Episode 397 - Marshall Crenshaw / Thomas Dolby
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck, buddies?
Marc:What the fuckineers?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:Alright, this is Mark.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:This is Mark Maron.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:We have a doubleheader today.
Marc:An interesting doubleheader because you're probably wondering, well, how does this happen?
Marc:How does this happen that Mark has Marshall Crenshaw and Thomas Dolby on his show?
Marc:Well, what happens with my show sometimes is
Marc:is that people approach me with guests.
Marc:I get emails.
Marc:Do you want to do this?
Marc:Do you want to do so-and-so?
Marc:And I'm like, why wouldn't I want to talk to that person?
Marc:That might be interesting.
Marc:Where's that guy been?
Marc:See, that's a big question I ask.
Marc:What's that guy been doing?
Marc:And I think I've talked to you a little bit about this before.
Marc:But look, I'm a guy that nobody knew for a long time.
Marc:A handful of you knew, but most people didn't know.
Marc:And quite honestly, still most people don't know.
Marc:I'm not saying that like I feel sorry for myself.
Marc:I'm just saying that as a reality.
Marc:So sometimes a name comes up and you're like, oh, yeah, what has that guy been doing?
Marc:And I think about it.
Marc:And when I get the opportunity to talk to certain people, I'm like, I want to know what that guy's been doing.
Marc:How does an artist live?
Marc:After they've disappeared to most people that once knew them.
Marc:So, OK, so I get, you know, Marshall Crenshaw is out there.
Marc:He's opening for Dave Alvin, who I've had on this show, who I love, who a lot of people don't know who Dave Alvin.
Marc:It's just I get sort of.
Marc:Having known what it's like to pursue a life of your own making in the creative field and knowing what it feels like to sort of be churning away for years and years and be relatively under the radar or off the grid or on the periphery or not on anyone's mind at all, it's sort of a painful thing.
Marc:So I'm always fascinated, here they come, what is happening?
Marc:You guys can hear that, right?
Marc:That feels like it's landing on the garage.
Marc:I didn't do anything.
Marc:I think the patent trolls now have an air force.
Marc:So when I get an opportunity to talk to somebody like Thomas Dolby, I only know him from that one record from way back when.
Marc:It was back in the early 80s.
Marc:Both of these guys, Crenshaw and Dolby, were early 1980s artists that had hits.
Marc:And when I see their name popped up as a possible guest, I'm like, well, I'm fascinated with how their life has gone.
Marc:Because it's always our...
Marc:OK, I shouldn't say always, but my instinct is like, oh, God, if they're not, you know, staying viably present in the cultural media spotlight, they must be living some sad life of desperation and despair.
Marc:but but that's rarely the case i have found from talking to people that usually people that we've known for one hit or one thing or whatever a lot of them are on you know they continue working in various things they continue some of them doing the best work of their life and obviously some of them made a lot of money some of them you have harder lives than other people but they're out there still doing it and i find that to be such a an encouraging and and noble thing somehow
Marc:It's so easy to treat people as trivia questions.
Marc:You watch enough VH1, everyone's just the goofy answer to some ridiculous trivia question or they become the brunt of some joke.
Marc:And they're just people, creative people doing what they do.
Marc:So that's this is the theme of this.
Marc:And this is why a lot of times I do these interviews, because I want to know what people are doing and where people's creativity has taken them and what they you know, what they've gone on to accomplish, you know, primarily for my own concern.
Marc:You know, I don't know what's going to happen with me.
Marc:And I'm hoping, well, I'm sort of on the took a long time to even get the modicum of success that I have now.
Marc:And I realize that can always fade.
Marc:You know, everything fades, folks.
Marc:I don't want to get existential.
Marc:But, you know, in time, eventually nobody knows who anybody was.
Marc:You know, everybody just becomes a name, just becomes a floating image or soundbite or piece of video that has no context that you can just click on on the Internet.
Marc:It's just like, who was that guy?
Marc:When did Milton Berle live?
Marc:What is this?
Marc:Who was Will Rogers?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know what?
Marc:I don't understand.
Marc:Who's this Hitler fella?
Marc:God forbid that happens.
Marc:God forbid history just completely becomes completely untethered from its significance and chronology to where everything's just sort of like, yeah, I saw a picture of that guy.
Marc:I don't.
Marc:Yeah, I have no idea.
Marc:It's black and white, so it must be old.
Marc:All right, let's talk to Marshall Crenshaw.
Marc:You can play a couple songs too, so hang around for that.
Marc:What am I saying?
Marc:This is like radio.
Marc:Yeah, so make sure you stick around.
Marc:Don't walk away from your iPod and leave it running and then come back and miss something.
Marc:All right, here's Marshall Crenshaw and me.
Marc:Marshall Crenshaw.
Guest:Where have you been, buddy?
Guest:Where have I been?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Let's see.
Guest:I left the house an hour and 15 minutes ago, hoping to be right on time or maybe a little early.
Guest:I stopped at Starbucks.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the gal who gave me my coffee, she said, here you go, handsome.
Guest:And then later on, she called me sweetheart.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:So I figured, okay, I must be...
Marc:you're exuding something today it's a big day man that doesn't come easy from starbucks employees right so that was the start of my day that was the first social contact of my day i get a call yesterday or was it yesterday or two days ago from jimmy vivino yeah from backstage at conan o'brien he's like what's going on man you got marshall on or what i know
Guest:I knew he would do that, too.
Guest:I knew that he would just pick up his phone and call you.
Guest:What were you doing over there?
Guest:Just hanging out?
Guest:No.
Guest:This is a story.
Guest:I'll tell you a story.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:I drove out here from New York State.
Guest:I live upstate New York.
Marc:All the way across country?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's the third time that I've done it in two years, so this time it was kind of tiresome.
Marc:Was it a romantic notion?
Marc:Were you setting out to be like, I'm going to do the country, or you just don't like planes?
Guest:No, it's a pragmatic thing.
Guest:You know, I hate, I don't really like flying.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'll do it if I have to.
Guest:I don't like airports.
Guest:I don't think anybody does anymore.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like to have my own gear with me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I have a lot of it with me, you know, because I have solo shows on this tour.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:As well as band shows.
Guest:So it's really for the sake of the gear, I guess.
Guest:And I just like to, I've had a lot of bad experiences in airports with gear.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:So I just have become a road trip guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I'm driving.
Guest:On Saturday, I was stuck in traffic, just sitting there motionless with the car turned off for about two hours.
Guest:This was an hour or so west of Santa Fe.
Guest:I'd stopped in Santa Fe to see some friends.
Marc:What the hell happened?
Marc:I grew up off of that highway.
Marc:How the hell was that backed up?
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:It was dreadful.
Guest:You know, I finally got up ahead and saw what had happened.
Guest:And there was a semi truck that had obviously burned, you know, so.
Marc:Did it flip or just flipped and burned?
Guest:Yeah, it was just a rusted hulk of shit.
Marc:Well, at least you're sitting on a pretty chunk of highway there.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I love New Mexico as far as that goes, the atmosphere and the scenery.
Guest:But anyway, I'm sitting there, and the phone rings, and it's Jimmy Vivino.
Guest:And a week earlier, the previous Saturday, I played with him at a show that he organized called the Rockabilly Ramble at Levon Helms' studio.
Guest:Where is that?
Guest:It's in Woodstock.
Guest:And you live up there?
Guest:I live near it.
Guest:I live in Rhinebeck, which is across- I know Rhinebeck.
Guest:Oh, do you?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, you're sort of an East Coast guy.
Marc:I had a friend who lived up in Rhinebeck, and Tommy Stinson was just in here.
Marc:He lives in Hudson, so there's a whole little world of you guys.
Guest:Tommy Stinson?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, for God's sakes.
Marc:Yeah, he lives in Hudson, man.
Marc:He's got a studio set up over there.
Marc:That's not far from you, is it?
Marc:No.
Guest:Hudson's close to me.
Marc:You guys should jam.
Guest:So, well, yeah.
Guest:I don't even know him, but-
Guest:Anyway, Jimmy was on the phone and I thought he was saying, I've got your strap and you've got mine.
Guest:But then after a minute I realized he was saying, I've got your strat and you've got mine.
Guest:So in other words, I'm hauling myself across country because I'm trying to keep my eyes on my own gear and I don't even have my own guitar with me.
Guest:I have Jimmy's guitar instead of mine.
Marc:Had you played it though and not known it?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:The guy who packed the stuff up at the end of the night switched them.
Guest:And this guitar that he's talking about is not just any guitar of mine.
Guest:It's a guitar that is me.
Guest:I've had this one since 1972.
Guest:My cousin brought it home from Southeast Asia.
Guest:He was in the Air Force during the Vietnam War.
Guest:Bought a Stratocaster over there.
Guest:I wound up buying it from him.
Guest:What year is it?
Guest:It's a 66 body with a 65 neck at this point.
Guest:It's gone through a lot of permutations.
Guest:But anyway...
Guest:jimmy tells me that i don't have my own guitar i have his yeah he has mine and it was like i got i was surprised that i felt this way but it was like i got socked in the guts you know yeah and it didn't even dawn on me at that moment to say well jimmy are you coming out to la this week because that's where i'm headed i didn't think of that till two hours later but right turns out of course that he was and he i said do you have a decent flight case for a strato caster
Guest:So that's why I was with him that day.
Guest:So you went over to Conan?
Guest:I went over to Conan to get my guitar and to give him his.
Guest:And, you know, he's a great guy.
Guest:Great guy.
Guest:He said, man, you know, the fret edges are getting a little dodgy on your strad.
Guest:Give it to this guy over here and let him work on it.
Guest:Skills, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Skills spent about a half hour on my Stratocaster.
Guest:And did he fix it up?
Marc:He did.
Marc:Yeah, they're fucking great over there.
Marc:Like, I'll go over there with guitars sometimes, because they just hang out, and they got nothing but guitars.
Marc:He had a case for you, too, right?
Marc:He's like, oh, yeah, fuck yeah, I got a case.
Marc:It was all good, yeah.
Marc:It really was.
Guest:And I love stuff like that because there were a lot of guys there that I knew from New York and New Jersey.
Guest:From the band?
Guest:Yeah, Richie La Bamba.
Guest:I'm going out the door and he goes, if you see Bertnick, say hello.
Guest:Who?
Guest:Bertnick is a mutual friend.
Guest:Glenn Bertnick is a mutual friend of ours.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, musicians, man, it's kind of like high school in a way.
Marc:The guys who stay in the racket long enough and keep working and don't disappear, you kind of run into them, don't you?
Guest:Exactly, yeah.
Guest:I'm old enough to know that that's an important thing and a good thing.
Guest:I love that I have a peer group like that, people I've known for a long time.
Marc:And also, you're a highly respected songwriter, and there's like a crew of cats that kind of stay in that space.
Marc:You go out, you probably still got a lot of people that love to see you.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:I would say so.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Although I should say about the friend thing, I had a dream this morning.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And in the dream, I was with two of my old musician friends, and in the dream, it turned out that they really disliked me, actually.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:So I don't know what that's about.
Marc:Well, I don't know.
Marc:When you run into him, you better say, what the fuck was going on in my dream?
Marc:I was getting a seriously bad vibe from you, too.
Marc:Can you validate or invalidate that, please?
Marc:I'm going to hold him responsible.
Marc:So you're one of these cats that you've been around.
Marc:I remember your heyday, and I don't mean to say it in a condescending way.
Marc:And then I think a lot of people would be like, well, what's Marshall Crenshaw been doing for the last few years?
Marc:And you've just been cranking out records, right?
Marc:And producing some shit and writing songs for other people.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:All of the above, mostly playing live and just trying to put one foot in front of the other.
Guest:I can't go away, and I haven't gone away, but let's see.
Guest:You grew up in Detroit, though.
Guest:grew up in the detroit area well what i mean and you're a little older than me so i have to assume that that was uh i mean that was where some pretty serious rock came from serious rock yeah absolutely um and my dad was uh it was really unusual because uh
Guest:I was, let's say I was born in 1953.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My dad loved rock and roll, and that was, you know, he was the only, probably the only adult anywhere who did, you know, but he liked it before they called it rock and roll.
Guest:He was, you know, he was into R&B.
Guest:So he got it.
Guest:So I heard that stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Always, you know.
Guest:It was always in the car, always on in the house.
Guest:I had some older cousins who were teenagers when I was a child, and I really was kind of raised by them.
Guest:They had the records.
Guest:They had the records, yeah, that my cousins, Carol and Marilyn, they would bring home the Chuck Berry 45s and Joe Bennett and the Sparkle Tones, all that stuff.
Guest:So I grew up with that music, always loved it.
Guest:My dad played guitar.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He never really learned how to play.
Guest:All the chords that he knew involved moving his index finger somewhere on the first three frets of the guitar, but he would get it out and bang on it.
Guest:As a little child, I thought that was very cool.
Guest:What kind of guitar do you remember?
Guest:It was a no-name guitar.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:It was just like a black guitar.
Guest:Like a Sears guitar, not even a Stella, just a thing?
Guest:Yeah, sure, something like that.
Marc:But Chuck Berry, man, I can't imagine what it would have been like to be a kid and be close to the source of that.
Marc:Because when I first heard that Chuck Berry riff, that opening riff, it was a life changer.
Marc:It was like some sort of key to the universe.
Guest:Yeah, I did.
Guest:I just really was drawn to the music right away.
Guest:It was kind of really the only thing that I loved other than my family.
Guest:I just really was obsessed almost for...
Guest:Such a long time.
Guest:And as time went on, I just really wanted to get out of the world that I was in and just be in that world that was coming out of the radio.
Guest:Which world were you in?
Guest:What kind of world of shit was that?
Guest:What variety?
Guest:Suburban Detroit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was nice.
Guest:I mean, my family life was always great.
Guest:My parents, my dad just passed away a few weeks ago, actually.
Guest:Sorry, man.
Guest:Still kind of fresh in my mind.
Guest:Was it unexpected?
Guest:No, it wasn't.
Guest:We thought that he had beaten colon cancer a couple of years ago, but it was quickly, the tables turned really fast on him.
Guest:Yeah, so anyhow, it was pretty... What did he do?
Guest:Let me see.
Guest:When I was born, he worked for the state of Michigan as some kind of tax assessor.
Guest:Then he worked for the city that we lived in for a while.
Guest:He got his dream job about 1968.
Guest:That was city manager of Berkeley, Michigan.
Guest:That was the town that we lived in.
Guest:B-E-R-K-L-E-Y.
Guest:And my mother had grown up there.
Guest:Her dad, my grandfather, he built a lot of the first houses in the town, and he built the first commercial block.
Guest:And I grew up there.
Guest:My dad...
Guest:I was city manager for only a short time, like a few months.
Guest:They went through a lot of city managers then.
Guest:Was it an unmanageable city?
Guest:Apparently so, yeah.
Guest:Well, just a lot of stupid assholes that he had to deal with.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I'm on his side in the whole thing.
Guest:You got to be.
Yeah.
Guest:He was explaining it to me because we were talking about this Italian restaurant that we used to go to in Berkeley the last time I visited him, which was around Thanksgiving, and we all knew it was going to be the last time.
Guest:And we were talking about this place.
Guest:Everybody called it Domenico's, which I'm sure is not how you were supposed to pronounce it.
Guest:But they had these big plate glass windows for a long time.
Guest:And then about 1969...
Guest:They got rid of the plate glass windows and filled in the whole front of the building with bricks.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I said, yeah, they riot-proofed the building.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In 67, there was a big riot in the city of Detroit.
Marc:Well, that was a huge riot.
Marc:I mean, that sort of became the reputation of Detroit from that point forward.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:And when I said that, it struck a nerve with my dad.
Guest:And then he then told me the story about why he'd gotten fired from his dream job because the city council people wanted him to put the cops on the streets in Berkeley 24 hours a day and pay them overtime because they were afraid that the hordes were going to pour out of the city.
Guest:That black people would just come raining down on your suburb.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:then set the place on fire and all this shit and my dad my dad grew up in a black neighborhood and he was a non-racist and uh you know he just refused to do it and pretty soon after that he was gone he refused to uh to do the first turn towards uh fascism that's right on the streets of berkeley 24 hours a day just wandering around looking for trouble uh-huh
Marc:Well, good for him, man.
Marc:Well, so that kind of tells you a little bit about what kind of place it was.
Marc:I mean, when you were a kid, I mean, was Mitch Ryder around?
Marc:What was happening with the Detroit Sound?
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:Well, when I was a child, you were really aware of all this stuff.
Guest:There was a guy named Jack Scott.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, Jackie Wilson.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then by the time I was about eight or nine, Motown was turning into something, and I was really aware of that, you know.
Guest:My dad took my brother and I to see Jimi Hendrix.
Marc:Get out of here.
Guest:Yeah, he did.
Marc:What year, man?
Guest:68.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How was Hendrix?
Guest:Well, it was great.
Guest:I mean, I'm a lifelong fan of his, you know, but he did seem kind of tired, maybe a little out of it.
Marc:Isn't it bizarre that, you know, as we get older, that you look at the output of that guy, and you look at, like...
Marc:The image is burned into your mind.
Marc:The music is burned into your mind.
Marc:He didn't even make it to fucking 30.
Marc:Those guys look like they're just ageless.
Marc:It's bizarre to me.
Guest:I love him, you know, and the other thing.
Guest:He was really together.
Guest:He has a bad reputation now.
Guest:People say, oh, he fucked up and he died.
Guest:I'm not even sure that that's what happened.
Guest:Just things that I've read over the years, I wonder.
Guest:What, you think it was a record company hit?
Guest:There's a theory about him being murdered that's very believable.
Guest:What's it revolve around?
Guest:What's the angle?
Guest:Well, here's the thing.
Guest:My brother Mitchell, he was with my dad and my brother.
Guest:Mitchell and I were the three that went to that concert.
Marc:How many brothers and sisters you got?
Guest:I have three younger brothers.
Guest:Three younger brothers.
Guest:I'm a little tired.
Guest:So you and Mitchell and your pop.
Guest:Yeah, and Mitchell's a real hardcore Hendricks fan, and he sent me this book a few years ago called Hendricks, The Last Days.
Guest:And I was reading the back section about his death, and this one thing stuck in my mind, how one of the examining physicians who looked at Hendricks' body when it came in to the hospital...
Guest:He was talking about the fact that Hendrix's clothes and hair were soaked with wine.
Guest:The guy just said he was covered in massive amounts of red wine.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there was very little alcohol in his system when he died, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So that stuck in my mind.
Guest:And then a few years later, or a couple years later, there was a guy in England...
Guest:named Tappy Wright, and he was a road manager for the animals and for other people.
Guest:He worked for Hendrix's manager, Mike Jeffrey.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he came out with an autobiography, and he was on a book tour in England, and he said in this book, and it could be bullshit, but he said that Jeffrey confessed to him that he had...
Guest:killed Hendrix and uh I guess it's also a matter of public record that during the last year of Jimi Hendrix's life he was under a lot of harassment he got spiked with LSD or something at a band of gypsies concert at Madison Square Garden there was all this kind of sinister shit that happened to him you know that suggests that he was being manipulated by his management you know to stick with the experience you know the two white guys and
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I mean, you know, you can find all this stuff and so forth.
Marc:So you're saying that his road manager admitted to killing him?
Guest:No, his manager, his road manager or this guy Tappy Wright.
Guest:He wrote the book and said that his manager copped to it.
Guest:Put a hit on it on him that he was held down and basically waterboarded to death with red wine.
Guest:And that jives with the thing that I read that the doctor said in that other book, you know.
Marc:But with the angle, like the reason for that, so if he was waterboarded, you're saying that maybe they were torturing him to go back to the experience?
Guest:No, they were killing him because apparently- How is there more money in a dead Hendrix situation?
Guest:An insurance settlement, I guess.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:It's also said that when Hendricks died, Jeffrey collected a big insurance settlement, paid off his gambling debts, bought a house, all this other stuff.
Marc:No shit.
Guest:You know, I'm just repeating what I've read on the internet and in books and so forth.
Marc:But that's out there.
Marc:There's like a conspiracy that makes sense for just about everything sorted in this world.
Guest:This one does make sense to me.
Guest:It rings true for me.
Guest:That's a fucking tragedy, man.
Guest:it is and i i've been trying look whenever i've had a conversation over the past three or four years with any rock writer yeah uh like i was talking to a friend of mine named lenny k one time i remember lenny k and he's a musician though he played with patty smith lenny k does play with patty smith yeah and uh and one of the things he said to me he says i'm trying to think of an idea for a book you know because he's written a few books yeah some great ones and uh
Guest:I said, I've got it.
Guest:Do an investigative book on the death of Jimi Hendrix.
Guest:And I just gave him that whole spiel that I gave you.
Guest:And is he on it?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:He wouldn't go near it.
Guest:Nobody will go near it.
Guest:I've had the same conversation.
Guest:Out of fear or just out of the rabbit hole?
Guest:Well, one guy said to me that I'm just not an investigative reporter.
Guest:I write about music, but you need somebody who's really motivated in that direction, has those kind of contacts and stuff.
Guest:I don't know if there is anybody like that.
Marc:Well, I mean, I'd heard things about Otis Redding, you know, being taken out.
Marc:And I heard that.
Marc:But I never heard anything about Buddy Holly and Richie and Buddy Holly, Richie Valance and the Big Bob.
Marc:I never heard anything, you know, sorted about that.
Marc:No, I'm not a conspiracy theory kind of guy at all.
Marc:But when you saw Hendrix, was Hendrix really like fucking transcendent?
Guest:Yeah, he was.
Guest:This sounds like jive, but it's not.
Guest:He played the whole first song with one hand.
Guest:He played manic depression.
Guest:He had his amp way up in a fuzz box, so he could do the whole thing with pull-offs.
Guest:But it was cool.
Guest:He's a showman, man.
Guest:He was unbelievably cool.
Marc:yeah well it's interesting that like you know you what you gravitate towards in just talking to you for 10 minutes so how do you get from there to these uh these beautiful pop well-crafted pop tunes that you seem to churn out i don't know i mean i just i'm a big music lover along the way in between all that i i was well actually at the time of the hendrix thing
Guest:There was a radio station in Detroit called WABX, one of the first- So you were like 14 or something?
Guest:Yeah, 14.
Guest:One of the first FM rock stations in the country.
Guest:And it was, I describe it as radio for smart stone people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I wasn't stoned at the time, but it was like- That was old FM radio, right?
Guest:Yep.
Guest:You could listen to that station for a day and just learn everything.
Guest:They would play-
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Howlin' Wolf.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then maybe 20 minutes later, it would be Igor Stravinsky.
Guest:Yeah, right, right, right.
Guest:The first time I ever heard Bob Wills was on that station.
Marc:And the cat was always like, now we're going to mix it up a little bit.
Guest:Yeah, and they would make it work, too.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:They were smart enough to do that.
Guest:They just carried it through.
Guest:So I soaked all that up.
Guest:Bob Wills, Rosa Sanitone.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right?
Guest:That's a good tune.
Guest:Western Swing, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I don't know.
Guest:Well, at the time I was writing all this stuff for my first album, I was just really...
Guest:excited about a lot of things new and old but uh i don't know i may be the only person who listens to my first album and hears it as a phil specter tribute album and that probably doesn't make any sense to you but i hear it that way because i spent a lot of hours listening to his records and really loving did you have like 100 people in the studio and mix layer upon layer upon layer
Guest:No, it's not too many instruments, but it's just the way the percussion is and the way the music is structured.
Guest:It's kind of got that vibe to it.
Guest:So there's a little bit of rockabilly in my early stuff, a little bit of Phil Spector, a little bit of current of the moment kind of stuff that I was hearing in New York.
Guest:I was very much influenced by what I was seeing and hearing in New York.
Guest:Well, you know, anytime you went into a restaurant or a shop in New York, you would hear WKTU, WBLS, R&B, kind of post-disco stuff, which I really liked a lot.
Guest:I was listening to a lot of Jamaican music on this other radio station called WLIB.
Guest:I know L.I.B.,
Guest:Well, at the time that I'm talking about, it was all Caribbean music during the day.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I listened to that.
Guest:And then there was a great rock station in New York when I first got there called WPIX.
Guest:And they would play The Clash and then they would play Joe Turner.
Guest:You know, I just kind of got a...
Marc:that's where I was coming from just the idea that everything that ever happened was contemporary and you could use it and draw from it but so that was in so that came out in 1982 my album yeah and like so what were you kicking around doing before that because you were already what I mean you're almost 30 I was yeah I mean that's sort of that's kind of late to be
Marc:doing the rock star thing, isn't it?
Marc:So what were you doing?
Guest:Yeah, it was.
Guest:Well, let's see.
Guest:I got out of high school in 71, and then I left the Detroit area in the late part of 76.
Guest:So that's a big chunk of time right there.
Guest:That was kind of squandered time.
Guest:And then I left the Detroit area.
Marc:That's like, what, five years of squandered time?
Guest:I was playing in a band, but it was a dead end kind of a band.
Marc:Like what?
Yeah.
Guest:Oh, it was a band with guys that I went to high school with.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The real deal.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In a garage.
Guest:And well, a couple of us were real big admirers at that time of the Grateful Dead during the Grateful Dead psychedelic phase.
Guest:No shame in that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so it was a big band kind of like that.
Guest:We had two drummers and- Oh, no shit.
Guest:Seven guitar players and four keyboard players.
Guest:Hard to organize, huh?
Guest:It was doomed.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I spent a lot of time with them and then finally split.
Guest:Doing some acid?
Guest:A little bit, yeah.
Guest:Did you get out there?
Guest:I had about 30 psychedelic experiences during my youth, I guess.
Marc:I can't imagine with that many instruments being on acid would be a positive experience.
Guest:Well, I remember I was on acid once when we were playing and I thought, you know, it doesn't matter if we play together just as long as we all play.
Yeah.
Marc:I think you just explained the entire noise music ideology.
Guest:Good times.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you spent five years tripping balls and hanging out with a large orchestra of psychedelic trippers.
Guest:Just before I did my first album, I had been in Beatlemania for two years.
Guest:i saw that show when i was a kid on broadway so you were at the touring company uh how'd that work i started out as an understudy of which guy uh john yeah yeah he was uh you know super heroic figure to me as a when i was a kid yeah and i kind of resembled him back then i had long hair and wire room glasses all that but uh
Guest:Anyway, yeah, Beatlemania was six months as an understudy.
Guest:Then I got in a company finally, and it was the West Coast Company.
Guest:I did the show at the Pantages in Hollywood for a couple months.
Guest:Then we went up to San Francisco for four months.
Guest:Then that company closed in San Diego, and I got in a touring company and finally split in Boston.
Guest:I gave my notice in Boston in February of 1980.
Guest:so you had to in order to tour of beatlemania you had to play all the songs it was all live music yeah so you were playing all those beetle riffs and and so you had to learn all those all those chord progressions and all the tunes yeah i knew it already i knew their music you know that was the reason why i got in the company when i did was because the the got one of the cast members had gotten a motorcycle accident
Guest:And there were two understudies in New York.
Guest:I was the one understudy who could play the guitar solo to get back.
Guest:The other guy couldn't play it.
Guest:So I got the gig.
Guest:That little country riff?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's John.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So I could play that.
Marc:And that got you in?
Marc:That got me the gig, yeah.
Marc:But it sounds like as a student of music that you sort of run the full range of possibilities.
Marc:I mean, you like to play rockabilly type of stuff.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Marc:It's a good time, but you can also play the Beatles.
Marc:I can't play the Beatles.
Marc:I never put my mind to it.
Marc:I'm not comparing us, but what else do you really need?
Guest:Well, I mean, some people don't need anything else.
Guest:Some people make a whole life out of those three chords.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Lots of great, great people.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But my taste goes through the whole 20th century.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And beyond.
Guest:And I think that comes from WABX, you know, the rock radio station for stone people that I used to listen to.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because that really got me into this mindset that it's just like it's all good, you know.
Marc:But what do you think in terms of when you, like, I mean, the big hit, Someday, Someway, right?
Marc:That's the one, yeah.
Marc:I mean, that's like, that was huge.
Marc:I mean, you could probably walk up to most people on the street and do the first couple verses of that or the first couple lines and people would be like, oh, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Did you see that coming?
Marc:When you wrote that first record, coming out of the Beatles and coming out, because I never realized that there was a real difference between what is called, not popular music, but pop, and what is just basic rock and roll.
Marc:And I think the Beatles had something to do with creating that.
Guest:I guess, well, I'll tell you, though, I mean, when somebody calls my stuff power pop, that's it.
Guest:That person is my enemy, because I don't like having my stuff shoved into a little subcategory like that.
Guest:It pisses me off.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, but... You don't strike me as a power pop.
Guest:That doesn't seem quite right.
Guest:No, I don't like it either.
Guest:I get tagged with that sometimes, but that's based on just my first album, which is only one of many records that I've made, you know?
Marc:But Power Pop seemed to be some way for music critics to sort of validate this group of underappreciated artists.
Marc:I mean, I don't know where the hell Power Pop came up, where they came up with that, but it's always like Big Star, Cheap Trick, Thin Lizzy, kind of, almost, maybe not.
Guest:There's nothing wrong whatsoever.
Guest:Who are the Power Pop actors?
Marc:Did you ever think about that?
Guest:Well, I always think of...
Guest:Well, no, I don't want to... It's going to sound like I'm bad-mouthing somebody if I name them right now.
Guest:No, no, no.
Marc:I mean, they're all good bands.
Guest:You just... Like skinny tie bands, you know?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:That kind of thing, you know?
Marc:Like the post-punk early 80s, like, you know, fuck disco, I'm wearing buttons.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I really try now never to, like, bad-mouth any of my fellow rock artistes.
Guest:Did you used to?
Guest:I did.
Guest:You know, I just had really shitty people skills once upon a time, and...
Guest:This is a story.
Guest:I once said something critical about a band in what I thought was a private conversation with a rock writer.
Guest:Oh, never a private conversation with a writer.
Guest:Yeah, I learned that.
Guest:Then what happened was a little ways down the road, this writer wrote a bad review of a concert by this group, and he quoted me in the first paragraph something that I'd said about them.
Guest:I said that their music was like white supremacist rock.
Guest:Oh, boy.
Guest:And one of my best friends was in that band at that time.
Guest:He was in this rock band.
Marc:Oh, you're not going to tell me the name?
Guest:Styx.
Guest:And my friend was Glenn Burtnick, and he said that those guys, they were sitting in an airport lobby, and they were all reading the newspaper, and they all fucking came over to him and just got right on him like, what is this motherfucker?
Guest:Again, I did not say it on the record, and I just felt, ever since then, I just thought, I'm going to watch my mouth from now on.
Marc:Can I ask you, though, obviously it was a metaphor.
Marc:For something.
Marc:In your mind, though, because I remember Styx.
Marc:I was in high school and Styx had their reign when Grand Illusion came out.
Marc:I think I actually went and saw Styx on that tour because my buddy was into them.
Marc:Yeah, they were big.
Marc:Yeah, they were big.
Marc:But in your mind, do you understand that metaphor?
Marc:Because clearly they're not selling anything that seemed white supremacist.
Guest:Was it just the... No, it was a stupid way to put it, but all I was referring to was just...
Guest:that they play with that real kind of anglophile on the beat kind of thing.
Guest:That's all.
Guest:Sort of like marching music.
Guest:Yeah, that's all I meant.
Marc:And it just was the wrong way to... I think I was trying to be funny or something when I said it.
Marc:Yeah, it sounds like it.
Marc:And you got nailed.
Marc:How'd you get into that gig on the Walk Hard movie?
Marc:How'd that happen?
Guest:That was cool.
Guest:That was the kind of thing I really liked because it was very random.
Guest:What'd you do?
Guest:The main song, right?
Guest:I did the theme song, yeah.
Guest:It was two guys on the phone.
Guest:One guy that I'd spoken to once on the phone, a guy named Jake Goralnik, who's a manager.
Guest:He manages Nick Lowe, I think, still.
Guest:And then the other person on the phone with Jake was Tom Wolfe.
Guest:noted music supervisor tom wolf you know and i never met him but these guys are just talking right back and forth about who what songwriters to bring into the project yeah jake mentioned my name to tom and that's how the whole thing happened and uh pretty soon i got i heard from tom and uh
Guest:He just said, you know, we're just asking people to submit stuff.
Guest:He sent me a script, which I really liked.
Guest:I thought it was hilarious.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The other thing, you know, was that everybody who submitted anything, whether your song got in or not, you got paid something just for submitting.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So how could I lose with that?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I wrote one, and of course I thought, I nailed it.
Guest:And nobody told me that I didn't nail it, but then they said, well, why don't you take a crack at the theme song?
Guest:So I did that.
Guest:I wrote it really fast.
Guest:It was the first time in years that I wrote a song, and it only took about 15 minutes to write.
Guest:And I got it.
Guest:And later on, people told me that there were maybe like 60 candidates.
Guest:One guy told me, he said, I wrote four different songs called Walk Hard.
Guest:So somehow mine was the one that won out.
Marc:You got a sense of what they were looking for?
Marc:I did.
Guest:I felt that I did, yeah.
Guest:Again, I really liked the... I dug what I was seeing on paper, and I was inspired by it, you know?
Guest:And that's a good gig.
Guest:Really good.
Guest:It was great.
Marc:So, like, I gotta ask you, having had that... Like, on that first record, that one hit was so fucking huge...
Marc:that it's a nostalgia classic on some level.
Marc:I mean, did you know that you had to chase that thing?
Marc:Did you have a feeling that like, how am I gonna get back, how am I gonna get that?
Marc:How am I gonna hit another one of those?
Marc:Was that part of your thinking?
Guest:Let me see.
Guest:Well, first of all, I recorded Someday Someway myself under duress because a guy named Robert Gordon had recorded it about a year before I did and had just a huge local hit with it in New York.
Guest:The rockabilly guy.
Guest:Robert Gordon's version of Someday Someway was a big hit in New York.
Guest:How did he get it?
Guest:That was one of the things that helped me get a record deal.
Guest:How'd he get it?
Guest:You gave it to him?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I used to do this thing where I would go into New York City.
Guest:I lived in Pelham.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right by the train station.
Guest:I'd get on the train and go into town with a bag full of cassettes, and I would just kind of march around town to this ... I had this list of addresses that somebody had given me.
Guest:Clubs?
Guest:Music business places, like record companies, publishing companies.
Guest:I dropped one of my tapes off with the doorman at the apartment building where Richard Goderer lived.
Guest:And about two months or maybe a couple weeks later, I got a message on my answering machine from Robert Gordon, who was managed and produced by Richard at the time.
Guest:And the next thing I knew, I was in the record plant with them.
Guest:They were recording some of my songs.
Guest:So that was a big turning point.
Marc:Because that's a pretty interesting matchup.
Marc:I mean, that sort of goes in with your love of rockabilly, because he was definitely doing that thing.
Guest:He was, yeah.
Marc:And he was good at it.
Marc:He was the best at it.
Marc:At that time, he had a real effect to him, like doing the bottom line and doing all those covers.
Marc:I think I had a couple of... He did a record with Link Wray, I think, didn't he?
Marc:Did a couple of records with Link Wray.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But it's interesting, because the way you do it is different.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, he really straightened out the beat with just like straight eighth notes.
Guest:And mine has this kind of really nice shuffle kind of groove to it.
Guest:It's got bounce to it.
Guest:Yeah, and that was the thing that I was really particular about.
Guest:We did a lot of takes of Someday, Someway.
Guest:After I'd been ordered by the record company to record it, I'd refused to do it, and then my refusal was not accepted.
Guest:So we had to do it, and we spent a whole day trying to get the basic track.
Guest:And then the next day, we went in, and the assistant engineer had put a circle around number 23 out of 39 or whatever.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he put it up, and we were listening to it.
Guest:And I said, take out everything except the drums.
Guest:And sure enough, my brother on drums is just killing it.
Guest:It's perfect.
Guest:So we made the record out of that track, you know.
Marc:But when you were recording those demos on cassette, was it just you on guitar?
Guest:No, the demos were a lot.
Guest:They were very fleshed out.
Guest:One of the demos was a tune called You're My Favorite Waste of Time.
Guest:And I wound up putting that out on one of my records.
Guest:It was the B-side of Someday, Someway.
Guest:So it's a really good little rock track that I made on my four track.
Marc:But so your plan was to get a record deal, not to sort of show off your songwriting so someone like Robert Gordon could do it.
Guest:It was all about recording and record making.
Guest:I only started writing songs because I wanted to make records.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And even now, if I don't have a recording project, I really don't write anything.
Marc:So yours obviously became a lot bigger than Robert's.
Marc:It turned out that way, yeah.
Marc:Now, once that happened, though, what was the pressure on you?
Marc:I mean, from the record company and how did the rest of it unfold?
Marc:I've had musicians in here before, and there's always that weird relationship with the record company, but here you've got this fucking bonafide hit.
Marc:I mean, what was the pressure after that record?
Marc:Were they like, can you write that song a few different ways?
Yeah.
Guest:oh man it's a really sordid tale yeah i don't even you know i like that i could i could spend four hours talking about that well let's spend like 10 minutes right let me see i did my first album yeah it was uh very rapturously received in many quarters there was a hit single yeah um but only one and then uh
Guest:uh things kind of started to die down after about 10 months you know we were on the road the record stayed in the charts for a long time but then it sort of slipped down and uh i was talked into i think doing a second album right away i did a second album less than a year after the first did you have the songs
Guest:I had a few.
Guest:I had one in particular called Whenever You're On My Mind that I'd been sort of keeping in my back pocket.
Guest:And we made a, that was the lead off track on my second album.
Guest:My second album was called Field Day.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But what happened was, to me, the sound of my first album was a little bit tame.
Guest:It wasn't exactly what I had in mind.
Guest:There wasn't really any tension in the sound.
Guest:It was sweet, right?
Guest:A bit, yeah.
Guest:And that didn't quite work for me.
Guest:So the next time around, I went...
Guest:you know, in the other direction.
Guest:And I got Steve Lilywhite to produce because I really loved this kind of explosive sound that he would get.
Guest:That's what power pop was to me.
Guest:The idea of it was to take a kind of a melodic song and then blow it up, you know, like Pictures of Lily by The Who is a power pop record to me.
Guest:But anywho, so I did this record with Steve Lilywhite and I loved every minute of it.
Guest:We had a ball every day, just laughed and
Guest:amused ourselves in various ways and made this record.
Guest:It was really great.
Guest:That was Field Day?
Guest:Field Day.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then my A&R person in New York was this great gal named Karen Berg.
Guest:She was not just some cream puff in the music business.
Guest:She was really somebody, a very cool person.
Guest:She liked Field Day.
Guest:The people in Burbank didn't.
Guest:They really balked at it.
Guest:And I just kind of balked back at them.
Guest:I said, you know what?
Guest:i'm not gonna well anyway with warner brothers yeah they were like what is this they were what is this yeah where's the cute guy yeah and so uh i just said you know fuck you fuck you is what i said yeah i did say fuck you and uh that was not smart it was not smart in retrospect not smart no it was really bad after that and uh
Guest:Did you do another record with them?
Guest:I did three more.
Guest:I did five albums with them all together.
Guest:But, I mean, I wanted out after that.
Guest:After Field Day, I begged them to let me off the label, and they wouldn't.
Guest:There was a guy in the Washington, D.C.
Guest:area.
Guest:His name was Van Wyckoff, and he worked for the distributor, not the record company.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he took whenever you're on my mind to...
Guest:the music director of a top 40, the big top 40 station in Washington, and he got her to add the record.
Guest:They put it on and boom, straight into the top 10, whenever you're on my mind.
Guest:Just regionally or nationally?
Guest:Well, see, that was the thing.
Guest:The people in Burbank, instead of saying, great, let's go, we've got a hit record.
Guest:Let's push it.
Guest:They just sat on it.
Guest:They didn't do anything.
Marc:Because you told them to fuck themselves.
Guest:Partly because of that, and I also think that maybe the guy who was the head of radio promotion wanted to make some point about the fact that Van was not on his staff.
Guest:He wasn't somebody from the label.
Guest:So it was politics.
Guest:It was politics, yeah.
Guest:I got caught up badly in that.
Guest:Damn, man.
Guest:East Coast versus West Coast.
Guest:I didn't know anything about that shit.
Marc:Yeah, that's the hardest way to learn about politics.
Marc:It is.
Marc:It was bad.
Marc:When you realize you're being used to fight a fight that's got nothing to do with you, and your career's on the fucking block because of it.
Guest:Yeah, it was like that.
Guest:I mean, there were other factors, too.
Guest:I mean, mistakes that I made.
Guest:I'll own up to my own shortcomings and so forth.
Guest:But there were facts on the other side, too, about politics that did sort of work against me.
Marc:Politics and Machiavellian bullshit happens in every structure, every structure of business, man.
Marc:And then when you're in the middle of it, you're like, oh, my God.
Guest:I'm being used.
Guest:It was really hard to digest all that, you know?
Guest:I mean, of course, a lot of anger builds up, you know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, really just fierce anger, you know?
Guest:And, like, what do you do with that?
Guest:Some people turn it on themselves and do self-destructive things, and I'm not wired that way, you know?
Guest:So I don't know what I did.
Guest:I just kind of got through it somehow, partly because I have a wife, and we...
Guest:I don't think I could have made it through without her.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's always good you didn't dump it on her.
Guest:She just helped you out?
Guest:She did, yeah.
Guest:You know, she would come home from work and we would just talk about something else.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What'd she do?
Guest:She'd make me laugh.
Guest:You know, it was all good.
Guest:She's not in the music business?
Guest:No, my God, no.
Guest:She barely even knows.
Guest:You know, like...
Marc:She hates it.
Marc:It's your dirty secret.
Guest:She hates it, yeah.
Guest:After all the sort of bad fallout from my records, things started to kind of turn upwards around 86, 87, because I had that monster hit with You're My Favorite Waste of Time as a songwriter, and then I was in La Bamba, and La Bamba was huge.
Guest:So those things kind of combined.
Guest:Oh, there was two movies that I was in that came out.
Guest:That same year, it was Peggy Sue got married.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:La Bamba and the thing with You're My Favorite Waste of Time.
Guest:That was a really nice little convergence.
Guest:So you were in the band in Peggy Sue?
Guest:That's right.
Guest:We were in the opening scene.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:As the band at the high school class reunion.
Guest:And in La Bamba, you were in the band as well?
Guest:I was Buddy Holly in La Bamba.
Guest:You were?
Guest:I played Buddy Holly in La Bamba, yeah.
Guest:Have you seen it?
Guest:Not in a long time, clearly.
Guest:I love fucking Buddy Holly.
Guest:Oh, my God, yeah.
Guest:As I said before, I've heard this music all my life.
Guest:I heard it when it was all new.
Guest:I saw Buddy Holly on the Ed Sullivan Show when I was four years old, and I remember it.
Guest:What was it about that guy?
Marc:Because there was something so damn unique about how he rocked things up.
Marc:Have you ever sort of put your finger on it, what made him so special in terms of his sound?
Guest:Well, I can't really account for why he sounds the way he sounds.
Marc:No, but I mean, what was it?
Marc:Because it had a lot of things in it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And nothing really sounded like that.
Marc:And the guitar player was kind of a wizard.
Guest:What I hear is, I can't pronounce this because I don't speak French, but I know that phrase, joie de vivre.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Joy of life.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I just hear that in his stuff.
Guest:It's just very celebratory and life-affirming, and that really hit me hard when I was a little kid.
Guest:It's very joyful stuff.
Guest:What song?
Guest:Everything.
Guest:That'll be the day my cousin Marilyn had the 45, the Brunswick, maroon and silver Brunswick label with the big star on top, really beautiful-looking record label.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:No, just anything he did back then I liked.
Guest:Words of Love.
Guest:The guitar solo in Not Fade Away where he just really attacks that Stratocaster.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So badass.
Guest:Is that why you play Strat?
Guest:It's partly why, yeah.
Guest:I play a Strat.
Guest:For one thing, I ended up with one sort of by accident.
Guest:With the guy from Vietnam?
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My cousin Chuck, he came home from the service.
Guest:He had started a family over there, so he brought his wife and child back home and the Stratocaster, and then he started to kind of need cash flow, so he had to sell the Stratocaster.
Guest:I actually put ads around my high school hallway to try to help him sell it.
Guest:Nobody bought it.
Guest:And then I had a guitar that was stolen at this party.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I turned my back for two seconds and boom, it was gone.
Guest:And my dad...
Guest:Said, all right, I'll lend you money to buy a new guitar, but you have to buy your cousin's guitar.
Guest:He wanted to help my cousin, and he wanted to help me.
Guest:So I got the Stratocaster.
Guest:I never complained about it.
Guest:I loved it, but it did take me about three or four years to be able to get a sound with it, honestly.
Guest:Do you do any Buddy Holly covers when you tour?
Guest:I do.
Guest:I do the song that I did in La Bamba.
Guest:I play Crying, Waiting, Hoping.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I always play it these days.
Guest:Do you want to play it?
Marc:If you want me to play that one, I will, yeah, sure.
Marc:Could you play, well, you know, you can do two if you like my guitar enough.
Guest:Sure.
Marc:Let me mic that thing up a little bit.
Guest:Take a crack at it.
Guest:Crying, waiting, hoping you'll come back I just can't seem to get you off my mind Crying, waiting, hoping you'll come back You're the one I love and I think about you all the time
Guest:Crying, doo-doo-doo My tears keep falling all night long Waiting, doo-doo-doo It seems so useless, I know it's wrong To keep a crying, waiting, hoping You'll come back, maybe someday soon Things will change and you'll be mine
Guest:guitar solo
Guest:My tears keep falling all night long I'm waiting It seems so useless I know it's wrong to keep on crying Waiting Hoping
Guest:You'll come back, baby, someday soon Things will change and you'll be mine Crying, waiting, hoping
Marc:That sounded great.
Marc:Why, thank you.
Marc:On not even your own guitar.
Marc:Beautiful.
Marc:I'm a professional.
Marc:You want to do the other one?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I do have to plug this, if you don't mind.
Guest:This is my new recording project, which is a new vinyl EP every four or five months.
Guest:It's kind of a subscription thing you can find out about on my website.
Marc:What is that?
Marc:You're not doing a podcast, per se.
Marc:You sign up for it, and you get a few episodes?
Marc:How does that work?
Marc:No, no.
Marc:It's records.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And you can get just one, or you can get all three that are in the series, but they're vinyl records.
Guest:Oh, why didn't they send it to me?
Guest:You buy a vinyl record.
Guest:God damn it.
Guest:You know why they didn't send you one?
Guest:Because they ran out my management office.
Guest:I'm all about the vinyl right now, bro.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Well, people are clamoring for this thing, and we've ordered more.
Guest:I'm going to do this tune that's the A side of the second one.
Guest:Okay, man.
Guest:And it's called Stranger and Stranger.
Guest:Sad to say, I'm confronted by this fact.
Guest:She's gone away now and never will be back.
Guest:It's so true that time can be a cruel rearranger.
Guest:And the weather outside is getting stranger and stranger It seems like everything's shifting in many crazy ways I thought that I'd have her beside me all my days Something unforeseen
Guest:Came along and it changed her Lately my dreams that night Been stranger and stranger And I wonder now which side of the mirror
Guest:Am I standing on?
Guest:My sense of assurance is gone, almost gone And it's harder every day to find a way To see past the doubt and the danger It's getting stranger and stranger
Guest:Said I didn't see it coming.
Guest:I never saw a sign.
Guest:Now I can't even see her face in my mind.
Guest:Dark clouds moving in.
Guest:They're already here in my heart.
Guest:I know that one of these days I've got to make a new start.
Guest:How many teardrops are enough?
Guest:How many more to go?
Guest:I swear in the end I'll be strong even though it's getting harder every day to find a way to see past the doubt and the danger.
Guest:It's getting stranger and stranger Stranger and stranger It's getting stranger and stranger
Marc:That's great, man.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Great songwriter, buddy.
Marc:You know that.
Marc:Well, good, man.
Marc:I really appreciate you coming over there.
Marc:It was great to talk to you.
Marc:Thanks, Mark.
Marc:I really enjoyed it, too.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Say hi to Dave Alvin for me.
Marc:I will.
Marc:He still sounds great.
Marc:He's still doing what he does, writing the songs, finding meaning in his creativity.
Marc:Good guy.
Marc:Out there doing it.
Marc:Fucking troubadour, man.
Marc:So Thomas Dolby, when I got this opportunity, I was like, well, I kind of... I mean, I remember his songs, but it turns out Dolby went on from...
Marc:This is a pretty fascinating interview because he was sort of a mad scientist or an inventor of technology because he needed to find something that would give him the sound he wanted that didn't exist.
Marc:It was a pretty fascinating talk.
Marc:And he's also an interesting guy because he's, I think, doing in his mind.
Marc:And when you go look at what he's working on, his wife's work now.
Marc:And he just, well, look, I'm not going to.
Marc:I'm not going to tip too much.
Marc:Enjoy this.
Marc:This is Thomas Dolby and me, myself, in my garage.
Marc:So, Thomas Dolby, I know that you asked when you got here, like, where am I?
Marc:But this is really the future of media.
Marc:We're in it right now.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:I mean, is it unusual that you get requests where you go to someone's home?
Guest:No, it's becoming more and more frequent.
Guest:And why not?
Guest:Why not keep the cost down and keep it personal?
Guest:I approve of that rather than the corporate radio thing of the 80s and 90s.
Guest:It's nice that it's come back to more of this kind of a level, I think.
Marc:Yeah, Pirate Radio.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:Yeah, we're our own stations.
Marc:But why are you in town exactly?
Guest:Yeah, well, so I made a film.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it won a couple of awards at the DIY Film Fest.
Marc:See, there we go.
Marc:Now we're in it.
Marc:DIY Media.
Marc:What is the film?
Marc:How did it come about?
Guest:It came about because there is a lighthouse that I can see from my house on the east coast of England.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:which is being discontinued because ships don't really need lighthouses anymore.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it's been there since 1792.
Guest:And I've fallen asleep with its flash on my bedroom wall ever since I was a little boy.
Guest:Oh, really?
Marc:So you have your family's house.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, no, actually, I just live in the same area that my mom's family came from.
Guest:So I've just always been within sight of the lighthouse.
Guest:And, you know, the coast is eroding and our village is probably going to go under one of these days.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And it's just a very emotional thing to
Guest:lose this landmark out of my life but interestingly the island that it's on was a former military testing zone as it turns out and all sorts of experimental weapons uh-huh were first tested there the first parachute jump was done there for the first world war yes first world war yeah all through the 20th century it uses a testing zone and you know detonators for nuclear warheads and a radio wave that could stop an aircraft engine at a distance of five kilometers and
Guest:Wow.
Guest:And plus, it was wrapped up in the biggest UFO sighting in the UK, which was a place called Rendlesham, which is sort of known as the British Roswell.
Marc:So everything revolving around the area of this White House is profoundly...
Marc:It's mythologized.
Guest:It is mythologized.
Guest:And it's also, it's very much burned into my memory because of my childhood.
Guest:And because of the way that your childhood memories become sort of jumbled, you know, over time.
Guest:And revised.
Guest:And revised.
Guest:And in fact, you know, the guys, these guys that saw the UFO, you know, their story has varied over the years.
Guest:And cynically, you could say, well, that's because they're very popular on the lecture circuit, you know.
Guest:Why not add that?
Guest:I'm pretty sure that happened.
Guest:But the flip side is that people do actually, you know, memories change.
Guest:Like anybody that's been in a legal trial will tell you the eyewitness testimony is the least reliable.
Guest:Sure, sure.
Guest:A guy will say, well, a red car came out of the driveway and turned right.
Guest:And then on camera, it was a green car and it turned left.
Marc:So, I mean, so there are people that believe that this UFO sighting is real, obviously.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:Obviously, the UFO believers, you know, love to believe it.
Guest:But I mean, you know, as an example, one of the guys that saw it said under hypnosis, he like the hypnotist asked him, you know, so it's from another planet.
Guest:And he said, no, they're from the future.
Guest:They're us.
Guest:And everybody, this reverberated around the blogosphere, you know, when this came out.
Guest:And then somebody said, wait a minute, that was a line from a TV movie that was on three months ago.
Guest:And everybody went, you know, the tractors all went, ah, the guy's just like, look.
Marc:It could have been something they were experimenting with.
Marc:I'm sure that theory has been thrown out there.
Guest:Absolutely.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:absolutely so what now the film it's called lighthouse the invisible lighthouse oh so and that was is it gone or did they is it gone now or did they tear it down or no they're like no it's still there i mean it's still there it's not clear when they're actually going to close it down so but it's imminent so there's still a chance to save it so what was the poetic uh sort of uh you know how what how is that title work in your head the invisible lighthouse
Guest:Well, because the lighthouse is very much burned onto my retina.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And yet I also have a memory of watching a building burn that my great great grandfather built.
Guest:It was this massive maltings, you know, they made malt for whiskey.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was turned into a concert hall.
Guest:by benjamin britain the famous english composer and it was the the center for the old bro festival and it burns to the ground and i remember watching it burn at night across the marshes and years later my mom told me we were nowhere near we were hundreds of miles away when it burned and yet i have this i'm re if i tell you the story i'm replaying a memory that is you know on my memory there's your ufo yeah yeah so the invisible lighthouse is just you know the so it's just a bit of poetry in a way
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And this is not like a David Attenborough documentary.
Guest:The narration is like a tone poem.
Guest:So it's wall-to-wall music.
Guest:Some of it is score.
Guest:Some of it is songs.
Guest:And when I perform it live, I project it on a screen, and I perform the score and narrate the thing live on stage.
Guest:So that's the show.
Guest:That's the show, and I'm hoping to tour with it later in the year.
Marc:That's a great idea.
Marc:So how did you shoot this thing, and is there...
Marc:Is it really just images or is there any actual, there's no interviews or anything?
Guest:Well, no, I mean, I'm on camera sometimes.
Guest:I did it all myself.
Guest:Sometimes I just put the camera on a tripod.
Guest:What kind of camera were you?
Guest:I had a couple of GoPros and I have a consumer Panasonic Handycam, nothing particularly special.
Guest:And I taught myself to do it and to edit in Final Cut to pull it off.
Guest:And I've always been into film.
Guest:And I used to write and direct my own videos and things, but I did that with a film crew.
Guest:And the amazing thing is now you don't need that.
Guest:And if I'd had a film crew.
Guest:And you're not wearing the same type of outfits.
No.
Guest:If I had a film crew, I wouldn't have been able to get the permits to go on this island.
Guest:You know, there would have been people problems, catering problems, transportation.
Guest:You would have needed a budget, a backer.
Guest:Union guys.
Guest:Union guys.
Guest:Then somebody would have, you know, wanted to change the script.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:It's becoming possible now because of the technology, like everything else, you know, to do it DIY.
Guest:And so stories will get told that you never would have heard otherwise, you know, because the technology is getting cheap.
Marc:It's a fascinating thing.
Marc:And I think everybody's sort of working on that premise.
Marc:But still, the odd thing is, is that, you know, what it takes for something to break through...
Marc:And I think that along with this idea that everything is so DIY is the dream that I'm going to shoot this right now and I'm going to be famous.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Which is not always the case unless there are cats involved.
Guest:No, but I'll tell you what.
Guest:When you and I were teenagers and we thought that, well, I've got talent.
Guest:All that needs to happen is the world needs to hear me and I'll be a superstar.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Unfortunately, before we ever got to know the answer to that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:We had to deal with the industry, the gatekeepers.
Guest:So first you had you had to impress some other, you know, a hole.
Guest:And and only then, you know, once you got through this whole obstacle course, did the public get to choose for itself?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If you got through, there was fewer stuff for them to pick between.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:So your odds were better.
Guest:It was controlled environment.
Marc:But most people never got that far.
Marc:No, that's right.
Marc:And it was all based on who can hold the eyes longest or the ears longest to get the sales up.
Marc:And now that's not even part of the equation.
Guest:So, I mean, I think if you're 17 and a genius, then today's a good time to be it because there is actually a chance that you could wake up in the morning and be a superstar.
Marc:It's always a good time to be a genius if you can handle it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's really on you.
Marc:Are you a genius?
Marc:Oh, that's not for me to say.
Guest:You're a genius, Mark.
Marc:Somebody must have said it.
Marc:I think most people, myself included, I was in high school, graduating high school in 1981.
Marc:I was there for the entire evolution of New Wave.
Marc:I saw it happen.
Marc:I saw it appear on my high school campus.
Marc:All of a sudden there were thin ties and people were wearing buttons.
Marc:And it was on the tail end of disco.
Marc:And I just remember it happening.
Marc:And my memory is of that song, your song, Blinded Me With Science.
Marc:And your video.
Marc:But it's interesting, though, even in my recollection of watching that, and I know you've done several albums since, and you seem to play somebody who had sort of a wizard-like identity, that you seem to be on top of something that nobody else is really taking note of, that you had some other plan.
Marc:Where did you come from and what struggles did you have in getting to the point of music?
Marc:I mean, what was your background like?
Marc:What did your old man do?
Marc:Academic.
Guest:Yeah, my whole family.
Guest:He's a professor of classical archaeology at Oxford University.
Marc:So you grew up around pieces of things.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Bits of old pots.
Marc:Yeah, with numbers on them.
Marc:And was that fascinating or boring to you at some point?
Guest:Totally boring.
Yeah.
Guest:unbelievably boring now of course you know yeah i wish i'd paid more attention now it's kind of fascinating and your mom was an academic as well she's a math teacher oh my god so i mean was it a yeah so it must have been a fairly encouraging environment anyways it was encouraging i mean i was the sixth of six kids six kids catholic so no actually no just just they like kids you know and um you know but by the time you get to your six kids you forget about
Guest:really you know you just let them let them at it yeah yeah and uh there's plenty of clothes around yeah i was given a free uh a free hand there really no i mean that they but having said that you know my family was one where if we're watching a movie and someone broke into song you'd sort of go tea darling and everybody would make excuses you know it's a bit embarrassing oh really yeah
Guest:And in fact, I encountered that, you know, doing this movie.
Guest:It's like for the first time, because I'll be playing and talking, doing the narrative.
Guest:And suddenly I have to start singing.
Guest:And I had this kind of hump about it.
Guest:And my wife asked me why.
Guest:And I had to think it through.
Guest:And then I thought back to that moment in, you know, probably Seven Brides for Seven Brothers or something where, you know, where I felt this deep embarrassment about breaking into songs.
Marc:Well, that's interesting.
Marc:I mean, because you're not I mean, I don't I mean, how how often have you sort of sung with your own voice sort of unadultured or not within a composition of music that was for, you know, either for dance or heavily altered?
Marc:I mean, is that something you did much of?
Guest:No, not really.
Guest:Not really.
Guest:I mean, I like doing it now because it's kind of challenging, actually, you know, in a small room with a handful of people and a piano, you know, to really pull it off.
Guest:Because I'm not a naturally gifted pianist slash singer.
Guest:I tend to work the studio and I can work all those instruments and I can tweak things and make something great.
Guest:But I'm not somebody that just walks into the spotlight, you know, and be a song and dance man.
Guest:Well, the vulnerability of it is intense.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's something that that's something that, you know, when you get to a certain age and you're more willing to let your guard down.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the audience is more open to that.
Guest:And they recognize that honesty and they appreciate that versus the, you know, the the superficial stuff that pop.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I mean, but yeah, I mean, I would think that at this point, you know, if you were just playing your hits, it would be and I'm sure you've had that experience where you're on stage doing that and you're like, what am I doing?
Guest:Well, there's always that moment when you see an artist from a decade, you know.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:Where they sort of say, well, I've got a new album out.
Guest:And everybody goes to the bar.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:They start texting.
Guest:Play the hits, man.
Marc:I want to do a song from the new record.
Guest:Man.
Guest:Oh, God.
Guest:I went to see Rufus Wainwright the other day.
Guest:Oh, he's a genius.
Guest:And he did this thing where, you know, he did like this suite of songs and he asked the audience not to applaud in between songs, you know, just to keep quiet.
Guest:And it was all very beautiful and everything.
Guest:And it was in England.
Guest:About halfway through it, this voice behind me goes...
Guest:Play your fucking hits, Rufus.
Guest:I mean, is anybody else enjoying this?
Guest:No, I'm not.
Marc:Well, I'm sure Rufus would be flattered to think that someone thinks he has hits.
Marc:I mean, that's obviously a fan who is familiar enough.
Marc:It's not like he's a Billboard Top 100 artist.
Marc:That's true.
Marc:So they were probably just sort of like, I don't know any of these.
Marc:I've got all his records.
Guest:Fuck this.
Guest:Oh, so you're saying this is an ironic heckle, was it?
Marc:Kind of.
Marc:I don't know if you were to take a poll of Rufus Wainwright hit songs and just say, can you name any people?
Marc:Be like, no, but people who know him, love him.
Marc:He's one of those guys.
Marc:Well, I mean, that's a funny thing.
Marc:So, I mean, at what point did you, the last of six kids, I've always wondered this about that.
Marc:What does it feel like?
Marc:I mean, I have to assume that that means you have siblings that are, what, 20 years older than you?
Guest:16, 16 years old.
Guest:So you sort of had to watch everybody leave, right?
Guest:Yes, I did.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, actually, you know, a lot of us went to boarding school.
Guest:So you were sort of leaving from, I went to boarding school age seven.
Guest:What is that like?
Marc:terrifying at the beginning well you got to wear an outfit and everything yeah but then you get into it you know it's because like i'm not you know that versed in in the uh the sort of british way of doing things and it always seems like you know when you say that there was a a stifling of uh a vulnerability in the house around singing i'm like well that makes sense that seems british to me right uh is is that a prop is that a real characterization of british culture that's sort of like polite and slightly repressed is that something you experience
Guest:You know, I think it's a sort of middle class British culture, you know, probably less working class.
Guest:But it's, no, I mean, it's certainly there.
Guest:But at the same time, we have an ability to sort of let our hair down and, you know, laugh at ourselves, you know, hence Monty Python.
Marc:Sure, yeah.
Marc:You get some great comic.
Marc:So you, okay, so you went to boarding school.
Marc:At what point did you start to sort of play with technology and with the idea of being a musician for it?
Guest:Well, with technology, you know, quite early on, because I was always a tinkerer, you know, I was the first kid in school to get a tape machine, you know, like a reel-to-reel portable.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:It's a big heavy thing that went over your shoulder and a big set of headphones.
Guest:What year was that?
Guest:Like how old were you?
Guest:I mean, that would have been early 70s, 71, 72 or something, you know, I was like a teenager.
Guest:And what were you doing with that?
Guest:I was recording stuff off the radio and chopping it up and making my own little mixtapes.
Marc:Oh, so songs.
Marc:So you're like early DJing.
Marc:Yeah, pretty much.
Marc:And did you do anything else with it?
Marc:Was there some sort of breakthrough with the reel-to-reel that thought, maybe there's a whole world opening up here?
Guest:Not really.
Guest:No, I mean, I'd love to be able to make the claim that I was sort of like slowing tapes down before, you know, Brian Eno.
Guest:But the reality was there was nothing, nothing very subversive that I did with it.
Guest:And when did you go to college?
Guest:No, I left school at 16 and went to work in a fruit and veg shop.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:How'd the old man feel about that?
Guest:Oh, they were fine with it.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, I think they felt that if I made my mistakes and I could always go back to academia later, but they were fine with it.
Guest:Did they think you were going to be an academic?
Marc:Was that their hope?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:They never hoped that for me.
Marc:Did any of the siblings turn out to be academics?
Marc:Yeah, most of them.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's bizarre.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I guess there's a sort of comfort in it, you know, if you get tenured or you... Well, you know, they'd be out at a dinner party and they'd say, well, Lucy's the secretary of the... Stephen's the professor of... And young Tom's a pop star.
Guest:Yeah, you're the pop star.
Guest:Yeah, my mum used to go into, like, you know, with the way they did the charts in the UK, they took a census of little record shops, you know, so your little local record store might be that if it sold five copies of a single, it would go top 30.
Guest:Oh, right.
Guest:My mum would go in and buy a stack of my records every time.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah, come on, I had a record out, you know, hello, Mrs. Robertson, here they are.
Marc:Did she tell you that?
Guest:She tried to rig the charts.
Marc:Did she tell you that when she was doing it or is that something that came out later?
Guest:It came out later.
Guest:Oh, that's a sweet moment.
Marc:Did it ever cause any movement on the charts?
No.
Marc:Well, there's a lot going on, you know, I think at that time.
Marc:So you worked at a fruit and veg shop.
Marc:You mean a fruit stand or a vegetable?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you were just kind of trying to figure it out?
Guest:No, I mean, during the day I was working the fruit and veg shop and at night I was playing keyboards, you know, my little bedsitter.
Guest:And I mean, this is at the time of punk, you know, this is sort of 76, 77.
Guest:What was going on there?
Guest:Who'd you see?
Guest:I saw the Sex Pistols, the Clash.
Guest:I mean, everybody was considered a punk back then.
Guest:Elvis Costello, the police, the jam, you know, anybody that didn't have long hair and flared trousers and was a bit angry was considered a punk.
Guest:It was only a bit later that it became defined as narrowly, you know, as it was.
Guest:And that was really by the King's Road thing, Malcolm McLaren.
Guest:With the fashion.
Guest:With the fashion.
Guest:And the fashion sort of took hold.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:um but it was early on it was basically anything that wasn't sort of you know progressive fusion music songs that went on for 23 minutes uh-huh and and who'd you see that like you can remember as being like holy shit that was amazing um Elvis Costello early on you know yeah time of sort of watching the detectives and Chelsea and stuff like that that was sort of after the pub rock business yeah it was pretty much that was pub rock yeah you know I mean that was the time Brinsley Schwartz right and Parker and people like right Nick Lowe
Guest:um and uh let's see later you know joy division uh but there was there was also so there was that going on and there was also the beginnings of an electronic music scene with people like throbbing gristle cabaret voltaire soft cell and human league you know started off being i remember all them quite arty you know before they got really poppy you know that it's quite arty and you know is sort of hanging in the air wasn't he almost i mean it was you know that really got me started you know because i mean
Guest:When I was a little bit before that, there were basically two pop TV shows in England.
Guest:It was Top of the Pops, which was just the charts, which dictated the charts.
Guest:And there was the Old Grey Whistle Test, which was this late night stoner thing.
Guest:This guy called Whistling, Whistling Bobber.
Guest:This is the latest from Roxy Music.
Guest:yeah so roxy music came on and i'm sitting there you know having just skinned up and you know i'm watching them and in the back is this guy in stack heel boots wearing leopard skin with his arms crossed yeah panel of a moon yeah looking completely bored yeah and every now and then he'd lean forward and just twiddle a knob you know and go back to being bored again and i thought wow this is the life that's the gig like yeah yeah yeah
Marc:rich and famous just twiddle a knob every now and then could you hear what he was doing could you identify it at that time so you were just impressed with like yeah there's that big old moog yeah and then he seems to be important and he's not doing much i just thought that's the life for me you know isn't that interesting and he he wasn't with them that long though was he i don't think he was and he like and then he did the records um
Marc:Taking Tiger Mountain.
Guest:That was great.
Marc:And Another Green World and Before and After Silence.
Marc:And then the ambient music happened.
Marc:And then it was sort of like, what is this?
Marc:I mean, I had all that shit.
Marc:I have it again.
Marc:I'm buying records again.
Guest:I mean, the guy's like the Leonardo da Vinci of his age, really.
Guest:I mean, who invented the helicopter and painted the Mona Lisa.
Marc:It's pretty fascinating, the impact he's had on modern music as a producer as well.
Guest:I mean, it's mind-blowing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It is extraordinary that, you know, sort of stadium rock bands would choose to go that route because he's quite destructive.
Guest:You know, he'll erase huge chunks of tape and make you start again and things.
Marc:Well, I think he created something of a tone.
Marc:And, you know, there's something like if you listen to The Joshua Tree, which, you know, changed U2's whole thing.
Marc:I mean, a lot of those chord progressions, they're his.
Marc:There's no way they're not his.
Marc:Right.
Marc:If you listen to him.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:And the time scale of it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Not any real hurry to do things.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:I remember the first time I ever heard with or without you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I didn't know who it was at first.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it finally made sense.
Guest:This was Eno plus.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So in and also like I had read, I believe I'm not making it up.
Marc:It might be one of those memories, but I had read that that one of the things that impressed Eno was the Velvet Underground.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Which was, you know, and when I figured out why that was, it made sense to me because if you listen to certainly their live stuff, there's, I think, an unconscious layering of sound that goes on of, you know, rhythms and textures that I think it was just by coincidence because of the way they were structured and that Mo Tucker was just that.
Marc:And then you had Lou's rhythm playing.
Marc:But I thought that was interesting because it gave me sort of a window into how he saw music.
Marc:I mean, did you have a, was your first synthesizer a monster?
Guest:it was actually it was it was a kit synthesizer from the back of popular mechanics magazine and it didn't have a keyboard so it was like an experiment it's like if you kids want to learn something about sound pretty much so you no keyboard just a lot of plugging in well you could you could get a keyboard that you could hook up with cables right you know and play one note at a time and i had that and a two-track tape recorder called a tiac which you you could ping pong
Guest:but so you record one track and then you bounce it over to the second and add while adding something new right so you could put a layer on there yeah so you would you would program you know a kick drum stand right you sit there going right you know you rewind the tape and you program you know you do that in the gaps and then you have soft sell
Guest:so that was the first experiment no mixer no because you you probably could have done a little more if you had a little four track well you had to make it every decision as you went along and i did eventually get a four track uh four track uh tape thing but yeah i mean it's very early days there were no drum machines really um in fact my first drum machine really was not a drum machine at all it was it was a lighting console that was designed to turn tangerine dreams light show on and off and made by a german and company called ppg how'd you get hold of that thing
Guest:Well, I went to a demo that they had in London of this new keyboard that they have, and they had this thing at the back that looked like a refrigerator.
Guest:I said, what's that?
Guest:And I said, oh, that's for Tangerine Dream's light show.
Guest:Was it a prototype?
Guest:No, no, it had actually belonged to Tangerine Dream, but I think they'd been given it back.
Guest:But I had a set of Simmons drums, which were those hexagonal electronic drums.
Guest:And I figured out that with a bit of soldering, I could get the lighting console to play my Simmons drums, you know, because I wasn't that good a drummer, you know.
Guest:And so actually the drums on She Blinded Me With Science are just that.
Guest:They're being played by a disco lighting console.
Marc:They're being played by Tangerine Dreams lighting console.
Marc:That's bizarre.
Marc:It's very interesting that when people are geared this way to sort of be that resourceful and also on the cusp of new sounds entirely that we take so much for granted now.
Marc:I mean, now I could do it on my phone.
Guest:Well, you have to be resourceful.
Guest:And I'm slightly nostalgic for those days when I work now, because it's always tempting to just, you know, if you don't have an idea, just download a new soft synth for $1.99 and try number 47 and go with it, you know.
Guest:So it takes away the need to be inventive like you used to have.
Guest:But conversely, that's why I'm enjoying filmmaking right now.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:Because it's a parallel thing that's going on now with video.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You have to, you know, the sort of striving to be authentic becomes challenged by the availability of a technology.
Right.
Guest:Well, yeah.
Guest:I mean, you know, when I started out doing music, it was really the first period that having grown up with music that was done in a studio with a big budget that could only be really done by, you know, somebody with record company backing in a professional recording studio.
Guest:Now suddenly there were devices that I could use in my back room.
Guest:So I had the option of trying to emulate what I was hearing coming out of studios or do something completely new.
Guest:There were no rules, you know, and it wasn't costing.
Guest:You weren't watching the clock.
Guest:So a similar thing is happening now with filmmaking.
Guest:You know, it's like there's no way if I if I needed a crew set of permits funding, you know, to go make my film, The Invisible Lighthouse, then it never got done, you know.
Guest:Sure.
Marc:Well, that's so that's interesting to me, because now did you take you took piano lessons as a kid?
Marc:I mean, you were OK on the piano.
Marc:How'd that work out?
Guest:Barely, barely.
Guest:I sang in a choir and I picked up a little bit of sight reading and harmony from that.
Guest:But I couldn't really, I didn't have the discipline, you know, to practice an instrument, really.
Marc:So what compels you to do it?
Marc:I mean, outside of seeing Brian Eno, I mean, why did you decide I'm going to be a musician without any real chops of any kind?
Guest:Well, because I could hear stuff, you know, I can hear chords, I can hear melodies, I can, you know, if you play me something from across the room, you know, I can sit down at the piano and I can play it back to you.
Guest:I just, I have an understanding of how music works.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That's just where my strong,
Marc:So when you were developing these, you know, when you were sort of pulling these technologies together to serve these purposes, so electronic drums were around, but then you took that light changer and you were able to get a synchronized and sort of self-playing situation.
Marc:who else was doing that at that time?
Marc:I mean, you know, if you came up with Soft Cell and Cabaret Voltaire and these other, was this a movement?
Marc:I mean, were there other people?
Marc:Were you talking to people and saying like, well, this is what I did.
Marc:You should try this.
Marc:I mean, that early electronic sound before it was easy, was there sort of a community?
Guest:Yeah, there was a community.
Guest:I mean, it was a bit spread out.
Guest:It was a bit in London, a little bit sort of Sheffield and up north, you know, with Human League and people like that.
Guest:And then you had Movers and Shakers.
Guest:You know, Daniel Miller was very active.
Guest:And, you know, you'd go to product demos for the new ARP 2600 and you'd see the same faces there.
Guest:But usually we were just sort of, you know, like perving them.
Guest:We couldn't actually afford them.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:But there was, I mean, to be affordable, you had to either be like a band with a contract or be a recording studio or be like an experimental music department of...
Marc:of some university or other sure and um i mean i actually you know there were some people used to hang out the mac of the university music departments like going through the skips for circuit boards and stuff like that so just to see what they could pick up yeah and but obviously there were synthesizers around because there was some pretty awful synthesizer music around but it was very specific i mean because you're not really talking about it seems to be that the synthesizers that kid you know kind of play a violin sound in
Marc:and just directly related to the keyboard were around, but percussion synthesizers were not.
Marc:Is that what the deal was?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, so you'd had people like Walter Carlos and Isaiah Tamita and so on who were doing sort of classical music using synths switched on bar and things.
Guest:And then you had these sort of Krautrock bands, you know, Cannes and Henry Cowan, people like that, Tangerine Dream, you know, that was starting to use sequences.
Guest:Um, but I think it was really, uh, there was definitely a movement that happened sort of, you know, parallel to the disco movement of people doing stuff with a bit of a groove, you know, but, um, and Giorgio Moroder was in there, you know, and Donna Summer did, um, sure.
Guest:I feel love, you know, it's quite a big, yeah, that was a similar sort of landmark moment with or without you actually, I think, you know, suddenly the, the, the timeframe changed, you know, right, right, right, right.
Marc:Um, cause it just had that, that weird vibrating.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Throughout all the song.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:I love that song, actually.
Guest:And then also when Bowie went to Berlin with Eno and did Low.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Bowie obviously being a megastar already, anything he did that was poppy was going to go in the charts.
Guest:But when things like Sound and Vision went in the charts, they clearly had a different flavor to them.
Guest:Then that was really interesting.
Guest:And side two of Low was ambient music.
Guest:Nobody had ever heard that.
Guest:It's kind of rough to get through.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, no, I don't think so.
Guest:I think it's wonderful.
Guest:It's huge.
Marc:Absolutely huge for me.
Marc:I don't know if I've ever sat down and done it because I get hung up with sound and vision in the first side.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And I don't know in my recent life because I started buying vinyl again.
Marc:And I bought myself some tubes, tube amp.
Marc:So I'm doing that thing.
Marc:I should sit down with it.
Marc:It was a life changer for you?
Guest:Oh, absolutely.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, I loved it.
Guest:I loved it.
Guest:I had no trouble.
Guest:I mean, I just love the fact that it was light and shade, you know, it was like very poppy stuff with synths and then this very dreamy stuff done with synths.
Marc:Well, I guess that was partial to, it was partly because, you know, and Bowie were sort of like, well, we don't want to get pigeonholed with this dance music.
Marc:I mean, they had to do something that was going to, you know, to counter the pop music to make it arty.
Marc:In a way, I'm just speculating.
Guest:I've never heard either of them say why they did that.
Guest:Yeah, they don't do that.
Guest:Musicians aren't, you know, like if there's magic to it, let the magic be.
Guest:That's probably a sensible thing.
Guest:I'm probably guilty of exploding too many myths or something.
Marc:Well, no, that's all right, though.
Marc:I mean, because at this point, it's amazing to talk to somebody who is at this juncture of technology and what became sort of commonplace, like you were.
Marc:I mean, as funny as a lot of the new wave bands were, in retrospect, I'm not sure that that era aged as well as other eras.
Marc:Just fashion-wise, I think, was the big problem.
Guest:Yeah, well, fashion was definitely a problem.
Guest:We can sort of laugh at that now.
Guest:But what was good about it was diversity.
Guest:You never knew what was going to come next.
Guest:And it was at a time when corporate rock really rules.
Guest:I mean, it really was an industry.
Guest:for the for the first time you know and and you had um you know uh bankers subscribing to to rolling stone and and you had you know grateful dead stickers in the back of cadillacs sure and it had really reached a sort of corporate level right and and the sort of guitar and drum thing with the look and the sound of aor rock yeah really really was very very entrenched sure it's hard to
Guest:Very hard to beat, man.
Guest:Very hard to beat.
Marc:I mean, I was in high school.
Marc:Like, I remember that era before you did that.
Marc:I mean, I think I graduated high school, but it was just hair bands, Styx, Foreigner, Van Halen.
Marc:I mean, it was very insanely produced big rock music.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:and you guys were sort of breaking it open well you never knew what was going to happen yeah and i think a lot of that actually was the arrival of mtv sure where you know a great video would get on mtv if it had any kind of a beat you know i mean if it was a great video yeah and radio suddenly was taking notice and and hip people were staying in to watch mtv instead of going out to clubs or concerts you know right and talking about it and stuff and so that that reflected back to radio and so
Guest:I mean, when my stuff first came out, it got no radio play here at all.
Guest:But MTV picked up the video and then suddenly I started to get a radio play.
Marc:And people were like, well, who's this guy?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, it solidified a lot of things.
Marc:I mean, video was a huge thing because there was a sort of artistic element to it.
Marc:And there were people that actually established video as being like, you know, this is a whole other level of engaging with the musician.
Marc:But ultimately, it was a marketing tool.
Marc:And at that time,
Marc:know if you could do something catchy in your video it could really push the song into the unconscious of everybody sure and and and videos themselves i mean when you look back at some of those videos and the quality of the video it's it's almost like it's it's impossible it's all it's hard to not you know uh look at it it's just kitschy and ridiculous because it was all the technology could afford sure and and it's weird do you look back at your videos and go oh my god
Marc:No, no, I think they're great.
Guest:I think there was a sort of charm, though, to that period, because it was like, you know, the kids let loose with a camera.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, and so it was unlike stuff that we'd seen on TV or in the movies, which had been through the corporate filter.
Guest:you know so it was a little bit punk that the fact you know just the idea of letting a young band sort of come up with ideas yeah for their own video or or you know the directors and people that would that were working then a lot of people you know the julian temples and david finchers and steve barons the world that you know ridley scott people that went on to be big time film directors were cutting their teeth back then you know on music videos were they yeah i had no idea yeah
Guest:Ridley Scott.
Guest:Well, I couldn't swear to that one.
Guest:I think I'm right in things that he did.
Guest:He did one.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, definitely.
Marc:A lot of people ended up doing them as sort of like, you know, sort of challenges, you know, like, you know, like I'd like to try this new medium and see if I can infuse some narrative into it.
Guest:Well,
Guest:I think in the case of a lot of those guys, it was, you know, you couldn't get work.
Guest:It was all heavily unionized and, and it was the old, old, old school tie, you know, and it was a great chance for them to do it.
Guest:And in fact, a lot of the, you know, because the budgets are very low, people would be upgraded.
Guest:So a focus puller would become a best boy grip and, you know, everybody sort of went a little bit above their station.
Guest:It was kind of cool to hang out with the bands and stuff.
Guest:I mean, we shot, she blown me in science in a day and on video.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, on video.
Marc:With that song, I mean, it blew up here.
Marc:You know, there was a wit to it and there was sort of a weirdness to it and there was a groove to it and it became a pretty huge hit, right?
Guest:I viewed it as it was like a silent film with a soundtrack.
Guest:In fact, you know, I wrote the song after I wrote the storyboard for the video.
Guest:I just found out that my record company were willing to give me the budget, you know, to make my own video.
Guest:And so I wrote the storyboard when I kind of only had the song half written.
Guest:But I was always a fan of silent films, you know, sort of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd and Chaplin and so on.
Guest:And they were all underdog heroes.
Guest:And that was me.
Guest:I wasn't a Sting or an Adamant, you know, a pinup type.
Guest:I was definitely the underdog, you know, with the professorial background and the rest of it.
Guest:Lab coat.
Guest:And so that's the way I saw it.
Guest:You know, it's like a silent film.
Marc:Well, it definitely had an effect.
Marc:It definitely worked.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Now, once you had that hit, though, was it like game on in terms of, you know, what you felt you had to do and what you, you know, you were now in the spotlight and you had to hit record.
Marc:I mean, did you end up chasing that thing?
Marc:I mean, once the record companies got hold of you.
Guest:You know, it was good and bad.
Guest:The good was that it was a bit like the first few throws in Monopoly.
Guest:You know, everything you land on, you sort of, you buy into.
Guest:I was getting these offers to go off and work with people.
Guest:Some of my peers, my heroes.
Guest:Like who?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like Joni Mitchell or George Clinton, who I produced.
Guest:You and Clinton, I could see.
Guest:What was the Joni Mitchell pitch?
Guest:I co-produced an album for her.
Guest:Oh, you did?
Guest:I've always been a hero.
Guest:Bowie for Live Aid.
Guest:It's great to be acknowledged by your peers.
Guest:Prince showed up to my gig.
Guest:It's just great to have stuff like that.
Marc:So you were looked at as sort of like, this guy's at the cutting edge of sound technology and a groove.
Marc:And they wanted a piece of that.
Guest:Yeah, which I liked.
Guest:Well, that happened in the US, and I like that about the USA, that when you get something that breaks through like that, people want to jump on your bandwagon.
Guest:They applaud the difference, the balls of it, and they want a piece of you.
Guest:In the UK, this is why I left the UK, they get bristly if you do that.
Guest:It's like, I can't pigeonhole you.
Guest:I don't know how you pulled that off, but there must be something wrong.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:So after blinding me with science, you get all this attention, and you work with Joni Mitchell.
Marc:You worked with George Clinton.
Marc:That makes sense to me.
Marc:That must have been mind-blowing.
Marc:And you work with David Bowie on what?
Marc:What was the collaboration?
Marc:Live Aid.
Marc:I put the band together for Live Aid for a while.
Marc:Really?
Marc:So you were all of a sudden, you took a pretty big jump from, you know, kind of exciting new pop artist to producer that somehow people were like, this guy knows what sound is.
Guest:Yeah, and I produced a band called Prefab Sprout, who are not very well known here, but were huge in the UK.
Guest:Sort of like the UK's.
Guest:Oh, right at the same time as you released a record?
Guest:Yeah, right after I did my own stuff, you know, and they were a bit younger than me and they needed to produce, so I sort of took them in hand.
Guest:And they were, the best way to explain them is sort of after the UK, what Steely Dan was to hear, you know, in other words, very musical, very literate, you know, very highly respected, not to everybody's taste, you know, but something a little bit classy.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:uh-huh and and they they trusted you they trusted me yeah they just put it all in my hands which was great so so we made a couple of albums you know which i think i think are real classics and i cared about them you know which records uh steve mcqueen known as two wheels good in the in the u.s um and uh from langley park to memphis and then jordan the comeback
Marc:three albums when you approach producing i mean what is it because that's a that's a whole different job and i imagine that you know after you know building your own machines and and and and creating the sound and sort of you know being at the at the beginning of a of a a new era of what what you can do sound wise it must have been sort of exciting to actually just get behind the big board and have a certain amount of you know you don't have to necessarily worry about the nuts and bolts of things but you can just kind of mold things
Guest:Well, I do kind of like that, yeah.
Guest:I mean, I find recording sessions, old-fashioned recording sessions, very exciting, much more so than twiddling knobs for weeks on end, you know, on my own.
Guest:There's a certain magic when you have real musicians and you're watching the clock and, you know, you put a bunch of musicians in the room together and they need an hour or so to, like, tell stories and hug and so on and then, you know, and then tune up and so on.
Guest:And then you've got a couple of hours before they're going to start nodding off in the room.
Guest:So there's this sort of magic window, and the magic has to happen.
Guest:And you go, okay, one more take, guys, and you just get this buzz, and you think this could be it.
Guest:There's nothing to replace that, really.
Guest:That's amazing.
Guest:Your own studio, you can just go to sleep and get up in the morning and try again.
Marc:So you actually became adept at operating a board on your own.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I always did my own.
Guest:I sort of bluffed my way through my own engineering.
Yeah.
Marc:That's obviously, you know, that was probably better than, you know, being under the tutelage of some sort of guy set in his ways for you to sort of bluff your way, gave you a style.
Guest:You know, well, I think so.
Guest:I mean, I probably, you know, I never looked at a meter.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, when something started to smell funny, I knew that the level was probably too hot.
Guest:um but you know other than that you know if it sounds good then it's then it's fine and i think that people that do that themselves there's an idiosyncratic sort of individuality i mean prince did that you know you throw everybody out of the studio and some of his records sound awful yeah you know but he was just he was such a master at you know these sort of bold strokes um that he made some really special sounding records and he could have
Guest:He could have achieved a certain sort of objective level of superior sound if he'd gone with another producer, but it wouldn't have been the same.
Marc:It wouldn't have been specifically his, and he couldn't take credit for all of it, so he was willing to take the hit.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, to have a point of view, I mean, that's so lacking in a lot of stuff.
Guest:When it goes through that filter, it's back to the industry thing.
Guest:When you think it through too much and you think, right, who would be the perfect producer for this?
Guest:Should we go the Trevor Horn route or should we go the Mutt Langer route?
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And sort of think it all through.
Marc:Then it takes all of the balls out of it.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:So now what was the pressure on you, not as a producer, but as an artist from the record company to continue producing more They Blinded Me With Science?
Guest:Well, there was some pressure, but they can't really pressurize you.
Guest:You know, I mean, to an extent, you know, you're not, you're in your contract until you've delivered, but they can't, you know, they can't force you into the studio and say, right, you're not coming out until you've made number 10.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But there was this sort of unspoken pressure.
Guest:And the thing is that, you know, there's a soft side to my music.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Um, in, in songs like screen kiss, I love you.
Guest:Goodbye.
Guest:Budapest by blimp.
Guest:Um,
Guest:which people did discover because they would buy the album because they'd heard a song on the radio, and then they'd discover the deeper cuts.
Guest:And those are the ones that, at the end of the day, people really fell in love with.
Guest:If they turned into hardcore fans, it was because of those songs, and they wouldn't be listening to the singles.
Guest:And in the period that I stopped making records... How long was that?
Guest:well it's 18 years um you know the internet yeah the internet grew up and people were still analyzing songs like screen kiss you know years later the chord sequences interpreting the lyrics and things and i would go into you know capital records in the capital building and they say oh man everybody around here has been singing screen kiss all the secretaries is just in love with you and i go great is that going to be in the next single
Guest:Well, no, we were sort of thinking that something a lot more along the lines of She Blinded Me With Science.
Guest:You know, if there are any songs we haven't heard yet from this new album.
Guest:So I would get that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was very hard to because I made them some money once.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:That's it.
Marc:That's the double edged sword right there.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there were believers.
Guest:It wasn't that there weren't believers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But the way corporations work, you know, is that if a guy's going to stick his neck out on on a long shot.
Guest:and it fails he could get fired right sure if he goes with something safe his boss is going to take the credit you know so um um so it it sort of defines itself really you know people won't take chances and that was part of the problem you know with that whole era so once you ran out of your original contract you sort of stopped for a while yeah i mean i got i got out of my deal and i tried to find other record companies that would you know buy into what i was doing more it was quite hard really what was the company
Guest:Well, I mean, I went with Giant after I got out of the EMI world.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And what was the first album with Giant?
Guest:Well, only one album, which was Astronauts and Heretics.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:You know, which was a very heartfelt, sort of very vulnerable album, you know, with songs like I Love You Goodbye on it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, it was early 90s.
Guest:It was a bad time for the music industry.
Guest:It was the Gulf War.
Guest:It was, you know, Michael Jackson's latest failing to sell 10 million copies.
Guest:And it was just a bad, it was a depressed time for the industry.
Guest:And, you know, record companies will assign a period of a window of two weeks where the marketing department are focused on your record.
Guest:And if it doesn't take off, then you're back to the drawing board.
Guest:So you're sitting there waiting for the phone to ring thinking...
Guest:Two weeks from now, either be like trying to write songs all over again, or I could be embarking on an 18 month world tour with a platinum album.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And your fate is just so out of your hands and it's not a good way to live.
Marc:So when you decided to sort of pull out of that world, I mean, what was what was the first thing you started to work on?
Guest:well you know i mean technology right i'd used um software and hardware over the years yeah worked quite closely with tech companies yeah and i'd been i was living in la at the time and i'd started doing trips up to silicon valley and consulting with computer companies on how to use audio in their products and it was very hard you know it's beginning of the 90s they didn't like they kind of preferred if computers were silent because it would distract the guy in the next cubicle you
Marc:Who were you talking to at that time?
Marc:I can't picture.
Marc:I'm not a tech nerd, so I don't know what that looked like up there.
Guest:It was Apple.
Guest:It was CompuServe and AOL and people like that.
Marc:So there was no music.
Marc:Everything was sort of beeps and silent.
Guest:Well, I mean, yeah, except that CompuServe and AOL, a lot of the download, you know, bandwidth was being used up, as it turns out, by people downloading songs.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You know, but there wasn't a name for it yet.
Guest:Nobody had heard of MP3.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, it was actually MP3, but it didn't, it wasn't a phenomenon yet.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Parasy was not on the radar.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, it was just going on, but it was, all corporations didn't understand it.
Guest:And they wanted to get their arms around it to understand it.
Guest:And what did you bring to the table?
Guest:I was able to bridge the gap because I'm techie enough to be able to talk to programmers and business enough that I could approach that point of view.
Guest:And I would get them backstage passes for the stones when they came through.
Guest:Beautiful.
Guest:You had that kind of access?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then halfway through a meeting, a guy would get this sort of wicked grin on his face.
Guest:And he'd go, I was dating this girl at MIT when your record came out.
Guest:And I remember making it.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Some story would come out from those guys.
Guest:And you were working for yourself at this time?
Guest:I was working for myself as a consultant.
Guest:And I just enjoyed being in a new industry that was a little bit more grown up, a little bit more adult.
Guest:It's a smart thing to do.
Guest:So did you make a big hit there?
Guest:Well, I did eventually because, you know, I mean, by the middle of the 90s, the web was really taking off.
Guest:And there's a lot of venture capital money going into all sorts of wacky ideas that didn't really have a business model per se.
Guest:But they seemed like, you know, good ideas on paper.
Guest:And so somebody would come and invest millions of dollars.
Guest:And so I formed a company called Headspace initially and we made really cool interactive music stuff kind of like the stuff you get today on an iPad or you know these sort of like music with training wheels you know some sort of cool interface for music that makes it really easy to remix a record without having a real skill or anything like that.
Guest:What year was this about?
Guest:95, roundabout then.
Guest:And we made really cool stuff using money that had been invested in us by venture capitalists.
Guest:And we ran up a lot of debt.
Guest:And eventually, we actually did find something to make some money, and that was mobile phones.
Guest:Because we'd made this synthesizer, which we gave away online.
Guest:But Nokia came along and said, we need a synthesizer for our phones because we want to do ringtones.
Guest:And so we put our synthesizer in Nokia phones and...
Guest:uh and many other manufacturers and and they shipped about three billion units with your technology on yeah with my synthesizer which is called beatnik uh-huh and that that must have been a good deal well yeah i mean it there are pitfalls to that whole world which is that you gotta you gotta figure out how to make money quickly uh-huh or else they get their teeth very deep into you you know the more they invest in you yeah the less of it you own so how do you make money on something like that
Guest:Well, theoretically, you make money in royalties.
Guest:But in reality, people like Nokia make, I don't know, 300 million phones a year.
Guest:They don't want to give any kind of a royalty on what they do.
Guest:Some of the others less so.
Guest:Some of the more niche phones and things like iPhones at the beginning, they sell a few million versus mass market phones.
Guest:They sell hundreds of millions.
Guest:So it was easier after the Nokia deal to get royalty deals.
Guest:But the problem was that by that time, I was seven, eight years into my company.
Guest:and the investors were in up to the hilt, and so we were part of the whole bubble.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you got wiped out?
Guest:No, we didn't get wiped out.
Guest:I mean, it kept going until just a few years ago.
Guest:I was on the board of directors until a few years ago.
Guest:What happened eventually?
Guest:So we stopped doing any web stuff.
Guest:We stopped doing any cool stuff, and it was just like engineering and sales.
Guest:It lost all interest for me.
Guest:Oh, so it's just like music.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, it was just like...
Guest:Four voice, you know, simple synthesized versions.
Marc:But just the arc of it that, you know, you sort of do something and you play it out and then it just becomes a job.
Guest:It becomes a job.
Guest:And then what happened was they started being able to play WAV files.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So the record companies went to the phone operators and said, you know, we'll license you Beyonce and you can play three seconds of that as a ringtone.
Guest:And so there was no need for a synthesizer anymore.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So it was a narrow window.
Guest:But you got in and got out.
Guest:I got in and got out.
Guest:This will all be on like a pack of trivial pursuits before, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right next to, you know, which of the monkeys mother made liquid paper.
Marc:Mike Nismith.
Marc:I know that one.
Guest:One of the following.
Guest:Howard Jones, Herbie Hancock, Thomas Dolby.
Marc:How much of nostalgia for you can you handle in the sense that do you see yourself?
Marc:Do you go out and perform your old songs?
Guest:You know, I go out and perform concerts.
Guest:I don't do sort of rewind type things.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which I find a bit undignified.
Marc:I agree with you.
Guest:But I do new concerts and I do different things.
Guest:You know, I've played solo.
Guest:I've played with a band.
Guest:Later in the year, I'm going to tour with this film.
Guest:You know, like I say.
Guest:That sounds really interesting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I have a hardcore following who are willing to go with the flow.
Guest:And there'll be a few people who'll show up and will want to hear a song that they know.
Guest:And I could probably play to bigger audiences if I was willing to go out and do the sort of ABC, Human League, Flock of Seagulls type things.
Guest:Are they doing that?
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Guest:There are tours like that.
Guest:I guess they always do that, don't they?
Guest:It doesn't really appeal to me because it seems like an admission that, well, nothing you do today could be of any interest.
Guest:You're just reliving people's glory days.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I also think that it's impressive that you sort of diversified in terms of your interests and, you know, you found some sort of excitement in continuing to create something.
Marc:I mean, it doesn't always end up that well for guys with a couple of huge hits.
Guest:No, I know.
Guest:It's absolutely true.
Guest:I mean, I have no complaints whatsoever.
Guest:I'm still charged up about the stuff that I'm doing and I still find ways to get very creative.
Guest:And actually, my latest album is my best album artistically.
Guest:You know, it's the best thing I've ever done.
Guest:A Map of the Floating City.
Marc:And you're using, you bring in studio musicians or people you know and.
Guest:Yeah, some of them have got, you know, some of them were recorded backing tracks with three or four musicians live in the studio and others I overdubbed different people.
Guest:There's sort of cameos, Imogen Heaps on a song, Regina Spector's on a song.
Guest:Oh, she's great.
Guest:Mark Knopfler plays on one of the songs.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:There's a song called 17 Hills, which is like seven and a half minutes long.
Guest:And it's kind of an epic, you know, almost like a lament.
Guest:It's got lots of verses, keeps coming back to the main refrain.
Guest:And Mark played on that for me, which is really nice.
Guest:He's got a great sound.
Marc:Yeah, that's right.
Marc:It sounds like you're doing some of the most interesting work of your life.
Marc:You know, I really am.
Guest:I really am.
Guest:I have to say it.
Guest:You know, it's about radio or, you know, marketing executives or anything.
Guest:I'm just in a fortunate position.
Guest:And I, you know, I mean, I do still need to make a living, but I'm not I don't have to count out to anybody.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:It sounds very exciting.
Marc:And you do scoring as well, right?
Guest:I haven't done any in a while.
Guest:I will get back to it.
Guest:It was actually very hard for me to score my own film.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah, I was tempted to get somebody else to do it.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:No, you can't do that.
Marc:Yeah, you couldn't do that.
Marc:Did you score video games as well?
Guest:Yeah, I did a couple of video games.
Guest:Yeah, and movies, right?
Guest:A few movies?
Guest:Yeah, a couple of movies, yeah.
Guest:But it's difficult.
Guest:It's tricky.
Guest:It's tricky.
Guest:It's a bit of a heartbreaker sometimes as well because you end up on the cutting room floor, you know.
Guest:Sure, because you're just there to service the movie.
Guest:They suddenly decide it has to be winter, not summer, and it has to be, you know, the desert, not the mountains.
Guest:Pick it up a little bit.
Guest:A gay couple, you know.
Guest:Those sort of decisions get made, and if the music goes by the wayside that took you days to compose and record, then it's tough, you know, and they own it.
Guest:Wow, well.
Guest:And then sometimes the movie turns out to be a piece of crap anyway, you know.
Marc:yes just a job it sounds like you've you've managed to avoid things being just a job for too long that's exactly right i've never had just a job well congratulations man thank you good talking to you likewise
Marc:Okay, that's it.
Marc:That's the show.
Marc:Big doubleheader.
Marc:Wait, do I got dates coming up?
Marc:Right, yeah.
Marc:I'm going to be... Well, we're doing this panel at the Paley Center here in Los Angeles on Tuesday, June 18th.
Marc:Me and some of the writers of the show, Marin.
Marc:And we're going to do some clips and have a little Q&A.
Marc:January 20... Oh, January.
Marc:June 20th through June 22nd, I will be at Helium in Buffalo, New York.
Marc:July 18th through July 20th, I will be at Zaney's in Nashville, Tennessee.
Marc:And August 1st through August 4th, I'll be at the main stage...
Marc:in Chicago.
Marc:And in between those dates, I will be trying to write some new material about the large life that I'll be living when I decide to become a mountain man or walk across country or perhaps go snowshoeing, something adventurous, maybe commit my life to a cause.
Marc:Maybe go back to school.
Marc:Maybe I should go back to college and become an engineer of some sort or perhaps an architect so I could build an addition onto my house.
Marc:In other words, I have work to do.
Marc:Boomer lives!