Episode 1671 - Peter Conheim

Episode 1671 • Released August 21, 2025 • Speakers detected

00:00:00Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fuck nicks what's going on how's it going where are we at

00:00:19Marc:You okay?

00:00:20Marc:So, look, I got some pretty big news I'd like to share with you, especially for people who want to commemorate the history of this show.

00:00:29Marc:Box Brown, who is a graphic novelist, comic artist, he's a New York Times bestselling author and illustrator, and we've known him for years.

00:00:40Marc:I mean, we go back...

00:00:42Marc:with Box to the Break Room Live days.

00:00:45Marc:He did a couple posters for me over the years.

00:00:49Marc:But he's gotten known for doing these biographical novels.

00:00:53Marc:There's one about Andre the Giant.

00:00:56Marc:There's one about Andy Kaufman.

00:00:58Marc:There's one about Child Stars.

00:01:00Marc:He did a whole book about Tetris, The Game.

00:01:03Marc:But anyway, great illustrator, graphic novelist, comic artist.

00:01:09Marc:And he came to us a little while ago before we knew the show was ending and asked if he could do a graphic novel about the history of WTF.

00:01:18Marc:Now, we thought...

00:01:19Marc:Well, that's a fucking great idea.

00:01:21Marc:So we started working with him on it.

00:01:23Marc:And now I am excited to announce it is a reality.

00:01:28Marc:What the fuck is a podcast?

00:01:30Marc:A graphic novel history of the show by Box Brown with contributions by me and Brendan will be published by Z2.

00:01:37Marc:And you can pre-order limited edition versions of the book, as well as tons of signed memorabilia and a unique one-of-a-kind WTF experience on Kickstarter.

00:01:49Marc:Yeah, that's all happening.

00:01:50Marc:I got a lot of signing to do, how to go through the vaults, how to dig up some stuff.

00:01:54Marc:While the book is already funded, we wanted to give WTF fans the opportunity to get involved early and have a shot at getting some real WTF artifacts.

00:02:04Marc:Yeah, bonafide.

00:02:06Marc:You can sign up now to get first access to the Kickstarter, which it launches on September 4th.

00:02:13Marc:Just go to Z2Comics.com slash WTF.

00:02:17Marc:That's Z, the number two, Comics.com slash WTF.

00:02:23Marc:And over the next couple of days, I will be signing sort of rare edition posters, T-shirts that have been out of print forever.

00:02:32Marc:One T-shirt that we couldn't even sell for legal reasons.

00:02:37Marc:A lot of hard copies of some of my first few CDs.

00:02:43Marc:Hard to come by.

00:02:45Marc:Got some DVDs of thinky pain, got some buttons that have been out of circulation, some never in circulation because of legal problems.

00:02:54Marc:They're they're around some other schwag, but a variety of posters and a giant.

00:03:01Marc:mosaic piece of art of the WTF logo.

00:03:05Marc:And I might toss in a fairly rare bit of movie memorabilia.

00:03:12Marc:So a lot of cool stuff.

00:03:15Marc:Yeah, and going through that stuff and also talking about the old albums with Brendan, the work, the bulk of work.

00:03:26Marc:Man, time is just flying by.

00:03:29Marc:Guy came up to me yesterday.

00:03:31Marc:I was over at the comedy store in between sets.

00:03:34Marc:And he's like, yeah, I did a scene on Glow with you.

00:03:36Marc:And I'm like, wow, that's pretty cool.

00:03:38Marc:And he said, yeah, it was like 10 years ago, I think.

00:03:42Marc:I'm like, no.

00:03:42Marc:No.

00:03:43Marc:That can't be true.

00:03:44Marc:10.

00:03:44Marc:That's crazy.

00:03:45Marc:10 years.

00:03:47Marc:And the first season of glow, I think, was 2016.

00:03:48Marc:So it is almost 10 years.

00:03:50Marc:It's fucking screaming by now.

00:03:53Marc:It's just I don't have no sense of it.

00:03:56Marc:And my days are full, you know, outside of going through the full spectrum of emotions.

00:04:00Marc:You know, I got things to do and it's just screaming by.

00:04:03Marc:There's no pausing.

00:04:06Marc:And I think, as I've said before, COVID, I think, just fucked up our sense of time.

00:04:11Marc:Every day seems like a week.

00:04:13Marc:And I don't know, man, just screaming by.

00:04:16Marc:I got to slow it down.

00:04:18Marc:I got to slow something down.

00:04:19Marc:Maybe I slowed the head down.

00:04:21Marc:It would seem like the rest is slowing down.

00:04:23Marc:No?

00:04:23Marc:Yeah?

00:04:24Marc:No?

00:04:25Marc:Huh?

00:04:25Marc:What?

00:04:26Marc:So today on the show, I talked to Peter Konheim.

00:04:30Marc:Peter Konheim.

00:04:31Marc:Who is Peter Konheim?

00:04:35Marc:Well, that's a fine question.

00:04:38Marc:Because...

00:04:40Marc:Peter Conheim is a film and audio archivist.

00:04:45Marc:He's a musician, multimedia artist.

00:04:48Marc:He was a member of the band Negative Land for a long time.

00:04:52Marc:And he's a guy that I kind of got to know years ago through him reaching out.

00:04:59Marc:He was a fan of the show.

00:05:01Marc:And then he sent me a bunch of the Negative Land stuff and things that are adjacent to Negative Land, which was sort of an art thing.

00:05:09Marc:How do you say it?

00:05:10Marc:It was a very specific time in the late 80s, early 90s.

00:05:15Marc:It was sort of, I don't want to call it art rock, but it was art audio.

00:05:21Marc:There was a lot of music to it.

00:05:22Marc:There was words to it.

00:05:23Marc:There was a lot of comedy in it.

00:05:25Marc:Most of them are satirical records.

00:05:27Marc:They're kind of fascinating.

00:05:28Marc:They actually still hold up pretty well.

00:05:31Marc:And they're kind of off the grid a little bit.

00:05:33Marc:A lot of people don't know about them, and I didn't either.

00:05:35Marc:But I knew of other artists during that time.

00:05:39Marc:It was a time where I guess my brain was kind of being blown.

00:05:42Marc:I mean, I guess the first Negative Land album comes out in 1980 and they do a bulk of work, you know, 81, 83, 87, 89, 93 and onward.

00:05:54Marc:They still go now.

00:05:56Marc:But I don't know how you would categorize it, except that there was a lot of art going on in the early 80s that was provocative.

00:06:05Marc:Culture jamming was a thing.

00:06:07Marc:There was a sort of anti-consumerism, anti-commercialism art going on.

00:06:13Marc:And, you know, Jello Biafra was ranting and raving.

00:06:17Marc:Alternative Tentacles Records was going on.

00:06:19Marc:There was just this proliferation of performance art and performance art adjacent stuff.

00:06:26Marc:that was very curious to me.

00:06:28Marc:And I remember it having an impact on me, walking around New York, certainly in the later 80s, you know, World War III Illustrated, Ad Busters magazine, all the performance artists that sort of came through the Lower East Side.

00:06:44Marc:It was like, it was a vital time of energy that had purpose.

00:06:50Marc:A lot of the anti-consumerism stuff really resonated with me.

00:06:53Marc:And now, like, a lot of that...

00:06:55Marc:that energy is just gone because everybody is fucking sold out.

00:07:00Marc:Nobody is critical of consumerism.

00:07:03Marc:Everybody is their own brand who have no problems with pushing other brands through their brand.

00:07:09Marc:That's the whole, that's the whole game now.

00:07:12Marc:So there's no real integrity on the level of what determines, you know, what real art is art with purpose, art with a socially active purpose.

00:07:22Marc:It just, it, it doesn't,

00:07:24Marc:I don't believe it does exist to a certain point, but only in clips driven by influencers of one kind or another, kind of delivered in the context of whatever platform expectations there are in order for them to get their grift going.

00:07:39Marc:I guess the reason I'm framing all this is that there was a type of art going on, and negative land certainly falls within that, where it

00:07:46Marc:It wasn't about being commercial.

00:07:50Marc:It was about, you know, making a stand or being abstract or absurdist, you know, in in relation to and in response to mediocrity, consumer culture, status quo of whatever.

00:08:05Marc:It was almost like an explosion of fuck you.

00:08:08Marc:We're here and you can go fuck yourself.

00:08:11Marc:And this is why.

00:08:13Marc:Or look at me.

00:08:14Marc:I don't fit into your paradigm.

00:08:17Marc:I'm free.

00:08:18Marc:And that kind of art just doesn't.

00:08:20Marc:Maybe it exists, but it doesn't have the thrust it used to, especially if it's just a clip or a reel of a guy doing a thing.

00:08:29Marc:You know, you'll pick up some traction, but there was sort of a community around this stuff.

00:08:34Marc:And I think it blew a lot of minds.

00:08:37Marc:I know I'm one of those guys that needed this type of, you had to go find it.

00:08:41Marc:You know, somebody had to turn you on to it.

00:08:43Marc:I've told this story before, but I had a guy I knew who worked at a record store, was in a band called Jungle Red that only played twice a year.

00:08:51Marc:It was a lot of sound layering and noise.

00:08:54Marc:And there were two of them, Steve and Greg.

00:08:57Marc:And I remember going to a party near the university.

00:09:01Marc:It must have been in the...

00:09:03Marc:early 80s, like before I graduated high school, 80, 81.

00:09:07Marc:And they were in surgical scrubs and they had borrowed some beat up old guitar, my brothers, that they wanted to tape a baby doll arm to.

00:09:15Marc:And it was just this, this cacophony of noise.

00:09:19Marc:And Greg was on piano playing dissonant things.

00:09:22Marc:And Steve was on guitar playing dissonant things.

00:09:25Marc:And a lot of the audience was sort of the local kind of out there,

00:09:30Marc:Not hipsters, but artists and weirdos.

00:09:34Marc:And there was one guy walking around and you could pay him a dollar to stick a pin through his nipple.

00:09:43Marc:You know, it was that kind of party, right?

00:09:45Marc:Who hasn't been to that kind of party?

00:09:47Marc:But I just remember that a lot of the audience was sort of like the kind of hipster, artsy, gay contingent of Albuquerque and LaRue, Steve LaRue, the leader of Jungle Red.

00:09:59Marc:had brought his entire collection of antique Fiesta Ware ceramics.

00:10:04Marc:And during the performance, during the cacophony of noise, he was breaking one piece at a time with a hammer.

00:10:10Marc:And just the layers of that sound, the drone of the piano and the feedback of the guitar, and just a large group of gay men who were just like, no, oh God, no.

00:10:25Marc:It was the layered performance.

00:10:27Marc:I'm not saying it had intent, but it did.

00:10:30Marc:There was intention there, but it wasn't a commentary on anything other than we are fucking out there.

00:10:38Marc:And this place where we are exists.

00:10:41Marc:If you want to make the journey, if not with us.

00:10:45Marc:Fucking take it into your own hands and find some artistic space where you can scream your fucking head off and fucking just say fuck you to the world so you can feel a sense of freedom.

00:10:59Marc:It was just a period of time where people in small artistic communities, you know, felt like what they were saying made a difference.

00:11:06Marc:And that evolved or came out of or ran alongside of early punk rock and

00:11:12Marc:And just people pushing the envelope in a visceral way, usually with their own operation, not well produced necessarily.

00:11:20Marc:Or if it was produced, it was produced within the little world that they were in.

00:11:25Marc:And there was nothing about it that was meant for consumer culture.

00:11:31Marc:So its very existence was a reflection and a pushback on that.

00:11:36Marc:And I'm old enough to remember that stuff having a profound impact on

00:11:41Marc:On my head and on what was possible.

00:11:44Marc:I can't say that I'm living that life or that it's what I do per se, but it certainly informed a lot of who I am.

00:11:54Marc:And as I was speaking of the last time about instead of looking at it as nostalgia, you know, look at it as the building blocks of your sense of self.

00:12:03Marc:So look, I'll be introducing a screening of McCabe and Mrs. Miller at the Arrow Theater this Saturday, August 23rd.

00:12:10Marc:Also, I'll be back at Largo with the band on Wednesday, September 10th.

00:12:15Marc:For links, you can go to wtfpod.com slash tour.

00:12:22Marc:Wait, I'll also be at Largo.

00:12:23Marc:Oh, that's sold out.

00:12:25Marc:Sorry.

00:12:26Marc:I'm there on the 28th, but I believe it's it's sold out.

00:12:31Marc:That's crazy.

00:12:32Marc:I don't usually sell out that quick there.

00:12:34Marc:I guess they're expecting something.

00:12:36Marc:So Peter Konheim, who we'll talk to in a moment, is the archival producer on the new Netflix documentary Devo.

00:12:43Marc:And also we're going to throw this in.

00:12:45Marc:This is the song content from Negative Land's album The World Will Decide, which features samples of me, Mark Maron, from this very show.

00:12:55Marc:Here we go.

00:13:10Guest:Participate.

00:13:11Marc:Content.

00:13:12Marc:Never forget the fact that we are all just content.

00:13:17Marc:That anything you put out there, you're content.

00:13:22Marc:We are all just potential content for someone else's needs.

00:13:26Guest:I think people are happy to participate.

00:13:28Marc:There's just hundreds of people rolling their dice, throwing their hat into the content providing ring.

00:13:35Marc:Content.

00:13:37Marc:Forever.

00:13:37Guest:Make it mandatory.

00:13:38Marc:Content.

00:13:39Guest:You don't have to pay people to participate.

00:13:42Marc:Your content.

00:13:42Marc:You're forced to participate.

00:13:43Marc:My content.

00:13:44Marc:You're forced to participate.

00:13:45Marc:Content is eternal.

00:13:53Guest:Before I forget, because I know this show, and I know how this works, and I know Brendan is going to listen to everything, and I know he's going to do his work.

00:14:00Guest:Sure.

00:14:00Guest:Brendan, I'm talking to you now.

00:14:03Guest:Yeah.

00:14:04Guest:I want to tell you, there has never been, in my estimation, a better dialogue editor than Brendan McDonald.

00:14:13Guest:I'm just going to say this right now.

00:14:15Guest:When I first started listening to the show 14 years ago, it was around the time of, oh, God.

00:14:21Guest:You know, Andy Kaufman's... Oh, Zamuda.

00:14:24Guest:Zamuda, thank you.

00:14:25Guest:200-something.

00:14:27Guest:I thought, wow, it's amazing how this show is not even edited.

00:14:30Guest:Like, these conversations just flow, and I don't hear any edits.

00:14:33Guest:Because I've been doing audio editing a great deal in my life.

00:14:37Guest:And I live for the perfect splice.

00:14:39Guest:I live for the crossfade.

00:14:40Guest:I live to hide the glitch.

00:14:44Guest:And it took me a long time to realize that these shows were edited.

00:14:47Guest:Because you're so fucking good.

00:14:50Marc:Oh, yeah, man.

00:14:51Marc:He's the best.

00:14:52Marc:And tell the people just how much time that can take.

00:14:55Marc:Oh.

00:14:56Guest:I mean, yeah.

00:14:57Guest:Hours.

00:14:58Guest:Hours.

00:14:58Guest:I mean, to do two shows a week for all this time, obviously your efforts, but Brendan's efforts as the editor, oh, God.

00:15:07Guest:Crazy.

00:15:07Guest:Now, you get into a rhythm when you start doing audio editing or any kind of editing, of course, and you find your flow.

00:15:13Guest:Yeah.

00:15:14Guest:You know your tricks.

00:15:15Guest:Yeah.

00:15:16Guest:Yeah.

00:15:16Guest:But I just – I'm in awe of you, Brendan.

00:15:19Guest:Yeah.

00:15:19Guest:Would you marry me?

00:15:20Guest:Oh, you're married.

00:15:21Guest:Yeah.

00:15:23Marc:He's all settled with that.

00:15:24Marc:Yeah.

00:15:25Marc:But, yeah, you have been on the periphery of this show for a long time.

00:15:29Marc:And I would say, you know, that your engagement with me has been, you know, sort of – I'm very reluctant to make new friends.

00:15:38Marc:Yeah.

00:15:38Marc:And, you know, your persistence was... It became sort of like, what does this guy want?

00:15:45Marc:Yeah, yeah.

00:15:46Marc:And then, like, he's sending me all these records.

00:15:48Marc:And then the resentment happened, and I'm like, I'm not even going to listen to these records.

00:15:52Guest:I am the result of your parasocial relationship with your fans.

00:15:58Guest:I am the tragic.

00:15:59Guest:I'm the tragic.

00:16:01Guest:And yet, look what happened.

00:16:02Marc:No, but I think ultimately, you know, that...

00:16:05Marc:For me, in sort of getting to know you a little bit, and then also we have an Albuquerque connection in that you ran the Guild Theater, but I think I was gone by then.

00:16:15Marc:Yeah, 2000.

00:16:16Marc:Oh, yeah, you were long gone.

00:16:17Marc:2003 to 2008.

00:16:19Marc:But, you know, in sort of engaging with the negative land stuff and—

00:16:24Marc:realizing the circle of artists that you were involved with.

00:16:27Marc:And I think you know from listening to this show that there is a period of my life where a lot of that type of stuff was introduced to me, but I have no context for it.

00:16:36Marc:And I still really don't.

00:16:38Marc:Because Negative Land and all that work, these are...

00:16:42Marc:really comedy records a lot of them.

00:16:44Marc:Oh, sure, of course.

00:16:45Marc:And they're comedy records in the tradition of probably Firesign.

00:16:49Marc:Absolutely.

00:16:49Marc:In some way.

00:16:50Guest:Oh, Firesign Theater is a huge influence on Negative Lands, radio arts specifically.

00:16:54Guest:Yeah.

00:16:54Guest:But I got to preface this by saying, I've been out of Negative Land now.

00:16:57Guest:I eventually did quit.

00:16:58Guest:I was in it for 20 years, 20 long years.

00:17:01Guest:So I've moved on, but I'm happy, happy to talk about what happened in that period.

00:17:06Marc:Well, I think it's important for me because I always gravitated to that.

00:17:11Marc:There was a period where I was reading research and research laboratories in San Francisco and what was going on there.

00:17:20Marc:Biafra's on a negative land record.

00:17:23Marc:There's this crew of people that were doing something a little more elevated than punk rock with political intent and social disruption intent.

00:17:33Marc:Adbusters magazine was very big for me for a while.

00:17:36Marc:and stuff like someone just sent me this, like these stickers.

00:17:41Marc:They just say, don't trust the algorithm.

00:17:44Marc:Yeah, right.

00:17:44Marc:And this was— Very much in the same mindset.

00:17:46Marc:That's right.

00:17:47Marc:There was a radical idea to doing this and to planting these messages.

00:17:52Marc:And while re-listening and listening to some of the negative land stuff for the first time over the last few days, that, you know, I started to realize that—

00:18:03Marc:The idea of culture jamming, which was a real thing, whereas is like you're going to create media that's going to infect the broader media almost as a virus to reveal the truth of its impact and domination on our consciousness.

00:18:16Marc:Right.

00:18:16Marc:Well said.

00:18:17Marc:Sure.

00:18:17Marc:And and that there were artists that would do this stuff.

00:18:21Marc:And when it was a smaller media landscape.

00:18:24Marc:Yes.

00:18:24Marc:It sometimes was possible.

00:18:26Marc:That's a huge distinction, I think.

00:18:28Marc:But what I realized this morning is that culture jamming the impact now, because when you listen to it into the way that you layer sort of rhythm in almost a hypnotic way with found footage, audio footage and things that you're saying and bits and pieces of writing and even on the last record, me.

00:18:44Marc:Yes, that's right.

00:18:46Marc:That's right.

00:18:46Guest:You are on that record.

00:18:47Marc:Yes.

00:18:48Marc:On the cut content.

00:18:49Marc:That's right.

00:18:49Guest:We made a. Yeah.

00:18:50Marc:Yeah.

00:18:51Marc:And that is that the impact is, I think, as powerful, but because we are all active parts, either passively or not, but but actually not passively of the media.

00:19:05Marc:Right.

00:19:06Guest:Certainly.

00:19:06Marc:Because of engagement and the way life works now is that the impact of culture jamming happens inside you.

00:19:12Guest:Yeah.

00:19:13Guest:And it's also completely 100 percent mainstreamed.

00:19:16Guest:And it is culture.

00:19:17Guest:Culture jamming is culture, is advertising, is everything now.

00:19:21Marc:But to reveal the truth of what you're trying to do, dismantle media's power and control on every level.

00:19:30Marc:Like I had an internal experience with it that I was listening to what was going on on the last record.

00:19:36Marc:And I realized that our brains are so integrated into it now that the revelation is not going to come outside you.

00:19:43Marc:Yeah.

00:19:43Marc:It's going to be an indictment of your engagement.

00:19:46Marc:Interesting.

00:19:47Marc:Right?

00:19:47Marc:I think that's true.

00:19:49Marc:I think that's true.

00:19:50Marc:So it still works.

00:19:51Guest:Yeah.

00:19:52Marc:But I'm sure the audience for it is limited.

00:19:55Guest:Well, I think the audience is limited because I'm just circling back to the idea that it's kind of like predominant culture now.

00:20:03Guest:Yeah.

00:20:05Guest:Make cut up audio, cut up video.

00:20:09Guest:We are so into a whole nother.

00:20:12Guest:Obviously, we don't even have to use the term A.I., but I mean, we are in a whole nother landscape where it's an accepted part of the discourse to be commenting on something and chopping it up into pieces one way or the other.

00:20:23Guest:Like that's just that is the way we.

00:20:26Guest:That's what social media essentially is on a certain level, right?

00:20:29Marc:But that's a corporate space.

00:20:31Marc:So on the basis of this, and this may be an intellectual point, that you're creating stuff to specifically –

00:20:42Marc:To honor the construct or the context of the social media platform.

00:20:48Marc:Right.

00:20:48Marc:So the free thinking part of it.

00:20:50Marc:Yeah.

00:20:50Marc:Or the external art part of it is no longer operative.

00:20:54Marc:Right.

00:20:55Marc:Right.

00:20:55Marc:And because it's like that song that you sampled me on, that it's all content.

00:21:00Marc:Right.

00:21:01Marc:And that if you want to make content that has traction, you have to honor the algorithm's appetite.

00:21:06Marc:Right.

00:21:06Marc:So the freedom of thinking and the freedom of expression is tragically limited to that context, no matter what you think.

00:21:16Marc:Right?

00:21:16Marc:Okay, that's fair, yeah.

00:21:18Marc:So when you listen to Negative Land in the early stuff and the albums that you were involved with—

00:21:24Marc:That, you know, this is stuff, you know, done on an independent label that you guys ran.

00:21:29Marc:Yeah.

00:21:29Marc:And then, you know, it was... Well, not always.

00:21:31Marc:That's a whole part of the trajectory is that we were on SST, punk rock label.

00:21:35Marc:Yeah, that got a little dicey.

00:21:36Marc:Got a little dicey.

00:21:37Marc:Yeah.

00:21:38Marc:But my point is, is that this is real independent art, right?

00:21:41Guest:So this is... That was always the idea.

00:21:44Guest:And it was always... And it was free.

00:21:45Guest:And it was... You could take it and do with it what you wanted was a big part of it.

00:21:48Guest:You know, no copyright.

00:21:50Guest:No, you know... Right.

00:21:51Guest:Right.

00:21:51Guest:Please come to our shows and record us.

00:21:53Guest:Please use this material to make your own object.

00:21:56Guest:Right.

00:21:57Guest:And then we went all the way with that idea after one of the early members and critical members, Don Joyce, when he died, I suggested we take his ashes and...

00:22:07Guest:And we include them in the next album, which was all about chopping up culture.

00:22:13Guest:And he became the album.

00:22:15Guest:And so 1,000 copies went out with his ashes.

00:22:17Guest:I don't know if I gave you one of those.

00:22:19Guest:Which album was that?

00:22:20Guest:That's called The Chopping Channel.

00:22:21Guest:And we gave his-

00:22:23Guest:Did you sign off on that?

00:22:24Guest:He was dead.

00:22:24Guest:I know, but you didn't discuss it before?

00:22:27Guest:No.

00:22:28Guest:This idea came up not long after he died.

00:22:31Guest:Right.

00:22:32Guest:And his whole idea of making this art in the first place was that it was essentially free, that it was open source before we were really calling it that.

00:22:40Guest:Yeah.

00:22:41Guest:And so I think he would have really appreciated it because not only did we...

00:22:45Guest:put him into the context of the record physically as his being.

00:22:50Guest:But you actually got tape fragments from his actual work with each album.

00:22:56Guest:So he was literally giving himself and the art away at the same time as part of the project, which in itself, this album, this is ridiculous concept, was that you could just have a shopping channel that sells like, you know...

00:23:10Guest:absolutely nothing and i don't mean products i mean like you know uh the world yeah like literally ludicrous absolutely data ideas yeah and uh it's sort of like all came full circle for me when we did that because he you know sure he didn't sign off on it um but nobody ever nobody from his in you know internal circle of which was very small pushed back on that yeah you know where does it start for you where did you come from

00:23:35Guest:I grew up in Berkeley.

00:23:37Guest:Yeah.

00:23:38Guest:So you're a little younger than me.

00:23:39Guest:Yeah, 57 last week.

00:23:41Marc:Right.

00:23:41Marc:So we missed the 60s in earnest.

00:23:44Marc:Right.

00:23:44Marc:And we just dealt with the crashing wave of it and picked our pieces.

00:23:47Guest:Right.

00:23:48Guest:I grew up with the Grateful Dead playing at the Greek theater and watching people come from Concord at Pleasant Hill and literally change out of their Izod shirts to their tie-dyes on the street.

00:23:58Guest:Hey, dude!

00:23:59Guest:Let's go to the show.

00:24:01Guest:That was my... Conquered out by Walnut Creek.

00:24:03Guest:Correct, yes, yes.

00:24:04Guest:Which is, you know, people think that the Trump phenomenon is excluded from the Bay Area.

00:24:08Guest:Oh, no, no.

00:24:09Guest:You just need to go through that tunnel and you are in... Yeah, I grew up in Berkeley and... Were your parents in academics?

00:24:17Guest:No.

00:24:18Guest:No, it's really interesting.

00:24:19Guest:They were very clerical type people.

00:24:22Guest:My father worked in business administration of some low-level sort.

00:24:26Guest:He was always angry.

00:24:27Guest:Right.

00:24:27Guest:My mother was a school teacher and a real estate agent simultaneously.

00:24:31Guest:Total workaholics.

00:24:32Guest:Yeah.

00:24:32Guest:And I was an only child.

00:24:33Guest:Right.

00:24:34Guest:So they pretty much just let me go.

00:24:36Guest:You know, I've spent some time hearing about some of the things that, you know, your folks...

00:24:42Guest:The way they encouraged you in a way, because for all the shit that you've talked about.

00:24:46Guest:Yeah, they cut us loose.

00:24:48Guest:They cut you loose, but they also, I mean, your mother was a painter.

00:24:52Guest:Yeah, no, it was there.

00:24:54Guest:Whereas in my family, my mother sang in the San Francisco Symphony Chorus for like decades until she no longer could.

00:25:01Guest:Yeah.

00:25:02Guest:But art was a kind of an afterthought, you know?

00:25:06Guest:And so they just didn't know what to do with me.

00:25:08Guest:And I would just sit there and do, you know, tape edits on quarter inch tape.

00:25:13Marc:When you were how old?

00:25:14Marc:Six, seven.

00:25:15Marc:So you became fascinated with that shit.

00:25:17Guest:Totally.

00:25:17Guest:I mean, at one point, you know how like the stereo Beatles records of the time, like Help and whatever, they're mixed in this horrible way where the vocals are on one side, guitars on the other side.

00:25:27Guest:And once I figured that out at like age seven or something, and I thought, well, shit, why don't I just strip out

00:25:32Guest:John's vocal of you got to hide your love away slow the tape machine down and then do a ridiculous cartoon Martian voice singing the song and like oh that was easy it worked I thought of it and it worked like that it was like no effort so that's the kind of crap I was doing in my room yeah

00:25:48Guest:And then I started to do incredibly badly academically at school.

00:25:52Guest:Yeah.

00:25:53Guest:Around junior high, things started to slip.

00:25:55Guest:Yeah.

00:25:55Guest:So, like, my father's bright idea, this is good.

00:25:58Guest:Yeah.

00:25:59Guest:His bright idea was to get me to do my homework, since he knew that I was into electronics and stereos and all this shit.

00:26:04Guest:And I had it all built into a closet in my, you know, bedroom.

00:26:08Guest:A rack, basically, right?

00:26:09Guest:Of all my goodies.

00:26:10Guest:Sure, yeah.

00:26:10Guest:Which he helped me put in.

00:26:12Guest:Yeah.

00:26:12Guest:Because, you know, he was...

00:26:13Guest:generous and an asshole at the same time it was like an incredibly dark depressed asshole who was generous excited you were excited about something maybe i never i don't think i ever actually okay let's let's say yes okay and his idea of getting me to do my homework was to install a timer so that at 8 p.m i had my own phone line in there too like i paid for my landline all that

00:26:35Guest:A switch would be thrown at eight that I could not get into, and it would cut off the power to the closet and the telephone.

00:26:42Guest:I would have complete blackout at eight.

00:26:45Guest:Early adapter to parental controls.

00:26:47Guest:Absolutely.

00:26:48Guest:Yeah.

00:26:48Guest:And it was utterly, utterly fruitless endeavor.

00:26:51Guest:Yeah.

00:26:51Guest:Because, of course, all it did was just make me mad.

00:26:53Guest:Yeah.

00:26:53Guest:And I'm not going to say, oh, it's time to do my homework right now.

00:26:56Guest:Yeah.

00:26:56Guest:Great.

00:26:56Guest:Yeah.

00:26:56Guest:This means I can just do some work.

00:26:58Marc:He radicalized you against authority.

00:27:01Marc:Oh.

00:27:01Marc:That's the beginning of it.

00:27:03Marc:Yes.

00:27:03Marc:So this is when you're in high school?

00:27:05Marc:Yeah.

00:27:06Marc:Junior high.

00:27:07Marc:Eighth grade.

00:27:08Guest:Are you doing something that you, with all this equipment, that you show other people and that you... We used to make... I had a gang of people that started doing audio sort of like...

00:27:17Guest:radio plays together.

00:27:18Marc:So it's a full sort of like audio nerd community that you're... Yeah, I wouldn't call it a community, but a little lint ball.

00:27:26Marc:No, but it's like, you know, the weird thing about nerdism is that, you know, the sort of obsessive focus

00:27:35Marc:on a specific thing that, you know, hopefully to live a life of a full-fledged nerd keeps growing with you.

00:27:43Marc:Yeah, right.

00:27:44Marc:And you can figure out how to use it is specific.

00:27:48Guest:Well, this is an interesting difference, I think, between you and me, knowing you from the podcast and all you've talked about about your childhood.

00:27:54Guest:I mean, I'm correct in saying that you...

00:27:57Guest:You were kind of a seeker, right?

00:27:59Guest:I mean, you kind of tried things on.

00:28:01Guest:You moved through high school kind of like, you know, you'd have a phase.

00:28:06Guest:You'd have a leather jacket phase or whatever.

00:28:07Marc:Yeah, a self-seeker, right.

00:28:08Marc:Self-seeker.

00:28:09Marc:Yeah, but not like a spiritual seeker.

00:28:10Marc:Right.

00:28:11Marc:But I wanted to...

00:28:13Guest:be part of so that that's a big difference between us and our upbringings is that I knew pretty much what I liked and I knew there weren't very many people that were into the same shit and I had I had no connections with a lot of people in school and so I just concentrated on that stuff and just did it all through high school and that turned into making films which were then super a then they became video with the same gang of people that I was doing the audio with in high school in high school yeah and

00:28:38Guest:And then I dropped out of high school.

00:28:40Guest:Yeah.

00:28:41Guest:I left in 11th grade.

00:28:42Marc:Well, that's good because then you have full control and fully actualized ability to express yourself in the way that you were totally confident in.

00:28:51Marc:Whereas I am too, but it's just charm based.

00:28:53Marc:But we all need, we need, yes.

00:28:55Guest:But we need those like Gus Blaisdales like you had in Albuquerque.

00:28:59Guest:Yeah, well that was, yeah, for sure.

00:29:01Guest:Well, who was your guy?

00:29:02Guest:I had a friend that I worked at my first video.

00:29:04Marc:Did you know Gus?

00:29:05Guest:Did we talk about that?

00:29:06Guest:We talked about him, but he was, I think his store is closed by the time I was there.

00:29:10Guest:There was a bookstore right across from the Guild that I don't think was his.

00:29:13Marc:Jerry's.

00:29:13Marc:Yeah, no, it was Jerry's.

00:29:14Marc:Yeah, he was a friend of Gus's.

00:29:15Marc:And we met, when you and I went to see that movie at the Guild that time when I was there, we met Nikki, his daughter.

00:29:21Guest:His daughter, right.

00:29:22Marc:It was all kind of full circle.

00:29:23Marc:It was funny.

00:29:24Marc:But Jerry was the guy that had the place across from the Guild.

00:29:27Marc:Who was your Gus?

00:29:28Guest:I worked in a video store from 14 to... Well, I worked for like 13 years.

00:29:33Guest:But my first gig, there was a guy named Zoltan Dare.

00:29:37Guest:He's a couple years older than me.

00:29:38Guest:Just the right age.

00:29:39Guest:Like the older brother I never had.

00:29:41Guest:And he got me into all kinds of fringy shit.

00:29:45Guest:The biggest one being Cannes.

00:29:47Guest:When I first heard Cannes, that just...

00:29:50Guest:I didn't understand how that music was being made.

00:29:52Guest:And I've actually been playing now with Malcolm, the singer of Cannes, for 22 years.

00:29:58Marc:Because when I got turned on to it early on, you know, I had a cassette of the greatest hits when I was in New York in the 90s.

00:30:03Marc:I couldn't lock in because I was trying to lock into Cannes and Throbbing Gristle.

00:30:09Marc:Well, that's pretty different.

00:30:10Marc:No, I know, but there were these sort of fringe things that, you know, certain people were like, this is the shit.

00:30:17Marc:And I'm sure that reading the research books, because, you know, what's their name from Throbbing Gristle?

00:30:24Marc:Genesis PR.

00:30:25Marc:Yeah.

00:30:27Marc:And I was sort of fascinated, like, what is this world?

00:30:29Marc:I mean, if it weren't for research, those books...

00:30:32Marc:I don't know that I'd know about it.

00:30:34Marc:And if it weren't for Steve LaRue.

00:30:36Marc:That's the record store guy, right?

00:30:37Marc:Yeah.

00:30:38Marc:Who you didn't know.

00:30:39Marc:Right.

00:30:39Guest:But you've made a big deal out of like how he got you into the residence.

00:30:42Marc:Fred Frith.

00:30:43Marc:Yeah.

00:30:44Marc:And Eno.

00:30:44Marc:And yeah.

00:30:47Marc:And he was in this experimental band.

00:30:49Marc:He went on to kill himself not long ago.

00:30:52Marc:Wow.

00:30:53Marc:But he was that guy.

00:30:53Marc:He's not unlike you in the world that he traversed or what he was trying to do.

00:30:58Marc:Yeah.

00:30:59Marc:And, you know, that can be a lonely place, obviously.

00:31:02Marc:Yes.

00:31:02Marc:So this guy, Zardoz, what's his name?

00:31:05Guest:Zardoz would have been good.

00:31:06Guest:Zoltan.

00:31:07Guest:He was Hungarian.

00:31:08Guest:Zardoz, yeah.

00:31:10Guest:Yeah, right.

00:31:11Guest:Zoltan.

00:31:12Guest:The penis is evil.

00:31:13Marc:Yes, right.

00:31:15Guest:Yeah, that's right.

00:31:16Guest:The gun is good.

00:31:16Guest:The penis is evil.

00:31:17Guest:Was that Sean Connery?

00:31:18Guest:Yes.

00:31:18Guest:Yeah, yeah.

00:31:19Guest:Loincloth.

00:31:19Marc:But-

00:31:20Marc:But yeah, so you were at that point, so a video store for that long.

00:31:27Marc:So that sort of informs the whole film nerd.

00:31:29Marc:Totally.

00:31:30Guest:Because I always, I thought I would be a film maker.

00:31:32Guest:Yeah.

00:31:32Guest:Then I kind of gave that up.

00:31:34Guest:I thought I might be a film critic.

00:31:35Guest:Yeah.

00:31:35Guest:Kind of gave that up.

00:31:37Guest:But it all revolved around, sure, the social connections I made at that video.

00:31:41Guest:I mean, a lot of video store people have this, Tarantino's got this backstory, the guy that made Clerks, right?

00:31:48Guest:Kevin Smith.

00:31:49Guest:Yeah.

00:31:50Guest:You know, it's like a social place, but it allowed you to be extreme deep nerd on the subjects you like.

00:31:57Marc:Well, do you remember Steve's place, The Naked Eye on Lower Hayes?

00:32:02Marc:Oh, of course.

00:32:02Marc:Yeah.

00:32:03Marc:You know, when I was living in San Francisco, I was there all the time talking to those nerds and Steve.

00:32:08Marc:Yeah.

00:32:08Guest:But that was a good video story.

00:32:10Guest:The Naked Eye was great.

00:32:10Guest:Leather Tongue, great.

00:32:11Guest:There were a bunch of them there.

00:32:13Guest:You know what I actually got from, I think, I don't think it was Naked, I think it was Leather Tongue.

00:32:17Guest:Yeah.

00:32:17Guest:They used to rent.

00:32:19Guest:The Chuck Berry P video.

00:32:21Marc:Sure, I remember that.

00:32:22Marc:Well, that was that time, dude, where this is all that kind of, you know, there was a point in the alt world where, you know, found footage and morbid fascination drove this sort of underground video barter world.

00:32:37Marc:Absolutely.

00:32:37Marc:You know, the one of, what's his name from Pennsylvania, blown his head off Bud Dwyer.

00:32:41Marc:I couldn't handle that.

00:32:42Marc:That was a big one.

00:32:42Guest:That disturbs me to this day.

00:32:44Marc:Because like, you know, my good friend is Boulware and he ran the nose for years.

00:32:48Marc:Sure.

00:32:48Marc:And this was all on the periphery of what you were doing, but a generation a little later probably.

00:32:53Guest:Yeah.

00:32:54Guest:Yeah.

00:32:54Guest:We were a generation after.

00:32:55Marc:Because Boulware was doing the nose in the early 90s, so maybe it's at the same time.

00:32:59Guest:No, it is the same time.

00:33:00Guest:It is the same time.

00:33:00Guest:I came into negative land in 95 or 96, and the nose, I think, had stopped.

00:33:05Guest:But that's right.

00:33:06Guest:Yeah, we're contemporaries.

00:33:07Marc:But so how do you get from...

00:33:10Marc:the video store to having an aesthetic that lends itself to joining up with Negative Land.

00:33:18Marc:What is the process?

00:33:20Guest:Well, the thing about Negative Land was that it's still on.

00:33:23Marc:Is it a collective, would you say?

00:33:26Guest:Yeah, it's a collective, and it's down to only really one slash two of the people that started in 78, 79.

00:33:31Guest:Yeah.

00:33:33Guest:There was a radio, still is, a radio show on KPFA.

00:33:36Guest:It's called Over the Edge.

00:33:37Guest:It's every Thursday at midnight.

00:33:38Guest:And my friend who kind of came into the band late, John Lidecker, his performance name is Wobbly.

00:33:45Guest:He took over after Don died.

00:33:46Guest:Don died pretty suddenly.

00:33:47Guest:I mean, he'd been sick, but he did a broadcast pretty much all the way up until he was hospitalized.

00:33:52Guest:Yeah.

00:33:52Guest:Well, that show has been on since 1981 or late 80.

00:33:57Guest:So a lot of us who grew up in the Bay Area who were radio weirdos and just like flipping through the channels, if you were up late, you would come across this completely fucked up collage show, which was like what the Firesign Theater was doing in the 60s, only, I would argue, denser and further out because of the level of tape manipulation and crazy shit that he did.

00:34:17Guest:And probably rhythm.

00:34:18Guest:Well, it eventually became that.

00:34:21Guest:Sometimes the band, we would go in and actually play on the show and actually bring instruments and play.

00:34:26Guest:Most of the time when we did the show as a group, and I assume it still happens, is that you don't necessarily bring in a lot of instruments.

00:34:34Guest:You're bringing in tape sources and whatever.

00:34:36Guest:But anyway, I listened to Over the Edge like a lot of my weirdest friends around 1984.

00:34:42Guest:Yeah.

00:34:43Guest:And the same guy as Zoltan was like, oh, I love that show.

00:34:46Guest:And one thing led to another, find the record.

00:34:48Guest:And, you know, it's, I only got drafted into it just because we were kind of all running in the same weird circles, you know?

00:34:55Guest:Yeah.

00:34:55Guest:I worked at a record store where one of the guys was, who used to be in Negative Line no longer is.

00:35:00Guest:Yeah.

00:35:00Guest:He was there.

00:35:01Guest:Yeah.

00:35:02Guest:We're all connected, you know, and just, they needed someone else, you know?

00:35:06Guest:Yeah.

00:35:06Guest:And it just, yeah, the video store pretty much just, I think, primed me to

00:35:11Marc:No, I know.

00:35:34Guest:It was a very, very important part of my life.

00:35:37Guest:And we had some great tours.

00:35:39Guest:We had, yes.

00:35:40Marc:But I just think it's like, it's interesting to me, you know, as I get older, and you think about, you know, what is the remaining audience for these things that were important to us when we were younger, and it's just old guys.

00:35:54Marc:Oh, yeah.

00:35:55Marc:But the weird thing is in listening to – like you weren't involved – you were involved in True, False because I'm on that.

00:36:03Guest:Kind of, sort of.

00:36:04Guest:That's a controversy.

00:36:05Guest:That was edited after I split.

00:36:08Marc:But a lot of my material is in there.

00:36:10Marc:Yeah, sure.

00:36:10Marc:Yeah, but the ones you were involved with, you know, these are full records –

00:36:14Marc:And also Monopause, which seems to be more musical.

00:36:17Marc:That's correct.

00:36:18Marc:But the negative ones is that you guys tackled a theme.

00:36:22Marc:Yeah.

00:36:23Marc:And through found footage and just your own poetics, kind of took it down.

00:36:30Marc:Yeah.

00:36:30Marc:And expanded it and put the listener in the position of having a –

00:36:36Marc:a hallucinatory experience through audio that would reveal their part in it.

00:36:42Guest:And we made the audience sit blindfolded for one tour because it was a radio show.

00:36:47Guest:So we handed out hundreds of blindfolds and we would look out into the audience.

00:36:50Guest:And the whole idea was, there's nothing to see here.

00:36:52Guest:This is a radio show.

00:36:53Guest:So go inside your head.

00:36:54Guest:And people actually did.

00:36:55Guest:It was totally insane.

00:36:57Guest:For two hours, they would sit there with a pinata blindfold over their eyes.

00:37:00Marc:But that is the nature of audio in general, the power of it.

00:37:04Marc:I mean, it's why Brendan and I stayed, you know, audio.

00:37:07Marc:But in the times during— Thank fucking God, by the way.

00:37:10Marc:Can I just say thank you?

00:37:11Guest:Why, because I don't look good?

00:37:12Guest:You know, I'm the one that has, I guess, had to tell you this.

00:37:16Guest:No, it's the YouTube podcast phenomenon has bummed me out to such an extent because—

00:37:23Guest:This is a diversion, but you want to listen to something not necessarily as an active participant on a fucking screen.

00:37:30Guest:You want to have it in your world.

00:37:32Guest:But the distraction of having to look at people who are sitting on a mic like this, I don't get it.

00:37:38Marc:It's the goofiest...

00:37:39Marc:Well, and the fact that that's become the dominant sort of entertainment structure to me, like, you know, in being the old guy yelling at the burning sky, the, you know, that you're just lowering the bar because people will adapt.

00:37:52Marc:And I think that, again, coming back to negative land is that, you know, most of those records through their themes, whether they're religion or data or politics.

00:38:02Marc:Yeah.

00:38:02Marc:Or media in general, commercial consumerism is that, you know, it puts you as the listener, you know, in the hot seat.

00:38:10Marc:Yes.

00:38:11Marc:And if you let it happen, you can, you know, reassess in a very real way your part in it and also how these things that dominate our consciousness, you know, fuck with our heads.

00:38:21Guest:Yeah.

00:38:22Guest:And sometimes we were actually specifically kind of didactic about that.

00:38:24Guest:We try not to be didactic, but there were times where we did.

00:38:28Guest:Like there was a, in Dyspepsy, which was one of the first records I worked on, which is all about the cola wars and the bullshit.

00:38:34Guest:That's just a meditation on like advertising and bad ideas.

00:38:37Guest:But inside it actually has a thing that says boycotts work and here's how you, you know, we actually advocated, which is sort of stepping over a weird line.

00:38:45Guest:Whereas I think for the most part, the best work doesn't actually advocate in that directly way.

00:38:50Marc:Well, that's the shift from being an anarchist to an ideologue.

00:38:56Marc:Yeah.

00:38:56Marc:Okay.

00:38:57Marc:Sure.

00:38:58Marc:Yeah.

00:38:58Marc:You know, there's a point where, you know, it's same with sometimes what I do.

00:39:02Marc:It's like you get to this point where you're putting out enough of your expression.

00:39:06Marc:Yeah.

00:39:06Marc:to sort of create the art and make the point through the art.

00:39:12Marc:And then one day you're like, fuck this.

00:39:14Marc:You know, here's where you call.

00:39:16Marc:Here's where you write.

00:39:17Marc:This is where the thing is happening.

00:39:19Marc:Here's where you march.

00:39:19Marc:That's right.

00:39:20Marc:That's right.

00:39:21Marc:That's right.

00:39:21Marc:Yeah, it's an interesting step because in the world of marginalized artists, that is the first step of selling out.

00:39:29Guest:Yeah, right.

00:39:30Marc:And it's kind of odd.

00:39:32Marc:To me, because I'm kind of geared towards that, even that stuff where...

00:39:37Marc:You know, Alternative Tentacles was doing some stuff.

00:39:39Marc:I guess, you know, Are You Serious with Mondo 2000 was on— That was a really weird period, actually.

00:39:46Marc:On the tip of that when he kind of took over culture in San Francisco at the beginning of the tech thing where everybody was idealistic and freaks.

00:39:56Marc:Right.

00:39:56Marc:And also, like, you know, I remember the—

00:39:59Marc:Was it John Guiorno and Laurie Anderson and William Burroughs?

00:40:03Marc:They made that record.

00:40:04Marc:The three different pieces.

00:40:06Marc:It's all of a piece of a type of art.

00:40:09Marc:And Laurie Anderson, I think, plays big in it.

00:40:12Marc:But the fact is that it has legs and it is not dated.

00:40:16Marc:And that some of it precedes things that were used in hip hop.

00:40:22Marc:Totally.

00:40:23Marc:Or at least were happening simultaneously for different reasons.

00:40:27Marc:Because ultimately, negative land and the ideology of it was we're against pop culture, period.

00:40:32Marc:Right.

00:40:33Marc:But then it gets absorbed.

00:40:34Marc:And if you could walk me through, it seems like the U2 incident, which you were part of, no?

00:40:41Guest:I came in right as the ashes were settling.

00:40:44Guest:Right.

00:40:45Guest:Right.

00:40:45Guest:But I wasn't on that.

00:40:46Marc:But that seemed to be have a true kind of human and legal impact on the nature of sampling.

00:40:51Marc:Right.

00:40:52Guest:You know, not that case didn't so much.

00:40:55Guest:It was more that case.

00:40:57Guest:For those who don't know, Negative Land did a 12 inch EP that was called U2.

00:41:04Guest:Yeah.

00:41:04Guest:It was a brazen, like, you know, thumb nose.

00:41:07Guest:Yeah.

00:41:07Guest:If I had been in the band at that time, which was, again, just like right around the corner, I probably would have been one of the people that would be putting the brakes on it and let's not poke the bear to this extent.

00:41:19Guest:I would have wanted to have poked the bear less...

00:41:23Guest:obviously yeah and when i say obvious the record was designed to be manipulative it had the words you the letters u2 in enormous letters on the cover yeah and negative land in small letters it was made and and the world was waiting for the next u2 record after joshua tree or whichever it was and so this was like a deliberate like we're gonna see how this goes yeah

00:41:43Guest:And, of course, it failed, right?

00:41:44Guest:I mean, it failed.

00:41:45Guest:Because you got sued.

00:41:46Guest:Because we got sued.

00:41:47Guest:Well, we didn't get sued.

00:41:48Guest:The record was stopped, but then there was a countersuit from the label at the time, SST, who blamed Negative Land for, you know, not holding up their end of the bargain to handle the legal responsibility.

00:41:59Guest:And it just became this disgusting kerfuffle.

00:42:01Guest:My feeling as the dust settled on that one was...

00:42:04Guest:The record itself is, I think, is great.

00:42:07Guest:The record is funny.

00:42:08Guest:I mean, if anybody has not heard it, it's widely available.

00:42:10Guest:But, you know, it's known for having this terrific Casey Kasem outtake that I'm assuming you're familiar with.

00:42:15Guest:Where he's cussing.

00:42:16Guest:He's cussing.

00:42:17Guest:And it's edited in such a way Don so brilliantly edited it so that it kind of sounds like he's going after you, too.

00:42:24Guest:But he really isn't.

00:42:24Guest:I mean, you know, it's just this little sleight of hand.

00:42:27Guest:But it's great.

00:42:28Guest:And the thing is that it was such a provocation that, like, the provocation itself became the controversy.

00:42:33Guest:The provocation itself overshadowed the fact that it was this pretty layered great piece of cut-up art.

00:42:39Guest:Yeah.

00:42:39Guest:You know?

00:42:40Guest:And that's where I think it kind of fails.

00:42:43Guest:That's where I think the legacy is sort of a shame.

00:42:46Guest:It's overshadowed.

00:42:48Guest:It's overshadowed the work itself.

00:42:50Guest:And there's a lot of, you know, you can read all about this.

00:42:52Guest:There's a lot of details.

00:42:53Guest:But...

00:42:54Guest:Once that happened, we were really gun-shy about the Dyspepsi record, and we did not put the letters P-E-P-S-I on the front of the record originally because we were so afraid.

00:43:05Guest:Yeah.

00:43:06Guest:And nothing happened.

00:43:07Guest:Right.

00:43:08Guest:So it's like, and in the end, we, geez, did I say that?

00:43:12Guest:I mean, someone bootlegged the U2 record and it was re-released, you know, and it's been out for 20 years.

00:43:18Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:43:19Guest:So nobody gives a fuck.

00:43:20Guest:It was bad.

00:43:22Guest:It was a provocation that poked the right bear.

00:43:25Guest:Did it serve its purpose in that way?

00:43:29Guest:Sure.

00:43:29Guest:But was that way as good as the art itself?

00:43:32Guest:I don't think so.

00:43:32Guest:I think the record's better than that.

00:43:34Marc:But how does... And sort of fold in the Ralph Records crew into... Because as a producer or as being part of a lot of different records, Tuxedo Moon and The Residents...

00:43:49Marc:And I guess Steve Reich as well?

00:43:52Guest:No, I don't think Reich had records.

00:43:53Guest:Frith did.

00:43:54Guest:Frith had records on Tuxedo Moon.

00:43:57Guest:MX-80 Sound, Tuxedo Moon, Frith, Chrome.

00:44:00Guest:Everybody had their—a lot of people from San Francisco and around had their Ron Ralph.

00:44:04Marc:Because they're all still a mystery to me, and I know they're probably—I don't even know who's alive from the original crew, and they're kind of out there.

00:44:11Marc:But like, you know, I was always sort of fascinated with it.

00:44:13Marc:But again, for me, it happened in a pure space.

00:44:16Marc:I had no context for it.

00:44:17Marc:I was just sort of like, where is this fucked up stuff coming from?

00:44:20Marc:You know, Fred Frith is like some, I can't picture these guys.

00:44:24Marc:You've never seen Frith play?

00:44:25Guest:No.

00:44:26Guest:Oh, he's a master.

00:44:27Marc:Yeah.

00:44:27Guest:He's a fantastic guitar player.

00:44:28Marc:Yeah, yeah.

00:44:29Marc:Maybe I have seen video, but specifically the guys who were wearing costumes.

00:44:35Marc:The residents themselves.

00:44:36Marc:Yeah.

00:44:37Marc:What was the manifesto of that crew?

00:44:40Guest:Yeah.

00:44:40Guest:Well, I'm actually really glad you brought them up because they are hugely, they loom large over me, but also I think anyone who grew up in the 70s and 80s in the Bay Area and was interested in making art.

00:44:53Guest:And I think about them a lot.

00:44:56Guest:because of their anonymous stance.

00:44:59Marc:The eyeballs.

00:44:59Marc:Well, I talked to Sarah Sherman about that.

00:45:01Marc:Okay, all right.

00:45:02Marc:And she's like a big residence person.

00:45:04Marc:Yeah.

00:45:04Marc:Of course.

00:45:05Guest:The thing is, they gave permission, I think, I'll just speak personally, they gave me permission

00:45:13Guest:permission at a really young age to be anonymous, to actually be able to do whatever the fuck you want to get away with without putting your name out there.

00:45:23Guest:And the Negative Land Records generally didn't have our names on them for a long time.

00:45:27Guest:That was partly in tribute to that.

00:45:29Guest:It was an endless band argument when the credits would come up.

00:45:32Guest:But the residents were like...

00:45:34Guest:I mean, they were fucked up hippies from the South, from Louisiana.

00:45:39Guest:They moved to San Francisco in the summer of love or right after like 69 to be, to make art.

00:45:45Guest:And they had money.

00:45:47Guest:I mean, it's not, I don't know how well known that, I think it's in the documentary.

00:45:51Guest:I think

00:45:51Guest:it's in the documentary is that they had one of the people in the band had a um if not a trust fund he had some kind of you know line yeah so they were able to basically get into record making filmmaking actual 60 millimeter filmmaking massive set building theater design yeah in a warehouse that they could just run wild in i mean it was

00:46:14Guest:Fantastic.

00:46:15Guest:So this was the early 70s.

00:46:17Marc:Okay.

00:46:17Marc:So it was like because the original model for that in terms of the freaks was the acid test.

00:46:26Marc:So then, you know, you realize that you can build your zone and trip out.

00:46:32Marc:Yeah.

00:46:32Guest:There's inevitable crossover.

00:46:34Guest:Yeah.

00:46:34Guest:Because, of course, the residents are like hallucinatory.

00:46:37Guest:Yeah.

00:46:37Guest:Of course.

00:46:38Guest:Absolutely.

00:46:38Guest:And they were doing copious amounts of everything, I'm sure.

00:46:42Yeah.

00:46:42Guest:everybody did was and yes to a degree but yeah the residents just they they i mean without giving away too much um the the two main members of what's called the cryptic corporation which is their spokespersons yeah they've always been their public face right hardy fox yeah and homer flynn yeah their actual fucking names which is just the best yeah you know

00:47:03Guest:Hardy died.

00:47:05Guest:So it's now pretty much just Homer, you know, steering the cryptic corporation and speaking on behalf of the band.

00:47:11Marc:And the idea was, you know, just for art's sake, go fuck yourself?

00:47:18Marc:Uh...

00:47:19Marc:Well, I wasn't there.

00:47:20Guest:So, I mean, what am I?

00:47:21Guest:No, but I mean, how do you take it in?

00:47:22Guest:Okay.

00:47:23Guest:Well, one of their first projects was to actually send a tape of really some of their most fucked up music ever.

00:47:30Guest:Yeah.

00:47:30Guest:Like unlistenably fucked up shit to Warner Brothers.

00:47:33Guest:Yeah.

00:47:34Guest:And that eventually came out as like recently, actually relatively as the Warner Brothers album is what it was known as.

00:47:40Guest:Yeah.

00:47:40Guest:send it to them as a demo yeah you know yeah and and it came the legend is that it was returned from warner's address to resident yeah so that's how they got their name so yeah that what else is that than a fuck you i mean if you listen to any of that shit i mean there's a there's a cut on there that's something like you know jimi hendrix's penis caught fire and and and elevated my head i mean it's like that yeah i'm paraphrasing but it's there isn't in no world

00:48:03Guest:Would this ever, even in like a Zappa, Beefheart world of that, there's no way that record would have come out.

00:48:11Guest:So that's a fuck you.

00:48:12Guest:Sure.

00:48:12Guest:What else?

00:48:14Marc:But in the Zappa, Beefheart world, it was like, you know, we demand you to pay attention to our music because it's better.

00:48:20Marc:Yes.

00:48:21Marc:And in the residence world, it's like, we want you to listen to our noise because we think you suck.

00:48:26Guest:Okay.

00:48:27Guest:Or we thought, I don't know if we think you suck.

00:48:29Guest:I think I'd push against that.

00:48:31Guest:Yeah.

00:48:32Guest:I think, I mean.

00:48:33Guest:Chew gum, chew, chew gum, chew gum, gum, chew gum, chew, chew gum.

00:48:37Guest:Oh, that one went deep for you.

00:48:38Guest:Yeah, I could tell.

00:48:40Guest:Absolutely.

00:48:41Guest:And the whole, the Discomo record?

00:48:43Guest:Yeah, of course, which is just a fake disco 12-inch of their Eskimo record.

00:48:47Marc:Yeah, well, I thought that's what the Eskimo record was called.

00:48:51Guest:No, Diskimo is the 12-inch disco remix of Eskimo, which is extremely pointless.

00:48:57Marc:Eskimo is great.

00:48:57Marc:And then there was the James Brown, George Gershwin.

00:49:00Marc:Yep.

00:49:01Marc:Was that with the two?

00:49:03Marc:George and James.

00:49:04Marc:George and James.

00:49:05Marc:Yeah, then they did Elvis.

00:49:06Marc:And I'm like, what the fuck is this?

00:49:07Marc:Yeah.

00:49:08Marc:what is this now?

00:49:09Marc:There was just this constant sort of like, what are they trying to do?

00:49:12Marc:Right.

00:49:13Marc:I mean, if you've watched any of their films, have you seen their films?

00:49:15Guest:Their short films?

00:49:16Guest:I think I've seen a video.

00:49:17Guest:That's what I mean.

00:49:18Guest:When I say a video, they were made on film.

00:49:20Guest:I kind of use the terms interchangeably.

00:49:22Guest:I restored all of their films some years ago, and now you can see them in really nice quality and all that.

00:49:28Guest:Their films are absolutely unlike anything else from like 1974.

00:49:33Guest:I mean, so it's really hard to...

00:49:36Guest:qualify this and say like, oh, this is just a, this is a nose thumb because the sets that they built for these things, the detail, it's like they wanted to inhabit a world.

00:49:48Guest:The records inhabit a similar world.

00:49:51Guest:Sure, it's parody on a level because Eskimo, they're talking fake Eskimo dialect.

00:49:56Guest:What?

00:49:57Guest:Coke?

00:49:57Guest:Oh, yeah.

00:49:58Guest:You know, it's just, like, ridiculous.

00:50:00Guest:But those films are true works of art that are really considered.

00:50:07Guest:They're seriously considered.

00:50:09Guest:Devo, same thing.

00:50:10Guest:You know, his work, I do restoration.

00:50:12Guest:Same deal.

00:50:13Guest:Like, they were 100% committed to the visual vision and the music vision.

00:50:18Guest:Yeah.

00:50:18Guest:And they did care what people thought.

00:50:21Guest:Right, sure.

00:50:21Guest:Certainly Devo did.

00:50:22Guest:Residents, I don't think, had those kind of aspirations, but...

00:50:26Guest:What about Snakefinger?

00:50:27Guest:Oh, he was in their crew.

00:50:29Guest:I mean, he was, yeah, he just, he fit right in.

00:50:31Guest:The thing that I think is really interesting, I think most of the kids today, they don't, they don't really know, you know, is that, is that when, is that when, uh, the residents had their Ralph records label, there was so little competition for fucked up shit like that in 77, 89, 80, even up to like 82.

00:50:48Guest:Yeah.

00:50:49Guest:There were so few record labels.

00:50:50Guest:There were so few independent labels, period, that if you were the residents or Snakefinger, MX-80, whatever, you made a record on Ralph, you might sell 100,000 records.

00:51:00Guest:That number is absurd now.

00:51:02Guest:100,000, 125,000 copies.

00:51:04Guest:Now, to Warner Brothers, who might sell...

00:51:09Guest:10 million Elvis records in a year or whatever the number is yeah that's of course nothing but as an independent like imagine the amount of people that you could have reached then and did yeah and then I mean this is a well-trawn well-trodden territory but around Nirvana like 1992 when Nirvana hit yeah

00:51:25Guest:it all broke open and suddenly independent labels had to compete on a mass scale.

00:51:30Guest:And there were so many releases, but prior to that, if you made a record and it was, it got someone's attention, there's a good chance it would actually get listened to.

00:51:38Guest:Yeah.

00:51:39Guest:And Devo kind of mainstream this for sure.

00:51:42Guest:Cause they got signed to Warner brothers in 78.

00:51:44Guest:Yeah.

00:51:45Guest:And then they had a hit, you know, and with whip it in 80.

00:51:49Marc:Yeah.

00:51:50Marc:So, and how long they've been around.

00:51:51Marc:I mean, I talked to Mark and they've been around 73.

00:51:54Marc:Yeah.

00:51:54Marc:73.

00:51:55Marc:But they started not unlike the residents.

00:51:57Marc:Absolutely.

00:51:57Guest:Yeah.

00:51:58Guest:Absolutely.

00:51:58Guest:And it's curiously enough, they both covered Satisfaction.

00:52:01Guest:Oh, really?

00:52:02Guest:Yes.

00:52:02Guest:They both have almost simultaneous fucked up versions.

00:52:05Marc:And you have a long friendship with Mark and you guys work together.

00:52:09Marc:But you don't work on the music, per se.

00:52:11Guest:No, I haven't.

00:52:12Guest:Well, I've restored and remastered thousands of hours of the music.

00:52:16Guest:We actually made a record called Art Devo a couple years ago.

00:52:19Guest:I would have brought you one, but I'm out.

00:52:21Guest:Which is all, like, the most fucked up stuff.

00:52:24Guest:The most...

00:52:25Guest:off the wall creations from the basement for, from 73 to 77.

00:52:30Guest:Yeah.

00:52:31Guest:Mostly from Ohio, a little bit of LA, but mostly from Ohio.

00:52:34Guest:Oh, great.

00:52:35Guest:Yeah.

00:52:35Guest:I mean, all these people, I feel like swim in the same water and how I think it ties back to negative land is interesting because I think most people don't really make this connection about negative land, but negative land, this is again before my time, but I can say this with authority, but

00:52:50Guest:were pretty serious kraut rock nerds.

00:52:53Guest:Yeah.

00:52:53Guest:So a lot of the rhythms and a lot of the- The can stuff.

00:52:55Guest:Yeah.

00:52:56Guest:A lot of the repetition, a lot of the music that exists in the bottom of those Negative Land records is deeply kraut rock.

00:53:03Guest:I mean, the name Negative Land is stolen from a kraut rock band.

00:53:06Guest:So it's all- Which one?

00:53:08Guest:Noi.

00:53:08Guest:Oh, yeah.

00:53:09Guest:They have a song called Negative Land.

00:53:11Guest:Right.

00:53:11Guest:So it's Noi, Kraftwerk, Can.

00:53:14Marc:Can, yeah, sure.

00:53:14Guest:Sure, to a degree, Amandula.

00:53:17Guest:Oh, there's so many.

00:53:18Marc:I mean.

00:53:18Marc:Yeah.

00:53:19Marc:Well, it's finite, but the big ones, I got into that later in life.

00:53:24Marc:So that's where the rhythms come from.

00:53:25Marc:Absolutely.

00:53:26Guest:I mean, it's all from the same sort of tribal rhythm, hypnotic rhythms place.

00:53:32Guest:And then like Terry Riley, to those of us who are really obsessed with him, do you ever listen to him at all?

00:53:36Guest:Yes, yes.

00:53:37Guest:So like Terry Riley's early 70s stuff in a similar way, where he's like using tape

00:53:42Guest:to accentuate rhythms, keyboard lines, saxophone lines.

00:53:49Guest:He's making loops and using the tape machine as an instrument.

00:53:53Guest:Very much became a negative land thing.

00:53:56Guest:That was Don's instrument, was playing cart.

00:53:59Guest:You're a radio guy.

00:54:00Guest:You remember the carts?

00:54:01Guest:So Don would play with... We would go on tour and he would have like...

00:54:06Guest:I don't know.

00:54:07Guest:I can't remember the number.

00:54:07Guest:But let's say at least 100, 150 individual carts of individual samples that were labeled that were specific to the narrative.

00:54:16Guest:And he would just jockey those carts the whole show.

00:54:20Guest:It made for a great show.

00:54:21Guest:You could watch the guy doing this.

00:54:23Guest:It's a different type of DJing.

00:54:24Guest:Absolutely it is.

00:54:26Guest:It's 100% DJing.

00:54:27Guest:And he kept using those pretty much until he died.

00:54:29Marc:Does this predate two turntables and a microphone?

00:54:33Marc:No.

00:54:34Marc:No.

00:54:34Marc:No, no, no.

00:54:35Marc:You mean, like, technologically?

00:54:37Marc:No, no.

00:54:37Marc:In the way hip-hop works.

00:54:40Marc:Oh.

00:54:40Marc:Using, you know, samples and turntables as sound.

00:54:44Marc:Yeah, it's right along the same.

00:54:45Marc:Sure.

00:54:45Marc:It's along the same.

00:54:46Marc:Yeah, yeah.

00:54:47Marc:Well, it's interesting, too, about the cut-up method in general.

00:54:51Marc:Yeah.

00:54:51Marc:Not as, you know...

00:54:53Marc:geison and burroughs right conceived of it but in terms of film and and music pieces so i assume that some of the archivist you know kind of matured in you know like finding these old clips and realizing they were lost to time and that served you because no one knew what the fuck it was from and it span a lot of its public domain which helps too

00:55:15Marc:Right, and I think that in documentary, I think the one practitioner of this that is really fully realized as an artist is that Adam Curtis.

00:55:26Marc:Oh, yeah.

00:55:27Marc:And creating, and also I think David Shields did it a bit with his doc on The Football Player, that where you don't have a narrator.

00:55:37Marc:You just have found pieces, and you put them together for montage effect.

00:55:41Guest:Well, did you see John and Yoko one-to-one?

00:55:44Guest:No.

00:55:44Guest:Dude.

00:55:45Guest:It's the best of its kind documentary I've seen in years.

00:55:49Guest:100% archival footage with one key exception that I won't give away.

00:55:54Guest:The music's beautiful.

00:55:55Guest:The story's beautiful.

00:55:56Guest:It just focuses on that period of time when they were in their Greenwich Village apartment before the Dakota.

00:56:00Guest:And then it kind of like bookends it with the Dakota.

00:56:03Guest:But it's a must because all it does is use historical footage.

00:56:08Guest:As a narrative.

00:56:10Guest:Yeah.

00:56:10Guest:It's genius.

00:56:11Guest:Yeah.

00:56:11Guest:Genius.

00:56:12Marc:Oh, I've got to watch it.

00:56:13Marc:Yeah.

00:56:14Marc:But the montage effect of found, you know, when you use found footage in montage, you are able to transcend time and space to create a narrative without a narrator.

00:56:27Marc:And it's great.

00:56:29Marc:Yeah.

00:56:29Marc:And you could argue Burroughs did that, too, though.

00:56:31Marc:Sure.

00:56:31Marc:Burroughs took it to a different experience.

00:56:33Marc:Well, his idea was that, you know, if you take the paragraph and cut it up and then rearrange it, that you're actually time traveling somehow.

00:56:40Guest:Right.

00:56:41Guest:Which I like that.

00:56:41Guest:Yeah, he had the sort of the Oregon box level of like thinking about it.

00:56:45Marc:But some of it's unreadable.

00:56:47Marc:Yeah.

00:56:47Marc:But, you know, you like it because of the poetry of it.

00:56:51Marc:Yeah.

00:56:51Marc:You know, it's kind of it is provocative.

00:56:53Marc:Yeah.

00:56:54Marc:uh but so how do you decide now i mean you know outside of working with mother's bar and you know kind of like curating you know or at least having in your house enough copies of negative lamb records to send me um yeah believe me we all have the boxes of records i thought this would sell i just heard you had all your your comedy cds from the with the freaks on the cover yeah they're upstairs yeah yeah i gotta go find those uh but

00:57:19Marc:When do you walk into film archiving as, you know, a curator and as a mission?

00:57:27Guest:I used to work at Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

00:57:30Guest:It was a total clerical kind of thing.

00:57:31Guest:Yeah.

00:57:32Guest:Film shipping.

00:57:33Guest:Like your dad?

00:57:33Guest:Like my dad.

00:57:35Guest:Thank you.

00:57:36Guest:Wow.

00:57:36Guest:Never made that connection.

00:57:37Guest:This is why I came on this show.

00:57:40Guest:And they would let me write program notes sometimes.

00:57:44Guest:Occasionally I would squeeze my way into like some curatorial ideas with the curators that I knew.

00:57:49Guest:That led to me owning the Guild Cinema in Albuquerque for a few years.

00:57:53Guest:So you were part of the community of curators.

00:57:55Guest:Yeah, yeah.

00:57:57Guest:I mean, there's a bunch of us in the Bay Area who have done shows at different venues.

00:58:01Marc:Well, we did McCabe and Mrs. Miller in a print that you loved, and pardon me because I'm not in that world of nerds.

00:58:06Marc:I'm like, this fucking movie's fucked up.

00:58:07Marc:Yeah, I know.

00:58:08Guest:It keeps changing colors.

00:58:09Guest:What's going on?

00:58:10Guest:Yeah, well, that was trial by fire, that one.

00:58:14Guest:But no, we all kind of, a lot of us have curated at different theaters, and I always wanted to do preservation work.

00:58:21Guest:I was always obsessed with...

00:58:25Guest:Not just the quality of something, like the way that Chad Kasim described of like, I know this can be made better.

00:58:31Guest:Yeah.

00:58:32Guest:Like he had a whole thing on your interview where he said that.

00:58:34Guest:Yeah.

00:58:35Guest:Like there has got to be a better master to be derived from this.

00:58:38Guest:Right.

00:58:38Guest:And that's driven me for the last like 25 years of doing this kind of work roughly.

00:58:44Guest:And it started officially with the film that you and Lynn came and saw right before.

00:58:48Guest:Spring night, summer night.

00:58:50Guest:Yeah.

00:58:50Guest:Right.

00:58:50Guest:Which was a totally obscure little movie from Ohio that nobody had seen that we just happened to have delivered to us at the Guild for a thing.

00:58:58Guest:And I fell in love with it.

00:58:59Guest:And I said, I'm going to restore this.

00:59:00Guest:And that's it took it was actually restored before me.

00:59:05Guest:Long story.

00:59:06Guest:That's kind of what started it.

00:59:07Guest:And I just never really wanted to stop doing that.

00:59:11Guest:So.

00:59:12Guest:In the same way that I have a parasocial relationship with you.

00:59:15Guest:When Devo needed some tapes transferred and we started communicating and I went down to their archive and I'm like, who the fuck is dealing with all this stuff?

00:59:24Guest:And Mark's like, well, nobody.

00:59:25Guest:And I'm like, well, me.

00:59:27Guest:And so I just, residents, same thing.

00:59:30Guest:The Residence documentary came out.

00:59:32Guest:I think it's called The Eyes Scream, I think.

00:59:34Guest:Yeah.

00:59:34Guest:Within the last 10 years.

00:59:35Guest:Yeah.

00:59:35Guest:And I watched it and I thought, my God, their films and videos in this documentary look so wretched.

00:59:43Guest:Like, these are the worst fucking copies of these things.

00:59:45Guest:I know where the originals are because I used to work at the archive where they're stored.

00:59:50Guest:And I just reached out to Homer Flynn and said, I want to do this.

00:59:53Guest:Yeah.

00:59:53Guest:He said, great.

00:59:54Guest:Go have fun.

00:59:55Guest:Yeah.

00:59:56Guest:Sometimes it gets funded from...

00:59:58Guest:Sometimes I've had grants, you know, whatever.

01:00:01Guest:But that's what drove it.

01:00:03Guest:And I just haven't stopped.

01:00:06Marc:But it's interesting that the drive, you know, still in the spirit of sort of, not nostalgia, but...

01:00:17Marc:honoring analog and honoring the past and honoring the integrity of what these original pieces have, that it's not this sort of move to digitize.

01:00:27Marc:I mean, that's what everyone's sort of like, got to digitize.

01:00:30Guest:Yeah, I have lots to say about that.

01:00:31Guest:I mean, you have to work in the digital domain because that's what's available, and it's better.

01:00:35Guest:It makes it easier, yeah.

01:00:36Guest:It's better.

01:00:37Guest:I mean, I am far from, I like to refer to some people in my sphere, I guess you could say, as format fetishists.

01:00:44Guest:Yeah.

01:00:45Guest:I mean, here's my favorite example of this.

01:00:47Guest:I'm not going to name the director.

01:00:49Guest:I'm going to do the research.

01:00:50Guest:You can figure it out.

01:00:50Guest:A famous director managed to get Warner Brothers to put out 2001 Space Odyssey on 70 millimeter about, I don't know, five, six, seven years ago, before pandemic.

01:01:01Guest:And he made a big deal out of, this is what he basically was after.

01:01:05Guest:He's like, this is an unrestored version of the film.

01:01:09Guest:Yeah.

01:01:10Guest:He used words like that.

01:01:11Guest:He's like, this is how it was seen in 1968.

01:01:15Guest:Yeah.

01:01:16Guest:Not so.

01:01:18Guest:Yeah.

01:01:18Guest:I mean, that was not true.

01:01:20Guest:And as somebody who works in the business a little bit on the fringes, I knew what he was going to do.

01:01:25Guest:And when he did it, it looked fine.

01:01:28Guest:But all it was, all it was, was a new print done as good as possible from a mediocre source.

01:01:36Guest:It was not...

01:01:37Guest:Kubrick would have been rolling over in his grave.

01:01:40Guest:And I actually talked to Kubrick's longtime assistant.

01:01:43Guest:You've probably seen the film Film Worker.

01:01:45Guest:Did you see this documentary about his guy, Leon Vitale?

01:01:48Guest:So I talked to Leon about this and he was mortified because in his mind, this is exactly, this is not honoring the vision, but it's honoring someone's idea of like, oh, well, this has never had a digital step.

01:01:59Guest:Therefore, it's the way it's supposed to be.

01:02:02Guest:There's all kinds of arguments you can make

01:02:04Guest:in those areas, and you can get really into the weeds.

01:02:07Guest:But in this particular case, they used a compromised thing to start with, pretending that that's like how it was.

01:02:15Marc:It's not how it was.

01:02:16Marc:It's like using CDs as a source for vinyl reissues.

01:02:21Guest:100%.

01:02:22Guest:Yeah.

01:02:22Guest:Sometimes you, as somebody who does these masters, sometimes you have to do that.

01:02:25Guest:Sometimes the tape is lost.

01:02:27Guest:That's what preservation work is all about.

01:02:29Guest:They knew that the money that it would have taken to do a full restoration from the camera negative, the original of 2001, was they didn't want, Warners didn't want to spend that money.

01:02:39Guest:So instead they just made these perfectly fine prints.

01:02:41Guest:People had a great show.

01:02:42Guest:Great, fine.

01:02:43Guest:I don't begrudge them that.

01:02:44Guest:But the whole idea that like somehow that it's unrestored or not restored is a plus is,

01:02:51Guest:It has no relation to the art.

01:02:54Guest:It has no relation to how it was made.

01:02:56Guest:It's just the state that it happens to be in now when they go to print it.

01:02:59Marc:So the idea is when you restore, you know that compromises are going to have to be made for damage, for missing pieces.

01:03:09Marc:And that's part of the puzzle.

01:03:11Guest:And opinions.

01:03:12Guest:Opinions.

01:03:13Guest:Because if the people that made the work are dead, which is a lot of the time with the stuff that I work on.

01:03:17Guest:Yeah.

01:03:18Guest:You're taking liberties.

01:03:19Guest:You know, you are making decisions.

01:03:21Guest:You're grading the color a certain way.

01:03:23Guest:Yeah.

01:03:24Guest:You try to use the best reference that you have, you know, like an unfaded perfect reference print.

01:03:30Guest:You try to, you know, time to that, for instance.

01:03:32Guest:Yeah.

01:03:33Guest:But you can't see I got partly I got into this.

01:03:37Guest:Because of like, I have this weird innate sense of justice.

01:03:42Guest:It's this weird sense of justice where it's like, I want the truth to be told, but I'm not on the spectrum about it.

01:03:51Guest:I'm not focusing on one part and saying, this is exactly the way it has to be.

01:03:56Guest:That's not right.

01:03:57Guest:I'm not going to do that.

01:03:59Guest:But...

01:04:01Guest:When you play this game of doing like a restoration from a compromised element and you want to make it as good as possible, a lot of the times you have the chance to make something way better, way better than it was originally.

01:04:13Guest:We're doing that with all the Devo films right now.

01:04:15Guest:Most of them look like they've never looked because the technology wasn't there.

01:04:19Guest:The reason why we chose to do that.

01:04:21Guest:It's a correction.

01:04:22Guest:It's a correction because Devo would are still around.

01:04:26Guest:And they're like, well, of course, if we had the technology, we would have done it that way.

01:04:29Guest:Right.

01:04:29Guest:It doesn't mean the old version gets thrown in the garbage.

01:04:31Guest:Right.

01:04:32Guest:Right.

01:04:32Guest:But it just becomes a relic.

01:04:34Guest:It becomes a relic.

01:04:35Guest:It's not necessarily their intent anymore.

01:04:37Guest:And they had like they're using Devo as an example.

01:04:40Guest:They had so many compromises because their budgets were so low.

01:04:43Guest:Yeah.

01:04:44Guest:And now it's like, well, these tools are on the desktop.

01:04:47Guest:I

01:04:47Guest:I can make this so much better.

01:04:48Guest:Let's do that.

01:04:49Guest:And everyone gets excited and that's fine.

01:04:52Guest:It's like a whole nother way of restoring something because you're not really restoring.

01:04:55Guest:You're reconstructing and you're changing.

01:04:57Marc:And you're there with the artist to make decisions.

01:05:00Marc:You hope so.

01:05:01Marc:Right.

01:05:01Marc:But when you're not, but like when you have Spring Night, Summer Night, which is an odd movie.

01:05:05Marc:Yeah.

01:05:05Marc:And it must have been an obsession.

01:05:07Marc:Oh, deep.

01:05:08Marc:And, you know, why that happened, I don't know in terms of your obsession because it's not an easy movie really.

01:05:14Guest:No, but it's a pretty beautiful movie.

01:05:15Guest:beautiful little movie.

01:05:16Marc:Sure.

01:05:16Guest:I mean, it's like narratively, it's kind of a beautiful movie.

01:05:18Marc:Yeah, yeah.

01:05:18Guest:You know, it's just like, I mean, it's made for nothing.

01:05:20Guest:It's made for like $8,000 or something.

01:05:22Marc:Well, it's like the one about the homeless prostitute woman that, you know, the actress, she was married to Kazan.

01:05:31Marc:Kazan's wife.

01:05:32Guest:Oh, Wanda.

01:05:32Guest:Yeah, Wanda.

01:05:33Guest:Wanda.

01:05:33Guest:Well, my colleague, Ross Lipman, who worked on Spring Night, restored Wanda.

01:05:36Guest:Yeah.

01:05:37Guest:Yeah.

01:05:37Guest:It's a similar zone.

01:05:39Guest:Totally similar zone, but that's like 16 millimeter, super low budget.

01:05:43Guest:This was 35 millimeter, beautifully photographed,

01:05:45Guest:Black and white.

01:05:46Guest:Yeah, we knew where the negative was.

01:05:48Guest:The directors were still alive when we did that.

01:05:50Guest:One of them still is.

01:05:50Guest:How do you feel about the restoration?

01:05:52Guest:Oh, they lost their minds.

01:05:54Guest:No, they lost their minds.

01:05:55Guest:That's worth the whole journey.

01:05:56Guest:It was worth the whole journey.

01:05:57Guest:I mean, that film has such a great story because they were supposed to show at the New York Film Festival in 1968 with Spring Night, Summer Night.

01:06:05Guest:This was going to be their big coming out party.

01:06:08Guest:Sure.

01:06:08Guest:And they'd labored for five years or whatever it was on this film.

01:06:11Guest:At the last minute, the New York Film Festival says, you know, we just got this other film by the John Cassavetes called Faces.

01:06:17Guest:We really can't have two kind of like small time black and white independent films.

01:06:21Guest:So you guys are going to get bumped.

01:06:23Guest:Wow.

01:06:23Guest:So Faces goes on to massive acclaim.

01:06:25Guest:No knock on that great movie.

01:06:26Guest:Yeah.

01:06:27Guest:And Spring Night disappeared.

01:06:29Guest:And then Spring Night was recut by like...

01:06:32Guest:effectively like a porno distributor they made them insert sex scenes and it was a disaster and then that it was gone yeah so when i came along to put it in its rightful place what was the seed of the obsession though like because it just read that story no no it just so happened to be programmed into a teeny little touring film festival that the guild got it was a it was a random event yeah it was a random event yeah

01:06:56Guest:And I watched it on an airplane on a terrible DVD.

01:07:00Guest:I remember.

01:07:00Guest:I was flying back from Germany.

01:07:02Guest:And I watched the movie.

01:07:04Guest:I was really moved by it.

01:07:05Guest:A travel DVD player?

01:07:07Guest:It was the old Max.

01:07:09Guest:Oh, that's right.

01:07:09Guest:That's right.

01:07:10Guest:The computer, yeah.

01:07:10Marc:Right.

01:07:11Guest:And I was watching it on that.

01:07:12Guest:And I was by myself on the plane.

01:07:13Guest:There was a stranger sitting next to me, a coach.

01:07:16Guest:And I started to cry.

01:07:17Guest:And I turned to the guy.

01:07:18Guest:And I'm like, I've just seen this beautiful film.

01:07:20Guest:And he's like, oh, that's nice.

01:07:22Guest:There was no...

01:07:23Guest:But I knew, like, I got to restore this thing.

01:07:25Marc:You have a life-changing event with a stranger who's just trying to be polite.

01:07:28Marc:Exactly.

01:07:29Guest:I'm sorry.

01:07:30Guest:This makes you so sad.

01:07:33Marc:But bye.

01:07:34Marc:Yeah.

01:07:34Marc:The German accent always is so good for sympathy.

01:07:37Marc:Yeah, exactly.

01:07:38Guest:And it was like an absolutely stereotypical situation.

01:07:41Guest:Oh, that's very nice.

01:07:44Yeah.

01:07:45Guest:He even got the guy's card, you know, like trying to be his friend.

01:07:47Marc:Yeah, are you familiar with Khan?

01:07:49Marc:Right.

01:07:51Marc:Yeah, so that's how that happened.

01:07:53Marc:And so what was the process was, the print you saw was without the... Print was the correct version.

01:08:00Guest:Oh, interesting.

01:08:00Guest:There was one existing print of the correct version.

01:08:03Guest:Okay.

01:08:03Guest:Which the director held.

01:08:04Guest:Yeah.

01:08:05Guest:The negative had been...

01:08:07Guest:physically re-spliced into the the soft core version yeah and so we had this whole business of how to put it back together when you physically i mean this is again getting into the weeds but when you've got a film negative once it's glued and spliced yeah you can't really take it apart and recut it without losing frames right you you inevitably lose a frame at every single cut so we had to do it in the computer yeah

01:08:30Guest:2016 17 this was still pretty expensive yeah and so we had to raise the money to do it okay once we did it and that's an interesting case because we actually gilded the lily on that one too there was a weird shot missing from the print which was their version yeah that was in the net the cut version but it was a really good shot that nobody could remember why it was there yeah

01:08:55Guest:And they decided, no, let's put that in.

01:08:57Guest:So that's an example of like, that's not how it was in 1968 by about 10 seconds or five seconds.

01:09:03Marc:But this is a completely engaging and exciting process.

01:09:08Marc:It's like bringing Frankenstein to life.

01:09:11Marc:It is.

01:09:11Guest:And it's a total fucking nightmare when you're one person.

01:09:15Guest:Because you literally just watch stuff frame by frame for weeks.

01:09:19Guest:Yeah, interesting.

01:09:20Guest:Cleaning dust, cleaning dirt.

01:09:21Guest:Well, in terms of the – that one was done with the team.

01:09:25Guest:But generally today I'm working mostly by myself.

01:09:28Marc:And like this one, Victims of Sin.

01:09:30Marc:Right.

01:09:31Marc:That Criterion put out.

01:09:32Marc:Right.

01:09:33Marc:Because you've done a handful of these movies.

01:09:34Marc:But like what was the – how did it get from wherever you started to Criterion?

01:09:40Guest:They were interested in Mexican films from this era from the producer who's a friend of mine.

01:09:45Guest:Her family produced these wonderful – The 50s.

01:09:49Guest:Actually, it started in the early sound era, early 30s.

01:09:52Guest:Oh, really?

01:09:52Guest:Okay.

01:09:53Guest:30s to the 80s.

01:09:54Guest:They had a studio called Calderon.

01:09:56Guest:And this was a film that people had loved.

01:09:58Guest:It was unavailable.

01:10:00Guest:I think she pitched it to them.

01:10:01Guest:But in any case, Criterion's doing a couple of her family's films.

01:10:05Marc:And she asked you, because of your relationship to, what'd you have to do to it?

01:10:09Guest:We, again, started back from the original negative.

01:10:12Marc:Uh-huh.

01:10:12Guest:Because she had them.

01:10:13Guest:Yes.

01:10:14Guest:It was nitrate.

01:10:15Guest:That one had been completely fucking hammered.

01:10:18Guest:Like, it had been dragged behind a truck.

01:10:20Guest:It was in such terrible... Yeah.

01:10:21Guest:So it took... It took...

01:10:22Guest:ages to clean that thing up and it looks gorgeous now but yeah that's a one victims of sins of wonderful like melodrama uh paris prado uh cuban uh musical noir baby in a garbage can you know has everything yeah you know so what are you working on now

01:10:43Guest:Mostly the Devo things.

01:10:45Guest:The Devo stuff is slowly coming out on their YouTube channel, and then eventually we'll put out a Blu-ray.

01:10:50Guest:So they made about 16 or 17 videos and films during the height.

01:10:55Marc:So I'm just going through them one by one.

01:10:56Marc:It's nice talking to you about it because of your passion for it, because I get cynical in that, like, who's going to watch this shit?

01:11:02Marc:Right.

01:11:03Marc:Who are you doing this for?

01:11:04Marc:Yeah, right.

01:11:04Marc:Five people.

01:11:05Marc:Right.

01:11:05Marc:Is that satisfying?

01:11:07Marc:But the truth is, it's important in a time where authoritarian momentum is consciously trying to erase the past.

01:11:18Marc:There's that.

01:11:19Marc:But, you know, it's not going to like, you know, pick on spring, night, summer.

01:11:22Marc:Yeah, right.

01:11:23Marc:But nonetheless, in people's minds, the curiosity.

01:11:26Marc:Yeah.

01:11:26Marc:You know, we'll go away eventually.

01:11:29Guest:But I want to pick up on something I heard you say a couple weeks ago.

01:11:32Guest:Yeah.

01:11:32Guest:Maybe real recently.

01:11:33Guest:You mentioned your killer interview with Rodrigo Prieto.

01:11:37Guest:Yeah.

01:11:37Guest:The DP.

01:11:37Guest:The best.

01:11:38Guest:That was so good.

01:11:39Guest:Changed my life.

01:11:40Guest:Yeah.

01:11:40Guest:Right?

01:11:41Guest:Now, see, that's an example of someone who is a craftsperson who got into the weeds on technical details and explained, like, why they were so important.

01:11:49Guest:Yeah.

01:11:49Guest:So there's something that I heard you say recently on a show.

01:11:52Guest:I can't remember who you were.

01:11:53Guest:Yeah.

01:11:54Guest:Actually, you might have been talking to doing your your New York.

01:11:57Marc:Was I talking about my my production designer and the Kintsugi thing?

01:12:03Marc:No.

01:12:04Marc:And the impact of poetry.

01:12:06Guest:Oh, possibly.

01:12:07Marc:Yeah.

01:12:07Guest:Yeah.

01:12:07Guest:With the wall behind.

01:12:08Marc:Yeah.

01:12:08Guest:The thing that you said about Prieto was he.

01:12:11Guest:You were commenting on how he had told you the way he got very specific with certain lenses, maybe even filters.

01:12:19Guest:For natives and for white people.

01:12:21Guest:Right.

01:12:22Guest:Yeah.

01:12:22Guest:But your reaction was like, well, nobody notices that.

01:12:25Guest:Yeah.

01:12:26Guest:So...

01:12:26Guest:Yeah.

01:12:27Guest:Right.

01:12:27Guest:I think most people don't notice that, but one of the things that I think is super interesting about preservation and it goes to mixing, mastering all forms of this live, live concert mixing.

01:12:39Guest:Yeah.

01:12:39Guest:The things that you don't necessarily perceive are sometimes the key to an emotional experience.

01:12:46Guest:If you go to a show.

01:12:48Guest:The poetry.

01:12:49Guest:Well, yeah, but it's, you don't even, it's like visceral.

01:12:51Guest:You don't even, you don't even know, right?

01:12:53Guest:So like if you go to a live show and the sound guy,

01:12:56Guest:really just loves his like gated snare that goes and it's like it's taking you out of the music but nobody says that yeah if you have it mixed right you may very well have people in the audience who feel something different yeah so i kind of feel like that's what prieto was getting to it's like it's not like people are gonna see and like oh look at he look at the brilliant yeah yeah they feel it colorized black and white pictures in france at the turn of the century

01:13:21Guest:Sure.

01:13:23Guest:I love color tinting.

01:13:25Guest:It's beautiful.

01:13:26Guest:But I just think there's something there.

01:13:27Guest:I think there's a lot of intangibles to this kind of work, whether it's picture or sound, that people don't perceive on a surface level.

01:13:36Marc:But it's rooted in something different.

01:13:40Marc:deliberate that doesn't need explanation because the magic of it is in sort of revived yeah or it adds up to an emotional response sure like it just gives you right something something you don't know

01:13:55Marc:It's good because, and I think this goes along with what I said before, is that the depth of the work is important.

01:14:02Marc:You can churn out garbage and people will adapt to it and just return it to the garbage.

01:14:08Marc:But when something has a depth of process and intention, that the power of it is transcendent for those who are willing to engage with it.

01:14:17Guest:Yeah, I think that's well said.

01:14:19Marc:Good.

01:14:20Marc:Well said.

01:14:20Marc:So before we end this up, correct me on what I understood from Chad Kasim about mastering.

01:14:27Guest:Oh, I believe what that came to was...

01:14:33Guest:he did a reissue of a Miles record, and he was talking about how he went back to the original separate tracks, and he did a remix, very different than a remaster.

01:14:45Guest:And I think that got, somehow that got

01:14:48Guest:That got skimmed over because, and it's important because there you go with making radical potential changes in audio.

01:14:56Guest:Again, I'm not saying this is a bad thing.

01:14:57Guest:I do tons of remixing.

01:15:00Guest:I'm all for it.

01:15:02Guest:It's an interesting distinction that people don't necessarily make.

01:15:06Guest:Remastering is taking the existing mix.

01:15:08Guest:The existing mix.

01:15:09Guest:Right.

01:15:10Guest:Now, you can dick with it quite a bit, as he told you.

01:15:13Guest:Yeah.

01:15:13Guest:You can EQ it.

01:15:14Guest:You can take noises out.

01:15:16Guest:But you're not making the drums come up high.

01:15:17Guest:Not really.

01:15:18Guest:Yeah.

01:15:18Guest:Although it's gotten very fucking fuzzy now.

01:15:22Guest:Because of the tools available.

01:15:23Guest:Because of the tools.

01:15:24Guest:Yeah.

01:15:24Guest:And now there are mastering labs where it's like, I get a mix and I... Not me, but an engineer will kick up the drums.

01:15:31Guest:Sure.

01:15:31Guest:I've had to deconstruct... I mean, I went to a friend's house who actually had... You'll love this, I think.

01:15:36Guest:He had the...

01:15:38Guest:half-inch or one-inch master multitrack of the Who's...

01:15:45Guest:Can't Explain.

01:15:46Guest:Okay.

01:15:47Guest:Just the song?

01:15:48Guest:The song.

01:15:48Guest:Yeah.

01:15:49Guest:The session tape.

01:15:50Guest:Yeah.

01:15:50Guest:And we sat there and we listened to each individual track.

01:15:54Guest:And then he's like, but you see here how Entwistle's bass is mixed in with Keith Moon.

01:15:59Guest:Watch this.

01:15:59Guest:And he like, and he stripped it away digitally.

01:16:03Guest:And so all of a sudden you're just hearing the bass.

01:16:05Guest:I just, you know, not a dry seat in the house.

01:16:08Guest:It was so exciting.

01:16:10Guest:So that's like, these tools exist to do fun things.

01:16:13Marc:Well, it's like those remixes that George Martin's kid did, like, Abbey Road.

01:16:17Marc:Absolutely.

01:16:18Marc:And, like, listening to that, you're like, what the fuck?

01:16:21Marc:Yeah, go for it.

01:16:22Marc:Why'd they take that out?

01:16:23Marc:Yeah.

01:16:24Marc:But, like, why not?

01:16:26Marc:I mean, if the original is there.

01:16:28Marc:No, no.

01:16:29Marc:What I'm saying is that, like, it's an interesting entertainment thing.

01:16:33Marc:To see these decisions made way in post to elevate certain elements of it.

01:16:40Marc:But, you know, outside of technology, and I had this problem with bootlegs, too.

01:16:44Marc:It's like the decision was made by the artist to do it this way.

01:16:47Marc:Right.

01:16:48Marc:And you have to honor that.

01:16:49Marc:And that's what you know.

01:16:50Marc:Right.

01:16:50Marc:It's interesting.

01:16:51Marc:Right.

01:16:52Marc:Right.

01:16:52Marc:But, you know, it's not what the artist intended.

01:16:55Guest:Which is what you always want to come back to.

01:16:57Guest:Sure.

01:16:57Guest:Inevitably, that's what you want to come back to.

01:16:59Guest:Good talking to you, pal.

01:17:00Guest:I enjoyed it.

01:17:01Guest:Good.

01:17:01Guest:Thank you, Mark.

01:17:03Marc:There you go.

01:17:08Marc:I enjoyed that conversation.

01:17:11Marc:Again, Peter worked on the new Devo documentary on Netflix, which is streaming now.

01:17:15Marc:Hang out for a minute.

01:17:18Marc:Hey, folks, if you watched my HBO special and want more of my stand up, full Marin subscribers can now hear my entire 2011 comedy album.

01:17:27Marc:This has to be funny.

01:17:29Marc:My mother just is, you know, she's got this eating problem.

01:17:31Marc:She's been 119 pounds my entire life.

01:17:34Marc:And because of that, I am also frightened of food.

01:17:36Marc:And I've tried to figure out why, but the only thing I could come up with is that the horror to her of having a child that might be overweight was so profound.

01:17:46Marc:Her fear was just displaced onto me.

01:17:49Marc:Like, I really think that for about the first 12 years of my life, my mother just saw me as her fat.

01:17:56Marc:That she, I think...

01:17:58Marc:Some part of her thought that if she just ate less, perhaps I would disappear and she would not have to worry about the fat that was on me that was somehow connected directly to her.

01:18:19Marc:This has to be funny.

01:18:24Marc:To get that bonus episode, plus all the bonus episodes we do twice a week, sign up for the full Marin.

01:18:30Marc:Just go to the link in the episode description or go to WTFpod.com and click on WTF+.

01:18:36Marc:And a reminder before we go, this podcast is hosted by Acast.

01:18:42Marc:Here's a slow one, best I could do, with one of my favorite songs.

01:18:49Marc:And it's by Randy Newman.

01:18:57.

01:19:00.

01:19:32Thank you.

01:19:59Thank you.

01:20:46.

01:21:04.

01:21:13Marc:Boomer lives.

01:21:21Marc:Monkey and La Fonda.

01:21:22Marc:Cat angels everywhere.