Episode 594 - Britt Daniel
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 fuckineers?
Marc:What the fuck sticks?
Marc:This is Mark Maron.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:Welcome to the show.
Marc:Got a packed show today.
Marc:Britt Daniel from the band Spoon is going to be here in the latter part of the show.
Marc:I can say that because we've got another meaty guest on the show as well.
Marc:The amazing John Ronson.
Marc:has written a book about shame.
Marc:So you've been publicly shamed.
Marc:It's out now.
Marc:We talked a bit about this book on episode 473.
Marc:He was in the middle of writing the book.
Marc:Now, I think some of you by now have probably realized that if I've had a guest on before who I enjoy and like, which is most of my guests,
Marc:If they've got something that they want to get out in the world, they want a little help or they want to talk about it some more, I'll have them on for what we call shorties.
Marc:That's what we call them behind your back.
Marc:I call them a shorty interview.
Marc:Though John and I did get into it.
Marc:We got into it a bit.
Marc:It's a heavy topic, the public shame business.
Marc:Shame in general weighs heavy on all of us.
Marc:Well, many of us, some know it better than others.
Marc:Some nourish it for no reason at all.
Marc:If you're out there nourishing shame without any purpose, you should probably check yourself.
Marc:It might be where you're most comfortable.
Marc:And that's what keeps religions in business and also psychiatrists and also the general capitalist model remains in business.
Marc:Because of persistent, chronic, and nourished shame.
Marc:You need relief from that shit?
Marc:Get something in you.
Marc:Go buy something.
Marc:Go talk to Jesus.
Marc:Go get some pills.
Marc:Do you really need it?
Marc:Is the shame based in anything?
Marc:Shame is not guilt.
Marc:It's something deeper.
Marc:It's something deeper.
Marc:It's a point of view on who you are.
Marc:It's not related to action necessarily.
Marc:And sometimes it's very old and very young and not so definable as to where it comes from.
Marc:But it's paralyzing, not like cancer is paralyzing, but it's sort of a soul cancer.
Marc:Rambling on, tonight I'll be in Madison, Wisconsin.
Marc:Might be a few tickets left for that.
Marc:On Friday, April 17th, the Carnegie of Homestead Music Hall in Pittsburgh.
Marc:I think there's a few tickets left for that.
Marc:Saturday, April 18th, the Royal Oak Music Theater in Royal Oak, Michigan, outside of Detroit there.
Marc:Might be a few for that.
Marc:Don't know.
Marc:Toronto on Sunday, April 19th.
Marc:First show is sold out.
Marc:Second show, maybe a few tickets at the Bluma Appel Theater.
Marc:You can go to WTFPod.com and get links to these things.
Marc:That's what's happening this weekend.
Marc:The next weekend we're doing Texas.
Marc:So that's the story.
Marc:If you want to go see me, I think there's still some opportunity.
Marc:Not a lot of tickets.
Marc:But there are some.
Marc:So if you're in any of those places and you're just hearing about this shit, go do it.
Marc:So last night I do this thing called Baked Comedy at the Baked Potato, which is this classic little jazz rock music bar hole, this box of a room that's magic.
Marc:It's a magic room.
Marc:I've been there before.
Marc:I've talked to you about this before.
Marc:The show Baked is basically it's a monthly show where comics can tell a story and also sing or play an instrument or whatever with a band that Brendan Small from Metalocalypse fame that he's put together.
Marc:And they're amazing musicians.
Marc:They're just fucking awesome.
Marc:You know who was in the band last night?
Marc:Mike Keneally.
Marc:Do you know who Mike Keneally is?
Marc:He's a fucking wizard.
Marc:He's one of them genius wizards of the guitar.
Marc:Played with Zappa towards the end.
Marc:Steve Vai.
Marc:Other guys at Noodle.
Marc:Joe Travers on drums, who's a genius.
Marc:Pete Griffin on bass.
Marc:Bass genius.
Marc:Mike Keneally on keyboards and guitar.
Marc:Mike Keneally.
Marc:The wizard.
Marc:The wizard.
Marc:and I told the story about talking to Mick and Keith, and Dean Del Rey sang, and I played, and the fellas jammed, and these wizards, they come up to me, and they're like, you sounded great.
Marc:Mike Keneally,
Marc:Fucking, you know, high level initiated guitar wizard, you know, tells me I did great.
Marc:And I accept it and I felt like I did great.
Marc:But then I realized, like, you know, it's interesting because this happened once before.
Marc:Many years ago, you know, I'm an amateur guitar player, but I play seriously.
Marc:And I don't grow so much, you know, skip my skill set or I'm not practicing to become a noodle wizard.
Marc:But, you know, I do play to sort of, you know, get my chops in order and express my feelings on the instrument.
Marc:And then when somebody who is a guitar wizard says, you know, you sounded great.
Marc:Part of me is like, I know he's not condescending.
Marc:But see, the thing that I have that those guys will never have again is
Marc:is the limitations.
Marc:The limitation of what I know is that I'm an energetic, I have a lot of emotion, but I'm severely limited on the instrument in relation to somebody who's a wizard.
Marc:So I've got to really work
Marc:within those limits to push through.
Marc:And if you do that, if you have limitations in whatever you do, but you are able to push everything you need to push through those limitations, you can express yourself thoroughly and simply and concisely in a way that...
Marc:wizards will never have again because wizards can do anything they can almost do it you know second nature they can hear something and recreate it and so the one thing that's gone forever is amateur passion i got feels and i gotta get some out now in the rawest form possible
Marc:why hide the feels behind the noodle that's my that's my take on guitar oh don't laugh at yourself i love talking to john ronson i do want to preface this that he brought his son over who's a fan of the show and and just a and the kid hadn't slept in about a day because they were traveling and uh he was all raw and cool and fun and he was just sitting there kind of laughing to himself when me and his dad were talking it
Marc:was very adorable so that that was what was happening so here i'm going to talk a bit to john ronson about his new book so you've been publicly shamed
Guest:what happened to you okay so this is when i was first starting out in journalism and i was working for this magazine that just closed down called loaded and they phoned me up and they said that um you can be flown on concord to prince's house uh in minneapolis do you want to do it yeah so i said yes please okay
Guest:So I turned up at the airport and I said, hi, I'm here to fly on Concorde.
Guest:And the woman said, are you the courier?
Guest:And I said, no, I'm a passenger.
Guest:And she turned to the woman next to her and said, find out if he's the courier.
Guest:So that was like a bad start.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What does that mean?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Like I didn't look like a passenger.
Guest:I must be delivering something.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And even when I said I was a passenger, she was still convinced I was delivering something.
Guest:So then I got on the plane and I was seated next to Keith Richards.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:In first class?
Guest:Well, it's all first class on Concorde.
Guest:It's all one class.
Guest:Is it still around?
Guest:No more, right?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:One crashed.
Guest:That was the end of it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And in fact, the story I'm about to tell will give an insight into why Concorde is no longer operational.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So it's you and Keith.
Guest:Me and Keith at the back in smoking.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This is when I still smoked.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I thought, oh, shit, I'm going to have to spend the next three and a half hours looking straight ahead and not acknowledging the fact that I'm sitting next to Keith Richards.
Guest:No.
Guest:Impossible.
Guest:Well, I swear to God, within a minute, he pokes me in my ribs.
Guest:I can't remember the first thing he said to me, but within about 10 seconds, he said to me...
Guest:I've done everything, man.
Guest:So we're talking.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then Concord takes off and it reaches, like, Mach 2.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And everybody, like, applauds because that's when you beat him.
Guest:Do you hear it?
Guest:Do you hear the sonic boom?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it says at the front, Mach 2.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, like, there's applause.
Guest:And...
Guest:And then it started to slow down.
Guest:I mean, I hadn't been on Concorde before, but I assumed that once it reaches Mach 2, it doesn't just immediately slow down.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But it did.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the captain came on the tannoy and went, you may have noticed that we have...
Guest:slow, hydraulic, like that.
Guest:The tannoy wasn't working.
Guest:So, like, you know, Keith Richards seems fine.
Guest:But then the guy in front of me, who was like the head of a radio station, Capital Radio, turned around and said, apparently the last time this happened, they gave everybody free vouchers for Marks and Spencers, which is like a kind of food store in England.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And then the woman on the next thing.
Guest:And by now, like, the plane's juddering.
Guest:It's, like, juddering alarmingly.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, like, the woman next to me is going, apparently, we get vouchers.
Guest:We get free vouchers.
Guest:Like, 500-pound vouchers.
Guest:And I'm thinking, fuck.
Marc:We're going down.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You're not thinking about vouchers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I swear, like, this story I'm telling you, this is no exaggeration.
Guest:So then the captain, like, tries to come on the tannoy again.
Guest:Goes out.
Guest:I'm sorry.
Guest:Apparently, the tannoy is hydraulic fuel.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so then the captain comes out of the cockpit and starts addressing people like four by four.
Guest:And Keith Richards goes, so he's like way down the front of the plane.
Guest:And Keith Richards goes, I don't care about this, but I'll tell you who is going to be pissed off.
Guest:I said, who?
Guest:He said, Mick.
Guest:It's down the front.
Guest:Mick Jagger like turns and waves at Keith.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:I swear.
Guest:I swear.
Guest:And then and obviously I'm thinking like, fuck, if this plane goes down, like for eternity, it's going to be like Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Liam Neeson and 97 others.
Guest:Yeah, you didn't even make top billing at all.
Guest:No, fucking... Liam Neeson was on the plane?
Guest:Yeah, Liam Neeson too.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Yeah, so then the captain, like, finally, he's, like, addressing people four by four, and he reaches us, and, like, he decides to, like, I guess he has to look at somebody, so he looks at me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he says, you may have noticed that the plane has, like, slowed down dramatically.
Guest:It's because we've lost our hydraulic fuel.
Guest:There's a leak, and we've lost our hydraulic fuel.
Guest:We're going to turn back to London.
Guest:We may or may not make it,
Guest:I swear.
Guest:But just enjoy, you know, the food.
Guest:And at this point, the guy in front of me turns around and goes, the vouchers.
Guest:He said we may or may not make it.
Guest:Look, this is my memory of it.
Guest:We may or may not make it.
Guest:That's my memory.
Marc:And Keith just sat there.
Guest:Yeah, so I said to Keith, you know, you've said you've done everything.
Guest:And he said, well, I've never flown over Greenland twice in one day.
Marc:So that's my, yeah.
Marc:He's clever, man.
Marc:He's quick.
Marc:I know, I know.
Marc:I noticed that too, just talking to him for 10 minutes.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:They're both very witty, yeah.
Guest:Hey, so thank you for having me back, Mark.
Marc:Well, I mean, we had talked about this book when you were on the show before, and I'm happy you're in Los Angeles.
Marc:This is the So You've Been Publicly Shamed book.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And this is a book about shame in general, in a way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Last time I came on the show, I was still writing it, and I hadn't told anybody.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I like what I was doing.
Guest:And then you said, so what are you working on?
Guest:And I said, I'm writing a book about public shame.
Guest:And I immediately regretted saying it to you because, you know, loose lips sink ships.
Guest:And I thought, you know, fuck, I don't even know where it's going yet.
Guest:So you didn't think you'd finish it, perhaps?
Guest:Maybe not.
Guest:Or maybe one of your bastard listeners would steal the idea and get the... Oh, yeah.
Marc:Steal the idea that you didn't explain at all.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Guest:So I thought, so I was skirting around it.
Guest:So I thought maybe, you know, it'd be nice now that the book's out.
Marc:Well, now it's here and now it's in America.
Marc:It took a little while to get it here because people have already gotten it in the UK, right?
Marc:And I read the excerpted piece in The New Yorker about the woman who... What was her job?
Guest:Justine Sacco.
Guest:She was a PR woman.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:She's kind of like... Is she the thread?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, but it's a really remarkable and difficult story, Justine.
Guest:And all the more easy.
Guest:I love it.
Guest:It's so difficult.
Guest:It makes people uncomfortable.
Guest:And for instance, I read something in the Washington Post that said, like, John Ronson's right to be writing a book about how we've gone, like, shaming crazy.
Guest:But he shouldn't have, like, made Justine Sacco a hero.
Guest:She's the wrong person.
Guest:And that obviously made me, like, even more happy that I was making her a hero because she's difficult and she makes people feel uncomfortable.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So her story is that she's got 170 Twitter followers, PR woman.
Guest:I mean, we went crazy.
Guest:Twitter went like crazy that night.
Guest:It was like Lord of the Flies.
Guest:So basically she's tweeting.
Guest:She's at Heathrow.
Guest:She's about to go to Cape Town and she tweets, going to Africa.
Guest:Hope I don't get AIDS.
Guest:Just kidding.
Guest:I'm white.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So she got no replies.
Guest:Easily misunderstood joke.
Guest:Yeah, it's definitely an easy to misunderstand.
Guest:You know, one stripped of its nuance.
Guest:What she was trying to do.
Guest:I mean, you know what she was trying to do in that joke.
Guest:What?
Guest:She was trying to be like Randy Newman of South Park.
Guest:She was trying to mock white privilege in a self-reflexive way by doing an extreme.
Marc:Without without really realizing that that text or Twitter has no there's no way to define one's voice if it floats there without the identification of the individual behind it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But she never thought about any of that because she never got any reply.
Guest:She only had 170 Twitter followers.
Guest:So, you know, obviously she felt that sad feeling that we all feel when the Internet.
Guest:No one liked it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No one likes me.
Marc:And now not only does no one like you, but they're going to come raining terror upon you.
Guest:Well, she had no idea, you know, because she just she just like got on the plane, you know, got no replies, felt sad.
Guest:No one congratulated her for being funny, turned off the phone and, you know, stretched, fell asleep, woke up 10 hours later, turned on her phone.
Guest:And straight away, there's a text from somebody she hasn't spoken to since high school that said, I am so sorry to see what's happening.
Marc:That was what she woke up.
Marc:That's what she landed to.
Guest:That's what she landed to.
Guest:And then another text from her best friend.
Guest:You need to phone me now.
Guest:You are the worldwide number one trending topic on Twitter.
Guest:And, you know, she realized what had happened.
Guest:But, I mean, it was unbelievable.
Guest:So it starts with, like, the humanitarians, like, in the light of this terrible tweet, I am donating to aid to Africa.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So then it's like, it gets a little bit darker.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like, let's get this cunt fired.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Everybody go report this cunt.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Then it gets darker still.
Guest:Like, somebody HIV positive should rape this bitch and then we'll find out if her skin colour protects her from AIDS.
Guest:Which, by the way, nobody went after that person.
Yeah.
Marc:That's pretty gnarly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's like we can only handle destroying one person a night.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then her employers tweeted, this is an outrageous, insulting comment.
Guest:Employee currently unreachable on an international flight.
Guest:And that's when things went crazy.
Guest:Because suddenly, like 100,000 people or more, millions of people, everybody was on Twitter that night.
Guest:This tweet overwhelmed their timeline.
Guest:I mean, were you on Twitter that night?
Marc:I don't remember it.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Well, it certainly overwhelmed my timeline.
Guest:And I thought like everybody else thought that night, which is, you know, wow, somebody's fucked.
Guest:And I got like excited.
Guest:And then I thought, I'm not sure that was a racist tweet.
Guest:I'm not sure that that was what was intended there.
Guest:But anybody who said that,
Guest:that night was like, well, you're just a privileged fucker too, so shut up.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:So everyone was scared.
Guest:Couldn't chime in, really.
Guest:No.
Guest:Well, everyone was scared.
Marc:And you don't have the bandwidth to, you don't have the space to sort of present that.
Marc:There's no time.
Marc:Some people have experimented with long-form narrative tweets.
Marc:Patton's been doing a bit of that.
Marc:And I've done it in my past.
Marc:But to actually create a defense in the middle of a shitstorm.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:On Twitter, it's not practical.
Guest:Because everything you say at that point is just more evidence for the prosecution.
Marc:Sure, and it'll get divided within people's timelines with other stuff, and people have to put it together, and if you don't have a real voice that anyone necessarily cares about, you're just going to be this fragmented narrative in a timeline.
Guest:Yeah, and then even if, like Justine, did have a good defense, she was asleep and oblivious
Marc:Oh, my God, it's just a nightmare.
Marc:I mean, the mild shaming that I've gotten on Twitter, I can only imagine exponentially just devastating.
Guest:Well, you know what happened next?
Guest:I mean, so after that, I haven't even told you the worst of it yet.
Guest:So as soon as we found out that she was oblivious to her destruction, that became hilarious to us.
Guest:That became like a great narrative arc.
Guest:So it's like,
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:Imagine what Justine Sack is going to be like when the plane lands and she turns on her phone.
Guest:And then a hashtag started to trend worldwide.
Guest:Hashtag has Justine landed yet?
Guest:And people were tweeting, oh, I so want to go home.
Guest:But everybody in this bar is so into hashtag has Justine landed yet?
Guest:You know, people were like gathered around smartphones.
Guest:It was like the Truman Show.
Guest:It was like the world's worst surprise party.
Guest:Yeah, but did she even get on Twitter when she landed?
Guest:Well, finally when she landed.
Guest:So everyone was like, Justin Sacco lands in like, because somebody linked to a flight tracker website so everybody could watch in real time as she was getting closer.
Guest:Like, what was she going to do when she landed?
Guest:Oh, shit.
Guest:You know what?
Guest:This isn't like crazy trolls.
Guest:Everybody wants to regulate against trolls.
Guest:This wasn't trolls.
Guest:This was us.
Guest:This was nice people like us.
Guest:And our massive desire to be seen, to be empathetic towards people dying of AIDS in Africa, we created this incredibly unempathetic thing.
Guest:This monster was there was the press already showing pictures of her places.
Guest:Well, somebody somebody said, come on Twitter.
Guest:Is anybody going to go to Cape Town Airport to tweet her arrival?
Guest:I want pictures.
Guest:So somebody went to the airport to tweet her arrival and took pictures of her.
Guest:And if you want to know what it looks like to have just found out that hundreds of thousands of people have destroyed you, you can see it.
Guest:She's just there at baggage claim, wearing dark glasses, looking utterly crushed and terrified.
Guest:And you talk to her.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I was on this journey because I was really interested in the people being destroyed by us because I would notice that, you know, I was joining in on these things all the time.
Guest:And then, you know, if you asked me back then, oh, could that person you just destroyed?
Guest:I mean, I probably wouldn't remember who they were or what it was that they did.
Guest:But then if I did remember, I think, oh, I'm sure they're fine.
Guest:So I wanted to meet people to find out.
Guest:And actually, her life was destroyed.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Our victims.
Guest:And I'm talking about, you know, don't don't rope me into your horrible behavior, John Ronson.
Marc:You've done it a bit.
Marc:I don't know if I have done it a bit.
Marc:Have I jumped on board?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:But I'm not.
Guest:I think you've done it a bit.
Guest:We've all done it a bit.
Guest:But also, don't you think we are doing to people like Justin Sacco the thing that really we're most terrified might happen to us?
Marc:Sure.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's weird.
Guest:I mean, I was really interested in that.
Guest:Like, why?
Guest:Like, we all walk around in life, like, permanently terrified of being shamed.
Guest:Like, we've all got something bubbling away within us that we're terrified would just destroy our reputation.
Marc:Yeah, but that also implies to me, and I was reading a little bit in the book about that group.
Marc:But, see, the fact that you say that we all walk around with these secrets implies that we are already ashamed.
Marc:So...
Marc:And I think that's a right observation that most people are walking around in some intensity of shame, personal shame, and the fear of being found out would be to shine a light on this horrible thing in themselves.
Marc:But I think the shame already exists.
Guest:Yeah, oh God, the shame does exist.
Guest:That group you mentioned, this is a group which tries to eradicate... Well, what happened to her, first of all?
Guest:Okay, so Justine, okay, so finally she landed, they took her photograph.
Guest:I mean, obviously she lost her job straight away, but...
Guest:You know, after everybody else had just forgotten about it because it would have been gone within a few days.
Guest:By the way, in November 2013, she was Googled 40 times.
Guest:Between December the 20th and the end of December, she was Googled 1,220,000 times.
Guest:And she was more like if you typed Justin into Google that night, you'd get Justine Sacco before you got Justin Bieber.
Guest:She was being searched for more often than Justin Bieber.
Marc:So now it's resided.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then she vanished and everybody just moved on.
Guest:And in fact, if you ask him, I asked one of the guys who was like the lead shamer, like this guy, Sam Biddle, who works for Valleywag and Gawker.
Guest:And he was the person who first alerted
Guest:You know, a large number of people to the tweet.
Guest:So one of Justine's 170 Twitter followers sent it to him and he retweeted it to his 15,000 followers.
Guest:And I asked him how it felt and he said it felt delicious.
Guest:And then the conversation got on to how he thought she was now.
Guest:And he said, I'm sure she's fine.
Guest:And that's because we want to... That kind of glibness is exactly what all of us feel when we're in the midst of shaming somebody.
Guest:We want to destroy somebody, but we don't feel bad about it.
Marc:I don't know if I exactly feel that.
Marc:I understand what you're saying, but I always wonder.
Marc:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:Like, how are they now?
Guest:yeah yeah well i certainly started to wonder that so i went on this kind of journey around america meeting our victims meeting the people who had been destroyed by us like all my life like with the minister at goats and the psychopath test like the crazy people who were doing the destroying were people a long way over there yeah justine sacco that she was destroyed by us so i went on this journey like trying to get into the the homes of the people who had been destroyed meeting them in restaurants they look like these kind of you know so i met justine in a restaurant three weeks later and
Guest:She was wearing the business clothes of her former life.
Guest:It was like The Living Dead.
Guest:It was like a kind of zombie film where they're wandering, like these spectral figures wandering the earth.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:She was crushed.
Guest:She said that she cried out her body weight in the first 24 hours and she'd wake up in the middle of the night forgetting who she was.
Guest:I mean, this is like PTSD.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, she forgot.
Guest:She was scared that she was going to lose herself forever.
Guest:So she lost her job and she wasn't fine.
Guest:And she wasn't fine for a year.
Guest:The only person who offered her a job was the owner of a yachting company in Florida who said, I'm completely on your side.
Guest:She thought, I don't know anything about yachts.
Guest:So it's this guy.
Guest:Somebody thinks white people can't get AIDS.
Guest:Was he?
Guest:She turned him down.
Guest:She ended up going to Addis Ababa to work with a charity helping reduce maternal mortality rates in Ethiopia.
Guest:which she kind of loved, partly because I think there was no internet there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I think she kind of daydreamed about maybe this is my new life.
Guest:But of course, that wasn't a new life because she was a kind of New York City person.
Guest:So she came back to a town where things still weren't OK for her.
Guest:She couldn't date because you Google everybody that you date and she was the AIDS tweet woman.
Guest:And finally...
Guest:So I wrote about it.
Guest:So I met her a couple of times.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Since my piece came out and people were like saying to her, like my book, oh, my God, you know, look at what we did to you.
Guest:Actually, that's not true.
Guest:Nobody said that to her.
Guest:People said, oh, my God, look at what those people did to you.
Guest:They weren't the fuckers who were doing it in the first place.
Guest:Not me.
Marc:I wasn't even home that night.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But of course, you know, there's nothing more traumatizing as a human being.
Guest:You know, when you meet these people like I did.
Guest:Who were the other people that you met?
Guest:Oh, other people, a woman called Lindsay Stone.
Guest:What did she do?
Guest:She made a similar joke where... On Twitter?
Guest:No, on Facebook, where she had, she had this, she worked with adults with learning difficulties and she had this running joke where she would pose in front of a sign and do the opposite.
Guest:So she'd loiter in front of a no loitering sign.
Guest:So she takes the people in her care to Arlington National Cemetery, sees the sign that says, keep off the grass, thinks, oh, well, I stand on the grass and thinks, no, no, that'll get me into trouble.
Guest:Then she sees a sign that says silence and respect.
Guest:Inspiration strikes.
Guest:She crouches in front of the sign, pretending to shout and flip the finger.
Guest:So that goes around the world.
Guest:You know, die, cunt, cut out our uterus.
Guest:Let's rape this bitch.
Guest:You know, disrespecting the military.
Guest:She doesn't leave her home for a year and a half.
Guest:reads every tweet, every tweet snakes its way into her, you know, believes everything that people are saying about her, even though she knows it's just a joke about a sign, feels completely worthless, is totally illiquit.
Marc:And what happened to her?
Guest:Well, after, I mean, now, like Justine, my book has kind of brought them back in.
Guest:It's like the opposite to, there's nothing more traumatizing than being, like, cast out.
Marc:And what happened, who were some other people?
Guest:There's a guy called, well, there's two people called Hank and Adria.
Guest:This is a really dark story.
Guest:So Hank is in the audience of a tech conference in Santa Clara.
Guest:And he's whispering some stupid beavis and butthead joke to the guy next to him.
Guest:Something about big dongles.
Guest:You can imagine him doing big dongles.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He half notices the woman in front take a photograph.
Guest:He thinks she's taken a photograph of the crowd.
Guest:So he leans forward, trying not to mess up her shot.
Guest:Ten minutes later, a conference organiser comes up and says, can you come with me?
Guest:So they're taken into a quiet room and told there's been a complaint about sexual comments.
Guest:And he's like, I'm so sorry.
Guest:He knew exactly what happened.
Guest:They meant and he apologized and they said, oh, that's fine.
Guest:And that was it.
Guest:So they left the conference on their way to the airport.
Guest:They're kind of nerdy.
Guest:And so the whole confrontation thing was like, you know, anxiety.
Guest:And she said to them on the way to the airport, they decide to think, how did the woman in front?
Guest:communicate her complaint to the conference organisers and the nightmare was that it was in the form of a public tweet so they had a look and there was a photograph of the two of them she'd taken a photograph of them and wrote not cool jokes about big dongles right behind me so the next day he was called into his office and fired
Guest:And Hank is like heartbroken.
Guest:He's been fired.
Guest:He posts a message on this website called Hacker News saying, you know, I'm really sorry that I upset this woman.
Guest:And, you know, I take responsibility for that.
Guest:But she turned around and took my photograph and sealed my fate.
Guest:And I've got three kids and getting fired was terrifying.
Guest:So every like men's right blogger and troll just turned on her.
Guest:And it's like a man's out of a job because of some stupid comment was overheard by a woman with more power than sense.
Guest:Let's crucify this cunt.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Cut out her uterus.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So to this day, like 18 months, two years later, she still hasn't got another job.
Guest:She had to leave home.
Guest:She got fired.
Guest:She got fired because some people from 4chan did a DDoS attack on her company's website, which is like some kind of malicious program.
Guest:Yeah, where the website gets overwhelmed and can't function.
Guest:So she got fired from her job.
Guest:So it's like carnage.
Guest:In that story, everybody thought they were punching up, right?
Guest:Everybody thought they were like Rosa Parks fighting the good fight.
Guest:But in fact, what happens, so she thinks that the guys are kind of emblematic of a male dominated tech industry.
Guest:So that's why she does it.
Guest:And then all these men are like, you know, this is feminism out of control.
Guest:So let's, let's kill this cunt.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Everybody's fucking thinks they're punching up and it's just carnage.
Marc:But also the other thing is, is like, you know, you know, William Burroughs once talked about a nation of rats and that the idea that Big Brother is watching us is ridiculous because he doesn't have to.
Marc:That like, you know, that if you have to walk through life nervous.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That if you make a joke that may be, you know, just appropriate to the conversation you're having, but culturally inappropriate, it's your business.
Marc:But there's absolutely no privacy anymore in any context.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That if there's somebody around with a phone, it's happened to me.
Marc:Like, you know, I'm just sitting there talking to somebody and I'll see a tweet like Maren's right next to me at the thing.
Marc:And I'm like, why?
Guest:Why?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:The Dutch in England, somebody came up to me and said, so what was it like going to Stanley Kubrick's house?
Guest:And I started telling him the story.
Guest:And I looked down at his hand and he was recording it.
Guest:He was taping it all with his phone.
Guest:I mean, I agree with you about the surveillance thing.
Guest:You know, everyone's worried about the NSA spying on us.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's not the NSA.
Guest:It's the guy next year.
Guest:Yeah, we're going to get us.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:We are going to get us.
Guest:Sure.
Marc:We're volunteering the information.
Guest:This is why I really wanted to write this book because I wanted people to feel like my book makes people panic when they read it.
Guest:And I want that because I wanted people to feel what it feels like to be destroyed by us.
Guest:This is what it feels like because we don't want to think about what it feels like.
Guest:So that's why, you know, your heart pounds, I think, when you read my book for that reason.
Marc:My heart pounds every time I tweet something, or sometimes when I say something publicly.
Marc:I don't know what's going to... I mean, the type of vigilance you have to maintain.
Marc:It's not even a matter of censorship.
Marc:You probably aren't going to say something you wouldn't say normally, but it's very easy to be taken out of context.
Guest:So have you got ideas and jokes and little comments and thoughts that you sort of dare not post anymore?
Marc:Well, I just check the tone.
Marc:You know, I make sure that it won't be misread.
Marc:I try to be aware of that.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like, I'm not, you know, my point of view is what it is.
Marc:And I tend to, like lately, I've gotten a little more sort of educated about what is and isn't offensive and made new decisions.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:around words that offend people and don't, and have decided which ones I agree with and which ones I don't.
Marc:But no, I'll generally just make sure that it's clear, because what you're saying, it's a matter of clarity in the context of that platform.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, clarity helps, but I don't think clarity solves the problem.
Guest:I think the problem is that we have created... I mean, the bullies have taken over the school and we've created this kind of world where... It reminds me of the Stasi, you know, when they would ask Stasi...
Guest:The Stasi, the East German secret police, got a psychologist to try and work out why they were just getting so many willing informants.
Guest:Like the Stasi pay was shit and the workload was massive because more and more like human behaviours were getting redefined as like enemy activities in the Stasi's East Germany.
Guest:And the psychologists worked out that basically the reason why they got so many informants was because they asked them and they said yes.
Guest:And it was like, why?
Guest:And it was just this, they said, well, it's just the desire to make sure that your neighbour is doing the right thing.
Guest:And when we look back on these times, like the Stasi or McCarthyism, it's like, we don't see those as the good guys.
Guest:Yet, that's the system that we're falling into.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But as you pointed out earlier, it's not about that.
Marc:It's to deflect.
Marc:It's to deflect the possibility of you becoming a suspect.
Guest:Of it happening to us.
Guest:Like the beast is sated.
Guest:Like if someone else is being struck.
Guest:Yeah, because somebody HIV positive should rape this bitch and then we'll find out if her skin color protects her from AIDS.
Guest:Nobody went for him that night because everybody was just so ferociously guilty.
Marc:But even worse than that, you know, you look at McCarthy, you look at Roy Cohn and what Roy Cohn turned out to be, you know, a closeted homosexual, you know, who had his own axe to grind and his own self-hatred around that.
Marc:And that, you know, that overcompensating was a complete deflection from his own shame.
Marc:So it seems to me that, you know, Hitler's willing executioners or the good Germans or these informers for the Stasi, you know, were people that sort of like, well, if I get out ahead of this...
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Then they're not going to find out this shit about me.
Marc:I mean, there may be some people within that group who thought they were perfect citizens.
Marc:But still, you know, after a certain point and everyone's biggest fear is that, you know, you're going to be corralled up with the rest of them that even no matter how you behave.
Marc:There's going to be a mistake or they're going to find that one thing.
Marc:So why not get ahead of it and throw the other guy under the bus?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, when I was writing this book, I was talking to this guy and I told him one of these stories and he kind of shivered and he said, it's about the terror, isn't it?
Guest:And I said, the terror of what?
Guest:And he said, the terror of being found out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, when the Justine Sacco story was when my book was extracted in the New York Times and most people were like, oh, you know, felt very compassionate towards Justine and we're glad I wrote it.
Guest:But then a few people were like, so what racist is John Ronson going to put his cape on for next?
Guest:And so I didn't.
Guest:The only thing I wrote, because you're right, like anything you say when you're in the eye of a shaming is like evidence for the prosecution.
Guest:So the only thing I wrote was, by the way,
Guest:this isn't a standalone article it's an extract from my book so you've been publicly shamed so then people were like oh now john ronson saying it's an extract from a book like now yeah it's a fucking extract from a book and then somebody said i didn't reply at all to anybody else because i had to stay silent because you're out it's profoundly undemocratic so somebody wrote why isn't john ronson replying to any of us and somebody else wrote because john ronson only replies to men
Marc:Well, see, that's the thing.
Marc:I think the important thing that you're saying here, and that is different than what happened to Justine, is that you are now in this other position.
Marc:But the important thing is somebody said.
Marc:The one thing we all forget, it's one fucking asshole.
Marc:And then maybe four other assholes get on board.
Marc:By the time they were coming at you, it was not a million people.
Marc:No.
Marc:It was completely countable.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And if you were to really do the research, probably five of them are the same fucking person over and over again.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But see, the mysterious sort of notion of the internet is that when you're sensitive and when you're involved in this, if two people say shitty things, the internet's saying it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But you're not Justine.
Marc:And those people are going to hang that on you.
Marc:Because I was wondering about this recently.
Marc:Is there were a lot of people that were busting my balls early on when I got a TV show or when the podcast was starting off.
Marc:Just sort of like, you're not going to last.
Marc:You're just like Louie.
Marc:You're ripping off Louie.
Marc:Or whatever their fucking criticism was.
Marc:They didn't like me.
Marc:So they were going to hit all my insecurities.
Marc:Like, you're not that funny.
Marc:Your podcast sucks.
Marc:Not going to last.
Marc:It's like...
Marc:I'd like to hear from them now.
Marc:I would like an opportunity to say, if I was more obsessive and more crazy, I would go back through my tweets from five years ago and find those three or four fuckheads and go like, I think you were wrong.
Marc:I just wanted to retweet this five years later.
Marc:But you know what you open yourself up to is like, you still suck.
Guest:But it's true.
Guest:So you're right.
Guest:I mean, both of me and with you, it's like a small handful of people, but it still sneaked its way into us and it still had an impact.
Guest:I'm completely, I think it's destroying my brain, John.
Marc:I think that Twitter is the, that, that,
Marc:Whatever it's opening up to, whatever's opening up in the mind, whatever, because it does have the same compulsive feeling as an addiction, and I'm an addictive person, so I know the feeling.
Marc:So when you're locked in like that, and you're experiencing this rush of dopamine from both negative things and positive things, there's a speedball effect, but you feel it in your heart, you feel your gut sink, you feel your brain race.
Marc:Anxiety.
Marc:Oh yeah, everything.
Marc:You know, and sometimes elation.
Marc:But usually you're kind of moving through the elation.
Marc:You're sort of like, yes, that is a good book.
Marc:Yes, I am.
Marc:Oh, thank you.
Marc:That's very nice.
Marc:You say, oh, I'm glad you liked it.
Marc:You suck.
Marc:And then, boom, your gut drops.
Marc:So now you've got a bottom end to this elation you were just feeling from five other tweets.
Marc:And then you want to go at that guy to feel the excitement of kicking someone's ass.
Marc:And then if he comes back at you and one-ups you, then you're in a thing that's making –
Marc:You're going to strangle yourself.
Marc:So the drama that you can experience inside yourself from just sitting with that platform, that media platform is is a little annihilating.
Marc:And I have a concern over what it's doing to my brain in terms of, you know, diminishing my ability to process emotional interaction.
Guest:Well, the other day I was giving a talk in England, and a woman came up to me in the signing queue and said she was a child therapist.
Guest:And she said pretty much every child who comes to her now damaged is damaged as a result of something that happened on social media.
Marc:What do you mean child?
Marc:How old?
Guest:Oh, like children, teenagers.
Guest:It's social media that is kind of damaging the children now.
Marc:Again, because as an adult, it's the same idea that before you can really sit there and practically say this is nine people, it's the Internet.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:So for us, it was nine people and it still snaked its way into us.
Guest:So the people in my book, it was like tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people.
Guest:I mean, it's like it's so profoundly agonizing to be at the end of that.
Guest:And yet if you ask us, like because the snowflake doesn't need to feel responsible for the avalanche, you ask us, I'm sure she's fine.
Guest:Or are the sociopaths?
Guest:So we dehumanise them.
Guest:All of this is to make us feel better about our fear that we've just destroyed somebody.
Guest:So we either just assume they're fine or we give them a dehumanising word because it's easier to destroy somebody who's not quite human.
Guest:So does it at least end with some laughs, the book?
Guest:Oh, the book's full of laughs.
Guest:Mark, I go to porn shoots.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:I went to a porn shoot in L.A., pretty close to where you're living now.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah, because I wanted to meet people who had found a way to eradicate shame.
Guest:So I went to like a shame eradication workshop.
Guest:I read a little of that.
Guest:Yeah, that was funny.
Guest:My friend, can I tell you the story so we can end on a laugh maybe?
Marc:Wait, the porn shoot, this was your concept of where shame is eradicated.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, actually, I met a porn guy who said to me, like a gay porn star called Connor Habib, who said, you know, that, you know, if you want to learn about unashamedness, you should go into the porn world.
Guest:He said, you should Google me if you want to know more about me.
Guest:So I Googled him and I just saw loads of photographs of his anus.
Guest:And then he hooked me up with this porn shoot.
Guest:So I went to this porn shoot.
Guest:A gay porn shoot?
Guest:No, it was S&M.
Guest:It's called Public Disgrace.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:I feel really sorry for the subscribers to Public Disgrace because somewhere in a Public Disgrace porn shoot, like a woman's getting her genitals electrocuted.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:She's called Jodie Taylor.
Marc:And then... I'm sure she'll appreciate that you gave her a name credit.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Wouldn't want to let that sweat by a gentleman.
Guest:No, no, she's a proud porn person.
Guest:Yeah, no, no.
Guest:So at home somewhere, there'll be people watching this who are getting off on her, having her genitals electrocuted.
Guest:And then suddenly, like, just as it's about to climax, a kind of tweedy owl-like journalist with a notepad peers into shots.
Guest:Do you?
Guest:Yeah, I do.
Guest:I fucking do.
Guest:I want to have, like, a closer look.
Guest:So I'm ruining people's erotic ambience.
Marc:Now they're going to know.
Marc:They were probably pretty focused before.
Marc:Maybe you're just comic relief.
Marc:Who's that fella?
Marc:Maybe for some people.
Marc:Well, I've only read parts of it and I love it, but I love all your books.
Marc:So you've been publicly shamed.
Marc:John Ronson, thanks for coming.
Marc:Mark, thank you for having me back.
Marc:Always nice to see you.
Marc:Smart guy, that John Ronson.
Marc:I love talking to him.
Marc:And he's a sweet guy, and he's a great guy.
Marc:And we went into the house, and we sat, and we listened to Pink Floyd's metal on my stereo.
Marc:And I believe it affected him deeply because he had forgotten about that record.
Marc:And from what I understand, he continued to listen to it for days on end after that.
Marc:Pink Floyd metal.
Marc:It's all there.
Marc:They lay out the future on that record.
Marc:All right, now I got this opportunity to talk to Britt Daniel, and I got an opportunity to sort of jam a bunch of Spoon in my head, and they were a pretty beautiful band, pretty beautiful sound, been around a long time, were huge for a while, and we had a nice chat, man.
Marc:He's a Texan, and for dudes who end up playing in Spoon, might not be the easiest thing to grow up in Texas.
Marc:So anyways, this is me and Britt Daniel from Spoon.
Marc:You come from Texas.
Marc:You're all from Texas.
Marc:100% Texan.
Guest:No, we're not all from Texas, but we've all... But you are.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What part?
Guest:Temple, Texas.
Guest:I have no point of... So that's an hour north of Austin.
Guest:Well, what kind of... How many people in your family?
Guest:Well, my folks split up when I was eight, and they had two kids before they split up, and then my dad got remarried, had two more kids.
Guest:So I kind of have four...
Guest:Four siblings.
Guest:But three from the original batch.
Marc:Two from the original.
Marc:Yeah, there are three from the original batch.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And you're the oldest one?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah?
Marc:How are your siblings doing?
Marc:Mostly good.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:One of them just had a baby and lives right around here.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My sister, it blows my mind that she's the one that had the kid.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Well, just because she's the youngest.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I still think of her as very much my kid sister.
Guest:How old are you?
Guest:43.
Guest:43.
Marc:Oh, she's 25.
Marc:Oh, wow.
Marc:That is kind of young for this day and age.
Marc:At another time, that was right on the money.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But yeah, I think my dad's happy to finally be a granddad.
Guest:Yeah?
Marc:Do you get along with him?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Pretty good?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:See, that's the jip of it all.
Marc:It's difficult, but usually when they have a grandkid, then they turn into this person that you never knew before.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Where was that guy?
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:This sweetheart, where was he?
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:What the hell?
Marc:How was I denied that guy?
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I think it's easier to be a grandparent, huh?
Guest:The affection without the discipline.
Marc:Yeah, you can just go get a fix.
Marc:You know, just get a little love fix and split.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:What was your dad's business?
Marc:He's a neurologist.
Marc:My dad's a doctor, too.
Marc:He was a surgeon, though.
Marc:What kind of surgeon?
Guest:Orthopedic.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:Yeah, bone cutter.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:The heavy-duty stuff.
Marc:Is he still doing it?
Marc:No, no, they ran him out of the business.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:My dad's still doing it.
Marc:Really?
Marc:He's 70.
Marc:70.
Marc:There's something good about, well, maybe I can, did you find yourself thinking you were ill a lot to get your dad's attention?
Guest:No.
Marc:Did you do that?
Marc:Yeah, I did do that.
Marc:I didn't realize it until later that's what was going on.
Guest:What did I do for his attention?
Guest:Well, he was out by eight, right?
Guest:He was out of the house, and that was not easy, but I would go see him on weekends, every other weekend.
Guest:I can't imagine that.
Guest:That's a rough gig.
Guest:Yeah, and he lived in Dallas, so that's like two and a half hours away.
Guest:So it was a trek.
Guest:It was a trek.
Guest:And would you take the bus?
Guest:Sometimes the bus, but lots of times he would just come down and pick us all up on a Friday.
Guest:And then drive back?
Guest:And drive all the way back, yeah.
Guest:And he'd just stay there until Sunday?
Guest:Yeah, he was good like that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, he was dedicated.
Guest:He did his part.
Guest:Give him that.
Marc:I mean, he did leave, but then... But he was responsible.
Marc:It wasn't like your dad left and it's like, we don't know where he is.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:He's in Dallas.
Marc:I know exactly where he is.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, that's good.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And what'd your mom do?
Marc:She did public relations.
Marc:Oh, yeah?
Marc:She is retired, yeah.
Marc:And she's around too?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you got your whole family?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now, like, I don't know what Temple's like, but...
Marc:But, you know... I'll tell you if you want to know.
Marc:I do want to know.
Marc:I have a weird thing with Texas.
Marc:Like, I grew up in New Mexico, so we were neighbors, state-wise.
Marc:And I used to have this weird attitude.
Marc:There was a sort of arrogance to Texans and sort of like...
Marc:Felt like they thought it was their own country and everything, but as I've gotten older, I've gotten a little softer about it, and I appreciate it a little more.
Guest:Why?
Guest:What was the deal?
Guest:Was there a specific thing that New Mexicans didn't like about this?
Marc:Well, Southern New Mexico is pretty Texan, really.
Marc:I mean, it looks the same, and there's a lot of ranches and stuff, and there's people that do that kind of work.
Marc:It was more focused around, like, we used to go skiing as a family, and Texans were always sort of, like, obnoxious and, you know, over-prepared.
Marc:Oh, right.
Marc:Over-outfitted and couldn't ski.
Marc:And, like, they had this sort of, like, you know, we're here and it's all ours, you know.
Marc:There's an attitude to it.
Marc:Oh, right, right.
Guest:Maybe they were, were they wealthy Texans?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I have a really good friend who grew up in Albuquerque, and he told me that they used to play a song on the radio that was like, Texans, uh, what are they good for?
Guest:Absolutely nothing.
Guest:So there must be something to it.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I talked to Mike Judge about it.
Marc:He felt the same way.
Marc:There was sort of like this weird thing.
Guest:He didn't grow up in Texas?
Marc:No, he grew up in Albuquerque.
Marc:Oh, he did?
Marc:Yeah, pretty much.
Guest:I figured he would have been from Texas.
Marc:No, he moved to Texas later for his wife's job.
Marc:He does it so well.
Marc:Yeah, he knows it, and he knows it from both sides.
Marc:He knows it as an Albuquerquean who resented them, and he knows it as a Texan.
Marc:He's got a little shit kicker in him, kind of, yeah.
Marc:But you seem like not quite the Texan.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Tell me about Temple.
Guest:Temple was, you know, I didn't mind it when I was growing up there.
Guest:I just thought that was everything about it was normal.
Guest:I guess I did mind getting picked on.
Guest:In Temple, there were a big contingent of cowboys and metalheads.
Guest:And I didn't really fit in with... I kind of got into the metalheads scene right at the very end.
Guest:At least it was music-based.
Guest:I finally got accepted.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But...
Guest:Yeah, you know, it was very conservative, fairly reactionary.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What do you mean, like politically?
Guest:Politically and just culturally.
Guest:I mean, me and my group of friends, you know, fancy ourselves sort of new wave.
Guest:And if you looked at any degree new wave, you were going to get harassed, you know?
Marc:So you were new wave, and what does that mean at that point?
Guest:At that point, well, it doesn't... It was hard to find out about new music, you know, or new wave music.
Guest:It wasn't coming in.
Guest:Yeah, well, you were dependent on, you know, the bookstore in the mall would get the NME, you know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So we would read that, and, like, Spin Magazine was still great then.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, 120 minutes on MTV.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:If we could find out about it on one of those things.
Guest:But the record store, no.
No.
Guest:There was actually a pretty good record store.
Guest:I remember they had a lot of 4AD stuff.
Guest:They had a lot of Cramps records.
Guest:It was bizarre what they stocked there because there wasn't really a market for it.
Guest:So that Cramps record, Smell of Female, sat there at the front of the stack for years.
Guest:And I loved going by and looking at it because it just blew my mind.
Guest:Smell of Female.
Guest:female did you get it no i didn't get it why i don't know because i had other i had you know who were your bands when you're i had uh what cure seven inches to buy cure 12 oh your cure guy yeah
Guest:Yeah, they would harass us in the hallways, and they would call you queer bitch.
Guest:That was a big one.
Guest:Queer bitch?
Guest:Queer bitch, yeah.
Marc:Wow, now you've heard that term?
Marc:Never.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's like a double whammy.
Guest:And my friend Cody started appropriating the name himself, so they would go,
Guest:Hey, man, why do you dress like that?
Guest:And he'd say, because I'm a queer bitch.
Guest:And he would lick his hand and say, I got the AIDS.
Guest:And they would kind of clear out.
Guest:I remember him specifically licking his hand and wiping it on some cowboy's truck, and he just flipped out.
Marc:I got the AIDS!
Guest:you stay away and it worked yeah it totally worked and otherwise they'd be grabbing your crotch you know which is which is strange really yeah the cowboys wouldn't the metalheads wouldn't do that yeah what was up with that i don't know maybe they had unresolved issues there yeah that was their that was how they were gonna i remember the center for the uh high school football team grabbing my friend's crotch and saying let me feel your pussy
Marc:what isn't that weird that yeah it's fucking weird like what was the cowboy business in temple what were they it was just a the style or was there actually uh ranches was there cattle business or what i don't know i think they just um they just dress like that there might have been some of them that lived not in uh the city proper and lived out on ranches i don't know but um i think it mostly was just a cultural thing where yeah country music was big and so they would
Marc:That's fucking menacing.
Marc:That's weird.
Marc:That's probably one of the weirder things, a very disturbing thing.
Marc:It was disturbing, yeah.
Marc:Well, the fact that the defense was, I got AIDS, and a cowboy freaked out because he touched his truck, thought his truck was going to get AIDS.
Marc:But the idea that they were actually sexually harassing you, that doesn't quite add up, does it?
Guest:It doesn't, no.
Guest:And at the time, I remember thinking...
Guest:this is terrifying but not but not really thinking about what that meant you know about uh oh the terror not thinking about the fact that these are guys and and they're totally homophobic and they're and they're grabbing my friend's crotch you know yeah it just didn't it didn't cross my mind till later like what what was really going on there just it was just some unresolved shit yeah
Guest:wow it was just scary as all yeah i mean did was there fights yeah there were fights you got beat up um i didn't get beat up too much but uh you could count on i got out of a lot of fight i got pushed you know i got pushed a lot of that weird two hand yeah yeah and then i'd be like okay see you later i don't need to hang out at this party yeah the jock shove yeah the worst right oh that's sad man yeah fuck those guys
Marc:Yeah, you don't see those people as much anymore.
Marc:I haven't been pushed in a long time.
Marc:No, well, you found your world.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, you don't have to go into that world.
Marc:Was there ever a point where you were touring with Spoon and you're like, what are those guys doing here?
Marc:I've talked to other bands, especially ones who have popular albums, where there's that moment where you're like, this music's not for those guys.
Guest:Bros.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm appreciative of anybody who comes to the show.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I guess there was a time when, around maybe ga ga ga ga ga, when we had this song called The Underdog that was in a bunch of movies and got played quite a bit on the radio.
Guest:And yeah, there were some dudes with baseball caps coming to our shows.
Guest:Yeah, that's all right, right?
Guest:They were very peaceful.
Marc:yeah it's all right you know we judge but i mean you know there's a difference between judging some guy because how he dresses and having a cowboy grab your friend's crotch right right well what were you doing in high school were you playing in a band were you art department guy were you good student yeah i played in um i had a cover band oh yeah that was and we started writing our own songs right at the end and then we all split up and went to college but
Guest:like senior year yeah what were you covering cure yeah the cure um all like led zeppelin the doors um what's your favorite zeppelin album uh probably now it's probably one i think back then it was three right yeah now it's one yeah because of the guitars i don't know just uh there's something about it that's just intense intense and hardcore yeah yeah and dark you know yeah what when you started writing originals what were they like were they like what you're writing now
Guest:Oh, they were terrible.
Guest:It took me a while to get good.
Guest:That's why I'm always impressed with somebody.
Guest:I know Connor Oberst fairly well.
Guest:I just interviewed him.
Guest:Oh, you did?
Guest:When I first met him, he was, I think, 15.
Guest:And by the time he was 17, he was writing songs with lyrics that just blew my mind.
Marc:Well, he's sort of one of those guys that just has this weird knack for it.
Marc:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I went to see him with Prine, with John Prine.
Marc:They did a double bill here.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And it was good, because I'm 51, so I kind of missed it.
Marc:I missed him.
Marc:And it seemed like a lot of girls, there's a lot of 15-year-old girls, 14-year-old girls that loved him.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that seemed like a lot of his audience.
Marc:But I went back and listened to a lot of stuff.
Marc:He does write really great songs.
Marc:But it's interesting as a person, he's just a guy.
Guest:He is a dude.
Guest:And people have this impression of him that he's maybe a depressed guy, but he's kind of the life of the party.
Marc:Well, you read it and you sort of like, every time I talk to somebody who's like known as this, like he got a lot of attention for the songs.
Marc:And then you think like, you must be some sort of wizard.
Marc:What's it?
Marc:Where's the, you know, guide my life somehow.
Marc:Show me something inside of you.
Marc:And he's just sort of like, I think he has a knack for it.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You know?
Yeah.
Marc:So you got better at it?
Guest:I got a lot better.
Guest:Were you a Dylan fan?
Guest:Around 2002, I went through my first serious phase.
Guest:I mean, I had a few records before then, but that's when I really got obsessed.
Guest:Read some books.
Guest:Usually I'm just a sound and sort of like soundscape and sort of emotion guy when it comes to music, but he's somebody that I can just listen to the lyrics and be entertained.
Guest:And there's very few people like that.
Guest:Connor is one of them.
Marc:yeah like uh beyond belief by elvis costello imperial bedroom yeah that's a great one is that yeah where'd that come from yeah and but it's like it's about phrase turning like because i have a hard time paying attention to words if they weren't if they really aren't right up front and like you know i can lock in but like it's almost like dylan's like a comedian like the way he tells you like it's almost like wow how did that happen
Marc:right where do you get that he gets into character yeah yeah have you seen him lately uh it's been a few years it's weird he's just out there yeah he's just going from town to town mumbling yeah well he loves it it seems like he's always on the road and he must love it yeah it's just a decision he made this is how i'm gonna go yeah so when spoon what what would you think is the moment like what were you writing about at the beginning
Guest:Oh, at the beginning, I was just anything that would distance me from revealing myself.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:It was...
Guest:It was just a... When we first started, we just... We were trying to get gigs in bars on the weekend.
Guest:And I'd been in a couple of very unsuccessful bands in Austin.
Guest:And I was like, I want to play on the weekend.
Guest:That's where people come out.
Marc:So you weren't in Temple at that time?
Guest:No, by then we were in Austin.
Marc:Now, did you go to Austin a lot in high school?
Guest:Yeah, we would go down there to go see shows or go record shopping, yeah.
Marc:What was it like?
Marc:Because now, I have to assume that when you grew up in Texas, and we're talking, what, 20-some-odd years ago, that it must have felt like your own place.
Marc:It must have been like this groovy sort of salvation.
Marc:But it must have felt uniquely Texan in that, you know, like it was your place.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Because now Austin seems to be everyone's place.
Marc:Like Austin is like Austin.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And like, was it more intimate?
Marc:Did you feel like it did it?
Guest:Yeah, it was smaller for sure.
Guest:There was nothing downtown.
Guest:I remember going down to Liberty Lunch, which was like one of the only, maybe the only venue downtown and just feeling like it was a ghost town down there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And now it's, you know, completely insane downtown.
Guest:Nobody lived down there.
Guest:After 5 p.m.
Guest:on weekdays, nobody was there.
Marc:And South by Southwest was probably not even happening yet, was it?
Marc:It was tiny.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It had just started.
Marc:I can't imagine what that stuff was like then.
Marc:I mean, it's a pretty special place.
Marc:I've been there a lot.
Marc:But it must have been really special in some ways when you're in high school.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, it was special to...
Guest:Yeah, to be able to go down and I felt like there were, you know, there were punks on the street and, you know, there was the Austin Chronicle you could pick up and the, I don't know, just the whole thing felt like welcoming and more, I don't know, accepting of whatever I felt like.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You fit in.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I mean, I used to, when I worked there, I call it the hipster Alamo.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like, you know, like it's just you guys, this is it.
Marc:And we got to protect ourselves from the rest of the state.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because I don't want, I mean, was there a lot of Bible belt, Bible thumping around when you grew up?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, for sure.
Marc:Yeah, there's a Jesus disposition in Texas that is uniquely Texan.
Marc:It's an aggressive Jesus position.
Guest:Yeah, I went to what they call a Bible church every other weekend when I wasn't with my dad.
Guest:Is that a born again?
Guest:Yeah, I guess it's born again.
Guest:It's non-denominational Protestant, so it's very politically conservative and heavy.
Guest:Heavy how?
Guest:Well...
Guest:you know there's a lot of talk about about hell oh really thing yeah this is a bible it's called a bible church bible church yeah and that's a thing and this is your mom's thing yeah and was she always in it um she was well i guess we went to methodist church for a while and then she did that and then she kind of that that was the one that she uh that she landed on yeah and was it a new thing
Guest:At the time?
Guest:It was a new church and it started out in like an office building, you know, where they were renting out the room and then it grew to be a big thing, almost like a super church.
Marc:It is now?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's still there?
Guest:It's, well, yeah, it's still there.
Guest:Does your mom still go?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:She does?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Every Sunday?
Guest:I don't know about every Sunday.
Guest:My stepdad likes, I don't know, they probably won't be talking about this, but they go to a couple different churches.
Marc:Oh, yeah?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, it's interesting to me, despite whatever I may think about or whatever kind of prejudice I may have about that type of Christian, it's just sort of like there is a community to it.
Marc:And people seem to kind of, it doesn't hurt most people's lives necessarily, does it?
Marc:I don't think it hurts her life.
Marc:But when you were there as a kid, you could feel like, I don't know, man.
Marc:A little bit.
Marc:I wasn't really sure what was going on.
Marc:Was there like one kind of charismatic leader guy?
Guest:Yeah, the very charismatic guy, yeah.
Guest:Is one guy?
Guest:The preacher.
Marc:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah, and he still is.
Marc:Really?
Guest:He's still very charismatic.
Marc:Does he have a TV show?
Marc:No, no.
Marc:But he's still around?
Marc:He's still around, yeah.
Marc:And it was a lot of talk of hell.
Marc:Yeah, there was a bit of that, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So your dad was Catholic.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:So you went for sort of the hot-rodded Christianity and then back into the old school.
Marc:Yeah, it was... Yeah, so I was doing... I was getting, you know... Getting it from both sides.
Marc:Exactly, right.
Guest:Old Jesus, new Jesus.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And did you believe?
Guest:Yeah, I believed, but it was just...
Guest:it was hard for me to relate to those people, you know?
Marc:Right, because were they judgmental of you as well?
Guest:I don't think that they were particularly judgmental of me.
Guest:It was, you know, maybe it was just that I was a kid and I was being rebellious.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But it didn't fit in there either.
Marc:No, not really.
Marc:All right, so the big dream was to get to Austin, so now you're in Austin.
Marc:Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Marc:And now you just want to play.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you thought you were sticking with mostly covers initially?
Guest:No, well, once I moved to Austin, my bands were, we'd play originals, yeah.
Marc:What were the bands?
Guest:There was one called Skellington.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There was one called the Alien Beats.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then started Spoon.
Marc:But you're never like a punk guy.
Guest:It was always kind of new wave and kind of... I liked some punk.
Guest:I think I fancied myself punk when we started Spoon, yeah.
Guest:Yeah?
Marc:Oh, that late?
Marc:Not as a kid, though.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, I wasn't really... Yeah, and as a kid, no, it was more new wave, yeah.
Marc:Because that's kind of like... I don't even know how to describe it, because I was not a Cure guy, because I sort of missed it, just because of my age.
Marc:But I get it.
Marc:Because when I listen to that music, it's very defined.
Marc:I can hear it in your music, too.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:It's not ethereal is not the word I want.
Marc:But there's something kind of like heart heavy about it all.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's not even melodramatic.
Marc:It's almost like, you know, it definitely is an environment.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right?
Marc:It's got some melancholy to it.
Marc:Melancholy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's it.
Marc:Yay.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Is that what you're thinking?
Guest:That is what I'm thinking.
Guest:All right, so... And I think, yeah, we've got a bit of that sometimes.
Guest:Well, yeah, I mean, it's... It comes natural to me for some reason.
Marc:You're a heavy-hearted guy.
Marc:I don't know, maybe.
Marc:What do you mean, maybe?
Marc:You can identify that.
Guest:Okay, yes, I am.
Marc:I'm not pressing you.
Marc:But yeah, you know, I mean, it's nice though, because I think that like when you have that, I have it too, but I can't really live in it, but I can live in it when I like listen to your songs.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I can live in it when I listen to music, but.
Marc:What happens when you live in it?
Marc:Well, there's like,
Marc:I don't know if it's a longing thing, where you're just sort of like, is this it?
Guest:And that's not where you want to live your life.
Marc:Well, no, I mean, it's there.
Marc:I mean, it's always there.
Marc:But sometimes then you've got to ask yourself where I'm at now.
Marc:It's sort of like, all right, I feel that.
Marc:But I should be pretty good.
Marc:Things are OK.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And yet there's this like weird kind of like primal yearning for like, I don't know if it's relief.
Marc:Like I imagine like when I get on stage and do standup or something and you connect, I mean, you can feel the relief.
Marc:And in that moment, you know, life makes sense and it's fulfilling.
Marc:But like when you're just sitting there, like, you know, writing, cause I do writing that's not comedic.
Marc:And I imagine when you're sitting up there, you know, writing like this last album,
Marc:there's that moment where the tone, I imagine the reason why you can't identify a theme until after it's done is because you're just writing what you're feeling and that becomes this kind of amazing equation.
Marc:So you make choices about what came out of you and something comes together and you can feel it come together and that's the joy of creation.
Marc:But it's not like, I think that's how we resolve that feeling.
Marc:Is that what you feel?
Guest:Yeah, that's one way that you can deal with it.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:But yeah, I hear what you're saying, like, why should we live in that place when there's so many great things?
Guest:But yeah, I think that the writing, being lonely in writing can be, it can kind of bring that out, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, but sometimes I'm lonely with people.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I have that problem less, but... Well, it sounds like when you grew up, it was probably, you know, it was probably real.
Marc:I mean, because you're surrounded by these, you know, metal monsters and cowboy hats.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:We had some friends, you know, there were a good, you know, two dozen, you know... Oh, so you had a fighting spirit.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, it's us against them.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And we're more fun.
Guest:Yeah, the more that I found a few of them, the happier I was.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And eventually I just like...
Guest:I kind of do like heavy metal.
Guest:And then the world became much easier.
Guest:You went?
Guest:You surrendered?
Guest:I didn't surrender as much as I started to understand.
Guest:Like, okay, Led Zeppelin is great.
Marc:So was there that moment where you sort of like you connected with one of the metal guys?
Guest:and and like you know he kind of pulled you over and i remember loaning a dollar to one of the metal guys that we always we would always be battling yeah and like waiting for school to open yeah always be battling he had this bon jovi light blue blue jean jacket right and he wouldn't call it a bon jovi jacket would he i don't know i mean yeah i know what you mean it had a bon jovi like a thing on the back like a so they weren't they weren't that heavy metal
Guest:Yeah, and I remember loaning him a dollar one time just out of the blue, and then everything changed.
Guest:Well, you guys are just kids.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know?
Guest:And then what?
Guest:He turns you on and led Zeppelin and shit?
Guest:No, we never really became friends, but around the same time...
Guest:yeah i kind of broadened my horizons and and yeah being able to like relate to something that that everybody else could could get was it was into was that was a nice change you know like everybody loves led zeppelin right right it's a portal everybody loves acdc yeah acdc
Marc:How great are they?
Marc:They're the best.
Marc:That's the guitar sound, man.
Marc:That's in you, man.
Marc:I still listen to the first five or six.
Marc:I'm good up through Back in Black.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then I kind of drift.
Guest:Yeah, me too.
Marc:But Powerage, that's one of the best fucking albums in the world.
Marc:Yeah, I love that one.
Marc:See, like that makes sense now.
Marc:Now I understand your guitar sound.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Because that's what I hear is that fucking Gibson tone.
Marc:There's a lot of crunch to what you do.
Marc:It's kind of, you know, it's there.
Marc:It's satisfying.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, thanks.
Marc:So you liked ACDC.
Marc:Now we're on a whole different level.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Now everything's.
Guest:I really got into ACDC in the last five years.
Guest:But there was a point, yeah, where everything, I didn't have to just be New Wave anymore and the world opened up to me.
Marc:that's hilarious in the last five years you really the acdc kind of really hit you well i was talking about high school yeah but oh yeah and i got you know but i'm saying when i had like an obsessive period was the first time i had an obsessive period acdc was in the last five years you go see him ever i've never seen him uh i saw him once when they were i think they opened for journey on their first tour oh wow and the fucked up thing is i was there to see journey you know so what record were they touring then
Marc:Well, Bond was alive.
Marc:Oh, right.
Marc:And, you know, it was probably like Highway to Hell or no, it was before that.
Marc:I think it was before that.
Marc:It was probably 77.
Marc:I don't know when he died, but I know that at the time, you know, a whole lot of Rosie, the live version had sort of like taken hold.
Marc:But what about, did you have a girlfriend in high school?
Guest:Yeah, I had one.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah, and that didn't end so well.
Guest:It didn't?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Heartbreaker?
Guest:Yeah, she was two years older than me and went off to college before me and kind of, it was brutal, yeah.
Guest:It's horrible.
Guest:It was brutal.
Guest:Well, it was particularly brutal.
Guest:She just stopped speaking.
Guest:I would never break up with someone that way.
Guest:I'm gone, and goodbye, and there's no explanation.
Marc:I don't know if there's another way to do it.
Guest:Yeah, okay.
Guest:Well, whatever happened then, it was...
Guest:how old were you it was painful 16 and you were with her for a while we were together for like nine months which felt like you know but you were in it was the first one and it was the first one that i really really felt yeah and uh and you took the hit huh yeah did you ever get back in touch with her
Guest:well i i saw her yeah eventually she like once i was in college she would she came to austin and so i did she became friends with my best friend and i think she probably really yeah yeah oh that that doesn't help yeah how many years after
Guest:That's like five or six years after.
Marc:Comes back into the world?
Guest:Yeah, just to do that.
Marc:Sleep with your best friend?
Marc:Yeah, I'm not sure exactly that.
Marc:Okay, all right.
Marc:Are you still best friends with that guy?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And you never asked him?
Marc:uh come on we've we've talked about it yeah all right all right you guys are okay we're very okay yeah yeah is he not in the band no no no he's just a dude he's a dude they've known since high school or what yeah right after high school really yeah right when i'm still your best friend yeah that's impressive man yeah all right so you're playing zeppelin songs then like spoon is not playing zeppelin songs spoon is its own thing yeah we did originals yeah
Marc:But the heartbreak, did that inform the music?
Guest:Probably.
Guest:I mean, I remember some of those very first early songs that I was trying to write were... You know, I was trying to convey heartbreak.
Guest:Is that where the melancholy started?
Guest:Maybe.
Guest:But is that the way you... Like, when you and a lady break up, then it's just... It's over.
Guest:You don't talk anymore.
Marc:No, no, no.
Marc:I mean, it's just something I've learned.
Guest:That that might be the... Just peeling off the band-aid is the easiest.
Marc:Well, you know, because there's like...
Marc:I'm terrible at relationships.
Marc:I've been married twice, I have no kids, and they're full of drama.
Marc:I think it's weird that, so your folks broke up when you were eight, and it sounds like they were okay though, parents-wise.
Marc:But it just seems like when you're younger, and unfortunately me now, when I'm with somebody, it's like, that's it.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:That's all of it.
Marc:And I need to be intrinsically connected in all ways.
Marc:Right.
Marc:That sounds intense.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But how can someone handle that?
Marc:After a while, they're like, I'm exhausted.
Marc:There's some of this shit you're going to have to resolve.
Marc:But I've gotten better with that.
Marc:This isn't about me.
Marc:But I just found that if you're really done, as heartbreaking as it is, and I still have heartache over a lot of stuff.
Marc:My wife left me like that.
Marc:Just sort of like, done.
Marc:But she had to talk to me for a little while just to take my money.
Marc:But we had no kids.
Marc:But I don't hear nothing from her, really.
Marc:And it just hurts because there's party and things like, well, we were so close.
Marc:Why can't, you know, like, because, because you're, you don't have, your feelings are unresolved.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So it's just going to be like weird.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like it's probably better for, for both of you because like, what's it just going to be weird.
Marc:Right.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I'm close to a lot of my ex-girlfriends, but, um, but yeah, right when that, in that phase where you're, where you're, and I think there's gotta be a couple years break or something, you know, at least.
Marc:Wait a minute.
Guest:What?
Marc:I think I know one of your ex-girlfriends.
Guest:Oh, yeah, I think you do.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Eleanor?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Yeah, we dated for like five years.
Guest:I just realized that.
Guest:Yeah, she's great, huh?
Guest:She's great.
Guest:And the whole time we were dating, well, until the very end, she was not doing music.
Guest:Eleanor Friedberger is who we're talking about.
Marc:And her solo records, you're on the same label now.
Marc:uh or no you're not we were yeah there the last solo record was great yeah oh that's so interesting now now i remembered that i'm glad i remembered that yeah you were for five years she wasn't and she wasn't doing music until at the very end she started fiery furnaces with her brother oh so that was so you guys were kids yeah kind of yeah she was 19 i was 23 when we started going out did that one hurt
Guest:Yeah, and that was a drawn-out one.
Guest:Well, that's a long time, five years.
Guest:Yeah, until she got her next boyfriend, and then we had some time apart at that point.
Marc:Are you guys all right now?
Marc:Yeah, we're real fine.
Marc:All right, so now we're dealing with Heartbreak Spoon.
Marc:All right, so where'd you meet those guys?
Guest:jim the drummer um who's been in it the whole time with me i met him in the band right before the alien beats yeah and uh that was sort of like a rockabilly we wanted to be country kind of thing it was like a thing i wanted to do to just get get to just do for a while and get out of the um new wave pop yeah yeah so you did country
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, a friend, a guy that DJed after me at the radio station just said one day, oh, I heard that Skellington broke up.
Guest:Maybe we should start a country band.
Guest:And I just said, okay, right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I know a few country songs, but that doesn't, no, that's not going to happen.
Guest:And then I call him up a week later and said, maybe that is what I should do.
Guest:Just something that's like somebody else can be singing half the songs and I don't have to, you know, because it was heartbreaking being in the band before, you know, we just couldn't get anything going, couldn't get any gigs.
Guest:And I was playing with a bunch of guys who didn't really want to do music full time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And did you have any love for country?
No.
Guest:Yeah, I was really into Dwight Yoakam and Hank Williams, but it was a thin, it wasn't a deep appreciation.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You didn't go George Jones?
Marc:Didn't go Merle?
Marc:Not then, yeah.
Marc:No.
Marc:George Jones, come on, now?
Guest:Anything?
Guest:I bet I know.
Guest:I think I have one of his records, but I can't remember.
Marc:Just a voice.
Marc:Hell of a singer.
Marc:Hell of a singer.
Marc:I'll put that in your head.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Hell of a singer.
Marc:And as he got older and weirder, it still held up.
Marc:Held up.
Guest:yeah but like but it was did you find that it was ironic given what you grew up in that you were doing country yeah that's a good point it really was a it felt like a vacation for me you know um and uh it was it was good and then once once we did that for a year then we split up and then i started a new band and jim was in that one
Guest:And then we started this band that was basically, I don't know, I mean, it was very damaged by the Pixies and some Nirvana.
Guest:Damaged?
Guest:You mean?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, influenced by.
Guest:Too much.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, we ripped them off quite a bit.
Guest:yeah i mean i think a lot of bands did but um yeah eventually we found our own thing and that became spoon why that name well it was um the name of a can you know that band can yeah i love them yeah they have a great song called spoon and at that time it was like you know
Guest:All these one-word bands were all the rage, like Blur and Oasis, like Ride.
Guest:I wanted one of those.
Guest:What was the journey of it?
Guest:Well, we put out a couple records that were pretty...
Guest:ignored what label was that first one is on matador that was a hot label yeah remember those guys they're well they're yeah they're still doing great stuff and uh then electra was the second one and we were dropped but that's a big deal yeah so you did a matador record yeah they still well they're in beggars they're in beggars group now yeah yeah but they still do a lot of good stuff i get records from them
Marc:So you do a big label deal.
Marc:It was like a big deal, right?
Guest:Yeah, it was a big deal, yeah.
Guest:And it was hard to leave Matador, but we had sold, I think, 1,500 copies of that record in the first year that it came out.
Guest:And so everybody, even Matador, was like, yeah, sorry, this didn't go so well.
Guest:So yeah, we put out a record on Elektra, and that did not so well either, and we got dropped.
Guest:So that must have been horrible.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But in that, like, we had this A&R guy who, you know, brought us over there from Matador.
Guest:And he basically, once we signed the deal with him, I mean, he had been, you know, on us and so dedicated to signing the band and very, you know, all over us.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, trying to show us, you know...
Guest:uh how serious he was about the band and then once we signed then he you know he didn't come to a single show i couldn't get him on the phone and then he quit and we got dropped the week after he quit and so we wrote these songs um with sort of loosely about him his name was lafitte ron lafitte and so we had a song called the agony of lafitte and we had a song called lafitte don't fail me now and this this single that we put out was kind of the first thing that like gave
Guest:the press or whatever anybody a reason to sort of latch on like there was a story all of a sudden right now right and that was the first thing that and that was on a series of sneaks it ended up as being like a bonus track on series of sneaks later yeah and so there was like some a good good press behind it like it had a little yeah for the first time yeah for the first time some people started taking notice and then the next time we put out a record um it's starting things started happening you know
Marc:Were you, like, when you... Was there a point where you got dropped from a lecture where you're like, fuck, we're fucked?
Guest:Yes, yes.
Marc:How long is that going?
Guest:For sure.
Guest:A long time.
Guest:And I don't really know why we kept going, you know, other than the fact that I was writing songs and I was really turned on by new kinds of music that I wasn't... So I just kept writing songs.
Guest:I mean, it was really...
Guest:wasn't very planned out but since i had songs and i had a band so i was like yeah maybe we should play this song but you felt like quitting i thought that it i thought that i was probably not going to be able to put out a record other than putting it out myself yeah for for a long time ever you like square one in your head like you know now what yeah and then like how'd you get hooked up with mac
Guest:He had come to one of our shows when we were on Matador, I think, actually.
Guest:And so I knew that he was...
Marc:you know at least vaguely a fan and so i got once we got that third record done i i sent it over to him how was that record like like this was a like a sink or swim record in a way in your mind like i mean what did you do on that record were you like if i'm gonna like i imagine you're sort of like well this is it my my attitude was like this is a kick i can't believe we're actually getting to put out a record
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I thought that it was over, you know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then somehow we got to put out a record, and then somehow it did, you know, 10 times better than anything we'd ever put out before.
Marc:Well, it seems like a pretty raw record somehow.
Marc:I listened to it today, actually.
Marc:I listened to Girls Can Tell today.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It seemed very personal.
Marc:Was it?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, it was.
Guest:It was.
Guest:It was the first time I wrote some fairly personal lyrics, vulnerable lyrics, and...
Guest:Yeah, the whole thing started coming together.
Guest:Were you aware of that when you were doing it?
Guest:Yeah, I knew this is... This is me.
Guest:It was new musically and also new lyrically.
Guest:It just was totally new territory.
Guest:And I still don't know why we kept playing a spoon.
Guest:We could have started something else.
Guest:We could have...
Guest:It probably would have made a lot more sense to change names.
Marc:You're saying no one would have noticed at that point.
Guest:Yeah, because we had zero success.
Guest:When you get dropped by a major label, especially back then, we had left the indie and then we went and did the major label thing.
Guest:Then we got dropped.
Guest:I remember it felt like seriously damaged goods.
Guest:There's nothing that's ever going to happen with this band now.
Guest:right um but yeah we just kept doing it and and do you know why things turned around why merge like maybe the audience for that label was different yeah for sure i think that they they knew what they were doing they definitely knew what they were doing more than electra did and with indie music anyway yeah right yeah right with for they knew what to do with us right than electra did right and um
Marc:yeah i think that the records changed and we had that store you know all this stuff and we got better you know my songs started getting better yeah so everything just kind of started turning around so that must have been pretty gratifying to have put your like you know real guts on the line for that album and then it turned everything around must have been reaffirming like okay
Guest:it was unbelievable yeah and what was it and then when did you just blow up completely it was well gradually we the next record kill the moonlight did maybe you know three times better than that one and then the next record give me fiction did two or three times better than that one and then gaga gaga gaga didn't did even better than that one that was a big one yeah that was like that it felt like in smaller steps actually which made me appreciate it
Marc:Well, you earned it.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's sort of like you're being rewarded, you know, in the right kind of pace.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Guest:It was, it's a, yeah, it was a unique trajectory.
Guest:and and you did so you did like what you did five albums with merge five yeah you're right five and why uh why loma vista for the new one um well we kind of just felt like it was time to if we were going to try something else that this was the record we should try something else on right um and we still got our catalog with merge and we just
Guest:you know yeah we're on good terms you're good with them yeah they're fine yeah I think they just reissued a bunch of the records right or they never were out of print I got the vinyl on them yeah they did eventually they reissued the two records that came before before their time yeah
Marc:And how did you feel about going into this record?
Marc:It seems like it was the longest time in between records.
Marc:Did this feel like a comeback record?
Guest:In a way, yeah, just simply because of how long we've been away.
Guest:And that was because I went and did Divine Fits.
Guest:How'd that go for you?
Guest:It was good.
Guest:It was a blast to be able to play in a band with different people and people who just have a totally different thing on stage.
Guest:Right, right.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And so how do you feel about Spoon now?
Guest:I feel good I'm in it you know I'm really into it yeah yeah it's going well it's fun yeah you're having fun it is fun I love being on tour yeah actually I like going away too yeah like if you stay in nice hotels it's nice right yeah
Guest:Yeah, well, often we got to sleep on the bus, but, you know.
Guest:But it's a nice bus, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's really good.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Be okay for a while.
Marc:Yeah, I'll be all right.
Guest:Oops, sorry.
Marc:That's your call, telling you to end the interview.
Marc:Well, it was great talking to you, man.
Marc:Yeah, good to talk to you, too.
Marc:And I appreciate you coming.
Marc:Thank you for having me.
Marc:All right, that's it.
Marc:That was good.
Marc:I got them going, that Brit Daniel, that band Spoon.
Marc:So that's the show.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com for all your WTFPod needs.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com slash calendar to check out the dates for the city near you.
Marc:And also, happy birthday to John Montagna, who did our theme song.
Marc:Other music on the show is by DJ Copley.
Marc:So I got the Telecaster out because I played some Stones last night, as I told you.
Guest:.
Guest:.
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Marc:Boomer lives!
Marc:Sloppy, sloppy telly.