Episode 755 - Roger Waters
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucking ears what the fucksters what the fucking hymers what's happening i'm mark maron this is my show this is my podcast wtf welcome to it
Marc:Pretty big show today.
Marc:Roger Waters from Pink Floyd is here.
Marc:He was here.
Marc:He was in the garage.
Marc:We talked about music mostly, and it was pretty exciting.
Marc:I get nervous with the legends, with the towering legends of rock and roll.
Marc:So that's coming up.
Marc:It's been a rough few days here at the Cat Ranch.
Marc:It's been a rough few days as some of you who are following the struggle or the process or the slow moving towards the castration of young Buster Kitten.
Marc:It's done.
Marc:Balls are gone.
Marc:I had his balls cut off, and I believe it was the right thing to do, but it seemed to open up some, I don't know.
Marc:You know, when you have a few cats, which I do, three indoor cats and one feral outdoor cat, things sort of happen all at once.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I had to take Buster in, and then Wednesday...
Marc:La Fonda started acting fucking weird.
Marc:She was hiding in the closet, not eating.
Marc:That's not good for a cat.
Marc:That means there's something wrong.
Marc:So I tried to give her some food, wouldn't take it.
Marc:Then she moved to the linen cabinet, tucked herself into there.
Marc:Hiding.
Marc:Not eating.
Marc:Problem.
Marc:God damn it.
Marc:So now I got to bring Buster in to get his balls cut off.
Marc:And I got to get the little feline fist of fury that is LaFonda into a box as well.
Marc:And bring both these fuckers in because there's something wrong with her.
Marc:I guess at some point I'm going to have to accept that these cats are going to fade out.
Marc:Pass on.
Marc:But so I get Fonda in the box and then I get Buster in the bag and Monkey's under the bed.
Marc:Why is he under the bed?
Marc:He's not eating.
Marc:What are you fucking kidding me?
Marc:All at once.
Marc:So I got to pick Fonda up in a little while.
Marc:Monkey might have to stay overnight.
Marc:Buster's back.
Marc:And it's just, it's aggravating to me.
Marc:But I think that...
Marc:It's weird.
Marc:Every time I'm heading towards something big like Carnegie Hall, that's this Friday, you know, things start to cycle out.
Marc:And I don't know if it's the power of my subconscious seeking chaos that I feel grounded in.
Marc:And I think these cats represent part of me, you know.
Marc:I think Fonda subconsciously.
Marc:Fonda is like this, like, you know, I'll admit it, just a sort of tough, defensive, distrusting feminine force that's very aggressive.
Marc:I'll own that.
Marc:I got that in me.
Marc:Monkey is this sort of kind of like nervous, kind of scared, a little insecure.
Marc:force like he's under the bed fond is lethargic so those two parts of my being are are sort of nervous as we move towards this buster what does he represent he's kind of crazy and childish and just had his balls cut off and i'm trying to you know sort of grow in my relationship so i think all the metaphors are there i think it all works out i'll let you know how those cats are i don't know right now but it's been a pretty pretty fucking gnarly few days
Marc:I'm looking at a picture right now, an old Polaroid of my friend Dave Bishop and myself from high school.
Marc:I must have been in 10th grade, maybe he was in 11th grade standing in front of a Christmas tree that would have been at his house.
Marc:And Dave passed away, some of you know that, years ago.
Marc:Recently saw his brother.
Marc:But me and Dave were best friends for a few years there in high school.
Marc:So I remember this one time.
Marc:I don't remember why we went to Santa Fe.
Marc:This is a Pink Floyd story.
Marc:I have two revolving around animals and one that I think is important to everybody.
Marc:was we go up for some reason.
Marc:Maybe we went up there for dinner, but it was me and Dave.
Marc:I think it was after he got rid of his 73 Firebird, the gold one.
Marc:He had a Scirocco, and his father owned a stereo store, so he always had a great sound system.
Marc:I remember we were there.
Marc:We were in Santa Fe.
Marc:We were a little drunk.
Marc:We were smoking weed.
Marc:And we decided to drive back to Albuquerque on Old 14 behind the Sandias, which is a quiet kind of lightless drive.
Marc:And there was a full moon.
Marc:And I remember we were smoking a joint and we're driving back.
Marc:We probably shouldn't have been driving, but that's...
Marc:Whatever.
Marc:You know, it happened back then.
Marc:I was probably 15.
Marc:He was probably 16, 17.
Marc:Get your driver's license when you're 15 there.
Marc:And we're just cruising down that old back road, down old 14.
Marc:High.
Marc:Late at night.
Marc:Full moon, that's the only thing lighting the environment.
Marc:And animals was playing.
Marc:Pink Floyd animals.
Marc:And this is the first time I remember, outside of money and some parts of dark side of the moon, kind of plowing into the consciousness, this was the first time where I went on the fucking journey that is animals.
Marc:And the first time that I registered...
Marc:That goddamn guitar and dogs.
Marc:Those two guitars, it sounds like.
Marc:But that was it, man.
Marc:It was almost like transportive, transformational.
Marc:Full moon, driving about 70, no one else on the road.
Marc:Pitch black out except for moonlight.
Marc:Heading back behind the Sandia Mountains, me and my best buddy.
Marc:High.
High.
Marc:Went all the way through animals and I don't think either one of us was the same again.
Marc:That's the power of Pink Floyd.
Marc:Took you somewhere.
Marc:Whether it was a mental environment or a feeling or an endorphin rush, whatever.
Marc:It changed your perception with or without drugs.
Marc:That was the amazing thing about Pink Floyd.
Marc:The other animals memory I have was when I lived in Boston on Carlton Street off Beacon with my roommate Lance, Lance Mayan.
Marc:Again, Pot was involved, and there was a video camera involved.
Marc:I had some sort of camera.
Marc:I think it recorded VHSs.
Marc:Lance and I got stoned.
Marc:We sat on that shitty couch in that shitty dark apartment with the camera on us, high out of our fucking mind, and I played air guitar.
Marc:Lance played air drums.
Marc:to both sides of animals, and that's recorded.
Marc:I've not seen that tape.
Marc:I don't know where that tape is.
Marc:It might be in a box somewhere, but it exists.
Marc:In the world, me and Lance stoned playing air guitar and drums for the entire duration of Pink Floyd Animals.
Marc:And it was another great experience.
Marc:So happy it's documented.
Marc:If anyone finds it, let me know.
Marc:And then, of course, the other important thing for Pink Floyd and myself is that transition in time where you move through, on Dark Side of the Moon, where you move through the bells, the alarms, and then the ticker starts.
Guest:And then those drums.
Marc:That's the kind of moment where if you're with somebody in a car and you're both listening to it and you both understand it, or even if there's four of you, where you're just sort of looking at each other and you're waiting.
Marc:You're waiting to take your hands off the wheel and play some air drums.
Marc:Ba-boom, boom, ba-boom.
Marc:Pink Floyd, great fucking band.
Marc:I sometimes forget how fucking great they are and how much they meant to all of us.
Marc:You know who I'm talking to.
Marc:So Roger Waters came over here and he actually talked to my neighbor, got out of his whatever car he was driving with the people he was with and my neighbor was, I think they talked about plants.
Marc:And my neighbor had no idea who it was.
Marc:And when I told him he was beside himself with feeling stupid.
Marc:It's the interesting thing about Pink Floyd.
Marc:How many of you could recognize Roger Waters or David Gilmore or the other guys?
Marc:Well, when I told Adam that was Roger Waters, he's like, no fucking way.
Marc:No way.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:So, Roger and I talked, and tickets are on sale now for his 2017 North American tour, Us and Them.
Marc:Go to rogerwaters.com or aeglive.com to see tour dates and locations and get tickets.
Marc:And right now, you can listen to me and Pink Floyd's Roger Waters.
Marc:It's nice to see you, man.
Marc:I appreciate you coming.
Marc:It's good to be here.
Marc:You know, I always get a little nervous.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:I do.
Marc:I do when I talk to certain musicians and musical artists because, you know, like I had John Prine in here a few weeks ago.
Marc:I listened to it.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Are you a Prine fan?
Marc:Of course.
Marc:How great is that guy?
Marc:Those songs, man.
Marc:Hang on a minute.
Marc:How great is John Prine?
Guest:Hang on.
Guest:Let me try and figure this out.
Guest:Quantify it.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:He's great, great.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But, you know, you talk to a guy like that and not unlike yourself, you have this tremendous history of music.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then you realize in a moment as a fan and also as a guy who's going to talk to you, like, well, I better get caught up somehow.
Yeah.
Marc:And then you're sort of looking at 50 years of expression.
Marc:And it's an amazing thing.
Marc:And it's a little daunting at times.
Guest:I believe you.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Do you look back at your creative life and think like, oh, my God.
Guest:No, of course not.
Guest:Oh, good, good.
Guest:I look at, I kind of live in the present.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:I think.
Marc:Well, I read a piece about the Desert Land show that you just did, and I got choked up reading that piece.
Marc:I'm doing Tomorrow.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And like from what I found fascinating and not unlike also the tour that you did with the wall is that if you have a timeless piece of art or timeless song or timeless idea that it stays relevant by just kind of reloading the metaphor that already exists.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Maybe, yeah.
Guest:Does that make sense?
Guest:Yeah, I guess so.
Guest:I mean, you know, talking about the wall, I did that for three years on the road.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I'm kind of pretty over it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Mind you, that we finished three years ago.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But you're using some of the wall with the show you're doing tomorrow, right?
Guest:Very, very little.
Marc:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What do we do from the wall?
Guest:We do brick two.
Guest:We do mother...
Marc:But you're able to make it fresh.
Marc:I mean, I'm just kind of relating to the present.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:We made a fresh show just for these five gigs.
Guest:We did three gigs in Mexico.
Guest:The last one in Zocalo Square, which was amazing.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah, because it's poor people there because it's free.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:So instead of getting rich people at the front, you get people who've been up all night queuing.
Guest:It's magic.
Marc:Were they appreciative?
Marc:Did they love it?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, they were all singing along.
Guest:And I was making, I took it upon myself to make speeches in Mexico.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah, about the disappeared, you know, about the 43 kids.
Guest:And in fact, there's 28,000 people missing in the last eight years.
Guest:It's crazy, man.
Guest:And about half of them have disappeared on Peña's watch.
Guest:So I had a word with him, which was interesting because his palace is just to the left and there's a line of soldiers along the top standing there with rifles.
Guest:I'm not suggesting I was in any danger.
Marc:But there were guys with rifles up there.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And a lot of the local people said, fuck me, he's got some balls on him to stand there and say that crap here.
Marc:But you probably were in danger on some level.
Marc:All it takes is one guy.
Guest:Yeah, on some level, probably.
Marc:One guy with a gun who can disappear.
Marc:They're not.
Guest:Disappearing is not unusual.
Guest:Anyway, you know, you only get one crack at this as far as we know.
Guest:The life thing.
Guest:Yeah, so you have to decide whether to...
Guest:stand up for something or just whether whether to be real or not or not right did you always find that to be true about you did it was something that you learned i mean was there a period where you were like i've got to do something else i mean i was a lot when i was younger i was quieter i never had less conviction right now you know i went through all my teenage years doing all the things that we did in those days going on all the master marches and you know
Marc:What were the marches then at that time?
Marc:Because I didn't grow up in England.
Guest:All the milestone was to try and ban nuclear weapons, certainly to get rid of the English independent nuclear deterrent, an aim that we never achieved.
Guest:Right.
Guest:No one did.
Guest:But there were some great people involved in that movement.
Marc:So you were politically active as a teenager.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But you grew up like... Because I have no sense of... The thing I was thinking before you came over, and I've talked to a couple of other people that are around your age and grew up in England, is that as an American, we have no sense...
Marc:of real rubble and destruction from war none there's no collective memory of it no there's no historic memory of it and and someone from your generation certainly does yeah i mean you came up in the rubble yeah do you have memories of it uh no i was too young for the rubble i was born in 43 so i have lots of memories of the aftermath of world war ii
Guest:Actually, I wrote something last week about something about the plaster bananas remain out of reach to the kids left behind on the beaches.
Guest:It was part of a longer musing about something, but it reminded me that the first time I ever saw a banana, I was about five years old or something, so it would have been 48 or 49 because there was no fruit anywhere.
Guest:And I remember being offered this kind of shriveled, small black thing, you know, that had a little bit of yellow showing through the black bits.
Guest:And said, I don't want one of those.
Guest:I want one of those.
Guest:And pointing to the plaster bananas that were hanging up in the ceiling of the green grocer's shop.
Guest:You can't have one of those.
Guest:They're made of plaster.
Marc:Right.
Marc:The good ones.
Guest:But that's why I wanted one of those that looked like a banana.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because I'd never seen a banana.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And where do you think that memory came from in terms of what you were writing?
Marc:What were you putting together?
Guest:I was actually, it was stream of consciousness stuff about, oh, God, it was a mixture of memories of seeing a bloated goat floating in a marina in Beirut in 1980 or sometime when I was back there.
Guest:Or maybe even earlier.
Guest:I was in Beirut for the first time in 1961 or 62.
Guest:Doing what?
Guest:The first time I was there, I was just kind of hanging out really on the beach with my friend Willa.
Marc:It was a place that you would go for a holiday?
Guest:No, we had driven an old...
Guest:vehicle there with some undergraduates in the back of it from England yeah and it eventually gave up the ghost on the road to Damascus like we all do yeah in one way or another uh-huh it's not just Saul or Paul or whatever his name was uh-huh um and and we were there for for some time before I decided to hitchhike home which you could do in 1962 and
Marc:But was that a journey that you took?
Marc:What inspired it?
Marc:Were you reading the beatniks?
Marc:Were you looking for something?
Marc:I mean, to go there, of all places, what compelled you?
Marc:We were on our way to Baghdad, obviously.
Marc:Oh, I'm sorry.
Marc:Of course you were.
Marc:These are not vacation options for Americans.
Guest:They're not vacation options for anyone anymore.
Marc:True.
Guest:But they were then.
Guest:That's where you went.
Guest:That's where you were on your way to.
Guest:Baghdad.
Guest:You were on your way to Afghanistan.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Fire Baghdad.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's where everybody was going to.
Guest:To smoke some hash.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I wrote some short stories later on about that.
Guest:And there's one thing that happened to me in Beirut that I'll tell you now.
Guest:I wish I had the short story here, but I haven't.
Guest:So I'll just tell you the bones of it.
Guest:so there I am we Willer this is my friend Willer anybody who's seen the film Roger Waters the Wall yes there's another old bloke in it with a beard and we sit and kind of philosophize about things on the side of a hill in the south of France he's my mate from then oh really we were 18 uh-huh and we were so and we would kind of live rough live off the local gay community you know get a free lunch yeah go swimming yeah and whatever um
Guest:So we're swimming one day and some kid steals my shoes.
Guest:Well, you never get out of sight of your passport or your stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I was swimming and I saw this kid steal my shoes, wading through the surf.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Really difficult.
Guest:Got out.
Guest:He's gone.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Melted into the crowd like they do in old black and white movies.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I'm looking around.
Guest:I saw a cop.
Guest:Well, in those days, the Lebanese, in their infinite wisdom, have cops whose only job is to look after foreigners.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Because tourism was important.
Guest:Protect the tourism, yeah.
Guest:Not anymore.
Guest:No.
Guest:But it was there.
Guest:It's a tricky tourism.
Guest:So I go, there's a cop.
Guest:Hey, there's a kid stolen my shoes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Guest:What are we going to do?
Guest:Oh, we're going to go and look for him.
Guest:So we set off to look for the needle in the haystack.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And unbelievably, suddenly, I see him.
Guest:That's him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So the cop goes where, you know, and he's a proper cop with that.
Guest:He's got moustache a bit like you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so the kid looks at us and he looks at and the cop sees him and the kid goes flight or flight, you know, and eventually he goes.
Guest:The cop obviously knows him.
Guest:He must know every kid.
Guest:Right.
Guest:On his beat.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So he sort of gives in.
Guest:You can see resignation.
Guest:Cop comes over, jabba, jabba, jabba, jabba, jabba, jabba.
Guest:The kid's looking at the ground, you know, a bit sullen.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And eventually, rather reluctantly, he takes my penny loafers off.
Guest:and puts them down in the story i think he said he places them in the neutral ground between us yeah yeah like that and the kid and the cop then waves him away with the sort of fingers hanging down kind of motion of his hand like go away and the kid disappears in the crowd
Guest:Now, I'm 18 years old, kind of Oxbridge, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Believe in law and order and all of that.
Guest:What the fuck's going on?
Guest:You're letting him go.
Guest:You know, he stole my shoes.
Guest:Where's the retribution here?
Guest:And I'll never get this.
Guest:It almost makes me tearful to remember it.
Guest:The cop sort of looks at me pityingly.
Guest:And for the first time, he speaks to me in English.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I've heard nothing but jabber so far.
Guest:And he looks at me and he goes,
Guest:He is poor.
Guest:And it went into my heart like a dagger.
Guest:I was at least clever enough to understand that I was learning a lesson.
Guest:And that's what I say at the end of the story.
Guest:I say, if when we're very young and dumb as shit and know nothing about anything, if we run into our cop...
Guest:we're very lucky because it's in that moment that we start to learn about love yeah and it was a very it was a huge moment in my life just that moment with that cop and that kid when you walked away from that moment where you you kind of jarred yeah i suddenly had to rethink everything jurisprudence right and you know and
Guest:Moral conditions and Christianity and right and wrong and all the rest.
Guest:He is poor.
Guest:In fact, I'm about to go on the road doing a tour next year.
Guest:And the new tour is called Us and Them.
Guest:And it's only about that.
Guest:It's about that.
Guest:There's a line in the song, the old song from Dark Side of the Moon, Us and Them, which is why I've called the tour Us and Them, which goes with, without, and who'll deny it's what the fighting's all about.
Guest:And as I say to people, unfortunately, almost everyone will deny that that is what the fighting is all about.
Guest:Almost everyone, if you ask them, will suggest that the fighting is all about right and wrong, about the fact that we're right and they're wrong.
Guest:and that they're conflicting ideologies of some kind or that they want to hurt us and that's why we're fighting.
Guest:And my contention is that it's not about that at all.
Guest:It's about with, without.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:It's about distribution of wealth and it's about where the cash resides.
Marc:Yeah, they don't even use the word class in this country, in America.
Marc:Right.
Marc:There's no class discussion.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Really?
Marc:No, it doesn't really exist.
Marc:I mean, Bernie Sanders brought it up and sort of initiated it.
Marc:But this population has been so ingrained with a fear of communist ideas that it's just there's no poor people.
Marc:They're just people that haven't had a fair break yet.
Guest:They're people that the Chinese and the Mexicans and the Islam have prevented from becoming billionaires.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:Somehow those bastards crept through.
Marc:And also the communists here, the socialists like Hillary and Obama, these big socialists have really screwed them.
Marc:It's a sad, angry, horrible situation.
Marc:And I think that coming from where you're coming from, at least the conversation existed.
Marc:I mean, it may not have existed in the way that people were going to be helped, but there was definitely a line.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:And that line does not exist here like that politically.
Guest:I actually read a poem last week at Desert Trip.
Guest:And part of it is, and it's called Why Cannot the Good Prevail?
Guest:And I haven't got it with me, so I can't read it to you.
Guest:But there's a line in it that says, Defenders of the Rosenbergs.
Guest:And it's about that's a passing line in the idea that Americans are good people at heart, people to help rebuild the barn, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The doctor's note from long ago.
Guest:I knew you're par enough.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Free medicine, whatever, you know, the idea of helping your neighbor and whatever.
Guest:That is entrenched in the idea of what the American dream might have been had it not been subverted by, you know, Vanderbilt and J.P.
Guest:Morgan.
Guest:I think that's true.
Marc:And I think that's what you hear a lot.
Marc:You know, one thing you always hear and you hear I heard it last week with the floods in North Carolina.
Marc:Is that, you know, all of a sudden when there's a disaster at hand, you know, people come together.
Marc:I guess in some ways that you have to bring them to the attention.
Marc:You have to bring them to the attention of the disaster that's ongoing.
Marc:Well, that's, you know what?
Guest:I'm glad you've said that.
Guest:I'm feeling a need to try and bring to people's attention the fact that the disaster is happening now, but it's global.
Guest:Always, yeah, and it's been going on for a while.
Guest:It's not just that the levee's broken in your neighborhood.
Guest:This has been going on for a long time, and it's happening all around us now.
Guest:And how desperately important it is that we arrange in our minds and try and help each other to understand that the less walls we have and the more that we understand that there's no difference between us and them.
Guest:And that Mexicans and Americans, well...
Guest:You have to face up to the fact that most United States citizens in the very near future are going to be of Mexican origin.
Guest:The demographics.
Guest:That terrifies a lot of white people.
Marc:Well, how fucking stupid is that?
Marc:I know.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, the interesting thing to me about you, obviously, you continue to write.
Marc:You continue to write poems impulsively.
Marc:that if something comes to you, you're going to put it on a paper and process it.
Marc:And these ideas that you're talking about, from the moment that you talked to the cop and you had your mind blown, that all the ideas that run through the seminal albums that are yours were dark sort of meditations on exactly these things without the exact definition that you've sort of rendered it down.
Marc:This is the fight.
Marc:that it seems to me that this darkness of of of human uh endeavor and and and corruption it's always been there yeah right yeah now when you started working early on like i have to assume that shortly after you had this moment with the cop you started playing music right
Marc:Yeah, well, I was already playing music.
Marc:What were you doing then?
Marc:What kind of music?
Marc:What was moving you musically?
Guest:Well, I was just about to go to college.
Guest:When you were going to study?
Guest:Architecture.
Marc:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Were you passionate about it?
No.
Marc:Well, why'd you choose that thing not to be passionate about?
Guest:My mom.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:My mom said, you cannot become a traveling salesman.
Guest:You'll get board rigid and you won't make enough money to support.
Marc:That was the only other option?
Guest:Traveling salesman?
Guest:No, policeman, she thought.
Guest:I might be a good policeman.
Guest:Huh.
Yeah.
Guest:She was not quite an understanding of who I can remember looking at her and I hoped it was pityingly in the middle of the night.
Guest:You know, when I said, Mom, come on, get real.
Guest:That is not going to happen.
Guest:Join the man.
Guest:Are you fucking crazy?
Marc:A cop or a traveling salesman.
Guest:These were your options that your mother saw for you.
Guest:No, my mother didn't see.
Guest:My mother thought, well, a cop, you know, you could that could be a proper career.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Police.
Guest:No, but she was desperate that I should get some kind of qualification so that I didn't get bored.
Guest:Oh, right.
Guest:Which is fair enough.
Guest:I would encourage anybody to pursue whatever, if they can find something they're interested in, I would encourage anybody to pursue it with vigor.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:In order to expand their mental capacities.
Marc:And how did you grow up economically?
Guest:What was your world?
Guest:My mom earned 40 quid a week as a school teacher.
Guest:Oh.
Guest:And she had a war pension, which was pitiful, but because my father had been killed.
Guest:Right.
Guest:In 1944.
Guest:So we were poor.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Without being, you know, we always had enough to eat.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I was never, well, I was cold because there was never any, I was freezing cold every night in the winter.
Guest:There was no central heating or anything like that.
Guest:So you were cold till you got down to the kitchen.
Marc:But did you see yourself as poor?
Marc:No.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Because that's the other interesting thing to me in talking to British people who were around then, that this was your lot in life.
Marc:This is how you lived.
Guest:Well, and we weren't poor.
Guest:I mean, my grandmother and my mother spent every Sunday afternoon darning socks because we didn't buy new stuff.
Guest:We mended old stuff.
Guest:I wore my brother's clothes.
Guest:It was hand-me-downs and things.
Guest:But poor people...
Guest:When my mother developed her social leanings and her left-wing politics, she was doing teacher training in Bradford in the north of England, and there they were poor.
Guest:She taught kids who all through the winter walked to school through six inches of snow with no shoes or nothing.
Guest:For real.
Guest:Bare feet walking through snow to come to school.
Guest:They were poor, and they didn't have enough to eat.
Guest:I've met poor people.
Guest:Here, in this country.
Guest:You know, everywhere I go with the wall, whenever we do Brick 2 anywhere, I always have local children to come and mime that bit.
Guest:And I always try and get them from the most disadvantaged background that I can find.
Guest:Anyway, we did a gig in San Diego a few years ago, and I looked at these kids and I thought, these are not my kids.
Guest:I don't know who they are.
Guest:So I found out that they were the children of the executives from the arena, who they thought would be fun for their kids to be part of the show.
Guest:So I went apeshit and got rid of them all.
Guest:Find me some proper kids.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So these kids turned up and I went, these are more like it.
Guest:These are my kids.
Guest:This is my constituency.
Guest:But they knew nothing because normally the kids have rehearsed a couple of dance steps before they arrive because we send them a DVD.
Guest:So these kids were there.
Guest:And we had about half an hour to lick them into shape, which we did.
Guest:And I said, who's in charge of these kids?
Guest:And there was a very nice black lady there whose name I can't remember now.
Guest:And so I took her one side.
Guest:I said, how did you find these children in this short space of time?
Guest:Thank you so much.
Guest:And I was just talking to her.
Guest:And she said, they're my clients.
Guest:And I went, what do you mean they're your clients?
Guest:And she said, they're my clients.
Guest:I see them every day.
Guest:And I went, I won't try and do her accent.
Guest:And anyway, to cut a long story short, she drove a van delivering free meals.
Guest:These are children who don't have enough to eat, whose parents can't feed them.
Guest:And this lady was part of the social services, and every day she would deliver something to eat to each of these 15 kids.
Guest:And it breaks your fucking heart, you know.
Guest:You go, wow.
Marc:Did they have a good time?
Guest:Oh, God, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Unbelievable.
Guest:I mean, the stories of the children that we've worked in, with thousands and thousands over the years, they're always magical.
Marc:And do you feel that this sensibility was instilled in you by your mother's work?
Marc:Of course.
Marc:And she came to that later?
Marc:Like she wasn't always that?
Guest:No, she grew up in a quite well-off middle-class family and went to boarding school, had very little contact with her parents, in fact, as that kind of Victorian model of family life.
Marc:So she must have had her cop moment at some point.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:What do you know about your father's politics?
Guest:Well, he was a poor kid in County Durham in the north of England.
Guest:His father was killed on the 24th of September, 1916.
Guest:In the war?
Guest:In the Somme Offensive, yeah, in Belgium.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So his mother got a job as housekeeper to the local doctor and so he and my auntie Verna lived in the attic room upstairs and their mother was the housekeeper and cook for the local doctor.
Guest:So they were in service, if you like.
Guest:So that's how they grew up.
Guest:But he was bright.
Guest:He got a scholarship to the local grammar school, and then he went to university, to Durham University, where I think he studied divinity and physical education.
Guest:And when he'd done that, he did teacher training.
Guest:And then he went, which showed he had some gumption.
Guest:He went to Palestine in 1934, and he was there till 36, teaching at St.
Guest:George's School.
Marc:So you come from like teachers.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And you've become one on some level.
Guest:On some level, maybe.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So your mother tells you, you know, become a cop or a traveling salesman and you go with architecture and then you drift into music or you were actively, you had the dream.
Guest:I feel more like a student than a teacher.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I have to say.
Guest:Well, that's good.
Guest:I've been watching NECA.
Guest:Do you know who she is?
Guest:Nneka?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:She's a Nigerian singer.
Guest:Double N-E-K-A.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And she's been very popular sort of in Germany and in Europe.
Guest:Pop singer?
Guest:I've never heard of her.
Guest:Well, yes and no.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Her great band.
Guest:I mean, anybody who listens to it, it's no point in talking about her because you have to see her.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:But she's very socially conscious as well.
Guest:But when you watch her perform, she's got the most expressive face that you can imagine.
Guest:And fantastic pipes.
Guest:Perfect pitch.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Incredible.
Guest:Great writer.
Guest:Great.
Guest:I have no idea how she slipped past my radar for this long.
Guest:But when you see her sing, you can see that she is entirely in what she's doing for every second that it's going on.
Guest:And so there is an absolute lack of artifice about it, which is, I realize, watching other artists who can do that.
Guest:Prine is a good example.
Guest:Actually, no, he's less.
Guest:There's more artifice in John Prine because...
Guest:He's definitely got a shtick.
Guest:He's got a shtick and he's a great comic and he's a great deliverer of material and stuff.
Guest:But yeah, but that is what one is aiming for is to somehow discover what it is that you feel and express it with nothing getting in the way.
Marc:Interesting.
Marc:I think that's true.
Marc:But when you're in that place, you sort of have to, like, are you going to be raw or are you going to be focused?
Guest:Do you know we're wearing almost exactly the same ring?
Marc:We are?
Marc:The turquoise ring?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Zuni.
Guest:Isn't that weird?
Guest:That is weird.
Guest:That we're both wearing.
Marc:Did you get that in New Mexico?
Guest:No.
Guest:I bought it in New York in 1968.
Marc:I bet you that's a Zuni ring.
Guest:It is Zuni.
Guest:Definitely.
Marc:That's a trip, man.
Marc:Isn't that weird?
Marc:You want to know what's even weirder?
Marc:Is that that ring, the reason I got this ring is my dad had a ring that looked like this.
Marc:And I have that, but it was too big for me.
Marc:But I wanted one that looked like that.
Guest:Funny.
Guest:What is happening?
Guest:Somebody once in a shop told me that this ring is made by Jay.
Guest:Just to explain, listeners, we're both wearing... Zuni turquoise rings.
Guest:Yeah, which is like a little checkerboard grid of turquoise.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's wild, Roger.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's trippy.
Marc:Now I feel like...
Marc:What are the odds?
Guest:Hey, man, we must be channeling, you know, Native Americans.
Marc:We're supposed to be here.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:This is supposed to happen.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Marc:But let's talk about this expression because I listened to like old Pink Floyd, like real old.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And like the one thing I noticed is that in order to realize the type of psychedelic music that was going to whatever you want to call your music and to make it sound like music was a feat of magic and confidence.
Marc:That either was innate or at that time you must have realized that you were all in.
Marc:What was it?
Guest:I was never that intellectual about it.
Guest:Right, of course.
Guest:You know, it's something that happened.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That development.
Guest:Now I understand a lot more than I did about it.
Guest:Well, you became more intellectual about it.
Marc:I mean, more decisive.
Guest:Well...
Guest:What happened was that the band became popular and my major contribution to rock and roll, if you like, I mean, I've written some decent songs, but it was really to develop the theater of arena rock, you know, which I did almost single handedly back in the sort of middle 70s.
Marc:And also to elevate the idea of the concept album completely.
Marc:Well, that's true.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Though that had been done before.
Guest:Yeah, but not like you.
Guest:You know, this the who, SF Zorro, let's not forget the pretty things.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Anyway, whatever.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But the musical thing, I always felt insignificant, you know, and somewhat inept.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Even the huge records?
Marc:I mean, even... Yeah, yeah.
Guest:That's interesting.
Guest:Sort of.
Guest:More recently, over the years, I've come to realize that actually I have quite a sophisticated musical brain.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And that I get a lot of things that other people don't notice.
Marc:What made you realize that?
Guest:Getting away from Pink Floyd, I think.
Guest:No, I'm serious.
Guest:I really think it was, you know, I think it was really important that I got away when I did.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because what did you realize then?
Marc:That you had gotten stuck in a specific vision?
Guest:Well, I was in a very toxic environment.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Where I was around, you know, some people, well, David and Rick mainly, who were like always trying to drag me down.
Guest:They were always trying to knock me off whatever that perch was.
Marc:Your own artistic vision.
Guest:Yeah, kind of.
Marc:How would they do that?
Guest:By claiming that I was tone deaf and that I didn't understand music.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, he's just the boring kind of teacher figure who tells us what to do.
Guest:But he can't tune his own guitar.
Guest:Oh, so they were snotty.
Guest:They were very snotty, yeah, and snipey.
Guest:Because they felt very insignificant, I think.
Guest:at that point i think so yeah yeah i think so and i'm not putting them down we i those years that we were together whatever it was like socially there is no question but that we we we did some really good work together and you were all you all shared the vision absolutely
Guest:Well, no, we didn't share the vision, but we shared the workload.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It was your vision, most of it.
Guest:But I wouldn't say that.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:But you... But yeah, it was.
Guest:Let's talk about something else.
Marc:No, it's interesting to me.
Marc:Well, let's talk about the other levels of music that you began to appreciate after that, that allowed you to take in, that you realize these things about yourself.
Yeah.
Guest:Well, you know, my friend Etienne Roderjil came up to me in whatever year it was, in 1978, and said, you know, Roger, I have this libretto about the French Revolution.
Guest:I have no music, you know, I want... And he smoked another 20 or 30 Galois, you know, and drank another bottle of whiskey, and then we started to talk about it.
Guest:And so I wrote an opera to his libretto
Marc:And did you, like, I have no understanding of opera.
Marc:Were you a fan of opera?
Guest:No.
Guest:I had no idea.
Guest:I had no idea what I was doing.
Guest:But what it made me realize was that given a page of text, you know,
Guest:I can remember the first page of this thing.
Guest:And it's a poetic kind of exposition of the later stages of the French Revolution.
Guest:No, the earlier stages of the French Revolution.
Marc:And what were the themes that resonated?
Guest:Well, it said, it actually, he describes the proletariat as birds, really.
Guest:That's his main metaphor.
Guest:That's why he says, one day a bird was sitting in a bush and someone hit it with a stick.
Guest:A priest of no particular religion said, you're right.
Guest:Not to the bird, but to the stick.
Guest:A warrior of no particular house, put the feathers of the bird on his shield.
Guest:A judge from no particular institution decreed that the birds were not allowed to sing in the bushes.
Guest:One day, they changed.
Guest:Not all of them, but a few.
Guest:It was the revolution.
Guest:And the birds sang in the bushes.
Guest:No, it's the first page of his thing.
Guest:That's a lot, man.
Guest:That's big.
Guest:That's a lot.
Guest:That is a big idea.
Guest:Yeah, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And this guy was actually Catalan.
Guest:He had crossed the Pyrenees at the end of the Spanish Civil War with his defeated father, who was a general in the Republican Army and lived in a refugee camp for the first 10 years of his life.
Guest:And he was a great and dear friend of mine, Etienne Roder-Gilles.
Guest:So anyway, so I wrote this thing, but I did it, you know, like with a piano and an old Selena string synthesizer and a Lindrum and something or other.
Guest:I just started writing music and singing all the parts.
Guest:And then I thought, Christ, I better go and look at an orchestra and, you know, see where people sit and...
Guest:And what was that like?
Guest:I mean, it was great, you know.
Guest:Being that kind of student to sort of like.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And learning it all by looking and thinking.
Guest:And then you had to write parts for orchestra.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:So then I discovered somebody who's become a really good friend of mine who was teaching at the Royal Academy in London.
Guest:He's called Rick Wentworth and we're very close.
Guest:I saw him.
Guest:He was at Desert Trip last weekend.
Guest:And he was teaching composition there.
Guest:And so I said, do you want to work with this on me?
Guest:I need a collaborator.
Guest:I know.
Guest:Fuck all, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I have to do this.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I can hear it all.
Guest:I've got it all.
Guest:But we have to figure, you know, how high does an oboe go?
Guest:I've no idea what the range is of these instruments.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I can't start writing oboe parts beyond the range that they can actually play.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And so we worked on an old Atari program called Notator, which was one of the very first computer programs for writing music.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:On a sort of little 10-inch screen.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then eventually we moved on to Logic and Sibelius and, you know, and all kinds of stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And got through it.
Guest:And the work has been performed about 10 times, I suppose.
Marc:Now, the first time you saw it performed, hearing all those instruments playing your parts, I mean, what was that experience like?
Guest:Oh, wonderful.
Guest:Well, the first time I ever heard the orchestra playing it, we went into Abbey Road, into number one at Abbey Road with a big orchestra.
Guest:and recorded three of the songs when I was negotiating with Sonny, with Peter Gelb, who was CEO of Sonny Classical at the time.
Guest:And he decided to release the record.
Guest:And so I made some sort of full demos with a big orchestra to play to him.
Guest:And then he made me translate it into English.
Guest:It was all in French.
Marc:Where'd you pick up French?
Guest:You have to learn because they live on the other side of La Manche, you know.
Guest:Also, we have to conquer them from time to time.
Guest:How would we, you know, what would we do with their women if we could not speak?
Guest:No, you learn French in school if you're English.
Guest:That's the first foreign language.
Guest:But it stuck.
Guest:I mean, it doesn't always stick with people.
Guest:My French is pretty poor, but I have a decent ear, so it sounds as if I can speak French.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And you've been to Abbey Road before.
Marc:You know that studio.
Marc:Oh, God, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:That was the thing.
Guest:I used to always sneak into number one just to play the piano.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:To play a nine-foot concert Steinway in that room.
Guest:Amazing.
Guest:It's magic.
Guest:You know, that's the room where they did A Day in the Life.
Guest:And, you know, all the big orchestral stuff from that is that room.
Marc:So you had to sneak in while you were down the hall?
Guest:Yeah, we were in number three.
Guest:Recording which?
Guest:Which one?
Guest:Well, we put all of them.
Marc:You did all of them at Abbey Road?
Guest:More or less, yeah.
Guest:Certainly that would be the first one, you know, Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
Guest:We were doing that in number three.
Guest:And the Beatles were doing Sgt.
Guest:Pepper's in number two.
Guest:oh my god and i made records in number two later i think yeah we yeah we made stuff in there as well was there a relationship or did you how dare you i didn't fancy any of them not even a little
Guest:I only met John Lennon once, to my huge regret, and that was in the control room at number two.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:And he was a bit kind of, you know, acerbic and... Surprising.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, he was quite snotty.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Well, I think, yeah.
Marc:Well, I have to assume, like... So was I. Right.
Marc:I mean, who did I talk to?
Marc:Like, I can't, like... It always surprised me at that time in London.
Marc:I mean, Jesus, there were so many fucking bands.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you were all across the street.
Marc:I mean, here it's like, you know, there's coast to coast, but it seemed like everybody was like, oh, shit, there's Mick Fleetwood, there's Peter Green, there's John Lennon, whatever.
Marc:They were around the... There's Jimmy Page.
Marc:Was everyone around?
Guest:There may have been.
Guest:Oh, you didn't see... I wasn't.
Guest:No.
Guest:No.
Guest:oh good no i didn't see you you had your own thing there was some talk about you know clubs in london like the establishment and the this where the rolling stones and beetles were all sit around doing whatever they did but i i never did any of that or was party to any of that why i have no idea you weren't interested um
Guest:I honestly can't remember.
Guest:Why not?
Marc:But you didn't go see music at that time?
Marc:You didn't feel like you were in the game with these other bands?
Guest:I used to go and see music, but I didn't go and see bands.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I saw the Rolling Stones once at the Gaumont State in Kilburn.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They were on a package show and they were wearing little houndstooth jackets.
Guest:They were all in uniform.
Guest:Do you remember that when they wore uniforms?
Yeah.
Guest:I don't think they called them uniforms, but yeah.
Guest:Well, they were.
Guest:They were about fifth on the bill.
Guest:Who was on the bill?
Guest:Eddie Cochran.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Howling Wolf.
Guest:Not Howling Wolf.
Guest:Bo Diddley.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Helen Shapiro.
Guest:Mickey Most.
Guest:You know, it's like, and you think back, and you think, wow, how weird is that?
Guest:It is weird.
Guest:Speaking of Howling Wolf, about around the same time, I went to the Fairfield Hall in Croydon, and they had these blues packages that came over to England, which I used to go to.
Guest:And that was like Howling Wolf, Lightning Hopkins, Sonny Boy Williamson, Hammy Nicks, and Sleepy John Estes.
Guest:The best.
Guest:Incredible blues.
Marc:I got this picture of Wolf right there.
Marc:There he is.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:About that time, probably.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you were a blues guy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, because I was wondering that.
Marc:At what point you departed from it.
Marc:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:Because you can hear some of it in the music, but then it sort of takes its own life.
Guest:We departed from it when Bob Close, who was the only bloke who could play anything in the band, got a big slap on the wrist from his mom and dad who said, you've got to go to college, sell that bloody strap, and get a proper job.
Marc:So the blues guy left.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you were left to your own devices.
Guest:He was the only one who could play.
Guest:He was really good.
Guest:He can still play.
Guest:He plays classical guitar, I believe.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Oh, he's really good.
Guest:Bob Close, that's with a K. K-L-O-S-E.
Guest:Did he stay in music or did he get out of it and then come back?
Guest:No, I think he stayed in music as something to enjoy for his life.
Guest:But I've no idea what career he pursued.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, because I was sort of wondering that because Pink Floyd and you have always seemed to kind of mind your own planet.
Marc:Like, you know, it didn't seem like there was a lot of crossover.
Marc:It didn't seem like you were hanging out with other bands.
Marc:It seemed like, you know, you like from very early on, Pink Floyd was its own thing and didn't, you know, and sort of built its own world.
Guest:You know, I'm playing with Neil next week.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You reminded me, you said about mining and heart of gold went bang into my head like that.
Guest:And I thought I'm paying the bridge thing.
Marc:Oh, that's great.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He's great.
Guest:I've been wanting to do it for years and years and finally I can do it.
Marc:He's another guy that built his own world.
Marc:Do you guys get along?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I've never talked to him.
Marc:Why not?
Marc:You were hanging out.
Marc:Who do you talk to?
Guest:He came to one of our gigs once.
Guest:And David cornered him.
Guest:And I'm that bloke who goes, oh, fuck you then.
Guest:I'm going to sit over here and find my own business.
Guest:Let that guy make a fool out of himself.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:i'm gonna play this but i've been a huge fan yeah of uh since you know buffalo springfield well the one thing you guys have in common is that the music doesn't date itself i mean it's timeless shit you know there's no like it just stands forever you know without time yeah but well yeah i like to think though that he was always really good at it and it's taken me 30 or 40 years to start to figure out how to write songs
Marc:When do you think that you really felt like you could?
Marc:I mean, I'm just coming into it.
Marc:Come on, come on.
Marc:Maybe you're just changing.
Marc:Maybe something is changing in your heart.
Marc:I mean, you can't disregard the fact that you wrote some of the best rock songs ever.
Guest:It's very interesting you should say that.
Guest:Yeah, because they're committed to all kinds of emotional and political ideas.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I agree that some of them are quite good.
Guest:And some of them are quite perceptive, you know.
Guest:Maybe beyond what you knew at the time you wrote it.
Guest:Well, I don't know.
Guest:I'm 29 years old and I suddenly write taking away the moments that make up a dull day.
Guest:You've written Waste Your House and an offhand man kicking around on pieces.
Guest:Just like scribbling it out.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Right, that's done.
Guest:I love that song.
Guest:Probably a few years later, I went, wow, how weird to have that realization, that old, 29 years old, before you figure out that you've missed the beginning of the race.
Guest:And then to write it down in a few lines like that is actually quite, but it's unconscious.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:It wasn't like I thought, oh, now I know how to write a song.
Guest:You're a vessel.
Marc:i am thank you yeah and a vassal well that stuff i i mean do you feel i was i was talking to somebody about the the kind of tone that that all those you know those middle floyd records have
Marc:I know people say they're dark and everything, but there's a comfort to that minor chord.
Marc:There's a comfort to that atmosphere, that sort of like that mind-opening minor atmosphere that no matter how dark the content was, to live in that place is like a big, warm blanket of rain.
Marc:And do you know where that comes from emotionally?
Marc:I mean, now that you're sort of shifting in how you are engaging in the world and how your heart is opening in a new way, do you find that that period was something you were working through, that there was a darkness that you haven't been able to shake?
Guest:I don't know if I'd put it like that, particularly in terms of the musicology.
Guest:But I think it maybe is true that if you grow up with no music in your life at all, there's a radio in the house, but there's never any music on it.
Guest:And you might listen to Saturday Night Theatre, you know, with your mother and your brother, but there's no music ever anywhere.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so, you know, almost the first thing that you hear in your life is Hound Dog or Singing the Blues.
Guest:Not Guy Mitchell, Tommy Steele.
Guest:But, you know, that shit.
Yeah.
Guest:Then at some point you realize that when you hear Mahler's Fifth Symphony, you can't speak or do anything except wonder at the effect that it is having on you.
Guest:So I became aware of that.
Guest:really what what music is beyond pop music jazz and well jazz and blues really right jazz and blues was my introduction but i was suddenly becoming aware of you know of the complexity of all those minor cadences yeah that you hear in that right sad stuff that right people write in the dagios you know and you go whoa
Guest:And there's a whole world here opening up in front of me.
Guest:And you can hear it as well in songs that people write.
Guest:So it's all over Dylan.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it's in the Beatles as well.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:It's actually all over popular music.
Guest:You don't even have to search for it.
Guest:You just hear it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Neil is just... It's all over it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, but that's a very specific atmosphere to live in.
Marc:And I can't quite describe it because it resonates with me.
Marc:I don't know if it resonates with everybody, but the blues and then on through what you're talking about in this minor...
Marc:universe there there's something like it what is it like it somehow placates the sadness and elevates it to almost a good thing yeah and but and it's but it's it's also an emotional thing it's the emotion is connected to the mathematics of okay the music yeah
Guest:But also you suddenly discover that, you know, it's like I heard John talking on your program, John Prine talking, and he's talking about Hello in There, which I actually, I performed that at the Newport Folk Festival last year because it's one of my favorite songs in the whole history of everything.
Guest:And you hear him talking about how he was delivering laundry to an old people's home and he would talk to the people.
Guest:I did that as a kid.
Guest:You did.
Guest:I did the laundry delivery thing.
Guest:That smell of crap and piss, you know, and those hampers of stuff from old people's homes and things.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It definitely connects you to the transient nature of life.
Marc:Well, yeah, that's the whole arc of those records, some of them, huh?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I'm fascinated that obviously Prine is one of the great songwriters ever, but you also like Neil.
Marc:I imagine you like the band and you like those guys.
Guest:Livon Helm became a friend.
Guest:Well, not really.
Guest:He couldn't become a friend.
Guest:I hardly knew him, but I felt a huge affinity, and I went up there a couple of times.
Marc:To Woodstock or wherever?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So there's a huge attachment.
Guest:But if you were in rock and roll in 1969, when Big Pink came out, you just went, fuck me.
Guest:Everything changed overnight.
Guest:Suddenly, nothing was the same.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Oh, absolutely.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:what was it exactly because i've heard that it was it was them gathering together in a room with all the kit all the stuff together without a huge amount of separation and human and playing and the band playing together and it was about i think it was about the sonics of open plan recording and um and also the fact that they had livon and and um
Guest:So the sound of the kit is completely unlike the sound that anybody else had ever recorded.
Guest:The drums were always taken from a jazz tradition where the kit was somewhere at the back, you know.
Guest:And the guy was probably doing things that were complicated and clever and what.
Guest:But basically the kit was recorded with, you know, two top mics.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:A couple of U77s over the top or even tinier mics.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Boom.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And really what was going on that was of any importance was down at the front, you know, with Dizzy Gillespie or whoever it was, playing saxophone or trumpet or whatever.
Guest:And so...
Guest:was all going on but you didn't get you didn't there wasn't any of that right foot that ripped your heart out every time you know yeah he hit it and so suddenly there was a i don't know i don't know who engineered those records or what but they were different i know todd rongren did one and everybody after that everybody everything changed
Marc:i've only heard one i mean i read that i read clapton talk about it that like once that happened he like had to rethink everything yeah that you know that he he actually felt like well now now it's been done now what yeah but that's very eric he's so defeatist you guys are buddies
Marc:yeah he just keeps going man he keeps going deeper and further back sometimes yeah interesting well he's claiming we're not claiming I think he's having problems now with his fingers and nerves and this and that I think Keith is too so is Dylan yeah what are you gonna do what are you gonna do
Marc:Yeah, how are your fingers?
Marc:Pretty good.
Marc:I'm pretty fit.
Marc:Oh, that's good.
Marc:Were you a Danko fan too?
Marc:Did you like the way he played?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:He seemed like such a sweet presence, man.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Great voices.
Marc:They could all sing too.
Marc:That's the other fascinating thing.
Guest:Amazing, yeah.
Guest:And yeah, they were absolutely, and Richard Emanuel as well.
Guest:Oh my God.
Guest:And they were obviously, I mean, I didn't know any of them.
Guest:I met Rick a bit afterwards.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I must have been in L.A.
Guest:in the 70s, you know, 75.
Guest:I was going through one of my many divorces.
Marc:How many you had?
Guest:Let's not go there.
Marc:How many kids you got?
Guest:Three.
Marc:Yeah?
Marc:How are they doing?
Marc:Good?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's good.
Guest:One of them's in my band.
Marc:Oh, that's great.
Guest:My oldest son.
Marc:What's he play?
Guest:Hammond.
Marc:Oh, that's great.
Marc:Is that fun?
Marc:Are you proud?
Marc:Is it exciting?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Is he good at it?
Marc:Yeah, he is good at it.
Guest:Yeah, otherwise he wouldn't be in the band.
Marc:Did he grow up around it?
Marc:I mean, was he on the road?
Guest:Yeah, he always played piano.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah, he was always keen.
Marc:And now you got a... Are you married now?
Guest:No, I'm not.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:I'm single.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How's that?
Guest:It's going quite well.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:That's good.
Marc:It's 73, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:You know, this being single thing, I did fall in deeply, deeply, deeply in love about a year ago.
Guest:And I'm not going to talk about that, except to say that that has opened up fresh horizons.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I've written some love songs.
Marc:So being in love is different than it was before?
Guest:Yeah, with all due respect to my many ex-wives.
Marc:Well, I mean, that's something that evolves, you know, the depth of that kind of thing and what you let go of as you move along.
Marc:I hope so.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, if it didn't, you know, we might as well go out the back and have somebody shoot us.
Marc:So there's going to be some love songs is what you're saying.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, there are.
Guest:And is that new to you?
Guest:I think so.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's never been my forte.
Marc:Does it make you feel insecure or vulnerable?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:To do it?
Guest:That doesn't make me feel insecure and vulnerable.
Guest:Love doesn't, but I mean to write about it?
Guest:No, no, I mean to write about it doesn't.
Guest:Oh, love does.
Guest:Are you fucking kidding me?
Marc:Scary shit, right?
Marc:It is.
Guest:Oh, God, my God, yeah, you open yourself up to love.
Guest:Trusting people.
Guest:It's the hardest, most kind of dangerous thing that anybody can do.
Guest:And that's why, and that's, you know, on a personal level with a woman.
Yeah.
Guest:But it points the way maybe to the fact that there is only one path worth walking in life, and that is to attempt, insofar as you can, to open yourself up to everybody else as well.
Guest:That is the mission, is to discover how much you can open yourself up.
Marc:So this is a tearing down.
Guest:To the rest of humanity.
Marc:Of that wall.
Marc:yeah yeah exactly do you feel like because i listened to final cut the other day yeah and you know you brought up lennon and i think that you know there are some some songs on there that have the intensity emotional intensity of some of the stuff that he did post beatles that like i saw a common thread there of of trying to resolve
Guest:that anger that first album he made i mean if you recognize some similar intensity that is a huge compliment and i accept i will accept it because you know that first album that he made with mother on it and i mean that yeah like just thinking about that song just thinking about that yeah
Marc:Did you feel that you were working through similar kind of emotional letting go?
Guest:Oh, I think, yeah, absolutely.
Guest:Probably it's every man's experience to some degree or another, but I feel as if my experience was maybe quite close to his.
Guest:I absolutely relate to that.
Marc:You both grew up without fathers.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And like, you know, I know people that that does leave a darkness, a hole that, you know, that is aggravated and seeks to put out into the world.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Do you feel like you're getting a little closure on that?
Guest:Well, yeah, because, you know, this old bloke who I met in Italy, Harry Schindler, who's become a good friend of mine, he's 95 years old now, he saw me on TV in Italy a few years ago and he decided to find out where my father was killed and he actually got the local people there, it's a town called Aprilia near Rome, to build a monument to my father and we went and unveiled it a few years ago.
Guest:In fact, 2014.
Guest:Really?
Guest:February the 18th, which was the 70th anniversary of my father's death.
Guest:We actually unveiled this monument.
Guest:So that was very moving and very cool.
Guest:But I think I've kind of worked through that so much.
Guest:I'm much more concerned now with the general picture.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I'm quite involved politically with a number of things.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I brought something with me.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:I'll share with you if you want.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Or not, because it's a bit long.
Guest:No, let's do it.
Guest:You want me to?
Guest:Yeah, I love it.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Is it a poem?
Guest:It is.
Guest:Beautiful.
Guest:All right.
Guest:I'm in.
Guest:All right.
Guest:It's called, Is This the Life We Really Want?
Guest:I'm very concerned with the idea that we're at perpetual war.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I can hear all those millions of fingers all over the world hitting the escape button.
Guest:Oh, for fuck's sake.
Guest:No way.
Guest:What's he going to?
Guest:No?
Guest:No way.
Marc:No way.
Marc:Are you kidding?
Marc:The interesting thing about talking to you and talking to people in general is that when you actually have a conversation, nobody turns away.
Guest:Right.
Right.
Guest:I'm sure you're right, but they would say, oh, no, he's going to read a poem now.
Guest:So this is no longer a conversation.
Guest:Now he's going to start telling us.
Marc:You're Roger Waters.
Marc:I had Sir Ian McKellen in here, and he did a Shakespeare monologue, and people would not, they loved it.
Marc:I love him.
Marc:Oh, he's great.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, this is the right venue for it, my friend.
Guest:We did a human rights evening once and he was asleep on the floor in the corridor.
Guest:I had to step over him to get to the stage, which is really great.
Guest:I thought, wow, how cool is that?
Guest:All right.
Guest:I wrote this, I don't know, 10 years ago or something.
Guest:I wrote this during the Bush-Cheney years.
Guest:So if I'm talking about Bush and Cheney, it's because it was then.
Guest:But nothing's really changed.
Guest:Do you ever consider, like, do you publish the poetry?
Guest:I will at some point.
Guest:I definitely will.
Marc:How many of the poems become songs?
Guest:One.
Guest:One.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which?
Guest:Um...
Guest:When the time comes and the last day dawns, And the air of the piper warms the high crags of the old country, When the holy writ blows like burned paper away, And wise men concede that there's more than one way, More than one path, more than one book, More than one fisherman, more than one hook,
Guest:I can't remember the rest of it.
Guest:It's called Crystal Clear Brooks and it turned into a song.
Guest:I did it at Newport last year.
Guest:When the cats have all been skinned and the fish have all been hooked, when the masters of war are our masters no more.
Guest:When old friends take their whiskey outside on the porch, raise a glass to their comrades who carried their torches, we will have done well if we're able to say as the sun settles down on that last final day that we never gave in, that we did all we could so the kids could go fishing in crystal clear brooks.
Guest:That was a poem that I set to music.
Guest:Has it been recorded yet?
Guest:no okay is it gonna uh yeah maybe i we we worked on it a bit i'm working with nigel godrich and we worked on it a little bit uh in fact he suggests a passing has suggested a passing chord in it which i think's improved it because it was all e flat and b flat so he said why not put a d minor i don't know why i'm telling you this i like it i like guitar talk okay
Guest:Right, this is... Okay.
Guest:This is this now.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Here we go.
Guest:Is this the life we really want?
Guest:The concept of an average guy is patently absurd.
Guest:There's too much differential in the herd.
Guest:Just look at Bush and Cheney, then look at you and me.
Guest:It's like comparing Shakespeare to reality TV.
Guest:Is this the life we really want?
Guest:Being murdered by these clowns, our children crushed in rubble?
Guest:Are we deafened by the sound of media mouths, all moving in apparent unity, spewing out the mantra of the free?
Guest:Free to plan the neo-land, safe in their bomb-proof lairs, free to send our sons to war, our sons, of course, not theirs.
Guest:Free to burn and pillage, to fill the family vault, free to claim it's dog-eat-dog and really not their fault.
Guest:fear drives the mills of modern man fear keeps us all in line fear of all those foreigners fear of all their crimes is this the life we really want it surely must be so for this is a democracy in what we all say goes we all say kill bin laden kill saddam hussein
Guest:Kill anyone collateral who might get in the way.
Guest:Kill all the dogs and shopkeepers.
Guest:Kill all the coppersmiths.
Guest:Kill everyone who chooses to be on the evil list.
Guest:Kill everyone who doesn't want to be our acolyte.
Guest:Kill everyone who disagrees that what we say is right.
Guest:It's going to cost us trillions, already has in fact, but no price is too heavy to keep the faith intact.
Guest:Because we believe in freedom, human rights for everyone.
Guest:Well, everyone that is, except the ones we need to bomb.
Guest:And if some of them are children and seem a bit forlorn, it's not our fault.
Guest:They should have chosen somewhere different to be born.
Guest:Anyway, I'm sure they'll all agree it's a success when we've killed all the insurgents and tidied up the mess.
Guest:Even though they may be crippled or rotting underground, they'll be happy when democracy is the only game in town.
Guest:They can help to build our bases.
Guest:They can wash our fancy cars.
Guest:They can service all our carnal needs in pickup joints and bars.
Guest:Against their religion, pfft,
Guest:Their religion's wrong.
Guest:I'm sure they'll get the hang of it.
Guest:Catch on before too long.
Guest:Then they can all watch baseball, they can build a Disneyland, eat pizza and McDonald's, drink bourbon, start a band.
Guest:I know, I know.
Guest:No alcohol.
Guest:The towelheads don't drink.
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:They'll soon get used to it.
Guest:We'll teach them how to drink.
Guest:I digress.
Guest:I'm sorry, what was my train of thought?
Guest:Oh yes, now I remember.
Guest:Is this what we all ought to be devoting our resources to?
Guest:To spread this rotten creed, teaching their dead children avarice and greed?
Guest:Was it Truman Capote who famously railed, It's not enough that I succeed, I need others to fail.
Guest:Is that the life we really want?
Guest:To set ourselves at odds with every other species, not to mention other gods?
Guest:I don't think so.
Guest:In general, my experience has been that ordinary Americans, when asked to cite their dream, conjure an existence where they can raise their kids without the chafe of blowing other people's kids to bits.
Guest:Is it my imagination?
Guest:Is it too much to suggest that their leaders over there and our leaders in the West
Guest:are driven not by trying to achieve peace in our time but by something else by something altogether less sublime call me a cynic but it sometimes seems to me that some of them are more attached to power than to peace just supposing for a moment that they're in it for the cash that they're looking out for number one building up their stash what better way to divert the attentions of the poor
Guest:than an axis of evil and a good old-fashioned war.
Guest:It's like economics 101, as every schoolboy knows.
Guest:War is good for business and diverts us from our woes.
Guest:It's so unpatriotic to complain about our lot when our brave boys are out there in the desert getting shot.
Guest:Imagine if the money that we're spending on the wall was used instead to rebuild dykes and help rehouse the poor to research cures for cancer and fund institutes to delve into ways of helping people less well-off than ourselves to secure our docks and airports and our power stations to prevent the disaffected in our own and other nations from expressing their attachment to some vengeful deity in self-immolation, immolating you and me.
Guest:Or is it power that gets them?
Guest:Being able to decide how to divvy up the cake, who should live, who should die?
Guest:To have at their disposal all those sexy tanks and planes.
Guest:Got you.
Guest:No, I got you first.
Guest:Reliving boyhood games.
Guest:Why don't we just stop them?
Guest:Why don't we get tough, take to the streets in millions, say enough is enough?
Guest:Why?
Guest:Why?
Guest:It's obvious because actually we, that's you and me, that's all of us, because actually we, all the blacks and all the whites, Chicanos, Asians, every type of ethnic group, even folks from Guadeloupe, the old, the young, the toothless hags, the supermodels, actors, fags, football stars, men in bars, washerwomen, tailors, tarts, grannies, grandpas, uncles, aunts,
Guest:friends relations homeless tramps clerics truckers clean as ants maybe not ants because it's true that ants don't have enough iq to differentiate between the pain that other people feel and well for instance cutting leaves or crawling across windowsills in search of open treacle tins
Guest:So like the ants, are we just dumb?
Guest:Is that why we don't feel or see?
Guest:Or are we really just numbed out on reality TV?
Guest:So every time, every time, the roadside mine, the guided bomb, the ricochet, the gatling gun, the tomahawk, the phantom mirage, RF squawk, the IED, the false hello, the cluster bomb with fries to go, every time, the curtain falls on some forgotten foreign life.
Guest:Rest assured it is because we did nothing to prevent our masters, dedicated as they are, not to protection of the weak, not to democracy, that we did nothing to prevent their headlong dash to maximise the bottom line.
Guest:So what, if anything, to do?
Guest:Well, understand that every day, in many small but central ways, we get to choose.
Guest:Enslavement to the bottom line, with all that that implies, dog eat dog, god eat god.
Guest:Did I mention freedom fries?
Guest:Anyway, we get to choose, or so we're all led to believe.
Guest:Well, now in 2008, election year, who knows?
Guest:It may well be too late, but just suppose, just suppose, if we all vote and we can start to bridge the gap between what we all have become and what we all just might have been, the gap between the blind and blinkered, great unwashed, the laughing stock, the butt of universal scorn and enmity and wrath and grace and pride.
Guest:and leadership and light and beacons shining in the West, admired by both the old world and the third, safe hayden for the lauded claims in constitutions written fair on parchment years ago, when equality, fraternity and liberty were rocks core bedded in an earth emerging from a darker age.
Guest:I do believe that we can spread our wings, take flight,
Guest:Renounce the darkness of the marketplace.
Guest:Reach out across the ideologue's abyss.
Guest:Embrace our longing to be kinder, I, and have more fun and garnish less the moneylender's nests and touch and sing and breathe in relish of our new unfettered selves.
Guest:Embrace the law in that we all agree that standard issue kicking in our door, tapping phones, rendition, torture, waterboarding and the rest...
Guest:The random shooting down on London's underground of someone's nephew from Brazil, however scared the powers that be, are alien to our beliefs.
Guest:And so should be confined to memories of Hitler's Reich and, of course, to Uncle Joe's Gulag archipelagos.
Guest:So are we babies that we need to be protected from ourselves, that left unfettered, thrashing we might hurt ourselves, that they, the Cheneys, Putins, Bushes, Blairs, and all their spawn, and all their heirs, in all their ruinous, bankrupt, fearful crap, that they should somehow have the power to keep us at each other's throats?'
Guest:Impotent, straight-jacketed, squabbling over dimes and groats Like infants in our swaddling clothes Fuck them, enough They've had their time A new day dawns And we will not be swaddled in their grime
Marc:Yes.
Guest:It feels good, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Doesn't it feel good to read it?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it's sort of a bit McGonagall.
Guest:It's doggerel, really.
Guest:It's not.
Guest:But it's heartfelt.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What's kind of sick is that it's eight years old.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I said I suddenly realized 2008.
Guest:So that must have been the Obama.
Guest:That's the year I played at Coachella when I dropped confetti saying vote Obama.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And I'm glad I did because by and large I think his legacy will be looked upon with pride.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, he did his best.
Guest:He definitely did.
Guest:He's just, you know, his hands are tied, obviously, and we're not quite sure by who.
Guest:Right.
Guest:There is somewhere in those back rooms somebody is tying the hands of good men.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:And we will maybe never know.
Guest:But that's why it's so important to applaud Edward Snowden, for instance, as a great hero of the republic, in that he gives the rest of us at least a slightly fairer chance to examine what is going on behind the locked doors and to not abrogate our inclusion in the process.
Marc:Well, I think you always knew what it was.
Marc:It's to not let capitalism be diminished ever.
Marc:I mean, that's what they're protecting.
Guest:Oh, that's their plan.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, yeah.
Guest:Well, but as we know, it is a short step from, you know, Amendment 1021 to...
Guest:To all-out total fascism and a complete police state where nobody has anything.
Guest:And it's always insidious when it creeps up.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:It was insidious in Germany in the 30s, you know, when national socialism came up.
Guest:This is... National Trumpism feels a bit less insidious, but it's just as dangerous.
Marc:It's exploiting the anger, the despair, and the hopelessness of people that feel like their world is going away.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the...
Guest:But the method for taking over the state and for it becoming a totalitarian police state is always the same.
Guest:And it is always the identification of the other as the enemy.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So in Trump's case, it's the Chinese and the Mexicans and Islam and it doesn't matter who it is.
Guest:You know, with Hitler, it was the Jews and the communists and the gypsies and anybody who had a physical deformity or whatever it might be and homosexuals and whatever.
Guest:But they all lumped together.
Guest:You have to have that desperate, angry populace.
Guest:But you have to have a population that feels defeated like the Germans did after the Treaty of Versailles.
Guest:And so they were, you know...
Guest:So what you have in the states now where everybody's standard of living is falling as like a free fall.
Guest:And also where the freedoms that are enshrined in your constitution that are in the Bill of Rights are being slowly eroded and taken away from you.
Guest:You know, if they decided now today, if they listen to this thing and they go, oof, he's stepped... I could be arrested tomorrow under the laws in the United States of America.
Guest:I could disappear tomorrow.
Guest:And you would never hear of me again.
Guest:I wouldn't be allowed a phone call to anybody.
Guest:No lawyer, no representation, nothing.
Guest:It is now legal for the government if they decide...
Guest:to take me or any U.S.
Guest:citizen off the street.
Guest:Under the threat of terrorism.
Guest:And you disappear.
Guest:Under the threat of terrorism.
Guest:All I have to be is expected of being, and given my position on BDS and Israel-Palestine, it's really easy to do that.
Guest:They'll probably just send you back to England.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We've had enough of this guy.
Guest:How lovely that would be.
Guest:Do you still have a place?
Guest:Whatever, you know.
Guest:I mean, we can laugh about it.
Guest:But what's scary is that the law exists.
Guest:And why hasn't the Patriot Act been revoked?
Guest:Why is the executive branch getting more and more power?
Guest:Why is it now legal for the president of the United States to kill U.S.
Guest:citizens with drones somewhere in the world?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, how is that possible?
Guest:Is that what?
Marc:Well, I think it has a lot to do with like, you know, on the record Amused to Death.
Marc:I guess you took the title from Postman's book.
Marc:Did you read that book?
Marc:Of course.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I mean, that's how it happens.
Marc:Like I pulled my copy of it out because it was one of those books where it's like, oh, my God, it's all here.
Marc:all the answers this is why it's happening it's all here you know in this book because I pulled it out and it's underlined and I'm like this is how you do it yeah everyone's so distracted by now that the same at the same pace that they're taking these freedoms that you talk about away they're tenfold giving us more things to be preoccupied with yeah so people don't see it as affecting their life no they don't and that to cross that gap
Marc:How is this affecting my life?
Marc:I'm okay.
Marc:We're in the garage.
Marc:I'm going to go eat something after, and I'm comfortable.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This is the greatest country on earth, and it has the best of everything.
Guest:And when you tell them, no, it doesn't, and no, it isn't, it's the richest.
Guest:It's got the most weapons, kills more people than anyone else, incarcerates more people, but it doesn't have the best...
Guest:you know, healthcare or education or any of the things that other people in the world think are fundamental indicators of a just and healthy and civilized society.
Guest:You don't have them.
Guest:You have a huge number of very, very poor people.
Guest:You know, why?
Guest:You're the richest country.
Guest:How is that possible?
Guest:How is it possible that you don't look after your veterans when they've been off?
Guest:Whatever the wars are about or whatever.
Right.
Guest:How is that possible?
Guest:I'm not quite sure.
Marc:But I think a lot of people in this country don't believe that.
Marc:Yeah, I think you're right.
Marc:And I think that that is turning out to be the majority.
Marc:But I don't think that that majority does know or acknowledge how their own quality of life is being chipped away at.
Guest:Well, this is why it's so important to understand, then, that the system of government is broken, that Congress is for sale, and that you are in really, really dire straits, and that somehow you need to organize yourselves to figure out how to get this thing back on the rails so that it's not a runaway train.
Marc:Well, here's how most people respond.
Marc:It's like, I'm busy.
Marc:But it seems like you're motivated and that the message is one of unity and love.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:You know, when you see all these people drowning in the Mediterranean, you can either throw your hands up in horror and say, keep them the fuck out of my country, they're going to take my job.
Guest:Or you can go, what is going on?
Guest:Why is this happening?
Guest:Why is where they live, i.e.
Guest:Syria, say, to take a good example, uninhabitable?
Guest:And why do we want to throw more bombs on it?
Guest:It's a fire.
Guest:It's a raging out-of-control fire.
Guest:What are we going to do?
Guest:Let's throw gasoline on it or drop bombs on it.
Guest:That's obviously, no, it's not the answer.
Guest:We need to start addressing some of the broader issues.
Guest:I think the broadest issue is with, without, and all deny.
Guest:That's what the fighting's all about.
Guest:I think that's the main issue that we need to...
Guest:All right.
Guest:Well, hopefully let's talk about something else.
Guest:I know people don't want to hear this rubbish.
Marc:No, no, it's not rubbish.
Marc:It's important.
Marc:And it's, you know, you know what I just realized when you're saying it and being that I did political talk radio for like almost two years is that the weight that happens in your heart when you talk about this is, is it's a weird mixture of I'm not doing enough and hopelessness.
Marc:And it's very easy to turn that in on yourself than to actually say, I'm going to go do that something.
Marc:It's a lot easier for me to relieve that feeling by eating some cake.
Marc:And that's a sad indication of how exactly the consumer culture placates people.
Marc:If there are enough people that are okay versus people who are in horrible shape, then the okay people don't think it's their problem.
Marc:But let's talk about next week's performance.
Marc:Are you changing it at all from the one you did last week?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:What are you going to do?
Guest:I'm dropping pigs on the wing, part one and two.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Why?
Guest:For theatrical reasons.
Guest:There's this part in the show, for anyone who was there last week will remember it, where we have Battersea Power Station and the chimneys come in three dimensions.
Guest:These chimneys that are 30 foot high come out of the top of a model of the building that is there and are deployed.
Guest:And it takes about half a minute to deploy these huge chimneys with lots and lots of noise and kerfuffle and sirens.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And it's a great theatrical moment.
Guest:After that, I started singing Pigs on the Wing, and I've realized that it would be much better theater to continue the sound effects that are going in the quad, which is beautiful.
Guest:I mean, Trip Califf and Claire Brothers, who've made the quad system, it's really wonderful out there.
Guest:To not do Pigs on the Wing, which is just a bloke singing with an acoustic, but to keep the theater and go straight into dogs,
Guest:So that very scary, you know, you've got to be crazy, you've got to have a real need, comes out of that theater.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:So I have to drop pigs on the wing.
Guest:But you're going to keep the chimneys.
Guest:Oh, fuck, yeah, the chimneys.
Guest:The chimneys are just magical.
Guest:People just, their jaws fall.
Guest:So does mine.
Guest:I mean, I love it.
Marc:I love that.
Marc:Well, getting back to what you feel was your contribution to modern rock music, which was the theater of it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That, you know, you're natural to opera in a way.
Marc:You have been doing opera all along.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So when you started to really focus on that stuff, it seemed like, you know, there was no limit to getting what you wanted to get done done on a theatrical level.
Marc:And it really it sort of paid off creatively and also making its mark on, you know, just lesions of adolescent people who were like, holy fuck.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:You know, the thing about it is, though, and which I've seen as the years have gone by, is you can't just throw money and build something.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You've got to conceive it.
Guest:The trick is having the idea.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You can't do the wall show unless you think,
Guest:Oh, I've got a good idea.
Guest:Let's build a wall between us and the audience, which is the stupidest idea that anybody's ever had.
Guest:And yet it's probably the strongest idea that anybody will ever have in terms of rock and roll theatre.
Guest:It's that.
Marc:Well, who was even in the league of actually doing theater with depth and message and metaphor and arc?
Marc:Who does it other than you, really?
Guest:Nobody.
Guest:But they thought they did by using Mark Fisher and throwing money at it.
Guest:And people did...
Guest:naming no names a lot of other bands have produced spectacle right spectacle well that's different well it's still something no yeah it's still it makes it it makes the brain the endorphins go yeah but it doesn't make you go like whoa what the fuck yeah yeah you want some of that yeah yeah you do well i do well it's great talking to you man thank you for coming very nice talking to you happy birthday john prine
Marc:For a guy that didn't seem to want to talk about the past too much, I think we got there enough and we had a nice conversation about a lot of things.
Marc:It was great to meet him because you got to remember how fucking great Pink Floyd really is.
Marc:Go to wtfpod.com slash tour for my dates upcoming.
Marc:Nashville, Chicago, all of them.
Marc:I'll reel them off another time.
Marc:Let's play a little guitar and get out of here.
Marc:For those of you who care, Stratocaster, ViberVerb, Earthquaker, Dispatch Master, know where we're going now?
Marc:And a Earthquaker Ghost Echo.
guitar solo
Marc:Boomer Lives!