Episode 462 - Patrick Stickles
Marc:Lock the gates!
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fuck nicks?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:What the fuckstables?
Marc:What the fuckadelics?
Marc:It is me, Mark Maron.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:Thank you for listening.
Marc:I feel like I'm not talking properly because I bit my fucking lip and then I bit it again in the exact same place and then I wanted to punch myself in the face.
Marc:It's fucking bullshit.
Marc:God damn, man.
Marc:Hey, did you know that... I don't know if you guys are on the premium app or not.
Marc:Oh, by the way, my guest today is Patrick Stickles.
Marc:Some of you might not know who he is.
Marc:He's in a band, his band, Titus Andronicus.
Marc:And they kick ass.
Marc:I'm not even sure how I got on to them.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I think...
Marc:I think I got a record in the mail, some vinyl.
Marc:I'm like, what is this, man?
Marc:Who are these guys?
Marc:What the hell is this?
Marc:It was called The Monitor.
Marc:And I put it on and I couldn't quite grasp it.
Marc:So I put it aside.
Marc:It's not that it's complicated music.
Marc:There was just a lot of momentum in it.
Marc:And it's a concept album in a way.
Marc:It's a double record.
Marc:And it's got this anthemic drive to it.
Marc:And I'm like, what is this?
Marc:But I didn't lock in.
Marc:Fucking rock and roll, man.
Marc:I'd been listening to a lot of records, obviously.
Marc:Titus Andronicus.
Marc:I had no idea.
Marc:How the hell do you keep up?
Marc:I can't keep up.
Marc:There's a lot of bands that I have no idea what's happening.
Marc:No idea.
Marc:So here's the thing about Stickles.
Marc:I became sort of with Patrick Stickles, the guest today.
Marc:I became a little obsessed with this guy in a healthy way.
Marc:I didn't know who he was.
Marc:And I listened to Titus Andronicus.
Marc:And here's the deal.
Marc:what kind of music resonates with you what what grabs you i mean sometimes it can be instrumentation sometimes it could be composition sometimes it can be a hook in a song sometimes it can be the production but for me most of the time especially with rock it's does this dude mean it does this guy mean it
Marc:And I put on Titus Andronicus The Monitor, this double album, this weird-ass cover.
Marc:Had no idea.
Marc:There's a weird momentum to it.
Marc:There's some spoken word parts to it that are sort of interesting, quoting Abraham Lincoln.
Marc:And I don't know, man.
Marc:But the rock itself, the music itself, is simple, basically punk rock riffs and just rock and roll drive.
Marc:And I heard this guy singing and I was listening to his words and I'm like, holy fuck, this guy means business.
Marc:This guy's heart is 100 percent in this and it's not flash.
Marc:He's not trying to impress anybody.
Marc:He's got something inside of him.
Marc:He has to get it out.
Marc:And when you hear rock music, that can only happen.
Marc:There's a certain age range where that happens.
Marc:I mean, people get older, and then they get more self-conscious, and they get more calculating, and they're after something.
Marc:But Patrick's a young dude, and you can hear it in the songs, and they're just thrilled to play Titus Andronicus.
Marc:And the songs have build, they have momentum, they have anthemic sort of drive shafts, and it's just raw music.
Marc:energy this dude has and his and his words are jarring and passionate and it just started to make me think back do you remember the first time you ever had that experience when you go to a rock show and you're like what is going on here there's an energy in the room there's sweat you know usually everyone's at the same level the band's basically a floor level
Marc:Perhaps you're in a basement.
Marc:For me, it was like I used to go see bands at the Ratskiller.
Marc:I remember seeing Steve Albini at the Rat in Boston.
Marc:When was that?
Marc:Somewhere in the mid-80s.
Marc:I was not a huge live music dude.
Marc:But there was a few concerts I saw back in Boston, like Firehose.
Marc:That was mind-blowing.
Marc:But even further back than that, I remember after college, I decided I'm going to take a train cross-country, so I got a sleeper car and went from New York to Chicago.
Marc:Now, a sleeper car and a train, generally, if you get the lower-level sleeper cars, you're basically sleeping in a bathroom.
Marc:You're sleeping where you poop.
Marc:And it's romantic, right?
Marc:So it's just me on this train.
Marc:I bought a bunch of books, bought a bunch of liquor.
Marc:And I was just going to be like, hey, I'm going to live it, man.
Marc:I'm going to be a hobo in a sleeping car with my books.
Marc:I remember I had Blue Movie by Terry Southern.
Marc:I had Less Than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis.
Marc:But I was going to do a lot of big reading.
Marc:I was going to do a lot of big drinking.
Marc:And I was going to sleep in my sleeper car on the train.
Marc:Just like rough it.
Marc:Got to Chicago, went to Union Station.
Marc:That's all I saw of Chicago at that time.
Marc:Got my shoes shined.
Marc:Then I took the train from Chicago down to Memphis.
Marc:I danced with a girl at a club in Memphis, and we were the only two people in the room.
Marc:Then she drove me in this large Cadillac Eldorado to my hotel, and she came up to my hotel room and stole my Graceland comb and took some money.
Marc:I didn't do anything with her.
Marc:She seemed to be in trouble of some kind.
Marc:So I figure if that's all you need is like $3 and an Elvis comb, I hope that helps out.
Marc:And I hope whoever owns that Eldorado is not going to be mad that you didn't come back with more money than that.
Marc:But that never even came up.
Marc:So then I go from Memphis to Austin, Texas.
Marc:And then I had about enough of the train.
Marc:I saw some band in Austin, Texas.
Marc:I don't know who they were.
Marc:I don't know what state of mind it was in.
Marc:I was blasted and tired because you can't sleep in a sweeper car, really.
Marc:I wanted to go home already.
Marc:And this band was just it was a club.
Marc:It was it was half filled.
Marc:It was just sweaty.
Marc:And it was everything was at the same level.
Marc:And this in my recollection, it was four people in the band and they were just pounding out some fucking punk rock version of Rosa San Antone.
Marc:And I thought it was spectacular.
Marc:And it had this quality to it where it was just so raw and so, you know, almost aggravated and angry.
Marc:And it was this classic old song.
Marc:And it was just one of those rock and roll moments.
Marc:I saw the meat puppets at Slim's in San Francisco once.
Marc:It's the same thing, man.
Marc:where you just, it's just mind-blowing.
Marc:It's like the real spirit of rock, man.
Marc:It's just like raw, and it's right there, and you can feel it.
Marc:That only comes, I mean, you can only do that in your 20s.
Marc:I'm not knocking anybody.
Marc:I'm not knocking you rockers who are pounding it out in your 40s, because certainly I do my share here at the house.
Marc:But when I heard Titus Andronicus, I was like, this guy means business.
Marc:And then I bought their other two records, and I was like, holy fuck.
Marc:This is the real thing.
Marc:And it's not about the music.
Marc:It's about the drive.
Marc:It's about the passion.
Marc:That's the thing.
Marc:I'm 50, and I think that somehow I still have that, but I don't know if I have the courage to put it out into the world because at 50, you should have a few things reeled in.
Marc:Maybe I have too much reeled in.
Marc:Maybe I have to just bust out.
Marc:Yeah, maybe I just got to hit the streets with the guitar and just pound it out.
Marc:But I'm 50.
Marc:Hey, man, live the dream.
Marc:Don't let that stifle you.
Marc:My buddy Tom Sharpling is into him.
Marc:I check him out with Sharpling.
Marc:I'm like, what do you know about this Titus Andronicus?
Marc:What do you know about this Stickles character?
Marc:He says, yeah, they're good.
Marc:And I'm like, they seem to mean it, Tom.
Marc:He's like, yeah, they do mean it.
Marc:They're from New Jersey.
Marc:Tom's from Jersey.
Marc:I was born in New Jersey.
Marc:Maybe it's a Jersey thing.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I like Bruce Springsteen.
Marc:Don't love him.
Marc:I get it.
Marc:Occasionally, I listen to it.
Marc:So I start pestering this dude on Twitter, Patrick Stickles, and he finally gets back in touch with me.
Marc:But I just heard that he's just this out there dude.
Marc:He's got an edge to him.
Marc:So now I'm nervous.
Marc:And he says, I'm going to be out in LA.
Marc:He gives me his phone number.
Marc:And he's playing down the street from me.
Marc:He showed up, he's smoking cigarettes, and he's going on.
Marc:He's got things on his mind.
Marc:You'll hear this.
Marc:You'll hear this when I talk to him.
Marc:It wasn't so much it was hard to get a word in edgewise, but he was working a lot of angles in his head.
Marc:He was going.
Marc:His brain was running.
Marc:And a lot of it was things I could relate to.
Marc:Some of it I could relate to more when I was younger, but I certainly locked into where he was coming from.
Marc:But then it just started to take a turn.
Marc:There was some momentum happening in what he was talking about.
Marc:And then sort of like about two-thirds through the interview, it just goes to this other level.
Marc:I'm not going to spoil anything.
Marc:It's not like there's a big spoiler to be had.
Marc:But there was definitely something...
Marc:relatable in a very punk rock way in a very rock and roll way but then it just sort of took a sort of sensitive twist about two-thirds of the way through and it went it just went a whole level deeper it was one of those things where you talk to a creative mind when you talk to a creative spirit that is full of struggle and and a bit of chaos and and just angrily trying to make sense of
Marc:of their world and the world and the sort of conflict between the two.
Marc:And you just feel their heart and their mind just fucking work in this goddamn equation.
Marc:And I love that.
Marc:I guess that's why he resonated with me.
Marc:And I really grew to like him, this Patrick Stickles character.
Marc:And I went to see them up the street at the Eagle Rock Community Center.
Marc:And there I was there.
Marc:I was, you know, this I'm a 50 year old guy surrounded by sweaty 20 year olds.
Marc:People don't move as much as they used to.
Marc:And then Stickles comes out with this band and it's just straight up.
Marc:And he's got a way of being on stage.
Marc:He's very earnest.
Marc:He just plants himself up there and he fucking lays it out.
Marc:And there I was, bouncing my head, sweating.
Marc:So let's go now and talk to Patrick Stickles of Titus Andronicus.
Lock the gates on these fuckheads.
Marc:I'm not sure how I got hold of your music.
Marc:I think that... Which label are you on?
Marc:Beggars?
Marc:You're on Beggars?
Marc:Well, Beggars is the larger conglomerate, but we're on XL.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Extra large recording.
Marc:So they sent me this album, and I listen to the albums, and I'm like, holy fuck, this guy means business.
Marc:Who the fuck are these guys?
Marc:They fucking mean it.
Marc:You mean it, whatever it is.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:Whatever it is, you mean it.
Marc:And out of all the records I've had lately, and even on the MP3, I fucking listen to The Monitor and local business repeatedly.
Marc:So you've done some good work.
Marc:I'm an old man.
Marc:That's not easy.
Marc:Well, thank you.
Marc:And you're from New Jersey.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:I grew up, my parents are both from Jersey.
Marc:I was born in New Jersey.
Marc:What part of New Jersey?
Marc:I'm from the top, the northernmost part, the suburbs of New York City.
Marc:Yeah, my father's from Jersey City.
Marc:My mother's from Pompton Lakes.
Marc:Pompton Lakes is pretty close to where I'm from.
Guest:Glen Rock, New Jersey.
Guest:Willowbrook Mall, Paramus Park.
Guest:Willowbrook Mall, that's right.
Guest:That was the one that was open on Sundays.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Blue Laws in Paramus, New Jersey kept the closer malls closed on Sundays.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we had to go to Willowbrook to consume.
Guest:To consume?
Guest:In the way we would like to on Sunday.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Did you hang out at the mall?
Marc:Were you a mall rat?
Guest:Sure.
Marc:You had to, right?
Guest:The mall is just kind of a safe and sort of blank space.
Guest:You can just go there and know that your time will be occupied in some way.
Marc:There was some social dynamic going on with other youngsters wandering around the mall.
Marc:Dispersed amongst the regular population.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Microcosm of the larger society.
Marc:A lesson to be learned of the banality of the future that is upon us.
Marc:Yeah, the sterilization and the homogenization of it all, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So when did you start doing the guitar?
Guest:I guess I got my first guitar for my 13th birthday, and I had been playing...
Guest:a little bit, truly playing, not working, but playing with my brothers.
Guest:My older brother had a guitar that he abandoned when he went off to further his education outside the house.
Guest:And I played that for six months or so and learned Smoke on the Water and Blister in the Sun on the one string that remained from when he had it.
Guest:And then for my 13th birthday, I got a real guitar that had all six strings on it.
Guest:yeah and then which was the first song that you mastered blister in the sun or smoke on the water um smoke on the water was first and blister in the sun i actually thought that i had composed i figured out how to play it and didn't and was like oh wow what a what a moment of inspiration and i played it for my sister like check this out yeah and she was like i know what that is
Guest:You had no idea?
Guest:It was the beginning of a long career, a long and lucrative career in taking something, stumbling upon something that I had misremembered and claiming to have invented it.
Guest:Sure, man.
Marc:Riffs are riffs, right?
Marc:Rock and roll, right?
Marc:That's it.
Marc:Keith Richards did it.
Guest:Sure, everybody does it.
Guest:Sure they do.
Guest:You listen to Exile today?
Guest:That's right.
Guest:My new Polish import CD.
Guest:Is there a difference other than the cover?
Guest:There's three bonus tracks from a live show in 1973.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A much faster version of Rocks Off and a much slower version of Tumbling Dice.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Some different cool perspectives on that one.
Guest:Are you a Stones guy in general?
Guest:Oh, I love them very much, but I only just got into them pretty recently.
Guest:Growing up, I kind of lumped them in with a lot of...
Guest:Old guy bands?
Guest:Not old guy bands, but hair bands, you know what I mean?
Guest:I didn't see much of a difference between the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin or Motley Crue.
Guest:Just a lot of phallocentric, look at me, I'm such a great guy sort of rock.
Guest:And I didn't really appreciate what separated the Rolling Stones from that stuff, to my discredit.
Guest:That was a mistake on my part.
Marc:Sometimes it takes years to come around to shit.
Marc:What are you going to do?
Marc:I mean, I didn't get, you know, I didn't understand why the doors were important until I was in my 30s.
Marc:Well, I look forward to that moment because I'm definitely not there yet.
Guest:I didn't say that I liked them.
Guest:But you understand.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I understand why Led Zeppelin's important, but I don't know that I'm ever going to be a fan of theirs.
Guest:Never going to come around.
Guest:Things that are important aren't always good.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The development of corporate personhood was important, but not good.
Marc:It was important to corporate structure.
Marc:It was important to somebody.
Marc:Yeah, sure.
Marc:It was important to the people that want to protect their corporation over the rights of people.
Guest:It's relevant to the contemporary concerns of society, even if they're not in line with my particular values.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:It's on the radar.
Guest:You got to reckon with it.
Marc:Don't got to like it.
Marc:It's true.
Guest:In a way, though, I'm grateful for my younger ignorance because now I'm a little more of an adult.
Guest:I'm in a little more of a position to appreciate the Rolling Stones.
Guest:And now it's like being open to a new world.
Guest:Sometimes you get pushed into a new world when you're not quite ready for it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Sometimes I wish I could have put off going to university or something until I was a little older.
Guest:Where'd you go?
Guest:I went to a very obscure and oft-overlooked public liberal arts college in New Jersey called?
Guest:Ramapo College.
Marc:Ramapo.
Guest:In Mahwah.
Marc:In Mahwah.
Guest:It was named the second fattest small school by Men's Health Magazine in my sophomore year.
Okay.
Marc:Did you go for the full ride?
Guest:Did I get a full ride?
Guest:No, I paid for it.
Guest:No, not a free ride, a full ride.
Guest:Did you go for all four years?
Guest:Oh, a full ride?
Guest:Yeah, I graduated.
Guest:As a matter of fact, I was the outstanding student in my department, my graduating class.
Guest:Which department?
Guest:Literature.
Marc:So that's where the interest, that's where the focus comes from, huh?
Marc:I was wondering that.
Guest:It's another symptom of an ongoing focus, I suppose.
Marc:But I mean, I was an English major, and I don't know that I even registered as much as you did.
Marc:I mean, just by the tracks on the albums and the context of the Monitor and stuff, and even Titus Andronicus, I can't even wrap my brain around Shakespeare, really.
Marc:It must have had some impact on you.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You know, I used to study him a lot when I was younger.
Guest:And, you know, he, you know, gets taught in school a lot.
Guest:So, you know, it was kind of hard to avoid.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was just the kind of thing you just get beaten over the head with so many times.
Guest:It's kind of a little bit Stockholm Syndrome with me and Shakespeare, I guess.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But, I mean, a big part of it is that...
Guest:Very influential person in my early life was the fellow who taught drama at the high school that I went to.
Guest:And he appears on our records.
Guest:He's the voice of Abraham Lincoln on that one album.
Guest:On the monitor?
Guest:And he reads from Albert Camus on our first album.
Marc:That's that voice that's sort of like, back here, and you can talk like this.
Marc:That's him.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:That's Oki Chenoweth, who was a drama teacher at Glen Rock High School for like 40 years or so and since retired.
Guest:But he taught me a lot about art, you know, being an artist.
Guest:And his big thing was, you know, truthfulness.
Guest:He would try and get us, you know, to stand up in class and just say the truth, whatever it was, and make him believe that...
Guest:We were telling the truth, whatever we were saying.
Guest:And his other big thing was when he didn't like something, he would tell us to raise the stakes.
Guest:He wanted everything to be life or death situation.
Guest:Even if it was like two characters trying to decide what they were going to eat for lunch, he wanted it to be a life or death situation.
Guest:So that influenced my outlook a lot.
Guest:So he blew your mind.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:He did, really.
Guest:And he would put Shakespeare on every year, and that was the big thing that the drama club did.
Guest:And my sophomore year, we did Hamlet.
Guest:And it was just a very important formative experience for me.
Guest:And also, he did another production of Hamlet in the 90s, more contemporaneous to my brother's high school career.
Guest:And the guy who played Hamlet nowadays is the guy in the Chase Bank Freedom Card commercial.
Guest:You know, the guy who sings Footloose about the Freedom Card?
Guest:That's Mike Torpy.
Guest:He played Hamlet at Glen Rock High School, and I saw it.
Guest:And that guy does other stuff.
Marc:Of course, of course.
Guest:He's a very, very talented man and a great singer.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And he actually starred opposite my brother's wife in Oklahoma, which I saw and did not fall asleep at, unlike Hamlet.
Guest:You couldn't get through Hamlet?
Guest:I mean, I was just a little kid.
Guest:It's pretty long.
Guest:The sentences are pretty weird, long sentences with a bunch of strange words.
Guest:It was like 9 p.m.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Were you in Hamlet, though, the production that Jennifer did?
Guest:I was, yeah.
Guest:I played Hamlet's father, the ghost.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:did you get the story sure I did you know alienated young man feels put upon by the world can't decide whether or not he wants to strike back against the world it's so inconsiderate of his precious little feelings yeah I relate to it very much yeah why'd you call the band Titus Andronicus what did that meaning what was the meaning of that play for you
Guest:Well, at first, at the time when we decided to name the band that, it didn't mean anything beyond that.
Guest:It was an appealing combination of syllables and sounded like the person who decided to name the band that must be pretty smart.
Guest:All this stuff that we did was just to make everybody say, oh, this guy's pretty smart.
Marc:Including the titles of the songs on the first record?
Marc:Of course.
Guest:Yeah, sure, man.
Guest:It was all just a... A ruse.
Guest:I mean, it was.
Guest:Was it a ruse?
Guest:I think it was pretty much straight up kissing my own ass about how many books I read kind of vibe.
Marc:But they must have had some impact on you.
Guest:Sure, sure they did.
Marc:I mean, but like, was it relative?
Marc:Because I mean, it seems like, you know, you're an open-minded dude looking to get your mind blown.
Marc:I mean, to have an experience with a high school teacher, there's always one, if you're lucky, that can turn the fucking course of your life around and not, you know, kind of save you from the sentence of just sort of a mundane future that you just buy without questioning.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, my God, buying the mundane future without questioning.
Guest:It's the whole story of my youth.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Well, New Jersey's a rough one, huh?
Guest:It is, you know, and it's very much, you know, your whole life is laid out before you, even before you're, you know, conceived.
Guest:And there was a whole plan for me.
Guest:What was it?
Guest:I mean, I did a lot of it, which was, you know, grow up in this little town and, you know, pretty much...
Guest:You're at the bowling alley with the bumpers up in this town.
Guest:You can get in trouble for drinking a beer or something or staying out too late, but at the end of the day, nothing is going to happen to you that's really going to derail your life, that's really going to get in the way of the plan.
Guest:You only have so much power to...
Marc:fuck up really hurt yourself to get in your own way yeah you know why just because of the small townness of it like everybody knows each other it's like hey your kid was causing trouble again in the parking lot of the place exactly constant surveillance you know police state police then it's not even a police state because like everybody is the police you know like they all you know they all think of themselves as you know
Guest:They're all just part of the sea of judging disembodied eyes.
Marc:What was your family's racket?
Marc:What did your old man do?
Guest:Well, you know, when my parents first fell in love, they were educators.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And my father had a promising career early on as an administrator.
Guest:He was a vice principal or something.
Guest:Might have been principal one day, but he decided to become a lawyer instead.
Guest:Who can really say why?
Guest:Something about trying to provide more opportunities for me and my brother and sister, I guess.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But eventually, you know, once we were all taken care of, he was able to retire from the law, and now he got to be a high school principal after all.
Guest:And as a matter of fact, he's the principal of the high school from which he graduated.
Guest:In New Jersey.
Guest:In New Jersey, in Roselle.
Guest:And they're still together?
Guest:Oh, no, my parents have been divorced for more than 20 years.
Guest:But my father is married to a wonderful woman named Vicky, who's very, very close to my heart.
Guest:And my mother, she's got a very nice gentleman friend named Art, who's a lovely fella as well, and has got some cool exotic birds and some cool classic cars that he likes.
Marc:Isn't it weird?
Marc:My mom's got a dude too, and my dad's with some woman now.
Marc:You grow up with these people for a little while, and then all of a sudden...
Marc:They go into this other phase of their life and you're like, oh, that's the guy, huh?
Guest:Yeah, it's weird.
Guest:It's almost like they didn't, you know, it's almost like they had a life before me and have some intention of a life beyond me.
Guest:It's bizarre.
Guest:Yeah, they're my parents.
Guest:It should be all about me.
Guest:They should be.
Guest:They are an object for my desires.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And they're not meant to be autonomous agents in their own, right?
Marc:With needs of their own?
Marc:That's crazy.
Marc:You cashed those chips in a long time ago, mom and dad.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:My mom goes out with this dude who's like a jazz head.
Marc:He never stops moving.
Marc:He never stops talking.
Marc:He's always got jazz playing in the house.
Marc:And I know a little bit about jazz, but it's weird when some dude grew up with it and it's his thing.
Guest:I mean, it's just another academic, basically dead art form like rock and roll that used to be the dominant youth culture.
Guest:And now it's something that people need to be...
Guest:Blowing on the embers all the time, otherwise it's not going to exist anymore.
Guest:But do you feel that way about what you're doing?
Guest:Most certainly, I do.
Guest:I do, you know?
Guest:When a guy like Keith Richards was young, the guitar was the answer to everything.
Guest:And if you were able to write the perfect rock and roll song, there might be a million dollar paycheck at the other end of it.
Guest:No guarantees of that, obviously.
Guest:Right.
Guest:There was the thought.
Guest:That was a plan that was not completely beyond the realm of possibility for a lot of people.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it's just not that way anymore.
Guest:And that's why rock and roll sucks now, because it's been de-incentivized.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It used to be that there were millions of kids all across the world all competing to write the perfect rock and roll song.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, as a result, we were blessed with, you know, the fruits of their labors.
Guest:Not all of them got the million-dollar paycheck, but because that carrot was dangling in front of everybody, lots of people made attempts at it, and, you know, we got all this, we got this whole great body of work.
Guest:And now it's like if you, you know, are dissatisfied with your lot in life, the life that you were born into and you want to weigh out, like you don't pick up a guitar anymore, you get a computer and you don't really think about writing the perfect rock and roll song.
Guest:You find the perfect version of, you know, party, you know?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And that's fine and everything for the kids.
Guest:I might think it's pretty stupid, but the people... Everybody thought rock and roll was quite stupid.
Guest:But it had some menace to it.
Guest:It did.
Guest:It was different.
Guest:It was a threat.
Guest:It was.
Guest:And maybe it's good, actually, that rock and roll is not the dominant youth culture anymore because when it became...
Guest:like you know when it became like the air and everybody like rock and roll was just the thing that everybody was into you know i guess maybe it kind of lost its ability to be rebellious a little bit you know and a loud distorted guitar became you know just another you know part of the the oral wallpaper of our life you know
Guest:But now it's getting to the point where people aren't confronted with that every day, and people maybe will start to forget the power of that.
Guest:And in their forgetting, the power will return.
Guest:Because it's surprising again.
Guest:Yeah, because it is, once again, a real alternative.
Guest:It's a real counterculture.
Marc:I think what you're describing, I don't want to interrupt you because you're on a riff, but that was my reaction to your albums.
Marc:Because I'm a 49-year-old dude.
Marc:I've listened to a lot of shit.
Marc:I miss most of the good shit, just like you did.
Marc:I got it secondhand.
Marc:I did miss it.
Marc:Yeah, but I felt the fucking earnestness in there that there was a build and there was a passion.
Marc:The sort of runs were like just good fucking raw rock and roll runs.
Marc:And like I said, I listened to it over and over again because like that Fugazi album I was playing when I walked in, like you said about the Stones.
Marc:I mean, I just listened to Fugazi for the first time last week, dude.
Marc:Last week.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:so like as a 49 year old dude i put on repeater first time in my life and i was like holy fuck this is great it had that surprise to it you know but like your records i listened to them i listened to it yesterday i'm like this shit is like this is the real deal so you don't you're not cynical about it are you about your own music
Guest:Oh, it's cynical as far as, like, you know, I lament how it sucks and stuff.
Guest:No, but, I mean, you don't feel like you're beating a dead horse.
Guest:You believe in it, right?
Guest:I mean, I absolutely do.
Guest:And, like, I promise you that, like, you know, this is how I would please myself, you know?
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:That's the thing about rock and roll.
Guest:Another good thing about it today, it being a dead art and everything, is that...
Guest:Without the giant potential reward, there's less temptation to pander, you know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Good point.
Guest:I don't have the option.
Guest:I want to be in a rock and roll band, for sure.
Guest:I definitely don't want to do electronic music.
Guest:Although I do have a desire to be a rapper, but...
Guest:Do you try to keep that to yourself?
Guest:No, I mean, I'm telling everybody.
Guest:But my point is, I know that I want to be in a rock and roll band, and it doesn't make as much sense for me to say, well, I want to be in a rock and roll band, but if I'm in this sort of rock and roll band, I can have a much better life than if I'm in this sort of band.
Yeah.
Guest:That choice isn't really even there anymore.
Guest:No, because if you're in a cheesy, lame, pandering band, you're still pandering to a very small minority of the population.
Guest:You can't do rock and roll and really pander to the lowest common denominator anymore because the lowest common denominator doesn't even know what rock and roll is.
Marc:And also the labels don't have the power they did to shove it down your head.
Guest:No, it will never be.
Guest:You're never going to walk down the street of your city and be assaulted with some rock and roll, Chuck Berry-derived song in the way that you're beat over the head with Justin Timberlake or whatever.
Guest:Not that I don't like him, because I do.
Guest:He seems like a talented guy.
Guest:Sure, but...
Guest:We're going to be bludgeoned with that stuff.
Guest:We're not going to be bludgeoned with the next regurgitation of Roll Over Beethoven or whatever.
Guest:So that stuff, you know.
Guest:It's a pretty good start.
Guest:Why pander?
Guest:Why be cheesier than you want to be?
Guest:You're not going to get that much more of a reward.
Guest:You're still going to be struggling in obscurity.
Marc:How's your, when you do, in terms of like obscurity, but I mean you seem to have a very loving following.
Guest:Sometimes they love me, other times they hate me.
Marc:Why do they hate you?
Guest:Generally, I mean generally they love the band.
Guest:It's part of my ongoing problem with, you know, not understanding that like...
Guest:You know, the band is not me.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:Yeah, kind of.
Guest:Like, I mean, they do love us a lot, but, you know, sometimes that relationship can turn to hate.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But, I mean, what you say is true.
Guest:Like, I'm much more interested in getting, you know, a hundred people together that really, really find this thing to be important than a thousand people who are, you know...
Guest:who are peripherally interested in it.
Guest:I want to be the most important thing in a hundred people's lives.
Guest:I don't want to be on the shelves of a thousand people with a thousand other CDs.
Marc:The first time I heard the Hold Steady,
Marc:You know, they had come out, you know, uh, was it boys and girls in America got some big attention and I didn't really know who they were.
Marc:And I listened to that record and I really liked it.
Marc:And I thought that guy was a pretty, you know, reasonable and forthright poetic, poetic dude, you know, very earnest, you know, and the, yeah.
Marc:And the music, I've interviewed him.
Marc:He's been in here, Craig.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:and and he's my friend yeah he's a great guy but i saw them in uh south by southwest and it was interesting because you know he deals with very thoughtful very you know somewhat dark stuff sometimes and and his own sort of struggle with things and then you just you you see i see them playing live in a tent and you just see like they're these four frat dudes just like yeah and hugging each other and i'm like i guess that's okay you know i don't i don't know that they're getting it the same way i'm getting it but they seem to fucking dig it so like i'm not going to condescend them
Guest:To me, it's like singing about something that is dark and is a painful part of yourself.
Guest:Expressing that in the public forum need not be a dark and painful thing necessarily.
Guest:It's always painful to stir up those kind of emotions, sort of, but when you put it out there,
Guest:Like you put it on a stage as though to say, I feel this way and that's all right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This is like a valid way to feel about the world or about, you know, being human.
Guest:I believe in this position, so I'm going to present it as loudly as I can.
Guest:And, you know, people see it and they see the artist presenting these feelings that they recognize within themselves about the way that they look at life.
Guest:And they are validated in this moment.
Guest:And they look to their right or their left and see another person also feeling the joy of that validation.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And in this moment, they're like not strangers anymore, but like long-lost family members, sort of.
Guest:Not to like overly romanticize it, but like, you know, you go through life and you're, you know, born into whatever population you're born into.
Guest:And, you know, the people around you have the interests and the values that they do, and they might not necessarily be aligned with yours.
Guest:And they might, you know, they might prefer to make you think that the way that you feel about life...
Guest:wrong in some way but like when you see somebody on this on stage saying I feel this way and clearly I am a strong cool person and like I validate your feeling about X Y or Z and like then you're next to the other person who feels this way and you know it's not the person who lives next door and think that you're the biggest jerk in the world it's another person who lives next door to some other jerk
Guest:And you stand, and you guys found each other.
Guest:You might not live next door to each other, but the artist put out a vibe.
Guest:You were attracted to it, and so was this other person.
Guest:You and this other person have got something in common.
Guest:You're not the lost tribe of Israel anymore.
Guest:You're together in one place.
Guest:You're a family again.
Guest:And you both know that you live next door to jerks.
Guest:I think that's an important thing.
Guest:And even though it's about something that's painful,
Guest:It's a joyful thing to say that like we feel this way and yet we are determined to survive.
Marc:Well, I think that like right there, the determination to survive in the face of darkness and the way you put together songs is that, you know, however, you know, your lyrics sort of carry this, you know, somewhat kind of personally or existentially bleak tone in what you're confronting.
Marc:You got a real good fucking sense of build, man.
Marc:I mean, those fucking songs build and there's like, it's an, you know,
Guest:the underpinnings of the song are this anthemic fucking movement it's like it's all right man we're gonna fucking plow through this shit we will plow through this shit and it might not always be so fun but like you know we will do it together to a certain extent what choice do we have we got the other we our only other choice is to lay down and die
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And that might be the smarter thing to do, but we can't really know that for sure.
Guest:Yeah, we're kind of innately wired not to do that.
Guest:Yeah, there's a certain biological imperative to continue to survive and cover the earth.
Marc:Exactly, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Not that we need to do that anymore.
Guest:It would be a great move to retreat from that for a while.
Guest:I know, it's a hard sell, though.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You're supposed to slow this shit down.
Marc:Yeah, gee whiz.
Marc:But the thing about that biological incentive to survive, that's there unspoken.
Marc:It's sort of interesting because as self-pitying or as dark as I've gotten or any artist has gotten, it takes a strange act of cowardice and courage to just fucking fight against that and fucking lay down or end it.
Marc:To be or not to be.
Marc:Right on, man.
Marc:Back to Hamlet.
Marc:It all comes back to Hamlet in the end.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Modern man.
Guest:Not man.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Human.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, what is this hate that you talk about?
Marc:What's the struggle that you have with the audience in general?
Marc:I mean, if you can sort of... Oh, jeez.
Marc:I mean, I don't mean to make it out like I hate the audience.
Marc:No, no, no, no, but you said they hate you.
Marc:You didn't actually say that.
Guest:They've just been, as soon as we've been in California, they've been giving me a little bit of trouble.
Guest:They're very aggressive is the thing, you know?
Guest:In what form?
Guest:Are these guys usually?
Guest:Bros, yeah, they're bros, meatheads, you know?
Guest:And, like, we, you know, it's punk rock, right?
Guest:So it's an aggressive idiom, sort of.
Guest:And, like, it's about absolute freedom, right?
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:Like punk is a very appealing thing to like a lot of different sorts of dickheads.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because it allows them, it enables them and empowers them to do absolutely whatever they want.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, and one interpretation of the ideology says that you just do anything that you want and there are no real consequences.
Guest:I don't think that that's a very practical application of the ideology.
Guest:And I think it's a bit of a perversion of it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And also it's a lie.
Marc:That's a lie.
Marc:I mean, you can think that, but I mean, there are going to be consequences.
Guest:There will, yeah.
Guest:I mean, that's the thing.
Guest:The world is sort of a void.
Guest:It's an abyss.
Guest:There is no real morality or anything.
Guest:But at the same time, our actions don't really happen in a vacuum.
Guest:And the fact of the matter is, if you really want absolute freedom for yourself, the way to go about getting it is to create opportunities for freedom for others.
Guest:You know, like if everybody in the world did their part to respect other people's, you know, personal and emotional and cerebral space, then people would find that they themselves had all the space and the freedom to do basically whatever they wanted within reason.
Guest:you know but like you know one application of this of this kind of you know this way of thinking is that you know you get together with a bunch of other meatheads and you just you know pummel each other until you don't feel anything anymore and like I see the value in that I guess and I used to be into it as a kid but like I see it now and like I try to be vulnerable I'm trying to like you know be vulnerable up there like I'm screaming and stuff but it's not like
Guest:And I'm often yelling at you, but I'm not really yelling at you.
Guest:I'm yelling into the void, and I want to invite you to be involved in that.
Marc:Sometimes that's interpreted as a provocation to just unleash...
Guest:It's like the whole thing about, you know, having all this freedom, like, you know, the price of freedom should be, you know, greater compassion and mercy.
Guest:Like you do sort of have the right to do whatever you want in a real way, as far as I'm concerned, you know, an ideological way.
Guest:We're supposed to have total freedom.
Guest:That's not really practical.
Guest:What sort of depends what you do with it.
Guest:If you have it, part of deserving it is saying, I have the freedom to do this thing and get in somebody's face and mess their day up a little bit, but I will waive my rights in an effort to make a more loving and compassionate world.
Guest:So that's a personal morality.
Guest:that's right yeah you know your morality should come from you know within and you should you know think about the things that you want from the world around you and you should be trying to give those things more than you go out and try and take them sure there's some bad seeds though that's why there are rules I guess
Guest:Yeah, I mean, that's what sucks about it, though, is like certain people like created a necessity for there to be all these rules.
Guest:And like without these rules, those people are going to go buck wild.
Guest:It just sucks that like the people, you know.
Guest:There are people for whom the rule was not invented that are beholden to the rule in its, like, most stupid, you know, illogical extension, right?
Guest:Like, for instance, you know, I live in New York City, right, and I often eat on the subway even though it is against the rules.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the reason I permit myself to do this is because I know that I'm not the person for whom that rule was invented.
Guest:There are people out there who, if you let them eat on the subway, they're going to bring a whole thing and then leave it there.
Guest:And there's going to be all this waste.
Guest:I'm not that sort of person.
Guest:you know, waste, I will take it and I'll put it in the proper receptacle.
Guest:That's because you have a personal morality about it.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:And I want to live in a world that's just not full of garbage.
Guest:You know, people think that like they're entitled to a garbage free world and yet they throw their garbage on the ground.
Guest:So when you grew up doing, so you were a punk kid?
Guest:I became a punk at, you know, I guess around the same time I got the guitar.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But really, in truth, I became a punk in 1994 when my sister brought home Dookie by Green Day.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And began a war with my father.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:yeah that i would have loved to be the one fighting you understand but i was too young and scared how old were you my father's a wonderful man okay like don't get the wrong idea but parents you know like your your parents are ultimately like your your greatest enemy you gotta push back you gotta push back they are the the quintessential villains of your life in a real way as much as you do love them yeah you have to you have to conquer them yeah at a certain point how'd that go
Guest:I mean, I'm working on it still.
Guest:I'm almost there.
Guest:They're still in my head, you know, is the thing.
Guest:They're Catholic brainwashing.
Marc:Yeah, well, what was the war at that time?
Marc:How old were you in 94?
Guest:I guess I was nine years old.
Guest:That's when you got dookie?
Guest:My sister did.
Guest:And I didn't listen to it, you know?
Guest:Like, I didn't understand that, like, this was punk rock and that it was, like, punk rock because it had these elements or whatever.
Guest:Right.
Guest:All I knew was that my sister got this CD, and one day she was a normal girl, and the next day she had green hair.
Guest:And my father was pissed.
Guest:He didn't want a daughter.
Guest:He didn't want to be known as the father of the green-haired girl.
Guest:And maybe that's his right.
Guest:Maybe he earned the right to not want that.
Guest:But that was appealing to me because... It pissed him off.
Guest:It was my sister's way of saying...
Guest:I choose not to play this absurd game that you have forced me into by virtue of raising me in this community.
Guest:I reject the standards of our little planned community, our little facsimile of real life that we call a town.
Guest:I reject that stuff.
Guest:I believe in a life of green hair now.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know?
Guest:And like...
Guest:She stood up to everything.
Guest:All this stuff that I thought just dominated the planet.
Guest:She might as well have been fighting God as far as I was concerned.
Guest:When you're nine years old, your parents, their authority is totally absolute.
Guest:But my sister found a CD that gave her the strength to take them on.
Guest:She didn't win.
Guest:But she went the distance.
Guest:She was like the Rocky Balboa of our house that year.
Guest:With green hair.
Guest:With green hair, yeah.
Guest:And that had a big impact, man.
Guest:Huge impact.
Guest:And there's a picture that I look at a lot now.
Guest:which is my sister with the green hair.
Guest:I guess this is actually the summer of 1995.
Guest:And my sister's got green hair, and my brother is in his uniform as a freshman at the Naval Academy.
Guest:And me, I'm some kind of smiling mongoloid in some kind of extra, extra-large T-shirt, four feet tall.
Marc:That's like the yin and the yang, man.
Marc:Tells the whole story, really, doesn't it?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:So your brother drank the Kool-Aid?
Marc:I mean, I don't want to, you know.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I love him to death, you know, and he's, you know, supported me more than anybody.
Guest:in my whole life you know i wish that there was no such thing as the military you know i'd love to live in a oh yeah well actually you know he like you know much to his credit you know like he uh he slugged it out and he gave them everything that they wanted for many years and now they're just you know
Guest:They're just paying him to get a really fancy degree from quite a prestigious school.
Guest:That's good.
Guest:We're very, very proud of him.
Guest:Even though I don't like the military, he's made a very, very nice life for his wife and his three beautiful kids.
Guest:and you know that's nice but obviously i wish there was no such thing as war i wish there was no navy and no army and no anything and no guns and no bombs and sure that would be my preference but that's not um it's not real life and i guess at the end of the day if somebody has to control a gun or a bomb i'm glad that it's my brother
Guest:So how far did you push your old man?
Guest:How far did I push him?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I never took him on as hard as my sister did.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:To my eternal regret.
Guest:And again, I love him to death.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:But, you know.
Guest:And my parents have supported me very, very much in my artistic career.
Guest:And they think that it's great.
Guest:And there were times when I was going to get on the path to have a life a lot more like their life.
Guest:And I wanted to make a choice to...
Guest:What were your thoughts then?
Guest:What was the other road that you didn't take?
Guest:I wanted to be an educator like my parents were.
Guest:And I think it's very noble to work with the kids.
Guest:I see now that my dream of being an educator was...
Guest:And just me trying to like fit myself into the paradigm or the model of life that my parents had laid out for me is just trying to become a redundant of my parents.
Guest:Because I thought that that was like I thought if I had all that stuff, like if I can get like, you know, this fancy degree in this nice job and get, you know, tenure or whatever, and then I can, you know.
Guest:fool some girl into marrying me put a couple kids in her and like at the end of that whole process like I'll have one you know what I mean I'll have one in life but you know I see now that there's lots of different ways to win in life are you winning I
Guest:I mean, I get to sort of do what I want.
Guest:Like, I kind of have the life that I want, you know?
Guest:You know, the most important thing in my life is my art.
Guest:And it gets me, you know, my art provides me with enough to eat.
Guest:My art keeps a shirt on my back.
Guest:I don't have a lot of other stuff.
Guest:Back home, I live in a 100-square-foot windowless room.
Guest:Where?
Guest:In the East Williamsburg Industrial Park in Brooklyn, New York.
Guest:Why are you living like that?
Guest:Because it's all that I can afford.
Guest:I could live like a king in some other city, but...
Guest:New York City is just kind of the move when you're an ambitious young man like me, when you're desperate to prove that you're the best in the world.
Guest:The best what?
Guest:The best whatever.
Guest:People move to New York City to prove that they're the best cook or the best librarian or the best tour guide or the best...
Guest:bus driver the best anything you know you go there because you feel like you deserve a couple minutes on the on the big stage and that's how i feel about myself and and this goofy rock and roll project and how how are you at uh being a band leader how's a how you how are you holding the band together oh my god they make their lives very very difficult you know
Guest:It's a tough thing because on the one hand you want to be professional and you want to do things by the book and you want to get places on time and you want to play all your best songs just about as well as you can every night and all that stuff.
Guest:But, like, ultimately, you know, that's just not really what it's about for me.
Guest:And, you know, like, we're pursuing some sort of different thing beyond that.
Guest:And that's, like, it's an amorphous concept.
Marc:What are some of the elements of it?
Guest:Some of the elements of it are freedom.
Guest:In a moment or forever?
Forever.
Guest:You create freedom in a moment because you're informed of a possible sustainable freedom.
Guest:You try to be free in the moment to glimpse a freer world, however temporarily.
Guest:But it's all about falling as you fail to fly.
Guest:It's all about trying to do something that is sort of beyond your means.
Guest:And often you reach for it and fall short, like we do on stage almost every night.
Guest:But the whole point is that you're informed of something beyond yourself and you're making an effort to say, you know, I've been born with certain abilities, resources, whatever.
Guest:But that doesn't dictate what I want out of life or what I want out of myself.
Guest:I've got bigger dreams than, you know, the stuff that I can see around me.
Guest:And even if I don't know how to achieve it, I will make the effort to achieve it.
Marc:But they're not necessarily clear, so it's actually the compulsion to keep pushing further.
Marc:You're never going to arrive.
Guest:Right, right, sure.
Guest:But that's the whole point of it.
Guest:That's the nobility of it.
Guest:You have a certain guarantee of failure, kind of.
Guest:But doing something in the face of that makes it a more worthwhile...
Guest:right pursuit to my mind it's a fight it is the fight and it is saying you know I want I just want more yeah that was my first word that I ever learned to say it was more and I always wanted more and I still want more like I don't know what more looks like but I know that I want it I know that I'm dissatisfied with the life that I've got and
Guest:And I feel like there's a better life out there somewhere and I don't know how to achieve it, but I am doing the work of achieving what version of it I can.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:This is how you reach the sublime, you know?
Guest:Like people see us and we get up on stage and we play 16 songs and 15 of them suck, right?
Guest:No.
Guest:I mean, that's not really true.
Guest:That's how it was in like 2009.
Guest:Being a little hard on yourself, right?
Guest:You know, got to get a little hard on some way, right?
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But, I mean, if you play 16 songs and 15 of them are bad and then one of them's good, you know, then that one good song isn't just a good song, it's like a miracle.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You understand?
Guest:It's like...
Guest:Oh, yeah, dude.
Guest:It happened.
Guest:They did it.
Guest:Like, you know, the tension of like, you know, like the Sex Pistols did this and the replacements and, you know, the Stooges and stuff like they were humans.
Guest:You know, they weren't like Led Zeppelin where like, you know, they get on stage and it's basically, you know, like.
Guest:failure proof situation it's gods coming down from mount olympus to strut their stuff and like and and fuck with the uh the mortals yeah yeah but iggy pop wasn't like that he was you know a mortal trying to climb the mountain and maybe he never got to the top but he tried yeah you know and like nobody gets to the top of the mountain okay not really
Marc:Why, because that one's there to kick you down?
Guest:Basically, yeah.
Guest:They've consolidated all the power up on the top.
Guest:It's a fixed game, you know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it's better to be a person trying to climb the mountain and failing than a person living some kind of neutered and self-pitying life at the bottom of the mountain.
Marc:right well they were somehow or another those guys were ordained you know you know whatever the you know the music business did at whatever time the selections were made you know the hits were pounded into people's heads and the mythology was established right yeah so i like the way you characterize that though you know because like you talk about the replacements you talk about iggy you talk about the sex pistols because it's hard to really you know he sat there where you were sitting you know with no shirt on and
Marc:And, you know, it's like I have always had this really strong sort of like confused kind of like respect and inability to kind of figure out what made him so fucking authentic.
Marc:And it's just that is that his humanness is the first thing you feel.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And the same with Paul and those guys.
Guest:He smacks it in your face with his, you know, his emaciated frame.
Marc:And his weird movements.
Guest:Which makes him quite a very big hero of mine, that frame of his.
Guest:Oh, yeah, man.
Guest:I think about Iggy Pop every time I lift up an amplifier.
Guest:What, you think Iggy could do this easier?
Guest:I mean, not, I mean, I just, I lift up the amplifier and say, I'm one amplifier lift closer to having the body of Iggy Pop and being the weird friggin' like creepy sex symbol that he was.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Because that's the thing about rock and roll.
Guest:It's the only idiom where a guy that looks like him or that looks like me can be put up as an object of sexual desire.
Guest:That wouldn't work in baseball or something.
Guest:Not that that's why I'm at it, to exploit my sexuality, but it's just another example of how punk and rock and roll is just the great validator of
Marc:So you think that like the idea of this humanness that you're talking about, the difference between the Mount Olympian gods and the struggle of the humans is just that the vulnerability that naturally happens from willingness to fail and to keep pushing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's saying like- I'm trying.
Guest:I'm trying.
Guest:I may not succeed.
Guest:And that's not the point.
Guest:Nobody's going to succeed.
Guest:Nobody gets everything that they want.
Guest:I mean, certain people do.
Guest:And as you say, they're ordained and they're pre-selected to lead this, to be ushered into the ruling class.
Guest:For those of us that don't have that kind of golden ticket, for whatever reason-
Guest:It's more about saying we reject the notion that this game is anything to be won.
Guest:The rules are perverted and gross, and anybody that would be a winner at this game is the ultimate loser.
Guest:Nietzsche called this slave morality.
Guest:The slaves saw that they were never going to have the luxurious life of the masters,
Guest:So they invented a morality that would put them on the high ground in much the same way that we do when we compare ourselves to whoever's on the radio now.
Guest:Sure.
Marc:There's a sort of self-righteous bitterness.
Guest:I mean, bitterness sort of, like it's skeptical and critical of the status quo.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Or maybe not even, like it doesn't, I mean, it doesn't even have to necessarily say that the status quo is bad as much as, you know, I went through...
Guest:The thought process, I did the work of determining whether or not the status quo was relevant to my personal set of values.
Guest:If someone really takes the time to look within themselves and they find out that really at the end of the day what makes them happy is putting on a shirt and tie and commuting to some what seems to me crap job,
Guest:You know, like if that's ultimately what really is going to satisfy their ascetic self, like that's every bit, you know, as, you know, on a fundamental level, that's as punk a decision as deciding to, you know, not be a green haired freak.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, it's just about, I've, you know, I have a dialogue with myself.
Guest:I don't just take what is, you know, pushed on me as an absolute truth and,
Guest:And accept it.
Guest:I don't have blind faith in anything.
Guest:I think about these things.
Marc:Well, what do you do?
Marc:Do you have any sort of peace of mind ever or any moments of joy other than the release of being in the moment on stage?
Marc:Do you eat things that make you happy?
Marc:Oh, God, don't talk to me about food.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, sure.
Guest:I have moments of incredible joy.
Guest:The fact of the matter is, like, you just make the decision to be an open-hearted person in general, you know?
Guest:It's not like, you know, you decide to be open-hearted and you say, I will be sensitive and I will, you know, I will accept all these stimuli of life and I will, you know, allow my emotions to be triggered, you know, accordingly.
Guest:And when you do that, you open yourself up to very great pain, you know, and people can hurt you very, very badly if you make yourself vulnerable before them, you know, like that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But at the same time, that open-heartedness will also allow you to have the greatest joys in life and, you know, feel the most love and the most, you know...
Guest:you know, real transcendent happiness.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:But, like, you have to accept that you can't let in just the good stuff and then be invulnerable to the bad stuff, you know?
Marc:Right, right, right.
Guest:If you want to really, really love the world, you have to accept the things about the world that you hate, you know?
Guest:Not accept them like, you know, oh, that's just the way it is and it's fine, but you say, like...
Guest:you don't shut yourself off to those experiences because in so doing you're going to also shut yourself off to the all the wonderful things in life so you know yes I'm able to be very very you know hurt psychologically damaged by you know certain things that other people would just shrug off right but I think that that gives me a greater ability to you know stop and smell the roses sometimes you know
Marc:What are those roses generally for you?
Marc:You like art for real?
Guest:Art, you mean like paintings and stuff?
Guest:I mean, not really.
Guest:I don't go out of my way to do that, to look at paintings.
Marc:What do you go out of your way to do?
Guest:I go out of my way to love people.
Guest:I go out of my way to be involved in the work that I feel.
Guest:is valuable.
Guest:Most of my free time goes to the venue back in New York City that we all work at, which is called Shea Stadium.
Guest:And we're in the East Williamsburg Industrial Park, where I also live.
Guest:Shea Stadium.
Guest:Shea Stadium, that's right.
Guest:Some friends of mine, some guys from this great band, the So So Glows, and the lead guitar player of Titus Andronicus, this fellow named Adam Reisch.
Guest:bonded as kids over the Mets.
Guest:Their fathers had season tickets to the Mets.
Guest:Their fathers were good friends, and they had season tickets at the original Shea Stadium, you know, where the Beatles played and where the Mets played for all those years.
Guest:And then years later, after Shea Stadium was closed, they started this venue and named it Shea Stadium.
Guest:In Brooklyn?
Guest:In Brooklyn, yeah.
Guest:Not Queens, where the original Shea Stadium was.
Guest:But I go there, and I work there, and I try to help do the work to create artistic opportunities for people.
Guest:And that's mostly what gives me satisfaction as far as, besides spending time with my friends and my special lady and the people that I care about.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:So can we talk about the records for a minute?
Marc:Yeah, sure.
Marc:Because these seem to be, well, the Monitor specifically seems to be a fully realized concept record.
Marc:Is it?
Marc:Was it fully realized?
Marc:I don't know about that.
Marc:When I listen to it, as much as I can and try to put it together, it seemed like there was a sort of story and an arc there.
Marc:What was the inspiration?
Marc:And the quotes were from Lincoln.
Marc:And who else did you have your drama teacher read?
Guest:Well, he read only from Lincoln, but other people read from William Lloyd Garrison and Jefferson Davis and Walt Whitman.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:But, yeah, I mean, what you're saying is true.
Guest:There was a concept.
Guest:There was an overarching theme and a vague narrative.
Guest:What was it?
Guest:The narrative was the story of something that happened to me, which was that I got out of college and I moved to Somerville, Massachusetts.
Guest:Oh, shit.
Guest:I lived there.
Guest:You lived there?
Guest:In Davis Square.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I used to live off Inman Square.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So anyway, I went there to start a new life.
Guest:And, you know, like my first attempt at like an adult life.
Guest:And it just didn't work out how I thought it would because of, you know, my relationship with, you know, the people who I was, you know, had relationships with at the time.
Guest:And because of, you know, my ongoing relationship with the wider society, you know.
Guest:So you had a meltdown or?
Guest:I don't know if I'd call it a meltdown exactly, but, you know.
Guest:You hit the wall.
Guest:If you want, you know, if you're interested in hearing a record about a real nervous breakdown, we're making a pretty serious one right now.
Marc:Yeah?
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:Did you have one?
Marc:Oh, yes.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:Well, how long ago?
Guest:two years ago i guess it started how did it manifest itself um what was the arc the arc of it was that you know um you know i lived a certain way throughout my entire life and kind of just to edit you know the vaguest of feelings that i was just like a weird freak yeah yeah
Guest:And I knew that I was a freak in some way and somehow other from society.
Guest:I didn't really understand how.
Guest:But I knew that it had made trouble for me and would continue to make trouble for me throughout my life.
Guest:And when I got to be about 26 years old, I came to understand that I was a manic depressive.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:The way that I did that was, you know, I had just learned about, you know, the condition from being, you know, very close to people who had it throughout my life, which should have been a huge clue that, like, all the people that I was closest to had this particular... Your family, too?
Guest:I mean, they're, you know, it's kind of a skeleton in my family's closet.
Guest:I think I might be the first one... To come out?
Guest:To come out of the closet...
Guest:Even though I could point to a lot of my relatives and tell you why the various choices that they made reflect this.
Guest:But they're all dead now.
Guest:There's no real way to prove it.
Guest:But more so looking at just the history of my own life and the people that I was close to.
Guest:And, you know, I entered into a phase, you know, where it just became too clear to ignore, you know, and, um...
Guest:I was like, oh, shoot.
Guest:I've been really depressed.
Guest:I always knew that I was depressed, and I'd been on antidepressants for many years at that point.
Guest:But I was like, gee, this is wild, because last week I was the saddest, mopiest guy in the world, and now I stay up all night, every night, and I never stop talking.
Guest:Isn't that a little strange that just so recently I was this way, and now I'm this way?
Guest:And it became to be like...
Guest:too much to ignore and then it kind of like i was like okay well so i'm a manic depressive this is like gonna be a hell of a ride let's do it you know and i just kind of like went through and i just made you know every kind of decision in mania yeah at the height of my mania
Guest:And I ripped my entire life apart.
Guest:In every institution in my life, I did everything that I could to destroy.
Guest:And several of them I destroyed irreparably.
Guest:And I could look back on it now as saying that it was my mania that gave me the strength to destroy these walls I had built up around myself and get myself out of situations that were toxic to me when in my depression I would be too...
Guest:chicken shit to do the work of it and endure the trauma of you know dismantling your life in that way and to look back on it now like you know I could have done things a lot differently and a lot of people would have been a lot happier including especially myself but anyway the point is that it was like a you know kind of a game to me at that point and I just was invulnerable and like everything that I was doing seemed to be brilliant to me and
Guest:And then, you know, like, people were trying to warn me, like, if you really think that this is, you know, what you're going through, like, there's going to be, you know, you're going to pay for this at some point.
Guest:And I was like, you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
Guest:Did you feel free?
Guest:It ain't so.
Guest:Yeah, I felt like I could fly, you know?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But, like, they were right.
Guest:And then, you know, um...
Guest:In March of last year, I hit the wall for real.
Guest:I basically didn't get out of bed until December.
Guest:And even when I was able to do that, I got out of bed, but I could barely talk.
Guest:And in the trauma of going through this and in the terror of not knowing what's going on in your brain, I listened to a lot of the wrong people and I took a lot of...
Guest:treatment for it that I come to see now is a very big mistake.
Guest:Did they fuck you up?
Guest:Very, very badly.
Guest:They couldn't figure out how to medicate you or what?
Guest:No, I mean, they could figure it out.
Guest:The goal of these doctors when dealing with a manic depressive person is like...
Guest:They feel like, you know, this person is potentially dangerous, so we got to find the part of their brain that makes them dangerous and turn it off.
Guest:And they did it.
Guest:You know, they turned that part of my brain off.
Guest:With what?
Guest:In a big way.
Guest:With drugs.
Guest:Which ones?
Guest:With clonazepam and Abilify and, geez, what the hell was the other one?
Guest:Did you do electroshock?
Guest:Ibuprofen.
Guest:Buproprin.
Guest:Buproprin.
Guest:Something.
Guest:I never did... No, I never got zapped.
Guest:I mean, I've been electrocuted before, but by accident.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But no, they didn't electrocute me like they did to try and cure the homosexuality of the teenage Lou Reed.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But like...
Guest:But they put you through it.
Guest:They did.
Guest:And I asked for it.
Guest:I was the decider ultimately.
Guest:But I was so desperate for any kind of solution.
Guest:And they told me that they had one.
Guest:What they didn't tell me was that when they turn off the part of your brain that makes you this dangerous person, they turn off everything else about you that makes you who you are.
Guest:They take your sexuality away from you.
Guest:They take away your ability to generate abstractions.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like the, you know, you know, the depression that I went through last year was like the worst thing that I ever experienced by far, you know?
Guest:And the thing that was really terrifying about it was not that like I looked into the future and, and felt like an unspeakable dread because I had felt that dread my entire life, but I could, I lacked, I felt the dread, but I lacked the ability to articulate it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I couldn't, I couldn't like, so you couldn't relieve yourself at all.
Guest:No.
Guest:When I was younger and I would get depressed, I was still able to make my art and stuff.
Guest:I could write a little poem and I could get a little bit of the bad stuff out, purge myself a little bit.
Guest:But in taking away the part of me that made all those problems for everybody when I was a maniac, they like...
Guest:They killed the poet in me.
Guest:They took away my ability to make the unique connections that I can make.
Guest:I'm not saying I have this one in a billion brain or anything, but people have got a neural network.
Guest:They have stored all this information and they make connections between it.
Guest:My brain was just like...
Marc:you know the dustiest old library you know that like you couldn't maybe there's all this information in there but it's all in a big pile and it's all under a foot of dust and it's useless yeah i mean i i i hear you i mean i grew up with it my my old man's a bipolar and i you know i just recently got a psyche valve and they want to put me on meds i don't know what the fuck to do i mean it's tough like and they do help a lot of people you know so you're off everything
Guest:No, I didn't say that.
Guest:But I'm off the white man's drugs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm off drugs that came out of a fucking laboratory.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm off drugs that, you know, that they, like, they give you these drugs.
Guest:Like, they don't even know what they do.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They made these drugs last year.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They're just trying them out.
Marc:Let's see.
Guest:Yeah, you're a guinea pig.
Marc:Yeah, that's right.
Guest:In the hope that, like, you know, as, you know, maybe they'll fuck up your life, but in so doing, they'll learn a little something and, like...
Guest:I choose not to throw my body upon those gears, you know?
Guest:I hear you.
Guest:Or my brain, rather.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:So were you able to sort of repair some of the damage that you caused in the break?
Marc:I think so, you know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, and it was like... It was a little dicey, you know, because I've been, you know...
Guest:You know, this year I went back to being quite a maniac and, you know, again, was alienating a lot of people.
Guest:And only recently I've begun, you know, to, like, make the transition to the next season, you know.
Guest:And in anticipating that, like, I felt, you know, this horrible terror that, like, I was going to, you know...
Guest:when i hit the wall like that my brain would just be erased you know and all that these plans i made and all these promises i made all these dreams that i nurtured would just be totally inaccessible to me you know but um if you went back on the meds no i mean just like when i just in the natural seasons of my mind yeah like i thought you know the depression will come again
Guest:In a race.
Guest:And, you know, and then it's going to be over.
Guest:So, like, it filled me with a terrible urgency.
Guest:And this summer I wrote, like, 15 songs.
Guest:And this is the new record?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And in 2012 I wrote Zero, you know?
Guest:Right.
Guest:And people try to tell me that that's bad.
Guest:And maybe it is, you know?
Guest:Like, I think about Daniel Johnston a lot, you know, and how, like, you know...
Guest:The person that he used to be and how he is now, I don't really know what it's like to be a part of his life, but it can see, or like any of these older mentally ill rockers, the story about them is like, oh, they're doing so much better.
Guest:Yeah, but they...
Guest:But they're not.
Guest:They can barely stand up.
Guest:Yeah, they're just wandering around.
Guest:And I don't want to condescend anybody at all.
Marc:Well, no, but you're just talking about the choice.
Guest:But the fact of the matter is, yeah.
Guest:And Daniel Johnson, if you saw that movie about him and stuff, you know that he tried to kill his family and stuff.
Guest:And at the end of the day, you can't do that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But it makes me really sad that they were able to get rid of the part of him that had the desire to kill his family.
Guest:And I'm not saying kill your family by any means, but in some weird kind of tragic way, it was the same thing that drove him to want to kill his family was the same thing that drove him to create all that beautiful and very useful to lots of people.
Guest:Yeah, music.
Guest:It's a tough negotiation, man.
Guest:It is.
Guest:And how do you say to Daniel Johnston's father, you know, who he tried to, you know, murder, like, it would be better if you would just leave him to his own devices and let him continue to be the artist that we love him for being.
Marc:Just keep your doors locked, man.
Guest:Yeah, like, you can't ask that to somebody.
Guest:It's tough because, like, people, you know, are artists and, like...
Guest:They're able to create art under certain conditions, and you get the art, and as far as you're concerned, that's the end of the story, but it's not.
Guest:That artist is not in some monastery somewhere.
Guest:That artist has got people in their lives that get hurt.
Guest:And Daniel Johnston's parents, or any of these people, or even the people in my life, they're like...
Guest:you know how you can't ask those people like ruin your whole life like sacrifice everything to help this kid just lay down in the road so that this person can walk all over you so that the world can enjoy their art you can't ask that as somebody not for dania johnson not for neil young yeah like not for anybody and definitely not for me so that was so when's that album coming out november 2014
Marc:That's great, man.
Marc:So, all right, let's go back to the monitor.
Marc:So, do you track your experience in Somerville as being part of this cycle?
Guest:Oh, geez.
Guest:I mean, I certainly didn't think about it that way, but I can look back on my life now and plug any of it into the story.
Marc:All right, well, let's isolate it then.
Marc:So, I just want to know from my own enjoyment when I go back to the record.
Guest:All it was was, you know...
Guest:I got into watching the movie The Civil War by Ken Burns.
Guest:It was on YouTube.
Guest:The YouTube user that put it up had an avatar of a Confederate flag, for whatever that's worth.
Guest:But the girl I was living with at the time, she would go to bed, and I would stay up, and I would be watching...
Guest:this movie and, like, being, like, so amazed and, like, have my, you know, my mind blown again, like I'm always looking for, as you observed.
Guest:And it just got me thinking a lot about, you know, you know, the divided house, right?
Guest:You know, about, like, these seemingly, like, cohesive units, right?
Guest:Or, like, they present this unified front and yet, like...
Guest:But under the surface, it's not so unified, whether that's this country.
Guest:We say, united we stand and stuff, and yet we all hate each other.
Guest:And everybody would love to choke out another American because they root for the wrong football team or something.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And even the people that you love the most, like me and this girl, we were supposedly so in love, and yet we always were going at it.
Guest:we know that like working together is going to get us more of what we want and yet we can't bring ourselves to stop fighting all the time yeah and it was just kind of an exploration of sort of the um the inherent need to fight and i found out after the fact that you know
Guest:Friedrich Nietzsche observed this about the world and commented that the world was nothing more than a system of forces in competition with each other.
Guest:Everything with a certain will to power.
Guest:And, you know, these things bounce around the universe and they create, you know, the universe.
Guest:The universe is a series of causes and effects.
Marc:So that was the root of it.
Marc:Ultimately, yeah.
Marc:It's a good record, man.
Marc:And local business is great.
Marc:And I'm looking forward to this one.
Marc:And I'm glad you're at least more self-aware of your struggle.
Guest:That's all that it is.
Guest:I'm just searching for my authentic self.
Marc:Yeah, I hear you.
Guest:And I feel that I will be better able to achieve this if I'm more open about the process.
Guest:And I let everybody know, like, I'm on this path.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, and I'm not sure where I'm going necessarily, but if you would like to walk it with me, even for just like an hour at a time, like spinning the CD or whatever, or, you know, a couple hours out in the town at the concert, you know, like we can forget about the other stuff for a little while and we can think about this stuff or, you know, not think about anything.
Guest:All right, man.
Guest:Can I go to the show tomorrow?
Guest:Oh, most certainly you can.
Guest:And you're going to have a great treat when you see the great band Lost Boy.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Lo-Fi High on Twitter.
Guest:Thanks for talking to me, man.
Guest:Thanks for listening.
Marc:Intense dude.
Marc:That's what you got there.
Marc:That Stickles fella is an intense dude.
Marc:So, alright, that's the show.
Marc:I gotta go to bed, man.
Marc:I gotta tape tomorrow.
Marc:I gotta shoot tomorrow.
Marc:It's interesting when you're... Go to WTFPod.com for all your WTFPod needs.
Marc:Get that free app.
Marc:Upgrade to premium.
Marc:Get me and Brendan McDonald talking shop a bit.
Marc:Do what you want.
Marc:Get some merch.
Marc:Check things out.
Marc:But it's weird when you work hard and you work your fucking ass off and you're in the middle of it and it ain't over yet and it's not going to be over for a while.
Marc:It's weird this thing that comes over you.
Marc:You just feel this part of your heart that is like six years old that you're just like, I don't want to do it anymore.
Marc:I don't want to.
Marc:I don't want to.
Marc:And then the grown up is like, just, just shut up.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Quit whining.
Marc:You know, we're going to be done in a couple of weeks.
Marc:This is what you worked for.
Marc:Just fucking lock down, focus and do the best you can.
Marc:But I don't know.
Marc:It's not going to shut up.
Marc:Shut up.
Marc:I know you're tired.
Marc:I know this is hard, but life is hard.
Marc:But can't we?
Marc:No, we can't.
Marc:In two weeks, we can.
Marc:We can do whatever it is that you were going to finish that sentence with.
Marc:All right?
Marc:All right?
Marc:I guess, but can I?
Marc:No, you can't.
Marc:You know what?
Marc:Just sit down and shut up and let the grown-up run this one.
Marc:All right?
Marc:I'm just going to need to borrow your state of mind occasionally to tap into something pure.
Marc:I don't even understand that.
Marc:Of course you don't understand that.
Marc:Because you're six.
Marc:But I can appreciate it now.
Marc:Maybe you'll be able to appreciate it eventually.
Marc:But this whining thing.
Marc:Jesus Christ.
Marc:That's got to go.
Marc:Yeah, Mark, but it really hasn't gone.
Marc:Who's that talking now?
Marc:You know who this is.
Marc:Boomer lives!