Episode 828 - Keb' Mo' / Taj Mahal
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fuck nicks what the fuckadelics what's happening i'm mark maron this is my podcast wtf that stands for what the fuck how's everybody doing
Marc:We're coming in at, I don't know how many episodes I've done, 800 and something.
Marc:And I'm here.
Marc:I'm here in my garage, sitting amongst the piles, gathering dust.
Marc:It's weird when a place, when you sit down and you realize, like, I've been working in this place for almost a decade.
Marc:Right here in this garage.
Marc:I've got some time.
Marc:And I've moved some shit around on the deck.
Marc:And I'm going to start taking shit out of here.
Marc:And looking at it.
Marc:I'm going to take everything out.
Marc:Give it a good once over.
Marc:And say garbage or not garbage.
Marc:It's time.
Marc:Blues legends.
Marc:Taj Mahal and Kebmo.
Marc:On the show today.
Marc:Blues legends.
Marc:Who did not bring their guitars.
Marc:But.
Marc:But Taj Mahal picks up my old weird guitar, the old K guitar, and plays something for like 30 seconds.
Marc:And I wanted it to continue for an hour.
Marc:I have no control over these things.
Marc:All right.
Marc:There was a lot of mics.
Marc:I didn't know how to, you know, two people in here.
Marc:Wasn't sure how I was going to do the music recording.
Marc:Then they didn't have guitars.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Maybe I could ask them to play more, but I didn't.
Marc:All right.
Marc:But anyways, they're on the show.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So you know that.
Marc:Why can't I just have fun?
Marc:There are people that know how to look.
Marc:I know the the world is on fire.
Marc:We don't know what's going to happen from day to day, but we know it's not good.
Marc:And that's a that's an undeniable.
Marc:That's a that is without question.
Marc:So that's a backdrop.
Marc:to trying to have fun in life.
Marc:I don't know if I've ever been capable of it.
Marc:I've talked to you guys about this before.
Marc:Some people seem to have fun.
Marc:Maybe they have lower expectations.
Marc:I don't know what it is.
Marc:I can have an okay time.
Marc:You know, like for me, if it doesn't involve eating or having an orgasm, there's a big drop off.
Marc:You know, those are fun.
Marc:And then everything else is like, yeah, it was all right.
Marc:Yeah, I went on a hike today.
Marc:It was okay.
Marc:I didn't eat cake or cum, but it was nice.
Marc:It was nice.
Marc:You know, I didn't think it was the right environment for those things.
Marc:You know, some things you got to you can't do at the same time.
Marc:But maybe I'm being a coward.
Marc:Maybe I'm being a pussy.
Marc:Maybe next time I take a hike up Runyon Canyon, I should just figure out a way to have a nice big slab of chocolate cake while I'm jerking off, walking up the hill.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Make it interesting for the yoga ladies and their dumb dogs.
Marc:Stay away from that, man.
Marc:That's not your cake.
Marc:Oh, my goodness.
Marc:Oh, my goodness.
Marc:Oh, I jammed with some people.
Marc:That happened.
Marc:Some of my rock star dreams, some of my jamming, my rock jam dreams are happening.
Marc:I jammed, and it was good.
Marc:I jammed with professional musicians, professional drummer, Mark Stepro, professional bass player, Tyler Chester,
Marc:and professional guitar player adam levy and uh we did the thing you know i never know what to do with gems i don't think that you know uh i guess it's just a confidence thing because i don't play with people i got to get over that because i just listened i just bought a paul kossoff record for all the i know a lot of people are like no shit paul kossoff
Marc:Some of you are like, Paul who?
Marc:What?
Marc:Paul Kossoff.
Marc:I just was at a record store and they had a solo album.
Marc:I forget which one it is.
Marc:He's got a couple.
Marc:But he's the guitar player from Free, Paul Rogers' band, before Bad Company.
Marc:Yeah, that's right.
Marc:That Paul Kossoff.
Marc:Died of a heroin overdose, I believe, at a young age.
Marc:Had a nice tone, but I bought a record.
Marc:And there's an entire side that's one instrumental song, 16 minutes.
Marc:Just that guy doing his thing with some band.
Marc:Now, he's a good guitar player.
Marc:But like, you know, I'm not comparing myself to him, but he didn't seem to be like, this is going on too long.
Marc:And I get that immediately.
Marc:I just got to lean into it, man.
Marc:I got to lose myself in it.
Marc:I got to lose myself in more shit.
Marc:But anyway, so we go do this jam, and I'm trying to put together a song list.
Marc:I had that in the back of my head, but I didn't really know what these guys wanted to do, whether they wanted to just indulge me.
Marc:Like, hey, let's make the podcast guy happy for a minute.
Marc:Let's give him...
Marc:Let's let him live his little fantasy.
Marc:So you get in, and then you do a blues jam, and you kind of figure out who everybody is and what they're capable of.
Marc:And obviously, I'm the low man on the totem pole, but I can hold my own all right.
Marc:But then it's sort of like, did you bring any songs you want to work on?
Marc:Yes, I did, as a matter of fact.
Marc:I have two I'd like to work on today, if we could.
Marc:I'd like to work on Guilty by Randy Newman, and I would like to work on Jumping at Shadows by Peter Green.
Marc:I think that one's a little trickier because I've got to figure out how to sing that, but we did...
Marc:work on for an hour or so and arrange a version of randy newman's guilty which is one of my favorite songs in the world and they just by chance knew because they play with somebody else uh broke down palace by the grateful dead which i've played and sung before so we did a version of that and then we did uh sort of an off the cuff version with none of them knowing the song of i walk with jesus by spaceman three and
Marc:And we also sort of dicked around with Mystery Train, though I play everything a lot dirtier than these guys.
Marc:These guys are tasteful players that know the space, know how to let things breathe, know how to turn it down, know how to change up the tone.
Marc:And I'm just like... But then I'm sort of like, oh, look at this.
Marc:I got this nice guitar and this amp.
Marc:I can roll.
Marc:I can switch the volume up.
Marc:I can make choices.
Marc:I'm not sure what I want out of it all.
Marc:I mean, I'm very nervous singing and I got to get my voice in shape.
Marc:I got to do a little more of that.
Marc:I think I can do it.
Marc:I'm not looking to transition, folks.
Marc:Not into a woman, but into a musician.
Marc:I'm not looking to do that.
Marc:I'm not looking to put out a record.
Marc:But I might do a show where I have a little combo and I do a few songs, a little comedy, have some other friends do some songs.
Marc:Just to mark that off the bucket list.
Marc:Play with other people, perform out, but not as a band.
Marc:Just do a few songs in context and then be maybe once sit in with Conan O'Brien's band.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Is that asking too much?
Marc:Are those doable dreams?
Marc:I'm going to be on Conan tonight, by the way.
Marc:All right.
Marc:I don't know how it went yet because I haven't done it yet.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Because I'm doing this early.
Marc:I'm taping this earlier.
Marc:If everything goes as planned and nothing horrible happens, I will be on Conan tonight.
Marc:That's Thursday.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:You got it.
Marc:So Taj Mahal.
Marc:Keb Moe, veterans.
Marc:I would say Taj is an elder statesman of the blues.
Marc:He's been out there doing records and touring for years.
Marc:Keb Moe as well.
Marc:But Taj is older.
Marc:And I've known about Taj a long time.
Marc:And I've known about Keb Moe for a while.
Marc:But I wasn't completely familiar with all their stuff until I knew they were coming on the show.
Marc:And, you know, I like blues.
Marc:And these guys are the real deal.
Marc:Couldn't pass on the opportunity to talk to Taj and Keb who are touring right now.
Marc:Learn a few things about the blues.
Marc:Pick their brains a little bit.
Marc:And have Taj Mahal pick up a guitar in here and play for about 30 seconds.
Marc:It was great.
Marc:It was a great 30 seconds.
Marc:It was very specific.
Marc:I was happy to have them.
Marc:Their collaborative album, Taj Mo, is available now wherever you get music.
Marc:They'll be back on tour in the U.S.
Marc:starting next month.
Marc:Go to TajMo.com for details.
Marc:That's T-A-J-M-O.com.
Marc:Dig it.
Marc:So this is me talking to the Blues Masters.
Marc:Taj Mahal and Keb Moe.
Marc:Pull that mic in, Taj.
Marc:Pull it in.
Marc:We'll get right up on you.
Marc:Oh, there you are.
Guest:You want the DJ sound?
Guest:Yeah, why not?
Guest:Showdown on here on the late night show.
Guest:Yeah, the late night show right here.
Guest:We got Keb Moe coming up with...
Guest:You remember those guys.
Guest:The whole day.
Guest:They're serious, man.
Guest:Boom, boom, Fran again.
Guest:And Murray the K. You remember Murray the K?
Marc:Yeah, man.
Marc:Come on.
Marc:It's been a long time.
Guest:Yeah, all of that, man.
Guest:Yeah, been a long time.
Guest:How about that?
Marc:What's the age difference between you guys?
Marc:Nine and a half.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Somewhere nine and a half.
Marc:So on some level, when you were a kid, he was already going.
Marc:He was going.
Marc:Yeah, so there was probably a point where you're like, I know who Taj Mahal is.
Guest:I got that first record.
Guest:Yeah, I found out who Taj Mahal.
Guest:He came out and I saw Taj Mahal at school.
Marc:You did?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In 69.
Marc:In 69?
Marc:When you were in school?
Guest:Yeah, he was in high school.
Marc:Where at?
Marc:Compton High School.
Marc:Out here?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And were you playing already?
Marc:Yeah, I was already playing.
Guest:What were you playing?
Guest:I was playing steel drums, guitar, and French horn.
Guest:Steel drums.
Guest:How do you choose that for the instrument of choice?
Guest:Oh, easy.
Guest:Well, I moved on the right block in Compton.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the same thing essentially happened to me with the guitar.
Guest:Yeah, what happened?
Guest:Well, I mean, you know, we lived around the town in probably like three different, three or four different apartment houses.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And my father got tired of it.
Guest:Family was getting bigger.
Guest:Where was this?
Guest:In Massachusetts.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In Massachusetts.
Guest:And then tragedy, but we moved and then we moved away.
Guest:away from that area to another place to some people who lived next door to us and who my parents knew.
Guest:And then one year, all of this happened.
Guest:My father passed.
Guest:My mother remarried.
Guest:My stepfather, unbeknownst to me, came with a guitar that he put in the hall closet that I never ever saw.
Guest:what kind it was uh like an old harmony yeah it was a harmony fo archtop tobacco sunburst guy you know yeah yeah yeah so maybe harmony or silvertone right right yeah you know and uh one day in the house i you know um discovered it and then next door to me these kids these people were from north carolina and their farm went down
Guest:that year and so the youngest two boys were sent up from north carolina yeah to springfield massachusetts to be with their older brother right and so springtime comes you know we started talking across the fence to one another well what you do well i you know i he said oh yes the first question was do you have a wheel
Guest:I said, what do you mean by a wheel?
Guest:He said, a bicycle.
Guest:I said, yeah, I got a bicycle.
Guest:He said, oh, he said, good.
Guest:He said, you play baseball?
Guest:I said, okay, I'm okay playing baseball.
Guest:He said, well, he said, do you got a bat or a glove?
Guest:I said, I got a bat and a ball.
Guest:He said, well, I got a glove.
Guest:He said, you hit me sometimes.
Guest:Then he said, well, I play guitar.
Guest:Not even guitar, but guitar.
Guest:And I said, well, I got a guitar.
Guest:He said, well, let me see your guitar.
Guest:So I ran in the house and brought the guitar out and came over to the fence.
Guest:He said, wait a minute.
Guest:He said, you got a pair of pliers?
Guest:And I said, yeah, I got some pliers.
Guest:And so I went and got the pliers.
Guest:And then...
Guest:Come back.
Guest:By the time I got back, he had unwound the G-string.
Guest:It was a wound G-string.
Guest:And he took the priors and he pulled that string, pulled all that wire off the G-string.
Guest:He said, now you see here?
Guest:That's the secret.
Guest:He said, and don't tune it up so tight.
Guest:Taking the wire off the G string?
Guest:Yeah, because it gave you an unwound G, and you could bend it and make it whine.
Marc:Oh, shit.
Marc:And that was the trick?
Marc:Same tuning, though.
Marc:No different tuning.
Marc:No, tune down maybe a step, a half step, a step lower.
Marc:And he taught you some tricks?
Guest:He just taught me, you know, he just taught me to play the basic good stuff.
Guest:And then my neighbors up the street, they were from Clarksdale, Mississippi, actually from Stovall.
Guest:And I could go up there and ask Ernest Nichols, Ernest, when you get through playing what you playing, would you play Boogie Chilling?
Guest:And he said, all right.
Guest:And he would play it.
Guest:And then he'd get up there and play it, and it would sound just exactly like John Lee Hooker on the record.
Marc:And Kev, when you started recording on your own, it was almost like you were doing something historical.
Marc:You were honoring a tradition that was pretty specific.
Marc:Is that true?
Marc:That's true.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Absolutely, yeah.
Guest:I didn't have time because during his part of his life when he heard Boogie Chillin' at a young age, I heard Jamaica Farewell.
Guest:Oh, right, right.
Guest:Yeah, me too, though.
Guest:Me too.
Guest:I heard all these, you know, Calypso and Latin, Mongo, Santa Maria.
Guest:Yeah, me too.
Guest:Things like that.
Guest:That's what I was listening to and trying to play Motown.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So blues was like, later on, it was like,
Guest:When I heard Taj, the awareness came in.
Marc:Well, that first record, that first Taj Mahal record, that thing is raw, it kicks ass.
Marc:I just listened to that again yesterday.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it's so wild because the production in the late 60s, it felt like it was all happening.
Guest:Oh, it was.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, that was what it was.
Guest:I mean, it was literally this.
Guest:I was with the Rising Suns.
Guest:We were all individually signed.
Guest:It was a fiasco because none of us really knew much about the music business.
Guest:And they got the wrong type of people to represent us.
Guest:So it was kind of crazy.
Guest:We just ultimately, even though we recorded all this music,
Guest:it just was impossible to try to put anything together.
Guest:And from the record company side, we had too much variation.
Guest:We were a bunch of different guys that came from lots of different traditions, and we created the music together.
Guest:I mean, a year and a half, two years after we did what we did, everybody pretty much got on that same kind of train.
Marc:Which was bringing a lot of different stuff together?
Guest:Right, exactly.
Guest:You know, and everybody being like a songwriter, you know, and that kind of thing.
Guest:But I moved off of that thing with the Rising Suns, and I was like maybe the only one that was on the record label.
Marc:Yeah, which label was this?
Marc:Columbia.
Guest:And so, I mean, I wanted to do something.
Guest:So I literally called up the president, the then president of the record company, who was Clive Davis, and left a message for him saying that,
Guest:I would like to talk to him about making the record, and he did the business, I did the music.
Marc:That is the first record.
Guest:Yep, and although his name appears as the producer, ultimately he didn't have to produce me in the sense of saying, okay, Tosh, here's a tune for you to do, and here's some other tunes, and what about those two tunes that he just completely left me alone.
Marc:You chose all the tunes.
Guest:I chose everything.
Guest:And then the other thing that happened in terms of that was that the musicians, I didn't have a band, so I had just gone and heard, I don't know how long before that session I had heard Jesse Davis playing with a band up in Topanga Canyon, and I just knew that this guy could play.
Guest:Because I didn't want somebody was a derivative of the way people play.
Guest:I wanted somebody who had their own sound of the blues.
Guest:And he had his own sound of the blues, own feel.
Marc:So you started with Calypso, basically, with that kind of music?
Guest:Yeah, as far as playing live, what I was listening to was different than what I was actually doing.
Guest:What was your first gigs doing live stuff?
Guest:Who were you working with?
Guest:The Young Calatino Steel Band from Compton, California.
Marc:That was the first one?
Marc:And you were playing the steel drum on that?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And then you started playing Calypso guitar?
Guest:No, I never played Calypso guitar.
Guest:My uncle who taught me, Herman Wyatt, who lived up in Cupertino at the time, started teaching me how to play guitar.
Guest:He started teaching me fingerpicking on his nylon guitar.
Guest:The first song he taught me was how to play a Jamaica Farewell fingerpicking in the key of C.
Marc:When did you start, you know, working in a studio with guys?
Guest:My first session was a, I think I was a flop on my first session.
Guest:It was a steel drum session.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And a producer came down and picked me up from Compton.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And took me to Gold Star Recording Studios with my steel pan.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the record crew was in there.
Guest:It was the Wrecking Crew, and Carole Kay was on the bass in there.
Guest:At the time I didn't know it was the Wrecking Crew.
Guest:Later on, I was like, oh shit, that was the Wrecking Crew.
Guest:What were they doing?
Guest:You don't know what they were doing?
Guest:I'm 14 years old.
Guest:I didn't even know what I was doing.
Guest:They needed somebody to play a steel drum, and they had heard it.
Guest:There was one down in Compton, and I was the guy, I guess I was the best player in the band, and I could play the pan.
Guest:So he got the pad, put it in the car.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was weird, because he asked me to play in, because the guy that tuned the drums, he tuned them to like an alto saxophone.
Guest:So when they said what key was in, I started playing in the key, and I was in the wrong key.
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:So you're the kid in the wrong key.
Guest:But really, my first real recording experience was probably playing with Papa John Creech.
Guest:Oh, he played with Jefferson Airplane?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In 70.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:In 70.
Guest:And what were you playing on that record?
Guest:Guitar.
Marc:So you got out of the drum.
Guest:That time I'd been in some cover bands and I'd been in high school playing the French horn.
Guest:A bunch of guys wanted to make a cover band.
Guest:There was one guitar player who had an amp and so they said, we need another guitar player.
Guest:So they knew I played a little guitar so they got me.
Guest:And I just learned the songs as they went.
Guest:Right, just standards, pops, pop hits.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I learned what I didn't know the other guy would teach me because he had guitar lessons at the Compton Music Center.
Guest:And that's how you came to the guitar.
Guest:Yeah, I came to the guitar.
Guest:So I came into the guitar from the steel drum, through the French horn, through the jazz band, which I played percussion in.
Guest:you were playing drums too or just like percussion like congas right okay so you're like both you're both multi-instrumentalists well i just do when in the steel band there was drums steel bands yeah drums bass all the way through cellos uh yeah and things like that other cello bands yeah and so and so i would i learned to play the drums yeah to play the congas and the bongas and every every arrangement they have had in there and then you just and then you became a guitar wizard later
Marc:I wouldn't call myself a wizard.
Marc:Yeah, you're kind of a wizard.
Marc:Yeah, you guys are magicians.
Guest:Then I started playing guitar with Papa John.
Guest:And that was an accident because he was on Adams Boulevard down between Crenshaw and Brea.
Guest:And there was a little soul food joint called Jet Set Cafe.
Guest:And we were rehearsed like two doors down from it.
Guest:And one day Papa John Creech and Roger Spots and Miles Grayson were walking down the street.
Guest:on the way to get some soul food, and they heard us rehearsing in this little makeshift studio on Adams.
Guest:And they came in, and next thing we know, we was playing on the Filthy Funky record.
Guest:With Papa John.
Guest:With Papa John.
Marc:So what was your relationship with some of the guys that you were listening to?
Marc:I know that early on, I don't remember which album of yours it is, where you got a picture of you and Mississippi John Hurt on the cover.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now, were you able to actually learn from those guys one-on-one?
Guest:No, I didn't.
Guest:Mostly, but John Hurt was watching him play because that's how I learned how to play.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I'm a Taurus.
Guest:You know, I'm from Missouri.
Guest:Not really, but I'm from Missouri, and you got to show me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know what I'm saying?
Guest:It's like I remember my dad trying to teach me something.
Guest:He was a math whiz.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was trying to deal with me with math, and it was like,
Guest:Okay, you can talk all that stuff out there in Fantasyland you want.
Guest:But if you put 12 oranges in front of me and you take away four, I know there's eight there.
Guest:That's how I work.
Guest:So Mississippi John, I went every opportunity he played some little
Guest:coffee house somewhere to hear him and then i had his records i had his you know america's and then i listened to some i was lucky enough every now and then to hear some of his old records yeah so you hear how much they were playing different back at the time because by the time we got to him he was probably like in his 70s yeah me in late 60s and 70s and that picture that is on uh
Guest:the Recycling the Blues and other related stuff album is I'm 19 and he's 76.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:So he was your guy.
Marc:You thought that was it.
Guest:Well, no.
Guest:I mean, what was the real thing was is that as a young black man in the 60s when everybody was getting pretty violent and the cities were burning and basically people said, draw a line.
Guest:You either over here or you over there.
Guest:And it's like, no...
Guest:That don't really work.
Guest:It isn't only two things.
Guest:This is a big world, and there's other things in it.
Guest:But I needed somebody whose music I could work with that would focus me and center me.
Guest:And I figured, this guy's living in the middle of Mississippi, and he's playing that gentle and that beautiful, that I'm going to have to learn how to calm down in the midst of...
Guest:of chaos and learn how to do this.
Guest:And so that's why I was just so thrilled to meet him and see him because I avoided a lot of crazy stuff.
Guest:A lot of people got caught up in them 60s and lost their life and incarcerated and had to make some terrible decisions and I just was focused on the music
Guest:focused on the culture of the music, focused on my responsibility as a musician from ancient times.
Guest:It's like, well, what would I be responsible for if I was a musician?
Guest:To keep the culture moving forward, have information.
Guest:And so I got about the business of that.
Guest:and you you realize that at that age oh yeah that this was the journey oh yeah yeah yeah you had to stay in this it's almost a spiritual journey oh yeah yeah yeah the input came in earlier but the actual practical uh application came you know as i started out recording and particularly after the first three records because
Guest:You know, what was going on in the world was like the British invasion.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And nobody was listening to the musicians here in the United States.
Marc:To the real guys.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, not only the real guys, but the younger guys that came after the real guys like myself and others, they weren't listening to us.
Marc:Like, who would you put in that list?
Guest:John Hammond.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:You know, Ry Cooter.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You know, Siegel Swall Blues Band.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, Blues Project.
Guest:They just were not giving a dude just turned away like, oh, it's all coming from England.
Guest:And they didn't listen to us.
Guest:And so after about three records, I was like, you know what?
Guest:I'm not going to stay in this spot.
Guest:I hear more music.
Guest:I have a bigger cultural activity than all of that.
Guest:And so I'm going to get out there and turn people on to what else is out here.
Guest:This is not a monolith.
Guest:I came over on a boat and I picked a cot and now I play guitar.
Guest:No.
Guest:That's a little bit too limiting.
Marc:Well, and I guess that the reason that the British guys, they just made it, what did they do?
Marc:Were they made hits out of it?
Guest:No, not so much that.
Guest:They did that too.
Guest:But it just was that American people, it's like anything else.
Guest:Your parents will talk to you, you don't hear them.
Guest:Your uncle talks to you, you hear them.
Guest:Your aunt talks to you, you hear it.
Guest:And it's just the familiarity of it.
Guest:They don't really get it.
Guest:Nobody said that you should hear this.
Guest:Until somebody like Ellis came on and they went like, oh.
Marc:Maybe we should hear it.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:I mean, for a long time, a lot of people were like...
Guest:very upset about the whole Elvis appropriating black music.
Guest:But I think it was Richie Avons was saying one day, he said, yeah, but consider it from this point of view, because he did it, you know, he said everybody that was around him didn't think that...
Guest:That was the thing for a young white guy to be doing.
Guest:But what he did was open the door for a whole lot of other folks to come through.
Guest:And I mean, you have to take it from that point of view, because if you look at it historically, look what happened after that.
Guest:I mean, America's music went completely over to the other side.
Marc:Broke it open.
Guest:Oh, broke it wide open.
Marc:And some of those British dudes, they were always respectful and inclusive, and they honored their heroes, certainly, right?
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, I listened to that original Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green.
Marc:That guy fucking kills me.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:The way he plays guitar.
Marc:Oh, he's great.
Marc:Yeah, and then they sat down.
Marc:They did session stuff with Otis Spann.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Yeah, and they kind of gave it back.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:That was the whole thing.
Guest:I mean...
Guest:In the rock and roll circus situation, I mean, we were playing one night at the Whiskey at Go-Go.
Guest:I was playing harmonica with my eyes because I opened my eyes and looked down on the floor and there's Mick Jagger dancing, there's Keith Richards dancing, there's Brian Jones dancing.
Guest:Over here, the animals are dancing.
Guest:And I was like, whoa.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So then I get off the stage and I go over and say to them,
Guest:You know, I ain't priggin', I have bloody good, you know, blah, blah, blah.
Guest:And I said, listen, you know what?
Guest:I don't know what you guys got in the water over there, but it's happening.
Guest:And I'm hearing from some of my friends that you guys are really doing a lot of different stuff and you're communicating and playing with other people.
Guest:If you ever have a project,
Guest:that you want us to be involved in this band right here?
Guest:I said, just give us a holla.
Guest:Did they?
Guest:Three months later, eight tickets were first class on BOAC.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we never reached our hands in our pocket for anything else other than to buy chewing gum, cigarettes, or gifts that you were going to bring back home.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Those guys treated us like we were royalty.
Marc:And you toured?
Marc:Yeah, we toured over there.
Marc:All of Europe?
Guest:A little bit, just a little bit, but we're not with them.
Guest:We did the rock and roll circus, and that's when Jesse Davis met John Lennon, and John fell in love with Jesse's plan, and a whole lot of different stuff happened from that.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:pretty excited it's an amazing time man oh john hammond coming back around to keb i you know i saw the weirdest thing i was in in tucson arizona and i and i was uh my brother lived there and the the tucson arizona blues society was having a night with john hammond right and i'm like what the because i love i love hammond i think he's great
Marc:So I'm like, all right, I'm in town.
Marc:I'll go check this out.
Marc:There must have been 30, 40 people there.
Marc:And John Hammond with a national dobro.
Marc:And he played, to the note, Robert Johnson's Hellhound on my Trail.
Marc:And I never, like, I only heard Robert Johnson do it.
Marc:And it's a weird song, right?
Marc:It's almost like a fragment.
Marc:It doesn't...
Marc:But he channeled Robert Johnson in that moment.
Marc:It's so rare to hear that thing played note to note in real time, like it's supposed to sound like.
Marc:And it was mind-blowing to me.
Marc:It was like I understood why he's the window in, why Robert Johnson is the portal in.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:And you seem like on some of your records that there was an actual, I think you kind of channeled him too on some of those stuff, right?
Guest:Yes, I did.
Guest:At that time, I mean, given the times where I was, I realized that I had to do something different than what I was doing.
Marc:Which was from the Calypso?
Guest:No, from the blues.
Guest:I had gotten to the blues.
Guest:I had started a journey because I did a record in 1980.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then after that, in 83, I got in a blues band called the Whodunit Band.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then from there, I started to go backwards.
Guest:They were doing like Chicago, more B.B.
Guest:King, St.
Guest:Louis things.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I started to go back and back and back.
Guest:And then when I stumbled on Robert Johnson, and it was the same day I heard Robert Johnson, I heard Big Bill Broomsey.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You haven't said I ain't heard none of this stuff.
Guest:Really?
Guest:How old were you?
Guest:I was like 39.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, really?
Marc:And you hadn't gotten there before?
Guest:I was playing.
Guest:I just wanted to be a background.
Guest:I wasn't trying to be a background.
Marc:guy, the main guy.
Guest:Front man.
Guest:If I was a front man, it was out of sheer, I just wanted somebody to sing my songs when no one was singing, I would sing them.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Because I wanted to be a songwriter.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So I said, I heard this guy, and the light went on.
Guest:All of a sudden, like, you know,
Guest:That door that was open when Taj Mahal came to high school.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There.
Guest:And all of a sudden when I heard Big Bill and Robert Johnson.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Okay, that's what blues was supposed to sound like.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because I've been hearing club blues.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The club.
Guest:You know, going jamming.
Guest:People come, let's just play some blues.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:But okay, let's play that.
Guest:Let's play Stormy Money.
Guest:Let's play Shadestream Mechanic.
Guest:Let's play this.
Guest:And then you play it, but it was not with the same reverence and regard that when you heard, you know, Mississippi John Hurt playing or Lance Lipskin.
Guest:When you heard them guys, it was like, no, wait a minute, that's different.
Guest:That's not like that other stuff.
Guest:That was real.
Guest:There was no Hollywood in it.
Guest:No cliches.
Guest:You know?
Guest:No cliches.
Guest:And the bars might be, the bars were not 16 or 12 or 8.
Guest:It was like, could be 19.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It could change in the song, right?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:No, no, you change.
Guest:Lightning used to tell them guys that tried to play, they said, listen, you change when lightning change.
Marc:You just gotta follow him.
Marc:But when you started to approach that Robert Johnson stuff, I mean, there's no precedent for it, right?
Guest:Yeah, there was no, and it changed.
Guest:In that moment, it was a defining moment where my head changed.
Guest:You see, now I'm not, because it wasn't like all of a sudden, it was like no, there was a path.
Guest:from 1983 to 1990, you know, 1991, where this thing was taking place, where all of a sudden I was ready to really hear that.
Guest:It was played.
Guest:And also, too, you know, I got into, and then right after that, I got involved in theater.
Guest:You know, when I met Chick Streetman, who ultimately introduced me to Taj Mahal.
Guest:Who's that guy?
Guest:Chick Streetman.
Guest:Yeah, very interesting character.
Guest:What's he do?
Guest:Guitar player.
Guest:Guitar player, songwriter.
Guest:He co-wrote All Around the World with me on the record there.
Guest:So he introduced me to Taj.
Guest:You know, so all this is happening in the same two-year period.
Guest:And because in theater, what's great about that is...
Guest:You know, I was in this play called Rabbit Foot at the L.A.
Guest:Theater Center.
Guest:You were acting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, I was a musician in the play.
Guest:I was acting.
Guest:But in that, I got a call from Chewbacca Henley, who's an actor named Chewbacca Henley.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he said, I need a guitar player to play this role in this rabbit foot.
Guest:And a guy named Quentin Denard recommended you.
Guest:He said, you was the guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I wasn't a guy.
Guest:No, you wasn't.
Guest:But he thought I was a guy.
Guest:So I said, let me check my schedule.
Guest:And I asked him a few questions like, OK, so when is this starting?
Guest:How long is the rehearsal?
Guest:Oh, we rehearsed for four weeks.
Guest:Bingo.
Guest:I got four weeks.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So you took it.
Guest:I took it.
Guest:I went down to McCabe's in Santa Monica and met a guy named Fran Banish.
Guest:And he started schooling me and put me together.
Guest:Meanwhile, I was handed this cassette of about 20 songs
Guest:that I had never heard before.
Guest:From who?
Guest:From Muddy Waters to people I can't even... Petey Wheatstrow.
Guest:Yeah, all the stuff that I had to listen to.
Guest:So this was like a divine kind of thing that happened to me that was orchestrated from the universe, in my opinion.
Marc:This theater gig, and then all of a sudden you're handed the history that you needed.
Marc:And four weeks to...
Marc:It was the Rosetta Stone of the blues.
Marc:It was all there.
Guest:Wait, that's not all.
Guest:Right after that, I hadn't really met Chick yet.
Guest:Right after that, I go, they need an understudy for Spunk, which is George Wolfe, the director George Wolfe.
Guest:I've talked to him.
Guest:Mark Taper.
Guest:He was the director.
Guest:I had to go audition for him.
Guest:He said,
Guest:Nah.
Guest:I was just coming and he's just like, I don't know, but this is all going on behind my, you know, not in the presence of me.
Guest:Chick was the role.
Guest:He said, no, I think you ought to hire this guy because he's going to learn it.
Guest:He'll do it.
Guest:For some reason, Chick, without knowing me, backed me up.
Guest:And so they gave me the gig.
Guest:And what was the role exactly?
Guest:It was Guitar Man.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Now, I got another...
Guest:about another seven weeks with pay yeah understudy more music more studying plus I'm working under a guy named George Wolfe yeah he's a great genius all his notes all when he's giving notes to all the actors and notes to while they're doing everything that he's doing
Guest:And the background on archetypes and things and the characters, it's like all of a sudden now this thing got really big.
Guest:So all of a sudden I had a master course in a period of about four months that was amazing.
Marc:On basically what took you to the beginning of it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then once I came out of that, then that's who you met.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The day when Chick took me down to meet.
Guest:John Porter.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, we were in the studio recording Dance in the Blues.
Guest:Richard Perry's old studio.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, that they originally recorded, Bing Crosby recorded White Christmas in that studio.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But you know, you were saying something about that Robert Johnson tune, Hell Out On My Trail.
Guest:You know what that is?
Guest:No.
Guest:And this is very interesting.
Guest:is that it's clear and obvious he had listened to skip james because that tune is is skip james that sounds right yeah yeah yeah yeah oh yeah right yeah so it's all the notes it sounds like but but but he plays it a lot faster skip is from uh bentonia yeah bentonia mississippi around belzona around that area and they have a whole other they got the what i call the monday galope in their music
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Whoa, is this guitar happening?
Marc:Here, this one is.
Guest:Which one?
Guest:I'll show you what I'm talking about.
It's the series Mondenga Lope.
You know, which is like this.
Guest:Let's see if we get this thing in there.
We got two.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:Oh yeah.
Guest:That's the mountain galope.
Marc:That's it.
Guest:And that represents people who walk.
Guest:They have donkeys.
Guest:They have camels, goats, chickens.
Guest:And that's how they move around.
Guest:Carts.
Guest:And so that movement is in the way they play the music.
Guest:Plus, when they go a long distance over anywhere, you gotta have a song that you can play all
Guest:a whole day long and not get tired.
Guest:And that keeps cycling itself around.
Guest:Whereas some blues, when it gets into being patterned, I remember little brother Montgomery was saying, he said,
Guest:You know how it is.
Guest:Some of these fellows, they play that pattern blues.
Guest:In other words, everything's patterned and cliche.
Guest:He said they're not really writing a song.
Guest:And this guy, he's famous for a tune called the Vicksburg Blues, or 44.
Guest:The Vicksburg Blues is one of the classic pieces of music.
Guest:If I ever get the opportunity, I want to have John Cleary play it on piano.
Guest:and have a symphony orchestra playing behind it, and I want to walk out in a swallowtail, you know, tuxedo, and sing that song.
Guest:You know, I mean, because it's just, it's fabulous the way he laid it out, because he really wrote, it's a written piece of music, you know, it's just like what Scott Joplin did with Ragtime, is what Little Brother Montgomery did with Blues.
Guest:And another thing,
Guest:is because he's a Creole from New Orleans.
Guest:The blues came down the river from Mississippi into that environment.
Guest:That's why it's a flavor.
Guest:Even when they take it as a blues, it still is different.
Guest:It's more melodic.
Guest:Because blues, it's like you can get the whole plate.
Guest:You know, like Big Bill Brunzi or Big Joe Williams, nine-string Big Joe Williams.
Guest:You know, it's like the blues.
Guest:And then you go somewhere else where it's like
Guest:A flavor.
Marc:Right.
Guest:You know, or a side dish.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:You can hear it in there.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Basie.
Guest:You can hear the blues in Basie.
Marc:Oh, of course, yeah.
Guest:You know, down Basie.
Marc:Yeah, I've been listening to, who am I listening to?
Marc:Lee Morgan, the Jazz Messengers.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Blues all up in there.
Marc:All blues.
Marc:All up in there.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, that stuff that you were just playing, you tracked that down.
Marc:Like, you know, you hit that moment with Robert Johnson, but you went further back.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:It tracked me down.
Guest:It tracked me down.
Guest:There's the modern world that we know.
Guest:And if you go back far enough, the sunrise is on the ancient world, which is still out there.
Guest:People are still connected to that.
Guest:It's very easy.
Guest:On this side of that...
Guest:that semi-permeable membrane to think that this is it.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:No, no, no, no, no, no.
Guest:You're in the wrong taxi.
Marc:But where does that groove that you just, is that Senegal?
Marc:Where does that come from?
Guest:Okay, it's the Songhai Empire.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A groove.
Guest:Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea-Conakry, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger.
Guest:That whole area right there.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And that's where it all came up to here.
Marc:Involuntarily.
Marc:Yeah, involuntarily.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:But it came here in Banjo.
Guest:It's from that same area, too.
Marc:And did you go down there and spend time down there?
Guest:Yeah, I always spend time there.
Marc:Yeah?
Guest:But, you know, I mean, it was like...
Guest:It's like a connection that you just have to constantly be a part of.
Guest:And once you hear that, all this other stuff hooks up to it.
Guest:You know, my point was to know the 500 years of music that developed after Africans were brought into the Western world.
Guest:So that in the possibility, or maybe 350 years, that one day I would actually hook up with them cats, I have something to say.
Guest:Right.
Guest:you know what i'm saying yeah and it's like because some people have developed their music so modernly that they can't communicate that anymore just hearing you play that one riff for two minutes i'm like it to me it's like a it's like time travel exactly exactly
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You hit it right on the head.
Marc:It's transcendent.
Marc:What do you think about how things were produced back when you were starting out?
Marc:Because it was kind of stunning to me when I listened to the first record that it sounded like a chess record almost.
Marc:And now it seems that things have gotten so complicated that it's hard to get back to that raw shit.
Marc:No, it's not hard at all.
Marc:No?
Guest:No, you go through and listen to my records, you hear it.
Marc:Oh, no, yeah, I know.
Marc:They stay raw.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:No, but the whole point of it is that everybody was playing.
Guest:Those records were almost out probably until the third record.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We hardly had any overdubs.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That was like, I'm playing harp, they're playing, the band's playing.
Guest:We decided how the record's gonna go, the tune's gonna go, and what everybody's gonna play.
Guest:It's like, when that record opens up with Leaving Trunk, I walked up to the bass player, and the two people I didn't tell anything about to play was Jesse Davis and Rye Cooter.
Guest:They didn't need to hear anything.
Guest:They played by instinct.
Guest:That was what was so great about Rye.
Guest:Rye had some of the...
Guest:best instincts of any of the young players at the time.
Marc:And you only had a certain amount of time in the studio, I bet.
Guest:Well, we were good.
Guest:I'm not somebody who likes to rehearse in the studio.
Guest:So I knew that I needed to really have this thing made.
Guest:I think we made that album for like 16 grand or something like that back then.
Guest:And so what I did was I walked into the bass player and I said, look, here's what I want you to do.
Guest:I want you to go... I'm going to come on.
Guest:And once I got them saying, I said, and now say that all the way through the whole record and put yourself in there where you want.
Guest:And then they said, well, how are we going to open it up?
Guest:I said, okay, here's how to open it up.
Guest:And I put that bebop lick on the front.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Doodle up.
Guest:They were off.
Guest:The band's chucking.
Guest:The cylinders are popping, man.
Guest:The dance is going, you know.
Guest:Now throw the lyrics on there.
Guest:And that was it.
Guest:It was for Sleepy John Estes.
Guest:Because that's what I was supposed to be doing.
Guest:Taking the old music and bringing it into my time.
Marc:And that's the whole journey right there.
Guest:Yeah, right there.
Marc:Now, both of you guys, like, let's talk about certain songs, because, like, there are certain songs that you've recorded two or three times, like, I think, like, what, further on down the road, maybe?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, Come On In My Kitchen, right?
Marc:What is it about that tune?
Marc:You know, because that's one of those tunes that, like, you know, you've both recorded it, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But you always hear more.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Is that it?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Whatever your lesson is at the time that you learn.
Guest:Because you can go in and you can completely play exactly the way you hear it.
Guest:And you're happy with that for a while.
Guest:Then after a while, you're not so happy with that.
Guest:But you're not aware that something's marinating in you.
Guest:And then one day, all of a sudden, you hear it.
Guest:And you've got to record a different version of it.
Guest:Yeah, because sometimes fresh ideas can rot like food.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The danger of having familiar music or some of what people call hits.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I've never had a hit.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I kind of like it like that.
Guest:I mean, I wouldn't turn one down, but I kind of like the fact that I don't have one.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There's a certain freedom that involves it.
Guest:Well, you don't have to follow it up.
Guest:Yeah, but even though there's certain songs that you have to play for your audience, and then like last year, there's a couple of songs that I play that always work that I was playing, and it got to about two weeks before the end of the tour, and it's like...
Guest:That got to go.
Guest:Not because I was, my tiredness, my fatigue idea was beginning to show in my performance.
Guest:Right, you felt it.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:You were faking it.
Guest:Then when I began to see hints of it with the audience, I had to just cut it loose because it's like it's...
Guest:But then, if that's a big hit, you start to get that feeling.
Guest:You can never stop playing it.
Guest:That's when the needle comes in.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:That's when the pills start coming in.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah, that makes sense.
Marc:You know, because it's like now you're eating, now you're delivering rotten ideas.
Marc:Right, you're a parody of yourself.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, a cover band of you.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, you don't want that.
Guest:And you start feeling that, and it's just really...
Guest:Well, shit.
Guest:So Come In My Kitchen, you're talking about that song.
Guest:Sometimes it just takes going back and listening to the original.
Guest:So why do I like that song so much?
Guest:Even a song that you do, that you got sick of, you go back and listen to it.
Guest:Why do they like that?
Guest:If you can't find it, you got to cut it loose.
Guest:That's why Barbra Streisand doesn't sing People anymore.
Marc:But there's something about those songs though.
Marc:There's something about Love in Vain, Come on in My Kitchen.
Marc:For me, for years, and again, I'm not a professional musician, but I thought that in order to be a real blues guy, you've got to figure out how to do rolling and tumbling.
Marc:You've got to figure out how to play that song.
Marc:Well, there's a lot of different ways to play it.
Marc:I know, that's just the thing.
Marc:That's the point.
Marc:You've got to figure out how to make that one your own.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:Well, all of them.
Marc:All those songs.
Guest:You have to make all the songs your own.
Guest:Figuring out why that works and then figuring out what works for you on it.
Guest:Because you can't copy those guys.
Guest:Right.
Guest:If you do, that's all you're doing.
Guest:You're just copying.
Guest:Well, yeah, but see, some places, I'll tell you who's really, what is it?
Guest:Jackie McLean.
Guest:Jackie McLean's an alto player.
Guest:And everybody used to say, but he sounds just like Bird.
Guest:And Jackie said, yeah, that's because I really just wanted to sound like Bird.
Guest:I didn't care about nobody.
Guest:He wasn't trying to sound like nobody else.
Guest:But the whole point was is that the majority of people that we grew up listening to, there was such a variety of musicians that had their own signature.
Guest:I mean, it's like, you know, Cat comes out, he ain't played two notes and I know who it is.
Guest:Now, the newer crowd of people, the music that they're listening to, they may play it, I don't know who the heck that is, because it doesn't have any kind of personality to it.
Marc:It's like the bar band blues.
Marc:The weird thing about the blues is that they're beautiful and that anyone can kind of play them, but to make them your own, that's a whole different thing.
Marc:And that's the whole difference, right?
Marc:Because like you were saying, you're just playing in cover bands or just these bands that are just playing these blues, Bobby Bland, whatever it is.
Marc:It's like a pretty good band can get through all that shit, but to really make it your own, it's that one thing you can't describe, right?
Marc:Right.
Guest:Well, a lot of it is the same.
Guest:I think that people don't recognize that these bands came out of the same area and basically had the same kind of nomenclature and language, which moved itself over to the music that they were playing.
Guest:And so they actually are having a conversation inside of the music.
Marc:Within the band.
Marc:Within the band.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And see, this is what doesn't happen with a lot of guys who come in and go like, you know, we want to play some blues.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:They don't understand.
Guest:That's a conversation that you have to relax and come from totally deep within them.
Marc:Right, and now there's a few steps removed generationally, who they listening to.
Marc:Because it took me... I was old already.
Marc:I was in my 40s before I really understood the Hubert Sumlin, Alan Wolf thing.
Marc:And it's like, what?
Marc:Because I know Jimmy Vivino, because I do Conan O'Brien sometimes.
Marc:And Jimmy did that last album with Hubert, one of the last ones.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:and just to hear what he was doing on guitar and to really isolate it and realize that the two of them and the rest of them but like that conversation that you're talking about you can't there there's nothing it's it's it's singular it's all there's no one else gonna do that yeah and you did did you know hubert you guys yeah i should i should do the wolf part for hubert
Marc:Oh, you did?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, we played along.
Guest:He was playing at the Long Beach Blues Festival.
Guest:They called me up and said, hey, listen, you know, we got Hubert here, and he sounds good, but he just don't sound like... I said, well, okay.
Guest:I said, I'll do my best wolf impressions for you.
Guest:And Hubert, boy, Hubert lit up like a tree.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, because that was the combination.
Guest:That was the...
Guest:That was the dynamic.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:It had to go back and forth.
Guest:And also, Wolf stopped Huber from playing with a pick.
Marc:Oh, he told him I'm perfect?
Guest:No, he said, man, don't play with a pick.
Guest:Because Huber was decided that he was going to try to play with a pick.
Guest:Wolf said, play with your natural fingers.
Guest:With your natural fingers.
Guest:And I mean, the stuff that you would play, going down slow.
Guest:Listen to the guitar on that.
Guest:It's crazy, right?
Guest:I mean, oh.
Guest:One of some of the best solos I ever heard anybody play.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah, and he lived a long time, huh?
Marc:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:So what made this album happen?
Marc:The new one.
Marc:The one that you guys did.
Marc:The one that you're out doing.
Guest:Well, what made it happen is it started happening years and years and years ago.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How so?
Guest:Well, it's like...
Guest:It's the result of everything I did, everything he did, everything all the people before us did, everything before them, all the people that were born, the history of people.
Guest:The guy that happened to be playing steel drums on my block, the guitar that happened to be in his closet.
Guest:And then one day...
Guest:And all the conversations I heard Taj talk about when he didn't know I was listening.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm glad somebody will listen.
Guest:You know, things like ancestral things that happen, like when you work with those work songs, working on the Delta, songs that you can work all day and not get tired.
Guest:It's like being a musician, you can play all day and not know you worked.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:That's the best day.
Guest:That's the best day, right?
Guest:Yeah, you know, you're doing something you love, you work all day, you don't know you're working.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You don't know.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:So this was just a destiny, almost.
Guest:It's just kind of, I can't even answer.
Guest:So basically, I can't even answer that question.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But the short answer is, we were in Atlanta, Georgia, at the Greg Allman tribute, May He Rest in Peace.
Guest:Yeah, May He Rest in Peace, yeah.
Guest:And we were at the bar at the hotel, and I said, well, what do you think about us doing a record together?
Guest:And there wasn't one answer was yes, whether he was serious or not.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My answer was yes.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:But he was serious.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I knew it was going to happen, though.
Guest:See, because I mean, you know, you can tell when people might be, you know, fluffing past your ears, you know, blowing smoke up your skirt.
Guest:You know, no.
Guest:No, this was going to happen.
Guest:And to me, it's like in my life, I just have, I can't just stay at the same place, gigging on the road.
Guest:That's why I'm always doing different stuff because I see that there's more information out there.
Guest:And I figured that what would happen between us working would be great for both of us as individuals.
Guest:And what we would put together would be something that everybody would...
Guest:probably in their wildest fantasy were fantasizing that, oh, what happened?
Guest:Those two guys got there.
Guest:And it was a great departure for me because I was getting a little sick of myself.
Guest:I wanted to be quite frank.
Guest:They're two books.
Marc:You were starting to drop into that almost a needle.
Marc:Almost a needle.
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:It's almost where you finish your year out, and the next year, I don't even want to go out next year.
Guest:I don't even want to go.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:You don't want to do the work.
Guest:What am I doing?
Guest:Yeah, what am I doing?
Guest:What the heck am I doing?
Guest:And also, because we're in the set, we do actually a lot of songs from the record, which is a big no-no when you have a back catalog, people want to hear this and that.
Guest:Fuck them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You said it, I didn't.
Guest:Well, no, I mean.
Guest:Thank you for saying that for us.
Guest:Yeah, right, because we don't ever have to say that.
Guest:You can't say that.
Guest:And it's a loving fuck them.
Marc:No, no, because like, well, you don't want to, but I didn't mean to be dramatic about the needle.
Guest:No, we understand.
Marc:Yeah, because you don't want to be... They won't grow if you don't do that.
Marc:Right, but they get so locked into that stuff, and when you go, we're going to do a couple new ones, they're like, no, let's go to the bathroom.
Marc:And you're like, no, no, no, no, this is where we're growing.
Marc:But don't tell them.
Marc:Don't tell them what you're going to do.
Marc:Don't tell them.
Guest:Just keep it coming.
Guest:And all of a sudden, they get comfortable.
Guest:Because I mean, night after night, for me, I'm always going to play new tunes that they never heard.
Guest:I mean, the challenge is to get up in front of a bunch of people who never heard you and make some music that they get with.
Guest:And a lot of it is you relaxing and getting on your game.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And you get on your, because I mean, I can go somewhere where I never heard a musician before and if the cat is playing, I'm transfixed.
Marc:Oh yeah, absolutely.
Marc:That's the best thing that can happen.
Marc:I just went to Lincoln Center for the second time in my life, just on a whim to see Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.
Marc:And they're doing Monk tunes, big arrangements.
Marc:I can't remember his name.
Marc:He was a Pakistani flautist on a wooden flute playing Monk.
Marc:And I was like, I don't even understand what's happening, but I'm in.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:And that guy from Brazil playing a bandolin, like Django Reinhardt.
Marc:And I was like, I don't need to know anything but what's happening right now.
Marc:And that's what you want that connection to the audience to be.
Guest:And when you go back and you listen, say, to the recordings,
Guest:From, I mean, before this loss, but I mean the popular recordings of jazz and popular jazz from the late 50s, let's say middle of the 40s on up to maybe almost the end of the 60s.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:man there was so many creative people a lot i mean it's like i just i'm in a way you know it's a shame that they only got recorded and you know are sitting in vaults someplace yeah but i'm really glad it got recorded it's out there somewhere i mean it really is it really is the output for people in the intellectual property yeah creativity is it's phenomenal
Marc:There's so much now.
Marc:And there's enough that they keep... And people used to listen, man.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:It was all over the place.
Marc:Yeah, I mean... It's amazing that that's what music used to be.
Marc:You'd go to a dance and there'd be 20 guys on the bandstand.
Marc:You know, like that was the band.
Marc:Yeah, right.
Guest:Or you'd have a band and they'd run 20 people through the band.
Marc:Right, right.
Guest:Everybody had two or three songs.
Marc:And we had time to listen.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:We still have it.
Marc:We just don't think we have it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:We're trying to keep up with... We've been sidetracked.
Marc:Big time.
Guest:We've been bamboozled.
Marc:Yes, we have.
Guest:We've been bushwhacked.
Guest:We've been snockered.
Guest:We've been snowjocked.
Guest:And we can keep on going.
Guest:But you knew this ship was going to Shanghai when you got on it.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, it seemed like the record, when I listened to it, it makes total sense knowing more about you and knowing what you're into, that you both have this range of experience with different musical styles that they're all just going to weave in and out.
Marc:People have that.
Marc:They just don't know it.
Marc:Well, that's what your job is.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:They just don't know it.
Guest:It's just that.
Guest:You know, most people have been exposed primarily to, you know, popular music.
Guest:I mean, I came to popular music long after what I've heard.
Guest:You know, gospel music from my mother from the South.
Guest:Caribbean music from my father from the Caribbean.
Guest:That's really funny.
Guest:The same thing, though.
Guest:But a different way.
Guest:Caribbean.
Guest:You're from your family.
Guest:And my Caribbean experience came from down the street.
Guest:You just heard it.
Guest:Every Sunday you go to church.
Guest:Hours.
Guest:We got off easy.
Guest:Some of you had to go to church every night.
Guest:Oh yeah.
Guest:They were making sure they knew where you were.
Guest:They wasn't on two things open after midnight up in there.
Guest:No, I'm serious, man.
Guest:It's just so exciting and people could have so much more expansive experience if they just get to hear what's out there and not pull the blanket over the top of their head and look at their cell phone and their listening device.
Guest:I mean, that's it.
Marc:And it's all out there.
Marc:That's the weird thing.
Marc:I grew up like that.
Marc:I was turned on to blues and turned on to experimental music.
Marc:I had people in my life that say, like the guy at the record store that gives you the thing.
Marc:You're like, what is this?
Marc:And you bring it home.
Marc:where does this even exist?
Marc:And you get that experience.
Marc:The beautiful thing about music is that there's no late to the party.
Marc:No.
Marc:Because the party's always going on.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:And you can just go find it.
Marc:And there's never a shortage.
Marc:Like you were saying before, like, what the fuck is this?
Marc:And it's like all new.
Marc:Don't matter how old it is.
Marc:I just bought three Dizzy Gillespie albums.
Marc:I never listened to Dizzy Gillespie until last week.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, he grew up like three and a half miles from where my mother grew up in South Carolina.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah, his Aunt Thelma delivered my Uncle Elmo.
Guest:I was just out on tour with the Hendrix Experience.
Guest:Oh, with Zappa?
Guest:With Dweezil?
Guest:Dweezil turned me on to all his dad stuff.
Guest:That's a whole other world.
Guest:Whole other thing.
Guest:Zappa, the whole Zappa thing.
Guest:It's crazy.
It's crazy.
Guest:And told me the story about his dad, how he got into music.
Guest:He taught himself everything, how to orchestrate, how to play, by going to the library.
Guest:Oh, that's Zappa World.
Guest:I remember when those kids were born, man.
Marc:Yeah?
Marc:Were you over at the house?
Marc:Well, yeah.
Marc:I used to hang out with Medusa back in those days.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:From the GTOs.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:So when did you come to L.A.
Marc:the first time?
Guest:65.
Guest:I came to L.A.
Guest:and stayed.
Guest:I never went there.
Marc:And from 65?
Guest:65 on, I've been out on the West Coast or somewhere out here.
Marc:So you knew all those guys?
Marc:All those characters.
Marc:Running around Laurel Canyon, all the crazies?
Guest:That's when it started on that side.
Guest:I mean, I used to be the bouncer at the Ash Grove.
Guest:Where's that?
Guest:You know where the improv is?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:On Melrose.
Guest:8162 Melrose Avenue.
Guest:That used to be the hashcrow.
Guest:That was the hippest club in the United States of America.
Marc:What was there?
Guest:They played nothing but like Mississippi John Hurt, Booker White, Lightning Hopkins, Clifton Chenier.
Marc:And you were the door guy?
Guest:I was the doorman.
Marc:In 65, 66?
Guest:65, and then the Rising Sun started, and so I was only the other guy sometimes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because sometimes I was on stage.
Marc:So you were taking all that in.
Guest:Hey, man, would those guys be playing Joseph Spence?
Guest:I mean, you name them when they played there.
Guest:The real stuff was there all the time.
Marc:So that was it.
Marc:That was the mind-blowing experience, right?
Marc:You were just there?
Guest:You could find them.
Guest:Back east, it was like the Newport Folk Festival, the Club 47 in Cambridge, all that stuff down in New York, and the cafes.
Marc:Bitter End and stuff?
Guest:Bitter End, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Gertie's Folk City, all that New York stuff, you know, Cafe Waugh.
Guest:And then there was, you know, the Philadelphia Folk Festival.
Guest:There was the Second Threat.
Guest:There was the Turks Head in Boston.
Guest:There was, you know, there was a lot of folk clubs.
Guest:And these guys, when they were coming to the area, they were, you know,
Marc:Yeah, Sonny Terry, Brian McKee.
Marc:Oh, yeah, lots.
Marc:Yeah, they were all part of that folk scene.
Marc:But I imagine that your time there in the mid-'60s, just being there and working there and seeing all that shit every night, that must have just, like, opened it up.
Guest:Oh, yeah, well, yeah.
Guest:You got an idea that this wasn't just somebody's thesis that was gathering dust in the back of a university.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:It was living music.
Guest:This was the living, breathing people.
Guest:Plus, they didn't come there and play one night.
Guest:They came and hung out for the week or two or three nights.
Guest:So you got a chance to relax into what it was that they were playing, and so did they, you know?
Marc:I saw Big Mama Thornton and Jonathan Swift in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Marc:You're probably there, right?
Marc:Downstairs.
Marc:That became a comedy club too, weirdly.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:I knew what happened to Jonathan Swift.
Guest:Robert Cray was opening for me.
Guest:And I remember everybody was talking about, Robert Cray, Robert Cray.
Guest:Have you seen Robert Cray?
Guest:Robert Cray, Robert Cray, Robert Cray, Robert Cray, Robert Cray, Robert Cray.
Guest:So I finally got to hear the record, and I was a strong persuader.
Guest:And I said, yeah, get playing.
Guest:More of a soul blues sound.
Guest:Stratocaster, right?
Guest:Straight up.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So then he opened for me playing.
Guest:I was playing solo, and he opened for me playing.
Guest:The band got playing up on the stage.
Guest:I said hello to them.
Guest:The band got playing on the stage.
Guest:And about the middle of the set, I came out of the back room, and I stood there, and I looked up at him.
Guest:And I didn't know it made him as nervous as it did.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But anyway, after the set, he came in drying up.
Guest:He said, wow, man.
Guest:Why did you come out in the middle of the set and look at me like that?
Guest:And I said, because my work is done.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He got it.
Guest:He got it.
Guest:I used to tease him because I used to tease Otis Clay because I said, you sure you ain't Robert Gray's daddy?
Guest:Otis said, not like that.
Guest:He sure you ain't Robert Gray's daddy.
Guest:You know, back five nights back then, I remember in my neighborhood down in the Poe region room, all those clubs.
Guest:Yeah, Poe region room, yeah.
Guest:Down there where in Ashgrove.
Guest:I lived around the corner from Ashgrove in 71.
Guest:It was still going the last days of it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I went in there a couple times just to check and see what was going on.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But before the onset of high ticket prices and things like that, you had to come and you'd play a week.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:McCrae would be down there for a week.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Jimmy Smith would come down there, he'd play for a week.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, because to make it worth the trip, you got to play a week.
Guest:I went down to the apartment on the Honeycomb and the Dell Finals would come and they'd play a week.
Wow.
Wow.
Guest:Yeah, and you get to hear that beautiful music every night.
Guest:Yeah, but to get enough people in there to keep them in the room.
Marc:Yeah, and then people probably see them two or three times just coming back.
Marc:This is a weird question, because how do you not...
Marc:Because like a lot of blues, I guess I just got to, I'm looking for a guitar lesson now.
Marc:But I mean, I can do the, I'm pretty good with the pentatonics and the licks and the riffs.
Marc:But like, how do you get to the next place?
Guest:What place are you talking about?
Marc:Well, like, how do I do what you just did for two seconds?
Guest:Believe me.
Guest:What I did is I deconstructed one of Skip James' tunes because he played in an open D minor.
Guest:Oh, there you go.
Guest:Which is the same thing that...
Guest:Yeah, I saw him there too, Albert Collins.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Albert Collins on a Telecaster cables up five or seven.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And plays in open D minor.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:When it's open down here.
Guest:It's open D minor.
Guest:Well, what I did is, like I'm saying, it's all about listening to the music.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There's still, actually one thing that...
Guest:Robert Jr.
Guest:Lockwood does that he learned from Robert Johnson that every once in a while it sneaks out.
Guest:But you notice how when he's playing that the high string is always ringing.
Guest:And there's a certain kind of way you got to be conscious of playing that way.
Guest:But what I did was deconstruct Skip James into standard tuning.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:And just figure out where the strings are sympathetically vibrating with one another.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:All that older music is all about sympathetic vibration.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:I mean, it is serious.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they got no friends.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:That's what's killing me.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, perfectly.
Guest:and no friends.
Marc:That's tricky.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:And you had a little, like, you have some, like, there's, even on this record, there's a lead on one of the songs that seems to, it feels like blues, but then you do these little calypso flourishes almost.
Marc:I don't know what they are, but they, I don't know how you do it.
Marc:Well, that's,
Marc:that's just in you.
Guest:I don't know what I'm asking you.
Guest:The thing about it is, for me, when I look at a Taj Mahal, the Taj Mahal, any person who's been in the game as long as he's been in there, and all of a sudden I wake up to it at 40, I can't catch him.
Guest:There's no way I'm going to catch him.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:But I can't catch Chuck Berry.
Guest:You can now.
Guest:No, no, no, I can't catch me, man.
Guest:But like, you know, you gotta go like, okay, who am I in this moment?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Who am I in this moment?
Guest:What do I need to do right now to get to where I need to go?
Guest:So I picked a few guys.
Guest:I picked Robert Johnson, Tampa Red, and Big Rim Bluesy, Muddy Waters.
Guest:Those are the guys.
Guest:I just went in on them guys.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:Because I figured, and it was kind of like, if I could figure out the commonality between those four guys, what they were doing, and why it sounded like that,
Guest:Plus, I've had a lot of singers.
Guest:I've had a lot of singers.
Guest:Which ones make the girls go crazy and which ones don't?
Guest:That's very important in music.
Guest:Yeah, but you know what's interesting?
Guest:What you just said, Whitaker was the only one that I think was out of the Delta.
Guest:Robert was in the Delta.
Guest:Muddy was in the Delta.
Guest:And Big Bill Brunzi was like just across the river from the Delta in Arkansas.
Guest:But Hudson Whitaker was from Florida.
Guest:And that late name was Tampa.
Guest:Tampa.
Guest:Tampa.
Guest:But where did he end up?
Marc:Chicago.
Marc:Right.
Marc:That Chuck Berry thing, too.
Marc:I'm going to say I'm going to never catch up with Todd Mahal.
Marc:But what you're saying, you take the sounds and you integrate them into your own thing.
Marc:But that Chuck Berry bounce, I don't know how he does it.
Marc:Oh, it's perfect.
Marc:It's amazing.
Guest:It's perfect.
Guest:It was perfect back then.
Guest:It's perfect now.
Guest:In fact, I got a chance to do one of his tunes recently on a John London tribute.
Guest:I was so thrilled.
Guest:Which one?
Guest:I did...
Guest:Sweet little 16.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:The band played perfect, man.
Guest:Because, you know, I mean, it's funny.
Guest:Really, if you go back and see, what you got to see is him doing it on bandstand.
Guest:Because he says all over St.
Guest:Louis.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Just that move.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Chuck had every single move where it was supposed to be.
Marc:I never understood how complex it was, really, but it is.
Guest:Yo, play it like he's playing it.
Marc:Yeah, because I don't think he picks up.
Marc:I think a lot of it's all down.
Marc:Downstroke, yeah.
Marc:Right, right, and it makes a big difference.
Guest:Downstroke like that and with the drum shuffling.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:You know, and you think, because his guitars are going like that, because most bands, when you play Johnny Migo, they go... Right, right.
Marc:They gotta swing a little.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:A whole bunch of them different guys played drums on that.
Guest:And what's really funny, how Willie Dixon played bass on so much stuff.
Marc:On Chuck stuff?
Marc:On Chuck stuff, yeah.
Marc:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I didn't know that.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But then, for me, it's all good.
Guest:But man, when he had that electric bass on Nadine, I was done.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Nadine.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And also, too, the moon glows on.
Guest:whoa whoa almost grown you know i'm doing all right in school i'm ready to go yeah yeah did you see that movie with him and keith oh yeah that was crazy like when chuck is just schooling keith richards oh yeah well no but see the trouble was that keith made a terrible mistake
Guest:The mistake he made was that Chuck wasn't in the dressing room and Keith went over to put his hands on Chuck's guitar.
Marc:And that was it.
Guest:She turned around.
Guest:Chuck clocked him right in there.
Guest:Clock.
Guest:And you know what?
Guest:Keith was a big enough man to say, hey, I deserved it.
Guest:He said I should have known better than put my hands on it.
Guest:Some people don't like you touching their guitar.
Guest:No?
Guest:I touched one of my favorite guitar players, probably my favorite guitar players, David T. Walker.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And I touched his guitar one time, and he kind of said, well, you know, I kind of...
Guest:I really don't like people touching my guitar that much.
Guest:That's better than a punch.
Guest:It was kind of like a, it was kind of, it was a very friendly, like.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Battlesnake.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Yes, sir.
Marc:Yes, sir.
Marc:What do you, do you have people touch your guitar?
Marc:i don't like them yeah i'm like you can ask me if i think i want to yeah yeah it's interesting some people just go grab a guitar other people don't no you know you don't you there's certain things you just don't do it's funny because i've had a few musicians come over and i had this i don't know if it was this one maybe this one i had a 335 in the living room once and like i'm always feel better if someone comes in and grabs it like james taylor came over and like right away didn't even talk just went over to the living room started playing i'm like great this is going to be good
Guest:Some people are like that.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Not everybody.
Marc:There's one.
Marc:I got to touch it.
Marc:He didn't think that I would freak out.
Guest:Some people rent guitars.
Guest:They don't get attached to them.
Guest:They go back and they get rent.
Guest:We just rent some guitars when we get there.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then I guess some people are very attached to them.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, if you like Larry Carlton, you play Larry Carlton has his guitar.
Guest:You know, some people have their guitar.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They don't switch around.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's like, this is my guitar.
Guest:Like, David, he's like that.
Guest:Carlton's like that?
Guest:Huh?
Marc:Carlton's like that, Larry?
Guest:Yeah, they have very, very most, they have a very relationship.
Guest:I don't know if it's like a don't touch my guitar thing, but he has a very personal relationship with his guitar.
Marc:Well, I guess BB did too, but I think there was a lot of Lucille's.
Marc:It's okay.
Guest:Yeah, there's a lot of them.
Guest:Just don't touch the one you got in his head.
Guest:Or in the dressing room.
Guest:Or the one sitting next to the one.
Guest:Sitting next to the one.
Guest:It's like, what was it?
Guest:Whatever King says, put your hands on my Lucy.
Guest:I don't know what I'm doing to you.
Guest:Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
Guest:I love Albert King there a lot of times.
Marc:Yeah, with F-Y-M-V.
Guest:Oh, please.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Man, yeah.
Marc:Well, you guys are doing great, and I think the new album's great, and I hope you had a fun time in here today.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, we did.
Marc:We'll be back.
Marc:All right, you can hang around if you want.
Marc:We know where you live now.
Marc:Yeah, right.
We do.
Marc:Yeah, right.
Guest:And so how many dates are you doing?
Guest:I think it's 90 dates all together.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:And it's over to a 10-week period.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:We're going through, with breaks, going through to October.
Marc:And which website can people go look to see?
Marc:Tajmo.
Marc:Tajmo.com?
Marc:Yep.
Marc:Thanks, fellas.
Marc:You know, look, I couldn't.
Marc:I'm sorry.
Marc:I love talking to those guys, but there was no way I could facilitate playing.
Marc:I'm just glad we got that few seconds there with Taj.
Marc:I can play.
Marc:You want me to play some dirty, blues-oriented material?
Marc:Okay.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Oh, by the way, my Netflix special has a date.
Marc:September 5th.
Marc:Alright, if you're still listening, September 5th is the date of my Netflix special.
Marc:And just a little commentary that I didn't do at the top about our current political situation.
Marc:Of course he knew.
Marc:Of course.
Marc:Of course.
Marc:Okay, that's my political commentary.
Marc:And now I'll get my rig set up and put my headphones and my earplugs in so I don't blow my ears out.
Guest:God damn it.
Guest:.
Guest:.
Guest:.
Guest:.
Guest:Boomer Lives!