Episode 420 - Ben Sidran
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:What the fuckstables?
Marc:What the fuckaholics?
Marc:Oh, I am Mark Maron.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:This is it.
Marc:I sit here early in the morning.
Marc:I'm here early in the morning.
Marc:Groggy.
Marc:A little bit tired, slightly hallucinating, listening to the sound of my own heartbeat, compulsively tweeting.
Marc:Not my heartbeat, but yeah, that would be interesting, wouldn't it?
Marc:I don't even know how to make that work.
Marc:What does that even mean?
Marc:Why am I even here?
Marc:See, that's the big question, isn't it?
Marc:on today's show ben sidron the jazz musician writer teacher uh spiritual thinker i you know i i'll explain to you how this came about i mean i'm sure some of you were like who the hell is ben sidron i was the same way but i got to be honest with you it was one of the best conversations i've had in my life and i'll tell you about in a little bit where we at now what's happening
Marc:I know I reached out to you folks on last week there to to sort of diagnose me psychologically because I was on my way to a psychiatric evaluation.
Marc:I think it might be my first one actually ever.
Marc:I don't know what I was expecting.
Marc:I did walk out with a prescription.
Marc:I'm going to tease this for one more episode, to be quite honest with you, because, you know, stuff is coming in.
Marc:People are diagnosing me.
Marc:People have big ideas.
Marc:Some of them are not nice.
Marc:But I think just the fact that people are doing it is exciting and it's all food for thought.
Marc:But I'm not going to reveal those.
Marc:I'm not going to reveal the medication.
Marc:I'm not going to.
Marc:Tell you what what was suggested.
Marc:You know, my experience with prescriptions is I think that the actual idea that I get one is enough for me.
Marc:I don't always go get them filled because sometimes I just don't believe them.
Marc:I've never been so sick as to need one to live.
Marc:So so it's relative to that.
Marc:I haven't prescribed things on trial basis is.
Marc:I do like to have a little stash of the, what do you call it?
Marc:It's not called Zovirix anymore.
Marc:I get the cold sores on the old lip occasionally, so I need that stuff.
Marc:Acyclovir, whatever the fuck it is now.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:It's good to have that stuff around so I don't walk on stage looking like I get punched in the mouth.
Marc:But yeah, so I went in.
Marc:All I'm going to tell you is this, is that I spent about an hour and a half with this psychiatrist.
Marc:And it's not that I'm wary.
Marc:It's just that in my mind, and I think in a lot of creative people's minds, and I'm the kind of guy that sometimes recommends against us.
Marc:Look, if you're fucked up in the head and you need some head medicine, you need some head salve, you should put that shit in there.
Marc:Especially if you're going down the hole.
Marc:If you're falling down the tunnel of self, you might need to cushion that.
Marc:With some peels.
Marc:You know, what gets you into a psychiatrist's office?
Marc:Look, I know why I'm in therapy.
Marc:I'm in therapy because I'm in a relationship and I don't want to fuck it all up.
Marc:It's very good.
Marc:Preemptive couples counseling is very good, but there's no such thing as preemptive with me.
Marc:We're fully emptive almost immediately in any situation.
Marc:And the relationship I'm in now is good, but she's a pip.
Marc:She's a firecracker.
Marc:We're both a little volatile and, you know, you got to figure out how to communicate.
Marc:So that's what drove me to therapy.
Marc:It was practical.
Marc:What drove me into the psychiatrist's office was I'm experiencing intense.
Marc:My brain feels like it's pushed up against the back of my face.
Marc:Like, you know, everything is very close to the surface.
Marc:There's one way to realize that, and I don't want to be hackneyed about it, but living in Los Angeles, really there's only one complaint you can have ever.
Marc:It's traffic, and traffic is very revealing.
Marc:It's a metaphor for life.
Marc:It's who you are, how you think in the car.
Marc:I mean, you're just trying to get from point A to point B, but where the fuck your brain is during that journey, who the hell knows?
Marc:But it's amazing how consistently irritating and how consistent the reality of it is and what you meditate on in traffic.
Marc:Can you rise above it?
Marc:Can you accept that this is just the way shit is and you've got to prepare accordingly?
Marc:Or are you in your car going, fuck, what, fuck, how is it?
Marc:I was in traffic on Wednesday night and my brain was trying to, you know, sort of, you know, render some explanation.
Marc:There's no fucking explanation.
Marc:There's too many fucking, you know, the roads aren't prepared.
Marc:God damn it.
Marc:And I had to get someplace.
Marc:It was Wednesday night at 8.30 and the fucking freeway was packed and my brain's trying to explain that to itself.
Marc:Like, you know, where could people be going on a Wednesday?
Marc:What is going on on Wednesday night that this has to happen?
Marc:Hundreds and hundreds of cars, thousands of cars.
Marc:No explanation.
Marc:I couldn't understand it.
Marc:I had somewhere to be.
Marc:There was no fucking way in my mind that other people had to be any place on a Wednesday night.
Marc:It's Wednesday.
Marc:And then it goes from there to, like, where's their sense of urgency?
Marc:We're not on a joyride here.
Marc:This isn't a Sunday drive.
Marc:This is a Wednesday night clusterfuck for no reason, and I got to be somewhere.
Marc:Where's their sense of urgency?
Marc:I feel the anger rising.
Marc:And I can't get to that place right now where it's just, look, man, it's out of your control.
Marc:See, that's the spiritual route.
Marc:That's the practical-minded route.
Marc:Look, what are you going to do?
Marc:What, are you going to sit here and give yourself fucking cancer because it's something you can't control?
Marc:Is that how you're going to do it?
Marc:And then I dumped my anger on somebody else, and it was kind of a shameful thing.
Marc:That's always the fucking situation, isn't it?
Marc:But they couldn't hear me.
Marc:I just like a smart car pulled up next to me.
Marc:You don't see those that much.
Marc:They're kind of new to the American landscape.
Marc:A little smart car pulled up next to me and I looked over and I saw the guy in it and I thought to myself, you deserve to die.
Marc:You deserve to die.
Marc:What is that?
Marc:And then I thought, well, that's a little harsh.
Marc:What are you talking about?
Marc:And then I realized if you're in one of those cars, even if you die in an accident in a smart car and it's not your fault, people are going to say, yeah, well, maybe you should have bought a whole car.
Marc:Maybe that would have been a...
Marc:A good idea for you until everybody's driving cars that size.
Marc:I think it's a tremendous liability, no matter how safe to say it is.
Marc:And I know it's economically, it's proactive.
Marc:You leave a smaller carbon footprint, but there's no reason you can't get stuck under the shoe of a semi truck.
Marc:that footprint what about that one might want to be wary of that good for you for doing the right thing but come on man there might be a truck driver in the middle of uh you know sexting a uh truck stop hustler and you just end up he doesn't even know that he hit you just looks in his rearview mirror thinking one of his tires kind of peeled itself and there you are tumbling into garbage in your smart car
Marc:Hey, look, man, that wasn't so upbeat.
Marc:What are we doing?
Marc:Where did I get to that?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:So I'm at the psychiatrist's office, and he tells me there's a British psychiatrist who has an analogy for the mind.
Marc:The psychiatrist explained to me my legacy as somebody who comes from bipolarity, that I share a genome with my father, but not a phenome, the way my brain's going differently.
Marc:So there's a little hint for you, okay?
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Uh, and then he goes, you know, the brain has a bucket in it.
Marc:There's a bucket in the brain and everyone's got a different size bucket and how much that bucket could hold is relative to your biology and also to your conditioning and how you were brought up.
Marc:So it's a bucket issue that, you know, your bucket is overflowing.
Marc:And I'm like, no shit.
Marc:My bucket is overflowing.
Marc:There's a, you know, there's a, it's always filling up.
Marc:Even when I'm sleeping, there's a drip.
Marc:I got to have the bucket there to catch the drip.
Marc:So I got an overflowing bucket.
Marc:That's the poetic explanation, and it makes good sense to me.
Marc:And by the way, I feel like I haven't checked in with you people about my relationship.
Marc:Yeah, everything's going pretty good.
Marc:We're having our issues, but we're working through them, and I'm not ruining it.
Marc:I'm right at the fucking juncture emotionally.
Marc:and psychologically where I ruin every relationship and we are moving through it and things are okay.
Marc:We're both working.
Marc:Life is pretty good.
Marc:We're okay.
Marc:I just have to turn.
Marc:I just have to empty my bucket.
Marc:Did I mention who's on the show today?
Marc:Ben Sidren.
Marc:This is one of the best shows I have ever had.
Marc:Well, it's a great talk is what I'm saying.
Marc:I mean, it's hard for me to really decide what the best shows I've ever had are, but it was an amazing talk with a guy
Marc:This has happened a couple of times.
Marc:His son reached out to me and said, I think you should talk to my father.
Marc:He's a jazz musician.
Marc:He's respected.
Marc:He's been a jazz musician and teacher and writer for years.
Marc:And I'm like, I don't know who he is.
Marc:And I started looking at his stuff.
Marc:Who's this Ben Sidren?
Marc:God, he's a real guy.
Marc:He's been around for a long time.
Marc:He's written books.
Marc:He's done interviews himself with jazz musicians.
Marc:He's played with some of the greats.
Marc:Yeah, I want to talk to this guy.
Marc:You know, his son was very, you know, very persistent.
Marc:And I sat down and talked to Ben Sidron about creativity, about improvisation, about the nature of life and of art and of spirituality.
Marc:I mean, it was fucking brain bending.
Marc:It was a great conversation.
Marc:Because his son thought we should talk.
Marc:You got to talk to my pop.
Marc:But I tell you, man, you know, I'm a guy that tries to get into the present by being immediately present and engaging emotionally with whatever the situation is.
Marc:If there's another human being in the room, even if they're not in the room, the idea of improvisation, the idea of being on stage and not knowing what's going to happen, but trusting yourself enough to let it happen is something I love.
Marc:And, you know, trying to get answers, big answers.
Marc:You know, Sidron was there, man.
Marc:I mean, he was there.
Marc:We had a great talk.
Marc:I think you're going to enjoy it.
Marc:Let's talk to Ben Sidren.
Marc:Ben Sidron.
Marc:You know, the interesting thing is really is that, you know, I have a limited understanding of jazz.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I have to be honest.
Marc:I did not know your work.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that upsets me because you're a guy that's, you know, been, you know, in the studio doing music for most of your life.
Marc:You've got at least, what, 40 records out, 30 records of your own.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, 30 some plus.
Guest:That's a lot of records.
Guest:It's a lot of records.
Guest:And now I feel like an asshole.
Guest:I'm like, how do I not know this guy?
Guest:Well, because I've been a gourmet item on the shelves for a long time.
Guest:I know that feeling.
Guest:I know you do.
Guest:And it's very much one foot in front of another, don't fall down, and you get there.
Guest:Right.
Guest:uh it's okay to get old you know the older you get the better you get some of my favorite jazz guys uh you know when they recorded they're 70 years old they sound great you can you can age well in jazz exactly and how old are you i'm gonna be 70 yeah and your voice is is spectacular thank you i mean it holds up yep how do you like i listen to these newer records and i'm like this guy's kind of an old guy right yeah and the voice is still intact oh i guess you didn't beat the shit out of yourself
Guest:No, I didn't.
Guest:And I'm not screaming.
Guest:And I lived a pretty good life.
Guest:I mean, actually, I was such a fan, man, just to get to hang with the guys I hung with and play.
Guest:You know, I just had a ball.
Guest:I've had a good time.
Marc:Well, let's go through it.
Marc:I mean, you're a Jewish fella.
Marc:It turns out I am.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And as am I. And it seems like, you know, you're arcing into more Jewiness as you get older.
Guest:You know, it's bizarre.
Guest:I spent my life avoiding the two things.
Guest:One, boxes of CDs in my basement, and second, the Jews, the organized Jews, only to wind up with boxes of Jewish CDs in my basement.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Swear to God.
Guest:So long story short, I made a CD about 20-some years ago called Life's a Lesson, and it's Hebrew liturgical music with 25 just fantastic Jewish jazz musicians.
Guest:That was how long ago did you make that?
Guest:93.
Guest:93.
Guest:Okay, I have that.
Guest:I listen to it.
Guest:I know those songs.
Guest:I grew up with them.
Guest:You know, but that's the point.
Guest:See, O Say Shalom, Abinu Malkana, we all had them in our ears.
Guest:And so at some point, when my son was maybe six years old, I thought, man, he's got, what's, you know, I don't have anything Jewish around here.
Guest:Let's just introduce him to something.
Marc:We better get some Jew in him.
Guest:Just get some Jew in him.
Guest:So I started doing these high holiday services, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, not for any other reason than I found a really cool place to hang out.
Guest:You do a musical, you mean?
Guest:Yeah, I play piano, and doors are open, and you don't have to buy a ticket, and a rabbi is this left-wing progressive woman, and it's a thing in Madison, Wisconsin.
Guest:It's the home of the alternative.
Guest:So I started doing the music, and one thing led to another, and eventually I just said, man...
Guest:I bet there's a lot of people out there have these tunes in their ears and maybe we should record them.
Guest:So I'm going around the country with reels of tape on.
Guest:I mean, we're talking today is like 40 pounds of two inch tape.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I'm working and wherever I'm working, I book an extra session in the studio and I call in Jewish guys and I say, I've got you down for a vinyl volcano.
Guest:You, you're the soloist on Osatio, whatever it is.
Guest:And every one of these guys, from Randy Brecker to Lee Conant, it didn't matter who, said, yeah, yeah, I'm Jewish, but I'm not.
Guest:I said, listen, man, come on down, play on the thing.
Guest:If you don't like it, we won't use it.
Guest:Every one of them left the studio with a cassette for their mother.
Guest:I swear to God.
Marc:Well, they finally did something.
Marc:They did it.
Marc:Look, Ma, I didn't waste my life.
Guest:Right.
Marc:So I'm not a doctor.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:So that's how I got into the Jew thing.
Marc:But when you started, I mean, where'd you grow up?
Marc:Racine, Wisconsin.
Marc:Now, what is that?
Marc:How far away is that from Chicago?
Marc:Well, my father commuted to Chicago.
Marc:He worked in Chicago.
Marc:And your parents both from here?
Guest:My father was born in Poland, came to the United States at age four, five, grew up in Chicago.
Guest:My mom was from Racine, and we wound up in Racine because when my father went into the army, the family moved there.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So, Racine, very few Jews.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Very few Jews.
Guest:My high school, there were two Jews.
Guest:One was my sister.
Guest:It's the truth.
Guest:And so, you know, I never dated a Jewish girl.
Guest:I kept my head down.
Marc:That was the basic M.O.
Marc:But you didn't feel, did you feel no anti-Semitism necessarily?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:A little bit.
Marc:Hey, Jew boy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Hey, Jew boy.
Marc:I mean, I guess at that time it was a little unique, certainly for certain areas.
Marc:And I don't know what the story is in terms of... I know that Minnesota...
Marc:had a large Jewish community at some point for some reason.
Marc:Oh, absolutely.
Marc:And Dylan came from that, and they moved out there for, I guess, import-export business, I don't know what.
Guest:Right, well, I think my family got to Racine because they got off the train at the wrong stop, I swear.
Guest:You know, Milwaukee, Chicago, I don't know.
Guest:My grandmother told me a story which was interesting.
Guest:She lived in North Dakota for a while.
Guest:They were homesteading.
Guest:You know, the government said, you can till this land.
Guest:Right, and they couldn't.
Guest:They got blown off of it.
Guest:She talks about the wind coming through the floorboards.
Guest:She come from Russia?
Guest:I think they were both kind of... My father came from Poland.
Guest:She must have come from the Palo Settlement somewhere.
Marc:But they were doing the farming thing, right?
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:Because they didn't know what the hell to do with that land.
Guest:It was impossible.
Guest:It was impossible.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And so in any case, in the Midwest, there are plenty of Jews and not all of them closeted.
Guest:Many of them very Jewish.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Dylan talks about being up in Hibbing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the experience that Dylan had, I mean, he's a year older than I am, but it's pretty similar, not a lot of Jews, kind of alienation.
Guest:But it was not a bad thing in the sense that it totally turned me to jazz.
Guest:When I was like in high school, if I opened a book,
Guest:And either the word Jew or the word jazz was on the page.
Guest:My eye went right to it.
Marc:Jays.
Guest:Jays.
Guest:It was bizarre.
Guest:It was bizarre.
Guest:And I did happen to notice I never saw him on the same page.
Guest:So the Jew jazz thing has always been curious to me.
Marc:So when did you start getting into it?
Marc:I mean, when you set out, how old were you when you started doing the music?
Guest:Well, you know, I played, I don't have a memory that goes back before I played piano.
Guest:So I was playing piano at five or six and fooling around.
Guest:Was that your mom singing?
Guest:Like teach your kid, give him piano lessons?
Guest:Well, my older sister had a piano lesson.
Guest:So I followed her and then she quit and I kept going and I quit.
Guest:But my father was a big music fan, big jazz fan.
Guest:So I just listened to his Boogie Woogie records.
Guest:Yeah, like who would that be?
Guest:Oh, Pine Top, Smith, Albert Ammons, you know, Chicago Boogie Woogie guys.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I started imitating it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And eventually I got a nice teacher in Milwaukee.
Guest:I would commute back and forth and I picked it up.
Guest:And then I was like 13 or 14.
Guest:I got a gig.
Guest:Somebody paid me three bucks to go play at a dance.
Guest:So, I mean.
Guest:Were you doing popular music?
Guest:I mean, dance music?
Marc:I mean, what?
Guest:Smoke gets in your eyes.
Marc:You know, boys and girls.
Marc:Sure, sure.
Marc:Ballroom.
Marc:You could lay out all that stuff.
Guest:Well, it was great, because I was on the stage watching these people be intimate, and I thought, man, this is just fabulous.
Guest:Magic.
Guest:It's magic, man.
Guest:And then they gave you three bucks.
Marc:I mean, come on.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:But that's the thing about music, that it's magic, and it's a repeatable magic.
Marc:That's always fascinated me, because I'm a comedian.
Marc:A joke is a joke.
Marc:You can retell a joke, but a joke's going to wear out.
Marc:I mean, it'll hold some juice.
Marc:And if someone's a good teller of a joke that everybody knows, you kind of want to hear it again.
Marc:But really with a song, I mean, if you engage with that thing with a piece of music, it's magic every time.
Guest:Well, it's channeling this particular spirit.
Guest:Every song, if it's a decent song, it's got some kind of underlying spirit to it.
Guest:And you just kind of go back to that place and try to tap into what that is.
Marc:Now, okay, so when you started, that boogie-woogie thing was already old news, really, right?
Marc:Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.
Marc:It was just something you gravitated towards.
Marc:What was the jazz of the time when you started to integrate yourself into the community?
Marc:I mean, what was happening?
Marc:Was that bebop already or post-bebop?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I was born in 43, so let's say when I'm 13 years old, it's 56.
Guest:You're two years away from Miles Davis' Kind of Blue.
Guest:I'm listening to Horace Silver, Art Blakey.
Guest:I'm listening to, well, Ray Charles, of course.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Definitely it's bebop, it's Miles, it's all this stuff.
Marc:When you started, did you start in rock music?
Marc:What was your evolution as a musician?
Guest:No, man.
Guest:The only rock music I liked was Ray Charles, if that was rock music.
Guest:I was not a big Jerry Lee Lewis fan, although ironically, years later when I got in the record business, everybody wanted you to imitate Jerry Lee Lewis.
Guest:I was a jazz guy, a bebop guy.
Guest:I love Bud Powell.
Guest:These are sophisticated cats, man.
Guest:you know being a jew i i'm drawn toward the intellectual side of things yeah and and bebop is almost a literary form of jazz improvisation i mean there's themes and sub themes and paragraphs and comments it's palmudic you know yeah yeah i mean you're gonna have to explain it i want to break it down so i can have a deeper appreciation of it but you never you never get you never did the high school rock band or you never even played there weren't high school rock bands
Guest:No.
Guest:I mean, I guess, right, because you're 19.
Guest:I was there.
Guest:I was there when middle-class white kids realized they could do it.
Guest:And what happened was this.
Guest:So I go to the university.
Guest:Well, basically, I'm 17 years old.
Guest:I'm escaping Racine.
Guest:I get to Madison, Wisconsin.
Guest:I'm playing on the weekends with a fraternity band.
Guest:And we're playing jazz.
Guest:Back then, fraternity music was...
Guest:uh what do they call it like new orleans jazz good time party music right right right like what uh professor long hair oh we should be so lucky no like uh the original dixieland jazz band imitators you know sure sure no professor my god yeah uh so uh
Guest:By coincidence, my sophomore year, I'm riding my Vespa motor scooter up to class and I see a little band off to the side.
Guest:I pull over and I go up and say, you know, well, you guys sound great.
Guest:What's the deal?
Guest:It's Steve Miller, Boz Skaggs.
Guest:They're playing Jimmy Reed tunes.
Guest:They don't have a keyboard player.
Guest:So Boz is singing, he's playing guitar?
Guest:He's playing bass at this point.
Guest:Okay, and Steve's playing?
Guest:He's playing guitar.
Guest:And they got another guy, a guy named Denny Berg playing guitar and singing as good as either one of them.
Marc:You never heard of him, right?
Guest:Take out some insurance, that kind of, those reps.
Guest:Absolutely, Fannie Mae, O'Charlina.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Who do you love?
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:So they're doing all that blues groove.
Guest:Yeah, and I had never heard that before.
Guest:Really?
Guest:How is that possible?
Guest:Racine, Wisconsin, man.
Guest:You were lucky to hear anything.
Marc:So you never heard that, but you heard Boogie Woogie because of your pop's records, but yet you've been sort of iced out of what was becoming the classic blues structure, the popular blues music.
Guest:Oh yeah, except to the extent it showed up on an Art Blakey record or it showed up on a Ray Charles thing.
Marc:but you're already adept at what that stuff is built on top of.
Marc:So you get in with these guys.
Guest:So I get in with these guys, and I learn right away that jazz guys tend to think it's easy.
Guest:It's not easy.
Guest:It's about commitment.
Guest:It's about commitment to the groove.
Guest:It's about surrender.
Marc:Commitment to the groove.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:You tell me jazz guys don't necessarily understand that?
Guest:No, I don't mean that.
Guest:I mean the jazz guys tend to belittle the funk groove or the backbeat groove, or they did at that time.
Guest:Now we're talking 1961, 62.
Marc:So bebop's already way in and people are taking it further.
Marc:Miles, train, bing, bing, bing.
Guest:But when I was saying I was there, I was there when the Beatles showed up, man.
Guest:I was working in a record store.
Guest:And, you know, the biggest selling record at that time might have been Blown in the Wind, Peter, Paul, Mary, the Dylan thing came out.
Guest:67?
Guest:Where are we at?
Guest:No, 62, 63.
Guest:Okay, yeah.
Guest:You know, it's coming on.
Guest:There is no white middle class rock and roll.
Marc:Right.
Guest:The garage bands I don't think existed because we're still talking about professional songwriters, Paul Anka.
Guest:We're talking about early versions of Motown, whatever.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:But when the Beatles showed up, it was a revelation, man.
Guest:I saw it on Steve Miller's face.
Guest:I mean, you mean we can write our own songs?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Okay, so you took up with these guys, and that's what, 60 what?
Marc:Two, three, 63.
Marc:All right, so you're playing with them.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And you're doing blues covers.
Marc:Doing blues covers.
Marc:Playing out?
Marc:You got a drummer?
Guest:Oh, we got a drummer.
Guest:We're playing out.
Guest:We're playing five gigs a week.
Guest:What's the name of the band?
Guest:The Fabulous Ardells.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we're making money.
Guest:I mean, we're making more money.
Guest:I mean, back then, I would make 50 bucks as a sideman on a college gig.
Guest:You play four gigs on a weekend.
Guest:200 bucks, that's a lot of money back then.
Marc:But with your background, I mean, you guys must have been really nailing it.
Marc:I mean, if you got a solid boogie-woogie thing and you're laying it into those tunes, you must have been holding that thing together.
Marc:The band was killing.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:The band was really killing.
Guest:There's actually a tape on my website of a rehearsal from 1962 or 63 with those guys.
Guest:You can hear just how good the band was and how good those guys sang, man.
Guest:I mean...
Marc:Steve Miller, I mean, both of them made huge careers out of really blues-based music in a way.
Marc:I mean, Steve Miller, certainly.
Marc:I mean, I often wonder what the hell that guy's up to.
Marc:I mean, he's around still.
Guest:Oh, he's playing the five or six hits that he got in the 70s.
Guest:Big hits.
Guest:Around the world, yeah, man.
Guest:It turns out that...
Guest:A song like The Joker is an industry.
Marc:A song like Fly Like an Eagle is a business.
Marc:Isn't that interesting about music publishing?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's fucking, yeah, the number of ways you can make money in that racket is profound, or it used to be.
Marc:I mean, really amazing.
Marc:Well, the best way to get paid is to own the copyright.
Marc:Right.
Guest:That's the bottom line.
Guest:The record companies will cheat you, but the... To own the publishing, right?
Guest:Publishing, right.
Guest:That's the ticket.
Guest:All right, so you and Steve... The Beatles, we're here.
Guest:The Beatles, we're hanging out.
Guest:One thing leads to another.
Guest:Now everything is changing.
Guest:Now everybody's smoking dope.
Guest:Now the anti-war thing is bubbling up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Now, the Chicago blues scene with Mike Bloomfield and these guys starts taking off.
Guest:Steve goes to Chicago.
Guest:Butterfield and Elvin Bishop.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:We go to Chicago.
Guest:We're hanging out at a club.
Marc:That generation.
Marc:The guys who weren't at the lap of those dudes playing with those guys.
Guest:That's it.
Guest:And they start to record.
Guest:So Steve drops out of college.
Guest:He goes there.
Guest:Now, eventually, he makes his way to San Francisco.
Guest:It's 1967.
Guest:And at this point, being a good Jewish intellectual, I'm on my way to graduate school in England to maintain a 2S student deferment so I don't go to Vietnam.
Guest:And so I'm there at the Sussex University in Brighton studying with, oh man, do you remember Leslie Fiedler, this literary critic?
Guest:Maybe not.
Marc:I know the name.
Marc:I know the name.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So he got thrown out of SUNY Buffalo for providing marijuana to some kids.
Guest:So he washed up over.
Guest:So it was a nice hang.
Guest:Stephen Boz came over there to make the first Steve Miller Band record they hooked up.
Guest:And I went and made the record with them.
Guest:And so suddenly, 1967, we're all in the record business.
Guest:They're really in the record business.
Marc:What was on that record?
Marc:It wasn't the big hits, but that was the- No, no.
Guest:It was called Children of the Future.
Guest:It was psychedelic.
Guest:The cover was psychedelic.
Guest:Everything was psychedelic.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And why do you record it in England?
Marc:That was where the label was or-
Guest:uh they wanted to record with this guy glenn johns yeah producer he had produced uh well he had engineered the stone uh the stones and the beatles and you know england at that time was where where that shit was happening pop music man they were selling so he so steve miller dropped out of college when he realized the beatles had broke open something
Marc:He could do this.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Okay, so you're there.
Marc:You sit on that record.
Marc:You're in the record business.
Guest:I'm in the record business.
Guest:They go back to San Francisco.
Guest:I'm there three more years writing a dissertation.
Guest:On what?
Guest:The social history.
Guest:Black music.
Guest:It was called Black Talk.
Guest:It got published.
Guest:But it's the sociology of black music in America as an oral tradition versus a literary tradition.
Guest:I took some of Marshall McLuhan's ideas.
Guest:I transformed it to, well, you know...
Guest:It's not that Thelonious Monk can't play like Vladimir Horowitz.
Guest:Horowitz can't play like Monk.
Guest:Let's talk about that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Interesting.
Guest:I was going to teach, and I graduated in 1971.
Guest:There were no teaching positions.
Guest:Everybody had been in graduate school to avoid going to Vietnam.
Guest:There's plenty of teachers around there.
Marc:too many teachers what do you think about in your in your heart to the the decision to to insulate yourself like that that like you know obviously you didn't have the wherewithal to do with steve and boz didn't say fuck it uh what what do you think was that what was that about uh i think it's a couple of things i think number one uh i didn't credit rock and roll that much i thought it was a bunch of guys playing guitar who had some talent but you know it wasn't gonna stick
Guest:Well, I was into black music.
Guest:Well, it's true.
Guest:I did tell Steve at one time, he told me to come out to San Francisco and join the band.
Guest:I said, no, man, I'm going to go to graduate school and make something of myself.
Guest:I did.
Guest:I actually said that to him.
Guest:But not just that.
Guest:I mean, there's something, quite honestly, a little over theatrical and a little cheap about the whole rock and roll business.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:So the integrity, it lacked some integrity for you at that time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Deep, a mile wide, man.
Guest:And I was into the truth, whatever that might have been.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Pursuit of the truth, man.
Marc:That's where I was at.
Marc:Commitment to the groove.
Marc:Surrender.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Surrender.
Marc:Groove slaves, I used to say.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:So where did your career take you?
Marc:So you didn't get your teaching gig.
Marc:No.
Marc:And now you're a well-educated, almost- Unemployed piano player.
Marc:Well, that's it, right?
Marc:And a sort of a fledgling jazz scholar.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So what I decided to do is move to Los Angeles.
Guest:I mean, I'd played on these recording sessions.
Guest:Like with who?
Guest:Well, I did a Rolling Stones session.
Guest:You did?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Let's talk about that.
Guest:Well, it was boring.
Guest:It was six hours, seven hours.
Guest:Were they there?
Guest:Yeah, they were there.
Guest:We were all lined up in a row in Olympic studios.
Guest:Glenn Johns had called me and said, man, this is a session.
Guest:Would you want to come?
Guest:Because he knew you from the Steve Miller session.
Marc:And he was in LA recording which album?
Marc:No, this was still in England.
Marc:Oh, he was still in England.
Marc:All right.
Marc:We're still in England.
Marc:What album are we looking at?
Guest:It was, I guess, right before Beggar's Banquet must have been.
Guest:I don't know if it ever appeared on a record.
Guest:It may have because... You don't know if you're on a Stones record?
Guest:I'm not credited, certainly.
Guest:I'm not credited.
Guest:You never went to listen?
Guest:I don't listen to the Stones.
Guest:Come on!
Guest:I listened to this.
Guest:This is true.
Guest:So Glynn told me, look, on the way to the studio, I want you to stop and pick up the drummer he doesn't drive.
Guest:So I'm living in Brighton.
Guest:Charlie Watts is living in Lewis, which is right up the road.
Guest:So I said, great.
Guest:I go to Charlie Watts' house.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, that's like a mansion by this point.
Guest:They made some money.
Guest:I knock on the door.
Guest:You know, Charlie opens it.
Guest:Behind him, there's a fireplace you can walk into.
Guest:Huge, a roaring fire.
Guest:And he's listening to Miles Davis.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I said to him, Charlie, man, I'm so glad to hear you listening to Miles.
Guest:I got to be honest with you, man.
Guest:I don't really listen to the Stones a lot.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He said, that's all right, mate.
Guest:Neither do we.
Yeah.
Guest:And all he wanted to do was talk about jazz.
Guest:And we hung.
Guest:We had a great hang.
Guest:We wind up, after a couple hours, driving into the studio, Olympic Studios.
Guest:And we walk in.
Guest:There's Mick sitting at the piano.
Guest:And he's playing this really nice ballad, man.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I went up to him.
Guest:How do you do?
Guest:Mick, Ben, blah, blah, blah.
Guest:I said, man, that's beautiful.
Guest:Is that what we're going to work on?
Guest:He said, no, man.
Guest:It's just something I'm fooling around with.
Guest:Next thing you know, we're all lined up in a row.
Guest:I'm playing a little Wurlitzer piano, and we're just hammering three chords for nine hours.
Guest:There are no lyrics.
Guest:Mick is doing his chicken dance in front of us.
Guest:And after about 45 minutes, I'm thinking, is this going somewhere?
Guest:Are we doing something?
Guest:What are we doing?
Guest:And that was it.
Guest:But that was pretty typical for sessions at that time.
Guest:I mean, even with the Steve Miller stuff, you'd hear the engineer say on the talkback,
Marc:okay guys lucky number 39 you know because you the cats couldn't necessarily hold it together it wasn't about music it was the theater right right and and also it was about like uh i i guess at the time to sort of control the song that there was a there was a sweet spot somewhere yeah i don't ever know what you know when i when i watch uh films or you know i've never been in a recording studio but i talked to dave grow recently you know about this process of when you're going to hit that when you're going to hit that sweet that one take yes
Marc:And the weird thing about that is, okay, so that took you 40 to do that.
Marc:When you go out on the road, you're going to have to jam.
Marc:You're going to have to figure out how to hit that every time.
Marc:I guess it doesn't matter as much when you're going live.
Marc:Well, no, but that's the point.
Marc:What works live does not necessarily work in the studio.
Guest:It doesn't matter necessarily.
Guest:Well, in a studio, small is big.
Guest:For example, if you want a drum to sound really big, instead of putting a lot of microphones on it, what you do is you put a mic 10 feet away.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So there's a lot of illusion in the process of making a record.
Guest:Now, once you go out there, people can't hear if the groove shifts or not.
Marc:They just want to see the theater.
Marc:They want to see the theater.
Marc:And that seems to be the big, that's the big difference for you, is that there seemed to be an artifice.
Guest:to uh to rock music or to pop music at that time it was disposable in a way you know man i always assumed i don't know where i got this idea it's a totally crazy idea but i always assumed that in the world there were what i thought of as first degree searchers yeah they could be shoemakers they could be comics they could be historians they could be but they would recognize one another when they saw each other and they were obligated to help each other it was this crazy idea i came up with and it's the path that i'm on man and i i
Marc:Every time the road forked, that's the fork I took.
Marc:And you were able to identify that, that it was some sort of personal truth you were looking for and whether or not, I'd have to assume that you're not always clear whether it translates, but the personal truth is where it's at.
Marc:How do you know how to make a decision?
Guest:Somebody books you on the gig.
Guest:How do you know if you really want to take the gig?
Guest:I never want to take the gig.
Right.
Marc:okay but you do take some gigs you got it I know that instinct is just fear okay yeah you know is that you know a lot of what we do if you're questing for that and you know I work as I get older I improvise more because I want to push it out there right you know and challenge myself on stage in front of people I'm I know and someone brought it up this just happened yesterday that
Marc:I was on stage in Indiana, Indianapolis, and I was improvising more than I ever had within characters and within moments.
Marc:And some guy on Twitter said, self-discovery as comedy.
Marc:And I never thought about it that way, that I get very tired with the structure of jokes or bits that I've done before, always.
Marc:So there's got to be time on stage where I'm moving through something that'll never happen again.
Marc:And those are the ones I'm going to remember.
Marc:That's what I walk away with.
Marc:It's gone.
Marc:You know, whoever was there got it.
Marc:I got it.
Marc:Whatever happened to me inside is what happened.
Marc:But that was it.
Marc:That moment of self-discovery is what makes it all worth it.
Guest:That's jazz.
Guest:That's exactly what jazz is.
Guest:And so in jazz, you can spend eight hours a day blowing through a copper tube, right?
Guest:And I promise you, after 10 years, that tube will not change, but you will be totally transformed.
Guest:We're transforming ourselves here.
Guest:And you can't do it if you're not in public.
Guest:And if you can't make your mistakes in front of people, it doesn't matter.
Guest:So what?
Guest:You can't make a mistake alone.
Guest:And if you're sitting there with friends, you've got to go out and hang it out.
Marc:Well, that's interesting because that type of, you know, that's getting lost.
Marc:in the culture we live in now across the board that, you know, there is an expectation of quality content to be provided at all times.
Marc:And, you know, if you do let it hang out and it doesn't go well, you've got an entire culture of people that are going to be like, he didn't, you know, he let it hang out and he's an asshole.
Marc:It didn't work.
Marc:And now that's up there being misinterpreted.
Marc:Here we are as human beings looking for personal truths, willing to make mistakes in public and fight the good fight.
Marc:And you got a bunch of assholes who are going to be like, no, you didn't quite do it, did you?
Marc:It's like, well, that's part of the thing.
Marc:We're at risk at losing what is organically human in the creative process.
Guest:Well, that's the same thing in music business, especially as you got further and further into the digital technology.
Guest:It was possible to fix it.
Guest:You know, just because it's possible to make something perfect doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Guest:What is perfect?
Guest:What is perfect?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Perfect is just your pathetic attempt to hide in the technology.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Oh, I made a mistake.
Guest:But the stuff that we love.
Guest:is for me, and I bet it's the same in comedy, it's not so much avoiding the mistakes, but how you recover from mistakes.
Guest:Like if you're in public and you do something and you didn't intend to do it, and the first thought in your mind is, shit, what did I just do?
Guest:If you can train yourself to say, I'm going to make something out of that, in that recovery, there's transcendence.
Guest:And people have a sense that something magic has just happened.
Guest:It's in the recovery.
Guest:It's not in being perfect.
Guest:It's in letting it all come through and using it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But I mean, I love it.
Marc:I mean, I agree with you.
Marc:I never thought about it like that, that like every moment of misstep is an opportunity to transcend that moment.
Marc:And it can happen in 30 seconds, 15 seconds.
Guest:Without the possibility of failure, there's no possibility of success.
Guest:That's absolutely a watchword, man.
Guest:You have to put yourself at risk.
Marc:And success is relative to your experience.
Marc:It's not necessarily how you're being judged.
Marc:Nothing to do with it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, that separation is a little tricky.
Guest:Well, bad reviews still hurt.
Guest:They do.
Guest:Bad reviews still hurt.
Guest:I got one recently.
Guest:I've had all these good reviews.
Guest:I got this new CD out called Don't Cry for No Hipster.
Guest:Yeah, I listened to it.
Guest:It's getting good reviews.
Guest:People are digging it.
Guest:So, you know, a lot of my stuff doesn't get a lot of good reviews, so I'm digging it, right?
Guest:And then I got a bad one.
Guest:Now, I've been in this 40-some years, and yet I read it.
Guest:I said, shit, what was he listening to?
Guest:You never get too old.
Guest:You never outgrow your need for mother's milk.
Marc:Yeah, sure.
Marc:But also the thing that you forget in that moment, it's just some asshole.
Marc:It's just some guy who's probably trying to cut his own teeth on being a dick to establish his own voice as a critic.
Marc:And somehow in our brains, the creative mind thinks like, well, nobody likes me.
Marc:That's it.
Marc:In that moment.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I thought about that the other day.
Marc:I thought, man, why is it that you want everybody to love you again?
Marc:Well, because, yeah, same thing, mother's milk.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:yeah you know we you know no matter how much you fight that like i don't care yeah you care you always care yeah so all right so you do this session but getting back to charlie i mean charlie's interesting because you know he actually did some swing he tried to you know he did some big band records i mean swing the early swing yeah uh drummers that's charlie's uh thing and charlie's you know a master of deception on the stage with the stones yeah for for for one thing he plays very softly and
Guest:When you hear him, he's smashing it, right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Those are microphones.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Charlie's not hitting that hard.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:No, he's not.
Guest:And he's got a really interesting way where he lifts the stick off the hi-hat so that the backbeat stands out.
Guest:I mean, he's developed this little thing that's a signature sound.
Guest:He's got really good time.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And he's very even as a person, man.
Guest:In the middle of a storm, in the midst of chaos, Charlie's cool.
Marc:Yeah, he seems that way.
Marc:I like that he didn't drive.
Marc:Yeah, he doesn't drive.
Marc:He still doesn't drive?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:So what were some of the other sessions you were involved with before you started making your own records?
Guest:Oh, well, by the time I moved to L.A.
Guest:So I moved to L.A.
Guest:and, you know, I started knocking on doors.
Guest:I was trying to get a record deal.
Guest:That's what I thought I was going to do.
Marc:And at this time, are you still friends with Steve and Boz?
Marc:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:To this day or no?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, that's great.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:No, we've kept it up.
Guest:Boz more than Steve.
Guest:Steve's really in the rock world.
Guest:I just don't resonate, man, so we don't have a lot to talk about.
Guest:But Boz, yeah, Boz is into good wine and jazz and stuff, and we still hang.
Guest:He had some big hits, man.
Guest:He had huge hits.
Guest:You know, you forget what that is, what a song like Lowdown is.
Guest:Yeah, Lowdown and the Lido Shuffle.
Guest:These are corporations.
Guest:Each one of these songs is an industry.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So anyway, I come to LA.
Guest:I figure I'm going to get a record deal because I've been on these Steve Miller records.
Guest:I've done these sessions, blah, blah, blah.
Guest:First thing I learned is don't say anything about graduate school.
Guest:That's not what we're selling here.
Guest:so i'm knocking on doors nobody's taking my call six months ago is by this is a true story one day so oh i'm sharing a house in uh the hollywood hills at this point with glenn johns who was the producer from england yeah yeah because i was living here and he was coming back and forth so he had a bedroom so one day he says look i got to go over to capital records why don't you come with me we'll go and hang out at the pool hall yeah we used to go shoot pool sure
Guest:So I go there with him.
Guest:He says, look, I just got to stop upstairs for a quick minute.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:We wind up in the office of a guy named Artie Mogul.
Guest:Artie Mogul, famous guy for going through record companies and being very creative, but being very generous to himself also.
Guest:uh so arty mogul somebody i've been trying to get on the phone for six months won't take my call but i walk in with glenn oh how you doing nice to meet you blah blah blah say listen i'm on my way out to lunch you guys want to come yeah sure yeah so glenn and i go with arty mogul down to the brown derby the old brown derby we walk in we're meeting his friend albert grossman who at the time was dylan's manager yeah so here's arty he's a badass right oh man yeah this is a real gangster yeah
Guest:And Artie Mogul was his right-hand guy.
Guest:So between the two of them, we've got Al Capone and Arnie Rothstein.
Guest:And we sit down and Artie Mogul says, you know, Albert, there's only one girl I want to fuck anymore.
Guest:And Albert says, well, who's that Artie?
Guest:Artie says the Queen of England.
Guest:I says, Queen of England, she's a dog.
Guest:Why do you want to fuck the Queen of England?
Guest:Artie says, because I want to hear the Queen of England say, give it to me, Artie, give it to me.
Guest:And I went, oh my God, we are not in Kansas.
Guest:Or Racine.
Guest:Or Racine.
Guest:Two days later, he took my call.
Guest:Six weeks later, I had a record deal.
Guest:Six weeks after that, he had left the company.
Guest:He threw me a bone on his way out the door.
Guest:He knew it.
Guest:And he knew it, and he did it just because I was there and I had lunch.
Guest:That's sweet.
Guest:And that's an L.A.
Guest:story.
Guest:And that was the first record?
Guest:That was my first record in 1971.
Guest:And now, were you still working as a session guy?
Guest:Did you do sessions?
Guest:I was trying, man.
Guest:I did song demos.
Guest:I did a James Taylor demo.
Guest:I did a bunch of demos by people.
Guest:What does a demo mean?
Guest:The publisher buys studio time.
Guest:An artist goes in there and lays down some tunes, not for their own record, but so that the publisher can get somebody else to cover the tune.
Marc:Oh, I see.
Marc:And who are some of the other guys you work with?
Marc:You work with James Taylor?
Marc:Well, I mean, I didn't work with them.
Marc:I just showed up and played on the demos.
Guest:I spent, when I was in LA, a bunch of time with this lunatic named Jesse Ed Davis.
Guest:He was very famous at the time.
Guest:He worked with Taj Mahal.
Guest:Great rock and roll guitar player.
Guest:Really inspired.
Guest:I wound up with him going on the road.
Guest:It ended when we were in Seattle.
Guest:The band had dropped acid.
Guest:I remember in the middle of the night, somebody banging on the door next to me saying, come on, man, just give me my clothes.
Guest:I decided I can't do this.
Guest:Yeah, and you were never a drug dude.
Guest:I wasn't a hallucinogenic drug dude.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I'm a bebopper, man.
Guest:I like a little smoke, a little taste, everything's cool.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Okay, so 1971 is the first record, and that's a bebop record.
Marc:Not really.
Guest:What it was, was I had said to Artie, I said, listen,
Guest:uh i like jazz i like blues like funk and i'm not really a singer so i'm gonna have my pals boz and steve and all these guys they're gonna sing he said no man he said we're uh doing uh singer songwriters here yeah and if you're not a singer well i don't think we can i said well of course i can sing right i never sang in my life i swear to god first time i saw a microphone in my face was a eight thousand dollar neumann in capital studio a you know the famous frank sinatra studio yeah
Guest:So I was faking it.
Guest:I was really, really faking it.
Guest:And my instincts were toward jazz.
Guest:So I had jazz guys.
Guest:I mean, Charlie Watts played on the record.
Guest:Boz played on the record.
Guest:But at the same time, Blue Mitchell, this great trumpet player who used to work with Horace Silver and Ray Charles, he was on the record.
Guest:So it was kind of a mix between jazz.
Marc:Jazz and pop.
Marc:Did you know these guys or was it intimidating?
Marc:I mean, did you feel like you had a relationship with these guys?
Marc:You were one of them and you weren't intimidated?
Guest:I tell you, man, that's a beautiful question because, of course, I knew a lot of the guys.
Guest:Jimmy Keltner, the drummer here, a great drummer.
Marc:He's a big drummer.
Marc:He was part of the Ventura crew, wasn't he?
Marc:Wasn't he part of that?
Guest:Yeah, and that was part of Jesse Davis.
Guest:I mean, there were a lot of those guys that I felt comfortable with.
Guest:But this guy, Blue Mitchell,
Guest:You know, when I was 13 years old in Racine, Wisconsin, I had this Horace Silver record.
Guest:And Blue was on it.
Guest:And this was like I had two records at the time, right?
Guest:And I would sit next to my little record player like an Eskimo around a fire, you know, listening and listening to this one record.
Guest:That's all I had.
Guest:Until the point where, one, I got totally nuts and I thought I could understand it, whatever that meant.
Guest:And the second thing was I thought I was related to these cats.
Guest:I just had this feeling that these guys were my cousins or something weird.
Guest:And when I found out they were black, I figured, well, black, white, doesn't matter, man.
Guest:So anyway, the first call I made when I got the record deal was to try to find Blue Mitchell.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I figured it was my last record.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If I'm going to make one record, I'm going down with Blue Mitchell.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I find him in Hawaii playing with Ray Charles.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'd say, Blue, you don't know me.
Guest:I got a record deal.
Guest:I wonder if he said, Baby Boy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Baby Boy.
Guest:I wish more people would call me.
Guest:I'd be delighted.
Guest:And he came and he played on it.
Guest:This is really revelatory because he came.
Guest:Now, I'm totally beside myself.
Marc:How old were you at that point?
Marc:71?
Guest:28.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So you're a kid.
Guest:I'm a kid.
Guest:I was just dancing as fast as I could.
Guest:So I made my chord chart up for him and everything.
Guest:We're going over, and I'm nervous.
Guest:Blue Mitchell, or Silver.
Guest:This is the top of the hill, man, as far as I'm concerned.
Guest:Gets the horn out.
Guest:Have a little taste, man.
Guest:Go in the studio.
Guest:Put the earphones on.
Guest:And nothing's happening, man.
Guest:I mean, he's kind of fluffing around his horn.
Guest:He's blowing the spit out of it.
Guest:I'm playing it again.
Guest:Something's wrong.
Guest:So like 15 minutes into it, I go out into the studio.
Guest:I say, Blue, I got to apologize.
Guest:I'm sure my chart's terrible.
Guest:He said, no, you keep doing it.
Guest:About a half hour into it, suddenly he starts playing like the voice of God.
Guest:And I realize he can't read.
Guest:He's just sitting there listening to it over and over until he's got it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I went out, man, everyone was over.
Guest:I said, man, how did you do all those great Horace Silver records, man?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He said, well, you know, we played them live for a long time before we recorded them.
Guest:So that's how he got it.
Guest:So he couldn't read the charts.
Guest:So this whole idea of mistakes.
Marc:But he wouldn't cop to it.
Guest:No, because this is, you know, he was of this tradition, this oral tradition.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:yeah which is just you pick it up you hear it yeah you uh you surrender to the groove you surrender to it you become it right you let it speak through you so why the choice and like you know okay so outside the singer songwriter thing i mean your love for bebop and the and the context it provides is so deep you know you just felt like in that in that first record you got it played by whatever the they were offering you within that
Guest:Well, I didn't really know what a record was.
Guest:I didn't know who I was.
Guest:I didn't know nothing.
Marc:I'm just trying to get in line and play this game, whatever this is.
Marc:So as things went on, I mean, because it seems like I couldn't listen to all 40 records, but your sound is a pretty smooth sound.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, you know, there's not... I didn't feel that, and maybe on some of the other records, I don't know, that it was, you know, sort of straight-up bebop exploration, where you're gonna, you know, kind of ride that stuff out.
Guest:Did you do some of that?
Guest:Yeah, well, you know, I made a live record once in Montreux, Switzerland, with the Brecker brothers and a bunch of cats, and it's pretty straight-up.
Guest:I made another record called Bop City that was dedicated to this, but I'm always writing lyrics.
Guest:You know, writing is something I've always been drawn to, and so there are always some kind of lyrics on it, and I...
Guest:I sing like a piano player.
Guest:I'm not a singer.
Guest:I sing like Fats Waller wasn't a singer.
Marc:It's a tradition.
Marc:It's a jazz tradition.
Marc:Well, maybe I'm confusing something.
Marc:Maybe I'm confusing, because bebop is, there's a groove to it and there's closure to it, but people like Miles or people like Coltrane or people like some of the other warriors who would take it to a place where everything was about to break apart.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I know what you're talking about.
Guest:Yeah, blowing the formal.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And that, you know, I sort of misidentify that, you know, because that's a very specific thing.
Marc:That is not bebop.
Marc:Bebop is what led to that.
Guest:Bebop is a grammar.
Marc:It's a grammar.
Guest:Yeah, so that was my misunderstanding.
Guest:So you did do bebop, really?
Guest:I, my whole life, have always wanted to speak that language.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That's what it was.
Guest:And it's a grammar.
Guest:Right.
Marc:and you learn it and then the the goal is to get your own voice i mean what is that okay so let's talk about that grammar you're coming out of uh the boogie woogie piano you know there you know there's a whole history behind bebop so what what separates you know what's the drop off you know from the big band to the smaller combo to you know what is the fun what's the first bebop record
Guest:First bebop record, tough to say, but certainly the, you know, everybody points to the early Charlie Parker records, you know, from the 40s, Dizzy Gillespie stuff.
Guest:Right.
Guest:By then the vocabulary, the idiom had matured to the point, there's an apocryphal story of Charlie Parker in a chili joint back in the 40s, where he said he made this breakthrough, the harmonic breakthrough.
Guest:Basically, I mean, if we had a keyboard here, I could show you what I'm talking about, but it's the upper intervals of a chord.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Briefly, a major chord is the 1st, the 3rd, the 5th, and if you're playing blues, the 7th.
Guest:But in jazz, we go to the 9th, we go to the 11th, the b5, the 13th, and these upper intervals are what makes jazz feel so exotic.
Guest:And there's also chord substitution, so instead of playing a Bb chord, you might play a C minor chord to an F chord, or you might play a Gb to a B and then down to Bb.
Guest:You've got all this...
Guest:indirection that's considered eloquent in the... Moving towards, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Resolution.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so the journey becomes very important.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, the elegance of your personal journey, you know, people, yeah, man, you hear what he said, he just said this, but I never heard anybody say that, so that's what he contributed.
Marc:Right, but he, you know, he's got this, that chord, this chord, this chord, and then like, boom, what was that?
Marc:Boom, what was that?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Whoa!
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:So now, this is the bebop idiom, but when you get somebody like Train, let's say, as a classic example, or Ornette, certainly,
Guest:When you take the form of this stuff and you keep progressing, ultimately what happens is the keyboard, 88 keys, turns into one chord.
Guest:That's like one, and then you start thinking in terms of sound rather than chords.
Guest:And once you're doing that, you're not in bebop anymore.
Guest:Bebop is this idiom where the rhythm, the swing, propels the exploration, which still is true with train, but the exploration is within the idiom.
Guest:It's a grammar.
Guest:It's like we got verbs and
Guest:and nouns and stuff, bebop's got a grammar.
Marc:And also bebop was defined by the intimacy of the combo.
Marc:Small groups, exactly.
Marc:Piano, horn, drum and bass, and that's it.
Marc:That's your basic bebop quartet.
Marc:And when that started happening, then you're sort of reentering a world
Marc:of what you were talking about with just a boogie-woogie piano player.
Marc:You know, you're coming out of big band, which I had to assume it had to have something to do with economics.
Marc:So you got all these players in big bands, which was the popular music, but I can't imagine what it must have been like to move that stuff around.
Marc:I mean, that's what people were dancing to.
Marc:You got to show up with 30 guys or 17 or however many is in that.
Marc:I mean, on some level, you know, these horn players, they must have been like, well, let's just jam.
Marc:And now, you know, okay, there's just four of us.
Marc:We can do this anywhere.
Guest:Well, and it also goes back even further.
Guest:If you go back to the original New Orleans stuff in 1910, 19-whatever, that was relatively small group, too.
Guest:Small group, mutual improvisation.
Guest:Everybody's improvising at once.
Guest:And that was like the day of younger Louis Armstrong and Oliver or whatever.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, King Oliver and Kid Ori and these guys.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They were improvising on popular songs and blues forms like ragtime.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was a piano form, but originally rag was a verb.
Marc:You know, you ragged a song.
Marc:Right.
Guest:but that's not like it seems that bebop's really you know into sort of you know a minory feel where that stuff felt sort of that's very hip man that's very hip because when we talked about substitutions a second ago those substitutions move through minor and major and they make this exotic thing happen yeah that's called bebop but the point is that back then you had small group improvisation right then it got bigger it got bigger because it got stylized it became duke ellington at the
Guest:cotton club yeah then heaven help us Benny Goodman got those hits those swing hits yeah then all the white kids started dancing oh my god we're gonna make some money and then everybody had a big band and everybody was gonna make some money and then the war came and cats got drafted and it was kind of rough during the depression as well and by the time the war ended there was hardly any big bands anymore so that was it so is it yeah so it did have to do with culture and economics and sort of the shattering of the national fabric there yes
Marc:So were you around then when that New York scene was sort of happening and the vanguard and that kind of stuff?
Guest:Well, when I was 17 years old, no, I was 18, the summer of my 18th year after my freshman year in college, I took a Greyhound bus from Racine, Wisconsin to New York City, got out at Port Authority and walked up to 52nd Street and stood in front of Birdland until it opened.
Guest:About six hours.
Guest:And I stood there and I went and I heard Dizzy Gillespie and some cats.
Guest:And so that was 61.
Guest:So I got to hear from 61 to, let's say, mid-70s a lot of The Great Cats.
Guest:I didn't hear Charlie Parker, but I heard Coltrane a lot.
Guest:I heard Miles.
Guest:I got to hear a lot of people.
Guest:You saw Coltrane?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, a few times.
Guest:And was that amazing?
Guest:Well, we were all so taken, man.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I can't separate truth from fiction.
Guest:In my mind, you know, it was spiritual.
Guest:But, you know, he was so burrowed into our consciousness by this.
Guest:Train was everything, you know, for a musician from 63, 4, 5, the music.
Guest:It was like the Joshua Jericho, man.
Guest:I mean, you know, so...
Guest:I did hear him once at the Half Note in New York, and the place was sold out, and there was one seat that they let me have.
Guest:There was an elevator bandstand, and the seat was right below Elvin Jones' bass drum.
Guest:So all I heard for two hours, bam!
Marc:I thought it was great, you know?
Guest:I thought, yeah, man.
Marc:so i don't know yeah now you and now who were the guys that you spend time with you i know because you did a series of conversations with these guys you know as a fan and as a musician yeah but i have to like you know in in looking at you know what i glean of your career um that you know i it seems to me that as as amazing a musician as you are that you know the fan thing you know probably never left you right never oh no no i still uh can't believe you know that i got to play with blue mitchell
Guest:That was it.
Marc:That was the moment.
Guest:That was it, man.
Marc:You could have shoot me now, man.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Shoot me now.
Marc:Now, when you approach these guys in conversations with Miles Davis, because when I read some of your stuff, I mean, you definitely have a poetic hunger, and I do too, where somebody can say something where you're like, oh, that's it.
Marc:You just did it.
Marc:What was your sense of him as a person, and how did you interact with him?
Guest:Well, you know, it's interesting because he had this reputation, of course, of attacking white people and all this insanity.
Guest:It's not true, of course.
Guest:Fortunately, I had been around music and musicians long enough to know that it's about music.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And music is about a person's life.
Guest:Mm hmm.
Guest:you know uh you can't play bigger than you are as a person and so if you love somebody's music there's something there that you really want to talk about that isn't music right so i never talked to cats particularly about music i talked to them about you know i would sit down say hey how you doing where were you last night yeah sure uh but miles uh i i the few times i was with him he was very generous very open i mean he cooked lunch for me and uh
Guest:He was nostalgic about the old days, and he was really sweet.
Guest:At the time, he was living with, what's her name in Malibu, the actress?
Guest:Cicely Tyson?
Guest:Yeah, he was living with Cicely.
Guest:And I said, you know, he used to sketch toward the end of his life.
Guest:We were sitting there in his place out on Malibu, and he was drawing.
Guest:I said, man, have you always drawn?
Guest:Why did you start drawing?
Guest:Because he really put a lot of time into it.
Uh-huh.
Guest:He said, oh, man, you know, he said, you know how long it takes actresses to get dressed.
Guest:He said, so I started drawing and he got off on the subject.
Guest:He said, man, come on.
Guest:He took me up into the bedroom into Cicely's closet.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I said, look at what this bitch has got going.
Guest:I mean, it was funny.
Guest:He was charming.
Guest:He was really funny.
Guest:And generally speaking, all the cats I talked to, with some exceptions.
Guest:Who were they?
Guest:Give me a short list.
Guest:The exceptions?
Guest:Well, no, no.
Guest:Who were the guys you talked to?
Guest:Oh, Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, you know, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Marc:Barry Harris, I don't know, you know, hundreds, hundreds of guys.
Marc:Well, it's interesting because in my limited experience of it, and I can listen to jazz and I do dig it, you know what I mean?
Marc:And, you know, I get it.
Marc:You know, I think some people, they enter it and it's sort of, I don't get it.
Marc:So I get it, but I don't necessarily have the obsession or the patience to get all of it.
Marc:There's a lot out there.
Marc:And, you know, and one of the things that I've noticed is that, you know, once you get outside the prime movers, you know, you're going to get a lot of similarity in sound.
Guest:It gets harder and harder to find your own voice, man.
Guest:These guys are so powerful that they suck a lot of guys along.
Guest:I mean, that's just the way it is.
Marc:But you run through that list, like Herbie Hancock.
Marc:Once you get into the softer grooves, I kind of get a little lost.
Marc:Yeah, too many notes.
Marc:Yeah, something.
Guest:Which notes would you like me to lose?
Marc:Right, it's too many notes.
Guest:The business in the 70s, the record business, really swamped the music.
Guest:The record business took the plant.
Guest:It was like you have jazz, which was this wildflower that grew up by itself through the cracks in the sidewalk, right?
Guest:And just pulled it up by the roots.
Guest:And so after that, jazz wasn't captured out in the world.
Guest:It was manufactured in the studios.
Guest:And you could just see Miles struggling with this and everybody struggling with this concept.
Guest:Do you think anybody hit it?
Marc:oh yeah yeah people hit it herbie hit it with headhunters for example uh no there were a lot of great jazz records have been made subsequent people figured it out of course yeah and for your own work i mean in the 70s you you know you did another few records right yeah and did you how are you evolving i mean what how are you approaching a jazz at that time
Guest:Well, that's really interesting because I was searching, too, for what was it about jazz that I could preserve in the face of this pop music onslaught?
Guest:I mean, I had to be making records that were sort of poppy because that's who was making records.
Guest:There really wasn't an option.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I struggle with it.
Guest:I made some records in the 70s that people dig, you know, Ben Sidren fans dig them, but I can hear myself struggling.
Guest:It wasn't until like 78 when I stumbled on a way to play what's called a halftime shuffle groove with some bebop on top of it.
Guest:that became a signature for me uh-huh uh where i figured out how to get the swing feel of bebop with a backbeat so it was authentic so it felt authentic so you could go play it in the club and get people to start screaming and turn them out you know that's really what you're talking about and how'd you what was the moment where you hit it i mean do you remember it yeah it was a studio here it was in sound lab studio here in la and uh
Guest:It's a drummer.
Guest:He's not a known guy.
Guest:His name is Bill Meeker.
Guest:And he started playing this halftime shuffle.
Guest:And I played this little vamp and I started talking.
Guest:It was the first time I started talking.
Guest:See, that's the other thing.
Guest:I didn't realize that you didn't have to be a pop singer.
Guest:It took me a long time to grasp that just because that's what sold yesterday, it doesn't mean that's who you are.
Guest:I started talking.
Guest:And I started telling stories on top of this groove.
Guest:And bingo, there it was.
Marc:And now you're in your mid-30s.
Marc:You're coming up on 40 and you find your moment.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I find out what I can do.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:And you held on to it.
Marc:You're like, that's it.
Marc:That's the sound.
Marc:Well, you're right.
Marc:It takes a little pressure off you as a vocalist.
Marc:It integrates your ability to write and just speak your mind into the groove that's laid down.
Guest:Can go out there and...
Guest:work with bebop players everybody's comfortable i don't have to pretend to play rock and roll we don't have to play everything really fast and loud right do you ever riff with uh with words you know yeah oh absolutely start doing that start doing that and at the same time great jazz soloists like phil woods or bunky green these guys are playing behind me now we got this thing but we got a pocket we got a back beat half time shuffle and you can swing on it now i make a series of records
Guest:that are really kind of pushing the margin.
Guest:There's a record called The Cat in the Hat, which was a notorious record when it was made in 1980 because it was all these old classic bebop tunes with the great jazz players, great, I mean, Steve Gadd is the drummer and Abe Laboreal is the bass player, done.
Guest:And I wrote lyrics to him and it was like really on the edge of what you could do in terms of the sound of a pop record, but the heart of...
Guest:of a jazz record.
Marc:Now, and when you talk about Ben Sidren, you know, fans and jazz fans in general, I mean, this is, it's an insulated culture in a little bit.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Of course.
Marc:Like, because like, you know, for me to be introduced to you now, you know, again, I'm not a jazz music bot here.
Marc:You know, I needed an education in the greats.
Marc:You know, I went through a period where I listened to some big band.
Marc:I listened to some swing.
Marc:I got the, you know, the major bebop records.
Marc:I wanted to know because I do dig it and I've gone through periods where I really listened to it.
Marc:But for somebody to pursue it
Marc:I mean, that's a big world.
Marc:I mean, when you're talking about that being a big record for you, what does that look like numbers wise?
Guest:Oh, number, I never sold more than 30,000 records ever.
Guest:That's the biggest selling record.
Marc:And how's that for a jazz record though?
Marc:I mean, in generally speaking- Today it's a smash hit.
Marc:Are you kidding?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Nobody sells 30,000 anymore.
Marc:So where are the people?
Marc:When you go out and you work, where are they coming out to see you?
Marc:uh last 20 years great following in spain great following in france i'm a star in france man in japan i got a good following um italy not so much uh what so what do you make of that i mean obviously america is consumed in pop culture so i understand the fall off here that i understand that you know you're gonna have you know jazz culture is sort of a nerd culture they're very specific and
Marc:And I'm sure they're very dedicated, but the numbers probably aren't there.
Marc:But what do you think about why France?
Marc:What is it that makes that different?
Guest:Well, I once got a review in the London Times that said Ben Sidren is the first existential jazz rapper.
Guest:The intellectual aspect of what I'm doing.
Guest:Okay, right.
Marc:More sophisticated audience.
Guest:More sophisticated.
Guest:I'm still in the tradition.
Guest:They can relate to the jazz roots of it, and yet I'm telling a contemporary story.
Marc:And during the 50s, a lot of those bebop dudes were, you know, France was a haven for them.
Marc:Paris was, you know, it was happening.
Guest:Well, exactly, and in part for the same reasons.
Guest:You see these movies, like the Bird movie and these movies, and they show jazz guys as basically drug addicts.
Guest:These guys were not that at all.
Guest:They were readers.
Guest:Charlie Parker read a lot of books.
Guest:They talked about world things.
Guest:The idea that jazz is a bunch of primitives just getting lucky playing anything.
Guest:Strung out on smack.
Guest:Strung out on smack.
Guest:is an American myth, man.
Guest:It's, I think, in part because that's what the white establishment needs to think of black artists, or did then, anyway.
Guest:Not so much, I suppose.
Marc:No, I mean, the stereotype evolves into rappers' lives.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:And they play it up because it sells.
Marc:It sells.
Marc:Well, yeah, I mean, I think that is a mischaracterization because even me, you know, I mean, I just read Keith Richards' autobiography and here your whole life you think this guy is some strung out moron and he's a very sophisticated cat.
Marc:Very sophisticated cat.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:I mean, on some level, I mean, if you manage your habit properly, it'll relax you to get some reading done.
Hey.
Marc:I like that.
Guest:Turn down the noise.
Guest:Focus.
Guest:It's like Alan Arkin's character in Little Miss Sunshine.
Guest:Remember that?
Guest:I love that.
Guest:I love that character.
Guest:That's me.
Guest:That's where I'm going.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, Art Blakey was doing smack in his 80s, and he had a five-year-old daughter when he died.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, the thing about, I think that people misunderstand about smack is that, you know, they're cats that get strung out and they lose it.
Marc:But, I mean, those lifelong habit dudes, you know, they know their dose.
Marc:They know what they need to get by.
Marc:You know, they're not pushing the envelope like they used to.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Guest:It's a sad life, but it is what it is.
Guest:It is what it is.
Guest:And everybody's out here just trying to get through it, you know.
Marc:I think that smack's interesting, especially in jazz, and I think that to really think about it intellectually, what that particular high enabled some of these guys to do.
Marc:Because, I mean, I was never a smack guy, but I tried it a couple times in my life, and there's something about the amount of noise it turns down in your brain.
Guest:You know, Charlie Parker once said, he was asked about this, he said you don't play better on heroin, but you hear better on heroin.
Yeah.
Marc:yeah because it you know it's like everything gets real close and it's just right here yeah a little it is a little bit of a a numbing effect yeah and it sort of pushes away the noise i mean i think that's why those guys do it if they're not going for the big hit and trying to you know get higher than high it just sort of like it turns down the noise it turns down the noise and it
Guest:You know, Phil Woods is a great, great alto player and a great friend, and I'm a huge fan of his.
Guest:And he must be in his 80s by now.
Guest:But anyway, he can play anything he can hear, which is, you know, there aren't that many people who can actually play what they can hear.
Guest:And I once said to him, man, what...
Guest:what's it like to be able to play whatever you hear?
Guest:He said, man, playing's no problem.
Guest:He said, the problem is wanting to play.
Guest:He said, as you get older, it's this desire for desire.
Guest:You know, you miss that desire that you felt when you were young and you have to find a way to stay in touch with that feeling.
Guest:You know, it's a sexual feeling almost, you know, like when you hear something or you go, fuck, man, I could do that.
Guest:Or what is that?
Guest:And he said, you got to remember the first time you played
Guest:played a note on your horn and it sounded good.
Guest:Do you remember that first time?
Guest:I remember the first time I was improvising and I felt something.
Guest:I said, whoa, that's what we're doing here.
Guest:The discovery moment.
Guest:The discovery moment.
Guest:And so as you get older, it gets harder and harder to get to this place.
Guest:And I think this is what drives people more and more to try to tune out the world and try to get back to this thing and try to remember this thing.
Guest:I mean, in a weird, twisted way, it's a spiritual thing.
Marc:It's a spiritual thing, but oddly, it's also specifically addictive.
Marc:In the same way that you're chasing that first note, that first moment of discovery, it's like, how am I going to get back into that?
Marc:First kiss, man.
Marc:Yeah, right?
Marc:First kiss.
Marc:How do I get back?
Marc:Shit, if I knew then, what I know now.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So that feeling and to frame it as a spiritual search for truth or just a basic search for truth where something happens that will never happen again and you're going to be touched by God or touched by that moment of brilliance.
Marc:That is what the life is about, right?
Guest:It goes back to how we started talking about making mistakes in public.
Guest:You've got to introduce an element of risk, of real risk.
Guest:You could really fail here.
Guest:Something bad could really happen for something good to really happen.
Guest:Now, it's only good in terms of yourself.
Guest:The people out there, they don't often know the difference, but that's not why we're out there.
Marc:Well, it's interesting because as I continue to work in what I do, the difference between having an act or being a guy.
Marc:You're going to be a guy, you're going to have an act.
Guest:I like that.
Marc:I like that.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And there's very few cats that do it.
Marc:and one of the only cats that do it and you know it's very and it's uh like richard lewis yeah is is uh he's a guy he's a guy yeah and uh you know there's a very easy way in the way that culture is structured in in in how people see failure or success or whatever has been i tell you man i've been talking to dudes who who time has forgotten you know culturally yes you know like you know when especially with musicians and some comics and
Marc:And these are guys that have big hits, and everyone's like, what happened to that guy?
Marc:And nine times out of 10, man, well, they've been doing the best work they've ever done in their life since they fell out of the public eye.
Marc:They've never been happier.
Marc:They got freedom.
Marc:They're exploring things they never would have explored, and they're fine.
Marc:And you talk to a guy like Richard Lewis, and he's got that hunger where he's like, I'm going to go out there with nothing, and I'm going to fucking ride it.
Marc:And I'm going to search for that thing that happens only on stage.
Marc:I'm not comparing myself, but in the same way, I was just in Indianapolis.
Marc:And the funny thing about me, I don't know if you ever have this experience where given all the technology we have,
Marc:to very easily at least record yourself, you know, in a basic way.
Marc:You know, before I go on, I'm like, no, I'm not fucking, I'm not going to turn it on.
Marc:What difference does it make?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because like, if you think I'm going to listen to that, in my heart and in my mind, it's the moment, that's it.
Marc:Well, I'm not going to be able to recapture that thing.
Marc:And as soon as you start trying to like, you know, I had that moment and it's like, it was one line, I should be able to recapture that line.
Marc:You're probably not going to be able to do it.
Marc:Absolutely not.
Guest:And it's going to throw your timing off.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's the real problem with trying to remember something.
Guest:I hate rehearsing.
Guest:I'm notoriously bad at rehearsing.
Guest:Because I figure when you rehearse, it just gives you more to forget.
Guest:You're going to go on stage and say, no, I'm going to remember this.
Guest:I'm going to remember this.
Guest:I'm going to remember this.
Guest:And you're going to forget something.
Guest:So why not just go up there and forget everything?
Guest:Start over.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So, all right, so then let's get, because I know you did a lot of records.
Marc:You're doing all right, and you had your breakthrough in your mid-30s.
Marc:You found your groove.
Marc:You stick with that groove.
Marc:But it seems to me that there's a couple albums recently outside of the Jewish record, which we talked about a little bit.
Marc:But it seems like this Garcia Lorca record is a big record for you.
Guest:Yeah, big record.
Guest:And the Dylan record a little bit?
Guest:Big record.
Guest:The first one is the Garcia Lorca record.
Guest:Which was a Grammy-nominated record.
Guest:Grammy-nominated record.
Guest:And what happened was I was traveling in Spain, playing some gigs, and my son was going to school in Seville.
Guest:So I went to Seville to visit him.
Guest:And then he and I went to Granada, which is just down the road, for a little concert.
Guest:And for some reason, I was getting some play.
Guest:And so I was getting interviewed a lot.
Guest:And a guy's doing an interview with me.
Guest:He's an editor of El Pais, big paper.
Guest:And we're in his hotel suite.
Guest:And he's got three good-looking chicks around him.
Guest:And I'm thinking, wow, what's going on?
Guest:And they're all asking if you want coffee and everything.
Guest:Well, one of them, it turned out they were part of his intellectual circle.
Guest:And one of them was Laura Garcia Lorca, the niece of Federico Garcia Lorca.
Guest:Great poet.
Guest:the best the bob dylan slash abraham lincoln of spain yeah let's just say that he's everything to spain he was murdered he was one of the first casualties of the spanish civil war 36 he was gay he he they thought he was a communist i mean he was everything you weren't allowed to be in franco spain but also everything that represents the not only the creative spirit of an artist but the rebellious spirit of an artist and and and also the you know he was you know he his art meant something
Guest:Yes, his art meant something, and he was associated with Dali and Bunuel in modernism, and this was the 20th century cat.
Guest:So anyway, they're going to do a tribute to Lorca to, I don't know, 50 years, 75 years since his assassination.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And Laura, his niece, is in charge of his estate and we're hanging.
Guest:She says, look, why don't you come on over here in a couple of months and perform?
Guest:And a lot of people at Patti Smith had gone.
Guest:I forget who else.
Guest:A lot of people were doing these tributes to him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I said, great.
Guest:I didn't know anything about Lorca.
Guest:So I went home.
Guest:You knew he was a big guy.
Guest:I knew he was a big guy.
Guest:I knew the name of one or two of his poems.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I went to a party that night when I got home.
Guest:I live in Madison, Wisconsin, University Town.
Guest:I'm at a party with the locals.
Guest:I say, anybody here know anything about Lorca?
Guest:The guy says, I wrote my dissertation on Lorca.
Guest:The next day, he brings over to my house a stack of books on Lorca.
Guest:I got six weeks to pull this together.
Guest:For six weeks, I did nothing but read Lorca day and night and try to learn enough Spanish to pull this off.
Marc:How'd you read them, though?
Marc:I mean, how do you, when you take some of that, because I did that with some of your records.
Marc:You know, that like, you know, I'm a pretty sensitive cat and I, you know, I can take shit in.
Marc:But, you know, you got to figure out, you know, how does this get into people's hearts?
Marc:I mean, you're talking about a nation who love this man and he's a respected literary figure.
Marc:So you got to approach him as an artist.
Guest:You got to approach him with more distance than if you just happened to stumble on him and it was something you were digging because you're now responsible to these people's memories.
Guest:And that's that's what was kind of the dance I was trying to do.
Guest:My Spanish is rudimentary, so I couldn't do it in Spanish, but at the same time, his language is very poetic and flowery, and so the feeling, it's like music, you know, you can't translate bebop into country music and say, well, I'm playing bebop.
Guest:Just similarly, you can't translate him into English and say, I'm doing Lorca, but...
Guest:There are certain elements he deals with, like the stuff that we're talking about.
Guest:He has this notion of duende.
Guest:Duende is like soul, right?
Guest:Duende for Lorca is in the bull ring where the matador and the bull are face to face.
Guest:And there's that moment you could die or you could triumph.
Guest:And that's why everybody's screaming for the victory of the human against the beast.
Guest:It's a great metaphor.
Guest:And so there are a lot of these elements that I start absorbing and absorbing and absorbing.
Guest:So eventually, six weeks on, man, I'm in Granada, and I'm at the childhood home of Garcia Lorca.
Guest:It's called the Huerta de San Vicente.
Guest:It's where he grew up.
Guest:It's where he lived.
Guest:It's where he was dragged out by his heels in 1936 into the countryside and murdered.
Guest:It's a very important, iconic place.
Guest:And Laura, God bless her, has decided to take Lorca's personal piano,
Guest:Out of the house, into the garden, and I'm going to play it on this event.
Guest:Never been done.
Guest:The piano's never been moved.
Guest:First of all, there's a myth about the piano that it's haunted.
Guest:Second of all, they actually, back in 1936, when they thought Lorca was a communist, they thought he was hiding a radio transmitter.
Guest:In that piano?
Guest:In the piano.
Guest:So they took the piano apart.
Guest:So now this is the mythical piano.
Guest:This is bird's horn.
Guest:This is, I don't know, this is George Washington's axe.
Marc:Now, in your general life, how much credence do you pay those ritual artifacts or things that are loaded, magic instruments, magic spaces?
Marc:I mean, is this part of your mind and heart?
Guest:I don't believe and I don't disbelieve.
Guest:It's like, you know, maybe some totems can have power.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I think maybe.
Marc:I guess it's, but it's really directly related to how you feel about it.
Marc:I mean, how'd you feel about playing that piano?
Guest:It was a terrible piano.
Guest:so you were like oh shit oh shit it was a terrible instrument yeah um first of all it was so old you couldn't tune it i mean it wouldn't go up to tune it was it was the action was a terrible it was an old piano it was 110 years old parlor piano so you were thinking on a practical level what am i going to do yeah because this is not what i thought i was going to do so we're out there but the interesting thing is that piano definitely is haunted and
Guest:I mean, I don't know if it's a ghost, but it's haunted.
Guest:It's something happens.
Guest:You know, it's got this sound, this weirdness.
Guest:So anyway, we play this gig and it's very dramatic.
Guest:I mean, we're under the moon.
Guest:There's the Alhambra behind us.
Guest:There's a couple hundred people scattered out in the garden.
Guest:I'm playing Lorca's piano and I'm saying into the microphone 76 years ago or 65 years ago.
Guest:years ago today on this piano and this place you know what i'm telling the stories yeah and i'm telling all these stories and at the end of the night the sound guy comes up to me and he hands me a dad a digital recording he said i don't know if you want this man but i just recorded the thing tonight i threw it in my bag i didn't listen to it for a couple of months a couple of months later i put it on i went oh shit this is there are spirits here yeah this is moving yeah
Guest:So I edited it down.
Guest:I decided, well, the only way anybody's going to take this seriously is if it's contextualized.
Guest:Why would anybody care about this unless we can tell them why they should care?
Guest:So I got Laura and I got a bunch of Lorca scholars and they gave me access to all of Lorca's drawings and papers.
Guest:And we put together this package.
Guest:And it became huge in Spain, as you can imagine.
Guest:And suddenly in Spain, I get to just like in France, I get to go on shows where we don't even talk about music.
Guest:We talk about America.
Guest:Heaven help us, you know.
Guest:So in Spain, I got to talk about Lorca and how it translates to a jazz guy.
Guest:They didn't want me to parse Lorca for them.
Guest:He's theirs.
Guest:They own him.
Guest:But they were very into the fact that I found a way to connect.
Marc:And it was very moving.
Marc:And what was that way in retrospect?
Marc:I mean, where did you see the intersection?
Marc:You found the intersection in Duende.
Marc:In terms of, because that seems to be the same way you were talking about those moments on stage that can't be recaptured.
Marc:There's a, you know, metaphorically a life or death situation there.
Guest:And there's also a thing in Lorca's life.
Guest:I mean, you can, the cliched way maybe to say modernism or 20th century.
Guest:But this connects to the Jewish thing.
Guest:You know, Lorca, his work was all about the outsider in the face of fascism.
Guest:I mean, it was all about the individual, about nature, about small things in life, about the heart.
Guest:And, you know, by the time I did the Lorca thing, I was deep into this Jewish thing.
Guest:And there was something that was kind of opening up.
Guest:And I was more interested in getting in touch with this than I was interested in being hip.
Guest:And that was a revelation to me.
Guest:My whole life was, you know.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:That's what age is, huh?
Marc:Yeah, maybe so.
Marc:So that's the hipster record and where you're talking about that rip you do on hipsters.
Guest:Don't cry for no hipster.
Guest:He knew what he signed up for.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:But you made it through.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So, okay.
Marc:So the age thing and the Jewish thing, what are you identifying as the Jewish thing right there?
Guest:Well, it's not religion, that's for sure.
Guest:No, no, I get that.
Guest:The Jewish thing is being a stranger in a strange land.
Guest:The Jewish thing is being somebody who's connected to the story, the tradition.
Guest:I mean, my feeling is, look, if God exists, that's clearly a miracle.
Guest:But if God doesn't exist, that means we worship a story.
Guest:And if we worship a story, and that story has moved so much history, that's a miracle too.
Guest:So let's look into this idea of...
Guest:of why people need a story so much.
Guest:What are people getting out of this idea of contextualizing themselves in terms of bigger things, bigger themes, guilt, revenge, all the things that are in the Bible, but love and compassion, and that there's more that keeps us together than separates them.
Guest:So to me, look, if anybody can convert, then everybody has the inner Jew.
Guest:That's the first thing.
Guest:I don't think being a Jew is so ethnically based, I think, especially as we go forward in the 21st century.
Guest:The Jewish thing is tied up with this American idea of social justice, which is a huge, in many ways, myth that was made by Jewish musicians, Jewish filmmakers.
Guest:You know, this idea that in America, the little guy who triumphs and love wins out over everything.
Guest:You know, you look around you, there's no evidence.
Guest:It's definitely a myth.
Guest:No evidence of any of this stuff.
Yeah.
Guest:But this is the myth of social justice.
Guest:This is a myth of caring.
Guest:This is the myth of tikkun olam, which is the Jewish expression for healing the world, leaving the world a better place.
Guest:So to me, I like that myth.
Guest:I mean, you got to buy some myth.
Guest:That's the myth I buy.
Guest:I think that's important.
Guest:I think it's real and you can take it to the bank.
Guest:And that was my point of contact with Lorca.
Guest:It's my point of contact.
Marc:Fighting the good fight.
Guest:Yeah, man.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You know, if I'm going to go down, I'm going to go down here with these guys.
Marc:Yeah, that's amazing.
Marc:So now, was it a similar thing with, for somebody to approach Dylan, I mean, I feel that there's a big love there.
Guest:Well, you know, Dylan, yeah, absolutely, because I'm not a singer either, and he's not a singer.
Guest:That was the first thing.
Guest:When I heard Dylan, the first thing I thought of was, oh, man, he can do that.
Guest:We can do it.
Guest:And I think Dylan actually is the reason why we got all this punk rock and rap and everything.
Guest:He just opened it up.
Guest:You didn't have to have a beautiful voice.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's the first thing.
Guest:But the second thing, quite obviously, is the words that are coming out of his mouth.
Marc:Where do they come from?
Guest:He doesn't know.
Guest:I mean, it's astounding.
Guest:He didn't know then.
Guest:He doesn't know now.
Guest:And...
Guest:so no i would never have approached dylan until i got to the point where it didn't matter and i was able to go to his songs and what happened was i started playing a couple of tunes on gigs i played subterranean homesick blues which you know that was one of my favorites because the language when you swing it up a little oh yeah yeah
Guest:You know, I say, again, it's like... It's got a little hip-hop thing.
Guest:I say, Johnny's in the basement mixing up the medicine.
Guest:I'm on the pavement thinking about the government.
Guest:The man in a trench coat, bad job laid off.
Guest:Says he got a bad cough, gotta get it paid off.
Guest:Look out, kids.
Guest:You know?
Guest:And so people, after the gig, are coming up to me and saying, man, I never understood Dylan's lyrics until you... Because he swallows them, you know?
Guest:He doesn't have to...
Guest:So I start introducing more and more.
Guest:The next thing I know, I got a set of Dylan material that's totally in my pocket, in my bag.
Guest:So I'm in France, and the one thing I wanted to do if I was going to do Dylan is try to get it haunted.
Guest:You know, this idea of haunted stuff is very appealing to me because by haunted, what I mean is sound, where the sound is probably more important than the content and the literal notes are the information.
Yeah.
Guest:and you can't stay in your comfort zone to do this because i mean i know all the great studios in la and all the great players and i could get them in here in a heartbeat and we could and it'd be great but it won't be haunted right and if you listen to those early dylan records they are definitely haunted who is this guy where is he oh yeah and that's the way john hammond recorded that stuff right a little bizarre you know it's just so stripped down stripped down and he's howling you know you get this howling thing he's bringing the history of the folk tradition uh upon us
Guest:And he's totally revealing something.
Guest:Now, it turned out it was a lie.
Guest:That was so unbelievable.
Guest:That wasn't his voice.
Guest:It was a lie.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:But it's a lie.
Marc:It was Ramblin' Jack Elliott's voice.
Marc:Woody Guthrie threw Ramblin' Jack.
Guest:That's exactly right.
Guest:But it told such a profound truth at the time when we needed to hear it that none of that mattered.
Guest:So to get it haunted...
Guest:I recorded it in a farmhouse in Spain with a bunch of European musicians who are good players, but approached it from an exotic point of view.
Marc:Well, they probably didn't have the cultural history with Dylan.
Guest:No, as a matter of fact, we were doing Tangled Up in Blue, and the drummer stopped and said, what is this song about?
Guest:And I had to stop and say, he's on the road, he's got this girl, he's got that girl, he's tangled up in blue.
Marc:Oh, okay.
Marc:Well, that's interesting because out of all the songs, I mean, in terms of the sort of stripped down, somewhat heartbreaking poetry, that's more Spanish than the other ones.
Marc:Well, that's true.
Marc:That is true.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:Well, you know, nobody even asks what Highway 61 means.
Guest:It's just too far off the chart.
Marc:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Marc:You're just jamming.
Marc:You're just jamming.
Marc:Well, I mean, that was ambitious.
Marc:Now, have you had any contact with Dylan?
Guest:Well, no.
Guest:The mountain has not come to Muhammad, but I'll tell you something.
Guest:I would be shocked if I ever do hear from him.
Guest:I actually would, in some ways, I would be a little...
Guest:It's not disappointed.
Guest:It's not disappointed because I would love when, you know, I met him a couple times.
Guest:He's a cranky old Jewish guy.
Guest:He's a cranky old guy, man.
Guest:You know, the feeling I have is that I did my best job.
Guest:And I know his manager digs it.
Guest:I know I've gotten.
Guest:Well, that's cool.
Marc:Yeah, people dig.
Marc:I had his son in here, you know.
Marc:Jake?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And I got a buddy who's a big Dylan fan, and every time Dylan's touring, my buddy goes and sees him many times.
Marc:I would ask him, what are you doing this weekend?
Guest:He'd say, I'm going to see the old Jew.
Guest:It is.
Guest:It's like going to show.
Guest:You can't understand a word he's saying.
Guest:He's davening.
Guest:He's howling.
Marc:But he's still doing it.
Marc:But that's it.
Marc:It's a very interesting decision he made that it seems to me he can't need the bread.
Marc:And it just seems like at some point he said, I'm going out like this.
Guest:But see, that's the Jewish thing.
Guest:That's my point about this whole thing.
Guest:You know, they say the Jews are the people of the book.
Guest:But the book isn't the Torah.
Guest:The book is the Talmud, which is the commentaries on the Torah, which is people sitting around.
Guest:The ongoing argument.
Guest:The ongoing argument.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you've got to get in a room with the other people to have the argument.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You don't tweet into the argument.
Guest:You're sitting around.
Guest:It's ongoing.
Guest:It's the rolling horizon of the questions of life.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you stay out there and you stay out there.
Guest:And that's what it is.
Guest:And in the process, you try to make things a little better than they were when you found them to bring a little truth to the fore.
Guest:And that's it.
Guest:That's the mission.
Marc:That is it.
Marc:That's beautiful, man.
Marc:And is that the through line of there was a fire?
Guest:That's the through line of There Was a Fire.
Marc:The book.
Guest:Jews, Music, and the American Dream.
Guest:It's about these people hit the ground running from Russia.
Guest:They had nothing in their pockets.
Guest:Between 1880 and 1920, two million of them showed up on the Lower East Side.
Guest:Biggest pocket of poverty in the world.
Guest:And from there, they- It all came.
Guest:They created the popular song form.
Guest:The movies.
Guest:At one point- The garment business.
Guest:But this is the beauty, the garment business.
Guest:This is a great example.
Guest:The reason they were into the needle trade is back in Russia, they weren't allowed to sell clothes.
Guest:They weren't allowed to have a business, right?
Guest:They could repair, the rag trade comes from, they would take rags and sew it into clothes and sell it, right?
Guest:They get to America, now they got sewing machines, right?
Guest:The next thing you know, they invent exact size clothing, right?
Guest:They democratize clothing.
Guest:Now everybody can look good.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's not that they wanted to do that.
Guest:It's that the Jewish impulse somehow, when it intersects with technology and modernity, pushes us forward.
Guest:There's something in this narrative that we participate in.
Marc:Oh, interesting, yeah.
Guest:So you took it from the needles to the horns to the... Well, these same guys who started the rag trade started the...
Guest:The business of song publishing and they started Hollywood, you know, Hollywood started Jewish kings.
Marc:Yeah, the junk man.
Marc:And the fascinating thing about that to me was they created the myth of America that, you know, it's very hard to distinguish.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Would America be what America is without their conception of it that they put in the movies?
Guest:That's right.
Guest:It certainly would not.
Guest:It would not be.
Guest:You know, this was a very specific dream that was being presented here.
Guest:That's fascinating.
Guest:You know, they asked Irving Berlin, so what's Jewish about your success?
Guest:He says, nothing, I'm an American.
Guest:They asked George Gershwin, saying, what's Jewish about you?
Guest:He said, nothing, I'm an American.
Guest:I asked Bob Krasnow, an executive, so what's Jewish about this?
Guest:Nothing, I'm an American.
Guest:You know, that's the most Jewish thing you can say, is being Jewish has nothing to do with it in America, right?
Marc:You don't want to draw attention to yourself.
Guest:Nobody here but us chickens, man.
Marc:Thanks, Ben.
Marc:Good talk.
Marc:Thanks, Mark.
Marc:All right, that's our show.
Marc:I learned and felt so good about that conversation.
Marc:I hope you enjoyed that.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com.
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Marc:Blah-dee-blah.
Marc:What have I got going on?
Marc:What's coming up for me?
Marc:Oh, PodFest.
Marc:PodFest.
Marc:Got the Rochester Fringe Festival coming up.
Marc:Look up Podfest, though, because I'm doing that.
Marc:We're doing a live WTF.
Marc:What have I got this weekend?
Marc:Going on that boat with Jesse Thorne's crew.
Marc:I'm writing my show, man.
Marc:I'm writing and doing stand-up and doing the podcast.
Marc:My bucket is full.
Marc:It's overflowing.
Marc:I gotta fucking get... I gotta get a new bucket.
Marc:I gotta figure out how to get a little more bottom end on this bucket.
Oh, my God.
Marc:Boomer lives!
Boomer lives!