Episode 230 - Dr. Stephen Dansinger
Guest:Are we doing this?
Guest:Really?
Guest:Wait for it.
Guest:Are we doing this?
Guest:Wait for it.
Guest:Pow!
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:And it's also, eh, what the fuck?
Guest:What's wrong with me?
Guest:It's time for WTF?
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:With Mark Maron.
Guest:Okay, let's do this.
Guest:How are you, what the fuckers?
Guest:What the fuck buddies?
Guest:What the fucking ears?
Guest:What the fuck nicks?
Guest:What the fuck ups?
Guest:What the fucking Thanksgiving?
Guest:All right, that was a stretch.
Guest:I don't even know why I said that because it is Thanksgiving.
Guest:Happy Thanksgiving.
Marc:to all of you who who listen to this show and even to people that don't listen to the show not that they're going to hear that but I want to wish a happy Thanksgiving to everybody and I'm not so much hung up on the the holiday itself because I know where it comes from where its roots are but a day of gratitude in a general sense is always necessary let me get into that in just a second let's do this before I forget a couple of things
Marc:First of all, I will be in Seattle tomorrow night.
Marc:That's Friday, November 25th.
Marc:Black Friday at the Neptune Theater.
Marc:If you still haven't got your tickets, I think there are some left.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:If you are coming, bring cash if you want merchandise because I don't have my iPhone yet.
Marc:I still haven't gotten it yet.
Marc:It's probably sitting at home on my front porch waiting to be stolen.
Marc:I'm having someone watch the house.
Marc:Perhaps it requires a signature, and I didn't just give somebody a Thanksgiving gift of an iPhone.
Marc:By the way, Dr. Steve is on the show today, and I'm going to tell you something.
Marc:I've known this guy for a lot of years.
Marc:He's been through a lot of shit, and the reason we're talking to Dr. Steve today is that his journey with creativity, with having a dream, with having personal problems, psychological problems, drug problems,
Marc:And also some, you know, the possibility for great success and having that crap out, fall away.
Marc:And how do you fight through that?
Marc:How do you transcend when everything collapses or when all things that you had thought were what you wanted and what you deserved go bad?
Marc:It's a great story.
Marc:It's a great guy, musician, writer, now a psychologist, doctor, PhD, Dr. Steve.
Marc:So, look, here's what I want to do, you guys.
Marc:This is sort of new for the show.
Marc:You know, I come from what I come from.
Marc:Steve comes from what he comes from.
Marc:He's a clinician.
Marc:I'm a fuck up.
Marc:I struggle.
Marc:He has answers and he struggled.
Marc:So I thought maybe if you're struggling with something him and I could talk about, we could talk about it on the show.
Marc:So why don't you do this?
Marc:If you have an issue that you think me and Steve can engage in, we're going to try a segment here and there.
Marc:I don't know how many we'll do.
Marc:We'll try at least one.
Marc:Send your issue and a little explanation to WTF pod at Gmail dot com.
Marc:Subject line, Dr. Steve.
Marc:Let's try that.
Marc:And we'll see if we can have a segment like that.
Marc:I'm into it with Dr. Steve.
Marc:But anyways, Thanksgiving.
Marc:As I said, gratitude is not something that comes easy for me.
Marc:And I have to sort of force myself to feel it and acknowledge it.
Marc:It's the right thing to do for yourself sometimes and also to others.
Marc:I'm always kind of propelled by my own momentum.
Marc:I'm always in my own head.
Marc:I'm always just rushing through things or thinking about something else.
Marc:It's usually my biggest crime is that I'm thinking about something else when I should be locking eyes with somebody and saying thank you.
Marc:Or acknowledging the work somebody's done or acknowledging the help that I've gotten in my life from other people and maybe thanking them for it or at least being present to acknowledge them for it.
Marc:I have to do that.
Marc:I don't.
Marc:It's not innate to me.
Marc:And certainly.
Marc:At this juncture, you know, two years and change into this podcast, I owe an incredible debt of thanks to you for supporting the show.
Marc:I'm glad you like the show.
Marc:I'm glad you get something out of the show.
Marc:And certainly to all the guests I've had on the show, my community of comedians and and certainly.
Marc:It's changed my life, and you guys know from knowing me what I've been through and what I go through on a day-to-day basis.
Marc:I share that with you, and I am not the most grateful guy in the world, and I'm not as humble as I should be, but certainly whether or not you believe in Thanksgiving or not, you might as well take the opportunity to make a little list, one of those gratitude lists that they talk about in the secret society that I belong to.
Marc:Because things are shitty for a lot of people.
Marc:I've got people in my life right now.
Marc:I've got people in my family who are struggling.
Marc:economically, with employment, with other issues.
Marc:And I talked to them and there's so little you can do to help somebody other than say, I understand.
Marc:I'm sorry you're going through that.
Marc:And also to let them know that they're not alone.
Marc:I mean, this person is very close to me and he's having some difficulty.
Marc:And I tell him it is not unusual right now to be struggling.
Marc:There's a lot of people in this country who are struggling.
Marc:There's a lot of people that don't see an end to it.
Marc:And there's a lot of people that blame themselves.
Marc:Look, the economy is not your fault.
Marc:What's going to happen with it?
Marc:I don't know what your politics are.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:But the point is, is that a lot of people are struggling desperately right now.
Marc:And it's not your fault.
Marc:This is not unusual.
Marc:This is a difficult time in the history of this country.
Marc:It's a difficult time for a lot of people.
Marc:And my fear is that a lot of people will blame themselves.
Marc:Why can't I get that job?
Marc:Why can't I be a better parent?
Marc:Well, it all trickles down from that job thing.
Marc:I mean, that's the scary thing is, is that if you don't share this stuff and you don't realize that you're not alone,
Marc:then you're going to take it out on yourself.
Marc:You're going to take it out on your kids.
Marc:You're going to take it on your family.
Marc:You're going to get an attitude that is negative and defeated when you go in to try to get what you need to get to survive.
Marc:And it's all going to blow up in your face.
Marc:What you have to understand is that...
Marc:On this day or any day, your life can't be total shit.
Marc:It just isn't.
Marc:You're still alive and there are good things in it.
Marc:You should write those good things down and say, okay, this is something to start with.
Marc:This is something where I can work from here.
Marc:I'm grateful for these things.
Marc:I'm not horrible.
Marc:A lot of these things are not in my control.
Marc:I can do what I can do.
Marc:You know, in terms of what's in front of me and take the next step towards what I need to do.
Marc:And that's what I can do.
Marc:Don't sit there and look at the future and say you're fucked forever.
Marc:Look at the past and say, like, well, that that clearly is why I'm here and that's why I'm fucked.
Marc:I mean, look, the past is what it is.
Marc:You learn from it, make different choices.
Marc:But all I want to say specifically to people who are struggling economically right now and with jobs and with that type of thing, you're not alone.
Marc:There's plenty of fingers to be pointed wherever you want to point them.
Marc:But the bottom line is, you know, outside of blame, it's not your fault.
Marc:It's difficult times.
Marc:We've gotten through difficult times together as a country, as a community, as families.
Marc:You can do it.
Marc:And just know that.
Marc:Don't be too hard on yourself.
Marc:Just adapt your life to the situation you're in now and live with that.
Marc:It's a lot of disappointment in life.
Marc:A lot of times things don't work out the way you want them to.
Marc:But instead of hanging on to that, to whatever your entitlement was or whatever you think you deserved, try to adapt to what you have right now in the present.
Marc:Be grateful for it.
Marc:Don't be bitter.
Marc:Try to move forward with the knowledge that it will get better and you're not alone.
Marc:And I think this is a great segue to my guest who went through a tremendous amount of disappointment.
Marc:And he's a creative guy.
Marc:And he had a rock and roll dream.
Bye.
Marc:And his life has taken him through a lot of curves and obstacles, both inner and outer.
Marc:And he ended up where he is now, happy with a family, doing something he likes and helping other people.
Marc:So let's talk to Dr. Steven Danziger now.
Marc:And happy Thanksgiving.
Marc:And even if it's not okay now, you're okay, no matter what you think.
Marc:If you're alive and you're listening, there's got to be a way for you to see that you're okay.
Marc:I'm sitting here holding a CD.
Marc:Steve Danziger.
Marc:Sensation Days.
Marc:It's a solo CD.
Marc:It's brand new.
Marc:No, this is a solo CD.
Guest:1996.
Guest:It wasn't supposed to be solo, but the record company claimed that there was another band called the Polanskys in London at the time.
Guest:Polanskys.
Marc:Yeah, that was the name of the band.
Marc:That was the name of your band?
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:So Steve Danziger is not...
Marc:This is a band.
Guest:No, in the end, I mean, it's a band the same way a lot of people are a band and they're just one guy.
Guest:But these were guys that you were touring with?
Guest:These were guys you were working with?
Guest:These are guys I was working with.
Guest:One in particular, William Dial, I had been working with for a very long time since we were teenagers.
Marc:So, on the cover, you have something almost looks like dreadlocks.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It's just out of focus, and it created this dreadlock image.
Marc:So, they're not dreadlocks.
Marc:They're not.
Marc:It's just long hair.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Now, this is 1996.
Marc:Now, you are a doctor.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Marc:You recently became Dr. Steve.
Marc:Some of you guys who are listening know Steve from my show as Dr. Steve.
Marc:We did some stuff with him.
Marc:But this wasn't the dream, Dan Ziger.
Guest:Not originally, no.
Marc:It was not the dream.
Guest:It wasn't the dream, but the fact is that the dream was that I would be able to communicate with people.
Guest:Let's talk about the... You want to talk about the dream that died, don't you?
Marc:No, I just... A lot of people become therapists.
Marc:Some people accuse me of it.
Marc:And I am in no way qualified.
Marc:for that, but sometimes when I have two or three interviews in here on a day, it feels like I have sessions going.
Marc:I don't approach this as therapy, but what interests me in your story is that
Marc:People become different things.
Marc:People evolve into different things.
Marc:People find a path for themselves.
Marc:And many people who start off as artists or as people who choose a creative field out of necessity must choose something else.
Marc:I find that many people with broken dreams end up in the massage therapy racket, or depending on how broken their dreams became, some of them end up born-again Christians.
Marc:I see two trajectories.
Marc:There's the...
Marc:The helping people through perhaps teaching yoga, massage therapy, perhaps some minor witchcraft.
Marc:I don't know if you would call those the holistic fields, more spiritual oriented.
Marc:And then there's some people that just go full on cult or born again Christian.
Marc:But people who have a history like you, you could have, you're a sober guy, right?
I am, yeah.
Marc:And you could have just went straight up drug counselor without the studying.
Marc:You didn't do that.
Marc:No.
Marc:But let's go back to New York.
Marc:Let's go back to New York City, the new American sound.
Guest:Actually, go back to the Hoboken sound of the 80s.
Guest:The 80s.
Guest:I mean, you can go even further back.
Guest:1979.
Guest:1978, 1979, when I started working with Will Dial, we were the Responsible Teenagers.
Guest:That was the name of the band.
Guest:We were called the Responsible Teenagers.
Marc:1979.
Guest:78 is when we formed.
Guest:79 is when we played our first gigs.
Marc:And you're a drummer.
Guest:CBGBs and Max's Kansas City.
Marc:So who was around then?
Marc:I mean, what were you up against?
Marc:Who were the guys you were going, fuck, man, I can't believe they hit?
Guest:Well, actually, we were 16 years old, so we weren't thinking those thoughts quite.
Guest:There were a couple other bands that were 16 years old, we thought that, like the Speedies.
Guest:Oh, fuck, the Speedies kicked your ass.
Guest:Yeah, completely.
Guest:And what was your sound then?
Guest:It was kind of a...
Guest:Power pop, bordering on punk, kind of like a Buzzcocks kind of a thing.
Guest:We were in my basement sort of doing Beatles covers and Searchers covers and all that kind of stuff, and we got on the Uncle Floyd show.
Guest:Do you remember the Uncle Floyd show?
Marc:I was not a East Coast person at that time, but I know of the Uncle Floyd show.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so all the bands of that time were, anyway, Will's brother had a picture on the wall on the Uncle Floyd show.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And so we had an inn.
Guest:And so we ended up on the Uncle Floyd show.
Guest:I think the Ramones were on the day before, you know, like that.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:It was really nice.
Guest:And so at that time, I thought we were kind of like the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Because I literally was 16 and we were, you know, suburban kids.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Ended up playing CBs like, you know, minutes after that.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, no, no.
Guest:Everything kind of took off in a little way.
Guest:So the heroes, that means where were you living?
Guest:Well, I'll give you an example.
Guest:I grew up on Long Island.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I was going to Manhattan all the time to see shows.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And instead of going to my prom, I went to see Richard Hell and the Voidoids.
Marc:So this is 1976, 77?
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:And then, so you're going into the city all the time.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:You're hanging out in front of CBGBs.
Marc:That's really the peak of American punk on the cusp of New Wave.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:So the Ramones are playing.
Marc:Richard Hell is playing.
Guest:Verlaine's there.
Marc:Talking Heads might have just broke.
Marc:Blondie just broke.
Marc:What's left of David Johansson and Johnny Thunders is still hanging around.
Guest:I used to see Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers a lot.
Marc:You did?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Live?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:How was that?
Marc:I thought you knew that about me.
Marc:Look, dude.
Marc:What do I... I mean, I picked up with you... You know what you know.
Marc:Well, no.
Marc:I picked up with you around...
Marc:I mean, the first time I met you was probably 2000 and no, it was probably 1999.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:1999.
Marc:You were fucking, you know, on the the amount of of pure fucking anger that was peeling off of your being at that time was was impossible to deal with for me.
Marc:I'm trying to remember just what that looked like and felt like.
Marc:I mean, I remember being an angry guy.
Marc:But you just had this intensity.
Marc:I'm sensitive to it because I'm an intensity.
Marc:We were in a car with a common friend taking a ride.
Marc:It was the first time I met you.
Marc:This is my friend Steve, and I sat there.
Marc:Your hair was shorter, and this had been out, you know,
Marc:three years already right so uh and you were sort of done and uh and this i think it was i i don't know how much you want to talk about but you were sort of mythic to me because uh you were a guy that you know in his his sober life was in a hospital and i found that tremendously impressive i you know at how how much sobriety had you had by the time you went in the hospital uh nine years
Marc:Okay, so let's go back to rock and roll.
Marc:So now you're 16, and anything you don't want on here, you can take it out.
Marc:You're 16 years old, you're fucking rocking.
Marc:That's the dream, then it evolves.
Guest:Well, it was the dream, and at the same time, I got into University of Pennsylvania, so I went there.
Guest:And the rest of the band was actually still in high school, so they used to come to Philly, and we started playing at the Hawk Club in Philly, and we had this sort of back and forth thing going, because the manager of the Hawk Club
Guest:Was doing sort of like a, what would you call it?
Guest:Like a home and home series.
Guest:And he would get us better gigs at Seabees than we did when we were a New York band.
Guest:So we were considered a Philly band and we played Saturday night.
Guest:It was a good deal.
Guest:Then I was a drummer, so I was kind of a mercenary.
Guest:So I ended up playing with a lot of different people.
Guest:And first I played on the first two King Missile records.
Marc:Oh, I like King Missile.
Guest:The second and third King Missile records.
Marc:Yeah, Jesus is... What was the one?
Marc:Jesus is way cool.
Marc:Jesus is way cool.
Marc:And what was the one about the detachable penis?
Marc:Detachable penis, yeah.
Marc:And did you ever end up playing... There was a whole crew down there, you know, Kramer and that guy and that bunch who was... What was her name?
Marc:Ann Magnusson.
Marc:Did you know them?
Marc:I knew them a little bit, yeah.
Marc:I knew Kramer a lot and Ann a little bit.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And so you were playing... So that was sort of like not really punk, not really pop, but sort of like, you know, arty...
Marc:I don't know what you would call it.
Marc:It was all the spoken word people.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:That's who I was hanging out with.
Guest:John Hall from King Missal.
Guest:Before King Missal, we had a band called You Suck, which the idea was we'd be the worst band in the world, and people would chant our name.
Guest:We had a song, Get the Fuck Off the Stage, which we'd play by request.
Guest:And Maggie Estep you knew?
Guest:Maggie as well.
Guest:And Maggie I ended up in a band with.
Guest:When she was on MTV?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Did you do that?
Guest:Oh, that first album?
Guest:What happened was we had a band.
Guest:I left music for a while.
Guest:When I got sober, I stopped playing with King Missile.
Guest:That was right when they got signed to Atlantic.
Guest:Speaking of the dream, the dream came true.
Guest:And I left the band because I didn't feel like I was going to stay sober if I stuck around at that time.
Marc:So your band, that was King Missile?
Guest:That was King Missile, yeah.
Guest:That first album.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I like that album.
Marc:The second They and Mystical Shit.
Marc:Mystical Shit is the one I like.
Marc:You were on that record?
Marc:Yeah, I'm on that record.
Marc:I had no fucking idea.
Marc:I was listening to that before I met you.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:But your band, I mean, then there was this period where you guys would play ukuleles and shit and you were playing a box or something.
Guest:Well, yeah, I did a lot of different things with alternative instruments.
Guest:The one thing that I did for a long time was a band called Pianosaurus.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:We played rock and roll on toy instruments.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Marc:And that was your hook?
Guest:Well, it was a hook, but the thing was that Alex Garvin, the songwriter, was a really great songwriter.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We were all very dedicated to playing the toys in a way that really made them sound like something.
Guest:And we ended up sounding like something.
Guest:We were on, not Arsenio Hall, but the pre-Arsenio Hall version of Arsenio Hall.
Guest:And we did...
Guest:I can't remember what other shows we did.
Guest:We ended up on a lot of shows with Emo Phillips for some reason.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Being on the same gig.
Guest:And we toured.
Guest:We toured everywhere.
Guest:We toured with Alex Chilton for a while.
Guest:Wow, you knew Alex Chilton?
Guest:I did.
Guest:Nice guy?
Guest:He was a nice guy at that time.
Guest:I heard he was kind of mercurial, but he kind of ended up being a real inspiration to me.
Guest:I mean, musically, I always saw him as someone I wanted to be like.
Guest:And then sort of the way that.
Guest:Underappreciated and brilliant.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And just the way he held himself and the way his commitment to his vision and the music that he played.
Marc:And that was your music too?
Guest:Were you a power pop guy?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, you know, you have my CD there.
Guest:I mean, it's a little all over the map.
Guest:I mean, there's obvious big star influences, R.E.M.
Guest:influences, but there's also, like, just straight ahead bluegrass.
Marc:Was there any of that business of people taking you under their wing or saying, you know, you guys are good, you're going places, like Chilton or Michael Stipe?
Marc:It seems like by the time you made Sensation Days that, you know, music had evolved into this more rootsy kind of poppy, but there was sort of a re-appreciation of American music with REM and that kind of stuff.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:No one necessarily took me under their wing.
Guest:I felt like I was kind of, I was sort of like 10 years younger, five or 10 years younger than a lot of the people I was hanging out with.
Guest:There was a time, for instance, you know, there's a lot of...
Guest:really weird aspects to my musical life including when anton fear broke up the golden palominos but there were still some couple shows booked and sid's draw really wanted to do them so i'd played basically you know with sid and um jody harris and peter holst apple and the rest of the people who were doing golden palominos and i just played a snare drum with brushes wow which was you know sort of what i was about at the time which was i was drinking and taking a lot of drugs and
Guest:Didn't mind just standing on stage with these people with a snare drum instead of Anton Fier being up there like, you know, hitting the drums like Bonham.
Marc:Well, it's interesting because like these bands, none of them are really, you know, the Golden Pound, Minos aren't around anymore.
Marc:I used to love, I like Sid Strauss, two solo albums.
Marc:I mean, they were very respected in that little world.
Marc:So, okay, so you were wasted.
Marc:How bad did that get?
Guest:It got pretty bad.
Guest:I mean, my story is around 86 or so.
Guest:I think it was that I decided to quit drugs, but I kept drinking.
Guest:And so the drinking remained really bad.
Guest:The drinking was always bad.
Guest:I would say that a lot of the drinking was pretty responsible for everything kind of falling apart career-wise.
Guest:Although it was also a group effort with Pianosaurus.
Guest:Alex, I don't know what he was doing, if he was smoking weed or taking a lot of hallucinogens, but he just had kind of like his brain tweaked.
Guest:And just before our second record was going to be put out, he just disappeared into the ether.
Marc:So he said Barretted it?
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Oh, shit.
Marc:It's too bad no one's at that stature.
Marc:Of Sid Barretting.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I don't know if there's anyone talking about, what's his name?
Guest:Alex.
Guest:I mean, there are people talking about Alex.
Guest:We had a little following.
Guest:We have a Facebook page with like 150 people or so.
Guest:Right now?
Guest:Yeah, right now.
Guest:Oh, all right.
Marc:Yeah, no, no.
Guest:It really, it made some waves.
Guest:We were in People Magazine.
Marc:I didn't mean to be condescending.
Guest:It's okay, please, anytime.
Guest:No.
Guest:It's wrong.
Guest:Morning edition.
Guest:We're a morning edition.
Marc:All right, so, okay, so this happened.
Marc:So you decided to get sober, and because of that, you pulled back from music.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:As a matter of fact, I remember also, I hope this doesn't sound like a name-dropping session.
Guest:It's all right.
Guest:But these are the people that were hanging around.
Guest:Freedy Johnston, when he was putting out, maybe it was his first record.
Guest:Fuck, I remember him.
Guest:Yeah, he's still around.
Guest:He's really, really well-respected.
Guest:He's a great singer-songwriter, yeah.
Guest:But he asked me to play on his record, and I was just curled up in a ball trying to be sober.
Guest:I was like, I can't do it.
Guest:So I kind of stayed away from it for a couple years.
Marc:Was all that about the drink, or was it also about the sort of fear of not being creative or good enough with your natural ego, and without the inflated ego of being fucked up and being in that scene?
Guest:There was...
Guest:There's some of that for me, probably not as much as for a lot of other people that I meet.
Guest:And because in my therapy practice, I work with a lot of creative people.
Guest:I do hear that story a lot.
Guest:For me, I felt like when Piano Stories broke up, we were about to put our second record and all these major labels were looking at us.
Guest:A lot had happened with the first record, and the second record was a lot better.
Guest:And it never came out.
Guest:Some people do talk about, you know, where is that record and can we find it?
Guest:I think someone took it, you know, the masters.
Guest:We should ask Henry Rollins.
Guest:He seems to have a lot of shit.
Guest:He might know.
Marc:He might have it.
Guest:He might have it.
Guest:He's the one who went in the middle of the night to Water Music in Hoboken.
Marc:Yeah, and he took it.
Marc:I mean, somebody gave it to him.
Marc:Rollins has got a lot of shit.
Marc:I guess what I'm trying to get at is that there must have been a moment
Marc:where you had to contextualize.
Marc:I know about sobriety, and I know that you have to put that first in order to stay sober, but there must have been a point where the heartbreak was tangible, where you felt this thing getting away from you.
Guest:Oh, totally tangible.
Guest:I guess when it happened was when Pianosaurus broke up.
Guest:And that led to the next three or four months of crazy drinking that led to getting sober.
Guest:So the dream was broken.
Guest:I really thought that that was the thing.
Marc:You were on the precipice of putting out a second album with a band that had a pretty good following that had national attention and a lot of different outlets.
Marc:And then there it was.
Marc:It's in the can, and the shit hits the fan, and you're just a drummer without a band.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:Not only that, I was the only toy drummer in the world.
Guest:And all of a sudden, there are no toy drummers in the world.
Guest:I'm just another bozo on the bus.
Guest:So it was a nightmare.
Guest:With a toy drum.
Marc:With a toy drum.
Guest:I had a Muppet kit.
Guest:I had a Smurf kit.
Guest:I had a Minuto kit.
Guest:And nowhere to go.
Guest:No one else wanted me to- Can we say that you're maybe one of the best toy drummers in the country at that time?
Guest:That's what people told me after the show, oftentimes.
Yeah.
Guest:Mark, I'll show you, I'll find some video for you because people, there are some people who said it was like pretty incredible.
Guest:We opened for a Jonathan Richmond at Central Park Summer Stage.
Guest:Yeah, that makes sense.
Guest:And we always, exactly.
Guest:And we always, almost always.
Guest:How was he as a guy?
Guest:He didn't give us much time.
Guest:And you always what?
Guest:You always... Oh, no, no.
Guest:We almost always would smash our instruments at the end of the show because they were, you know, like for another 20 bucks, you go to Toys R Us, I got a new drum kit.
Guest:And I used to travel with a lot of, you know, because the little bass drum pedals, they're like little plastic numbers.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And they'd break all the time.
Guest:So I used to order from Noble and Cooley and the other companies, you know, like...
Guest:a hundred of them and just travel and break through them.
Guest:But anyway, this was towards the end and Alex and I were not getting along and he just kept saying, we're not smashing the instruments at Central Park Summer Stage.
Guest:We need to have some dignity or something like that.
Guest:Not breaking the toys.
Guest:Yeah, I was like,
Guest:You've got to be kidding me.
Guest:This is our hometown.
Guest:This is where we're really breaking the instruments.
Guest:I just remember we were finishing, and the last number, the last encore was Wipeout.
Guest:I got a lot of feature in that.
Guest:And then at the end, Alex looked at me.
Guest:He just looked back at me, and he's looking at me, you're not going to do it.
Guest:And I just kept looking at him.
Guest:I said, yeah, I'm going to do it.
Guest:I'm going to do it.
Guest:I'm going to do it.
Guest:I just, you know, lifted up the bass drum high above my head, smashed it.
Guest:And that was it.
Guest:And that was it.
Guest:And he finally, well, he was just like, I guess if you can't beat him, join him.
Guest:And he started smashing his guitar.
Guest:And where's he now?
Guest:I don't, I have not seen him in 20 years.
Guest:Really?
Guest:I have not seen him.
Guest:Or heard from him.
Guest:Or heard from him.
Guest:The way I found out that we were broken up was like two or three weeks into his disappearance, I ran into his mother in the street because he was a New Yorker.
Guest:And I said, where's your son?
Guest:And she said, he got all your phone calls.
Guest:And that was it.
Guest:That's when I knew.
Guest:And then the record company kind of contacted all of us and was wondering what was up.
Guest:And then they said they weren't going to release the record.
Marc:If you weren't going to tour with it.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So then there you are.
Marc:There's a broken brain for you.
Marc:And it took four months of hard drinking for you to, you know, you drank yourself through this, your band breaking up.
Marc:You couldn't find any other gigs.
Marc:You didn't even try.
Marc:Didn't want to.
Marc:Just felt defeated.
Marc:Defeated.
Marc:And then you find yourself getting sober.
Mm-hmm.
Marc:So you let it go.
Marc:I did.
Marc:But you didn't because you put out Sensation Days.
Guest:Well, a couple of years into it- Into sobriety.
Guest:Into sobriety.
Guest:Maggie Estep said, you want to form a band for fun.
Guest:And she had Pat Place, who was in Bush Tetras back in the 80s, and a woman, Julie Murphy, who plays with Bush Tetras now, and a friend of ours, Terry Baker, who's not playing anymore as far as I know, or he might be.
Guest:He lives up in Humboldt, I think.
Guest:And so we just started writing songs and we had no intention.
Guest:We didn't play gigs.
Guest:We didn't do anything.
Guest:We were just goofing around.
Guest:And that was my big transition in terms of like the whole what had happened to me through the drinking and the drugs and everything else and just sort of what it did to my mind around, you know, my love of music actually turned into music.
Guest:like wow as a drummer i get free drugs and free alcohol and women will look at me faster and and that became really primary above the music or that's what it felt like by the end that that's what had gone on so that two years kind of clarified for me or kind of like drain that out of me a bit right and then playing with maggie i just really was digging it i was really enjoying enjoying playing drums fantastic and i you know i was like oh wow i actually have good time when i'm not a good time but good time keep good time when i'm
Marc:So there was no pressure.
Marc:You realized you had this talent.
Marc:You loved it from when you were a kid.
Marc:It was something you always wanted to do and you were good at it.
Marc:So it felt good to do it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then you put this record together.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I put that record together.
Marc:Did it start label support?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It had a small label support and it had... It was...
Guest:the result of songwriting that started a year or two into sobriety.
Guest:I started writing songs.
Guest:So I started doing that.
Guest:And I actually put out a single early on.
Guest:It was called The Ballad of John Parker.
Guest:It was about this guy who I helped do needle exchange.
Guest:He was like one of the early needle exchange guys.
Guest:So it was a folk song.
Guest:It was just me and Will, acoustic guitars.
Guest:And Steve Fallon from Maxwell's in Hoboken and Bob Mould.
Guest:maybe a couple other guys had a little label and they put out this single and it actually got some attention and then I just kept writing songs and eventually I started playing gigs with the band that's on the record.
Guest:So that's 96.
Guest:Then finally by 96 it came out so it's more like 93, 94, 95 like that.
Marc:Well by the time I met you, this wasn't going anywhere.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Oh, the story behind how it didn't go anywhere is another.
Guest:So it's one of the stories behind the hospital.
Guest:OK.
Guest:You know, it's it.
Guest:What happened was, you know, I had pretty good support, you know, from the label, et cetera.
Guest:And I have like great musicians on it, et cetera.
Guest:And.
Guest:What happened was, right around when it was going to come out, I got some kind of bronchial infection or something like that.
Guest:And we didn't cancel all the record release stuff.
Guest:So I did a record release party at Sinead Cafe, and then I did another record release at J&R Music World.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, downtown.
Guest:All that.
Guest:I had a great band to the band that's on the record, but the drummer was J.D.
Guest:Daugherty from Patti Smith Group.
Guest:You didn't play drums?
Guest:I played drums on the record.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you fronted the band.
Guest:And I fronted the band.
Guest:At times I would sing from behind the drums, but at that point I was starting to front the band.
Guest:And so I literally, I couldn't, I wasn't hitting notes.
Guest:Like I was like, it sounded like in the Brady Bunch, you know, when his voice changes.
Guest:And it was just amazing.
Guest:It was so awful.
Guest:You know, because...
Guest:everyone was there like all my friends all the people and then at the JNR Music World I thought it got worse like I had like 102 I was like hallucinating and the label was there and they're just staring at me like what the and you're sober so you're feeling it all oh feeling it all I'm thinking looking at shocked faces yeah
Guest:It was so bad that there's a third record release event that I can't remember what it was.
Guest:It was that 104 fever.
Guest:And that was it.
Guest:They just basically canceled all of their plans for tour support and stuff like that.
Guest:And I had a booking agent who was booking, I think, like Wilco and Matthew Sweet and all those people at the time who was really digging it, really liking the record.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But he said, I'm due to lose money for the first two years that you're on tour no matter what I do, so I really need your label to put up this tour support.
Guest:And I just begged and begged, and it just didn't happen.
Guest:You told them you were sick?
Guest:I told him I was sick.
Guest:I said, look, the package is really nice.
Guest:It's a nice looking CD.
Guest:I'm like, let's not stop here.
Guest:And they just sort of changed.
Guest:They lost interest.
Guest:They went on to other things.
Guest:And where are the CDs?
Guest:There's some copies in a storage unit in Brooklyn.
Guest:How many are we talking?
Guest:About 3,000 to 4,000.
Guest:There are some people who have them.
Guest:And you can go on Amazon, you can find them for like 99 cents.
Marc:Steve Danziger, Sensation Days is the name of the CD we're talking about.
Marc:So now this happens.
Marc:Yeah, this happens.
Marc:You're a few years sober.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So this just kills it.
Marc:So now the dream has died sober.
Marc:But this was a second wave.
Marc:I mean, this is you coming into music with a new love for it.
Marc:You're sober.
Marc:You've done this beautiful record that you put a lot of time in that came out of pure joy of playing music.
Marc:But you knew in the middle of that once the record happened, you felt that old thing again.
Marc:Like, it's going to happen.
Marc:This is going to go a little bit.
Guest:Well, not only that, I was doing that.
Guest:And at the same time, I was playing drums with Maggie.
Guest:And then we broke up.
Guest:We broke up at some point.
Guest:Just because we were done having fun.
Guest:And then she did the MTV stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then she got the record deal then.
Guest:And you played on that.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:So she's like, she put the band back together because she figured a spoken word record isn't going to sell it.
Marc:This is after Sensation Days?
Guest:This is around the same time.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Yeah, around the same time.
Guest:So you're still playing?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you're making money?
Guest:Playing drums.
Guest:I'm making money playing drums.
Guest:You toured with her?
Guest:Yep, toured with her.
Guest:We did a number of different tours.
Guest:We did one sponsored by MTV.
Guest:It was MTV Unplugged.
Guest:It was spoken word artists.
Guest:It was Maggie and John.
Guest:So no one's wedding your dream die.
Guest:Not yet.
Guest:Don't worry.
Guest:That comes now.
Guest:What?
Guest:So Maggie, tell me if this sounds familiar after the beginning of the interview, but Maggie, after the first record was done, we wrote the second record.
Guest:We pretty much, we hadn't recorded it, but we had demoed everything.
Guest:And all sorts of people supposedly were interested.
Guest:Rick Rubin was interested.
Marc:I remember when she was a thing.
Guest:Yeah, she was a thing.
Guest:And so she got a book deal.
Guest:And I love Maggie dearly, but back then what happened was she's like, wow, writing books is so much easier.
Guest:There's only one person and you don't have to deal with all this kind of relationship stuff around the band.
Guest:And so she broke up the band just like that.
Guest:So that happened around the same time that that was coming apart.
Guest:So it was like a double whammy.
Guest:It's like, go ahead and try and be a songwriter.
Guest:Go and try to be a drummer.
Guest:Sorry you can't have either one.
Guest:Have a nice day.
Guest:Hope you have a day job.
Guest:And then did you have a day job?
Guest:I did.
Guest:What I was doing at the time was very early in sobriety, I started teaching high school.
Guest:And I was teaching high school in Crown Heights when the Crown Heights riots happened.
Guest:I ended up getting involved in the aftermath in the healing of the neighborhood, et cetera.
Guest:Got trained by a lot of nonprofits.
Guest:In healing neighborhoods?
Guest:In the healing what had happened.
Marc:Well, that's interesting.
Marc:I've forgotten about that, that you spent years doing that proactive in-class high school, don't be bully kind of stuff.
Marc:What is that called, exactly?
Guest:Well, it's called a lot of different things because I did a lot of different things.
Guest:Back then, it was mostly called diversity training.
Guest:A lot of the work was in conflict.
Guest:I did anger management.
Guest:I did conflict resolution.
Guest:I did prejudice reduction work.
Guest:And then right now, the focus is on bullying.
Marc:How does that play out, prejudice reduction work?
Marc:What's the situation?
Guest:Like let's say Crown Heights.
Guest:Okay, well, there's different situations.
Guest:When there's a flashpoint, that's very different.
Guest:That's the ER with that kind of work.
Marc:Most of the work that I would do is- So is there actually like a triage situation?
Marc:Like this guy's hopelessly racist.
Marc:Bring in the next case.
Guest:something like that you know you're not doing a lot of one-on-one work in that way yeah you're dealing with groups of people and like i there were times where there were a couple times where i was sent into a school and we weren't given sufficient information yeah and it would just be it would be chaos you know because what kind of school like what do you mean chaos well the chaos would be you know like the kids weren't told why they were coming into this workshop was it mixed was it blacks and whites
Guest:Yeah, I've done all kinds of it.
Guest:I've done it in homogenous situations.
Guest:But I mean, Crown Heights was blacks and Jews.
Guest:Okay, well, with the Crown Heights, I was teaching a school, you know, Crown Heights is the Orthodox, the Lubavitchers, so they're in their yeshivas.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The work that I was doing was related to Crown Heights in as much as it involved all those kids there.
Guest:And we did some work where we were working with the Rebbies and bringing people together.
Guest:And that was great.
Guest:It was around the time when Anna Devere Smith did- Her multiple character show.
Guest:Right, did the show, which was fantastic.
Guest:I'm sorry I'm spacing on the name.
Guest:So I was working with the school that I worked at was mostly African-American, Latino, a lot of kids from the Dominican, from Haiti, etc.
Guest:So it was more sort of an overriding, you know, like, let's look at this idea of racism.
Guest:Let's look at this idea of prejudice, stereotyping, discrimination, etc.
Guest:And see what it means to you, kids, and then see what solutions you come up with.
Guest:So what came out of that whole time, more than anything, was the development of a peer training program that we put together where the idea was trying to build a sort of a foundation of some leadership amongst students themselves to go out and then work with their peers on these issues.
Guest:So the adults, we were seeing ourselves more as facilitators of the process for the kids who were going to be the leaders.
Guest:But at the same time, sometimes as adults, we drop in.
Marc:And from doing this type of work, what did you find was the most common theme at the core of racism in this situation with kids of different races?
Guest:I think the common theme is that...
Guest:in some ways that class is actually one of the biggest factors.
Guest:There's a class, gender, and sexual orientation.
Guest:Those were kind of the things that really plagued a lot of young people, whether or not they had sort of racist ideas.
Guest:And a lot of times, I remember... Class in what way?
Marc:That they were...
Marc:predestined to be poor or stuck in a bad situation financially?
Guest:No, because I worked with a lot of kids from a lot of different, what you would consider a lot of different classes.
Guest:And I just think that a lot of- So it went both ways.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:The way that people sort of responded to each other in an ist kind of way, oftentimes had to do with socioeconomic.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And at the same time, I found that, you know, the, you know, sort of the ideas that, you know, especially back then, you know, that white people had about racism.
Guest:Like I remember, I remember in particular, like, I can't remember the exact numbers, but there was a Skidmore College study that said something like, you know,
Guest:It was like 35% of African-Americans thought that the race situation, black and white particular, was fine now.
Guest:And like 85% of whites thought that it was fine now.
Guest:So I kind of saw a lot of sort of naivete and just sort of not – I don't want to say ignorance because that has so much connotation to it.
Guest:But there was just a lot of people kind of walking around who didn't seem to really understand just how much racism and the other isms have kind of infiltrated kind of the way we treat each other.
Marc:So you're doing this type of work.
Marc:You're evolving into this type of thinker.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:At the time that your music career is just in shambles, you feel a second wave of heartbreak and your sobriety around your music career, but you're doing hands-on work.
Marc:helping kids, helping communities, and sort of building your own wisdom around how to heal.
Marc:And then you end up hitting the wall again?
Guest:Yeah, the wall that I hit, I think, was the combination of the musical heartbreak and kind of a burnout around the other work.
Guest:Like I just, I had nothing left.
Marc:And how did it manifest itself?
Guest:It manifested itself in a deep depression.
Guest:And it just didn't get better.
Marc:And you didn't think it was chemical?
Marc:You saw it had a foundation, but you couldn't get out of it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I was open to the thought that it was chemical because I had been depressed in the past.
Guest:You know, it's hard to tell, you know, a lot of people, especially come into my practice, you know, if they come in and they're actively addicted to something, it's going to be a while before they clear up enough to see, you know, if the depression bone is connected to the beer bone.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So with me, I think, you know, you know, as a kid, I remember having those moods.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:I remember, you know, going down the tubes, but I was drinking and using, you know, from the age of 12.
Guest:So...
Marc:And also you'd chosen a pursuit that was ripe with a sort of sense of grandiosity.
Marc:That there was no way on some level, when you enter a creative field with the ambition of being a star, which is really at the core of it, that the possibilities, you have blinders on to any other kind of normal existence.
Marc:So the possibilities for heartbreak and depression are pretty big.
Marc:So you end up in this hospital
Guest:Yeah, I ended up in three hospitals, thank you.
Marc:Oh, good for you.
Guest:Yeah, I did a little tour of the neighborhood.
Guest:That's very good, yeah.
Guest:I did Lenox Hill was where I started.
Guest:The crowd goes wild.
Guest:And actually at the time when I got there, they were at the forefront of using ECT as a first line.
Guest:What is that?
Guest:Oh, electroconvulsive therapy.
Guest:Electroshock.
Guest:Back.
Guest:It's back.
Guest:It's back.
Guest:It's still back.
Guest:It's actually, it's very in vogue.
Guest:And, you know, and actually in very, very, very intractable cases, it sometimes is helpful.
Marc:Like, you know, when someone is just- Rejiggers the wiring.
Marc:And it's not the same as Cuckoo's Nest, is it?
Guest:Well, it's, you know, it's not all that different.
Guest:You know, I mean, what would happen was I- Did you get it?
Guest:I did not.
Guest:It was funny because... Did they offer you a lobotomy?
Guest:No offers of a lobotomy, but the ECT, they actually were trying to get my family to kind of buy into it.
Guest:I think they gave my parents a video, like ECT and you, you know, like trying to get them to maybe press the issue a little bit with me because whatever.
Guest:Like I said, they were kind of using it as a frontline therapy.
Guest:The other thing was that when I got there, they told me, or the doctor sent me there, he told me that they...
Guest:There were a lot of professionals there.
Guest:I'd be with doctors and cops.
Guest:There's people like you here.
Marc:Exactly, right.
Marc:So I got there.
Guest:We really want to use this machine.
Guest:And there was a doctor there, right?
Guest:There was a doctor and a cop, and they weren't lying.
Guest:And then the doctor got ECT, and they rolled him in before, and they rolled him in after, and his hair was out in seven different directions.
Guest:I was like, man, I am bummed, but I'm not doing that.
Guest:Did Chief smother him with a pillow?
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:Oh, man.
Guest:And lift the sink, no?
Guest:No, it didn't happen that way for me.
Marc:I wasn't so lucky.
Marc:All right, so Lenox Hill, that's round one.
Guest:Lenox Hill, and then I left against medical advice, because I was just freaking out in there.
Guest:The next place I ended up, okay, I was living in Williamsburg, and I ended up being taken to Woodhull Hospital,
Guest:which the social workers in New York City, they call it the hole.
Guest:And it is- Taken.
Marc:You mean someone had to say, we're leaving now.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:Because you were doing what?
Guest:I had a little sort of a, kind of a, I tried to hurt myself.
Guest:Yeah, I tried to hurt myself.
Guest:So they took me there and-
Guest:It's diabolical.
Guest:It's diabolical.
Guest:I actually hesitate to even start to say the words.
Marc:Like fecal matter and people wandering the halls.
Marc:Sort of.
Marc:Undressed.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:The horrible thing that we would picture of the worst kind of mental facility.
Marc:Thank you for saying it so I don't have to.
Guest:Yeah, it's exactly what it was.
Guest:It was really demented.
Guest:And there were like six wards, and I was in Ward 6, and supposedly that meant you were the most out there.
Guest:Oh, God.
Guest:Meet any good people?
Guest:I met some good people that I still have relationships with today.
Guest:Wait a second.
Guest:I'm thinking of something else.
Guest:No, I did not make any good relationships there.
Guest:It was a lot of revolving door stuff going on there.
Guest:I was there for two weeks.
Guest:Were you calling him or did you just get concerned?
Guest:I was calling people.
Guest:I was calling people from there.
Guest:Don't get me the fuck out of here.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And a lot of people were like, no, we're not going to get... No one knew what to do with me.
Guest:Because that's how... It got deep.
Guest:It was a depression with psychotic features.
Guest:I was...
Guest:really having a hard time.
Guest:And I kept going into the mental, don't ever, look, people out there, if you're ever going to go to the mental hospital, don't go on a Friday.
Guest:Don't go on the weekend.
Guest:Because the regular people leave and they have like this shift that, you know, it's sort of like they're just holding on to you and seeing if they can keep doing something.
Guest:Scatman Crothers will let you drink.
Guest:It's really not a place you want to be on a weekend.
Guest:So it was Memorial Day weekend that I ended up in Woodhull, and Lenox Hill was in April, and then I ended up in St.
Guest:Vincent's, which I think is closed, and St.
Guest:Vincent's... At least it's in the city.
Guest:It's still in the city.
Guest:That's right, I'm in the village now.
Guest:I've left like Bushwick, and I'm in the village, so I got a better address than Williamsburg.
Guest:So there I was there for three weeks,
Guest:And that was where a good friend of mine, I remember, Josh Korda.
Guest:I don't know if you know him.
Guest:If you know Dharma Punks, know Levine.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Well, yeah, I know Levine.
Guest:I was going to interview him.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Well, Josh runs his sangha in New York now.
Guest:And he's someone I've known for a long time.
Guest:I knew him from my drinking music days.
Guest:Anyway, he was one of the people who visited me, and he said to me, in retrospect afterwards, he said, when I left that visit, I thought you were one of the lost ones, like you weren't coming back.
Guest:And that's really how bad it was.
Guest:And I remember thinking, I don't remember the last time I've had a positive future-based thought.
Guest:So in that three weeks, here's the other thing is this particular run, there was no more room in like the 20, 30, 40 something wing.
Guest:So they put me in the geriatric psych ward.
Guest:So I was in the psych ward with like, you know, 60, 70, 90 year old people.
Marc:The one thing about that is at least you realize that you can still have energy at that age.
Guest:Yeah, energy to poop all over my room.
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:Yeah, no, seriously, that happened once.
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:There's one guy who used to take a leak outside, like he was marking the rooms.
Guest:It was, again, another recommendation, don't do that either.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Geriatric psych ward.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Especially if you're young.
Marc:So now when you got out, when did you find the Buddhist path?
Guest:Well, I had been on the Buddhist path already.
Guest:I hadn't maybe given it my best.
Guest:I guess what happened when the depression hit.
Marc:And you come from middle class Jews like me, right?
Marc:Exactly, I'm a Jew boo.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So when did you find, because I mean by the time.
Guest:Right after, I got sober in 89.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And early 90, a friend of mine took me to an AA retreat at a Zen monastery.
Guest:And so, you know, they gave you the option if you really want to hang out with the monks and see what that was all about.
Guest:You could do it if you didn't want to.
Guest:No big deal.
Guest:And I was just totally fascinated.
Guest:And then I got my first lesson in meditation, which was given to me by a like a six foot five Swiss German.
Guest:I don't know if he's Swiss German.
Guest:There are lots of Swiss Germans up there.
Guest:But he was this guy who I think was like the biggest speed dealer and.
Guest:San Francisco in the 60s.
Guest:Now he's a monk.
Guest:Anyway, he said Zazen, which is Zen meditation.
Guest:He says, Zazen, sit down, shut up, don't move.
Guest:That was it.
Guest:That was all he said.
Guest:And that's what I've been doing pretty much for the last 20 years is I sit down, I shut up, and I don't move.
Guest:But it didn't save you.
Guest:Well, here's the thing.
Guest:That's the beauty and the tragedy of life and the spiritual life and kind of like the reality of, I think, mental illness or whatever you want to call it, is that it's a process and it's got its ups and downs.
Guest:And I couldn't access it.
Guest:When I hit the depression, no matter what I did, I couldn't access it.
Marc:Couldn't get out from under it.
Guest:It was so beyond oppressive that any tool that I had or any sort of idea that I had of how the world worked or what it was that was going to quote-unquote save me was just out the window.
Guest:So it did save me in that when...
Guest:What happened was while I was at St.
Guest:Vincent's, I reached out to Julia Murphy, who I mentioned earlier, and Josh, I think.
Guest:And I said, I think I might get better.
Guest:It was the only thing that I said might do it.
Guest:I said, I think I might get better if I go live at the monastery for a while.
Guest:And so they both kind of like heard that their alarm bells went off.
Guest:And there was one psychiatrist at St.
Guest:Vincent's too said to my family,
Guest:this is the only thing he said that has been positive at all, has been hope.
Guest:So they all helped me.
Guest:I was like faxing documents to the monastery from the psych ward.
Guest:And they're like, they're a monastery.
Guest:So they get people who are like already flying high in their spiritual practice, et cetera.
Guest:And you got people who are hurting.
Guest:And so they weren't, oh, really?
Guest:You're from mental hospital?
Guest:All right.
Guest:And they also knew me.
Guest:It was kind of weird.
Guest:My friend Sagan, Ed Glassing, who's a wonderful monk, and a good friend for the last 20 years, he had just come back from Japan.
Guest:He had spent the last three and a half years or so in Japan at a monastery there.
Guest:And he came back, and the first thing they handed him, they were like, here, you handle this.
Guest:He kept looking at it over and over and over again.
Guest:It's like, that's his name, but how could this be, you know?
Guest:um and so i got up to the monastery and um the short version of story is that 21 days later 21 days later i had like an experience that you know kind of uh uh imploded exploded etc the depression you know like it wasn't like i was just sitting down shutting up and not moving i was doing a lot of work you know spiritual work like what does that look like
Guest:Well, what it looked like was a hell of a lot of meditation, and it looked like sort of mindful work out and about.
Guest:What, you mean like gardening?
Guest:It was some gardening.
Guest:It was just whatever was in front of me.
Guest:It was just sort of getting used to mopping the floor and having that be a great thing.
Guest:Humbling service.
Mm-hmm.
Guest:And that's a big Zen.
Guest:Zen people are really into cleaning things.
Guest:So there's a lot of cleaning going on.
Marc:Are they into cooking?
Marc:Because I think I'm Zen with that shit.
Guest:Yeah, very, very much into cooking.
Guest:And to the Zen of cooking and preparing food in a certain way that I think you would really appreciate.
Guest:The Tenzo, the cook up there at the time, he actually ended up writing a book called Three Bowls because of the way the food is served.
Guest:It's in three bowls and the portions are kind of right and eat in silence.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So what's happening then to you is that there's no past to beat yourself up about.
Marc:There's no future that you're manufacturing to beat yourself up about.
Marc:And you somehow manage through mindfulness and meditation to get into a present where the tasks at hand were fulfilling enough for you to get some distance from the depression.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And combined with, there were 21 residents up there at that time.
Guest:And one of them was like this yoga teacher who had been teaching yoga for like 20, 30 years, something like that.
Guest:And so she just sort of took me on as kind of like a private case.
Guest:There was a monk there who had a PhD in psychology from the University of Vienna.
Guest:I thought that was close enough to the source.
Guest:Smart guy.
Guest:And he was really a smart guy and sweet guy.
Guest:And he was really healthy.
Jungian?
Guest:I would say he was a young man.
Guest:And then there were a number of other people, a couple of people who turned out to be friends who I was able to sort of just relate to in that way.
Guest:And so a combination of all those things and then working with the Zen master and doing the work around that.
Guest:And the way that the fever broke, like the day the fever broke, the way it broke was I was sitting on the cushion and sort of going through what I was going through at the time, which was some really dark thinking.
Guest:And suddenly I had a thought that came out of nowhere.
Guest:I mean, obviously from somewhere, but that said, maybe when I'm done with the stay at the monastery, I'll teach kids how to do this meditation thing.
Guest:And that was the first thought that I had had in months that indicated that I would have a life in the future.
Guest:And so what happened was this wave of thoughts came after that, like, oh, that means I have a life.
Guest:That means maybe I'll have an apartment and maybe blah, blah, blah, blah.
Guest:And my friends will be back and et cetera.
Guest:And maybe there'll be a woman in my, you know, like all this stuff came over me.
Guest:It did.
Guest:And I remember what happened was during the walking meditation, I grabbed one of my friends and I dragged him into the bathroom, you know, where all the monks go, you know, to be able to talk.
Guest:And I was like, I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay, you know.
Guest:And he's like, I knew you were okay.
Guest:You know, like no one really got it up there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because there was so much silence.
Marc:Right.
Marc:They didn't realize the hell you were living in.
Guest:The hell I was in.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:They're like, I thought you were a little kind of unhappy.
Marc:Intensely quiet.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:All right, so you get out of that and you start working with the, you're still working with the high school kids, you're still staying sober, and I met you around 2000, I guess, what was it, 2001, 2002, I don't want to jump ahead, but to get to the sort of the final turn of the screw for you was, you had literal heartbreak.
Marc:You know, based around a relationship with a woman.
Marc:And that's, you know, that's when I met you.
Marc:I mean, I hadn't seen you in a couple years and we're out in LA and you come out to LA with her.
Marc:I know her.
Marc:You guys are wild and in love and she's wild.
Marc:And then that fucking hits the fan.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, practically on contact with Los Angeles.
Guest:It hit the fan.
Marc:Well, you guys met in New York because I remember you were playing guitar again.
Marc:You guys were writing funny songs.
Marc:I mean, I know what that feels like.
Marc:I know the elation of new love and that, you know, you were all lit up and I was happy for you, but there was a little bit of concern on my part.
Marc:Legitimate.
Marc:Yeah, and sure enough, you guys come out to L.A.
Marc:and I literally, I can't remember within months, I mean, you know, you were like, I got nowhere to go.
Marc:You know, this fucking hit the fan.
Marc:You're on my couch.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:And I'm looking at you, and I'm like, oh, there's a lot of darkness on that couch.
Marc:What the fuck is he going to do?
Yeah.
Marc:And then you moved in in some freaky situation.
Guest:Yeah, a couple of different freaky situations, yeah.
Marc:What was that one where you were living in that room in that house?
Marc:Yeah, yeah, very Sunset Boulevard.
Marc:Yeah, you were living with some rich widow.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:And I remember going to visit you there, and you were writing a book, and you had your fucking Buddha shrine there.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:and you were doing the meditation.
Marc:You know, and I'm still looking to you for help, but I felt like, you know, maybe I'm helping him too.
Marc:And he wrote a book about your life, about a lot of what we talked about.
Marc:So here you are, you know, after you finally processed your life and you go through all of these horrendous things and these challenges, you know, letting go of the creative dream and then, you know, sort of getting your shit together after a complete mental breakdown.
Marc:You didn't know what the fuck you were gonna do.
Marc:And he wrote this book and that didn't go anywhere, right?
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Guest:but you wrote it i wrote it it was very diligent work and then bam you're like you said you know i'm going back to school yeah the the thing that led to that was i kept i kept doing the diversity work you know in different forms and fashions and then uh i met someone here in la who was doing uh substance abuse prevention intervention education
Guest:for young people.
Guest:And it was an organization that did it in schools all over the world.
Guest:And so I was like, how do I get that job?
Guest:And so I interviewed and I got the job.
Guest:And so I started doing a lot of traveling.
Guest:And what I saw happening was that I ended up trying to be helpful to kids one step further than the education.
Guest:I ended up referring a lot of people to treatment and
Guest:you know kids were confiding in me and i think this happened to all the teachers but for me it was so connected to the work that i did uh in education became more like a lot more individual and coaching and you know really you know closer to therapy than anything else that you know i've ever done so so that's what kind of you know that got me back on my feet you know that gave me uh you know a job that really like you know fed me the other thing about that is that
Guest:I really did always feel that teaching, at least the way that I teach, is very creative.
Guest:And so at the same time that I would always have the creative dream is dead and now I'm a teacher, at the same time I was always like, I'm really being creative here.
Guest:And I had to come up with new ways.
Marc:And there's a selflessness to it.
Marc:It doesn't revolve around the ego of being a star, of being recognized, of being applauded for your rock and roll, man.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:So in a sense, it's sort of like I've always said about politics is that the unsung heroes are those that are working on a grassroots level and a community level.
Marc:People don't acknowledge them.
Marc:So you get all these people bloviating, but you get people who are out there doing the real work with individuals in schools and stuff.
Marc:So you're doing that around the world.
Marc:I remember you're flying everywhere.
Marc:You're always in these hotels and going to schools to do this stuff.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:And so that led to going back to school.
Guest:Yeah, and then I want to do something more with this, and I want to learn more.
Guest:And the other big, big thing that sort of drove me further and finally into that direction was my therapist in New York, Simon Eccles, who passed away a couple years ago.
Guest:And he kept telling me, and he was a very creative guy.
Guest:He was the son of a pig farmer in West Virginia and a schizophrenic mother who eventually went on to be a country singer, an opera singer,
Guest:an interior designer i think he was an assistant to john and yoko for a while and then he uh became a therapist and so he was a really really amazing person influence yeah and he basically kept telling me that i should do this that i should be a therapist and he kept telling me that it was a creative field and he kept telling me how he was creative you know with it
Guest:And the more that I listened to him, the more that I realized that it was true.
Guest:And it was funny because a lot of the time he was telling me that, I was in the midst of a lot of my like, my creative dream is dead.
Guest:You know, he just kept on kind of pounding at me.
Guest:And finally, I kind of relented and went to school.
Guest:And I, you know, I haven't looked back at all.
Guest:You know, I mean, now it's sort of, you know, the creativity piece is,
Guest:It's funny because I have so many stories that kind of circulate in my mind of really humiliating experiences.
Guest:And then if I want to, I can conjure up the ones that were really wonderful, productive, fantastic stories as well.
Guest:But now I kind of...
Guest:feel like I've got a combination of everything.
Guest:Like when I was teaching, the reason I started teaching was I wanted to do something where I'd be engaged for eight hours a day that was meaningful to me and felt like I was doing something.
Guest:And that's something I really wanted to give myself.
Guest:And now as a therapist, I'm absolutely giving that to myself.
Guest:And at the same time, I can be doing things like sitting here with you.
Guest:I can play with my wife's band.
Guest:I can...
Marc:Well that's the interesting thing is that you ended up with a beautiful wife who is also sober and been through her own shit.
Marc:You have a lovely child now and you're a family man and she's got a band and that was what sort of provoked me to have a longer conversation with you was there was this moment where I don't remember what it was you said but I felt a little bit of that sort of like there was a little bit of a nag of like I'd miss the rock and roll
Marc:And that that there is that moment where it was sort of like, you know, that was really it's a heartbreak of of of adulthood in some ways, in the sense that, you know, what a lot of us forget is that we're kind of prepared to process disappointment and there's no way around it.
Marc:as you get older and then contextualizing it or putting the shit into perspective and that I feel like there is, if you're a creative person, there's an inherent sadness that doesn't just come from like, you know, I was never good enough or anything else, but the feeling of pursuing something
Marc:something that is creative in a long shot.
Marc:And wanting to be acknowledged, that's a childish thing.
Marc:The desire to be acknowledged for creativity, I think, is not infantile, but it's sort of look at me-ish.
Marc:But the romance of succeeding in that
Marc:is heartbreaking for a lot of people.
Marc:And I sort of heard a little of that and I'm like, well, how does he handle that?
Marc:Because I've been through different stages of that and myself and I know a lot of people that listen to me because of the emails I get around people like, you're inspiring me to be creative or I used to do this, I used to do that.
Marc:But there is a way to integrate it into your life in a way that's healthy that you should be able to enjoy, right?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, I kind of feel like
Guest:All the humiliating experiences and all of the triumphs are available to me and I can use them as fodder for helping other people to get through.
Guest:I don't necessarily sit in a therapy session and start telling them about how Evan Dando, when I was opening for Jeff Buckley, heckled me mercilessly to the point where I just wanted to kill myself on stage.
Guest:you don't bring that up i don't bring that up with you here and and then pretended backstage that he had hadn't done it um
Guest:I bring that energy.
Guest:I have that experience.
Guest:I really have that experience.
Guest:And I feel like those kind of experiences and the experience of the fact that when you're a creative and you're in the creative endeavor, you're engaged, you're in it, and then the rest of life feels so boring, so meaningless.
Guest:This is the experience that I hear a lot of people talking about.
Guest:I mean, that's something that
Marc:that people need to learn how to you know to feel that excitement about the regular life about the regular responsibilities that's that's integrating them that's what i feel and that's what i feel makes me happier now well what do you what what are the primary um what are the themes if you can be in a general way that you see mostly in your practice now
Marc:uh in regards to creative people and their struggles well i mean just in general i mean you know what what do you find you're being sought out for and and and who are the and what are the themes of the patients that stay with you the longest well um certainly because of kind of where i've been where i've come from and sort of then where some of my referrals come from the fact that i've
Guest:I'm executive director at a treatment center at 180 Center now.
Guest:A lot of addiction stuff is driving the bus.
Guest:But the themes, because I also work as an EMDR therapist and work with a lot of trauma, eye movement desensitization processing, we're gonna do that together.
Guest:Because I work at that trauma level, the theme is the reason why I use these drugs is because of what happened then and I didn't realize the connection and now I want to find a way to sort through that.
Marc:Source of the wound.
Marc:And then you also do, you're on the sort of cutting edge with some of this new thinking around porn addiction, sex addiction, sex and love addiction.
Marc:I think that's pretty important.
Guest:And all of that is also linked to the trauma piece.
Guest:There's a number of people out there who are linking the trauma piece to the behavioral addictions as well as the substance addictions.
Guest:And that's kind of where I sit with it.
Guest:And I also sit with it from the perspective of
Guest:some of the role of spirituality.
Guest:And when I say that, I don't mean like you have to get spirituality in order to get through this.
Guest:I mean that what the role of spirituality is in this whole dilemma, you know, like for some people it's, they had spirituality and they lost it for some people.
Guest:Spirituality didn't get them through that difficult time and WTF.
Guest:And then there's, uh, people who are atheist.
Guest:And so there, that relationship to spirituality, uh,
Guest:has some relationship to... Well, how do you define it?
Guest:How do I define what?
Guest:Spirituality.
Guest:Well, I define it very broadly, and I define it as... I like to think of it more like on a Viktor Frankl sense, that it's a search for meaning.
Guest:So regardless of whether that's a divine being or the infinite or there is nothing out there,
Marc:You can do both of those things with Buddhism.
Guest:Yeah, you can play both sides.
Marc:That's what we like about Buddha.
Marc:Well, I also think that Ernest Becker was very prescient in his assumption that there is an innate desire within the human mind and spirit, if you want to use the word spirit, to feel part of something bigger, that there is some sort of
Marc:almost genetic component to, you know, community, social organization, to being alive and aware that you're alive that requires a type of spirituality, a type of transference onto something that's going to make you feel like your life has meaning.
Guest:My doctorate was on the role of spirituality in the etiology and treatment of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, which, you know, really more simply said is, you know, what is it about what you just said, you know, like that search, that need, you know, what's there before the trauma?
Guest:And then what does the trauma do to that spirit and to that desire, that need, that direction?
Guest:And then when a person is in treatment for that kind of trauma, what are the interventions that work and what of those are spiritual in some nature or have some kind of relationship to that?
Marc:And what did you track your wound down to?
Marc:Oy vey.
Guest:My, well, you know, I've got a few markers, you know, like there's stuff from birth, there's stuff from, I mean, literally for me, it is from birth where, you know, my birth was quite difficult.
Guest:And I was an emergency cesarean after something like 35 hours of labor.
Guest:You didn't want to come out.
Guest:Didn't want to come out.
Guest:Well, I was also, I was already tangled.
Guest:I used to say, you know, I had the suicidal tendencies in the womb.
Guest:I was, you know, a lot of people have this, but I was-
Guest:the cord was wrapped around my neck.
Guest:And you did it on purpose.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:I thought that through.
Guest:And then when I came out, I think I was blue, and they revived me, and my mom got an infection as a result of all the botched work.
Guest:And so they kept her in the hospital, and as a result of keeping her in the hospital, they kept me in the hospital.
Guest:you know, just to hang with my mom.
Guest:They had me in a nursery.
Guest:It was 1962.
Guest:They had me in a nursery and then someone in the, one of the babies in the nursery got sick and so they quarantined the nursery.
Guest:And so all these babies started leaving and they didn't add new babies because it was a quarantined unit.
Guest:And so I was left alone in this huge nursery for like a couple weeks.
Guest:And there's also a major talk, you know, nowadays in the psychology community about attachment trauma.
Guest:And, you know, for a baby to kind of like be in that situation for the first couple of weeks.
Guest:And there's more that followed, you know, in terms of sort of the way that they were able to or not able to handle my mom's illness, you know, at the very beginning.
Guest:That left me probably with less, you know, not anybody's fault, but, you know.
Marc:A very early abandoned thing.
Marc:And also there's just the insanity of compulsive parents and whatnot.
Yeah.
Marc:There's a little bit of that, too.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I mean, I just think that you've certainly earned your stripes, given that, you know, you have a certain amount of a long term amount of sobriety in a few different areas.
Marc:And you have very deep experiences with relationship trauma and, you know, drug and alcohol stuff and creativity stuff.
Marc:And I just thought.
Marc:and that we're friends, I think that we should maybe take some emails around some of these issues and see if we can address them and as well as address some of my issues.
Marc:There's one outstanding, which is relationship issues and emotional issues and try to sort of integrate that into the fabric of what we're doing here.
Guest:All right.
Marc:Are you into it?
Marc:I'm completely into it.
Marc:You feel good about what we did here?
Marc:I feel like many of your guests probably feel like, wow, I can't believe I said some of that stuff.
Marc:Well, I'll let you think about it.
Marc:And if you want anything out, we can take it out.
Marc:You can probably just use it all and we'll see what happens.
Marc:Isn't it nice to not have to turn your back on the past?
Marc:And even given the line of work you've chosen, that your past sort of earns you a certain amount of credibility in what you do?
Guest:It's pretty astounding to me that everything that I talked about today actually lends a great deal of credibility to the work that I do today.
Guest:And it was completely painful and felt like the most pointless exercise in misery and just please somehow make this end.
Guest:And actually, I think it makes me a pretty good therapist.
Marc:You seem good.
Marc:That's what I like to say.
Marc:That's what people say to me.
Marc:You seem good and they say that preemptively.
Marc:My father will say that.
Marc:I'll say, hey, dad.
Marc:He's like, you sound good.
Marc:I'm like, what are you judging that on?
Marc:And usually they're right.
Marc:It's like, you all right?
Marc:And I'm like, how the fuck?
Marc:Does he know?
Marc:I just said one thing.
Marc:Right.
Marc:My mother like, Mark, you all right?
Marc:I'm fine.
Marc:Can I just call?
Marc:Get out of me.
Marc:See, now all of a sudden we're starting a session.
Marc:That's how it always works with us, doesn't it?
Marc:I know, but I give you a lot of time here.
Guest:You did.
Guest:Is our time up?
Guest:It is up.
Guest:Do you take a credit card?
Marc:That's our show.
Marc:Thank you for listening and please have a good Thanksgiving.
Marc:If you don't believe in Thanksgiving or you don't have family or you're not where you want to be in life or in geography, take a second and really think about what you're grateful for because I'm sure you can find something and try to hang on to that at least for a day and see what that sprouts.
Marc:All right, I am completely grateful to all of you for listening.
Marc:And if you are in Seattle, I will be there at Thanksgiving, and I will be there the day after Thanksgiving at the Neptune Theater on Black Friday.
Marc:That's November 25th.
Marc:And I will also be at the Arlington Draft House in Arlington, Virginia, December 2nd and 3rd.
Marc:And take care of you and yours, and be nice to somebody that you don't know, and maybe feed a cat.
Marc:I gotta go feed a bunch of them.
Marc:Okay, bye.
Marc:Thank you.