones, the innocents,
Guest:that are left behind and they're awake.
Guest:You don't think about that too much.
Guest:Merle Haggard's song that I've talked about over the years often that taught me more about songwriting as a young adult.
Guest:I stared at the record when I heard the lyric, it has one verse.
Guest:It's called Holding Things Together.
Guest:It starts with a chorus.
Guest:Holding things together ain't no easy thing to do.
Guest:When it comes to raising children, it's a job meant for two.
Guest:And perspective is the wife has left the family, not the other way around.
Guest:Usually the husband has left.
Guest:But he's left there with the kids alone.
Guest:And he goes, but Alice, please believe me, I can't go on and on holding things together with you gone.
Guest:He goes, but the verse, the only verse in the song is, today was Angie's birthday.
Guest:And it must have slipped your mind.
Guest:I tried twice to call you with no answer either time.
Guest:But the postman brought a package.
Guest:I mailed some days ago.
Guest:I signed it, Love for Mama, so Angie wouldn't know.
Guest:You don't get any more poignant than that.
Guest:This is a dad that has to cover for the mom that's left, you know, the old blues song, Motherless Child.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:There's nothing worse.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because I watch, you know, I've got a little guy in this album.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Brighter Days is an outgrowth.
Guest:He sings at the end of one of them, right?
Guest:He does.
Guest:Yeah, he comes in.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Forced me to write the song.
Guest:It didn't force me.
Guest:He prompted my writing the song.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which one was it?
Guest:Brighter Days, the title track.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:As I looked at him, we were in the height of, at that point, two years into COVID.
Guest:He's about two years old.
Guest:He was born in 2020.
Guest:And what a strange experience.
Guest:You know, it was like my living my life in reverse anyway.
Guest:It's like I thought...
Guest:that possibility for me.
Guest:And you're out asked.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I, well, I didn't think I, and I'd always thought I would have children, you know, and you look around one day, John Lennon's famous quote, life's what goes on while you're making other plans.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, and, um,
Guest:There he was, and there he is thanks to my beautiful wife, Emily, who came into my life some years before.
Guest:We had decided to get married, and just as fate would have it in 2019, we said, well, we're going to make good on this promise.
Guest:We're getting married.
Guest:And then he showed up.
Guest:We realized just before we were married—
Guest:She was pregnant with him.
Guest:And you're no youngster.
Guest:No.
Guest:And you're like, well, I'm spry.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you know what?
Guest:He makes me young now.
Guest:I'm sure.
Guest:I now feel a certain...
Guest:And it's not a condescending tone to this.
Guest:But I feel a sadness for especially guys.
Guest:Because women have a natural maternal instinct that they kind of sense being a mother is part of their biology.
Guest:We don't.
Guest:It's not our nature.
Guest:We just, our nature is to try and not get trapped.
Guest:Another great song Merle wrote, Merle Haggard, this is California country music in capital letters, was called The Running Kind.
Guest:And I was born the running kind with Leaving Always on My Mind.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Home was never home for me at any time.
Guest:He said, every front door left me hoping that I'd find a back door open.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because there just had to be an exit for the running kind.
Guest:That's kind of the summation, especially young guys, you know, 19, 20.
Marc:A certain type of guy, yeah, sure.
Guest:Well, I mean, yeah, but I think it's more common for men, you know, the hunter-gatherer nature.
Marc:Or also just, you know, kind of like a selfish fucked up.
Guest:Yes, the selfishness of men, you know.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:We are.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I never thought that way until I had my own little guy, and I'm like, you know, a child in my world.
Guest:I'm like, wow, you know, I miss this for other people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Friends.
Guest:Well, good for you.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:It's a weird emotion to have now.
Guest:No, I think it's good.
Guest:That I miss it for other friends.
Marc:Yeah, other guys, you know, I don't.
Marc:I've been married twice and didn't have kids.
Marc:I used to do a joke about it.
Marc:It takes a special kind of asshole to have two wives and no kids.
Marc:I think my second wife put it like this, you think I'm bringing children into this?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's my country song.
Guest:You think I'm bringing kids into this?
Yeah.
Guest:Oh, man.
Marc:Anyway, so.
Marc:But no, but I see guys who have kids and definitely change them.
Marc:It opens up something in you.
Guest:It talks about the glory and the happiness and the fulfillment, but they also don't talk about the struggle for parents.
Marc:Well, the panic.
Marc:I think that's one of the reasons I didn't have him.
Marc:I used to say, I don't have kids, and if I think about having a kid right now, my thought is like, is he okay?
Marc:Is he still breathing?
Marc:No, no, no.
Marc:Did you check on the kid?
Marc:What's going on?
Guest:Well, my mother used to tell a story about this old woman lived in his holler.
Guest:She said,
Guest:They came by her house, and Miss Collins, she said, Miss Collins, why are you crying?
Guest:She's on the porch.
Guest:She said, oh, I was just thinking.
Guest:She goes, well, what were you thinking about?
Guest:Made you cry.
Guest:She goes, oh, I was just thinking.
Guest:I don't have any children, but if I was ever to have had a child and something would have happened to that child,
Guest:Oh, something could have happened to that child, and I'd have been just, what if they'd have died?
Guest:And what you're going to... It's this whole made-up scenario with the story goes on and on.
Guest:She's miserable anyways.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Made herself just a thought of... And it is.
Guest:I...
Guest:I've never been as frightened in my life as when in the four years he's been led, the few moments of sheer terror that I thought he was hurt.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I've never felt fear like I felt for myself or anybody, a family member, but never as severe as that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In any event, I, yeah, I very fortunately have had this.
Guest:And the album was an outgrowth of that day I was sitting and reading a book in one of the rooms in the house that I have a guitar sitting in.
Guest:And he came in and he has a little Telecaster ukulele that dragged around.
Guest:Because he went, it's just a weird experience.
Guest:I was back out toward the end of 2020 doing a couple of things.
Guest:In 2021, I was...
Guest:out doing shows.
Guest:And he was able to, you know, he went out and probably went to 60 shows by the time he was two years old.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:Stopped because it got harder as he got a little older.
Guest:But he would have this little Telecaster ukulele.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So he had that on.
Guest:He goes, yeah, yeah.
Guest:He was talking a bit.
Guest:He was, like, pointing my guitar.
Guest:He said, ah, come on.
Guest:Come on, play.
Guest:And I thought, oh, okay, I'm going to stop what I'm doing.
Guest:So I stopped.
Guest:I was looking.
Guest:And just his excitement about it, you know, touched me.
Guest:And I grabbed it.
Guest:I said, what do you want to sing?
Guest:What do you want to... And he...
Guest:He would kind of intone stuff that he'd heard me sing.
Guest:And I looked at him and just began.
Guest:I said, well, let's write something.
Guest:Let's make something up.
Guest:And I started singing that first verse.
Guest:What are we going to do?
Guest:Looking at him, just the joy of him, his expression, his excitement of the smallest thing of just me picking up that guitar, stopping what I was doing to focus on him.
Guest:brought such excitement to his eyes and he started laughing.
Guest:And I said, okay, well, the brightness of that moment, because in 2022, we were all still fumbling around with being shut down, opened up, shut down, couldn't go to the grocery store without three masks on.
Guest:And anyway...
Guest:And I went, well, there's brightness.
Guest:And I was just like, brighter days, rough ahead.
Guest:Because early on, I was getting him just when he was an infant to say something to me.
Guest:And I got him on video going.
Guest:Tell Daddy you love me.
Guest:He made the sound of just mimicking me.
Guest:And I, you know, kept that clip like, you said I love you to me.
Guest:You know, projecting onto this two-month-old, three-month-old.
Guest:But I looked at him and went, brighter days, or brighter days, that's what you said, the first time you ever spoke to me.
Guest:Just that, you know, the license.
Guest:And so he was...
Guest:howling back and forth to me with this, you know, banging around.
Guest:And so then I finished that song and I gave him a co-writer credit on it.
Guest:But I do control the publishing.
Marc:I had to let him know that.
Marc:Well, I'll tell you, this record, like, you know, I hadn't heard a record of yours in a long time.
Marc:You haven't made one in a long time.
Marc:But I put this thing on, and I'm like, holy fuck.
Marc:He means business.
Marc:Oh, well, thank you.
Marc:I mean, every song is a great song.
Marc:Holy fuck could go the other way, too.
Marc:No, no.
Marc:Well, thank you.
Marc:Every fucking song lands, and the sound.
Guest:Well, some of it came out of this channel of the Bakersfield beat on the SiriusXM.
Guest:Because that's where I met Post.
Guest:In 2018, he came in.
Guest:I didn't know of him only through— Post Malone?
Guest:Yeah, Post Malone.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he had just had the—White Iverson had happened, and he had the first big Republic record that he put out.
Guest:And he was between that and the next one.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I said, no, I haven't heard.
Guest:And they said, have you heard that he's got you on all of his playlists?
Guest:And I didn't know.
Guest:Then I looked into it.
Guest:He's raised in Dallas, right?
Guest:He's a kid, you know, taken to Texas.
Guest:And he came on the show.
Guest:And he's noodling around with one of my guitars at the Sirius station, you know, with the studio.
Guest:And before we start, and I'm like watching him, I said, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Guest:What are you playing?
Guest:Because I could tell it was a finger pick.
Guest:Bob Dylan, he started doing Don't Think Twice.
Guest:I said, ho, ho, ho.
Guest:I said, you, and Charlie Crockett later told me the, you know, the country guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Charlie said, yeah, I first heard of my, I went up to Dallas.
Guest:He's a teenager that his dad was dropping off at bars.
Guest:He said, there's this guy, Austin post was his name.
Guest:And he said, uh, and he's sitting in clubs.
Guest:His dad drops him off and he sits and does Dylan songs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's, I said, no, no, you're playing that first.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So that folks know, you know, whether it's the band's long black veil or whatever, that you really, the earnestness of his love of music.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Independent of style, because at that point he was known for the kind of pseudo rap, you know, that, you know, that urban thing and that launched him.
Guest:And I knew he had enormous love for contributing.
Guest:He wanted to do Thousand Miles from Nowhere, my song, and we did it together that night.
Guest:And then I had him do Haggard stuff with me.
Guest:It's on video if you look it up.
Guest:So this inspired you to do the record?
Guest:Well, it led to my doing what I did with him on the record, which, you know, bang, bang, boom, boom.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The track on there.
Guest:I don't know how to say goodbye.
Guest:Because I had finished the album, had mixed it,
Guest:Two weeks later, they called and said, Post, because they'd asked me about doing Stagecoach with him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because I was there the night before doing my own show.
Guest:And they said, Post is there the next night and wants you to sit in if you would.
Guest:I said, sure.
Guest:He said, he's doing this like a covers album, country music, which was not correct.
Guest:You know, became the album that he's put out now, F1 Trillion.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But...
Guest:They said, but he wants to sing on your record.
Guest:I said, I just finished it.
Guest:It's like mixed, done.
Guest:I said, God, why didn't somebody tell me three months ago I could... And I got through a couple stoplights and said, you know, my wife was with me at car, Emily.
Guest:I said, I was going to write something for us.
Guest:Because I know he likes...
Guest:traditional country music, so I said, I want to write a shuffle, because we had decided we would do, that's what the calls back and forth were about, my manager was saying, they wanted to know which, so I said, well, I already did Thousand Miles with Carrie Underwood at CMA Fest, and we did guitars, she and I did that there, Fast as You with Keith Urban at Stagecoach, and I said, I said, I don't know, I said, maybe Little Ways, and he'd called back and said, yeah, Little Ways, he loves Little Ways, so I went,
Guest:He loves that.
Guest:I said, I'm going to write one for him, just for he and I to do.
Guest:And so I did this in that vein of that moment in my career.
Guest:That came off the second album, Hillbilly Deluxe.
Guest:And I have the cover of Chris Hillman on this record, which was outgrowth of doing...
Guest:the radio shows with him and then him launching his own show on our channel.
Guest:And then Jeffrey Steele, who was a California native and a country musician in the late 80s, early 90s with his band Boy Howdy that came in the next wave after
Guest:My band and I broke in the mid 80s out of the cow punk scene, you know, with Maria McKee, Lone Justice, you know, the Los Lobos.
Guest:Well, the precedent groups were the Blasters.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Los Lobos.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They were on Slash.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And X. Yeah.
Guest:John Doe and Xene.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The knitters, the offshoot of that, because the cow punk, the punk rockers, which California every decade or so has rock and rollers who decide they want to explore the country roots of California.
Guest:And that is... Merle Haggard, Buck Owens.
Guest:Well, they go back to that, but preceding that...
Guest:Which is one of the slug lines of the channel is the Dust Bowl to the Hollywood Bowl.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:All points between and beyond.
Guest:Right.
Guest:From Buck Owens to the Byrds.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:All points between and beyond.
Guest:Because one begats, begats, begats, right?
Guest:And it's that way in history.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:It's throughout, you know, it's social, cultural history.
Guest:But it's the Tom Joad road.
Guest:The grapes are out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Delivers.
Yeah.
Guest:Really, what gives you Fleetwood Mac and the pop incarnation of the Eagles in the 70s.
Guest:California, the California sound that took over the airways from the early 70s through the late 70s.
Guest:But you come up.
Marc:Listening to Merle, listening to Buck Owens.
Guest:Yeah, early, because they were distant figures in California.
Guest:And I didn't realize until I became a young adult that disparate, you had Nashville, but you had this outpost.
Guest:The Bakersfield sound, the Bakersfield beat came out of actually Hollywood.
Guest:I think credence even comes from it a little bit.
Guest:The East Bay, Oakland, the working class side of the Bay, right?
Guest:The blue collar.
Guest:John Fogarty talks about that.
Guest:He had never been to Lodi and he wrote Lodi.
Guest:But you went to Nashville.
Guest:Briefly.
Guest:You had a band together?
Guest:I didn't have a band at that point.
Guest:I had a rockabilly band out of high school.
Guest:It was what goes back to...
Guest:You know, nobody knew.
Guest:I was at home in my room and in church, a cappella church, a cappella singing in church.
Guest:Church of Christ, which I was raised in.
Guest:And the variation of the church that I was in didn't believe in the first century they used any instrumentation in worship.
Guest:So we had a pitch pipe and we sang a cappella.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I came out of that culture.
Guest:So I was singing there as a child all the way through.
Guest:And it's hillbilly hymn tradition, which is different than deep Southern gospel, which is rooted in African-American culture and the blues influence of that.
Guest:This is Welsh, Irish, Scottish, Presbyterian hymns.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like Old Rugged Cross, you know, In the Garden, famous hymn, the hillbilly hymns.
Guest:But my schoolmates, my peers, didn't know anything about this.
Guest:They didn't know I could sing at all.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I heard...
Guest:some band members, stage band members, trying to get ready for a variety show that I was hosting, singing, trying to do some incarnation of Sha Na Na.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:In 73, because they had happened at Woodstock.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:Sha Na Na had taken this throwback to the 50s.
Guest:There was a moment, you know, and the movie came out, American Graffiti, in that same summer.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I heard them trying to do something.
Guest:I went in and went, what are you guys doing?
Guest:And they said, well, you know, we're doing like a greaser thing, you know, a band.
Guest:So I went, well, you mean like this?
Guest:I picked up the guitar.
Guest:They didn't know I played drums.
Guest:And I started singing Everly's to them, and they were like...
Guest:So I became the front guy, and I was hosting that high school variety show that year with another guy, because I was in the theater department, and I ended up doing it for the first time my junior year, and it became a rage.
Guest:The 50s band.
Guest:Yeah, it was a weird...
Guest:kind of hybrid of that because I didn't gas my hair back.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I had hair still there.
Guest:My bangs hang.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But all the other guys look like, you know, Lords of Flatbush.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:The movie that, you know, Henry Winkler and if you ever saw Stallone.
Guest:Great film.
Marc:Weird.
Marc:I rewatched it.
Marc:It's an odd movie.
Guest:It's a very odd movie.
Guest:The greatest scene ever in there is where Stallone's
Guest:at the jewelry store where the girlfriend brought him the ring that he could.
Guest:And he goes, won't you wait outside?
Guest:Yeah, if you ever.
Guest:He grabbed the gig and goes, you see that girl outside?
Guest:He makes her go out of the jewelry store.
Guest:You see her standing out there?
Guest:She's chewing gum and kind of waiting.
Guest:He goes, if you ever see that girl come in the store again, you ever show her a ring.
Guest:There's that much money.
Guest:I will come back here.
Guest:Anyway, if nothing else, that scene is great.
Guest:There's a humanness to that.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:It's a real gritty movie.
Guest:Well, the humility of what he had just, you know, he couldn't buy that ring for her even if he wanted to.
Guest:And he, you know, this jeweler, you know,
Guest:trading her up, you know, getting her in.
Marc:You like all the heartbreak stuff.
Guest:Well, you know, just the moment of, you know.
Guest:The weight.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So that was going on that whole period.
Guest:And I, you know, was now decided I got this taste of response that was strong and positive.
Guest:You'd done some theater, though, too?
Guest:Yeah, I'd been, you know, not very sophisticated stuff, but just, you know, on stage and acting.
Guest:And, uh,
Guest:But this was the first love, you know, the thing that I'd done, you know, kind of kept hidden, you know, at home.
Guest:And I broke up with the guitar and we started playing gigs and there were sock hops going on again because of American Graffiti and all that stuff.
Guest:I get out of high school, nothing going on.
Guest:The country rock thing had taken hold by this point, the Eagles and all.
Guest:So I was really 72, 3, 4, right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because I get out in 74.
Guest:So the 60s, so the birds are done.
Guest:Yeah, that's done, but it's the precedence version of this.
Guest:And the burritos are done.
Guest:They're the most famous band that nobody ever heard.
Guest:I knew the Eagles were out there and Credence, John Fogarty, through junior high and high school.
Guest:What a fucking band.
Guest:Oh, he was my handhold that I could have a conversation with a peer and
Guest:That and Led Zeppelin.
Guest:So all of that, but Creed and John Fogarty, because you're at that point of transition, because I have an older sibling, the oldest of three, so I didn't have anybody coaching me through.
Guest:And
Guest:I had an access point to Fogarty, ironically, because looking out my back door, where he's just listening to Buck Owens, you know, Buck Owens, dude, dude, dude, looking out my back door.
Guest:And...
Guest:I knew there was something special and unique and American about Fogarty and what he was doing, you know, and Credence.
Guest:And they became, you know, without a plan or design, the soundtrack, if you will, the backdrop sound audio soundtrack,
Guest:soundtrack to the Vietnam War in a lot of weird ways, Run Through the Jungle, Fortunate Son, you know, all those things that he was writing.
Marc:I just watched that DVD of them live at Albert Hall.
Marc:They were just a fucking machine dude.
Marc:Oh, how good.
Marc:It was almost like they didn't fucking even care about the audience.
Marc:No.
Marc:He was right there on top of the drummer.
Guest:It was pure music.
Guest:Pure music.
Guest:Pure music.
Guest:Fogarty.
Guest:So I was thrilled with that, but I didn't know how to put an electric band together.
Guest:So it was Emmy's record, that first record.
Guest:And Linda, those first three Linda Ronset albums.
Guest:Because she was doing Silver Threads.
Guest:But Emmy, because by then I was just 75, college.
Guest:So I was at Ohio State and I was... So everything's coming into you, but you're not playing country music.
Guest:So I go to Nashville because I'm figuring that's the... I had friends there that I could go down there and kind of hang with.
Guest:And I auditioned at the Opera Land Park because I thought, I don't know, nobody's got a roadmap.
Guest:My parents didn't know.
Guest:They just thought...
Guest:Well, you better go to college, get something to fall back on because nobody knows.
Guest:Show business is so foreign.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:Everybody.
Guest:I'm sure your family.
Guest:Well, they never want you to sign.
Guest:They don't want you to go that way.
Guest:If they don't have family in it.
Guest:They're worried.
Guest:No, they are.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I go to Nashville and spin my wheels there briefly.
Yeah.
Guest:Was there something there that disillusioned you?
Guest:No, I just... They offered me an alt slot in the park because they had performers throughout the Opryland Park through the summer.
Guest:And I passed the first audition and I hung around a couple of weeks, went back and did another.
Guest:And...
Guest:Then went back home, back to Ohio, and they called and said, well, you can have an alternative, so if you just want to come and hang out.
Guest:In the meantime, my guitar player, a guy named Billy Alves, who'd been in that rockabilly band with me, said he had relatives in California who was coming out here.
Guest:I didn't realize he was just coming to visit.
Guest:His intent wasn't to stay.
Guest:He said, you're going with me.
Guest:You're coming.
Guest:I'm taking you.
Guest:You're going.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because he had the wherewithal to sense I needed some prodding.
Guest:And so I sold my 68 Impala to my brother for $150.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And gotten his 74 Volkswagen Beetle.
Guest:That's a downsizing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I'd gotten that with him and didn't even own a car.
Guest:And we drove and ended up in Long Beach, California.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he had family in Tustin, Orange County.
Guest:And I said, well, look, man, we've come this far.
Guest:Let's find someplace either at the beach or in Hollywood.
Guest:And we started in Santa Monica and couldn't afford anything until we got to Long Beach.
Guest:It was something we could probably make ends meet to afford.
Guest:We ended up there.
Guest:He stayed till just like 4th of July.
Guest:This was in the spring.
Guest:Like early March.
Guest:And he left.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I planted my flag and stayed.
Guest:You know, I got a job.
Guest:I rode a bus and got a job in the loading dock at Bullocks Lakewood.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:An old department store here.
Guest:And I stayed, you know, and I managed to scrape money together, get a car, a little
Guest:Chevy Vega and started driving up to the Palomino at night, the club in the Valley.
Guest:And they had a hoot night up there every Thursday night.
Guest:And I'd go up there and watch.
Guest:Who was around?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And sit in and started to meet like-minded musicians.
Guest:Like who?
Guest:Well,
Guest:I met a guy named Boo Bernstein who became an executive at Capitol Records later, but he was a steel guitar player, just various guys, and you start to try to put a band together, and I finally did through a guy from...
Guest:Tulsa, Oklahoma, named Stuart Deeming.
Guest:I don't even remember these names.
Guest:This guy, and he knew a drummer named Richard Coffey.
Guest:And Richard believed in me enough that he started playing with me in a place called the Corral out here in Lakeview Terrace.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right up the road here from where you are in Glendale.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Where Foothill and Osborne meet.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's now no longer there.
Guest:It's gone.
Guest:There's like a...
Guest:a civic center, a library or something for kids.
Marc:So you're tapping into what is country here?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It has always been, it's been here since the Tom Joad Road, the Dust Bowl.
Guest:They brought with them the Okies, the Arkies, and the Texans.
Guest:Right, but what's going on in?
Guest:70s, 1978, 70, yeah.
Guest:So punk's starting to happen?
Guest:Yeah, oh, the punk scene's going, because LA punk happens really in 79 with X. Yeah.
Guest:But it's going on, but I'm,
Guest:suited to do what I do.
Guest:I'm, you know, I'm doing Bill Monroe and Merle Haggard.
Guest:You got a mandolin player?
Guest:No, but I've got just hillbilly me on the guitar and a guitarist, lead guitarist, bass and drums.
Guest:And, uh, we're playing.
Guest:I couldn't, I look back and I thought, well, uh,
Guest:I wasn't good enough to play the Thursday, Friday, Saturday slot at the corral.
Guest:But I was good enough to do the Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
Guest:So I'm doing the off nights.
Guest:And I was driving air freight in the daytime, go out there at night and start at 9.
Guest:Playing covers?
Guest:9 till 2.
Guest:But my covers were hardcore country.
Guest:And it's right ahead of the whole urban cowboy thing that happened.
Guest:That year, I think, is when it came out.
Guest:Or 79, it came out.
Marc:But still, you're just playing for whatever you can scrape up for country audiences here?
Guest:Yeah, but I wouldn't do the top 40 version of country.
Guest:I wasn't doing Looking for Love, the Urban Cowboys.
Guest:I was doing Haggard, George Jones, all the stuff.
Guest:But people wanted to dance to it, and they liked it.
Guest:And I spent a year in there, a solid year in the off notes.
Guest:Five sets a night.
Guest:And, you know, it grows you up.
Guest:I met other musicians and was there the night that John Lennon was killed.
Guest:I remember Delaney Bramlett.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Who, one of the great musicians in California.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:ever came out of the South.
Guest:He and Leon Russell formed the band for Shindig.
Guest:I didn't realize at the time, but he came in and wrecked because he knew John Lennon that night.
Guest:So that's what I'm doing that year.
Guest:And I'm getting my sea legs and meeting more musicians.
Guest:And a guy, Boo Bernstein said, I'm playing with this guy.
Guest:You got to come meet him over in the West Valley.
Guest:He's playing at this place called Wild Bill's Roundup.
Guest:And I go over in Chatsworth and
Guest:Right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And sit in this night and it's this guitar player named Pete Anderson.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he heard me sing this Merle Haggard song and I said, well, I do it now.
Guest:We did two or three songs and he starts telling me he's curious about me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he's from Detroit.
Guest:And it leads to
Guest:us developing a musical friendship and him saying, what are you doing by this point through the drummer from Tulsa?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He said, you got to meet a guy who's a staff engineer at United Western.
Guest:And he meets me through Richard and says,
Guest:Thank you, Richard.
Guest:This guy, I could cut songs because he had spec time.
Guest:He was a house engineer at United Western, which is the old Western recorders on Sunset Boulevard that Frank Sinatra built with Bill Putnam, who had a United Sound, Yuri speakers in the studios.
Guest:Have you ever one of the big monitors?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The blue foam on the horn.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yuri, you know, United.
Guest:So United Western Studios, I had no idea the history of this till later that I was in there.
Guest:And he...
Guest:said, well, we'll trade, if I can get you a deal, we'll trade publishing.
Guest:And I was green enough to not realize, you know, you're, because I've been writing these songs for years that I'd been here, writing about my family and, you know, my life before California.
Guest:And he said, uh,
Guest:I can cut sides on you.
Guest:So after I get off at work at night, he would have spec time there, and I'd go in, and we would cut.
Guest:And the band he put together, because he knew he had access to the cats in town, and it's the end of the wrecking crew.
Guest:Yes, sure.
Guest:But at this point, it's probably 81 by now.
Guest:But the guys that I cut the demos that are on my...
Guest:There's a new series of albums that came out on Warner the first part of the year, the first three albums.
Guest:And there's other stuff that came out.
Guest:And there are these demos.
Guest:And the band that did the demos consisted of Glenn D. Harden on piano, who was in Elvis' band.
Guest:David Mansfield's playing fiddle.
Guest:David Mansfield's mandolin fiddle player, I mean...
Guest:Prodigy was on Rolling Thunder Review with Bob Dylan.
Guest:He was like 17 years old out touring with him.
Guest:He had Jerry McGee on guitar, who had been part of the record crew, going back to the Monkees.
Guest:And I'll get back to Nesmith and I and our experience together.
Guest:But Nesmith is doing country rock before there's a term for it in the Monkees.
Guest:66, that first album.
Guest:I'm a kid who sees this...
Guest:I got the Beatles by that point, but still not as fully as that exploding color on a console TV in the fall of 66 in everybody's living room.
Guest:It's this fictitious band, but there's a real musician, Mike Nesmith in this band, who writes Linda Ronstadt's first radio hit.
Guest:was the Stone Ponies.
Guest:You and I travel to the beat of a different drum.
Guest:Mike Nesmus wrote that.
Marc:The Stone Ponies records are good.
Guest:Yeah, that was his song.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so they're letting Mike have two songs on each Monkees album that he gets to sing and produce and write.
Guest:And so I hear on the first Monkees album, I hear not knowing.
Guest:I'm hearing Carole King co-write with Mike Nesmith.
Guest:I'm hearing the Boyce and Hart write inverted versions of Paperback Rider with Last Brand at Clarksville, which turns out being hillbilly-fied.
Guest:So that's going on.
Guest:And Nesmith was bringing the Texas story.
Guest:sound to the monkeys.
Guest:He said, they didn't want to hear any hillbilly.
Guest:They didn't want to hear from, he said, but you can do it, just don't call it that.
Guest:But I point to on the channel, and Chris Hillman and I talk about this a lot, that it really begins country rock.
Marc:With first national band?
Guest:No, with Rick Nelson and the Ozzie and Harriet show.
Guest:And Rick Nelson, Ricky Nelson, becomes 16 years old and Ozzy decides, I'm going to let him do his music on the show.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:And he becomes the heartthrob.
Guest:What was the hit?
Marc:Well, the first hit's Hello, Mary Lou.
Marc:Well, hello.
Marc:That's country rock.
Marc:But that's really Louven Brothers, Elverly Brothers through Hello, Mary Lou.
Guest:Well, but it's country rock when you listen and listen to...
Guest:listen to him play Young World and the guitar sound, the tonality of that.
Guest:And then what he did, it's not Memphis Rockabilly.
Guest:Ozzy let Ricky pick most of that material.
Guest:People are unaware of that.
Guest:Rick Nelson picked his own material.
Guest:And my argument is that he's one of the greatest singers in rock music because he didn't think he could sing.
Marc:So this moves through... So your roots come up through... Eventually it gets... Because that's pre-Birds.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:So it's pre-all that stuff.
Guest:Chris Hill and I talked about it.
Guest:He said, yes, you are right.
Guest:Rick Nelson is the...
Marc:is the radar return of what's going to come from over the horizon sure but in terms of like where your direct descendant from like the the late birds that sweetheart of the rodeo album sure and then but then those mike nesmith records absolutely joanne silver moon those things i heard on the radio no one really knows about that those albums
Guest:I know.
Guest:It's the first national band, right?
Marc:Oh, no.
Guest:It's brilliant.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he has Red Roads in that band.
Guest:There's like, what, three or four records?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But her name was Joanne, and she lived in a meadow by a fall.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he wrote that, and he had, standing in the lonely light of the silver moon.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:These hillbilly things, this country rock, first national band stuff.
Marc:But like when you're on AM radio.
Marc:When you're living here, though, so when you start really working, when you get out of the country rooms, are you playing with Los Lobos and the Blasters?
Guest:A guy comes out and hears me, because Pete and I had put another incarnation of a band together.
Guest:And we start playing the bars.
Guest:We got fired more than we got hired, as much as we got hired.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because they wanted to hear Urban Cowboy Top 40 Country.
Guest:And I wasn't doing that.
Guest:Wasn't suited to do it.
Guest:Wasn't doing it.
Guest:And we were really, by that point, doing electric bluegrass.
Guest:I was doing, you know, I would start each show with Hear Me Calling.
Guest:Bill Monroe, sweetheart of mine.
Guest:Pete knew a fiddle player named Brantley Kearns, who was a great harmony singer and fiddle player.
Guest:I knew the drummer from the King B's named Jeff Donovan, who was the swingin'est guy, the best wrist shot action ever.
Guest:I said, I got this drummer, man.
Guest:I'd like to get him to play drum.
Guest:And Pete said, okay.
Guest:And I got the bass player.
Guest:He's got a name, J.D.
Guest:Foster.
Guest:So we put it together between the two of us, and we started playing these clubs.
Guest:We started hiring in.
Guest:We would work, they would all say they wanted to hear hardcore country music until they got a dose of me for a weekend or two.
Guest:It's like that stuff you're doing, that hard country music, we're thinking we might need something softer than that.
Guest:Cause I was doing George Jones, you know, yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:And we were doing it with a passion and with a rave up.
Guest:You know, like I said, if you took late 30s Bill Monroe or Jimmy Martin, you talked about Detroit.
Guest:Jimmy Martin broke out of two, Wheeling, West Virginia, WWVA, and then Detroit radio.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:He went up to the big hillbilly station in Detroit and he had massive success up there on that radio station.
Guest:So you're blasting the country.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And a guy named Bill Bentley comes out and sees, we meet in a driveway where I lived in a garage apartment and we're standing in the driveway talking.
Guest:He goes, well, what do you do?
Guest:I said, well, I'm, you know,
Guest:and he gets curious because he's a writer for the L.A.
Guest:Weekly.
Guest:I didn't know.
Guest:Meet him in the driveway.
Guest:We just start shooting the shit.
Guest:And he says, I said, well, I'm doing this.
Guest:I said, well, I'm playing the Palomino if you're interested.
Guest:Come out.
Guest:I gave him some tickets, you know, the Palomino.
Guest:And he comes out and sees me, and he's booking nights at the Club Lingerie.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In addition to being a writer for the Weekly and a head publicist over at Slash Records.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Because they have Los Lobos.
Guest:They've just signed the blasters.
Guest:The Americana thing.
Guest:Yeah, before there's a term, right?
Guest:And he drags Dave Alvin out to see me at the Palomino.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Dave Alvin said...
Guest:he walked in and looked at Bill Bentley and went, this guy's, this kid's got limousines in his future.
Guest:And Dave took me under his wing and great guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He allowed us to go to New York and open for the blasters.
Guest:He let us go to Houston, Texas and Austin.
Guest:And that's actually where I got signed by Warner.
Guest:The folks out of Nashville came there, saw me open for the blasters in Austin and signed us.
Guest:But Bill Bentley, uh,
Guest:championed me, wrote a gatefold piece in the fall of 84 on that album that in the LA Weekly that helped launch me to the Sun Times, the East Village.
Guest:I then wrote, picked up that, that, you know, LP, the six song version, the independent record.
Guest:And that led to my being signed to Warner.
Guest:But in the middle of all that, the scene had started happening, the cow punk quote unquote scene with the knitters, the offshoot of the X, but, but,
Guest:Maria McKee and Lone Justice.
Guest:Oh, she was the best.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was Los Cruzados, which had been the plugs as a punk band.
Guest:All these bands that were happening, and we were on the bill with them.
Guest:Was Rank and File around?
Guest:Rank and File.
Guest:Yeah, Tony and Chip.
Guest:The Dills become Rank and File.
Guest:So that's going on.
Guest:We're sharing bills with all those bands.
Guest:I'm this hillbilly thing.
Marc:cowboy hat me and and them you know and it was this this moment in fact michael gilmore wrote about it in uh in uh i think he wrote a piece in the herald examiner about it and todd everett wrote about it but what's interesting is that like out of the alejandro escovedo he you know he's in austin so he's he still he wrote you know that record is uh gravity no oh my god it's one of the great records but but nonetheless somehow or another what's interesting about your career
Marc:is that you're playing straight-up fucking balls-to-the-wall country, and at that time, country's not really going in that direction.
Marc:And then somehow or another, there was a couple of guys, the old-timers, like George Strait, who were bringing it back.
Marc:Well, Ricky Skaggs.
Guest:Ricky Skaggs.
Guest:A fellow Kentuckian that had huge commercial success in 84 years.
Guest:he'd come out of the hot band, Amy Lou's band.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he went back to Nashville.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he launches when it has a massive gold album with, and I think it's 84.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:84 and 85.
Guest:Those first two albums were Ricky.
Guest:And then George had come out from Texas in 83, 83, 83 at George Strait.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And another guy that happens in that moment, neo-traditionalism, John Anderson, uh,
Guest:But it doesn't really, you know, have that moment until 86 with myself and then Steve Earle.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Guitar Town?
Guest:He did Guitar Town on the heels of guitars.
Guest:Cadillacs had been out as an indie record.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then we get signed and then Steve puts his out.
Marc:But you have like solid country hits on all the three records.
Guest:Well, yeah, it starts.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That begins.
Guest:And that separated me, you know, again then from...
Guest:the remnants of the scene here because it took me in a different path.
Guest:Funny enough, I was played on MTV until I had a country hit and they didn't want anything to do because I had a commercial country hit and they didn't want, they segregated us, you know, back out to, and, but VH1 still played me.
Guest:And I'll tell you who played me all the way through was much music in Toronto.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They never quit.
Guest:I would be played right in rotation with you too.
Guest:You know, or whatever.
Marc:And you had this whole style going.
Marc:Yeah, there was a thing, a California thing, you know, that we were doing it.
Marc:I guess, but it became like, I mean, like at this point, though, you're an established country.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So we get here now to, you know, Hillman's cut song on your new record.
Marc:And you also did the traditional, which one did you do on this one?
Guest:Well, we covered...
Guest:the old Carter family.
Marc:Yeah, the Carter family.
Guest:They're literally, they're from 30 miles from where I was born, Pikeville, Kentucky, just on the other side of the Virginia line, Clinch Mountain, Sunnyside, which people will know most famously used by the Coen brothers and Brother Huerta as the Soggy Bottom boys were going into that radio station to try and get some money for cutting a record.
Guest:old-timey music.
Guest:A flatbed truck goes by advertising for the governor and his run, and they're doing the Carter family's sunny side.
Guest:Keep on the sunny side, always on it.
Guest:And I used it in my residency show in 2019.
Guest:It's all ties to the album, pre-COVID.
Guest:And in the first two months of 2020, as we do the residency for a second time, we're supposed to do it again later.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But the world goes sideways.
Guest:But that I work up as the first song that I do when I walk out, because it starts with a bunch of videos.
Guest:It's a three-hour show.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Where I, can you believe I talk the whole time?
Guest:No.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Shocking.
Guest:Shocking.
Guest:Stunned.
Guest:That revelation.
Guest:That I ramble on.
Guest:But it was me going...
Guest:Because the radio channel had started by that point.
Guest:So we took it as a residency.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because one of the agents, Jeff Frasco over at CAA, heard the channel and goes, there's got to be a TV show or a show.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Something with this channel.
Guest:I said, maybe.
Guest:I said, maybe.
Guest:You talking about me doing a residency over there?
Guest:He said, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I said, let me go in and pitch this.
Guest:So I did.
Guest:It's all the deck.
Guest:It starts in the 30s, but I start first in Bristol, Tennessee with modern commercial country.
Guest:Ralph Pierre goes from New York with the first portable recording devices down to...
Guest:Bristol, Tennessee, and advertises, come one, come all, sing for me.
Guest:And the two people that came the first week, he went on down to Carolina and set up again.
Guest:But the two that came in that became...
Guest:you know, modern country music were Jimmy Rogers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, the singing breakman, singing breakman.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The blue yodeler.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the Carter family.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Mother Maybelle.
Marc:So you start there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I start there with this resident to explain to the live audience.
Guest:They see the,
Guest:The dust, you know, the beginning, the depression.
Guest:They see how you get to California.
Guest:How everybody gets to California.
Guest:How that music gets to California, right?
Guest:How all of us get to California.
Guest:The Tom Jode Road.
Guest:And I go out and begin that.
Guest:And so I used...
Guest:this jacked up Stones-esque, I said to the band, I said, I got an idea about rethinking Sunnyside.
Marc:And that's what's on the record.
Guest:And I, so come full circle, two years, I go, I'm going to cut that because we're now in the doldrums of, you know, everything we lived through with the pandemic.
Guest:And I'm like,
Marc:sunny side keep on the sunny side even in the height of the depression yeah so gong came out of the depression yeah so it fit the record and uh but with an aggression you know that the whole record has a fucking drive yeah you know even the swell ones have a drive and it's like the difference in you know your production like is i once talked to fogarty you know and i said you know i i got all those old fantasy records oh yeah yeah
Marc:And those grooves are deep, and they all sound clean as fuck.
Marc:And everything is... Well, it's him producing.
Marc:I know that.
Marc:So I said to him, it's very funny, because I'm thinking about even the opening of this new record, your record of Brighter Days.
Marc:I said, well, how do you mix?
Marc:And he goes, well, we're thinking of an AM radio speaker in a car.
Marc:So when the guitar plays, you put that up front.
Marc:When I'm singing, you put that up front.
Bye.
Guest:Well, there's a funny story about Jimmy Martin's band, this bluegrass.
Guest:When you put that up, when the guitar plays, you put that up.
Guest:J.D.
Guest:Crowe, I don't know if you know that name, but he had the New South.
Guest:And he was a great bluegrass banjo player.
Guest:And he was playing in Jimmy Martin's bluegrass band after Jimmy left.
Guest:That's how Jimmy Martin replaced Flatton's Krugs, or Lester Flatt.
Guest:He's a singer.
Guest:And then he leaves Bill because he gets his designs on himself.
Guest:And never became an Opry member because of that.
Guest:Bill Monroe blocked that forever.
Guest:But he's got his band, and J.D.
Guest:Crowe's playing banjo with him.
Guest:And he says one day, he goes, something came up, and they're standing there looking at each other.
Guest:He goes, Jimmy?
Guest:When you were singing, you were the star.
Guest:He said, well, I'm going to play in that banjo.
Guest:I'm the fucking star.
Guest:So Fogarty sang that.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:You put that up.
Guest:Well, that's how we use.
Guest:I'm old enough that when I was first ever in a recording studio, the little brown wood grain boxes, oritones.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You've seen them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The little cheapest six inch speaker.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's what you mixed on final because that's what it was going to sound like, they would say, in a car.
Guest:And that would be in the booth.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:In the control room.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You'd sit there and go, that's what it's.
Guest:The big speakers sound glorious, but you know how everybody's going to hear it?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:On that.
Guest:The shittiest, cheapest little.
Guest:And that's why some records sound shitty on good systems.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I, so you know what I mixed on this?
Guest:What?
Guest:Well, we went from, Pete and I used to, I caught, we couldn't afford to go record at Capitol.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Until I got signed by Warner.
Guest:We cut the set, the last four songs at Capitol.
Guest:On this record?
Guest:No, no, no, no.
Guest:The first album ever, Guitarist Cadillacs.
Guest:But on the original six-song LP, I could master.
Guest:I had enough money to go master at Capitol.
Guest:So I went in there, got him Eddie Schreier, and I went back to my little one-room
Guest:As Dave Alvin said to somebody, he said, Dwight lives up there at the top of Argyle.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Above the freeway.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Franklin.
Guest:Yeah, Franklin and Argyle.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He said he lives up there in the smallest apartment you ever saw in your life.
Guest:Because he came there and was to pick me up.
Guest:We were going to go to one of their gigs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he looked.
Guest:It was literally an eight by eight room.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:With a little step in.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The sink was in the kitchen.
Guest:I didn't even have a bath.
Guest:They had a toilet and a tub and that whole bath.
Guest:It was funky, but it was up in the hills, so I was peaceful.
Guest:This is 1984, and I go up there, and I had—the only thing I'd ever afforded myself, you know—
Guest:living out here and being able to buy as an accoutrement to my life was an old JVC receiver.
Guest:It had the blue dial.
Guest:Remember the JVC lit up blue.
Guest:And I bought a pretty good pair of Altec Lansing speakers.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I could afford that much.
Guest:They were 10 inch woofer tweeter.
Guest:And so I had that set in an eight by eight room and I'm listening and I call up Pete and I go, Hey man, there's a bass feedback on a couple of tracks on the lacquer.
Guest:He goes, what?
Guest:I went, yeah.
Guest:He goes,
Guest:He said, that's Eddie Shriver.
Guest:He's in the Capitol.
Guest:He's like, I said, I don't know.
Guest:I said, but it's just come over here.
Guest:So he drives over.
Guest:He's like,
Guest:He calls Eddie.
Guest:He goes, hey, Dwight's got something.
Guest:He goes, where's he living?
Guest:What the?
Guest:I'm like, incredulous.
Guest:I'm calling.
Guest:The engineer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Capital.
Guest:I'm questioning his base feedback.
Guest:So I'm sitting there and I go, no, man.
Guest:Another day goes by.
Guest:I'm listening to these tracks.
Guest:Pete comes.
Guest:He goes, no.
Guest:Eddie, you better.
Guest:So he's like, no, I haven't listened.
Guest:I just listened to it again.
Guest:I put it on.
Guest:He goes, I've got a copy.
Guest:It's fine.
Guest:Two days later, phone rings at Pete's.
Guest:He goes, hey, man, it's Eddie.
Guest:I said, holy shit.
Guest:He goes, they just went down the hall.
Guest:I can't remember the guy, the oldest engineer, mastering engineer at Capitol is four bays down from, I don't know if you've ever been to Capitol Studios.
Guest:You got to go.
Guest:If they open back up, go.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because Les Paul designed the echo chambers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They're underneath the parking lot.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the Studio B at Capitol is one of the greatest recordings.
Guest:If you go in there and burp, it sounds like a record.
Guest:But you better be good because whatever you do, it's going to sound like it's on a record.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And if it ain't good, it's going to sound like it ain't good on a record.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So...
Guest:Down the other end of the hall was an L-shaped set of these mastering rooms.
Guest:Well, he said, I walked down, and what was his name?
Guest:Anyway, he said, I went into his room to hear something else and put one of my lacquers on it.
Guest:holy shit.
Guest:He said, man, my room hadn't been tuned in like four months.
Guest:He said, I should have never let it go that long.
Guest:He said, I have a bass frequency that's all out of white.
Guest:He said, get Dwight's record back.
Guest:Come on back.
Guest:He said, I got a rematch.
Guest:He said, I went in and sure enough, he's right.
Guest:There's a frequency on two of the tracks.
Guest:It's like came off my little Altec Lansing speakers.
Guest:So how did that impact how you recorded this one?
Guest:So speakers listening to.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So what we started doing after that.
Guest:Well, when we started mixing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I would go to the car and sit with a cassette tape.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or CD.
Guest:And with CDs, I would go sit with a CD.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:and play back because I'd catch things in my car that we wouldn't catch in the room.
Guest:It sounded rocking and great.
Guest:David Leonard became the first pro mixer.
Guest:Dusty Wakeman was our engineer on the first album, and he would mix.
Guest:And that's what you used to do.
Guest:So then Pete said, by our third album,
Guest:Actually, the fourth album, he said, you know, I think we need to get one of these guys, and we did David Leonard, that are just mixing in.
Guest:They're specialists now.
Guest:It's almost like having a, you know, for medicine, a specialist comes in.
Guest:He only does the snip here and that there and goes, close them up.
Guest:You know, a specialist.
Guest:And that's what mixing engineers have become.
Guest:Chris Lordalgie is one.
Guest:They focus on mixing records.
Guest:And that's what they do.
Guest:They don't track anymore.
Guest:So we started that.
Guest:And even with David, I would catch stuff.
Guest:in my car that he wouldn't.
Guest:And so Chris Lord Algy and I started doing records together a few years ago.
Guest:And he, when I got my last car, they quit putting CD players in them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I said, and I hadn't made it.
Guest:It was between the last record and now.
Guest:And Chris, we started getting ready to do this record.
Guest:And he said, hey, we're going to have to bring that.
Guest:I had an old Corvette, an 07 Corvette that I drove for years.
Guest:He goes, you're going to have to get...
Guest:He goes, I'm serious.
Guest:We're bringing that on a trailer so you can sit in the parking lot and you can listen to them.
Guest:I said, no, we don't need that.
Guest:I said, the world doesn't live there anymore, Chris.
Guest:It's MP3s.
Guest:Spotify, everybody's listening through earbuds.
Guest:He goes, no, no, Chris, you got superstitions.
Guest:So we get there and I go, and the first track that we mix, and he didn't know, I don't know if you know, JBL puts out these Bluetooth speakers.
Guest:Well, there's a thing called a clip.
Guest:It's the smallest of those.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's manual.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's a round, looks like a donut and it clips on.
Guest:You can just clip on your bike.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I have one of those and I started listing on that next to the phone, which if you hold an iPhone 14 vertically, it's mono.
Guest:If you flip it horizontally, it becomes stereo.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I'm listing and I don't tell him till about three mixes in.
Yeah.
Guest:Because he's got a ghetto black, we listen to that, like the oratone thing.
Guest:And he goes, so you're not listening, you don't want to bring the car and the CD?
Guest:I go, no, I'm okay.
Guest:We're going to be okay.
Guest:And then I brought in, I showed him one.
Guest:I said, I've been listening on this on the way home.
Guest:I leave you, I drive, and I'm giving you my notes.
Guest:Based on that.
Guest:The next day I go in, next day to mix again, he's got two of them.
Guest:Because when I started playing it that way before, he realized, wow, like they said, this is how the world's going to hear it.
Guest:Like Fogarty said to you, that's what they're going to hear.
Guest:And the Beatles, if you listen to those mono records and even the stereo, it's like...
Guest:the vocal and, and Pete and I used to talk, but he said, well, you got to be ready because radio is going to compress it and the vocal gets louder.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it's funny that John would say that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, and there's a, there isn't, I'm a, well, you mentioned Credence.
Guest:A lot of guys I can tell, you know, Credence.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:See, I'm talking, and the Blue Ridge Rangers album, how about that?
Guest:The solo record he did, listen to that.
Guest:But Fogarty, when he breaks up over the soul's ants, buying the other three out, and they voted against him, because he knew.
Guest:He said, I packed...
Guest:records for fantasy.
Guest:That's where he worked.
Guest:That's how they got their deal.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because he worked in the record company packing boxes and shipping.
Guest:He was in the shipping department.
Guest:So the Blue Rangers record?
Guest:So, well, he leaves when they break up in 73 and he goes and does a solo album.
Guest:Look up John Furry, Blue Ridge Rangers.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And it's him doing...
Guest:Merle Haggard, today I started loving you again.
Guest:He does working on a building, the old gospel thing.
Guest:He's doing all this.
Guest:He goes, Hank Lachlan, please help me.
Guest:I'm falling in love with you.
Guest:It's Fogarty doing that and playing everything himself.
Guest:Wow.
Marc:That's where that begins, you know?
Marc:One of the first records I ever had when I was a kid on a cassette that my parents had, you know, left downstairs with a cassette player was Cosmos Factory.
Guest:Cosmos Factory album?
Guest:It's the fucking best.
Guest:I became...
Guest:One of the albums I went and bought riding my bicycle down to Rinks.
Guest:It was just like a Target.
Guest:And they had record shopping.
Guest:Dude, the guitar on Come Around the Bend.
Guest:Oh, up around the bend.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:His tone.
Guest:And like you said, that Royal Albert Hall stuff.
Guest:There's an innocence to John and the band when they were interviewing them about being in Europe and they're looking around like, you know.
Marc:Because they are so like watching that.
Marc:Strangers in a strange lane.
Marc:I just watched that recently when it just came out.
Marc:But they are so like, you know, they are just in it with each other.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:A lot like the Beatles in it.
Guest:They're a bunch of guys, toughs from Liverpool, who aren't London.
Guest:They're not the Stones.
Guest:They're not sophisticated.
Guest:No.
Guest:They're not guys that went to, I mean, John went to art college, but not really.
Guest:I mean, you've got Ringo and George.
Guest:the the uh the cats you know so there's there's like there is a love when you watch get back that eight hour documentary the first hour and a half i was scared i said how long does this go on i'm like a fly on the wall yeah yeah and then you realize what you're watching and you go i tell i've told audiences said look if you want to see something great you love music watch get back yeah
Guest:I said, don't be afraid.
Guest:It's eight hours that you'll never regret spending.
Marc:And what you realize, they love music, but more than anything, they loved each other.
Marc:But they're magic.
Marc:I really think, my theory is that all those Hamburg years, when they were jacked up on speed.
Marc:The 10,000-hour rule.
Marc:But also, they're jacked up on speed.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And they had a mind melt, and it never went away.
Marc:No.
Guest:no but so and they're from a four block they're like siblings yeah it's it's like it's like tom fergity and john and they understood the guys that they're all from the east bay they're from within a four block it's just one mind shit and bands that go to new york guys that meet each other in la you know from all over they're never locked like that it's crazy the only band only bands that are are siblings yeah
Marc:And they can't last.
Marc:So on this record, by doing that thing you were doing with those little speakers, because I noticed it immediately with the first guitar chord.
Marc:I'm like, oh, I'm fucking in.
Marc:What the hell is that?
Marc:My casino.
Marc:Holy shit, dude.
Marc:That's the Beatle.
Marc:That's the revolution.
Marc:The Epiphone Casino.
Marc:I saw John's.
Marc:Over at the rock hall.
Marc:The guy took me in back.
Guest:You saw his?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:He sanded that down from a sunburst.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's the one that he and George are playing on the Budokan.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The bootleg video.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Oh, those are those Epiphones.
Guest:And he sanded his blonde.
Guest:I know.
Guest:It's great.
Guest:And that's the famous...
Guest:Do we pass the audition on the rooftop?
Marc:But like every song on the new record just kind of comes right out.
Marc:And it's because of what you did.
Marc:Thank you.
Guest:I fucking loved it, man.
Guest:I'm flattered that you would listen in that way.
Guest:And I hope folks realize.
Guest:I love music because it's the only thing.
Guest:Well, one of the only things, not the only thing.
Guest:Paintings can do it.
Guest:Art.
Guest:Art, when it's executed well, can do it.
Guest:Visual art, but also theatrical art, film art, storytelling art.
Guest:can make us all understand how much we have in common.
Guest:Not what we are, you know, by the power mongers that want to separate us.
Guest:But those that...
Guest:really understand and physicists are now discovering this more and more every day about the universality of our existence that, wow, we all share space outside of ourselves somewhere other.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:And music is that.
Guest:Sure, it's magic.
Guest:So that's my goal is that
Guest:excitement that i felt i get it every time you know the band what you know i become 13 in a garage trying struggling to be the guy i saw on tv to be the guy that dave edmunds dave edmunds
Guest:Also, T-Rex.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:What you're hearing on the— I talked to David Bowie one time.
Guest:He, you know, flattered me with just being a fan of stuff I was doing acting-wise.
Guest:We met each other, and I said, you're a fan of Mark Mullen?
Guest:Of course.
Guest:Oh, God.
Guest:And he said, he said, it's not who does it first.
Guest:It gets all the credits.
Guest:Who does it second?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He said, Mark, because it's a top of the pops show where he and Elton John are sitting in with Mark.
Guest:Elton's playing piano.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they're doing bang a gong.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:With, with, you know, Mark.
Guest:But the first, first one of his was, you know, was hot love.
Yeah.
Guest:Ba-da-da-da-da-da-da.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:But T-Rex, the guitar sound.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:On Bang a Gong.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Dave Edmonds.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then later Rock Pile and The Pretenders.
Guest:Dave produces the first, I think, three albums of The Pretenders.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Dave Edmonds.
Guest:And Nick Lowe with Elvis Costello.
Guest:That whole thing.
Guest:I gravitated more immediately to New Wave because it was still, and The Clash.
Guest:And I covered The Clash with Ralph Stanley, of all people.
Guest:And Ralph didn't know The Clash, but we did Train and Bane.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Because when I first heard that, I was living up above...
Marc:But I thought that guitar sound at the beginning of this new record, it's just got that crunch.
Marc:Well, that's my casino.
Marc:That's the best, dude.
Marc:But the thing is, every fucking song... Wide open heart.
Marc:Yeah, every song just pops right out of the thing.
Marc:Like every fucking one, dude.
Guest:Thank you for saying so, but it's just...
Guest:It's an homage to everything that I loved about music, the stuff you and I have touched on, the ricochet of our musical memory.
Marc:Yeah, great job.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:And I appreciate you talking.
Guest:Well, I did talk, didn't I?
Guest:Well, you did.
Guest:I never got back to Alaska, and I'm going to right now.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:You and I began with me asking you where you're from.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There's another Johnny Horton song you got to hear when it's springtime in Alaska.
Guest:North to Alaska was the title track of the John Wayne movie.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:But there's another song that came out of that film.
Guest:When it's springtime in Alaska, it's 40 below, and there's a haunted female voice.
Guest:It goes, whoo-hoo.
Guest:When he says that, he goes, I mushed from Fort Barron through blizzard of snow.
Guest:I'd been out prospecting for two years or so.
Guest:Or more.
Guest:Pulled into Fairbanks, the city was a boom.
Guest:So I took a little stroll to the Red Dog Saloon.
Guest:When I walked in the door, the music was clear.
Guest:The prettiest voice I had heard in two years.
Guest:It was redheaded Lil who was singing a tune.
Guest:We did the Eskimo hop all around the saloon.
Guest:And it's like the hook on it is when it's springtime in Alaska.
Guest:It's 40 below.
Guest:Well, it sounds like you got to get up there.
Guest:I probably do.
Guest:Good talking.
Guest:At some point.
Guest:It's great to talk to you, Mark.
Guest:And thanks for having me.
Guest:You bet.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:Did you learn something?
Marc:Huh?
Marc:Did you?
Marc:Dwight Yoakam, the new album, which is awesome, Brighter Days, is available now.
Marc:Hang out for a minute.
Marc:People, we've had some great stories told on WTF throughout the years, so we've been collecting them and putting together bonus episodes filled with some of the best stories from past WTF guests.
Marc:This week on The Full Marin, you can get the collection of epic failures with stories told by John Benjamin, Terry Gross, Chris Gethard, Natasha Leggero, and this one from Danny McBride.
Guest:Okay, I lived here for, I managed to stay in for like two years, and then I went through a really bad breakup with the girl I'd been dating since college.
Guest:And then that threw me back.
Guest:That was the first trip where I went back.
Guest:Was she here with you?
Guest:Yeah, she moved here with me.
Guest:And then she started wearing slinkier clothes, and everything just went downhill really fast.
Marc:You were here to make it.
Marc:She was here to find somebody who already made it.
Guest:Yeah, and that's the thing, too.
Guest:When you move here as a young kid, you're right out of film school.
Guest:You're 21 years old, and it's like there's guys who are 28 and have some real money, and you're still kind of living on like a $25 a week sort of like – And you realize that you're just there to provide them with new girlfriends.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:You bring out your – Fell for the trap right out of the gate.
Guest:And so that was the first hit the wall of like, geez, this is tough out here.
Guest:This is brutal.
Guest:Heartbreak and no way in.
Guest:It's like you didn't have an agent or nothing, right?
Guest:Oh, nothing.
Guest:A couple ideas.
Guest:Just a few shitty scripts that I came out with.
Marc:And you're eating fat burgers and wondering how many people were living in the house.
Marc:At that point, there were four of us.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, so that was no good in an apartment in Burbank.
Guest:And I can remember still the day when I found out that it was over with her.
Guest:I was working at the Crocodile Cafe in Burbank, which is no longer there.
Guest:And I went into the manager and just told him, like, I don't think I can do my shift today.
Guest:I'm just...
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:My girlfriend just broke up with me.
Guest:And I'm sitting there.
Guest:I'm like, don't cry.
Guest:And I start crying in front of this guy who doesn't give a shit.
Guest:And he's just looking at me.
Guest:And he's like, all right, just get yourself together.
Guest:Like, go take some time off.
Guest:And he puts his hand out.
Guest:And I assume that he's going in for like a hug.
Guest:But he wasn't.
Guest:He was going for a handshake.
Guest:And I'm just like hugging him, crying with my apron from Crocodile Cafe.
Guest:I remember just walking back to my apartment with my apron wrapped up and my white polo shirt with my name tag.
Guest:Just like, fuck LA, I hate this out here.
Guest:This is like the worst.
Guest:There's so many beautifully poignant bad parts of that story.
Guest:The misjudged hug and then the walk back with the work clothes.
Guest:Terrible.
Marc:To subscribe to the full Marin, go to the link in the episode description or go to WTF pod.com and click on WTF plus.
Marc:And a reminder before we go, this podcast is hosted by a cast and here's some classic guitar from the personal vault.
Yeah.
Marc:Boomer lives.
Marc:Monkey and the fond of cat angels everywhere.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:All right.