Episode 366 - John Darnielle
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:Are we doing this?
Marc:Really?
Marc:Wait for it.
Marc:Are we doing this?
Marc:Wait for it.
Marc:Pow!
Marc:What the fuck?
Marc:And it's also, eh, what the fuck?
Marc:What's wrong with me?
Marc:It's time for WTF!
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:With Marc Maron.
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuck in ears?
Marc:What the fuck ups?
Marc:What the fuckadelics?
Marc:All right, that's it.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:This is Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my show.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:Thank you for joining me.
Marc:I want to thank everybody who jumped on board and, uh,
Marc:got in contact with their representatives about the Shield Act.
Marc:We pulled in like thousands and thousands of signatures.
Marc:The response was incredible.
Marc:I heard back from Julie over at the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and she told me that Congress was excited to deal with patent trolling.
Marc:Excited.
Marc:And they're going to go into a judicial committee meeting this week.
Marc:I mean, I don't know that this will help us out of whatever issues we're having as podcasters.
Marc:But in the long run, it's a good thing.
Marc:This is dangerous business.
Marc:Patent trolling is evil and it's horrendous.
Marc:and it's predatory, and it's sanctioned extortion vis-a-vis misusing the patent system.
Marc:But I just want to thank you guys for getting on board with that.
Marc:I'll keep you in the loop as to what's happening.
Marc:But right now, I want to tell you that I have John Darniel on the show today from the Mountain Goats.
Marc:The Mountain Goats.
Marc:He's going to play at the end, too.
Marc:So John Darniel's coming up, and we'll get to that in a minute.
Marc:I want to thank...
Marc:All the WTF people, all the what the fuckers who came out to the shows in Portland and Seattle.
Marc:Great shows.
Marc:We sold out both venues.
Marc:It was very exciting for me.
Marc:Mike Lawrence did a great job opening for me.
Marc:He, by the way, is taping his CD here in Los Angeles.
Marc:The mighty Mike Lawrence.
Marc:And you can go see him for free if you're in L.A.
Marc:He'll be at the Meltdown on March 9th, 7.30 and 9.30 shows.
Marc:It's a free show.
Marc:There's free beer.
Marc:And Mike's great.
Marc:And I want to push some of you people that way.
Marc:I wish I was going to be in town.
Marc:I'm not.
Marc:I'm going to be at South by Southwest doing things.
Marc:But go see Mike at the Meltdown there March 9th.
Marc:Two free shows and free beer.
Marc:Come on.
Marc:I just sold the room out for you, Mike.
Marc:I sold it out with the free beer pitch.
Marc:But Portland was great.
Marc:Had a good time.
Marc:Ian Carmel opened for me.
Marc:He was awesome.
Marc:We went out and ate pock-pock wings.
Marc:So I had that gurgling and bubbling in my stomach throughout that show.
Marc:That was the subtext of that show was how much pain was rifling through my colon.
Marc:But it was great.
Marc:Portland's a great city, and I had a good time.
Marc:Seattle.
Marc:Got to Seattle.
Marc:Got sick.
Marc:I didn't let on too much, but I got a touch of the flu.
Marc:I keep fighting off this touch of the flu.
Marc:It's either that or cancer.
Marc:I'll keep you in the loop on that.
Marc:I'm being negative.
Marc:But no, I felt all week and I got chills and then I was kind of fevery.
Marc:I just climbed into bed when I got to Seattle and stayed into bed till like an hour before showtime.
Marc:Then I got up there and right when I got on stage within five minutes, I felt that fevery sweat.
Marc:So I let the people know.
Marc:I was concerned about my performance, that it might be dragging.
Marc:So I went ahead and did like almost two hours just to make sure that everybody got their Mark Marins worth.
Marc:And it was good.
Marc:It kicked in.
Marc:I forgot about the sickness in Seattle was great.
Marc:Thank you for the donuts and the cupcakes.
Marc:And I would like to thank also.
Marc:This is a weird thing.
Marc:Now, you guys know I don't drink.
Marc:So when I get into an argument with Jessica, I don't have a lot of recourse.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:I mean, I should not argue.
Marc:I have a difficult time with this.
Marc:I don't know how many men deal with this or women, for that matter, where the person you're with yells directly at you to your face.
Marc:And uses your name in it and then says it's not about you, that that you should know that I'm just upset and I'm yelling at you, but it's got nothing to do with you.
Marc:It's very hard to make that separation because when someone's yelling at you, it feels like someone is yelling at you.
Marc:But I get it.
Marc:I'm starting to understand her better.
Marc:That's good after about three years that you're finally getting the hang of somebody.
Marc:So we had this engagement.
Marc:It got ugly.
Marc:It could have gotten uglier had I not left.
Marc:Now, I am not a leaver.
Marc:I will usually stay in a stupid...
Marc:No reason fight until the relationship is just near the end, just hanging by a thread decimated.
Marc:You know, you could be fighting about bullshit that has nothing to do with anything.
Marc:And I will stay in that fight until, you know, where your clothes are being packed.
Marc:That's who I am.
Marc:But not anymore.
Marc:A new thing happened.
Marc:The fight started.
Marc:It got ugly.
Marc:I canceled our dinner reservations out of spite.
Marc:That made her more upset.
Marc:I went out to my garage.
Marc:I sat here.
Marc:I quietly called the restaurant back and said, could you put us back on the books?
Marc:It was a bad idea for me.
Marc:I don't need to go into much detail about it.
Marc:But can we just get our table, please?
Marc:Because it would make things easier.
Marc:And then she came in.
Marc:The fight continued.
Marc:And I said, look, we can still go to dinner.
Marc:If you want to get ready, get ready.
Marc:You've got an hour and a half.
Marc:I'm leaving.
Marc:And I left seething with something, but not horrible.
Marc:But I left.
Marc:I didn't know where I would go.
Marc:I think that in the old days, that would be a good time to go to the bar, have a few cocktails, then come back and really destroy everything.
Marc:But I went down to Gimme Gimme Records and just said, fuck it.
Marc:I don't know where I'm going to go.
Marc:I can't travel far.
Marc:I'm not going to drink.
Marc:I don't want to eat.
Marc:So I'm going to go to the record store and just browse, angrily browse.
Marc:And I went down there and I'm angrily browsing.
Marc:And Dan, the dude who owns the place, he's there.
Marc:And I'm like, you know, doing my regular thing, holding up records.
Marc:I don't know that much about going, do I need this or not?
Marc:Is this something I need to know about?
Marc:And then I just said, yeah, I got just had a fight.
Marc:Yeah, we're just it's bullshit at the house right now.
Marc:And he's like, oh, yeah, man, I know how that goes.
Marc:And we talked.
Marc:Me and the record store guy talked for like a half an hour about relationship bullshit.
Marc:And he talked me off the ledge.
Marc:We processed some feelings.
Marc:I bought a Fleetwood Mac album.
Marc:Came home.
Marc:Everything was leveled.
Marc:So that's some male bonding shit right there.
Marc:And I didn't have to get drunk to do it.
Marc:I have to fucking make any phone calls and I got some vinyl.
Marc:Thank you, Dan.
Marc:Thank you for doing that.
Marc:Now I know.
Marc:Now, look, I'm not suggesting that everybody go to record stores to hash out their relationships problems.
Marc:But I was just grateful that, you know, Dan showed up for me there because I was in the middle of it.
Marc:That's what used to be great about walking around and talking to people is you could used to be able to go out into the world, not just go online and buy a book, go to the bookstore, you know, emotionally tax the people that work at local businesses.
Marc:This is what good consumerism was about.
Marc:This is how you build bonds with shop owners is you you get to like them.
Marc:You dump some shit on them.
Marc:They accept it and process it and maybe help you a little bit.
Marc:And then you go back.
Marc:You go back.
Marc:You've got to be wary, though.
Marc:You don't want to be the guy that just goes to the bookstore or the record store or the hipster clothing shop just to whine and bitch, though record stores were, I think, designed for that initially.
Marc:I think that what the record store became perhaps in the 60s, 70s, and 80s was really just a collective gripe session about the integrity of certain musicians.
Marc:But this was different.
Marc:This was personal.
Marc:And I appreciate it.
Marc:Now I'm talking about it in a new medium.
Marc:So I'm home and next door they got a bouncy house going.
Marc:That kid must be about two or three.
Marc:It's a bouncy house precariously sitting on a deck.
Marc:I think it'll hold.
Marc:Looks like it's holding.
Marc:Do they have bouncy houses for grown-ups?
Marc:I mean, I've bounced in a bouncy house before with children.
Marc:But I'm thinking maybe that wouldn't be a bad thing for grown-up parties too.
Marc:Just a dinner party and...
Marc:Would someone please do that?
Marc:Could someone please have a grown up dinner party with no kids involved and no kids in the house and just have a bouncy house out back set up and just see what happens?
Marc:Could someone do that?
Marc:Maybe they can design bouncy houses for grown ups.
Marc:I don't think that they would be much different in design in terms of the fantasies of grown ups have.
Marc:I think a castle is fine.
Marc:I think that'll be fine.
Marc:Could someone do that please and invite me?
Marc:Uh, that would be nice.
Marc:And before I bring John Darneal into this, and by the way, uh, the mountain goats released a transcendental youth in October.
Marc:It's the latest record.
Marc:And you can also find John on Twitter at mountain underscore goats or at mountain dash goats.com for that business strap in me and John Darneal, uh,
Marc:It gets gnarly, gets good, and then he sings.
Marc:Let's do it.
Guest:I like to record when I'm on tour.
Guest:I like to if I have any ideas.
Guest:We had a day off in Portland and Brandon runs a studio called Cloud City in Portland.
Guest:And it's a better use of my time to write and record music than to walk around and shop on my days off.
Marc:Well, it seems like some of the music is in terms of there's always a I've been listening to you a bit and there's always a sort of urgency to it.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, no, that's right.
Guest:A big part of what I do is about trying to get that feeling of when you've just had a good idea, and it really has that lively thing that goes away if you hit it too hard.
Guest:Or you do it too many times.
Guest:Very similar to improv, what I do, I think.
Guest:I like to write fast.
Guest:I revise a lot.
Guest:You're not getting the first look, but you're getting as close to that first look as I can get.
Marc:So you're just sitting there with a pad, crossing things out, going, out.
Marc:Yeah, I'm an old speed freak.
Guest:That's how I work.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Speed was your thing?
Guest:For a while.
Guest:There's very little that wasn't my thing at some point or another.
Guest:But yeah, I mean, speed in 85, 86.
Guest:Oh, so back when it was still made by the bikers.
Guest:Back when it was made in bathtubs.
Guest:And back when you would split a quarter into two eighths and just slam it one at a time.
Marc:Oh, you're a slammer.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Good for you.
Guest:I don't know about that.
Guest:Why not light those synapses up?
Guest:Well, the thing is, but for those of us who that was our deal when it became clear that you could get AIDS and die from that, your first AIDS test was remarkably terrifying.
Marc:I think it was remarkably terrifying for anybody, but certainly needle guys, yeah.
Guest:And that week-long wait that you used to have.
Marc:Oh, it was horrendous.
Guest:And just going over everything you stuck in your arm, everything you stuck your dick in.
Guest:And everybody you were going to have to apologize to.
Guest:Everybody you were going to have to call up and go, I killed you.
Guest:And it's like the terror.
Marc:Did you ever do that thing, though, before the AIDS test where you'd call people up and be like, so how are you feeling?
Marc:Everything good with you?
Marc:No, I would just sit around and plot my suicide.
Guest:I was seriously like, because I knew.
Guest:So you weren't going to make the rounds with the apologies.
Guest:You were just going to- I was going to leave a letter.
Guest:Because it was just too terrifying.
Guest:Because the thing is, I was a scumbag, but the people I was with were not scumbags.
Guest:They were perfectly nice people who deserved better than me.
Marc:So you were the guy dragging everybody into the hole.
Marc:Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc:i'm not that person now john darnell you pronounce darnell darnell yeah i'm sorry that's that's what nobody ever gets it right the first try is that true yes but i imagine that your your your rabid fans are like oh fuck how does he not know his name half of them call me john darnell anyway do they really yes they do it's like so where did you come from
Guest:I was born in Bloomington, Indiana to an English professor.
Guest:My father and I think my mother was probably just doing full-time mom and he was looking for work.
Marc:At the University of Indiana there?
Guest:Yeah, he was at U of I Bloomington, I think.
Guest:He'd been all over.
Guest:He'd been in the Merchant Marines in World War II, but he got a job offer at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
Guest:I've been there, too.
Guest:And they drove me across the country when I was, I think, about a year old.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And lived in San Luis Obispo until the divorce.
Guest:How old were you?
Guest:Five.
Marc:Oh.
Guest:Life-forming event for me, obviously.
Marc:That's a bad one.
Guest:It's a bad time.
Guest:Didn't know it was going to... Well, you know, it's true.
Guest:And my therapist just said, because I had a two-and-a-half-year-old sister this time, my therapist just said, you know, like, that's about for the...
Guest:other baby to come along and to go through that stress.
Guest:And then two and a half years later, the divorce is kind of like the perfect storm.
Marc:The perfect storm that will define you for the rest of your life.
Guest:But I mean, everybody has their perfect storm.
Marc:No, I know.
Marc:I'm not special.
Marc:No, but I mean, it's like, there's your struggle.
Marc:You're five.
Marc:Welcome to it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was very intense because we really, because my stepfather, who my mother then married, was a friend of the family, mainly of my mom, obviously.
Guest:And we loved him.
Guest:He was the fun dad.
Guest:He's the guy who bought us the shit that we weren't supposed to eat.
Guest:Who, your stepdad?
Marc:My stepfather.
Guest:He was the fun dad in the courtship phase.
Guest:And he's a diabetic, insulin-dependent diabetic who didn't watch his diet.
Guest:He would just shoot extra insulin when he'd eat.
Guest:And he was a hospital pharmacist.
Guest:He knew what he was doing.
Guest:But...
Marc:So that also sort of gave you some firsthand early on experience with watching the process of shooting up.
Marc:That's a way of life for some people.
Guest:In my junkie time, I had unfettered access to needles because he had giant thousand packs of them.
Guest:He was never going to miss 20 of them.
Marc:Right, so what were you worried about AIDS for?
Marc:You were the guy with the clean ones.
Marc:Well, no, but then I moved to Portland.
Guest:Whatever goes.
Guest:Well, in Portland, yeah, it was a whole scene.
Marc:But ultimately, so you lived in San Luis Obispo, and then you went where?
Guest:Lived there until I was, so after the divorce, I guess I was there for an extra year, then went up to Milpitas, because it might...
Guest:And that's the Bay Area, right?
Guest:Yeah, it's right outside of San Jose.
Guest:And again, it was my stepfather had got a good job offer.
Guest:You went where the jobs were.
Guest:And so he worked for I don't know what hospital up in San Jose.
Marc:And we lived in Milpitas, which was a new- But the stepfather didn't pan out that well, ultimately?
Guest:Well, I mean, no.
Guest:But I mean, we were with him until I was 17.
Guest:I mean, it's like he panned out poorly, but permanently.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, what does poorly entail?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:He was abusive.
Guest:He beat my mother and myself and possibly my sister.
Guest:I don't know about that, but I think my sister alludes to that.
Guest:And it was your classic sort of cycle of abuse stuff where we used to go to the wrestling matches at the Olympic Auditorium.
Guest:How long have you lived out here?
Marc:In LA, about 2002.
Guest:Okay, so the Olympic was already gone by the time you got here.
Guest:It's a place called the Grand Olympic Auditorium.
Guest:It's a church now.
Guest:But it was built, I think, for the Olympics, and boxing and wrestling was held there, and punk rock shows in the 80s and 90s.
Guest:Twice a week, it was a big fixture, and it's an awesome... You should see it.
Guest:It's right near the original pantry.
Guest:Near the original pantry was, in fact, a code name for the Sunset Tree when I was working on it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's this big, beautiful old building that they used to have local wrestling and local boxing.
Guest:Right, when that existed.
Guest:Yeah, because local wrestling was an amazing thing.
Guest:And my stepfather's father had been a local wrestling promoter in South Bend, Indiana.
Guest:So he knew all about all that stuff.
Guest:I was so into wrestling.
Guest:Those were my heroes.
Guest:Chavo Guerrero, all these Southern California wrestlers.
Marc:Those were my dudes.
Marc:I just got an education, and I just interviewed Colt Cabana recently.
Marc:Oh, get out.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:There's a whole sort of alt-wrestling movement.
Guest:Yeah, no, I know one of the guys up in Vancouver is a big Mountain Goats fan.
Guest:We've talked about me doing a heel turn for him at some point, which would be really amazing.
Marc:How would you picture your heel?
Guest:I would like to pattern after a guy.
Guest:What was his name?
Guest:The Grand.
Guest:Oh, God.
Guest:What was his name?
Guest:I want to say Grand Wizard, but that's like a clan thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think it was like the Imperial.
Guest:The Grand Inquisitor or something?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:It was.
Guest:What was he called?
Guest:Ernie.
Guest:His real name was Ernie something.
Guest:And any of your wrestling fans will be like ready to beat my ass for not knowing this guy's name.
Guest:He managed the Sheik.
Guest:That's it.
Guest:All right.
Guest:And the Sheik was the guy who would throw fire in your eyes.
Guest:Right.
Marc:The Sheik, the one that's on Twitter now?
Marc:No, no, that's the Iron Sheik.
Marc:The Iron Sheik.
Marc:That's much later.
Guest:The Sheik was a 70s regional dude who was one of those types of heels whose sole desire was to injure his opponents, right?
Guest:And those are my dudes, the ones who- In unfair ways.
Guest:Andy Kaufman was really into these types of dudes, right?
Guest:Who you wanted to be a heel that you legitimately felt hatred for.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That would be a fun heel to be.
Marc:So how do you picture your heel?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Who would you be?
Marc:What would be your contemptible device?
Marc:I mean, I think-
Guest:I mean, I think my deal is like if I talk, I've had enough therapy and been in the therapeutic professions long enough that if you let me talk to you long enough, I can hold your eyes long enough.
Guest:I can make you feel something.
Guest:And generally speaking, I try to use those powers for good.
Guest:But I think if I was looking into a camera talking about how I'm going to injure somebody, I could make you believe that I'm going to take your favorite person.
Guest:I'm going to grind his face into the pavement at the base of the ring.
Guest:I'm going to do it for you.
Guest:Something that's evil like that, right?
Marc:So you're sort of going to impose with sort of lyrical sickness.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And sort of like, do you remember in Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, there's this sense from the queen that she wants to do evil for the sake of its magnificence, for the sake of hurting something that's nice.
Guest:It's memorable.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, what is that movie or something?
Guest:I wanted to destroy something beautiful.
Guest:I can't remember what it is, but yeah, just that sense that like with the good guys- Pure evil.
Marc:There's no- Evil for its own sake.
Marc:No political agenda.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Not even necessary.
Marc:Well, I mean, I imagine it would be about power.
Guest:Just hates what's good.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Break it down.
Guest:Right.
Marc:So, yeah.
Marc:So you're going to be that guy, the guy who's going to talk you into either hating you or just, this guy is so annoying.
Guest:I don't think I could do like a yelling heel.
Guest:I think I would have to be like the guy who is like mellow inside his own evil.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:You don't even know pain.
Guest:yeah exactly exactly when you see me you see something special so uh something like that but yeah so my stepfather had been uh my stepfather his father had been a wrestling promoter and he would take me oh i am totally coming back to my theme i'm very happy i'm very happy i didn't have to pull you back around i might i can just walk out so you know what i'll do is i'll just i'll train other guests if you have problem guests i'll give them a little talk through so so uh
Guest:But we were pals when he wasn't... I mean, this is the case with a lot of abusive relationships, that we loved him, right?
Guest:This was a very hard thing to try and express.
Marc:Well, you were five, so he was really, for most... What was your relationship with your real father after the divorce?
Guest:I loved my father the way that... Well...
Guest:That's hard to say.
Guest:I mean, it's gone through so many different phases.
Guest:But would you see him in the show?
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:No, he was a weekend dad.
Guest:He was angry and bitter.
Guest:About the divorce.
Guest:He didn't want a divorce.
Guest:Oh, so your mom drifted.
Guest:Mom left.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And they tried to fix it, but they could not.
Guest:And so, I mean, we went directly from my father's house to my stepfather's house, which is a traumatic thing to remember.
Guest:It's like, cause it really was going from a nice house to an apartment, you know?
Guest:And although I've been to the so-called nice house that I like, this is an amazing thing I did.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I went to San Luis Obispo on tour a couple of years ago.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I had most of the day off, and I was like, I'm going to go look at the old house.
Guest:I'd driven past it before, but this time I walked.
Guest:Did you knock and say, hey, I used to live here?
Guest:Yep.
Guest:It's a rental unit now.
Guest:Did they let you in?
Guest:Yep.
Guest:It was insane.
Guest:What was that like?
Guest:It was insane.
Guest:How much was in place?
Guest:Okay, so I want you to think.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:wherever you were when you were five right yeah where was it uh wayne new jersey oh man and with both parents yeah do they still own this house or have they oh no no no no we lived there we left when i was about six but it was a red brick apartment complex cool okay that's where i first saw the harmony guitar that's where i first remember it being played oh that's an amazing memory so but when you think of it when you think of yourself standing in it does it seem like you have room to run around and to be a kid
Guest:no not really not really for my place seemed big to me in my mind the hallway yeah i remember running all the way to the end of the hallway and running all the way back down and being exhausted yeah oh man i'm running all the way to the to the heater at the end and back that's two steps right now that i've been in the house really two paces and i remember running down that hallway and the distance between my room my parents room which i remember being a walk it's like if i have to go see dad to talk to him about something i'm gonna walk down the hall i'm gonna get a talking to you know right
Guest:that's two steps so those memories were like of what three years old four years old four yeah four three and those were the only things you really remembered i remembered well the thing is like we had added a room while i was there and it was called the front room and i remembered it being a cavernous big room with very high ceiling it's a fucking garage really it's the tiniest it's where the students live now because now it's a rental unit there was a fucking poster of biggie and tupac in on the front door i was so stoked and i was like well these people won't mind if i knock on their door so did they know who you were
Guest:No, they had never heard of me.
Guest:I was glad.
Guest:That would have been really awkward.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:This is my old house.
Guest:Can I come in and feel sad about shit?
Marc:You don't mind if I come in and weep in the hallway, do you?
Guest:No, that was what I did.
Guest:I walked in.
Guest:I looked around and just went, whoa.
Guest:So this is a bedroom now because this is the front room.
Guest:We had a piano in there and a stereo.
Guest:Were you telling this to whoever lived there?
Guest:A little bit, but for the most part, I was just, I mean, I didn't want to see you.
Guest:So you're sort of like the weird old guy that kind of came by.
Guest:No, the weird permanently young guy who came by.
Guest:But no, it's like, I wanted to keep it uninvasive.
Guest:I wanted to go, I know this is strange, but I lived here when I was a child and I am a musician.
Guest:I happen to be playing in town.
Guest:If I could just come in just to see the house I used to live in just for a second, that would be awesome.
Guest:And they let me write in and I looked at the backyard and I looked at my old room and I nodded and said, thank you.
Guest:And then, you know, then told my therapist about it when I got home.
Marc:What was the effect of that?
Marc:Did it compel you to write?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:I had written things about that sort of thing.
Guest:For one thing, I think stuff that compels me to write, it has to marinate for several years.
Marc:So we might be looking forward to an album based on that trip.
Guest:Possibly.
Guest:Maybe, maybe.
Guest:It's hard to say.
Guest:But it wasn't that traumatic.
Guest:It was interesting.
Guest:It was kind of sweet in a way.
Guest:It was good to see.
Guest:When you feel like you're okay with where your life is at, it's good to see the smaller place it came from.
Marc:I think that's true.
Marc:I've gone back to where a lot of my growing up was in Albuquerque and the house has been leveled.
Guest:It's gone.
Marc:And there's another house there that looks kind of like the old one.
Marc:So there's no real there there anymore.
Marc:There's the street, but that's about it.
Marc:Totally.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The house we lived in in Kolo, Iowa, my wife and I, when we were really super poor, like 97 to 99, it was a $275 a month place owned by a guy who everybody called a slumlord, although he knew this and he loved to get, they call me a slumlord in this town, but nobody else will rent you a house for this.
Guest:He was kind of great.
Guest:That's a weird logic.
Guest:I am, but it's a good deal.
Guest:I am, but you like your place, right?
Guest:And it was true.
Guest:But when we left Iowa...
Guest:In 2002 or 2003, we drove past the old place.
Guest:We'd come a little ways since then.
Guest:Not a whole big ways.
Guest:We were still leaving a very small house and moving to another small house.
Guest:But we weren't Kolo poor anymore.
Guest:And we went past the Kolo house and it was a hole in the ground.
Guest:The city had finally bought it from the slumlord and they had knocked it down with a ball.
Guest:It was just like rubble.
Guest:It was amazing.
Guest:Isn't it bizarre?
Guest:It's the weirdest thing to drive past a place where you, I mean, to be corny, where you lived and loved and did things that made you a person, and there's nothing there.
Marc:That was happening with, did you ever perform at Luna Lounge in New York?
Marc:I never did, no.
Marc:On the Lower East Side on Ludlow Street?
Marc:I mean, there was a lot of sort of the birth of New York alternative comedy sort of happened there.
Marc:Oh, wow.
Marc:And I went back there a couple years ago, and it's just been knocked down.
Marc:Heavy.
Marc:They're building something there.
Marc:Man.
Marc:And you kind of look in, I look through the hole in the construction site.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Wood.
Marc:Totally.
Marc:And I'm like, oh, the stage must have been over there where those pipes were sticking out of the ground.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:That's almost heavier than a house for it to be someplace where you got your start doing the thing that you are.
Guest:Yeah, where you bled a lot.
Guest:Yeah, totally, totally, exactly where you had, yeah, yeah.
Guest:You put it out there.
Marc:So, okay, so we're back at wrestling with your stepdad.
Guest:So we're back at wrestling with my stepdad, the song that got left off the album that had this line.
Guest:It was a song about going to wrestling matches because we would go in early just to make a day of it.
Guest:We'd eat at the pantry and do some other stuff and go...
Guest:get our seat and maybe walk around the olympic and figure out where the dressing room was at and he'd talk to me well this is probably where the guy who's gonna storm in later right right right he'll be stationed he knew the angle yeah he knew all the angles right and and he would cheer for the bad guys right it was like he was the few people the building who would be booing chavo guerrero who was my hero right uh but the line was you were at the end of the song was you know you were an evil man much of the time
Guest:But on our best days, we were partners in crime.
Guest:And it was true.
Guest:And that's what makes the whole thing complicated.
Guest:It's like if your abuser could be, and this is true for many people, and I won't say they're lucky because nobody's lucky to survive abuse.
Guest:Well, they're lucky to survive, but not lucky to have been abused.
Guest:But if you can have a monochromatically evil person antagonizing you, then it's very easy just to say, well, there was a shitty person who treated me shitty, not my friend who couldn't stop himself from ruining everybody's life.
Guest:Was there booze involved?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:It was just rage.
Guest:It was rage.
Guest:I mean, this is the other thing that makes it difficult is you know a person doesn't get like that by himself.
Guest:I mean, people think of this as a wishy-washy liberal way of thinking, but unfortunately it's also true that you don't just wake up one morning and go, you know, I'm going to suck at marriage and fatherhood.
Guest:I'm going to just become abusive.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That happens to you because you came from a place where that happened to you.
Marc:But even if that's the case, being a rager myself, and I imagine you've had to wrestle with it.
Marc:You know, rage is not an issue for me.
Guest:No?
Marc:No, I became a lot more- You turned it in on yourself?
Marc:Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc:it's all going in that's right no i'm gonna beat me became a self-mutilator became a big oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you're not gonna kick my ass because i am i'm better at it yeah it's like you'll you'll beat me but you won't get out knives yeah but but so when you talk about the cycle of abuse the the confusion of that yeah to because i imagine on the other side of the rage was a sort of uh kind of contrition
Guest:Well, yeah, the profound regret.
Guest:I mean, he would get really, really, really sad.
Guest:But did he beat you till you bled kind of shit?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:Well, yeah.
Guest:I had fresh earrings when I was 14 or 15, and that pissed him off to no end.
Guest:I hadn't consulted anybody about it.
Guest:I think I got mom to sign off on him somehow.
Guest:He just hated that.
Guest:He was a left-wing political activist who beat his wife and child and was kind of homophobic, right?
Guest:And I was getting girly at 14 and 15.
Guest:I was growing my hair long.
Guest:I was trying to eyeshadow and rouge and stuff like that.
Guest:What was the influence there?
Guest:Who were the musicians?
Guest:David Bowie and Lou Reed.
Guest:I mean, I was into it.
Guest:I was very into it.
Guest:How old are you now?
Yeah.
Guest:You know, I've never answered that question out loud in an interview.
Guest:I prefer not to, but I'm 46.
Guest:So, okay.
Guest:We're in the same ballpark.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:But I prefer for people to think that I'm 31.
Guest:I feel that I pass.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:We'll let the myth continue.
Guest:You can edit that.
Marc:For all you fans out there, he's 31.
Guest:31 years old.
Guest:But I have to say I only feel 27.
Guest:Well, you look great.
Guest:Thank you so much.
Guest:But, uh, so I remember the day that he knocked me hard enough to actually knock out an earring and the, and the post dug into my neck.
Guest:And that was the day that I wound up getting thrown out of the house.
Guest:I had to go live with my dad, dad.
Guest:How old were you?
Guest:14 or 15.
Guest:So that was just a fucking mess.
Guest:It was a mess and the thing is about that period of time was that I had at that point a strong network of friends.
Guest:Like for the first time I was close enough to grown up that my friends weren't just my friends.
Guest:There were meaningful people in my life who I talked to about my life and who I was constructing that amazing teenage life that you get with, right?
Guest:They know your struggle, you know?
Guest:And suddenly, you know, there was this big blow-up day about which I remember only that he did that, right?
Guest:He was slapping me around the face hard enough to make the earring dig into my neck and make me bleed.
Guest:And I went back to my room and just sat there listening to music.
Guest:And my mom came down the hall to say it was time for dinner.
Guest:And I'd been sitting there for half an hour contemplating what I was going to do to express that I didn't deserve this and the extent of the rage.
Guest:So I punched my window.
Guest:I put my fist through the window.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It felt like a million bucks.
Guest:I bet.
Guest:I never felt so good in my whole life.
Guest:It was like, holy shit.
Guest:And the house melted down, right?
Guest:It was like, there was this immediate, you know, my stepfather screamed that he was going to beat everybody's ass even worse.
Guest:And my mother's, my sister's crying.
Guest:It was a whole terrible scene.
Guest:You were losing?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, bleeding all up the arm.
Guest:And I just felt like a million bucks.
Guest:I never, I mean, it was like, you know what?
Guest:I mean, it just felt so good to show them what it felt like inside.
Guest:You know, there was no way of getting it through their heads.
Marc:And also it's sort of a way of trumping the pain that they inflicted or that he inflicted.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:No, that's right.
Marc:It's like you- You win in some weird way.
Marc:Exactly.
Guest:No, that's right.
Guest:That was my victory.
Guest:And then, so it was a big argument that night about he, my stepfather, oh God, this is hard to remember, saying it was him or me and- To your mother.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And my mother calling my dad and saying, I don't think John can be in the house.
Guest:It's not safe.
Guest:And my dad said, well, I'll meet you halfway and he can live with me.
Guest:He lived in, I don't even remember the name of the damn town anymore.
Guest:Beach town in Northern California, like Cayucas or something like that.
Guest:And so they did.
Guest:And I lived there for the better part of a week calling friends.
Guest:I mean, this place, God love all the children of Cayucas.
Guest:But there was, I went to Claremont High School.
Guest:Freaks went to Claremont High School.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like there was 900 people and there was so much culture.
Guest:You had your people.
Guest:The theater department at Claremont High is a special, special place.
Guest:And I was in that, you know, we were all, all my friends were 16, 17-year-old Yale-bound intellectuals.
Guest:And we would sit around and argue about Lou Reed versus David Bowie all day.
Guest:And that was like our biggest argument, who is better?
Guest:I was the only Lou Reed partisan, right?
Guest:Are you still?
Guest:Yeah, even though, I mean, Bowie, to his credit, seems to have said, you know what, I don't think I have anything else to say.
Marc:But the weird thing, because now I'm, in retrospect, we have a lot in common in that, you know, I have a lot of Bowie records.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And I have a lot of Louie records and I have a lot of Velvet Underwood.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:More than most people.
Marc:Well, I mean, more than other records.
Marc:But I also have a lot of Lynyrd Skynyrd records and a lot of Grateful Dead records.
Guest:No, I listen to very broad stuff myself.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But the one thing I noticed about those Bowie records is that the production value on most of them is astounding.
Marc:Oh, it's amazing.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And, you know, Lou Reed was lyrically probably much better.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:But, you know, he sort of flew by the seat of- His ear is not as good as Bowie's.
Marc:He flew by the seat of his pants, and I think he thought more of himself as a musician than he actually was.
Guest:Oh, absolutely.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, no, I mean, Bowie thinks about sound.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think Lou Reed actually did start thinking about sound with metal machine music, and his stuff then starts to be more sonically interesting.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I think that the blue mask is a masterpiece.
Guest:I love that period.
Guest:I love when Fernando Saunders is playing bass.
Guest:I'm a happy man.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:All right.
Marc:So, okay.
Marc:So, you're stranded in Cayucos.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And I'm not- And the kids there- Cry for help on the phone.
Guest:Oh, man.
Guest:And the kids there were just not-
Guest:It was clear I was not going to go over with my long hair.
Guest:My hair was down to my shoulders at this point.
Guest:And I did.
Guest:I mean, I like to drag it up a little bit.
Guest:I was not going to be able to do that at this place.
Guest:And I would call my friends and my friend Jeannie Kirk when I called her.
Guest:I was so desperately in love with Jeannie Kirk, although she was the greatest.
Guest:Had to keep her as a friend, though, huh?
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Well, I mean, we were never seeing each other.
Guest:I had this unrequited crush on her.
Guest:And she was... Yeah, I mean, we're friends now.
Guest:Oh, still, huh?
Guest:Yeah, I'm friends with practically everybody I used to know.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Not everybody, but a lot of people.
Guest:But...
Guest:but, uh, but Jeannie was like a very earth goddess, animal loving, uh, uh, Californian person.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, uh, and the kids at the Cayucas place, they like to hunt on weekends.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:When I told her that she had a conniption, she like, what you have to get out of there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:As if nobody in South California hunts.
Guest:Gotta save you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You have to come home.
Guest:Your friends miss you, and that's a bullshit culture to be in.
Guest:And I was like, okay, yeah, you're right.
Guest:I just needed somebody to tell me that.
Guest:Besides which, I had left a girlfriend behind with whom I was sleeping.
Guest:I got started early, and that was a very important part of my life was that I was getting bullied and beaten, and it was a bad scene, but I was having sex several times a day.
Guest:And it makes a big goddamn difference in your adolescent life.
Marc:You got to balance that shit out.
Guest:Your self-esteem just goes through the roof for that.
Guest:It's like nobody can say shit to you.
Guest:The guy's beating you up, aren't you?
Guest:I mean, I think this is true also when you're a grownup is like, if you are having good sex, nobody can say shit to you.
Marc:Oh, no, absolutely.
Marc:It's like your ace in the hole.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:It's like, well, whatever.
Guest:When you get done abusing me, I'm going to go home and feel great.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:So anyway, I hitchhiked.
Guest:My father dropped me off at school and I walked.
Guest:As soon as he was out of view, I turned around and walked across the parking lot.
Guest:And back, I think I thumbed a ride back to his house so that I could steal his weed and so I'd have something to barter with on the way up.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That work out?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I caught ride after ride, although the problem was, like the first few rides, we would just blaze up, get really stoned, and they'd drive me about half a mile.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Everybody's too stoned to function, and they'd let me out, and I'd get that thumb back up.
Guest:I was 15, 14 years old, you know, but I halfway- You can't do that anymore.
Guest:Halfway down, I caught a ride with a bunch of guys, a bunch of migrant workers who were coming down to SoCal looking for work.
Guest:And I was just in the back of a flatbed with like eight other guys.
Guest:And they dropped me off in downtown LA.
Guest:And I called my girlfriend and said, and everybody at this point was panicking in my life.
Guest:There were no cell phones.
Guest:I could be like, where the fuck is John going?
Guest:And I called my girlfriend and said, I'm in downtown LA.
Guest:And she said, go to Kathleen's.
Guest:And I said, give me your number.
Guest:And she did.
Guest:And Kathleen put me up for the night.
Marc:So, okay.
Marc:So you made it back there.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you escaped.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And you went and lived with this girl for a while or what?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:She was only 18.
Guest:I stayed on friends' couches and at a teacher's house for a week.
Guest:I was like couch surfing as a 15-year-old and going to school.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And calling home and saying, I don't know if I'm coming home yet.
Guest:I'll figure something out and going to my therapist who was saying, you need to go home, but you need to make sure it's a safe place for you.
Guest:And I went home and the abuse, I mean, I don't remember how long it stilled for.
Guest:I have no, it gets kind of blurry after that, but I know it was calmer for a period.
Guest:And when did the drugs, the heavy drugs start?
Guest:When I was like 16.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A year and a half later.
Guest:I was very into weed up to that point of mushrooms and stuff like that.
Marc:Who was the evil fuck that took you over to the other side?
Guest:I had a girlfriend who went off to school in New York and she came back with a coke habit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there was no way I could afford a coke habit.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But we on New Year's Eve of that year, we managed to cop both some cocaine and some heroin and acid.
Guest:It was a long night.
Marc:A long couple of days.
Guest:But this is the thing is like, so we tripped all day.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then we shot coke.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then when that started to wear off, we did the heroin.
Guest:And of course, that is the only way to bypass the cocaine depression.
Guest:You know how the morning you wake up after the morning if you're doing a lot of coke and you regret everything in your entire life?
Guest:That was like just the same.
Guest:Took the edge off.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:It didn't take the edge off.
Guest:It obliterates it.
Guest:It's like there is no depression.
Guest:There's just a mellow feeling.
Guest:I mean, I hate to sound like I'm evangelizing for a very addictive and dangerous drug, but yeah, so that was, I mean, we both immediately were like, oh, well, I would like to take this as often as I can.
Guest:Did you get strung out?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:yeah i was thinking about this the way over i think she was stepping on my dose for most of our relationship so i didn't i didn't get as kicking was not as hard for me as it is although the other thing is like when i did kick after about a year i just got i went directly back to cocaine and booze for about a week right yeah and i was getting very high every night yeah for a for a week week and a half yeah coke was my thing too i mean it's it's a weird thing that balance of booze and coke yeah yeah no but but it was the perfect detox for me i never really fully felt the throws and you never went back to dope
Guest:I mean, I chipped a couple of times afterwards, but never back to daily use.
Guest:I did enough.
Guest:Like I had a weekend in Portland that, that severely affected my short term memory.
Guest:And, and to this day I have a click in my hip and I don't know how, I really don't know what I was doing for several days.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, and that was when I scored some good stuff in the early days of the black tar in Portland.
Guest:Do you, do you do anything now?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:I mean, I drink some.
Guest:I'm not on the program.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But I mean, look, I hate to say I'm too old for anything because I really do.
Guest:I mean, it's like I resist aging strongly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But but I am too old for that.
Guest:I mean, it's like that that's not that those were for one thing.
Guest:I was trying to treat stuff that was wrong with me.
Guest:It was fun.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I was also trying to to to to cover up a lot of pain.
Marc:there's better ways of dealing with that pain right but it also takes a while to get there i mean you know you were fortunate enough not to kill yourself or get so strung out that you compromised you know uh the integrity of your soul yeah i guess i mean i was a shitty person when i was on drugs yeah but that's different than than than you know doing things uh to get drugs what do you i mean the the the tape won't reflect the smile that i gave him but
Guest:i mean i did some shitty things what's robin and stealing yeah yeah yeah all right well that's you know i i well i it doesn't seem to me that you were a guy that that lost himself it seemed that there was there's a fight in you that might not have let you i never fully lost view of myself but i don't take any credit for that i think it was my friends and luck you know and the fact that i come from from enough privilege to not have gone you know what fuck it right uh
Marc:Well, that's a, but that's a rare thing.
Marc:I mean, because, you know, I feel the same way, but you know, there are people who come from, uh, you know, self-aware, educated middle class backgrounds that, that end up completely fucking.
Guest:That become sociopathic.
Marc:Obliterary.
Guest:Yeah, no, that's, you're right.
Guest:And I know I've known some of them, so.
Marc:Or completely lost.
Marc:I've never been really able to identify the part of me that even when I knew my edge, even when I made commitments to myself, like I'm never going to go that far.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And that sort of keeps getting pushed out a bit.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:But there's still that weird thing where you have that moment where I'm never going to become that guy.
Marc:Right, right, right.
Marc:And then all of a sudden you're like, well, I'm sitting here with him.
Guest:You have your outliers.
Guest:In the program, I kept chipping into the program again and again, and they call them your yets.
Guest:It's like you haven't done this yet.
Marc:Right, but there's some weird thing that stops certain people, and clearly it stopped you, that it may have been self-awareness.
Marc:But did you ever have that feeling where you were observing yourself, that you knew you were pushing yourself to a limit?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because I think that's part of it.
Marc:It's like you don't become the drug.
Marc:You actually can see yourself on the drug.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And you're literally able to say to yourself, how far out am I going to go with this shit?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, the thing is, for me, there was always when I would cross one of those lines.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I don't like to say I'm an artist for any, you know, to get a pass.
Guest:But when you cross a line, if there's an artist in you, you go, oh, bitchin'.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When you cross lines, that's when special shit goes down.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Even if it hurts you, you know, you know that in your own creativity, when you go past something that you knew you were able to do into something you didn't know about, that's power, right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:And for me, it was the same thing in my life.
Guest:It was like, I'd be like, holy shit, look at you.
Guest:You're not a person who hangs out in this house.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But here you are.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it's like, you ever play Hitman?
Guest:The video game?
Guest:No.
Guest:The video game where you sneak around and do stuff.
Guest:And when you figure out who you have to throttle to steal his clothes to get into the right building, you go, oh man, I'm in the house.
Marc:I'm inside.
Marc:Right, right, right.
Guest:And that's what it's like.
Marc:So you run in the remote.
Marc:You run in the John remote.
Marc:No, exactly.
Guest:Oh man, you got him into this place that he's always been curious what it looked like to be this person.
Guest:Always wondered what it feels like.
Guest:Well, this is what it feels like.
Guest:And there's some strength and power in that.
Guest:And I want to say actually power is an interesting word there because...
Guest:I think what a lot of drug abuse that arises from having been abused and from being in environments that deprive you is about wanting to feel power.
Guest:It's like, you know, it's like you were talking about when I punched the window.
Guest:It's like, you know, that's wanting to say, well, I can control something.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And in the case of drug abuse, well, I can control the rate of my own destruction.
Guest:And of course, it's a myth.
Guest:It's like you can't really.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I think if you do, it's largely just luck.
Guest:It's luck and fear.
Guest:It's like I've always, I don't know about you, but the fact that I didn't die, there's a part of me that stands in judgment of the me who failed to die.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:Pussy.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:It's like you stayed high for a while, but you never did enough of the tar to really, really, really be writhing on the floor like some of your friends.
Marc:But the truth is that even that acknowledgement of a creative journey or a sordid creative journey or going to dark places under the auspices that I am an artist and I need to experience this.
Marc:There's a lot of people that don't ever make note of that.
Marc:It doesn't reflect in their art.
Marc:So I think that on some level, look, if you die now, people would be like, oh, I've got all those records.
Marc:It's so sad.
Guest:When you speak at my funeral, John's dead.
Guest:I've got all these records of his.
Guest:It's really sad.
Marc:Have a good day.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But if you would have died when you were 16, be like, poor kid, didn't live up to his potential.
Marc:Yeah, that's right.
Marc:So there's still a romantic notion.
Marc:Yeah, that's right.
Marc:Of the life you're living.
Marc:So, I mean, once you became aware of the fact that, you know, okay, so you're hurting yourself and doing drugs for power, and also I think there's the power numbing out sort of paradigm.
Guest:Right.
Marc:It kind of operates, you know, it kills your feelings, but also you own the shit you're in because you're causing it to yourself.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But when did you get the self-awareness to know that the pain that you actually were experiencing from your childhood or just as a sensitive person was something that needed to be treated differently?
Guest:I mean, not until years after I'd stopped.
Guest:I got out because of a legal threat hanging over me when I was 21.
Guest:All this stuff we're talking about happens before I'm 19, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I was generally, I went through a long speed period that's its own thing.
Guest:I mean, it seemed long to me.
Marc:Well, that beats you up physically.
Guest:Oh, man.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:How the hell did you come down from that if you weren't doing dope?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:The thing is, I was mainlining speed.
Guest:I was big into tweak at the time.
Guest:But somehow or another, I was drinking a lot.
Guest:But yeah, the year I spent in Portland, I did a lot, a lot of speed.
Guest:Did you get anything done?
Guest:no i mean i wasn't you weren't writing i was i was writing poetry uh but uh but i mean i was heading down the tunnel i was i was i was chasing death i was like really trying pretty hard to to get that's a good point yeah portland seems to be a nice kind of dark rainy place yeah you know if you if you grew up where there's sun it's hard to move to portland and that's largely what that was about and i couldn't make why'd you move there uh so
Guest:So, toward the end of the relationship with the girl who I got into dope with, our connections all dried up.
Guest:And we didn't know enough people.
Guest:We didn't know the rounds.
Guest:In LA?
Guest:You weren't going down to the...
Guest:Yeah, we didn't really have the stones to do that.
Marc:We had a person who supplied us who was local.
Marc:The middleman who'd step on your shit and never knew when you were going to show up.
Guest:And I think he either decided he was going to clean up or whatever.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:On his periodic power trips where he wasn't going to supply us.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You guys are too fucked up.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:I'm going to help you out.
Guest:It was such a naked power trip with this guy.
Guest:He was just like, I don't know, you guys.
Guest:You're always coming over here saying, yeah, we are because you are our connection, you dick, right?
Guest:And so-
Guest:So we had to sit and listen to him talk about music.
Marc:Oh, yeah, for hours.
Guest:He knew much more about music than anybody else.
Guest:But we couldn't score.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But we knew somebody who had what's called a load.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You know this?
Guest:It's four Codeine 4s and two Doradins, which I've never even looked up.
Guest:I don't even know that.
Guest:I don't either.
Guest:It could be wrong.
Guest:But that's what we called it at the time.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And...
Guest:And they were supposed to be good enough if you couldn't cop.
Guest:And we took them.
Guest:I don't remember anything about it.
Guest:I remember it came on.
Guest:It was quite a load, huh?
Guest:Well, this is the thing.
Guest:This is where I, I mean, when I think back, it seems clear to me that my girlfriend was stepping on my dose because I couldn't handle this.
Guest:She was really into it.
Guest:I was like, boom.
Guest:But maybe I hadn't eaten that.
Guest:But either way, she said, well, you're kind of out of it.
Guest:This is hilarious.
Guest:You'll love this.
Guest:You should go home.
Guest:And put me in my car.
Marc:Yeah, sure.
Guest:I do not remember the drive at all.
Marc:That's caring.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Well, I mean, we were both hot.
Guest:Sure, yeah.
Guest:I don't blame her personally for that or anything.
Guest:She's a good person now.
Guest:But put me in my car.
Guest:I drove home.
Guest:I'm 17 at this point.
Guest:The whole big blow up with my stepfather is having.
Guest:My mother's living in an apartment with me and my sister now.
Guest:We're out of that.
Marc:Oh, they broke up too?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, that was a whole... This is a whole... There's a number of different...
Guest:It's a pretty complicated story to get all together.
Guest:But yeah, so on New Year's Eve, well, right around the time of that night I was talking about where we dropped acid, did cocaine, and heroin, right around then was when we stayed in a motel that Christmas because the abuse had gotten too bad at home.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then my mom found an apartment.
Guest:Me and my sister and my mom were living there.
Guest:This is the one I go back to on the load, and I get to the front door, and apparently I couldn't think how to get in.
Guest:So I was just standing there at like 2 in the morning, and the dogs are barking, and my mom opens the door.
Guest:And my junkie mind was still conscious enough to go, you have to somehow explain why you're so fucked up right now.
Guest:So I said, oh, I'm feeling sick.
Guest:And I went to the bathroom to grab some decongestants to prove I'm real sick.
Guest:So watch me take some Sudafed, right?
Guest:And the Sudafed combined in my system with that to cause my lungs to fill with fluid.
Guest:And in the morning, my mom couldn't wake me up to get me to my dishwashing job.
Guest:And to this day, one of my biggest life regrets is how horrible it must have been in that apartment when the EMTs showed up to take me to the hospital.
Guest:I woke up handcuffed to the bed because I had become apparently very violent under the influence of Narcan that they put in me.
Guest:And I woke up with handcuffs with private detectives asking me questions, and it was a whole scene.
Guest:And my father...
Guest:real father my father father decided as people do when your life goes south on drugs that the problem in your life is your girlfriend so so he said he would pay me uh x amount of dollars to live in any city and he didn't have a lot of money this was like money and you're fucking 17 yeah but he knew i wasn't going to go to college that i was just going to keep on doing whatever i was doing working a dishwashing job and getting high right yeah
Guest:And he figured if I took a geographical, I would do better.
Guest:And he said, I'll pay you to live in any city in the U.S.
Guest:as long as you will attend community college for a year.
Guest:I was in Portland visiting him when he made the offer.
Guest:He was about to return to San Luis Obispo.
Guest:And I said, yeah, what the hell?
Guest:I mean, I didn't care for my life at all at this time.
Guest:And so I said, yeah, Portland, fine.
Guest:And he gave me the money.
Guest:Well, of course, he had no way of knowing this, but Portland in 85, it's not a good place to drop off a junkie who you're trying to get off dope, right?
And so...
Guest:And yeah, so I continued getting high for nine more months and then the money ran out and I came back and moved back in with mom.
Guest:And then I was outside of, my old drug friends had all dispersed to their various stations.
Guest:And my older friends from high school weren't like that.
Guest:And I fell back in with them and I spent a couple of years generally a little less fucked up.
Guest:Except that then I did fuck up again and got like my luck, I always say my luck ran out and I got arrested twice in one month.
Guest:And that was sort of when your question was,
Guest:When do I get some clarity on having a sense of purpose?
Guest:I was in the nursing program trying to turn my life around at the end of the semester.
Guest:Where?
Guest:In Walnut here in Southern California at Mount Sac.
Guest:I was in therapy and he's trying to convince me to think of my life as having conceivably some direction.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I said, what would you like to do?
Guest:And I said, what you do seems pretty awesome.
Guest:And he said, well, one path to that is to become a psychiatric technician and then study to become a social worker and then you can do that.
Guest:And I got on the psych tech program and a friend of mine, close, close friend joined it with me and I was really motivated.
Guest:Like I was really, and I, you know, I was living fairly clean.
Marc:I wasn't clean, clean, clean, clean, but you know, I wasn't.
Marc:But this would seem to me also an effort to solve your problem.
Guest:yeah yeah no exactly not just get a job but like sort of like well this is the guy in charge of you know getting me you know of of trying to understand why my head is like it is yeah no to have something to do besides yeah there's just yeah and so but at the end of the second semester we all went out to party yeah and i'm not you know in those days if i if i got a little tipsy i would just keep chasing the blackout it was really bad but the
Marc:The people that you were with weren't like that.
Guest:No, but we all got too drunk for any of us to drive.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was the one insisting that I should be the one who would drive.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I got me my drunk driving that night and then, or no, wait, that was two weeks after the cocaine arrest.
Marc:You got a cocaine arrest?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I got hassled by the Canadian border this last time through for it for the first time ever.
Guest:Oh, dude, the Canadians will... But they had never come up before, and it's so horrible.
Guest:They sit there and make you, and Peter... You go into immigration, and they're like, what is this?
Guest:They sit there and make you confess, right?
Guest:And I want to go, there's a lifetime.
Guest:I'm describing this shit to you, but it really is like I'm talking, like I'm telling you a story.
Guest:30 years ago.
Guest:It's not somebody I really remember.
Guest:I mean, I remember, but that's not... I stopped being that person five years or so after all these stories take place, and it's now 20 years after these stories take place.
Marc:Yeah, customs people.
Marc:People don't.
Marc:The immigration people don't hear that well.
Guest:And the thing is, it's like, I said, they said, what's this?
Guest:I said, what's this?
Guest:And they sit there and make you tell your story.
Guest:It's really, and my bassist, Peter, whose wife is from El Salvador, says, oh, yeah, you think that's bad.
Guest:You should try coming to the U.S.
Guest:from El Salvador.
Marc:I mean, they just basically- Well, the Canadians crack down after we crack down on them after 9-11.
Marc:No, that's right.
Marc:So you get busted twice-
Guest:And it was, I mean, I had done a lot of heinous shit in the previous three or four years and never got caught.
Guest:I was golden.
Guest:Nobody ever, nobody touches me.
Guest:Did you see this as a sign?
Guest:Yes, I did.
Guest:Well, and especially I had two semesters of work toward this nursing degree that was important to me.
Guest:I had important shit in my life.
Guest:And the arrest, the cocaine arrest was a real betrayal of a girl I was with who didn't, I left her and then we were a little tipsy and I thought, man, I should go score some blood.
Guest:It'd be fun.
Guest:And instead of spending the night at her house and she was hurt,
Guest:And I was becoming a grown-up.
Guest:It was like I was beginning to understand that, you know.
Guest:You were fucked up.
Guest:And that I cared.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I'd been away from my stepfather's sphere long enough to start to really be in touch with what I would consider my core.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And all these behaviors I'm talking about are responsive behaviors.
Guest:I mean, I think I, as a person, am, in fact, the basic me.
Guest:I'm a person who cares about people and doesn't want to hurt anybody.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I did a bunch of shit for about four or five years where you would have been hard pressed to prove that.
Guest:Well, like what?
Guest:Well, like the stuff we're talking about.
Guest:Like this particular instance, like this doesn't seem like a big deal.
Guest:But to say goodnight to somebody, I love you.
Guest:I love you too.
Guest:Goodnight.
Guest:I'll see you tomorrow.
Guest:I'm going to go home and sleep.
Guest:See you at school.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And instead.
Guest:You go cruising the islands in Pomona and smoking rock all night, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Until you get arrested.
Guest:That's profoundly shitty, right?
Guest:I mean, you know, there's worse stuff that... I mean, I have my limits as to how far I can go in talking about this stuff.
Guest:This is not really comfortable for me when it goes past, when it goes to really harmful shit.
Guest:But it's like not hand-to-hand shit, you know, but, you know, robbing people.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:But...
Guest:lying I mean this thing like lying is a basic human behavior when you look back on your druggie lies you don't feel good about it you know you feel like that's really almost the worst is like when you look somebody dead in the eye and just who you like you know your friend oh yeah without even thinking exactly and it becomes second nature to you but if you're me you know that it's not second nature to you that's like an adopted nature it's a survival strategy I think but are you right with this shit now I mean I don't think I'm ever gonna be right with it I'm Catholic I nurture my guilt
Marc:But was there ever any outreach around it?
Marc:How do you mean?
Marc:Well, I mean, in the program, there's an amends process.
Guest:Yeah, I didn't get there.
Guest:To as many people as I have come into contact with, I've tried to...
Guest:for the stuff that must have been hard for you i said to the last time i saw him when i was over in england where he lives now uh you know uh when uh when all that stuff went down when i was 18 i can't even imagine now that you know i'm a grown up what that must have been you have one i have a 15 month old son so that's kind of weighing on you too yeah yeah well i mean the thing is he won't he won't go through a divorce you know
Marc:But still, the responsibility, the fear, the pain, and the worry and concern of taking care of a child and knowing in your heart that your childhood, for reasons that were out of your control, went awry.
Marc:But that doesn't mean that the emotional drain or pain that you caused those people was any less.
Guest:Right.
Guest:No, that's right.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:And my father, it was a good, I'm not super close to my father, but we did have a good moment on that.
Guest:I could see him sort of go, you could see this thing cross of remembering, but also remembering that was a long time ago, you know.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, it was pretty deep.
Guest:What about the stepfather?
Guest:Well, he's dead.
Guest:And that's a long and complicated story.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There's a lot more in that.
Guest:He never really stopped feeding on us.
Guest:He was locked in, chasing him.
Guest:Well, no, no, no.
Guest:It's like we were never, he moved back in with mom.
Guest:After I was gone.
Guest:She kept taking him back, huh?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Is she still around?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, that's why I don't want to go too deep into that part of the story.
Guest:Are you okay with her?
Guest:yeah as okay as you can be you know we're we're dysfunctional we get on well i talked to her today she's she's cool you're grown-ups yeah yeah no that's right they proud of you i don't know really i don't know either of them i don't my well yeah my father doesn't listen to podcasts uh my my father does mine
Guest:My father.
Guest:It's my problem.
Guest:My father has tried.
Guest:Yeah, I can see him trying to be ever since I was a poet.
Guest:You know, when I was writing poetry, I was winning national prizes.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And my poetry was well regarded.
Guest:And my father would just tell me that, you know, if you weren't writing in verse that it wasn't poetry.
Guest:Was he a failed poet?
Guest:No, he was an English teacher, but he had not tried to write poetry.
Guest:He wasn't a failed writer in any way.
Guest:He loved literature and was a very, very, very staunch traditionalist.
Guest:He's the same way with jazz.
Guest:He plays jazz, but his cutoff for good jazz is like 41.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Really?
Guest:41?
Marc:Well, maybe the earliest bebop.
Guest:He'll take Charlie Parker, but once you get to Coltrane, he's not down.
Guest:Yeah, I get it.
Guest:But anyway, so my dad has a hard time feeling pride in stuff that he himself doesn't feel.
Guest:Although I do wonder whether like if I, and I'm not going to do this, but if I like made it my mission to craft exactly the kind of thing that he would like and did it well and it was generally acclaimed or anything, I still wonder whether it would get across, you know.
Marc:Well, no, yeah, I think there's a fundamental sort of ego struggle between fathers and sons.
Marc:Yeah, no, I agree.
Guest:It's terrifying as a father to think about that because my son is a baby.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you don't really think in terms of there being any ego struggle there.
Guest:It's like he's a baby, he's a wonderful human being, and you don't hold any of his behaviors against him because he's a baby, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's terrifying to think that at age 12 or 13, you'll start to feel- Threatened.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's like, you know, you want to be better than that.
Guest:You know, you really, and you know, I'll spend the next 12 years trying to assemble as many tools for coping as I can.
Guest:So when it comes, I can be as graceful and good as I can.
Guest:But I mean, some degree of struggle is necessary for the growth of the child.
Guest:They have to differentiate themselves from you at that point, right?
Guest:They have to say, well, you are to some extent what I am not, right?
Guest:And it will be, I will have to learn
Guest:how that works in a healthy household.
Marc:How to accommodate the heartbreak of detachment.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:But I mean, I know I will do it.
Guest:I've made my life's mission since I was 22 or so, being a better person than the one that I was sort of heading toward.
Marc:Well, so now I have to assume that after listening to your records and the urgency and the...
Marc:and the sort of compulsion that there was some problem solving going on through that.
Marc:Maybe.
Guest:I mean, the thing is that you were playing The Sunset Tree.
Guest:That's like the second autobiographical record I made.
Marc:Why do I listen to the later ones?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:No, but there's a lot before that, right?
Guest:And most of that was just storytelling, right, for the most part.
Guest:And then I wrote We Shall Be Healed, which was my Tweaker album, right?
Guest:And I was like, hmm, that's kind of interesting to get a little real about it, you know?
Guest:And then The Sunset Tree was after my stepfather died.
Guest:He died, and my sister called in the middle of the night to say, Mike's dead.
Guest:And then I went on tour a month or two later and stuff started to crack open.
Guest:It was really amazing.
Guest:I just started to feel free with my feelings.
Guest:In general?
Guest:Well, no.
Guest:With those...
Guest:Just my vision, my ability to think about that time and how far I'd come.
Guest:I lived in Iowa at the time.
Guest:You think that some impact was that the abuser was dead?
Guest:Yes, absolutely.
Guest:I tell people, I tell survivors when they come up to me in the merch line, they'll say, has your abuser died yet?
Guest:And they will say...
Guest:you know, no, I say, I want you to be ready because it is, I mean, I hate to say this because you don't wish death on anybody.
Guest:It's wonderful when your user dies.
Guest:It's wonderful.
Guest:It's like nothing in the world.
Guest:It's like you are free.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, there's a feeling that you will never be free of what you were, you know, there's that, but there is this, you know, even though my stepfather was helpless at the end of his life, but to know that the person who used to hurt you no longer can, it's very, very, very deep.
Guest:It's, it's unbelievable.
Guest:You forgive him?
Guest:No.
Guest:which i hate about myself but but i don't yeah the uh so the record was you know that one was a cathartic oh yeah i mean i wasn't even ready for it it wasn't something i tried to do i was on tour and peter will tell you stories about who would come out of the shower and come to the hotel room we shared a room at the time peter and i roomed
Guest:Brandon, my tour manager, is next to me now.
Guest:Now I room with Brandon, so Brandon would be the one coping with this instead now.
Guest:But Peter would come out of the shower, and I would just be on the floor with a guitar, a fucking train wreck of a human being, working on stuff, writing these songs, like 10 verses per song, just trying to sort it.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I remember writing dance music in the van.
Marc:That's a very sweet, touching, deep song.
Marc:Oh, thank you, yeah.
Marc:That's like, to me, when I listen to that again today, that's sort of like, that's the doorway into it all.
Guest:Yeah, no, it was one of the earliest ones.
Guest:I was working on stuff like that tour, and it must have been like day six of the tour, and we were parked trying to find a place to park in Paris, and I'm in the van with a notebook just scribbling stuff fast, and I wrote a little thing that said, you know, very jumpy, maybe CG, or maybe GCD, and...
Guest:Like five days later, we're doing an appeal session with no ideas about what to do.
Guest:And I said, well, let me just work on music on the floor of the studio here and I'll write three new ones and we'll do a cover of something.
Guest:And that's what we did.
Guest:It's like that day we did Tetrapod and Dance Music and God, one other, Magpie.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was so, and I said to Peter during like the three or four days in London on that tour, he's like, I'm thinking about doing a whole album of this stuff.
Guest:It really feels like that's where I'm supposed to go.
Guest:And Peter, and it was very important, this little tiny bit of conversation, I think you should do that, right?
Guest:And I was like, cool, I got permission.
Marc:And do you see that album and that catharsis of that event, sort of like that broke you wide open to continue responsibly and dedicatedly to songwriting?
Guest:In many ways, that's the first Mountain Goats album.
Guest:I know a lot of Mountain Goats fans would be less than pleased to hear that, but it's like all this stuff before that sort of feels like a study for when I was able to tap something.
Guest:And I think I'd hit...
Guest:The root a few times before, you know, on Ohio West, Texas, there's a few love songs that I think and I on the corners gambit where I address a friend's death.
Guest:There's there's moments where I where I hit the reserve, right?
Guest:That thing that you get.
Guest:And this is why I think what I do is improvisational is like it's when you are making shit up as you go along.
Guest:And then suddenly you go, oh, that's real.
Guest:If I have the balls, let me follow that.
Marc:Well, obviously, you know, you had a sort of a knack for it, you know, from from writing poetry for so long that, you know, that that that lyricism was something that you had a handle on.
Marc:And I think not unlike someone like Bob Dylan or you sort of hard pressed to find a Dylan record, you know, pre, you know, some of the later records that you can really say, well, that must be him.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:But you get into blood on the tracks, right?
Guest:And then suddenly, suddenly he has.
Guest:But all that formal study before then, I think, is so important.
Guest:No, no, absolutely.
Marc:You can't do it until you know how to.
Marc:Right, but there's also like a lot of sort of kind of skirting the issue.
Guest:Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Circling it.
Guest:You know, kind of dancing around.
Guest:Because you're afraid.
Guest:It's terrifying.
Guest:Because if people... Look, if we'd made the sunset tree and people had gone, this sucks, it would have been very hard.
Marc:It would have been painful.
Marc:Because it would have been such a... Not just a craft rejection, but an emotional...
Guest:Right.
Guest:But the other thing is, it wouldn't have mattered that much as long as it reached a few people, because as soon as it came out, I can't even begin to describe to you what it's like to get contacted by 16-year-old people who are living where I lived, not in the same town, but who are living through what I lived, to tell me...
Guest:This is useful to me.
Guest:You know, it's like, it really makes you feel like, well, I'll be goddamned.
Guest:My life has a purpose.
Guest:The guy who sucked ass at being a person has made something useful that is deep.
Guest:I mean, it's like, it's seriously like, it means if I, if you tell me now what, and at the end of this interview, I'm going to shoot you dead, right?
Guest:Then I'll go, well, you know what?
Guest:I had a good one.
Guest:Well, that's like from before.
Guest:It's like he died, but we have these records.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:And so that happened.
Guest:The other thing is, at the end of tracking it, I was like, what if the label turns it down?
Guest:And I didn't even care.
Guest:It's like I had done something that was important for me.
Guest:And I could feel that we had gone someplace new.
Guest:And it was really super...
Guest:Intense for me.
Marc:And also focused your emotional integration.
Marc:Like, I imagine now, like, you must feel some personal connection to all the records post that.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You know, dealing with, you know, fatherhood and traveling and everything else.
Marc:That they're all, you know, when you compare them to the first few records that you've made, you've got to...
Marc:that you're maturing and mature.
Guest:Yeah, you always feel like you're getting better, right?
Guest:But I would say it's like, I don't think I tapped that vein again for another couple until the Black Pear Tree EP a couple years later.
Marc:So, like, we missed Iowa, we missed marriage.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, the thing is, like, when you... I get my chattiness from my father, but it's like, I feel like other people might be able to condense my story into something a little more that doesn't range as long as... So you crapped out in nursing school...
Guest:No, no.
Guest:So what I did is I got busted and then busted, and then they combined my charges, which was I didn't have a lawyer.
Guest:I couldn't afford the $1,500 retainer fee.
Guest:And so I just stood before the judge, and he said, what do you want to plea?
Guest:And I was just...
Guest:taking a gamble and I said nolo contendere and he said do you would you like me to try these charges together I see you've been arrested since I last saw you in here and I said uh I mean I don't I don't know and he and he says if I try if I combine the two charges then you will only be convicted on the greater of the two and I said which is the greater of the two and he said the drunk driving and I said yeah I said okay well I'm finding you guilty uh and I'm sentencing to three years probation with random drug testing and uh
Guest:and uh you'll show up for all that and i will send you to jail for three years if you fail any of your drug tests and and the thing is i had been to jail right and i did not i didn't were you in jail when they arrested me for the coke yeah yeah and for the 502 uh and and i'd been in the drunk tank several times in portland uh and the drunk tank in portland is no joke it's pretty intense and uh and i knew that i wouldn't make it in jail i was i was skinny and small you know and uh
Guest:So that's it.
Guest:You scared straight.
Guest:Scared the hell out of me.
Guest:I went on the program for five years and I confessed everything to the nursing board.
Guest:It's like I wrote it all down in vivid detail, what I was doing and all this.
Guest:And I stayed dead sober with random testing for five years.
Guest:Well, no, for two.
Guest:After two years, my probation officer looked at my record of clean tests and said, what are you even doing here?
Guest:It's like, you don't have to come in for these anymore.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, because I mean, literally everybody else's caseload was routinely testing dirty and paying fines and shit like that.
Marc:You passed.
Guest:I was dead serious.
Guest:I was like, I was done with that part of my life.
Guest:I didn't want anything to do with it anymore.
Guest:And I really do, when I think of all that drug use, which is really compressed into a four-year period.
Guest:It was just a survival strategy.
Guest:You know, it was just me trying to cope with, you know, it was that or suicide.
Guest:And I didn't want to kill myself.
Guest:And so I wanted to obliterate myself.
Guest:I wanted to be obliterated without dying if I could and make it through that period.
Guest:And so I did.
Guest:And then I had a purpose.
Guest:I was a nurse.
Guest:You know, it's like I was going somewhere.
Guest:I was helping people doing work I loved.
Guest:What kind of nursing?
Guest:Psychiatric nursing.
Marc:How did that affect you?
Marc:And in terms of like under my assumption, not yours, that that, you know, being put in a service situation with people that were suffering from perhaps similar types of reactions.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, I was working with long terms.
Guest:I mean, I did some stuff in short term with the most part of the people I was working with are chronically mentally ill, who are also people who will put your shit in perspective.
Guest:It's like, we talk about my life.
Guest:There's another version of my life in which a stronger person could go, I'm just going to buckle down and avoid...
Guest:The abuser, as long as I can, get out of here when I'm 18 and make a decent life.
Guest:I didn't choose to do that.
Guest:I chose to be narcissistic like a lot of addicts are.
Guest:But you go work in long-term psych, you meet people with real problems that they cannot help who come from fine families, but their brain has fucked them over.
Guest:And that's not on them at all.
Guest:And so that was really healthy for me.
Guest:Sobering.
Guest:Oh, it was great.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it really was.
Guest:It was like, you know, I don't take... I talk... If people ask me about my life, I talk about it seriously, but I don't want people to get it in any way twisted.
Guest:I don't think I'm special, and I don't think I had it especially hard.
Guest:I know a million people who had it harder than me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right?
Guest:It's like, I am lucky.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I know people who haven't had any luck, you know, and so... And I wanted to make it my mission to somehow...
Guest:you know give back to the world in some way because i made it you know and so yeah so i was a nurse for a while with those guys i loved those guys they were the best i worked in the long-term unit at what kind of problems i mean schizophrenia and all right and bipolar disorder yeah unmanageable bipolar disorder and uh and uh it was on the spanish-speaking unit at metro in norwalk yeah and uh did that for several years you speak spanish i did at the time after i moved to iowa and then to north carolina my spanish has kind of died in my mouth but i used to be fluent why the fuck iowa
Guest:My girlfriend who I met when I was in college, I went back to college at the end of nursing.
Guest:I was still staying at community college and there was an English teacher named Lois Cole who was like, why don't you have a BA in English?
Guest:You're a person who needs, that's who you actually are.
Guest:I was like, you're right.
Guest:So I went to Pitzer from the time I was 24 to the time I was 28.
Guest:And I met this girl through the Mountain Goats, which I started during that time.
Guest:It was just you and another person, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was me and actually four other people, and then it was the former members of a band called The Casual Girls.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then one of them, Rachel, became my bassist, and we toured a little bit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But then during that time, I met this girl named Lalitri, who's my wife now, who knew my music.
Guest:She wasn't a massive fan or anything, but we wound up having a conversation online.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was 94 or 5.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And when I got back from a European tour, I had a little bit of money, like $1,000 or something like that.
Guest:And I was like, fly out to the Midwest and meet this girl.
Guest:Why the fuck not?
Guest:And I told her, I'm going to fly to Chicago.
Guest:Don't feel any pressure.
Guest:But if you want to come out and meet me, it's chill.
Guest:And she did.
Guest:And we are still married.
Guest:How long?
Guest:I guess we got married in 98 or 99.
Guest:And then you ended up in Iowa because that's where she came from?
Guest:She was still going to school.
Guest:She was younger than me by a good deal.
Guest:What's a good deal?
Guest:eight years nine years and uh i mean not you know yeah not not to me like super eyebrow raising yeah you know uh but uh but i don't know it's not for me to say either but uh but in any case i uh you know we met up and she was still going to grinnell so i moved to grinnell and when she graduated we moved up to colo yeah because we're kind of stupid together a week we don't
Guest:We could have gone anywhere in the fucking world.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We couldn't have because we were poor, but we could have picked better than just to go to the nearest Iowa town that we could afford a freestanding house in.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:But that's what we did.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And yeah, so lived there for two years and Ames for another three or so.
Guest:Oh my God, yeah.
Guest:Well, Ames was, I mean- Yeah, it's nice.
Guest:I got a lot of love for Iowa.
Guest:I don't talk down Iowa.
Guest:Iowa's cool.
Guest:But after I came back from an Australian tour in 2002 or 2003, and it was clear that leaving my wife at home for as long as seven or eight months, not continuously, but total during the year.
Guest:Tricky.
Guest:To sit around in Ames.
Yeah.
Guest:It was really not a tenable strategy.
Marc:So then where'd you go after that?
Guest:North Carolina, where I live now.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:So Durham, North Carolina, the best town in the U.S.
Guest:Right on.
Guest:Durham is popping.
Guest:Raleigh's cool and Chapel Hill's cool, but Durham has just been doing this slow growth amazing thing for the past, since we moved there, which is a coincidence.
Guest:We picked it because it was a little cheaper than living in Carborough or Chapel Hill, but it has just grown and grown.
Guest:It's really cool.
Marc:So you want to play some music?
Marc:Yeah, what do you want to hear?
Marc:Whatever you feel comfortable playing.
Marc:You can do new ones or you can do old ones.
Guest:Well, let me figure something out.
Guest:Let's do it.
Guest:All right.
Guest:I've been saying to audiences that this song is about the yoga of self-mutilation.
Guest:It's called Until I Am Whole.
Guest:Sunset on Snohomish
Guest:Burn the tree line down Hold my hopes underwater Stand there and watch them drown Fishing out their bodies
Guest:from the bathroom sink leave them in a bucket till they start to stink I think I'll stay here until I feel whole again I don't know when
Guest:Trouts swim past the fishing line Sky gets dark and close Cars start up in May Their nightly exodus
Guest:on a picnic bench alone I watch the lake go dark dig my nails into my hands hope it leaves a mark I think I'll stay here until I feel home again I don't know when
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Marc:That sounded amazing.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:Want to do one more?
Marc:Sure.
Guest:Let me think, let me think, let me think.
Guest:So this song is for a specific person.
Guest:This is a song with the same four chords I use most of the time When I've got something on my mind and I don't want to squander the moment Trying to come up with a better way to say what I want to say People were mean to you But I always thought you were cool
Guest:clicking down the concrete hallways in your spiked heels back in high school
Guest:It's good to be young, but let's not kid ourselves It's better to pass on through those years and come out the other side With our hearts still beating Having stared down demons Come back breathing People were mean to you But I always thought you were cool Clicking down the concrete hallways In your spiked heels Back in high school
Guest:You deserved better than you got Someone's gotta say it sometime cause it's true People should've told you you were awesome Instead of taking advantage of you I hope you love your life now Like I love mine I hope the painful memories only flex their power over you A little of the time
Guest:We held on to hope of better days coming And when we did, we were right I hope the people who did you wrong Have trouble sleeping at night People were mean to you But I always thought you were cool
Guest:Clicking down the concrete hallways.
Guest:In your spike heels.
Guest:Back in high school.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Thanks, John.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Thanks for sharing.
Marc:You bet.
Marc:Okay, that's it.
Marc:That's the show.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Thank you, John.
Marc:Amazing talk.
Marc:You sounded great.
Marc:Happy you were here.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com for all your WTFPod needs.
Marc:Do whatever you got to do.
Marc:Get some merch.
Marc:Get the app.
Marc:Get on the mailing list.
Marc:Kick in a few shekels.
Marc:Check out my calendar.
Marc:Check out clips.
Marc:A lot of shit on there, man.
Marc:Get yourself a Box Brown poster.
Marc:There's more posters coming.
Marc:More things coming.
Marc:Come see me.
Marc:Come see me.
Marc:Somewhere.
Marc:I'm funny right now.
Marc:I'm trying to put this special together.
Marc:Swear to God, I am.
Marc:I'm not fucking lying to you.
Marc:Boomer lives!
you