Latest / The Bob Lefsetz Podcast / Lenny Kaye

Transcript

Lenny Kaye · The Bob Lefsetz Podcast

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: My guest today is Lenny Kay, who's got a new
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: solo album, Going Local. Lenny, why that title?
• 0:15
  Speaker 2: Well, for several reasons. I'm a person that likes the local,
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: you know, I always, you know, I do go up
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: to the enormo Drome to see the spectacular stage shows
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: that you know, seem to be Deligo now, you know,
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: with all its flashing lives. But my favorite thing is
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: to go see my friends play in the club's intimacy,
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: one on one communication, taking advantage of the moment. And
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: I've always been like that, you know, I always stay
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: within my intermediate thing. Plus, I wrote the book Brightening Striking,
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: which describes how local scenes, often off the main axis
• 0:55
  Speaker 2: of the music business, find their way into becoming something.
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: And so that to me has always been very precious.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: Well, certainly in the pre internet days, you had to
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: go out for all kinds of reasons to hear music,
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: to meet people. Clubs have been challenged a are you
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: going out as much? And what do you view the
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: future of the local scene.
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: Being That's a good question. I mean, you know, there's
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: less local clubs with live musicians in New York City.
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: I find that somewhat distressing. But on the other hand,
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: music is being made all over the place and you
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: just have to search it out. I'm all for watching
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: something on a screen, especially a band that I know
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: nothing about, so I have to kind of find my
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: way to them. But on the other hand, there's nothing
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: like being in a room feeling the decibels at one
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: hundred at one hundred and eight asorbing it with fellow audiences.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: And I don't know. That's to me where the magic happens.
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: I believe Brian Eno calls it genius, where it's not
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: just a band on stage, it's the audience, what they're
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: bringing to it, what they hope to see, how they
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: hope to have their lives changed, And that to me
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: is very valuable. And in a time when things become
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: overly large, sometimes it's good to go back and find
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: the root cause of why you love music.
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: So how often you're going out these days?
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: Can I go out once or twice three times? I
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: don't go out as much as I used to, because
• 2:44
  Speaker 2: you know, I'm getting to be more of a homebody
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: as I get older. But you know, I go out
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: when there's something that strikes my attention that makes me
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: want to go either support in order or have my
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: life transformed by an artist, and that to me is
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: very valuable.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: Well, in the old days, in the pre internet days,
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: you know, there were gatekeepers, mostly major labels, and they
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: would support acts going to clubs and they graduate from
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: clubs to theaters to hopefully arenas thereafter, whereas today there's
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: not that support, and it's not clear. It used to
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: be clear who the labels were behind. They were spending
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: a lot of money other than your friends, something brand new,
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: How do you find it?
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: You know, at completely random. I'm on Instagrampa, so occasionally I'll,
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: you know, some algorithm will pull up a band that
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: I'm intrigued with, and I'll chase them down and I'll
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: see what they sound like. I'm a big fan of
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: the rabbit hole, you know. You know, I listen to
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: reform radio, especially WFMU out of North Jersey, and so
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: you hear a lot of intriguing stuff. I mean, one
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: might say, yeah, there's no gatekeepers, but there's no shortage
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: of music out there, and how it arrives on your
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: doorstep can be many, many different ways, you know, somebody
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: sends me a record out of the blue because they
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: think I might like it. Somebody tracks me down and says,
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: I think you might like this, And you know, I
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: kind of keep my ears open. I like all types
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: of music. That's the thing, you know. I'm multi genrefull,
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: if one might say. And so if something attracts my interest,
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: and it doesn't even have to be contemporary, you know,
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: I might hear of an artist from you know, the
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: nineteen forties or the nineteen fifties or the early two
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: thousands that I don't know anything about. Maybe I recognize
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: their name. I went on a deep dive into the
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: work of this female R and B singer from the
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: forties and early fifties named Nellie Lucher last week. You know,
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: fascinating stuff and it's all out there to be found.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: So how did you find her?
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: I'm just looking around. I do a show on Sirius XM,
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: and I have this this little thing called the Monday
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: Moment of Mind Expansion or the Tuesday time Machine, where
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: I look for somebody that kind of needs a little
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: visibility or eer ability. And I try to educate myself too,
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: because there's so much that I don't know. So many
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: artists that you know pass me by a record. I'll
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: go to a record fair and I'll see, you know,
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: you know, a random record that somebody brings over to me,
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: and all of a sudden, I'm on the deep dive.
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: In my life, I've been through so many different musics.
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: I know, I'm known for a quote garage band, but
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: that was the music I listened to and played when
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: I was a teenager. You know, I've been through jazz,
• 6:14
  Speaker 2: I've been through country music. I'm a very substandard pedal
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: steel player. I just, you know, I just love music
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: in all its shapes and forms for music, and sometimes,
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: thank you Internet, I hear of something and I don't
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: have to go to fifteen record stores to see if
• 6:34
  Speaker 2: they might have it. I can tap a button and
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: find an Algerian singer, you know, Rachebby that I've never
• 6:41
  Speaker 2: heard of before, and then move slightly into that universe
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: for a while and see how it affects me and
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: affects my own artistic compulsion.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: So you feature these artists on your radio show. Have
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: you noticed with any of the artists the fact that
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: you champion them, they start to gain further traction.
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: I don't know I put it out there. You know,
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: somebody tells me, man, I never heard of that artist,
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: but I'm into their fan club. You know, it's hard
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: to measure these things. So much of what I do,
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: I mean nuggets. When it came out, you know, those
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: artists were somewhat unknown on it, and yet that album
• 7:28
  Speaker 2: has been buying me beers around the world for the
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: last half century. It's you know, rather amazing. People like introductions,
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: people like interesting curations, and people like you know, fans
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: of music who have a sensibility that that might turn
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: them onto something they've never heard before.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: Let's go back to the new album. So why make
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: an album now?
• 7:59
  Speaker 2: Well, I had the time for a start. You know,
• 8:02
  Speaker 2: I can only really concentrate on one thing at a time.
• 8:05
  Speaker 2: And you know, I've written my books, and I played
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: with Patty for half a century, and I had some
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: open space, and I found a recording studio eight minutes
• 8:15
  Speaker 2: drive from my house along the shores of the Delaware
• 8:18
  Speaker 2: and I started. I had these songs, some of which
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: I started fifteen years ago, some of which I've written
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: in the interval time, and I just wanted artistic closure.
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: You know, I have no illusions about what the music
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: business is like these days. I don't expect to have
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: a hit single or what. I don't even know sometimes
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: how people find music, especially from an artist like myself.
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: So I wanted to realize these songs. I felt that
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: they were worthy. I don't write many songs for myself
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: over the course of a year, maybe one or two
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: when I feel the need to express an emotion or
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: to understand a moment in time. And I just thought
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: somehow they fit together, and I resolved to finish them.
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: Because you know, I'm a copricorn, so sometimes it takes
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: me a long time to realize things, or to realize
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: them in the way that I feel that they're successful.
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: And I gathered these songs and some were half done,
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: and I completed them. I would go to the studio
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: once twice a week, a weekend, book six hours. You know,
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: it was very easy to do, and I made them
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: real and that, to me, is one of the things
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: you do. You try to realize your artistic impulse. And
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: you know, if it's taken me a long time to
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: gather these songs together, well, you know, as Orson Well said,
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: there is no why before it's.
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: Time Okay, you use the word closure upon that.
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: You have a song I sing. It's sometimes a live
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: When I do it solo, you know, I feel the
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: audience response and I've never recorded it. They actually respond
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: to it without having any reference point to a record.
• 10:18
  Speaker 2: So I do this song and then I think, well,
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: how can I flesh it out? I have the basic
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: chords I have, you know, the way to play it
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: on guitar? How to realize it? Because I like making
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: records As a record producer, I made over twenty records,
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: and that's a real joy to watch a song grow
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: in a recording studio, to see it tell you I
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: don't want that part. I want this part and allow
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: the speakers to illuminate the song and to reveal its
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: wonder and mystery of creativity. And so I thought, these songs,
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: which I feel have merit, if only to me, I
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: wanted to realize them. I wanted to get them in
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: a form that I could appreciate as an artist, and
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: hopefully someone out there in the great white universe will
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: also appreciate them.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: Okay, based on both your history and speaking with you
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: for ten minutes, you're not the average beer. You have
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: a level of intellectuality. If that's even a word. You drop, Capricorn,
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: Do you really believe in all that stuff?
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: Does it matter?
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: No, that's a perfect answer. That's what I was looking for.
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: You know, does it matter? I don't know. I look
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: at my chart. You know, I'm a Capricorn. I take
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: a long time. I've been climbing the mountain. It's not
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: like I came out of the gate and had a
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: huge success and then have been trying to replicate it.
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: I'm a hard worker, just like a mountain goat. I
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: get up in the morning. It doesn't matter what I
• 11:54
  Speaker 2: did yesterday or ten years ago or twenty five years ago.
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: What am I doing today? What am I doing to
• 12:02
  Speaker 2: illuminate my soul? To make my focus of something creative
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: in front of me? That's what I'm about. I mean,
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: once you finish a piece of work, and I've done
• 12:15
  Speaker 2: a bunch of work in my time, it's finished for me.
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: I'll take the accolade. You know, I'll understand how it's
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: affected one person or a million people. But the fact
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: of the matter is is that that piece of work
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: is over for me. I want to get up and say,
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: what is this part on this song? I'm working on
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: can I you know, can I put a keyboard pad
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: on it that illuminates it. That's how I work, you know.
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's all about moving into the future for me.
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: And you know, my future just keeps on going. And
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: I'm you know, I'm a resolute slow mover. Each of
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: my books took you know, six to seven years to
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: write because I just kept diving deeper and deeper and
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: deeper into the subject. And you know, that's that's how
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: I get my amusements personally.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: So you talked about the studio being by the Delaware.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: Where exactly do you live?
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: I live in northeast Pennsylvania, by the Pocono Mountains, even
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: if there are more hills than mountains, and I'm riley
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: close to the Delaware water Gap where Don Sternacher's mix
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: Olidian Studios is. And I've known Don for forty years.
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: I worked at his studio when it was in Central Jersey.
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: And to find him here in a small building once
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: owned by Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, you know, in
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: a room with beautiful equipment, you know, I just figured,
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: what the heck, I'll go over there. You know, here's
• 13:53
  Speaker 2: Saturday arrived there noon. You know, we worked till twelve
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: I put the stuff up. You know, the technology these
• 14:02
  Speaker 2: days is so amenable to doing the kind of work
• 14:05
  Speaker 2: I do because in some ways, being in the studio
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: is like writing. You know, you're editing, and I'm a
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: good editor, so you know, I put these parts together,
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: then see how they fit and move them around, and
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: you know, like writing, which I believe has rhythm and
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: melody and a sentence, and a guitar solo has a
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: narrative art. I feel very comfortable, you know, and with
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: don because I don't really have any sense of destination.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: I'm just trying to resolve these songs. We can try
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: out stuff and if it doesn't work, come so what,
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: you know, try something else. I feel a real sense
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: of creative freedom now because I don't have anything to prove.
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: I've done pretty much what will be in my CV.
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: You know, this is kind of a new way of
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: seeing who I am and who I'm becoming, and that,
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: to me is one of the blessings of making music
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: is that it's not age related. I'm not a sports
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: guy where in the late thirties I'm going to start losing.
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: I actually feel more in touch with my musical self
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: because I have all these decades of doing it and
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: understanding who I am as a musician.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: Well, you use the word closure earlier, and as a
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: result of the Internet, we know that you're going to
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: be eighty this year. To what degree does the end
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: come into your thinking, your artwork? And how do you
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: cope with the fact that we're not here forever. You
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: could die tomorrow, you could live another thirty years. We
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: don't know, but the odds start to get worse.
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: Let's hope. So I'm just getting good. I mean, I
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: don't know. You know, I'm a very present, tense person.
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: You know, I don't have any place I want to say.
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: I'm doing it a lot for myself, but I think
• 16:04
  Speaker 2: sometimes that's what artists do. I actually, I love the
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: fact that yep ROC has been so encouraging to me
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: because I've put out the record that I hope to
• 16:16
  Speaker 2: put out, and I think it was it took until
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: now to put it out, to have the right songs,
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: to have the right sense of myself, to have, you know,
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: the years of experience behind me, to know that I
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: am who I am. I'm not going to change. I'm
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: not going to suddenly jump on some bandwagon. You know,
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: I do have a metal goth jam band which I
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: have on the side a drift which I'm also working
• 16:47
  Speaker 2: on for my darker self. But you know, I just
• 16:51
  Speaker 2: feel like this record is me in a way that
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: I'm happy to present it and if people appreciate it,
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: I love them and I'll go out and place some
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: I'm not going to go on, you know, eight week
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: tour in a van, but I like to play and
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: it keeps me, keeps my blood flowing. It's like going
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: to the gym, which I don't do as often as
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: I should.
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: So how do you end up living where you're living? Oh?
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: God, well, it's not that far from New York City.
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: It's an hour and a half if you don't hit traffic.
• 17:27
  Speaker 2: In the late eighties, my daughter was two and we
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: were living in the East Village. If you stood in
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: front of CBGB and looked in the ten o'clock position,
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: that was our loft. And you know, at that time
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: these village was not gentrified at all. There were crack
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: vials across the street. My daughter would want to get
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: some exercise, I take her over to Tompkins Square Park
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: and you know, there'd be glass all over the children's thing,
• 17:56
  Speaker 2: and you know, pretty soon we thought, well, this is
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: not a great place to raise her. So we just
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: kept driving west until you know, we could afford As
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: soon as we got over the border from Pennsylvania, housing
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: prices drop fifty percent, and you know, so we could
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: actually afford something. And I got this house. I was
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: kind of shell shocked, to be honest. I never thought
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: about Pennsylvania as a as a place. You know, I
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: grew up in New York, so it took me a
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: while to understand it. But then I started liking the
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: perspective of being outside the city, where you know, if
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: you're not doing seven hundred and fifty things, and you know,
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: it's just because then I get out here and I
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: things that seem so important in New York. And I
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: still have a little place in New York, so I
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: can take that manic energy inside. But all of a sudden,
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: you get out here and you get a sense of
• 18:53
  Speaker 2: perspective and also what the rest of the country's like,
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: because there used to be a sign when we got
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: across the border or America starts here, really, and I thought,
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: you're right, this could be Indiana, This could be Ohio.
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: This is not the New York metropolitan area. And so
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: I've grown, you know, I've been out here DISI thirty
• 19:14
  Speaker 2: nine years. And it helped that I had a garage
• 19:17
  Speaker 2: in the back, as I've always wanted a garage, and
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: about thirty years ago I filled it up with motorcycles
• 19:23
  Speaker 2: and then I got rid of them and now I
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: have a nice nineteen sixty month underbirden there. So I
• 19:29
  Speaker 2: don't know, I just like it. I like sitting on
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: my porch around six o'clock and having a cocktail and
• 19:35
  Speaker 2: thinking about life and you know, just catching my breath.
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: It's a kind of great place. And the Delaware is
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: to swim in a river is one of the most
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: beautiful things ever. You know, what can I say? It's
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: not the ocean, it's not a lake. To feel a
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: living being carrying you along in the currents, hopefully not
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: to not too are out. But I don't know, I
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: just I just like it out here.
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: Okay, did you move there, you had a young child,
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: did you get engaged in the community, or you were
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: just living there and the people in the environment, et cetera.
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: They were doing their own thing.
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: You know, I just came out to live here, but
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: I found a lot of friends. The nearby Delaware water
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: Gap Town is a jazz center. Bob Deureau would show
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: up at the deer Head End all the time of
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: phil Woods. It was kind of like a little jazz mecca.
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: I don't play jazz at all, so I don't participate
• 20:47
  Speaker 2: in that. It's like, you want me to play summertime
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: with you. You got to be kidding me. Shut me down,
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: you know. And then I find the local musicians here,
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: you know, and I just like it. You know, there's
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: an alternative bar in Stroudsburg called the Goat where I
• 21:05
  Speaker 2: go to see my tattooed friends. And you know, like
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: I said, I have this group adrift where you know,
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: we're we're an interesting combination. And you know, there are
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: two local guys, the drummers into Rush, the bass player
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: six string bass players into industrial music of the nineties.
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: And then there's me, you know, slightly hippie, slightly spaced out,
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: and you know, accessing, you know, my heavier side.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: To what degree is where you are influenced by Philadelphia?
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: Is it more of Philadelphia or more NYC?
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: It's all NYC. Philadelphia is two hours away, and I
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: never lived in Philadelphia. I like the town, but I'm
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: New York centry. I mean, I was born in Washington Heights,
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: you know, I grew up in Brooklyn, Queens. Yeah, I'm
• 21:59
  Speaker 2: in New York. I still like the joke that I'm
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: not quite a local out here, but you know, uh
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: I really, you know, I like it and it's a
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: it's a different it's a different vibe out here, and uh,
• 22:15
  Speaker 2: I don't know what to say. You know, I have
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: a lot of friends, and but I'm you know, sometimes
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: I just like to be home and puttering around in
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: the basement and you know, moving equipment around. And I
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: call my house the museum of me because there's two floors,
• 22:31
  Speaker 2: an attic and a basement and I filled it up oil.
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: Let me tell you, there's books and records and so
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: much stuff. And uh, I don't know, it's it's what
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: do I call it? Ome? That's what it is.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: Okay, you know, this is the nature of music is
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: it's a memorabilia orientented hord oriented. So when you move
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: to the other side, what's going to happen to all
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: this stuff?
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: My daughter asked that many a time. But on my record,
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: there's this which is probably my most popular live song.
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: It's called the Things We Leave Behind, because sooner or
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: later we're all going to find that we made it
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: to the end of the line. It gets heavier every
• 23:14
  Speaker 2: mountain climb. It's the things you leave behind, and yeah,
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: you know, I'm attempting to find the herd ha ha ha.
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: I took two records out of my collection last week.
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: You know, whoa did you really take two records out
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: of your collection?
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: You just metaphoricallyaim, no, No, I did take too. You know,
• 23:35
  Speaker 2: I have a little uh they have a little flea
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: market and you know, antique works here and I have
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: a I have a little stand there and I sometimes
• 23:44
  Speaker 2: take records, you know, or whatever I'm taken out of that.
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: That's like part of your identity. You know, two records
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: isn't going to make much room. So how do you
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: decide which two records? How'd you let go? What records
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: were they?
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: You know, I don't know, some some eighties hairband that
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: I you know, I was into it one time. You
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: know what it was, that girl band Vixen. Right, I'm
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: living on the Edge of the World or whatever their song,
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: and I said, I'm not going to listen to this again,
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: so I put it down there, you know, eleven books.
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: You know, never can tell when hair Metal la fan
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: comes down. I just try to move things around. But
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: I've been very unsuccessful in cleaning the house, I must say.
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: And you know, but you know, it all gets dispersed whenever,
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: whenever you're not here. But right now, you know, I know,
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: next week I'm going to say, you know, I have
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: a real urge to hear that Vixen record. Wow maybe,
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: and then you know you're all. But then I can
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: just go down to the engine works, which is what
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: it's called, and buy my own record back.
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: Okay, So what's your daughter up to now? All these
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: years later?
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: She lives in Oxford, Mississippi. She's a chiropractor. She has
• 25:09
  Speaker 2: three children. The boys are ten and wild animals and
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: the little girls going to turn four. And they're very
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: happy down there. And frankly, for a person who grew
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: up in the phill oaksara with here's to the state
• 25:24
  Speaker 2: of Mississippi. Find yourself another country to be part of.
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: I love going down there because it really is a
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: real you know, it's got a great bookstore, it's got
• 25:36
  Speaker 2: a great record store, and that's all I asked for
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: a town just like you know my town here Strausburg.
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: I got main Street jukebox for the for going down
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: and hanging with my record collecting buddies, and a great
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: bookstore Carol and Carol, and that's really all I need.
• 25:51
  Speaker 2: And then of course bring home stuff from that. And
• 25:54
  Speaker 2: then you got to think, oh, it's you know, sooner related.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: How did she end up in Oxford?
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: She moved to California, LA, and then San Francisco where
• 26:04
  Speaker 2: she met her husband, and they moved to back to
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: LA and they were living in a small, you know,
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: one bedroom apartment when they had the boys and they
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: weren't doing anything. And he's from Jackson, Mississippi, home of
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: Ace Records, and you know, they just looked around and
• 26:26
  Speaker 2: they thought, oh, this is a nice size town. You know,
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: it's got a good sense of culture. It's got a
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: pretty good football team. And I don't know, they just
• 26:38
  Speaker 2: liked it. And when I went to visit them the
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: first time, I thought, this is perfect. So they have
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: a nice, you know, little little house and they're doing
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: quite well. And as my daughter says to me, Dad,
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: I can't believe you just have another job now, because
• 26:55
  Speaker 2: you know, but they're really you know, she's great, and
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: she's happy and and I think she wanted a town
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: a little bit more like Strausburg, which is kind of
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: a small, you know, but not tiny town in Pennsylvania.
• 27:08
  Speaker 2: It's got a college here, East Stroudsburg University. And I
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: don't know, she seems happy and in the end, that's
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: all you can ask for your children.
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: Okay, Is she a chiropractor like on family ties where
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: the parents or hippies and the kid goes straight. She
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: sees you as a musician and she's got to have
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: to have something more reliable.
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: Yes, I'd say that's true. But you know, chiropractice is
• 27:35
  Speaker 2: an ord to I mean, I respect people who work
• 27:38
  Speaker 2: with the human body. I respect carpenters. I respect a
• 27:42
  Speaker 2: guy who keeps my tea berg running. You know, I
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: don't think I'm more special because I'm a musician or
• 27:51
  Speaker 2: an artist or anything like that. It's just my particular
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: skill set in the human organism. I mean, I think
• 27:58
  Speaker 2: of all of us as an organism. You know, there's
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: like people who cook and you know, supply food. That's
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: the stomach. People who build that's the uh, you know,
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: the muscles. For me being a musician is you're living
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: in the soul, the center of emotional heart in the brain,
• 28:20
  Speaker 2: and I feel very lucky to be there. But you know,
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: when my water pump goes, I would really like the
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: skill set to, you know, open that hood and whack
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: another one in.
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: Okay, your wife passed not that long ago. How do
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: you cope with that?
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: It's you know, we spent forty years together. It was
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: somewhat of a roller coaster. I was on the road
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: a lot. It's not as conducive to a stable marriage
• 28:50
  Speaker 2: as one might think. But she did pass and and
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: now I have a friend who lives across the creek
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: from me, and you know, and I have my Pennsylvania
• 29:05
  Speaker 2: girl and she actually wrote some of the lyrics on
• 29:08
  Speaker 2: that song, because you know, Pennsylvania girls fly under the radar,
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: so you know, she's a good person. And of course
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: I'm less crazy these days. I mean, you know, rock
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: and roll is a lifestyle that sometimes can push you
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: over the edge. Luckily, no matter how much I like
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: to stay up late at a rock club and dance
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: to white wedding at three point thirty in the morning,
• 29:39
  Speaker 2: I you know, I like to get up in the
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: morning and do my work, and so that's what keeps
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: me focused and centered. And like I said, I just
• 29:47
  Speaker 2: I just like it here. I like, I like, and
• 29:51
  Speaker 2: you know, and I respect the fact that over those
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: forty years of marriage, me and me and Stephanie, you know,
• 29:59
  Speaker 2: we create ad a world that I still live in
• 30:02
  Speaker 2: and a daughter who is righteous and honest and a
• 30:05
  Speaker 2: hard worker. What else could you hope for?
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: Ho'd you meet this new friend?
• 30:12
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's a very dodd, she said, Well, she was
• 30:17
  Speaker 2: my wife's best friend at one time, and I haven't
• 30:21
  Speaker 2: confronted that in song yet, but you know, at one
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: point we oh god, it's just about music. Now. At
• 30:33
  Speaker 2: one point, when my wife and I were apart, she
• 30:37
  Speaker 2: said to Dawn, let me needs somebody to talk to.
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: Would you talk to him? And so and I've known
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: her for thirty forty years, and you know, so we
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: started going out to dinner and she was telling me
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: about her ex husband and I was telling me her about,
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: you know, my wife, and we realized we're telling the
• 30:59
  Speaker 2: same story. Orians slowly were brought into the gravity of
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: each other. And you know, many complications got to say,
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: but at this point they're all resolved and we're very happy.
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: And you know, very relaxed with each other. And you know,
• 31:20
  Speaker 2: what can I say? She's my Pennsylvania girl.
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: Is she an expat or is she from Pennsylvania?
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: She's from She's a reason we knew about this place.
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: You know, when we came out here, she had just
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: had a two year old as well, and so we
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: had bought or paid the fixture fee of the loft
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: that we lived in on the bowery from her and
• 31:43
  Speaker 2: her husband, so we knew them as friends. And when
• 31:47
  Speaker 2: we started looking around, we decided to look out here,
• 31:52
  Speaker 2: and you know, as it turns out, we wound up
• 31:56
  Speaker 2: here amazingly enough. And you know, we were friends, I
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: mean her, me and her, which is so revealing. Me
• 32:03
  Speaker 2: and her husband were best friends here too, you know,
• 32:06
  Speaker 2: we were the couple. But luckily, uh you know, I
• 32:10
  Speaker 2: mean I never had thoughts about her, you know, until
• 32:17
  Speaker 2: That's a good name for song, isn't it about? Until
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: I had lost my will and still we are together.
• 32:30
  Speaker 2: I'll give you write a credit.
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: Don't worry inspired by you can keep one hundred percent. Okay, okay,
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: let's go back to the beginning. So you grew up
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: exactly where.
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: I was born in Upper Manhattan by the George Washington Bridge.
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: We moved to Jamaica, Queens when I was one, and
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: then to Flat Push in Brooklyn when I was eight,
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: so I actually got to see the Brooklyn Dodgers at
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: EBITs Field. And then when I was thirteen, we moved
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: out to New Jersey, New Brunswick, which is kind of
• 33:08
  Speaker 2: in Central Jersey suburbia as they say, and that's where
• 33:13
  Speaker 2: I spent my teenage years. And then when I got
• 33:16
  Speaker 2: to be when I graduated college Rutgers, I moved back
• 33:21
  Speaker 2: to New York and never left.
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: Okay, what'd your parents do for a living?
• 33:26
  Speaker 2: My dad was an import export He dealt in woods
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: from Asia and that's why our living room was covered
• 33:36
  Speaker 2: in plywood of all sorts. And my mother was what
• 33:42
  Speaker 2: they call a homemaker and then later worked for the
• 33:45
  Speaker 2: Boy Scouts of America in their medical claims, which was
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: right down the highway. The Boy Scouts headquarters was right
• 33:55
  Speaker 2: down the highway from our house at that time.
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: And how many kids in the family.
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: My sister who was three and a half years younger
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: than me, Judy, she lives in Asheville, North Carolina, and
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: is an artist. She works in a thing called cyanotypes,
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: which takes photographs and does something with them, solarizes them
• 34:19
  Speaker 2: and makes kind of art from that.
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: And to you, growing up, what kind of kid are you?
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: I'm kind of a mutant, you know. I was really
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: young when I lived in Brooklyn. I skipped a grade,
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: skipped the eighth grade. They had this thing called special Progress,
• 34:37
  Speaker 2: and I made it. But when we moved to New
• 34:42
  Speaker 2: Jersey in the ninth grade, I was a year younger
• 34:45
  Speaker 2: than everybody in my class, plus very small, and at
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: that time a year is a big difference, and so
• 34:53
  Speaker 2: I was kind of a loner. Throughout high school. I
• 34:57
  Speaker 2: did have some friends, but I found my universe and
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: science fiction fandom, which gave me a kind of interstellar
• 35:04
  Speaker 2: viewpoint of the world and also a social subculture in
• 35:09
  Speaker 2: which otherness was celebrated. You know, I published a fanzine.
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: It was called Obelisk. I'm not going into the phallic
• 35:19
  Speaker 2: symbolism of that at the moment, but just stop here
• 35:22
  Speaker 2: for a second.
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: What year do you What year did you publish a fanzine?
• 35:26
  Speaker 2: It was probably sixty one sixty two, so I was
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: like fourteen, So.
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: What does a fanzine look like in sixty one or sixty.
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: Two fanzine is you get a mimeograph, you learn how
• 35:40
  Speaker 2: to cut that stencil, you pour the ink in there,
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: you get yourself covered in a mess, and you crank
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: the machine and you've come out with a page. And
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: you do that for twenty five or thirty pages. You
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: staple it together and you send it out to four
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: or five hundred of your friends and science fiction fandom,
• 36:03
  Speaker 2: who then send you their fanzines, and you know, occasionally
• 36:08
  Speaker 2: you go to a convention and meet them in person,
• 36:11
  Speaker 2: and you know, within those fanzines it mutated from science
• 36:16
  Speaker 2: fiction into kind of what is called Fanish culture faa N,
• 36:21
  Speaker 2: where you're talking more about social interactions of fans than
• 36:26
  Speaker 2: you are actual literature. And that's what interesting because kind
• 36:30
  Speaker 2: of like it's like a bohemian subculture. You're you know,
• 36:34
  Speaker 2: you're talking to people are into jazz and kind of
• 36:39
  Speaker 2: underground politics. You know. I really got a good schooling
• 36:46
  Speaker 2: in kind of the beginnings of what would be the counterculture,
• 36:52
  Speaker 2: and a lot of science fiction fans moved easily into
• 36:56
  Speaker 2: that later in the sixties.
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: So I'm a little younger than you are, and I
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: was certainly aware of music for seasons Novelty records, and
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: then the Beatles hit. It was a big line of
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: demarcation to what deg we were a music fan prior
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: to the explosion of the Beatles and everything had brought.
• 37:21
  Speaker 2: I was a huge doop fan when I was growing
• 37:25
  Speaker 2: up in Brooklyn, and I'm too young to be one
• 37:28
  Speaker 2: of those kids on the corner, but that was the
• 37:31
  Speaker 2: music of the streets. In the early nineteen sixties, I
• 37:34
  Speaker 2: got into collecting doop records. I went to the legendary
• 37:39
  Speaker 2: Times Square Records. There was a host of what were
• 37:42
  Speaker 2: called oldies stores, which kind of implied that they were
• 37:46
  Speaker 2: on the verge of obsolescence. But I really love do
• 37:50
  Speaker 2: oop music, and I also, you know, kind of coming
• 37:54
  Speaker 2: out of high school, got attracted to folk music. In fact,
• 37:59
  Speaker 2: I got my first guitar because I wanted to be
• 38:02
  Speaker 2: a lonely folks singer in the backyard. I wanted to
• 38:05
  Speaker 2: be Eric Anderson. But then the Beatles came along and
• 38:10
  Speaker 2: presented an entirely new band model. And this is about
• 38:15
  Speaker 2: the time when I'm starting to think about having a
• 38:19
  Speaker 2: band and you know, and singing for whatever reason. And
• 38:24
  Speaker 2: you know, and as we know, that was the seismic change.
• 38:28
  Speaker 2: I mean, all the do wop groups were very bitter
• 38:31
  Speaker 2: because they were blown out of the water in the
• 38:34
  Speaker 2: same way that say Elvis blew out an entire world
• 38:38
  Speaker 2: of pop music. You know. I love when change happens overnight.
• 38:43
  Speaker 2: We see this in rock and roll all the time.
• 38:45
  Speaker 2: You know, punk rock, you know, all of a sudden
• 38:48
  Speaker 2: changing the channel from hippie rock if you call it that,
• 38:52
  Speaker 2: or progressive rock, you know, grunge, rendering la hair metal
• 38:59
  Speaker 2: obsolute within months. You know, sometimes it happened seismically. But
• 39:06
  Speaker 2: I was one of those, along with many, many, many
• 39:09
  Speaker 2: others in my generation, who saw in the Beatles a
• 39:12
  Speaker 2: chance to say I can do that, whatever that is,
• 39:16
  Speaker 2: even if I don't know those chords that they're playing.
• 39:20
  Speaker 2: And so I was perfectly positioned. I'm probably what seventeen,
• 39:25
  Speaker 2: you know, I'm perfectly positioned to surf on what would
• 39:30
  Speaker 2: become the sixties, and for me, the sixties, especially in
• 39:34
  Speaker 2: rock and roll. And we can be nostalgic about it,
• 39:36
  Speaker 2: or we can say, oh, you know, that was then,
• 39:39
  Speaker 2: but there was so much experimentation and artistic progress and
• 39:46
  Speaker 2: giants of creativity, you know, in some ways I equate
• 39:52
  Speaker 2: it with you know, the Italian Renaissance. You know, these
• 39:56
  Speaker 2: these incredible musicians suddenly realizing certain cultural moment, which of
• 40:02
  Speaker 2: course comes into play with it, and you know, I
• 40:06
  Speaker 2: was able to surf along with it.
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: Okay, to what degue? Was there music in the home
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: growing up? And did you take piano lessons before guitar
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: or anything like that.
• 40:24
  Speaker 2: I wish I would have taken piano lessons, then I
• 40:26
  Speaker 2: might have read music. But my dad was a musician.
• 40:31
  Speaker 2: In fact, I'm the third generation local Lato too. My
• 40:34
  Speaker 2: grandfather was a drummer and a working drummer in like
• 40:39
  Speaker 2: wedding bands and stuff. So I didn't know that. I
• 40:42
  Speaker 2: didn't know that, you know, otherwise I would have taken
• 40:44
  Speaker 2: some drum lessons from him. My dad played accordion, which
• 40:48
  Speaker 2: he picked up when he lived in Europe representing an
• 40:52
  Speaker 2: American import company, and piano, and he started me on
• 40:57
  Speaker 2: accordion and Lord Love you know, the squeeze box. But
• 41:01
  Speaker 2: in terms of the music I was listening to, it
• 41:04
  Speaker 2: was a kid, It wasn't relevant at all, and it
• 41:07
  Speaker 2: was heavy and it was you know, so I round
• 41:11
  Speaker 2: the time around when I was like eleven. I started
• 41:14
  Speaker 2: when I was six, so I actually knew how to
• 41:17
  Speaker 2: read those dots. But I've lost that. But you know,
• 41:21
  Speaker 2: you know, but my dad played, and you know, but
• 41:25
  Speaker 2: I just wanted to play guitar like everybody. Plus, you know,
• 41:29
  Speaker 2: guitar is really I love the guitar because it's so easy.
• 41:33
  Speaker 2: You can learn how to play those three chords in
• 41:36
  Speaker 2: five minutes and be off and running. But it takes
• 41:39
  Speaker 2: a lifetime to understand its intricacies. And I'm still learning,
• 41:43
  Speaker 2: believe me. So that was the music, you know, I mean.
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: You know, okay, But prior to the Beatles, there were
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: a number of scenes. We have the earliest rock scene,
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: Rocket eighty eight. We have Elvis. Then it evolves into
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: the Philadelphia you know, Bobby Idell, baby in et cetera.
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: Early sixties, there's a big folks scene. Were you went
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: to that folks scene?
• 42:08
  Speaker 2: I was, you know, I loved phil Oaks, Like I said,
• 42:12
  Speaker 2: I loved Eric Anderson was my hero, you know, and
• 42:17
  Speaker 2: it seemed accessible to me. Where I grew up, there
• 42:21
  Speaker 2: were no rockabilly bands. That was entirely separate scene. The
• 42:25
  Speaker 2: only bands I saw when I moved to New Jersey
• 42:28
  Speaker 2: because there were I didn't know any band I was
• 42:30
  Speaker 2: too young in Brooklyn were instrumental bands. Remember there was
• 42:35
  Speaker 2: a band called the Renegades and a band called the
• 42:38
  Speaker 2: Dual Sonics, and they played dances and they usually had
• 42:41
  Speaker 2: a saxophone, and you know, they played kind of instrumentals.
• 42:47
  Speaker 2: So but I was still too young to participate in
• 42:51
  Speaker 2: that du up. Vocal harmony was the first time I
• 42:54
  Speaker 2: could sit and harmonize with my friends. I had high
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: hopes of being a high tenor, but of course my
• 43:01
  Speaker 2: voice is evolved at this point. I'm kind of a
• 43:05
  Speaker 2: baritone no matter how you look at it. But you know,
• 43:09
  Speaker 2: I mean, I was, I was young. I was perfectly
• 43:13
  Speaker 2: positioned for a group like the Beatles. I mean, of course,
• 43:16
  Speaker 2: I'm buying records off the radio all the time, the
• 43:19
  Speaker 2: girl groups, uh, you know, great pop songs, and I
• 43:23
  Speaker 2: still love many of them, you know, all the time.
• 43:27
  Speaker 2: I love the Klin Twins, Buddy Holly, I mean, but
• 43:31
  Speaker 2: all of them were songs I would hear on the radio,
• 43:34
  Speaker 2: w mc A, w ABC, that the AM classic stations,
• 43:39
  Speaker 2: w I n S with Murray the k the Boss
• 43:42
  Speaker 2: with the you know, I mean, Mary the Kay with
• 43:44
  Speaker 2: the you know, submarine race watching. And when I went
• 43:48
  Speaker 2: to camp and near Pens Philadelphia, I would tune in
• 43:52
  Speaker 2: to Jerry Blaffett Eat It with the heater, the boss
• 43:54
  Speaker 2: with the hot salesport cast all you young teenagers and uh,
• 43:58
  Speaker 2: you know, and he played a lot of group harmony stuff.
• 44:01
  Speaker 2: So that's kind of what I came out of. But
• 44:05
  Speaker 2: by the time I was old enough to actually pick
• 44:09
  Speaker 2: up an instrument and have some high hopes, you know,
• 44:14
  Speaker 2: already the guitar, the electric guitar was there, and I
• 44:18
  Speaker 2: bought my first one in nineteen sixty four. I wish
• 44:24
  Speaker 2: I still had it. It was a Gibson Les Paul Special,
• 44:28
  Speaker 2: one of those red slab bodies. I didn't appreciate it
• 44:32
  Speaker 2: all at it all because everybody had Fender Jazz Masters
• 44:35
  Speaker 2: and I had this wacky Gibson that's now worth tons
• 44:39
  Speaker 2: of money. But you know, I just started playing. A
• 44:43
  Speaker 2: friend of mine taught me some barchords, and by November
• 44:48
  Speaker 2: of nineteen sixty four, I played my first band gig
• 44:51
  Speaker 2: with the group we call the Vandals at the Pond,
• 44:55
  Speaker 2: the Fraternity Circuit at Rutgers where somewhere in the night,
• 45:00
  Speaker 2: you know, for twenty minutes you play shout and the
• 45:02
  Speaker 2: brothers would swim and beer on the floor. It was
• 45:05
  Speaker 2: a great training. It was really great training.
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: Okay, so your college experience everything from girls to the
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: studies to bands. There's some people form bands and they're
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: not really almost in college. They're busy traveling. What was
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: going on for you?
• 45:23
  Speaker 2: I was, you know, just going to school. You know,
• 45:26
  Speaker 2: I was, actually I'm actually very well trained for what
• 45:30
  Speaker 2: even though I would never have expected that. I was
• 45:32
  Speaker 2: an American history major, and my kind of beat was
• 45:37
  Speaker 2: cultural history. I wasn't too interested in politics or war stories,
• 45:42
  Speaker 2: so that's what I studied. Actually, if I could have
• 45:47
  Speaker 2: accessed Latin and Greek, I might have gone into ancient history.
• 45:51
  Speaker 2: I really loved Roman and Byzantine history. But there's no
• 45:56
  Speaker 2: way you can do that, and of course how relevant
• 45:59
  Speaker 2: is that to life today? But you know, I really
• 46:02
  Speaker 2: got a good grounding in cultural history, and I learned
• 46:05
  Speaker 2: how to play in a band. You know, we worked
• 46:08
  Speaker 2: almost every weekend playing you know, Delta, Kap Epsilon, the
• 46:13
  Speaker 2: jock fraternity, Lambda, Kay Alpha, the party fraternity, you know
• 46:19
  Speaker 2: Alpha Epsilon, Pie, the Jewish fraternity. You know, we just
• 46:23
  Speaker 2: went there, we played. We don't didn't do any originals.
• 46:26
  Speaker 2: Four sets and twenty five dollars a guy, which I
• 46:31
  Speaker 2: guess hasn't changed that much.
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: Twenty five dollars a guy was pretty good.
• 46:37
  Speaker 2: I know, I know it hasn't kept up with inflation,
• 46:40
  Speaker 2: I'm sure, but you know it was really fun to do.
• 46:43
  Speaker 2: And you know, I started out as a rhythm guitar
• 46:46
  Speaker 2: player and then slowly morphed into a lead singer, playing two,
• 46:50
  Speaker 2: not one, but two tambourines, and rode the evolution from
• 46:56
  Speaker 2: say sixty four to sixty seven, which was really large.
• 46:59
  Speaker 2: You know, we started playing and like Jerry Lee Lewis
• 47:01
  Speaker 2: and what did I say? And you know, kind of
• 47:04
  Speaker 2: the classics, and then as garage rock as it was
• 47:09
  Speaker 2: later cold then it was just teen bands. You know,
• 47:12
  Speaker 2: we would put dirty water in the set or do
• 47:14
  Speaker 2: the English stuff. You know, you Really Got Me. I
• 47:18
  Speaker 2: think at our first gig we wanted to do a
• 47:21
  Speaker 2: song that nobody had played on the circuit, so we
• 47:26
  Speaker 2: went to the radio. We chose you Really Got Me
• 47:29
  Speaker 2: by the Kinks, and so we were the first to
• 47:31
  Speaker 2: play that, you know, for the fraternities. Then of course
• 47:34
  Speaker 2: the beautiful irony is that is that I don't know.
• 47:38
  Speaker 2: Thirty five years later, I'm playing at a Tibet House
• 47:41
  Speaker 2: concert benefit at Carnegie Hall, and who's there but Ray
• 47:47
  Speaker 2: Davies And I'm in the house band and when the
• 47:50
  Speaker 2: solo comes, man, I get to play that solo. And
• 47:54
  Speaker 2: I thought, what a beautiful circle that is.
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: Okay, you graduate from college than what you know.
• 48:02
  Speaker 2: I'm trying to stay out of the draft.
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: So okay, let's stop there for a second. How did
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: you ultimately get out of the draft?
• 48:10
  Speaker 2: I did it the middle class way. I've passed my
• 48:13
  Speaker 2: physical I was classified one A, which since I was
• 48:20
  Speaker 2: on speed for three days and completely disheveled and incoherent,
• 48:24
  Speaker 2: they just put it to me. But I was able
• 48:27
  Speaker 2: to find a psychiatrist who wrote me a note saying
• 48:32
  Speaker 2: I was not fit for military service, and to be honest,
• 48:36
  Speaker 2: I probably wasn't. And I was able to submit that
• 48:40
  Speaker 2: and get a one y, you know, not something as
• 48:43
  Speaker 2: available to many who got sent to Vietnam.
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: But okay, from your eighteenth birthday when you have to register,
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: when do you get the sigh of relief of the
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: one Why?
• 48:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I was probably twenty one. I graduated school when
• 49:00
  Speaker 2: I was twenty because I'd skipped that grade and I
• 49:04
  Speaker 2: was going to school at NYU. I was taking a
• 49:08
  Speaker 2: master's degree, in American history. By then, I was kind of,
• 49:15
  Speaker 2: I don't know, not really paying that much attention to school.
• 49:18
  Speaker 2: I was starting to feel like, you know, what exactly
• 49:21
  Speaker 2: am I doing it? You know, And I was also
• 49:24
  Speaker 2: almost beginning to write That's what I thought I would do,
• 49:27
  Speaker 2: you know, Rutgers. I was on the school paper, so
• 49:31
  Speaker 2: I thought, you know, I don't have a band, so
• 49:36
  Speaker 2: you know, I'll become a rock journalist. And so I did.
• 49:40
  Speaker 2: But when I graduated, probably I guess it would be
• 49:46
  Speaker 2: sixty nine or something. That's when I got called up
• 49:49
  Speaker 2: and I got and I got out, which was great.
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: So, right, whatever it takes, So let's go back to NY.
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: You finished the master's degree at NY.
• 50:01
  Speaker 2: I did. I did. I had thoughts about going for
• 50:03
  Speaker 2: a doctorate, but one of my professors gave me a
• 50:09
  Speaker 2: C plus for something and that meant that you really
• 50:13
  Speaker 2: couldn't get into a good graduate program. But by then
• 50:16
  Speaker 2: I had one foot out the door. You know, I'd
• 50:18
  Speaker 2: already i believe, started writing for Jazz and Pop magazine
• 50:22
  Speaker 2: and starting on my career as a rock journalist, and
• 50:29
  Speaker 2: you know, and starting to live in New York. I'd
• 50:32
  Speaker 2: moved back to the city, and I was starting to
• 50:36
  Speaker 2: kind of enter into the social universe that would nurture
• 50:42
  Speaker 2: me as I as I grew deeper into the music scene.
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: Okay, how did you make that transition? Did the bell
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: go off? I'm going to be a rock journalist, and
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: how did you get the gigs?
• 50:54
  Speaker 2: I was very friendly with a guy named David Wally
• 50:57
  Speaker 2: who I went to Rutgers with, who was also on
• 51:00
  Speaker 2: the score.
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: You think I wrote the Frank Zappa book.
• 51:02
  Speaker 2: Yes, And at that point he was the boyfriend of
• 51:08
  Speaker 2: Patricia Kenneally, the editor of Jazz and Pop magazine and
• 51:14
  Speaker 2: who later married Jim Morrison in that witchy ceremony, and
• 51:21
  Speaker 2: he said to me, you know you should write some
• 51:25
  Speaker 2: reviews for them. I said sure, because he got a
• 51:28
  Speaker 2: free record. It was exciting, and my first review for
• 51:33
  Speaker 2: Jazz and Pop was The Small Faces Ogden's Nut Gone
• 51:37
  Speaker 2: Flake album. A great album, and my opening line of
• 51:41
  Speaker 2: it actually is kind of futuristic because it describes what
• 51:47
  Speaker 2: rock writing is like. And the opening line was, how
• 51:51
  Speaker 2: can you describe an aesthetic experience? And really that's that's
• 51:57
  Speaker 2: what you do as a writer. You know, you're trying
• 51:59
  Speaker 2: to to understand how a piece of in this sense
• 52:05
  Speaker 2: music works. Upon your emotions, your intellect and what it's
• 52:10
  Speaker 2: short circuits, you know. I mean a lot of times
• 52:14
  Speaker 2: you like a piece of music and then you have
• 52:16
  Speaker 2: to work backwards why. And so that that was my start,
• 52:22
  Speaker 2: and I started writing reviews for them. My beat, as
• 52:26
  Speaker 2: I called it, was kind of the groups I was
• 52:29
  Speaker 2: interested in. I ate Velvet Underground, you know, the MC five,
• 52:35
  Speaker 2: the Stooges and a lot of electure bands actually because
• 52:41
  Speaker 2: they seemed very very open to critical and you know analysis.
• 52:50
  Speaker 2: And I wrote what I think might have been the
• 52:54
  Speaker 2: first review national review of the Stuge's debut album, Usion,
• 53:00
  Speaker 2: a magazine out of Boston run by Robert Soma. And
• 53:05
  Speaker 2: after it came out, I got a call from a
• 53:08
  Speaker 2: guy named Danny Fields, who I didn't know, and he
• 53:11
  Speaker 2: said who are you? And I said, well, to be honest,
• 53:15
  Speaker 2: I've been trying to figure that myself. You know, I'm
• 53:18
  Speaker 2: kind of at a crossroads. He said, well, there's a
• 53:22
  Speaker 2: music editor Dennis Frohley and Bob Rudney have just left
• 53:26
  Speaker 2: Cavalier Magazine and you could be their music editor. Write
• 53:30
  Speaker 2: a column once a month. He's two hundred and fifty dollars,
• 53:33
  Speaker 2: which took care of my Rent, so I'm fine. All
• 53:36
  Speaker 2: of a sudden, he introduces me to the world of
• 53:39
  Speaker 2: rock journalism within New York, which was a very cool
• 53:44
  Speaker 2: world at the time. Lisa, Richard Robinson, Sandy Pearlman, Richard Meltzer,
• 53:51
  Speaker 2: just you know, a core of people, Lillian Roxon, and
• 53:56
  Speaker 2: you know, I started going to press parties, you know,
• 53:58
  Speaker 2: three times a week sometimes, you know, and sometimes you
• 54:02
  Speaker 2: get big headed about it, and you know, I think
• 54:04
  Speaker 2: you're more important than the group, which of course is
• 54:07
  Speaker 2: never true. And then you know, and then you get
• 54:10
  Speaker 2: friendly with the people, the record companies, and all of
• 54:14
  Speaker 2: a sudden, I'm there in an epicenter. I was supposed to.
• 54:18
  Speaker 2: I gave up my apartment for one hundred dollars a
• 54:20
  Speaker 2: month in the West Village because I was going to
• 54:23
  Speaker 2: go travel in Europe for six months. Be that as
• 54:26
  Speaker 2: it may. But Danny got me this gig, and so
• 54:29
  Speaker 2: I wound up staying and thank god, because it led
• 54:33
  Speaker 2: to my entire life.
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's back up. How'd you get the gig at Fusion?
• 54:39
  Speaker 2: You know, I was just a working guy, you know,
• 54:41
  Speaker 2: Robert Robert Soma called me up. You know, you would
• 54:44
  Speaker 2: write these reviews and send them to whoever.
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: And okay, so you worked it a little bit. You said, oh,
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: a guy got published. Anybody who might offer me work,
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: I'm going to send him a letter.
• 54:54
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you know, I got to be the associate
• 54:56
  Speaker 2: editor of Changes magazine, kind of underground. You know, there's
• 55:00
  Speaker 2: a lot of outlets you could write for, you know,
• 55:03
  Speaker 2: the local underground newspaper. You know, hardly get paid, but
• 55:08
  Speaker 2: who cared? You know, there was your name by any kay.
• 55:12
  Speaker 2: So yeah, and it was fun. I mean, like I said,
• 55:16
  Speaker 2: I love writing. It's it's part part of my DNA
• 55:21
  Speaker 2: at this point. And you know, I had kind of
• 55:25
  Speaker 2: put aside my my musical aspirations because I didn't have
• 55:30
  Speaker 2: a band, and you know, I didn't really see the
• 55:34
  Speaker 2: need for one until my life really changed when I
• 55:38
  Speaker 2: met Patty Smith.
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: Okay, you get the gig for two fifty dollars a month.
• 55:44
  Speaker 2: And all the records, all the records that you know
• 55:47
  Speaker 2: right right.
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: Which was people have no idea how important that was
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: back then, but that was it. Once you get that gig, economically,
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: are you always above water or you start at other
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: times in your life?
• 56:02
  Speaker 2: Well, thank god for press parties. You know, you get
• 56:05
  Speaker 2: fed three times a week. You know, those those chicken
• 56:08
  Speaker 2: wings went a long way, you know, and I wound
• 56:12
  Speaker 2: up writing, you know, for like five or six publications
• 56:16
  Speaker 2: at one time, you know, I writing for Rolling Stone
• 56:19
  Speaker 2: in the review section. I had a gig at an
• 56:24
  Speaker 2: English weekly called Disc and Music Echo, where you know,
• 56:29
  Speaker 2: when an English artist would come to New York, you know,
• 56:32
  Speaker 2: I'd go up to their healtel room and say, so,
• 56:35
  Speaker 2: how do you feel about being an American? You know,
• 56:37
  Speaker 2: write it out. The Robinsons were so great. I mean,
• 56:41
  Speaker 2: Richard was editing six magazines at the time. He edited Go.
• 56:46
  Speaker 2: We invented rock scene, you know, so there was no shortage.
• 56:51
  Speaker 2: And thank god, when I was a science fiction fan,
• 56:53
  Speaker 2: I learned how to type sixty words a minute, so
• 56:56
  Speaker 2: you know, I could really crank it out. And one
• 56:58
  Speaker 2: great thing about Richard is that he taught me not
• 57:01
  Speaker 2: to be precious about my writing.
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 57:04
  Speaker 2: I was like, he says, now, man, bang it out,
• 57:08
  Speaker 2: and pretty soon I got that facility to just sit there.
• 57:11
  Speaker 2: You know, I've got five articles to do, some you know,
• 57:14
  Speaker 2: some of which are under pseudonyms. You know. I think
• 57:17
  Speaker 2: Dave Salmon was one of mine. That's Salmon, Dave Backwards
• 57:21
  Speaker 2: and Raymond Lay Forchet and you just bang stuff out
• 57:24
  Speaker 2: and if you needed a quote, well, you know, make
• 57:27
  Speaker 2: it up as if the artist. You know, I mean,
• 57:30
  Speaker 2: I'm not writing high end journalism. I'm writing essentially, you know,
• 57:36
  Speaker 2: fan magazine stuff with the purpose. And you know there was,
• 57:41
  Speaker 2: you know, within this coterie of rock writers, you know,
• 57:45
  Speaker 2: there was always work to be had. It never paid much,
• 57:49
  Speaker 2: but I didn't need much. All I needed to do was,
• 57:54
  Speaker 2: you know, get my staffers macaroni and cheese, pay the rent,
• 58:00
  Speaker 2: and you know, have enough for a beer.
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: Okay, Well, you Forrest Gump, just bumping into these things.
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: Where is the layer you're not verbalizing where you're networking
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: asking for opportunities.
• 58:16
  Speaker 2: Oh, I'm surely networking. I mean, you know I'm out
• 58:19
  Speaker 2: there and people are networking me. I mean, in nineteen seventy,
• 58:27
  Speaker 2: when I'm pretty well working as a journalist, Lilia Roxon
• 58:32
  Speaker 2: and Danny Fields are advising Escoyer magazine about the quote
• 58:37
  Speaker 2: heavy hundred in the music business. Okay, so I'm the
• 58:42
  Speaker 2: token rock critic that they choose, and there's a picture
• 58:46
  Speaker 2: of me sitting there looking rock criticing. And I get
• 58:51
  Speaker 2: a call from Jack Holsman and he says are you
• 58:55
  Speaker 2: interested in becoming an independent talent scout for us? Well? Sure,
• 59:00
  Speaker 2: I mean that's how it worked. You know, somebody would
• 59:02
  Speaker 2: recommend you to this, they think, okay, you could do
• 59:05
  Speaker 2: a job. And you know, I worked for Lecture for
• 59:08
  Speaker 2: like four or five months. Nothing I suggested to them
• 59:12
  Speaker 2: had any traction. You know. I wanted them to sign
• 59:19
  Speaker 2: the band The Sidewinders, which contained Andy Paley. I tried
• 59:24
  Speaker 2: to get them to keep the Stooges for the third album.
• 59:27
  Speaker 2: I tried to get them to put out the stalk
• 59:29
  Speaker 2: Forest Group record they became Blue Orshed, a cult, but
• 59:34
  Speaker 2: nothing really stuck. But Jack did call me into his
• 59:38
  Speaker 2: office one day and say, I have an idea for
• 59:42
  Speaker 2: an album called Nuggets, where you find these kind of
• 59:47
  Speaker 2: under the radar tracks that have been forgotten. Could you
• 59:51
  Speaker 2: make up a list? And he gave me a couple suggestions,
• 59:54
  Speaker 2: one of which was Serpent Powers the Endless Tunnel. Great song,
• 59:59
  Speaker 2: great song, but eleven minutes long, some long jazz odyssey
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 2: from Circus Maximus' debut album, and a track from Little
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 2: Anthony and the Imperials Hallucinogenic record from sixty eight. But
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 2: he gave it to me, and I'm kind of like,
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 2: you know, somewhat full of myself, and I'm working a
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 2: village oldies at the time, So I just started assembling
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 2: a list of my favorite songs, about sixty of them.
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 2: I had no sense of direction hand it. In my
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 2: time at Electra Leaves, I'm back home, you know, banging
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 2: out interviews with whoever's in town, and I get a
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 2: call from Electra saying, we have the rights to all
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 2: these songs. What do we do with them? And I'm thinking,
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 2: what this thing is still happening? And so that became
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 2: you know, Nuggets. Can't say I would ever think about
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 2: talking about it a half century into the future, because
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 2: you know, it just was like kind of a somewhat
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 2: self indulgent and plus maybe I don't know the sense
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 2: of curation that time had arrived. You know. I know
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 2: it's a trope of garage rock at this point, and
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 2: you know, we all love garage rock. But if you
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 2: listen to my original Nuggets, it's all over the place stylistically,
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 2: you know, and you know, it's just a collection of
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 2: great songs that seemed to inspire people at a time
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 2: when rock was getting a bit too full of itself,
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 2: you know, to like virtuoso musicians, you know, so it
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 2: kind of brought things back to a grassroots the sense
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 2: of yearning that I had as a kid to be
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 2: in a band, to see who I could become, and
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 2: that I believe touched a lot of people all over
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 2: the world amazingly enough. So, yeah, I was out there,
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 2: you know, working on my brand over.
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: A couple of things. You've just said an important thing.
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: The time was right for those of us who were dedicated.
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: We looked at that and said, well, these songs are
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: not that obscure. Not why was it so successful, because
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: really things have been moving so fast or there were
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: a lot of people out of the loop that needed
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: to be brought into the mainstream.
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 2: I just think at that point, I mean, some of
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 2: those records on Nuggets are like four years old, five
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 2: years old. I'd had no perspective on what they were
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 2: except they seemed to be of another era. They had
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 2: been I don't know, forgotten or scorned. You know, the
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 2: late sixties was so incredible in terms of the possibilities
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 2: of improvisation and elaboration and taking rock to be an
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 2: art form. And you know, there was kind of a
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 2: little critical consensus at the time Greg Shaw and Lester
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 2: Bangs that things needed to be brought back to a
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 2: certain sense of a certain sense of acquiescence to the
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 2: classic strictures of the pop single quick bang, hit it, good, chorus, youthful,
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 2: you know, slightly antagonistic, as if the music is being
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 2: invented for the first time. And I believe that's one
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 2: of the reasons why it had legs into the punk era,
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 2: because all of a sudden, it's like, we want our
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 2: own you know, we want our own music, and we
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 2: want it to be able to start it. We wanted
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 2: to bring it down to ground zero and build it
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 2: up again again. I was not aware. I mean, I
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 2: guess I was. You read the liner notes and I'm
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 2: expert locating it, but I really wasn't that aware. I
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 2: was just doing it on impulse and intuition. And these
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 2: songs are fun, they sound great together, and you know,
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 2: if I would have taken it seriously, the record would
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 2: have been stodgy. I would say, oh, well, we have
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 2: to have that one or this one is But it's
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 2: kind of two types of records. It's like it's one
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 2: of those k Tell two o'clock in the morning hits
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 2: of the sixties, you know, let's get get there. And
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 2: it's got a scholarly context as in the the you know,
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 2: the subtitle original artifact for the first psychedelic era, like
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 2: the Yazoo Blues records that I adored, you know, Blues
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 2: of Southeast Georgia nineteen twenty seven to nineteen thirty three.
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 2: This artist is playing it in a drop X tuning.
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 2: You know, they kind of caught both ends of something.
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 2: And I was first on the block, simple as that.
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 2: I don't think i'd invent it. I lived through it.
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 2: Maybe I understood it, but the fact is is that
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 2: I just got there first by luck. You know, that
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 2: music was waiting to be discovered.
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: Okay, I don't know what it was like in the
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: eye of the hurricane, but that double album got incredible
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: amount of press and for the first time I could remember,
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 1: and for the first time for a long time, your
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: name was attached. Everyone said, oh, let me Kate. There
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: was not a review without your name. Okay, I signed
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: the back of it. I don't know no what I'm
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: trying to say. To what degree was that conscious? And
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: to what degree could you feel that?
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 2: I know, I guess it was conscious. You know, I
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 2: wrote the liner notes, I gathered the songs. It was
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 2: my project. I don't really know, to be honest, perhaps
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 2: I was presumptuous. I don't know.
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: I know I'm more interested in the other side. Could
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: you perceive that you suddenly had worldwide visibility the people
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: who knew who Lenny K was, Oh, Lenny K. He
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: put together nuggets.
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 2: Well, you know, I'm still known for that, which is
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 2: kind of funny. But the fact is that I don't know.
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 2: I was just happy it came out. I mean, it
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 2: got really good reviews and sold nothing, sold nothing. In fact,
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 2: around the early eighties, I got a letter and it
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 2: also was reissued by Swire in nineteen seventy six. But
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 2: I got a letter from Warner Brothers saying this is
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 2: never going to make back its royalties, so we're going
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 2: to stop sending you royalty statements. What was my royalty?
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 2: Seven hundred and fifty dollars So okay, you know, but
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 2: like I said, seven hundred and fifty dollars worth of
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 2: beer goes along way.
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: This album's had a long life. Did you ever ultimately
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: get any royalties?
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Actually a friend of mine who worked, you know,
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 2: getting royalties about in the early nineties chased Electra down
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 2: and I think I got like or whoever owns e
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 2: Lecture or what, And you know I got like around
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 2: I don't know, eight or ten grand I think I
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 2: had one percent royalty on it or something. But to
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 2: be honest, I don't do things for money. I know
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 2: that's hard to say, and I hope that anybody.
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: Wait, we're not talking to Elton John here. Okay, no, no,
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: not so. The point is it's one thing for someone
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: who's playing arenas, et cetera. Oh, I don't do things
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: for money. It's another thing. You have to survive. You
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 1: need money.
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 2: I am able to survive. I don't have a lot
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 2: of needs, you know. I mean, I got that Lamborghini
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 2: in my mind, but that's all I needed there. You know,
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 2: I don't have I don't really, you know. I live
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 2: in a very modest house that actually I own at
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 2: this point. You know, I have enough guitars and books
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 2: and records to entertain me for another lifetime. I do things,
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 2: all the things that I've done, you know, I don't
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 2: do for money. Essentially, I like to get paid. I
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 2: am a professional. I am a member of local Ato too.
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 2: But on the other hand, I you know, I've never
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 2: done anything for money, and the things that I've made
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 2: money from are honest. Then you know, I never started
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 2: playing with Patty thinking this is going to be my
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 2: gateway to the future.
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 2: It was just some weird art project that just kept
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 2: going and understanding itself and becoming organic. And by the
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 2: time we actually had a real band two or three
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 2: years after we started, sounded like us. To me, that's
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 2: the satisfaction I get. What did David Lynch say? The
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 2: pleasure is in the doing, And that's what I feel
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 2: about my record too. You know, I've taken care of
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 2: all my recording expenses because it's mine. You know, if
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 2: it makes money, great, But I really enjoyed building these things.
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 2: You know, if the cash comes through, I'll take it
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 2: and I'll go on eBay drunk and buy something I
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 2: don't need. But to be honest, I just love realizing work.
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 2: That to me is a great blessing.
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's go back. How do you end up working
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: in a record store? How many records store? Emerson for
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 1: how long?
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 2: I would always go into Village Oldies and Bleeker Bob,
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 2: who is quite obstreperous. You know, you'd have to be
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 2: there for twenty minutes while he piled invective and you
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 2: don't know what you're talking about on you. And then
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 2: he would reveal himself as a heart of Gold and
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 2: his partner broadway out and I would go in there
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 2: buy some records. He said, So, when are you going
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 2: to start working here? I thought, Oh, that's a good idea.
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 2: I wouldn't mind it. So I started six days a week,
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 2: ten dollars a day. I mean, as I like to
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 2: add all the records I could filch. But you know,
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 2: I would work there six hour shifts, you know, and
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 2: really get a sense of the subculture of record collecting,
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 2: which is very, very beautiful. You know, these somewhat mutant
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 2: people coming in every Saturday and wanting some weird genre.
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 2: You know. You know this guy coming in. Oh it's
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 2: mister Simon Bill. Okay, yeah, we have a new record
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 2: for you. I just had a lot of affection for
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 2: that because I'm part of it. You know, I still
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 2: go to record fairs. I still can't resist it. If
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 2: I'm at a flea market, flipping through those albums and
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 2: seeing if there's anything worthy aside from you know, the
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 2: usual stuff. You know, I just in fact, I wrote
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 2: a song called Record Collector about this guy, Rick Whitezell,
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 2: who used to edit gold Mine magazine in the seventies
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 2: and eighties, and we were friendly, and he would send
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 2: me tapes of Alan Freed on the radio and I'd
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 2: send him amta. You know, we just were friendly. Then
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 2: one day I pick up gold Mine and I realized
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 2: and I read that he's passed away, that he had
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 2: a congenital illness that confined him to a wheelchair. I thought,
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 2: you know, that's something I never knew about him. But
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 2: he found his soul in the subculture of record collecting.
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: And so you know, okay, just stop there for one second.
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: Oh I can't no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no no.
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: I want to talk about that. In terms of record collecting,
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 1: I remember passing up a cut out version of Lumpy
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 1: Gravy and then looking for years before I finally bought
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: an import copy at an exorbitant price. Didn't the Internet,
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: just like with guitars, but even more so, didn't it
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: surface all the rarities? And what are you looking for
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 1: when you go to a record swap meet or something today.
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 2: I'm looking for nothing. That's the great thing about my
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 2: record collection. I have so many genres, you know, am I.
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 2: It's like what part of what niche will I go to?
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 2: Because what I usually do is I go there, stand
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 2: in the car, smoke a bone. So my my, my
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 2: buying instinct is lower than I don't really need this,
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 2: and I just follow my and you know, walk around,
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 2: you know, see what attracts me, ask to have something played,
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 2: See what what kind of place I'm at. When I
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 2: go with my friend Tom, you know, let's check out
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 2: Hawaiian records. Hawaiian lap steel is our is our is
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 2: our thing today, and so you know, we look around,
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 2: we find some stuff. I like to think that I
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 2: know a lot about music, but the fact is you
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 2: walk into any any record fair, I may know ten
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 2: percent of the records. I may have heard of another
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 2: ten percent fifteen. But in that seventy five percent there's
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 2: such great music and it's just waiting to be discovered.
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 2: I'm back in the seventy eight world because I just
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 2: the girl that takes care of my cat, found the
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 2: Voice of Music half console from the fifties, and she said,
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 2: do you want it? I said, I don't need it,
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 2: no room, but it fit perfectly in my parlor. So
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 2: I got it, and then I put a seventy eight
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 2: on it to hear it pumping out of that speaker
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 2: with an amplifier inside. That's kind of like Offender at Princeton. Man,
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 2: it sounded revelatory, And so now you know when I
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 2: passed the seventy ags, I don't know. I just love
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 2: living in the world of music, That's all I can
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 2: tell you, you know, And I feel like the people
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 2: who also live in it are very good hearted. You
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 2: know that they're anxious more well, not only to show
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 2: off their rarity. I got this, You'll never find it,
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 2: but also they want to share their knowledge, their sensibility,
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 2: and their sense of adventure in this universe. And so
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 2: that's why I'm happy to make a record for them,
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 2: because you never know, going local, forty years from now,
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 2: some guy will be trolling through the antique record fair
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 2: and said, well, LP, interesting, I have one of those players.
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 2: Who is this guy? Maybe I'll look him up on
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 2: my mental you know aiphone? Oh interesting?
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 1: Well, okay, so you're working in the record store. Yes,
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: I remember. I worked this job slinging food at a
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 1: ski area. Everybody had to come through there, and that's
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 1: how I met all the big people. You're working at
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: the record store. Is that such that everyone's going to
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: pass through, and now you end up knowing everybody.
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 2: I met a lot of people there, you know, Robert
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 2: Plant and Jimmy Page would come in looking for records.
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 2: Bob was very friendly with Frank Zappa, who would come
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 2: in and look for records. I wasn't there at that time.
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 2: I wonder if Bob said to him, Rag, you don't
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 2: know anything about it, but you know, I mean, it
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 2: was great, but it was also you know, random Saturday nights,
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 2: we'd be sitting there and I'd be pulling records from
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 2: the stacks and playing them just for my own amusement,
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 2: my own little radio show. And that's of course where
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 2: Patty and I first got he getting friendly because when
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 2: she called me up one day out of nowhere after
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 2: I'd written an article for Jazz and Pop on on
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 2: a cappella do wop music and it touched a nerve
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 2: in her because that was the music she listened to
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 2: when she was growing up in South Jersey. You know,
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 2: she started coming in the shop, and you know, I'd
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 2: play our favorite records, My hero by the Blue Notes,
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 2: Today's the day, Maureen Gray, Bristol Stomp and we just
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 2: got friendly.
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 1: I mean Bristol.
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 2: Kis in Bristol sharp as a pistol, which is actually
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 2: every day of the week by the students. They could
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 2: have they could have sued them because that is every
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 2: day of the week without with different words.
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 1: Okay, to go sideways for a second. You're right in
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: for all these magazines. You got a job in the
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: record store. Are you still playing the guitar?
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 2: Not much? Nope, nope. I tried. I tried out for
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 2: a couple of bands. I didn't make them. I played
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 2: with a group they called themselves the Reality Sandwich at
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 2: Cheetah in turn of the seventies. They were into Jeff Beck.
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 2: I was into John Sippolina of the Quicksilver Messenger Service.
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 2: So that didn't last long. I really wasn't playing and
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 2: there was no scene in New York. People find this
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 2: hard to believe, but in the early seventies there were
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 2: no underline, no rock clubs, no place to play until
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 2: you know, I mean the Mercer Street Arts Center had
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 2: like some renegade bands like The Dolls and Suicide, but
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 2: CPGB hadn't open Max's was kind of a stopover for
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 2: touring national acts, so there was no rock scene. So
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 2: it wasn't like you could go down and meet musicians
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 2: and say, hey, let's let's do something.
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 1: Okay, soon you're meeting Patty. What is she like? Then
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 1: hanging with Robert Mapelethorpe. What's going on?
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 2: She's just a real human person. She's fun, she's she's
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 2: open minded. I didn't know her that well when she
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 2: asked me to play at the first reading with her.
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 2: She wanted to shake it up because she knew Gregor
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 2: Ricorso would be in the audience and he hated boring poets.
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 2: He would always heckle them from the balcony. So she
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 2: thought she would shake it up. And she knew I
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 2: played a little guitar. And I played a little guitar,
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 2: and you know, she said, would you back me up?
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 2: I went over to the loft where she was saying
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 2: with Robert, I you know, we did like two or
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 2: three songs. I mostly watched how she breathed. I played
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 2: some simple rhythmic chords underneath her. We did it at
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 2: Saint Mark's Church in February of seventy one. It was
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 2: received rapturously by the assembled of one hundred people of
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 2: New York, various artists and tastemakers and whatever. And we
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 2: didn't do it again until November of seventy three. It
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 2: was just kind of like some weird, weird art happening,
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 2: never meant to be anything. I mean, who knew? And
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 2: when we started playing again, it was still who knew?
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: You know? It was her was why why did you
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: start again?
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 2: She did another one of her readings, and I would
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 2: always see her around, and you know, she would give
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 2: a poetry reading up on a roof and soho I'd
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 2: be there to, you know, tell her how great she was.
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 2: But you know, I didn't have any thoughts that it
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 2: was going to be a good thing. Yeah, it just was.
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 2: I was in her fan club.
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: And.
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 2: You know, then she did another reading in November that year,
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 2: and she said, I want to come up and play
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 2: our three songs again. I said sure. And then a
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 2: week later, a month later, she got a gig at
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 2: the West End Cafe up by Columbia and went up
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 2: there and did another three songs, and then we got
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 2: a gig at Max's. Her manager, Jane Freeman, got us
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 2: a gig opening up for phil Oaks over the holidays,
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 2: and I was on stage the whole set. You know.
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 2: Sometimes she would work with the piano players, sometimes I play.
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 2: It just was like, you know what, like topsy, It
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 2: just grew and you know, I mean I could tell
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 2: early on that Patty had the attention of the audience.
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 2: They might not have understood at all what we were doing,
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 2: and we didn't understand it either, but they were wrapped
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 2: with attention and that was an interesting thing. And we
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 2: just kept following the trail, not trying to direct it
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 2: and not saying, oh man, let's have a rock band.
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 2: You know. You know, we were a trio myself, her
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 2: and Richard Sol for over a year, you know, until
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 2: we started feeling like the music was starting to grow
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 2: and we got Ivan Krawl and then we started playing
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 2: more and we felt the need for a drum, and
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 2: finally finally we went electric. You know, we had all
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 2: the pieces, but we sounded like ourselves and that was
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 2: a very gratifying thing.
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 1: Okay, a couple of things. It is so hard to
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 1: make it nearly impossible talented mostes fifty percent did you
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 1: get a vibe from Patty from the moment you met her. Wait,
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 1: this woman is different. She's going somewhere.
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 2: I never thought she was going somewhere. I just thought
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 2: she was really interesting and creative. I loved her poetry,
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 2: you know, especially you know, when she would recite her poetry.
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 2: That was enough for me, you know, it was it
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 2: was great poetics. The fact that we could set some
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 2: of it to music was really revelatory. And then we
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 2: started doing this thing where she would do a poem
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 2: and then we would segue into a piece of music.
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 2: And then as the piece of music developed, she would
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 2: begin to improvise on it. And I'm not talking about like,
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 2: you know, jazz improvisation. She would go on these storytelling
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 2: voyages that really would capture the attention of the audience.
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 2: And you know, we didn't know why. We didn't know.
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 2: I didn't even know how it might be preserved on
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 2: a record, you know, because it was so ephemeral. It
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 2: was in the air. And that's why we went in
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 2: the studio and did that Hey Joe version Flash Piss
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 2: Factory single. We were able to afford three hours in
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 2: the back room of Electric Lady thanks to Robert Ablethorpe,
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 2: and you know, it was just how do we get
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 2: this on a record. It was all kind of searching
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 2: in the dark with a light going on further off
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 2: in the distance.
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: Okay, by the time we hit the early seventies, it's
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 1: not the business it was. There's a level of sophistication.
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: Clive Davis even writes his book seventy four, to what
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: degree are you people doing your people? What degree is
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 1: the assembled multitude doing this thing? Hey, wait a second,
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 1: there are record companies. Maybe this can be something. How
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: do we work it? Who should we talk to?
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 2: Well, you know, we had a manager, Jane Freeman, who
• 1:23:43
  Speaker 2: was familiar with the business. She was the publicist for Woodstock.
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 2: You know, she took our little single around to some
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 2: of the record companies. I'm at Ertigan famously said, put
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 2: it in the trash, and Jane, to her credit, said okay.
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 2: She went over to the trash, picked it up, and
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 2: she said, we can sell this at our next show.
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 2: You know, we were off the point, but we started
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 2: to have a following in New York City. Lord knows how,
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 2: you know. We would set up these kind of rogue
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 2: gigs in restaurants. I remember we played this place, the
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 2: Blue Hawaii Room in the Hotel Roosevelt near Grand Central
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 2: Station and there was a line down the block. I
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 2: don't know how, except people started feeling some energy. And
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 2: it was concurrent with the time that there seemed to
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 2: be a lot of energy in downtown New York City,
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 2: which I write about quite a bit in the New
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 2: York nineteen seventy five chapter of Lightning Striking. But yeah,
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 2: there seemed to be a lot of kind of rogue
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 2: energy coming out of the East Village. And that's when
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 2: CBGB started, and we started hanging out there with a
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 2: bunch of other miss bands, none of which sounded like
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 2: each other. And when we finally played there with television
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 2: in the spring of seventy five, all of a sudden,
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 2: this locus of energy started attracting more than the other
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 2: members of the band. I don't know how it happened,
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 2: but sometimes you can feel the need for people. I
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 2: believe as a cultural historian that sometimes the universe calls
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 2: for an artist. You know, would Patty have made it
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 2: that well today in this current you know, I don't know,
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 2: But all I know is that there was certain longing
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 2: for what we were doing, and you know, we it
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 2: was like riding the wave. We just kept moving forward,
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 2: moving forward. We we never really explained ourselves because we
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 2: didn't want to. You know, one of the things we're
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 2: about is not to be defined. You know, we're not
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 2: punk rock. We're not you know. We have as much
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 2: pasted as we have future. We love free jazz, we
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 2: love cinematic storytelling, We love a great Motown hit single.
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 2: We love all these things. And how do we put
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 2: it together in something that's unique and ours? And it
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 2: wasn't like we sat around and schemed it. Maybe people
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 2: schemed things today. We just followed its trail, like you know,
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 2: the little crumbs of you know, Hansel and Gretel.
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: So how does it turn into a record deal?
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 2: We were starting to get press in the underground, you know,
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 2: Soho Weekly News, Village Voice. There was a little interest,
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 2: and you know, we had tried. We went up to
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 2: RCA and did an audition for them. I guess in
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 2: February of seventy five. We hadn't we didn't have a
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 2: drummer yet, you know. We did Glory and Hunter gets
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 2: Captured by the game, the Great Marvelette song, and you know,
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 2: but words started getting around and Clive Davis, who quite savvy,
• 1:27:24
  Speaker 2: you know, and has his ear to the ground, and
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 2: you know, possibly had known Patty from when she was
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 2: hanging out with Steve Paul and the Johnny Winter crew.
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 2: Came to see us, and we went up to his office.
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 2: We auditioned. Can't imagine what he thought. And the only
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 2: thing Patty wanted was create a freedom and he gave
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 2: it to us. He had, I believe in some ways
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 2: he had a very traditional artist roster Barry Manilow, Melyssa Manchester,
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 2: Eric Carmon, and he wanted a Maverick element in that
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 2: and and we were the Mavericks. And you know that's
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 2: how we came to make horses.
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: Okay, just to jump forward. Clyde is legendary for messing
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 1: with the art, so she had she had control as
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: years passed by, To what degree did he give his input?
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 1: Shall we sir?
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 2: He always said one thing, Can I have another rock song?
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 2: He didn't mess with us at all. Gotta say yeah,
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 2: he accepted. He just said, you know, how about another
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 2: rock song? And that was it. You know, whether it
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 2: was a hit or not, he really because how could
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 2: you start pulling Patty back if you look at something
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 2: like Birdland or Land, you know, or more or more
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 2: outra areas of exploration. You know, what, what are you
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 2: going to say? This? This needs to be a pop single.
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 2: You know, we never really had pop single except for
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 2: Because the Night. Not that we didn't try, but you know,
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 2: it's just not in our dna. We would always do
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 2: something to undermine it, or to make it not palatable
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 2: to radio or not elementary enough. I don't actually know.
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 2: But the fact is is we did our work and
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 2: Clive Clive went along with it. Got to hand it
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 2: to him. He was there for us when we need it,
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 2: and he got his payback because Horses surely one of
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 2: the weirder records of all time. You know, it was
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 2: right up there in the top fifty. Who knew? I didn't.
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 2: I'm just trying to keep my guitar into.
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 1: Okay, how did John Cale end up producing it?
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 2: We we respected his art, Patty especially respected the sound
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 2: on his records, and as John told us at one time,
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 2: I don't do that as my engineer. But you know,
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 2: we love the Velvet Underground. We love their reach, their
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 2: their sense of avante, and we felt that John would
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 2: understand us. He did to some extent. You know, he
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 2: kept pushing us. I believe that he had in mind
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 2: a more arranged record. He was a little bit in
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 2: his Brian Wilson period, and we wanted to preserve our
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 2: currency as an eternal rock band. You know, we don't
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 2: want a bunch of overdubs or you know, and you know,
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 2: I believe producers are there for many reasons. Sometimes they're
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 2: a mirror. Who do you want to be? If the
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 2: producer says he wants you to be like that or
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 2: she and you want to be like that, well that's
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 2: the mirror. And you know, John Birdland would not exist
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 2: on the record without John saying to us, you want
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 2: to have improvisation in what is essentially a three minute poem,
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 2: you better prove it to me. And he just kept
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 2: pushing us and pushing us, and you know, around take
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 2: six we thought, oh yeah, we're almost there. He kept
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 2: pushing us, and that and that song happened in the studio.
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 2: That nine minutes of take taking Flight would not have
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 2: happened had not John not allowed us to settle. He
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 2: understood not allowing to settle. Whether the tac piano on
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 2: radio on Redondo Beach was a good idea, that's left
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 2: to history to decide. It does disappear a third of
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 2: the way through the song because we had a lengthy
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 2: discussion over it. But you know, that's that's the dynamic
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 2: of a record, how everybody plays the take, you get
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 2: at that moment in time. Records are not as planned
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 2: as people think. You know, it's you can look at
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 2: a record and say, oh, it should have been like this,
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 2: or you know, no, it's that day, that take, that moment,
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 2: how you're feeling that amp sound, that's you know, the
• 1:32:14
  Speaker 2: wheel of fortune. That's a record. And you know, for
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 2: whatever its flaws or gifts, horses communicated because the time
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 2: called for it, the time called for that call to arms.
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 2: Patty always said it was we were like Paul Revere,
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 2: trying to, you know, stir up what seemed to be
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 2: a moribund music scene, whether it was more abund or not.
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 2: Always great records coming out, but we wanted to help
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 2: create the next generation because, to be honest, we had
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 2: our foot in the past generation as much as the
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 2: future generation. So we really wanted to kind of keep
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 2: this music that we loved alive and and you know,
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 2: and creative.
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 1: Let's stay on the tip of producers. The next album
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 1: was made with a recently passed Jack Douglas. What was
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 1: that experience like.
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 2: Well, it was great. Jack was fantastic. He put three
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 2: chord changes into Ask the Angels, I mean, the key
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 2: changes was he was great. We had been on the
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 2: road for a year and as you know, we had
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 2: grown from being a club band, you know, with you
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 2: know two somewhat powerhouse rock and roll combination, you know,
• 1:33:49
  Speaker 2: which made our fan base somewhat suspect of us, because
• 1:33:53
  Speaker 2: they really like you to stay where you are. You know,
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 2: they've sold out. You know, when you sell out, you
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 2: know you want that.
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 1: You know, you want to.
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 2: Say, okay now, you know, we wanted to do our work.
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 2: I believe Radio Ethiopia. It's our kind of black Sheep.
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 2: We were trying to react against certain precious things about
• 1:34:19
  Speaker 2: our debut and also kind of express ourselves as a
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 2: full fledged band, and Jack was great for that, you know,
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 2: really allowed us to explore as much as as much
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 2: as we could. You know, there's very specific songs on
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 2: that record, but there's also fields of complete avante experimentation,
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 2: and Jack was there for all of it. He really
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 2: he encouraged us to become who we were at that
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 2: moment in time, and that's an important thing.
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 1: So, how did Jimmy Iavian end up working with you?
• 1:34:58
  Speaker 1: And what was that like?
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 2: Jimmy was great because he came in at the end
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 2: of Radioeciopia. Jack had already started moving into the first
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 2: Cheap Trick album. So Jimmy, who was working at the
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 2: record plant with Bruce Springsteen and John Lennon, was there
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 2: and he was kind of a brash kid, but he
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 2: had a sense of vision. He had a sense of
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 2: vision of what Patty could be that and in a
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 2: way he became her friend in a time when she
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 2: was at her most vulnerable because toward the end of
• 1:35:36
  Speaker 2: the Radioecopia tour was when she fell off the stage
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 2: when we were opening for Bob Seger, and he gave
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 2: us about two feet of room in front of his
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 2: immovable drum set. And you know, so I think both
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 2: of them worked together to make an album to which
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 2: there would be no sense of misinterpretation, a really strong positive,
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 2: this is what we stand for album. And he worked hard.
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 2: He took us in the studio early on, you know,
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 2: months before the record, you know it was done. We
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 2: started recording out New Jersey. We did Space Monkey, and
• 1:36:24
  Speaker 2: we started He kept on us to write songs. He
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 2: was looking obviously for a hit, not something that came
• 1:36:31
  Speaker 2: easily to us, Like I would be out in the
• 1:36:33
  Speaker 2: studio and strumming some chords and he'd become out, that's great,
• 1:36:37
  Speaker 2: that's great, keep it going, and the song would turn
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 2: out to be ghosts dance acoustic with you know, recorded
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 2: in the round. You know, it wasn't, but he had
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 2: a sense of that Patty could be at home with
• 1:36:52
  Speaker 2: a hit. And when he heard Bruce's version of Because
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 2: the Night, which was kind of unformed, it had its
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 2: rhythm was almost like it was almost Latin. He almos
• 1:37:08
  Speaker 2: had a Latin rhythm and he kind of mumbled the
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 2: verses and you know, and I don't think he was
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 2: comfortable with it in an album that he was piling up,
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 2: you know, forty or fifty or sixty tracks. So anyway,
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 2: he got Bruce to give us the song and then
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 2: he went to town and made it a hit, made
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 2: it a damn hit. I remember him and Shelley Acus
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 2: behind the behind the board and those opening drums when
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 2: they come and you know they're mixing it, of course
• 1:37:41
  Speaker 2: by hand, because that's the way they did it. Then
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 2: they both had their fingers on the faders and they
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 2: just went yeah, and those drums come bounding in and yeah,
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 2: it's a great hit. We love playing it and it's
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 2: it's great to have a song that people were respawn to.
• 1:38:01
  Speaker 2: And even for our non hits, they respond they love
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 2: dancing barefoot, pissing in the river, summer Cannibals. Uh So,
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 2: I mean, I feel like we have a very good
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 2: repertoire of songs that are meaningful and touch people within.
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 2: And then of course there's a persona of Patty, which
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 2: is so righteous and she's such a great performer and
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 2: such a an honest person. So there there's my my
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 2: brief for Patty.
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 1: Okay, when do you realize because the Night is a hit?
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 2: Immediately it comes out Vin Skelza, No no, no, no.
• 1:38:43
  Speaker 1: No, no, no, no no, I'm not talking about it. It
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: is a hit. Tell me Bruce's arrangement was different. You're
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 1: working with Jimmy. At what point from the moment Bruce
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 1: gives it to you or in the mix, where do
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 1: you say, wait a second, this is something different.
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 2: Well, you know when we took it into you know,
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 2: when the band played it, we we rocked it up,
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 2: we took it on you know, we made it tough,
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 2: and as it grew in the studio, it was it
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 2: was obviously a hit. It was obviously like something that
• 1:39:15
  Speaker 2: had all the components of what a hit is, including
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 2: a mega chorus, mega chorus and whatever we think we're
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 2: in pop music. You know, this is this is not
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 2: like you know, for quatrains of a symphony. You know,
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 2: people like to have something. They rolled down the window,
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 2: they stick their arm out, they go, yeah, because the
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 2: Night I was playing for lovers and that's a hit.
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 2: And I do it myself whenever I hear Katie Perry's
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 2: roar man, I'm hard away. You know, hits are great.
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 2: I never I never deny a hit. And uh, you know,
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 2: sister Christian, when that comes on the radio, I am voting,
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 2: you know, I mean, hits they're great, you know. I uh,
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 2: I just I love them. You know. Sometimes they're not
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 2: that deep, and that's okay. I don't require that, you know,
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 2: And sometimes they have deeper meanings, I believe, because the
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 2: Night has a lot of levels of meaning. But the
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 2: fact is is that it's a hit. And you know,
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 2: I've heard it sung along too in many a country,
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 2: and people love to sing along.
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 1: Okay, yes, So then why do you work with Todd
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 1: runggreand on the next album? What's that like?
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 2: Well, to do an album that's a bit more feminine perhaps,
• 1:40:48
  Speaker 2: you know, I mean, you always change your producer because
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 2: you don't want to do the last record sideways. When
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 2: I was a producer, I had a thing, you know,
• 1:40:59
  Speaker 2: I'll do your record. If I do it, great, You've
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 2: gotten all my moves. You need to move on or
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 2: everything changes, that's you know, or else everything changes and
• 1:41:13
  Speaker 2: then I can come in and do whatever it is.
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 2: But you know, a producer is a kind of personality
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 2: to a record. Patty knew Todd for years and years
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 2: and years. We went up to Woodstock. It was a
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 2: very good working environment. Todd has this philosophy which I've
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 2: always quoted. If you know what you want, I'll get
• 1:41:36
  Speaker 2: it for you. If you don't know what you want,
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 2: I'll do it for you. You know, we kind of
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 2: knew what we've wanted, except you know, the stacked harmonies
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 2: on Frederick, which he said, okay, sing here, sing here,
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 2: sing here, and it was and it was great. And
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 2: also I knew that Patty was was thinking about moving
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 2: that that the original incarnation of the group was reaching
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 2: the end of its lifeline. I mean, that's a very
• 1:42:06
  Speaker 2: wave goodbye. I mean that last cut where she's walking
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 2: on the peak on the beach with John Paul the First,
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 2: it really is her farewell bye by you know, Frederick,
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 2: Bye bye, hey hey. Maybe we will come back some day,
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 2: but till then, on the wings of a dove, off
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 2: we go to the land of love. And by then
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 2: her and fred were deeply in love, and her attention
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 2: was divided. And I also believe that she had done
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 2: what she had set out to do at that period
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 2: of time, you know, the journey from Jesus died from
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 2: somebody's sins but not mine personal responsibility, to bending the
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 2: knee to John Paul the First, walking on the beach,
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 2: that's a beautiful journey and answers the questions of art
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 2: in some ways. To me, it's like the Velvet Underground's
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 2: original quartet of albums, you know, moving from confrontation to acceptance.
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 2: And that's something that artists long for because in the end,
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 2: that's why you make art, to understand yourself and to
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 2: perhaps move beyond who you thought you'd be and who
• 1:43:25
  Speaker 2: you might be. And if I can draw an analogy.
• 1:43:29
  Speaker 2: That's kind of like where I am at the moment.
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 2: You know, I have a long history, and I love
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 2: my history, and I'll celebrate it with anybody. But I've
• 1:43:40
  Speaker 2: understood all these places. I'm not going to make a
• 1:43:44
  Speaker 2: garage record. I'm not going to make any of the
• 1:43:47
  Speaker 2: records I've been involved in before, or write the books
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 2: that I've already written. I'm interested in seeing who I
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 2: will be, because that's how you become your feu Sure.
• 1:44:01
  Speaker 1: Okay, Todd works differently from some of the people you
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 1: work with previously. You go to Woodstock, he gives you
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 1: X period of time, four weeks, works very fast. Did
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 1: you notice the style was different and that what was
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 1: that like compared to working with Jimmy?
• 1:44:18
  Speaker 2: You know, I remember mixing. I was left up there
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 2: to mix the record with Todd. So, you know, we
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 2: pull up the first song We've got to mix together.
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 2: You know, I start making notes. You know, he says,
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 2: what's that about? He says, well, you know we got
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 2: to I want to do it again. Okay, So I
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 2: brought you know, after a day and a half where
• 1:44:42
  Speaker 2: he mixed the entire record, bam, bam bam, I brought
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 2: it back to the band and they flipped. You know,
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 2: I mean Todd he's brilliant. He is totally brilliant, and
• 1:44:52
  Speaker 2: sometimes he doesn't have patience, which is, you know perfectly fine.
• 1:44:59
  Speaker 2: I remember when we want to do seven of Ways
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 2: of Going and do it, you know, live in the
• 1:45:03
  Speaker 2: studio and choose the best track. All they did was say, hey,
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 2: there's a lump of hash, call me when you get
• 1:45:09
  Speaker 2: something you like. Fine. Uh, you know, I don't think
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 2: it hurt the record. In fact, if anything, I think
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 2: it contains some of our best work. Broken Flag, to
• 1:45:23
  Speaker 2: me is just a heartrending song of allegiance, revenge of
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 2: course the classics. So you want to be a rock
• 1:45:33
  Speaker 2: and roll star, it's it kind of continued our tale
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 2: to where the tail needed to be reinvented, and that,
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 2: to me, is a good lifeline for any band, you know,
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 2: five years, you know, if you're going to stay together,
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 2: you have to change, you have to have a new way.
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 2: And when Patty returned to performance, you know, with the
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 2: Bridge of the Beautiful People Have the Power album that
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 2: she made with Fred, her concerns were not about herself,
• 1:46:13
  Speaker 2: It wasn't about her growth. Her concerns were social and
• 1:46:17
  Speaker 2: that to me is what has characterized our work of
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 2: the past. This, you know, the second act, which who
• 1:46:24
  Speaker 2: ever knew it would continue for thirty years after that?
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 2: You know, all all the records we've made have a
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 2: social grounding about, you know, ecology and politics and and
• 1:46:37
  Speaker 2: and sense of community and sense of togetherness. Uh, you know,
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 2: forthright and and so so we continue.
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 1: Was your name on the record dealer? Just Patty's just Patty's.
• 1:46:54
  Speaker 1: So ultimately she makes the record with Fred. But this
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 1: is a business literally with people who make it. Say
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: wait a second, let me get let me get the
• 1:47:04
  Speaker 1: best players I could ever find, the guys on every
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 1: record whatever. Were you ever anxious that, wow, you know,
• 1:47:10
  Speaker 1: she might replace me.
• 1:47:13
  Speaker 2: I didn't care. I have you know, I have my
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 2: own thing. I was excited to try my hand as
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 2: a solo artist. I was not successful. I didn't get
• 1:47:24
  Speaker 2: the record deal. I hoped all of the above. But
• 1:47:29
  Speaker 2: you know, then I became a record produce. So I
• 1:47:31
  Speaker 2: actually had a hit. That's amazing, a real hit. And
• 1:47:35
  Speaker 2: I made a lot of you know, maybe almost twenty
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 2: records with artists who were idiosyncratic individual not not some
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 2: kind of cookie cutter genre. They were all had something
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 2: worthy to say, whether anybody heard the records or not.
• 1:47:52
  Speaker 1: So I was, so, how did you get the gig
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 1: with susianne Vega.
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 2: I was working at a Electra Records under Bob kras
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 2: Now doing these box sets. Uh and uh, you know,
• 1:48:06
  Speaker 2: Bob wanted to do something called, and he was a
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 2: great visionary himself, something called the Jack Holdsman Years, where
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 2: I went into the vaults and put together these box sets.
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 2: Of the first one was Bleeker and McDougall the folk,
• 1:48:22
  Speaker 2: the Folk Elektra because you know, they had almost everybody
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 2: except for Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. I did one
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 2: on White Blues Colonel Ryan Glover, uh, Paul Butterfield and
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 2: got to delve deeply into black and white interaction, going
• 1:48:43
  Speaker 2: both ways, creating the music of today. One on Electroc
• 1:48:48
  Speaker 2: of course with their great rock catalog. And then my
• 1:48:51
  Speaker 2: favorite one was called Oh Love Is Teasing Anglo American
• 1:48:56
  Speaker 2: balladry uh starring Gene Richie, some of the earliest Electra recordings,
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 2: and I, you know, I just so went in that
• 1:49:06
  Speaker 2: rabbit hole the you know, the Appalachian minstrels and just
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 2: a beautiful thing. And Nancy Jeffries, who was working at
• 1:49:15
  Speaker 2: a and m uh called me up one day and
• 1:49:18
  Speaker 2: you know, I was you know, she knew I was
• 1:49:21
  Speaker 2: interested in folk music as this was. She said, I'd
• 1:49:25
  Speaker 2: like you to go and see this woman named Suzanne Vega.
• 1:49:29
  Speaker 2: She's playing in the West Village on this small circuit,
• 1:49:35
  Speaker 2: the fast folk circuit, and I've been approached by her
• 1:49:41
  Speaker 2: management and producer to do a record, and I like her,
• 1:49:45
  Speaker 2: but I think what they're doing is too traditionally folk rock. Anyway,
• 1:49:51
  Speaker 2: I went to see Suzanne. I really liked her. I
• 1:49:55
  Speaker 2: thought she had a excuse me, a great personality and
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 2: the way song I went backstage, she says, I said,
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 2: you know, I hear strings and you know, flutes like
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 2: Nico's Chelsea Girls. She says, I hate strings and flutes.
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 2: But she was really open to being expansive in the world.
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 2: Her little scene wanted her to stay quote folk music,
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 2: but you know, she loved lou Reed, she loved all
• 1:50:29
  Speaker 2: these things. So my my brief was to bring in
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 2: some of the outside world. And one of the first
• 1:50:36
  Speaker 2: things I did was strip away the folk rock aspects
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 2: because at that point folk was kind of an ethma
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 2: to any label, you know, to take away the boom chick,
• 1:50:47
  Speaker 2: boom boom chick, you know, to kind of make it
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 2: more palatable, to create her intimacy. And to me, that
• 1:50:54
  Speaker 2: was her breakthrough because in that time, in nineteen eighty five,
• 1:50:59
  Speaker 2: with empty and everything kind of so cartoonish and overblown, twisted,
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 2: sister Cindy Lauper, all you good, good artists, but very
• 1:51:11
  Speaker 2: very larger than life. Here's Suzanne just a guitar. And
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 2: I believe, as I do, the culture sometimes asks for
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 2: his artists, and Suzanne all of a sudden resonated with
• 1:51:25
  Speaker 2: people who wanted things to be brought more intimately. And she,
• 1:51:30
  Speaker 2: of course she didn't stop there. Because we made this
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 2: record there was no drums. Only time we had percussion
• 1:51:37
  Speaker 2: was real percussion. It was nothing bong bang, and it
• 1:51:41
  Speaker 2: was very kind of subliminal. And then by the second album,
• 1:51:48
  Speaker 2: which I wasn't supposed to do because I only do
• 1:51:50
  Speaker 2: one album, she had acquired a band and a different
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 2: concept of how to present herself. And I was over
• 1:51:59
  Speaker 2: in England in English year doing micro Disney and James
• 1:52:03
  Speaker 2: and the Weather Profits, and I got a call there
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 2: saying would I come back to produce or co produced
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 2: with Steve Adabo was really good, and I said sure,
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 2: And then of course we had a real hit Luca,
• 1:52:19
  Speaker 2: and then a really weird hit, Tom's Diner, which all
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 2: we did was point the microphone at her.
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 1: Well, Tom's Diners has a life of its own, Luca.
• 1:52:29
  Speaker 1: What you got down on the record was that the
• 1:52:32
  Speaker 1: song she came in with? Or did you make it
• 1:52:35
  Speaker 1: a hit?
• 1:52:37
  Speaker 2: Well? I mean she had Luca doing it acoustically, but
• 1:52:42
  Speaker 2: she had acquired a band, Anton Sanko on synthesizers, Mike
• 1:52:47
  Speaker 2: Siglia on bass, a great drummer, Steve somebody, and I
• 1:52:55
  Speaker 2: don't know. We just went up to Woodstock. We recorded
• 1:52:58
  Speaker 2: the basics up in bears Well, and we went for it.
• 1:53:03
  Speaker 2: You know, we went for let's let's go all the way.
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 2: You know, when the guitar solo comes in and uh,
• 1:53:11
  Speaker 2: Mark Shulman played the first lick, you know, the first
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 2: run through. I said, that was great, Mark, Let's double it.
• 1:53:18
  Speaker 2: He said, huh. I said, okay, let's double it. He
• 1:53:21
  Speaker 2: doubled it. He said, Okay, now we're going to do
• 1:53:23
  Speaker 2: something great. We're going to triple it. And you know,
• 1:53:26
  Speaker 2: all of a sudden you grow a song, because again,
• 1:53:31
  Speaker 2: songs tell you what they would like to be. You know,
• 1:53:34
  Speaker 2: I've spent my life trying to get the sound of
• 1:53:38
  Speaker 2: bone shaking like it's a percussion. You know, try every
• 1:53:41
  Speaker 2: real bones, you know, never never. The song says, what
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 2: do you want? I said, forget about it, that doesn't
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 2: need it. So yeah, we just kept following the tracks
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 2: and Solitude Standing is a beautiful, beautiful record. The title
• 1:53:56
  Speaker 2: track is all inspiring, all of it is great, and
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 2: so Uzanne hasn't stopped there. I mean she's made I
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 2: don't know eight nine records after that, all different, all progressive,
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 2: all intricate lyrically beautiful. I feel very privileged to have
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 2: gotten a chance to work with her.
• 1:54:17
  Speaker 1: Okay, at this laid date, how do you feel about
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 1: going on the road with Patty?
• 1:54:24
  Speaker 2: I like it. I mean she has a smaller scale
• 1:54:26
  Speaker 2: band with her son Jackson on guitar, and he's a
• 1:54:32
  Speaker 2: genius guitar player, and I think she's more comfortable with
• 1:54:36
  Speaker 2: a smaller scale. At this point, we are going to
• 1:54:39
  Speaker 2: be playing riot Fest in Chicago in September, and this
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 2: should be a funny one CBGB Festival also in September.
• 1:54:49
  Speaker 2: But right now, I think she's explored the band, her
• 1:54:57
  Speaker 2: band aspect of it, and in a sense it's more formal.
• 1:55:01
  Speaker 2: When we went out last year and did Horses, it
• 1:55:05
  Speaker 2: felt like a very formal presentation. I feel now she
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 2: has more freedom, with lesser volume and a different sense
• 1:55:12
  Speaker 2: of soundscape. And to me, that's that's good because you know,
• 1:55:17
  Speaker 2: we have a lifeline of songs that we've understood. And
• 1:55:23
  Speaker 2: the fact is when you've understand something, it's time to
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 2: challenge yourself over and over and over.
• 1:55:32
  Speaker 1: How come she hasn't made a new recording in an
• 1:55:35
  Speaker 1: excess of a decade.
• 1:55:37
  Speaker 2: I don't know, to be honest, perhaps she doesn't feel
• 1:55:41
  Speaker 2: the need. She's been writing books, you know'st She actually
• 1:55:45
  Speaker 2: has been doing recordings. She's done a lot of work
• 1:55:47
  Speaker 2: with this group sound Wall Collective over in Europe where
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 2: they create soundscapes and installations and cinematic overlays, and he
• 1:56:00
  Speaker 2: recites poetry. Patty is really one of the most you know,
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 2: constantly creating, constantly writing, and you know, to be honest,
• 1:56:12
  Speaker 2: sometimes you just follow what's there. I mean, if I
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 2: had made all those records, perhaps I wouldn't feel the
• 1:56:20
  Speaker 2: need to make a record. But right now I have
• 1:56:23
  Speaker 2: a lot of music within me, that seems to want
• 1:56:27
  Speaker 2: to get out into the world, whatever the world is.
• 1:56:30
  Speaker 2: And I don't pretend to understand it. But I like
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 2: doing the work, and I like challenging myself and looking
• 1:56:39
  Speaker 2: at new horizons, and that to me is essential as
• 1:56:42
  Speaker 2: an artist. Otherwise you just, you know, wind up in
• 1:56:46
  Speaker 2: a cycle of repetition. And you know who wants that,
• 1:56:51
  Speaker 2: not me.
• 1:56:52
  Speaker 1: So now you always say the theme here is there
• 1:56:55
  Speaker 1: is a chapter. Then you close the book, you open
• 1:56:57
  Speaker 1: a new book. So you'll promote this album, you'll go
• 1:57:01
  Speaker 1: on the road.
• 1:57:02
  Speaker 2: Then what well, I've already started working on another record.
• 1:57:06
  Speaker 2: I have a great song called Buddy Holly's Motorcycle, which
• 1:57:10
  Speaker 2: is a narrative piece that touches on my work with
• 1:57:15
  Speaker 2: Whale and Jennings. When I walked into his garage, that
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 2: great story when the crickets get off the plane from Australia.
• 1:57:23
  Speaker 2: They've done it, and they go to their in Dallas
• 1:57:26
  Speaker 2: and they go to the motorcycle shop and in Triumph
• 1:57:29
  Speaker 2: they rent motorcycles and drive back to Lubbock. It's such
• 1:57:33
  Speaker 2: a beautiful story. And then when I was working with
• 1:57:35
  Speaker 2: Whale and Jennings on his autobiography, a very strange literary
• 1:57:40
  Speaker 2: genre kind of akin to producing. I would say, I
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 2: walked into his garage one day, you know, with him,
• 1:57:48
  Speaker 2: and I was into motorcycles then, had nothing to do
• 1:57:51
  Speaker 2: with the fact I wasn't playing much and within the
• 1:57:54
  Speaker 2: recording studio and middlight crisis that acquired six of them
• 1:57:59
  Speaker 2: at one point. Thank god, I got back to playing.
• 1:58:03
  Speaker 2: But I saw a motorcycle under acover. I said, Oh,
• 1:58:09
  Speaker 2: what kind of bike is that. He says, Oh, that's
• 1:58:11
  Speaker 2: Buddies and he walks in the house. It's so waft
• 1:58:13
  Speaker 2: hand and I thought, is that his son, Buddy, his
• 1:58:16
  Speaker 2: oldest son? I thought, is that? And I go to
• 1:58:21
  Speaker 2: take the cover off and Buddy's Holly's motorcycle, and I'm like,
• 1:58:26
  Speaker 2: it's like a sacred artifact to me. Plus it's a
• 1:58:29
  Speaker 2: really cool motorcycle. It's an aerial cyclone, a very obscure
• 1:58:33
  Speaker 2: British brand.
• 1:58:35
  Speaker 1: And so.
• 1:58:37
  Speaker 2: I tell the story over six and a half minutes
• 1:58:39
  Speaker 2: with musical accompaniment, and yeah, So I'm just working on songs.
• 1:58:46
  Speaker 2: I really like it. I love my goth jam whatever
• 1:58:51
  Speaker 2: the hell it is. Band Adrift we have eight songs
• 1:58:54
  Speaker 2: recorded and you know, hopefully we'll play outside of Northeast
• 1:58:59
  Speaker 2: Pencil Bana one of these days. But I don't know.
• 1:59:02
  Speaker 2: I just like making music. Really. At this point, I've emptied,
• 1:59:07
  Speaker 2: you know, I'm lik in that same place. I've emptied
• 1:59:09
  Speaker 2: myself out of expectation. I'm so happy that the album
• 1:59:14
  Speaker 2: is a real thing, Thank you yep ROC Records. But
• 1:59:18
  Speaker 2: whatever happens with it, that's going to happen with it.
• 1:59:22
  Speaker 2: I'm really into what I'm doing now, and that's a
• 1:59:27
  Speaker 2: beautiful thing, you know. So I have studio time scheduled
• 1:59:31
  Speaker 2: a week from Saturday. I've already recorded a song called
• 1:59:35
  Speaker 2: how to Write a song? How to write a song?
• 1:59:38
  Speaker 2: You know it won't take long. Find a note that's
• 1:59:42
  Speaker 2: deep inside, and then you take it for a ride.
• 1:59:46
  Speaker 2: It helps if you don't know the way it ought
• 1:59:48
  Speaker 2: to go. It'll tell you loud and strong, all the
• 1:59:52
  Speaker 2: notes that should be long, and then you write some
• 1:59:56
  Speaker 2: words that turn into have you heard? I'm just having
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 2: a good time. I'm like the guy in spinal Tap.
• 2:00:04
  Speaker 2: I have a good time all the time.
• 2:00:08
  Speaker 1: So what's a nice Jewish boy doing? Buying and riding motorcycles?
• 2:00:12
  Speaker 1: Everybody I've ever known, even if you're the best rider ever,
• 2:00:17
  Speaker 1: the drivers aren't that good. And I have a single
• 2:00:19
  Speaker 1: person who hasn't dumped their motorcycle, never mind rockstar. After
• 2:00:23
  Speaker 1: rockstar has been killed or had terrible accidents.
• 2:00:27
  Speaker 2: I don't know why. I mean, when I moved out
• 2:00:30
  Speaker 2: to Pennsylvania, I looked out in the backyard and there
• 2:00:33
  Speaker 2: was this house. When we first looked at the house,
• 2:00:36
  Speaker 2: and I said, oh, what's that? And I said, oh,
• 2:00:38
  Speaker 2: that's your garage. I thought, anyway, it's a great you know,
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 2: I equate motorcycle riding with guitar playing. They require the
• 2:00:50
  Speaker 2: same skill. When you're going out a curve at eighty
• 2:00:53
  Speaker 2: miles an hour leading at a forty five or fifty
• 2:00:56
  Speaker 2: degree argle, you can't stop and say, really cool, this
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 2: is really great because you're gonna dump it. You know.
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 2: Same thing with a guitar solo. If I'm playing a
• 2:01:05
  Speaker 2: guitar solo and I hit a really cool note, I
• 2:01:07
  Speaker 2: can't say, man, it's a cool note because I know
• 2:01:12
  Speaker 2: the clam is coming upon me really quickly. It's concentration,
• 2:01:17
  Speaker 2: it's focus, it's becoming one with your instrument or your engine.
• 2:01:24
  Speaker 2: And I like that about it. I thought it was
• 2:01:27
  Speaker 2: it was kind of unusual. I mean, it was when
• 2:01:30
  Speaker 2: I got back to playing full time. Because I wasn't
• 2:01:32
  Speaker 2: doing a lot of playing, the motorcycles lost some of
• 2:01:36
  Speaker 2: their allure. And you know, I did live through it.
• 2:01:40
  Speaker 2: But of course the joke is that my mother was like,
• 2:01:45
  Speaker 2: I never told my mother, of course. And then one
• 2:01:48
  Speaker 2: day my mom calls up. I'd just ridden in the
• 2:01:51
  Speaker 2: Saint Patrick's Day parade out here with my buddy, and
• 2:01:56
  Speaker 2: I put my daughter on the phone there, told you, so,
• 2:01:59
  Speaker 2: what did you do to We watched daddy ride his
• 2:02:02
  Speaker 2: motorcycle in the parade. My mother goes, put your father,
• 2:02:09
  Speaker 2: But you know, I live through it. It Sometimes it's
• 2:02:11
  Speaker 2: good to test your your limits and your courage. Never
• 2:02:15
  Speaker 2: let fear stand in the way of your dreams is
• 2:02:18
  Speaker 2: another one of my many aphorisms. And I liked it
• 2:02:21
  Speaker 2: and it was fun, you know, and I lived. That's
• 2:02:25
  Speaker 2: the best part of it.
• 2:02:27
  Speaker 1: Okay, final question. Your name is Lenny. I'm sure it's
• 2:02:30
  Speaker 1: Leonard on your birth certificate. Yes, not a super hip
• 2:02:34
  Speaker 1: name in its era, in the era before very hip.
• 2:02:38
  Speaker 1: That ever trouble you? Was he people make fun of you?
• 2:02:40
  Speaker 1: Or what was your experience?
• 2:02:43
  Speaker 2: No, it's the name you got, you know.
• 2:02:46
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 2:02:46
  Speaker 2: My birth name, last name was Kossakov. My dad changed
• 2:02:50
  Speaker 2: it when I was one, so I didn't have to
• 2:02:53
  Speaker 2: make that moral decision. I'm just I'm just a Lenny,
• 2:02:58
  Speaker 2: you know, Lenny Bruce, Lenny Bernstein. It's it's a I
• 2:03:04
  Speaker 2: don't know, it's just serves me well. I like making
• 2:03:07
  Speaker 2: the l It's kind of you know, it's kind of fun.
• 2:03:11
  Speaker 2: I don't really think about it that much. You know,
• 2:03:13
  Speaker 2: it is the name that I'm known by, unless you
• 2:03:19
  Speaker 2: want to call me Link Cromwell, which some in the
• 2:03:22
  Speaker 2: no do. But I just really, you know, as they say,
• 2:03:27
  Speaker 2: a rose by any other name still sells smells the sweet.
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 1: Okay, Lenny. You know, it's just amazing seeing your name
• 2:03:37
  Speaker 1: everywhere and seeing you. Good to finally talk.
• 2:03:40
  Speaker 2: To you, and you too, And I've and I've been
• 2:03:43
  Speaker 2: reading your columns all the time, and you've got a
• 2:03:47
  Speaker 2: point of view, brother, and I agree with it most
• 2:03:50
  Speaker 2: of the time.
• 2:03:51
  Speaker 1: No one agrees with it all the time. And if
• 2:03:55
  Speaker 1: you don't lay it out there, why do it?
• 2:03:58
  Speaker 2: Well, you know, I appreciate it. And you never pull
• 2:04:00
  Speaker 2: any punches, you know, you say what's on your mind
• 2:04:03
  Speaker 2: and you go for it. And in the end, what
• 2:04:05
  Speaker 2: it reveals about you is that you love music, that
• 2:04:09
  Speaker 2: you love what it does to you when you go
• 2:04:12
  Speaker 2: to see an artist and it moves you. You open
• 2:04:18
  Speaker 2: yourself to that experience, and that, to me is the key.
• 2:04:22
  Speaker 2: You're not trying to be hip. You're not trying to like,
• 2:04:25
  Speaker 2: you know, wear a T shirt that you don't know
• 2:04:27
  Speaker 2: what the band is about. You know, you're just like
• 2:04:32
  Speaker 2: you're open, and you know when you're open, you have
• 2:04:37
  Speaker 2: things to say, and I want you to keep saying them.
• 2:04:40
  Speaker 1: The other thing I want to say, you just this
• 2:04:42
  Speaker 1: is a microcosm or a small point in what you said.
• 2:04:46
  Speaker 1: If you're going to a show, it makes me crazy.
• 2:04:49
  Speaker 1: The people who go to the show or the fans.
• 2:04:51
  Speaker 1: I don't want to hear some outside person who doesn't
• 2:04:54
  Speaker 1: like this music go and criticize it. It's like, well,
• 2:04:57
  Speaker 1: would a fan have to say?
• 2:05:00
  Speaker 2: Well, That's one of the things that I learned as
• 2:05:02
  Speaker 2: a rock critic, even though I like to think of
• 2:05:04
  Speaker 2: myself as a rock writer. I wrote some pretty opinionated
• 2:05:11
  Speaker 2: reviews where I wanted the band to be what I
• 2:05:17
  Speaker 2: wanted the band to be, and I didn't look at
• 2:05:19
  Speaker 2: the band as what they were trying to achieve. You know,
• 2:05:25
  Speaker 2: opinions that you know nobody cares about my opinion on
• 2:05:29
  Speaker 2: whether I like you know this, that or the other thing.
• 2:05:33
  Speaker 2: When I write, I want to illuminate from the band's perspective.
• 2:05:38
  Speaker 2: If you were sitting in the drummer stool and hearing
• 2:05:41
  Speaker 2: the band around you and how they fit the pieces together.
• 2:05:45
  Speaker 2: That's the important thing to understand music from the perspective
• 2:05:49
  Speaker 2: of the band. You know, don't get on Paul McCartney
• 2:05:52
  Speaker 2: because he's writing silly love songs. Come on, That's that's
• 2:05:57
  Speaker 2: what he does, among many other things things. You know,
• 2:06:01
  Speaker 2: you have to look at art from the perspective of
• 2:06:05
  Speaker 2: the artist and not try to change. And when I
• 2:06:07
  Speaker 2: got out of rock criticism, I realized that's what I
• 2:06:11
  Speaker 2: was starting to do. You know, I've listened to the
• 2:06:13
  Speaker 2: Who's Quadrophenia and say, well, if you're going to, you know,
• 2:06:17
  Speaker 2: reflect the person's for sighted personality, there has to be
• 2:06:21
  Speaker 2: some dissonance. Okay, that's possibly true, but that would be
• 2:06:27
  Speaker 2: how I would illuminate it, not how Pete Townsend would.
• 2:06:30
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 2:06:30
  Speaker 2: And you know, and when I started realizing that, I
• 2:06:34
  Speaker 2: was imposing the places I wanted music to go to
• 2:06:38
  Speaker 2: because I was already in a band, playing music and
• 2:06:42
  Speaker 2: having directions liking dissonance and free noise and how that
• 2:06:48
  Speaker 2: would work within a structured song. I realized I'm not
• 2:06:53
  Speaker 2: writing about the record. I'm writing about me, and that's
• 2:06:56
  Speaker 2: not fair to the artist, and so that's why I'm
• 2:07:01
  Speaker 2: mostly historical writer now.
• 2:07:05
  Speaker 1: But we certainly got your history, Laddie. Thank you. Till
• 2:07:09
  Speaker 1: next time. This is Bob Left sets