Latest / Four Finger Discount (Simpsons Podcast) / New Kid On The Block (with Wheatus)

Transcript

New Kid On The Block (with Wheatus) · Four Finger Discount (Simpsons Podcast)

• 0:00
  Hey everybody, it's Brendan from Whittis and you're listening to four Finger Discount.
• 0:03
  Four Finger Discount. Dude, Hey guys, Dana here for a very special
• 0:23
  edition of four Finger Discount this week. I was very lucky to be joined
• 0:26
  in the studio by the frontmen of wheatas he is mister Brendan B. Brown.
• 0:31
  Brendan spelled correctly by the way bre and d A n the way Brendan
• 0:35
  should be spelled. He's currently in Australia tour in the country on a solo
• 0:39
  acoustic tour with art from Everclear. Tickets for the remaining shows are available in
• 0:42
  the description of this podcast, so if you check out the dates and you
• 0:45
  can get to one of the shows, make sure you do so. But
• 0:47
  the guys that were playing in Geelong a couple of days ago, where we're
• 0:49
  based obviously, and Brendan's stopped by the studio to chat about the classic episode
• 0:54
  New Kid on the Block, you know, the one Laura Powers look could
• 0:56
  have been me Homer withes all you can eat Escapades and the one that was
• 1:00
  written by Colonel and O'Brien and we figured Nikid on the Block. We chose
• 1:03
  this one because it has the time of the whole Teenage Dirtbag s story.
• 1:07
  Now, look, this chat it goes for well over ninety minutes, and
• 1:11
  we do cover the main stories and themes and plots of the episode. But
• 1:15
  honestly, this just turned into one of the most enjoyable conversations that I think
• 1:19
  I've ever had on this podcast. Honestly, I am not kidding. You
• 1:22
  know. It's fun, it's informative. From a music side of things,
• 1:26
  it's nostalgic when we do a little bit of a dive into the whole Teenage
• 1:29
  Dirtbag video and the song and how it all came about. But it actually
• 1:32
  gets pretty personal at times too, And you know exactly what I mean.
• 1:36
  When we get to those moments, you'll think, Jesus, I really think
• 1:38
  you're gonna love this conversation. Like I said, it's one of the most
• 1:41
  enjoyable conversations, one of the most enjoyable pieces of work I've ever put together.
• 1:46
  I absolutely love this funny story. Once the chat was done, I
• 1:49
  was driving home with Brendan to his hotel, and just on the way home,
• 1:53
  we decided to go for an impromptuy lunch date. I figured why not
• 1:57
  Brendan from Witness has invited me out for lunch to take this opportunity, and
• 2:00
  we went down to the Geelong waterfront. We went to a place called Bayview
• 2:05
  shout out to Bayview and he had the grill barrow Monday and I had the
• 2:08
  Yep, you guessed it, I'm dando, you know me, guess what
• 2:12
  I got the chicken burger and Brenda then shatted me to an ice cream afterwards
• 2:16
  and just walked around Geelong for a little while. We paid a visit to
• 2:19
  the Pop Cultural Record Store and just yeah, honestly, just an overall great
• 2:23
  afternoon, so much fun and absolute delight. I should also remind you guys
• 2:27
  too that Waitas They will be returning to Australia in April for a full band
• 2:30
  show at the Pandemonium Festival. Pre start tickets go on sale for that on
• 2:34
  January twenty second. I'll chucklink for that in description of this pot as well
• 2:37
  if you want to get tickets for it, and you're gonna want to because
• 2:38
  not only doesn't have a waitess, but the headliners are people like Blondie,
• 2:43
  Alice Cooper, Placebo. You're gonna want to go to this one as well,
• 2:46
  also, speaking of things that you're going to enjoy, my man Guy
• 2:49
  Davis, he shall be returning to the hot seat once again next week by
• 2:52
  my side here in the studio as we get back to our usual schedule of
• 2:54
  season eighteen reviews, where we're going to be doing a review of the episode
• 2:59
  the Boys of bumm Us. Look at for that in your feeds next week.
• 3:01
  Also forget, of course, if you do enjoy the show and you
• 3:05
  can't afford to do so, we really appreciate support by joining the Forefinger the
• 3:08
  Scant Family on Patreon for as little as just one single dollar wedoo. On
• 3:13
  Patreon, we go exclusive podcasts such as Talking Seinfoud, Speaking of the Hill,
• 3:16
  Tales of Futurama, the Movie Guys, and so much more on the
• 3:20
  Facebook group of this core group, and all the other fun stuff that you
• 3:22
  get by being a supporter of ours on Patreon. But for now, it's
• 3:24
  time to sit back and enjoy my conversation with the legendary Brendan B. Brown
• 3:29
  of Whites as we review a new kid on the block. Enjoy now,
• 3:38
  I'm not gonna lie. You're the first. I've been doing podcasting for nearly
• 3:40
  twenty years now. And you are the first Brendan that I've ever actually had
• 3:44
  on any of my shows. Did you ever find that it's hard to find
• 3:46
  another Brendan? It is and spelt the right way too. Yeah, it's
• 3:51
  always Brendon. I never forget my school photos, my football photo as well
• 3:53
  as a kid, always brend On Brendon. I mean, how many times
• 3:55
  you tell them? Yeah, I've kind of over it. I'm not correct
• 3:59
  people anymore. I'm sure you know brand still do it annoys me? Yeah?
• 4:03
  Yeah, yeah yeah. And it's you know, it's a proper Gaelic
• 4:08
  name. Yeah, and there are so many wrong versions of it that brand
• 4:15
  get Brandon a lot. They can't get the A n. That's the hardest
• 4:17
  one for them. It's always Brandon. I've had Brandan, Yeah, I've
• 4:21
  had you know, I've haven't even had watched people spell it with an eye
• 4:26
  and I'm like, oh, man, is that what you just do?
• 4:29
  Triple Ban now? Just so you discover that, Yeah, I guess.
• 4:32
  But has Australia been this time of record? Has been what twelve years since
• 4:35
  you've been here? Yeah, it's been beautiful, weather, it's been amazing.
• 4:40
  Perth was incredible, But that's always good weather. Yeah, really nice.
• 4:44
  I swam in the Indian Ocean for the first time, you know,
• 4:46
  it's great. Yeah. Give any favorite spots that you always go to.
• 4:48
  You came here first time? What two thousand and one. I quite like
• 4:51
  a place near Sydney called Manly Veil. I've heard you mention that a few
• 4:56
  times. Yeah, and there's a beach up there, Shelley Beach that that
• 4:59
  I've it whenever I'm here. Didn't get to this time, just for timing,
• 5:02
  but but yeah, whenever we come down, I try to spend a
• 5:06
  few days with my friend Dave Froggett there. And he's a guy I met
• 5:12
  the first time we came through. He was really nice to us, and
• 5:15
  we we're both guitarists, so we just kind of bum around the house and
• 5:18
  play guitar all day. You know, it's perfect. But I try to
• 5:25
  get the jet lag out on like a three day you know window. It's
• 5:30
  the best way to get jet lag for you sleep whenever your body tells you
• 5:32
  to. All that nonsense about oh it's you got to wait until it's sleep
• 5:36
  time and all no, doesn't work. Just take what you can get when
• 5:40
  you can get it. We've made a mistake. We took the kids to
• 5:42
  Inglam and wash from England, so we haven't see the family three and five
• 5:46
  and jet lag not good. No, it's it's worse on the way back,
• 5:49
  always is. Why is I think probably because losing a night on a
• 5:54
  plane is much easier than losing a day on a plane. That's that's what
• 5:58
  it is, I think. But detime your plane flats accordingly, try to
• 6:01
  but it's not always financially possible. You got to go for like what you
• 6:06
  can afford, you know. Yeah, but I think that I think that
• 6:11
  if you just I've always done this. Just if your body's telling you to
• 6:14
  sleep, just do it. And don't eat. That's another thing on the
• 6:17
  plane or once you get off. No I've eaten on the plane before,
• 6:20
  but like I'm always stick off the plane food. Well, yeah it's not
• 6:24
  great. But once you're off right and you're you're starting to feel it,
• 6:30
  just go to bed, even if you're very hungry, Just go to bed
• 6:32
  right, sleep off that first whatever it is, like four hour stretch that
• 6:36
  you can get, eat something and then go back to bed again. Don't
• 6:41
  try to do anything. If you have to do anything when you land,
• 6:43
  you're you're doomed man on a honeymoon to America. We land in La.
• 6:46
  My wife, she's just a guy. Get she goes, right, let's
• 6:48
  go do all these things today because we land in the morning. Oh sweet,
• 6:51
  I love you, but unfortunately I love the enthusiasm. But that's sadly
• 6:57
  the way to ruin the rest of your job. I shouldn't in the honeymoon.
• 7:00
  Look well, it depends on how it depends on how my morning.
• 7:03
  Yeah right, yeah, sorry, I didn't mean that, and I ruined.
• 7:09
  I ruined her honeymoon by taking her to the Simpsons studio. She was
• 7:12
  like, oh, this is great, yeah right right, this is your
• 7:15
  stuff. Yeah yeah, but I'm slowly trying to get her into it.
• 7:17
  You know, she's my age thirty five, and she's seen maybe three episodes
• 7:20
  of the Simpsons. It's not wild interesting. So I was in college when
• 7:25
  the Simpsons really kicked into full gear. Really prior to that, I had
• 7:29
  seen Tracy Ullman show and caught a few of these like weird sort of I
• 7:33
  remember thinking, oh, this is like adult animation, yeah, which I
• 7:38
  think that's kind of that. And uh, doctor Katz, you remember doctor
• 7:42
  Katz. I know the name. I don't record. This is sort of
• 7:45
  like earlier like adult animation stuff, before that became a thing that everyone was
• 7:49
  doing. Yeah, that's now the thing, isn't it? It is the
• 7:53
  thing? Yeah? So I I love the Simpsons. Matthew, our bass
• 7:57
  player is there is our resident Simpsons experts and he really is. I could
• 8:01
  tell that from the emails. Yeah, yeah, you know we have this
• 8:05
  thing. What are you going to do when you get back from tour?
• 8:07
  I don't know, probably sitting in my underwear and watch the Simpsons like that's
• 8:11
  that's his that's the thing to do for him to recuperate from tour. You
• 8:16
  know, see what mid thirties, late twenties, late thirties, late thirty
• 8:18
  that same age. Yeah yeah, yeah, but that's just what happened.
• 8:22
  Was we just grew up in the Simpsons. It was just that past time.
• 8:24
  True. What was your version of the Simpsons then? Going on,
• 8:26
  interesting question, I probably inspector gadget. Okay, I still replayed when I
• 8:33
  was growing up. Yeah right, but I was. I was drawn to
• 8:35
  dramas when I was a kid. I much preferred drama or good times.
• 8:41
  It was my favorite. Like when I came home from school, I watched
• 8:43
  Good Times. Yep. I was a bidy bunch of kids growing up,
• 8:46
  budy bunch, so I had to watch the Body Bunch. Yeah. So
• 8:50
  yeah, it was like this was me. I was a little bit more
• 8:52
  drawn to like, like more serious TV. But not to say that The
• 8:56
  Simpsons is actually pretty serious TV. And I was reminded of that in the
• 9:01
  past couple of days when I've been refreshing on this episode that we're going to
• 9:03
  talk about, but we've been touching on New Kid on the Block because it's
• 9:05
  sort of that teenage comparison it has. It has elements of that. First
• 9:11
  of all, the voice of the new kid on the Block, the new
• 9:13
  girl that's uh doing what's her name from? Uh? From Roseanne? Yes,
• 9:20
  that and that right there got me because I remember Roseanne intensely and it
• 9:26
  was kind of like, oh, that's so cool. And they did make
• 9:28
  that man that sort of like tomboy archetype, so so devastatingly attractive to me.
• 9:35
  On the side I had to crush on Laura Pale was growing up,
• 9:39
  right, I've felt the hell out of that right as soon as it happened,
• 9:43
  and I was like, whoa man? And I did remember the episode,
• 9:46
  but you know, not the details. You know, there's something about
• 9:50
  a girl that's going to go out and kick the football with the boys,
• 9:52
  not afraid of boys. It was extremely like alluring, you know, it's
• 9:56
  like, oh, she's a what is your badass? She's the Jim Bog
• 10:01
  Yeah yeah, yeah, and it does. They did a good job of
• 10:05
  illustrating how and this is the realest thing I think in that episode is how
• 10:11
  that does throw the bullies for a loop. Yeah. It's like, you
• 10:15
  know, all of a sudden, all of their all theirslin geometry is screwed
• 10:20
  up. You know, they can't they can't do their old boy friends.
• 10:24
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, so yeah, I enjoyed that. Yeah,
• 10:28
  Pamela Reid, have you heard that, Pamela Reid? Yes, I heard
• 10:31
  so she Have you seen Kindergarten Cop? Yes? So she is Annie's partner
• 10:35
  in kindergarten. Okay, she's the voice of the mother in this that's that's
• 10:39
  that was familiar as well. Yeah, I felt like the mother's character was
• 10:43
  a little underdeveloped. Yeah, well, she gets her chance in an upcoming
• 10:46
  episode later on margin the Lamb where she's she's a badass as well. I
• 10:52
  wanted to know much more about the mom. The mom uh what felt super
• 10:56
  strong and you said what Laura gets from Yeah, yeah, but but also
• 11:01
  like I was like, Oh, they're just going to put her in Mo's
• 11:03
  and just leave the character there. And I was like, hope, that's
• 11:07
  not it. And now you got me wanting to watch another one. Yeah,
• 11:09
  Madgin the Lamps. It's a Thumber and Little Waiste take off essentially okay,
• 11:13
  and she takes Madge on the lamb. It's a very very good episode.
• 11:16
  It's fantastic. But what are your memories of The Simpsons? So you
• 11:20
  in college? You said, so, you have really been in the target
• 11:22
  demo by the time the show was really out. Well, so it has
• 11:26
  to do with like, when you're in college, you don't watch much TV,
• 11:30
  right, And then when I got out of college, I also wasn't
• 11:33
  watching much TV. And the reason was that I didn't have a TV.
• 11:37
  Like I was living in a you know, a converted living room apartment,
• 11:41
  and The Simpsons was just something that seemed like out of my reach. Then
• 11:46
  we did have a TV for a while there, and I was sort of
• 11:50
  like becoming a songwriter in full and watching a lot of much music and MTV
• 11:56
  and whatever else. So I actually I'm a little too old to have hit
• 12:01
  that perfect stride of like like Matthew was in I think probably early high school
• 12:07
  and then all through high school, Simpsons was a serious iconic thing for him
• 12:11
  to come home and watch. That said, I caught up on it a
• 12:15
  lot in the early two thousands and really enjoy it still. It's one of
• 12:20
  those things in the school yard is like, have you seen the new Simpsons?
• 12:24
  It was just it was the thing very much like that. And then
• 12:26
  we evolved to south Park because south Park became the naughtier version of the Simpsons,
• 12:30
  right, and then Family Guy came out. They kind of found that
• 12:31
  middle grand between south Park craziness and Simpsons more granted him, But I've never
• 12:37
  been a huge Family Guy fan. I have absolutely no knowledge of Family Guy.
• 12:39
  I have a friend back home He's trying to get me into it all
• 12:43
  the time, and I'm just like, dude, I like, there's no
• 12:46
  space on the table for this right now. And Rick and Morty kind of
• 12:50
  took me into a newer, like animated space. Anyways. Yeah, so
• 12:54
  we got a south Park podcast here too, and going back and revisiting those
• 12:58
  earlier south Back episodes. I forgot how great Today were as well. Did
• 13:00
  you watch the south Park? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah that became popular.
• 13:05
  Yeah, well so so that was like once I did have a television
• 13:11
  and a VCR, that became a thing that like all all like young adults
• 13:16
  were watching. Yeah so yeah. So unfortunately, just the timing of my
• 13:22
  life, I kind of had this moment of no TV when the Simpsons started
• 13:26
  to kick into full gear. But you have come to appreciate it just as
• 13:31
  much as any of the Rick and Morty stuff that I'm into, or or
• 13:35
  South Park or Mordi fan. Yeah what, I haven't seen any of the
• 13:39
  newer episodes. Then I haven't caught up either because we've been on the road.
• 13:43
  Yeah. Do you want to binge watch? I do? Yeah,
• 13:45
  I do. I prefer to watch a whole season. It's funny how I'm
• 13:48
  viewing Habits of Change, isn't it? Yeah? Very much so. In
• 13:50
  fact, I don't want to watch it until I can watch the whole season.
• 13:52
  Really. Yeah, So you will wait till it's finished and then watch
• 13:56
  it, Yeah, because the character as are more interesting when you don't have
• 13:58
  to be minded of what happened. Yeah, you know, I missed the
• 14:03
  aspect of spending the week dwelling and thinking about, Oh, I wonder where
• 14:05
  they're going to go next with it. That's interesting. So you're into like
• 14:09
  edging, Well, see, I do podcasts. We have to have content
• 14:13
  to talk about. So it's like if you just blow your loan in the
• 14:16
  first we went there fast, didn't we? Wow? No, I get
• 14:22
  what you're saying. So I was how old are you? I'm thirty five,
• 14:26
  right, I think for a second. Then okay, So so you're
• 14:28
  not technically from the generation of TV people who did not have the option of
• 14:33
  Benjing one hundred percent? Did Yeah? You did? I did? Break
• 14:37
  I didn't. No, I didn't have the option, so you didn't.
• 14:41
  The internet became more probably like two thousand. So growing up I was four
• 14:46
  or five when what about TVO and things like that. Didn't you have the
• 14:48
  ability to record TV shows when I was maybe thirteen fourteen? Okay? Interesting?
• 14:54
  Yeah, So when I was a kid kid, if you fucking you
• 14:56
  missed what was on TV, you miss it? Right, Okay, so
• 14:58
  you know the feeling feeling, So for me, I when I like,
• 15:03
  okay, there's I'll go back to what I was talking about. Before the
• 15:07
  Good Times, Right, Good Times was my favorite. I went I went
• 15:09
  home and watched. I was heavily invested in the characters and where they were
• 15:13
  headed, in what was going on, and it was full of like interesting
• 15:16
  conflict and stress and I just was drawn to that for some reason. And
• 15:20
  I the episode where the father dies is for me was this moment of like,
• 15:28
  had I missed that, it would have it would have ruined the show
• 15:31
  for me because I wouldn't understand, you know, what was going on.
• 15:35
  So I have that fear of like like I don't want to get invested and
• 15:41
  get invested right in these characters and then like miss their most important life moment.
• 15:46
  Now that's like I'm creative person, So I get maybe too too heavily.
• 15:50
  It's too real, you know, in some sense. And I can't
• 15:54
  I can't understand why people would be like, oh man, it's just a
• 15:56
  show. That's the beauty of a good writing. Though, Yeah, that's
• 15:58
  it. That's why that's why you watch. I don't know why that's why
• 16:02
  I watch, Yeah, you know. And I was the same way with
• 16:06
  the Sopranos, you know, like I don't want to have to find or
• 16:11
  find out from somebody that's something developed, and I'm watching the whole season.
• 16:15
  Yeah, do you not missed the Sopranos when at first I was still a
• 16:17
  little bit too young, I was not thirteen watching I somehow missed the spoiler
• 16:22
  that way I ended everything, so I was able to watch it as if
• 16:25
  I was watching it in like the nineties, early two thousands and not have
• 16:26
  anything spoiled. Yeah, I loved it. I don't think that a thirteen
• 16:30
  Well, I'm sure that there are thirteen year olds who could fully process the
• 16:34
  complexity of the Sopranos. But I'm glad that I didn't watch it when I
• 16:40
  was thirteen because I couldn't watch it when I was thirteen when it came out.
• 16:42
  Just mobsters, Yeah you know, yeah right? So but uh yeah,
• 16:47
  I think so we have different we have slightly differ I'm more of a
• 16:51
  much more of avenger than you. I think, like I will take the
• 16:53
  whole thing all at once. So I binge now and I hate myself for
• 16:57
  it. It's really Yeah, you have self. What do you like with
• 17:00
  intros? Now? Do you skip the intro even shows that you love in
• 17:04
  Simpsons? No, for me, my wife, she's obsessed with Friends skipped
• 17:08
  at it, No, you do not. But she watches Friends on loop.
• 17:11
  Right, She's just more wife than obsessive Friends fans. Always been a
• 17:14
  Friends fan, but now she's fans. She skips the intro because she's like,
• 17:15
  I can't be bother. I've already heard a million times and I'm like
• 17:18
  for me, though, a good theme song sets you up for the show.
• 17:21
  It puts you in that frame of mind of what you should be feeling
• 17:23
  when you watchings and how you using it. Right, Like sometimes when I'm
• 17:27
  working, I'll put on the Big Short in the background, or the Assassination
• 17:34
  of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford and just have it playing on the
• 17:37
  TV while I'm working in the other room. Yep. Because it's a sort
• 17:41
  of like flow of like, Okay, I know how this narrative is.
• 17:45
  It makes me feel a certain way. I'm I'm not. My distractions are
• 17:48
  not things that will take me away from this work. They're this, they're
• 17:52
  this other thing that already right right right, So maybe she's using it for
• 17:56
  background noise and doesn't need the intro. Yeah, that's true. Yeah,
• 18:00
  it's when we do it for the reviews. Now she's found and now that
• 18:02
  we're reviewing the episodes, it's almost ruining the show for her because she prefers
• 18:06
  to just watch it not critique it, and shows like Friends, you watch
• 18:08
  it and you're like, there's a lot of shit you can critique here.
• 18:11
  Yeah, I'd rather just watch it the way I used to. Yeah,
• 18:14
  yeah, yeah, I have over critique things that you watch always, but
• 18:18
  I never I never had a show where I was just like along for the
• 18:22
  ride. Yeah, I never had that. What's been your favorite ride show
• 18:26
  wiseen? For me? I think it was Breaking Bad. Oh, that
• 18:30
  was really good. That's a really good one. But that just sort of
• 18:33
  just it peaked at the right time and then it was out. Breaking Bear
• 18:36
  was really good. The one I still talk about the most has to still
• 18:41
  be the Sopranos. Okay, yeah, that's the one who I have a
• 18:44
  friend who and we we still go deep on talking about that show. That
• 18:48
  ending. Yes, yeah, atual thoughts, I think Tony died on the
• 18:53
  operating table and it's a sort of a Jacob's ladder you're taking thatach, Yeah,
• 18:57
  yeah, kind of, it's a Jacob's Ladder, uh occurrence at Owl
• 19:02
  Creek Ridge kind of bite, you know, you know what I'm talking about.
• 19:04
  Where so dealing with compressed time, lots of things are artificialized, right,
• 19:11
  They're not. These are your dreams. Your brain is firing off,
• 19:15
  like the possibility of a life with all of the endorphins and the the uh
• 19:19
  d m T is firing and you're having this sort of like leaving your leaving
• 19:23
  your life moment, and so time can stretch and characters can become bizarre.
• 19:29
  There are so many things about the post shooting Tony episodes that are unreal weed
• 19:37
  very very sort of like completely unreal. I don't think Chase cared. David
• 19:41
  Chase cares to tell everybody how it is because he wants people to interpret it.
• 19:45
  And the way that I interpret it is he never made it off that
• 19:48
  operating table. He died there, and everything else is peculiar, like peculiar
• 19:56
  flashes of a life that didn't complete, that didn't happen. Do you have
• 19:59
  people take approach with your music, Yeah, very much. So. I've
• 20:03
  said this before about Teenage Stirpeg, you know, because there's a sort of
• 20:06
  origin story about the murder and whatnot, right, but but what the only
• 20:11
  thing that really counts is how people see themselves in the narrative. That's the
• 20:15
  only thing that matters for a song, if you plug yourself in and you
• 20:21
  understand your life a little bit more clearly because you kind of walk through the
• 20:26
  song with the characters. That's the only thing that gives it new life.
• 20:30
  That's the only important thing. And however, young people need to do that.
• 20:33
  I'm is none of my business, like in that sense, it belongs
• 20:37
  to them and the author is dead like what my intentions were anyway, So
• 20:42
  yeah, yeah, because I always saw as just the good guy wants the
• 20:48
  girl who's with the bad guy, and that's just that's the simple approach.
• 20:51
  Because I still have memories. It came out when I was in grade six,
• 20:53
  which is our last year of what you call elementary school. Yeah,
• 20:56
  and there's this girl, this big crush on but she was dating the bad
• 21:00
  guy, and I was like, teenage door back is just my life.
• 21:03
  It's just it. I felt it, right. There's a bit of that
• 21:06
  in the Simpsons episode she winds up with the bad guy. But you know
• 21:10
  what, I think that they give her. They give her control the whole
• 21:14
  time, oddly, which is a really interesting choice, and I love that
• 21:18
  like that she's just like I just want to date this bad boy for a
• 21:21
  little while. Maybe he's an idiot, and I'll get rid of him.
• 21:22
  Because if at Lisa li likesh or she goes she gushes, Yeah, she
• 21:26
  gets it. She's like, oh I know why you know? And Bart's
• 21:30
  baffled. Do you hate that ideology of girls love the bad boys? It's
• 21:33
  always because always always thinking myself is like the good guy. I was never
• 21:34
  the bad boy. Always just like it annoyed me, like why do you
• 21:40
  like these guys? They look good for you. It's a funny. It's
• 21:41
  a funny arc type. I I've seen it in my own life, but
• 21:48
  much more dangerous like way yeah, like like scary, like and you know,
• 21:52
  there's a line there where my mind goes where it's like she really want
• 21:56
  to be with him? Or is she afraid he's going to kill her?
• 22:00
  Yeah? If she breaks up? Like is that that? That's where my
• 22:02
  mind goes with that because of where you know, how I grew up.
• 22:07
  Okay, but in the Simpsons, all of that sort of like washed and
• 22:11
  in the song in teenaged her, what's kind of washed over by somehow she
• 22:17
  majestically has this power that she's in control of her own life. In some
• 22:22
  sense, that's a little bit unfair to what women's lives are actually like,
• 22:26
  Like we're giving them this control that we haven't given them in the real world.
• 22:30
  And you know, I think I think about that. I thought about
• 22:33
  that watching the episode. I was like, well, I'm glad this is
• 22:36
  a cartoon and it's not going to be like, you know, domestic abuse
• 22:40
  kind of situation, because I'm I'm sorry to say, that's where my that's
• 22:44
  where my mind goes. Yeah, you know, I mean I've experienced similar
• 22:47
  things like growing up. Yeah, yeah, I do like the idea though
• 22:49
  that the Simpsons. I never saw this as a kid, but it's nice
• 22:53
  that kids growing up in the nineties had a character like Lisa, a female
• 22:56
  character who had sort of power over her life, Smarter than her dad,
• 23:00
  smarter than head, and she was sort of being held backed by a family.
• 23:03
  But still you knew she was going to make something of herself. Yeah
• 23:06
  she was. Well, you thought she's gonna be fine. Yeah, right,
• 23:07
  And that's a comforting thought because and you know what, this episode hit
• 23:12
  on something that I don't always think about with The Simpsons, and you are
• 23:15
  reminded from time to time, Homer's an alcoholic, Like, he's fully and
• 23:22
  completely abusing alcohol, choosing alcohol over the nurturing of his kids all the time.
• 23:27
  So just because it's funny doesn't mean that the little Leasa Simpsons in the
• 23:33
  world are aren't seeing that in their own homes and going, yeah, I'm
• 23:37
  definitely getting the fuck out of here, you know, as soon as I
• 23:40
  can. Dad way smarter than you, I'm getting a job when I'm sixteen,
• 23:42
  I'm getting a fuck out, you know. And that's I hope that
• 23:45
  that works out for the for the lease leases out there, you know,
• 23:49
  I assume it doesn't always, but but yeah, it's the Simpsons is complex
• 23:55
  like that always has been. And that's one of the reasons I revisited it
• 23:59
  and still keep it like as a thing like I have. I don't know
• 24:03
  why I was compelled to do this, but I purchased all of the Blockbuster
• 24:08
  Video Simpson's memorabilia. Really, yes, back in the oh geez, was
• 24:14
  it the late nineties when the Blockbuster video started shutting down? Why what made
• 24:18
  you want to do that? Because they were offering these they just looked great.
• 24:22
  They were fantastic looking toys and bobbleheads. And so was DVD sets and
• 24:30
  things that the the n VHS sets and I still have them money of my
• 24:34
  v I have the Simpsons Monopoly game from the late nineties, and I was
• 24:41
  thinking, I don't know why I was compelled to buy them. It was
• 24:42
  just it looked important Iconically, physically, the art of it was beautiful.
• 24:48
  Could just sense that times were changing, you thought, if I get it
• 24:52
  now, I did sense the times were changing. Because I can't remember the
• 24:56
  year. It might have been right after we signed our record deal because at
• 24:59
  the time when was two thousand. No, actually we signed in December of
• 25:03
  ninety nine a deal memo, but the full one was executed the following spring
• 25:07
  and the end. At the time, I was working a day job that
• 25:10
  I kept even though we signed a deal for another six months. I worked
• 25:15
  my day job while we were signed, and I was working at a VPN
• 25:19
  service place in Times Square right forty six and seven. Yeah, because I
• 25:26
  lived in Manhattan at time, and the guys who ran that place where IBM
• 25:30
  engineers, very very knowledgeable Oracle and IBM engineers, And they said to me,
• 25:34
  when I found out I was a musician, I was had a CD
• 25:38
  I'd brought them a CD and they were like, you know this is software,
• 25:41
  right, you get your digital rights all sorted out. They knew.
• 25:44
  They were like, this is going to be free or you're going to have
• 25:47
  to like figure something out like vinyl or something. They and they they clued
• 25:51
  me into like no, no, no, no no, no, you
• 25:52
  don't understand is that this can be ripped onto here and they show they showed
• 25:56
  me the whole process. This is like ninety seven ninety eight kind of time.
• 26:00
  This is before you could download song with Willi Nilly. Yeah, this
• 26:03
  was before you could really download anything before because I was the other one because
• 26:07
  yeah, because yeah we're talking Netscape. Yeah right, So uh I knew
• 26:15
  some abstractly something was going to happen where music was not going to be the
• 26:19
  way that it was like, it was going to be this. It was
• 26:22
  going to be a piece of software digital. Yeah, it was already a
• 26:23
  piece of software. Every CD is from nineteen eighty two or whatever when the
• 26:26
  first one came out, it is all software copyable. And so uh when
• 26:33
  I saw the Simpsons stuff, it was probably right around that time where there
• 26:38
  was this sense of like, oh, you might not be able to get
• 26:41
  this stuff anymore like thing on before, with a little bit of like of
• 26:45
  like what did I miss out on in the nineties on this show that there's
• 26:48
  like the Blockbuster video was decorated with it, and I was like, I
• 26:51
  should buy this stuff. This is cool, and you did get it and
• 26:52
  I did buy it all. I bought every single thing I had. Yeah,
• 26:56
  I still have Wow. Yeah, you should be pacing that online.
• 26:59
  You have you pist No, No, it's just just hiding near my guitar.
• 27:03
  I know. I know the Simpsons Monopoly game. I don't care what
• 27:07
  it's worth for one reason or another. That's the one I really care about.
• 27:08
  Yeah, I've got a copy of it somewhere in the gun. Yeah.
• 27:11
  And a Burns the Burns doll. Okay, I felt those were cool.
• 27:15
  So Blockbuster had dolls. Yeah, they were selling Bible had dolls and
• 27:18
  stuff in New York on Long Island. Yeah, shortly before Blockbuster went out
• 27:25
  of business. This is before people knew to keep that kind of shit,
• 27:27
  right. Everyone now buys three copies of it actually figured one to keep one
• 27:30
  of display one or whatever totally. But when I was growing up, it
• 27:33
  was like Mum just gave him to the we call them, the Salvation Army,
• 27:36
  just the the shops that what do you call them, strip store?
• 27:38
  Right, Well, it's prior to eBay. Yeah, so so before before
• 27:41
  there was a virtual marketplace where people could say, yes, my original ad
• 27:45
  at Walker is perfect condition, and it's the one with the weird little Cereal
• 27:49
  number on it. And yet you know, my world changed when I discovered
• 27:52
  eBay in like ninety nine, two thousand, mine too. Yeah. I
• 27:56
  started buying vintage BMX spikes that I could never really yeah, yeah, yeah,
• 28:00
  okay, yeah, I got really into that, and I saved the
• 28:03
  band later on when we hit hard times, I saw them. I liquidated
• 28:06
  them on and had they had gone up in price, so I was able
• 28:08
  to fund the band for a little bit longer. Yeah yeah, wow,
• 28:11
  not all of them. I kept a few, but I've got so much
• 28:12
  stuff that I've told my wife I'm going to sell one bag. It's just
• 28:17
  the idea of taking the photo and then the posting and I can't read Bob.
• 28:21
  Yeah, one day somebody will write a book about what the fiscal forces
• 28:26
  and memorabilia forces were gathering that gathering storm at the end of the nineties.
• 28:30
  If you recall, there had never been such a thing as a box set,
• 28:36
  right, and then suddenly Blockbuster had, for a very short period of
• 28:40
  time, the unedited VHS box set of Star Wars, the one before he
• 28:47
  before he untouched. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I kind of
• 28:49
  remember that there were original VHS's that you could get your hands on that was
• 28:53
  part of a set, and then he edited them, and then it was
• 28:57
  DVD, So I don't think the d d original see, yeah, he
• 29:02
  ruined them, Yeah, he ruined them. You know. The thing that
• 29:06
  bothered me the most about I know that, I know that, I know
• 29:08
  that Hans shot first, I know I know all that, right, that's
• 29:11
  it's it's all garbage what he put in there. But the thing that bothered
• 29:15
  me the most was the explosion of the Death Star. Was so much cooler
• 29:19
  before because it looked like a possible space explosion would look. It looked like
• 29:26
  a collapse, it looked like it it looked like there was a no pressure
• 29:30
  explosion right where where there's no where the fire goes out quickly because there's no
• 29:33
  oxygen. That was cooler, way cooler. I mean, we don't want
• 29:38
  to talk about the Han going over Jebba's tail. And things like that.
• 29:41
  That sucks. What is going on? Why did you do that? How
• 29:47
  did anyone approve that? I think he just George surround himself with yes.
• 29:49
  Men have to have been the case, right, I think that. Look,
• 29:53
  there's Rush is my favorite band. But there's a video that they made
• 29:57
  that is arguably maybe the worst looking video of all time, and therefore it
• 30:00
  becomes goes over the line and becomes the best don't want to gangsters, It's
• 30:04
  it's close. I want to be gangster is probably worse, but it's it's
• 30:08
  for a kid at that time. Look, man with the et in the
• 30:11
  corner really triggering me on this whole thing, So back off, no,
• 30:15
  no, I'll I'll get into that in a second. But there's a video
• 30:18
  for Time stand Still, one of my favorite songs. We cover it live
• 30:19
  right. The video for Time stand Still is all of that sort of grabbed
• 30:25
  animated moving around the screen, characters like it's VHS early. It's terrible,
• 30:30
  and Amy Man is in it, which makes it even like more peculiar and
• 30:34
  wonderful and strange. But but this video is is is a is a people
• 30:40
  getting a bad new toy, okay, right, and then it's doing stuff
• 30:42
  with it, and that's what Lucas did with the Star Wars. He got
• 30:45
  a bad new toy. Yeah, you know this is I wish we could
• 30:48
  have done this back in the BLA. You know his parents are telling him
• 30:51
  to stop it, right, yeah right, STI I did it with at
• 30:55
  eight is my favorite movie. Love at ruined ET Well two thousand and two,
• 30:57
  you re released it for the twentyth anniversary and he got the deleted scenes,
• 31:02
  much like the Star Wars ones. And but he computer generated ET.
• 31:04
  And when you've gone from a person in a puppet that's physically there to c
• 31:10
  GI, it's just not the same. And it looks shit. And he's
• 31:12
  like ET when he's running at the start, he makes him like he's galloping
• 31:15
  and things. And the Spielberg has acknowledged I made a mistake. And when
• 31:19
  they re released it on Blu ray and four K, it's the original version.
• 31:22
  Good yeap, good good job. The self knowledge is difficult for those
• 31:26
  guys who are in that rarefied air. I'm glad Spielberg has it. But
• 31:30
  I've always wondered what the Simpsons these earlier episodes because everyone always hates that the
• 31:34
  first season because they look so clunky. They're clunky. What they would look
• 31:37
  like if they reanimated them today, I thought, don't do it, don't
• 31:40
  do that. No, No, that's the charm of it again. It's
• 31:42
  like if the Sopranos first episode looked better because they shot it on some other
• 31:45
  format that wasn't that great looking. No, I haven't bet to watch it.
• 31:49
  What format? I've got the Blue I've got the Blu ray box sect
• 31:52
  if I bought it recently, and if I were to do it, if
• 31:55
  I should do it today, I would just do it on on like a
• 31:59
  streaming which will be HD. Yeah, so should you watch that? Not
• 32:02
  really ideally, but we're not in an ideal This is a good question.
• 32:07
  So I was talking to the guys in Everclear about this the other day.
• 32:10
  Digital masters, the dawn of digital masters, or early early to mid nineties,
• 32:15
  right, they started using these machines called aid ads. They got away
• 32:19
  from two inch magnetic tape, which was analog, and they started using these
• 32:22
  digital formats. And they use those digital formats up all the way up until
• 32:27
  the dawn of pro tools, which really took over around two thousand and one
• 32:30
  two thousand and two. Right, So this is decade or a little less
• 32:34
  than a decade of early digital masters. They're all going to decay. Ours
• 32:40
  are lost from the first records, right why you read made the album?
• 32:44
  That's why? Yeah. Yeah, And I'm wondering about that a lot lately
• 32:49
  because you know, with title and even iTunes and the distribution distribution places are
• 32:57
  using higher reds in the ninety six K stuff. Now, is there going
• 33:00
  to be this generation of lost inferior masters? Is my question? Like where
• 33:07
  the streaming services they just sound grainy. It's like you're constantly watching the first
• 33:09
  episode of The Simpsons, or the sound or on TV show is so fucking
• 33:15
  bad. The explosions are too lad. You can't hear the dialogue, yep,
• 33:19
  yeah, yeah, it's it's then they're also that's that's a strange new
• 33:23
  toy seven point one or whatever they're messing around with. Now, it's just
• 33:25
  like, yeah, that's it's. I love that you're making this music mix
• 33:30
  in the background, but there's a dialogue scene, right and it's as loud
• 33:34
  as the music and I can't hear it. Yeah. We have to live
• 33:36
  with subtitles on now, right, right? Yeah? Right, we had
• 33:39
  the subtitles on anyway, because we've got kids in bed and we try to
• 33:43
  keep it down. But when you got the TV down already, it's weird.
• 33:45
  You can't hear anything. It's very weird. Yeah, I agree with
• 33:47
  you. We sound like old guys. But a man shakes at that cloud,
• 33:53
  grandpa. But let's talk about like the two anyway. So like is
• 33:58
  the acoustic You're coming back from pandamaic. That's April, isn't it. Yeah,
• 34:00
  come back for the full electric band six piece in April. You've always
• 34:05
  been an acoustic guard there, right, I always write an acoustic The first
• 34:07
  album is all acoustic guitar. I know that people don't understand how it's all
• 34:12
  electric, but I put my my acoustic guitar through an electric system. So
• 34:16
  if you hear an electric guitar on the first record, it's almost always my
• 34:22
  Martin tripleo. Yeah sixteen still right. Yeah. I had to retire it
• 34:27
  from the road because it's got a sort of a design flaw that's revealing itself.
• 34:31
  Oh okay, you don't want to reveal it? Yeah, well no,
• 34:32
  no, you can only repair it once. Oh and then after that
• 34:37
  it's curtains. So I did the repair and I was advised to keep it
• 34:40
  off the road because that's that's the end of that. Well, it's the
• 34:43
  one from the video, right, it is the one from the video.
• 34:45
  Yeah, And I have a search alert on reverbount on eBay for those guitars.
• 34:50
  They're kind of getting rare, and they're not that they're not that collectible,
• 34:52
  they're they're in the two thousand dollars range. Would you ever sell that
• 34:57
  one? Because you sign el you sold your box and shit, there's always
• 35:00
  gonna be times where you fall on hard times. You gotta sell stuff.
• 35:01
  But there's something sell the part with If I'm selling that guitar to survive,
• 35:06
  you're in trouble, right, it's over. I should I should already have
• 35:08
  gotten a job at a deli. I feel like that the teenage dort Bad
• 35:14
  guitar would sell for quite a bit, though, right, I don't know.
• 35:15
  I don't know. I don't know how much things are worth. What
• 35:19
  do those guitars go for when they're not the teenage dorpe Bank guitar? About
• 35:22
  two thousand bucks? You're gonna get ten for it, right, I don't
• 35:28
  know. Man, you're making me wonder, You're making me worry. Let's
• 35:31
  call my girlfriend, Hey, can you get the guitar out of the house
• 35:35
  and put it in a safety box somewhere. She's not there. When you
• 35:38
  get back, the guitar's gone. House is gone. I've always wondered with
• 35:43
  that video. So because it wasn't a hit in America, the song now
• 35:45
  it became a hit here first it is now it is now we get the
• 35:49
  majority of streaming is American. Yeah, okay, now see as a keep
• 35:52
  growing up in Australia, it just it felt like the biggest song in the
• 35:55
  world at the time. It was the biggest song in our world. It
• 35:58
  was you know, in December of two was number one on the pop charts
• 36:01
  here and it was quadruple platinum. Yeah. The film clip though it wasn't
• 36:06
  made for Loser? Was it the song? No? No, So they
• 36:08
  just the director she wanted. She picked it up for the film, Amy
• 36:10
  Heckerling thought to fit the movie yet But so you hadn't made a video for
• 36:15
  it before Loser was coming to the Equations. Correct, it was just Columbia
• 36:19
  TriStar and we were on Columbia Records. So they were like, oh,
• 36:22
  we have this perfect cross pollination moment here. We can get you in the
• 36:24
  movie and we can make the video that has the movie stars in it,
• 36:28
  and it was just like, yeah, they got to do that, you
• 36:30
  know, because they were Jason coming off of American Pie like they that's that
• 36:34
  were big stars, very serious. Yeah still are you know, of course,
• 36:38
  I think I think we got really lucky that they that these knuckleheads from
• 36:44
  Long Island had these two top shelf thespians in there. You know, It's
• 36:49
  like it was like and Amy Heckerling also is a genius. I've watched the
• 36:53
  movie several times. I love it because for a couple of reasons. I'm
• 36:58
  glad you did, because so many people tell it's a ship movie, and
• 37:00
  I'm like, I love this movie. No, it's just not her.
• 37:02
  It's just the slower like it's this it's kind of people who would say that
• 37:06
  would say I like pulp fiction, but not Jackie Brown, you know that.
• 37:12
  But I like it personally because two things combined in the beginning, in
• 37:15
  the first five minutes of that movie that that that's just my heart's pumping out
• 37:21
  of my chest when the first time I saw it is uh, Dan Ackroyd
• 37:24
  is on the screen and he's he's wood Blues Elwood Blues. I was the
• 37:30
  Blues Brothers was such an important movie for me. It was so huge.
• 37:34
  It was just like I knew every line. I watched it every time it
• 37:37
  was on any of the cable channels. I had the vhs. I have
• 37:40
  the two copies of the soundtrack on Final Kid, I was gone. So
• 37:45
  that's what cool is? Oh god, so cool and relevant. They chase
• 37:51
  Nazis off of a bridge in Chicago. Hey, that's still happening, you
• 37:53
  know. So Dan Akroyd's Elwood Blues and he's on the screen and right,
• 38:00
  he's the dad. He's the dad. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a
• 38:04
  helicopter flying shot out of the Twin Towers the year before they fell down,
• 38:07
  and that's our home, you know. So it really it really tied the
• 38:10
  room together for us, put a bow on the nineties, yeah, and
• 38:15
  put us in a new place, strangely without the towers, you know.
• 38:19
  And it was just like, wow, it's all a full stop for a
• 38:23
  generation, wasn't it. It's a new world after that. Yeah, it
• 38:27
  was like it's time to be an adult. There's a Simpsons episode where he
• 38:30
  goes to New York and he has to beat it's when he goes to the
• 38:32
  two towers and he's got to get these cars and jacked up. You remember
• 38:37
  that episode and the Cloff clash guy, and you watch it now and you
• 38:38
  go, oh, yeah, they're not there anymore. Yeah, it's crazy,
• 38:43
  isn't it. Yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot of stuff
• 38:45
  you're watching. They're not there anymore. You know, they're all over friends
• 38:47
  landscapes. Yeah. Yeah, they're all over the movies and TV. I
• 38:52
  always thought they should have built them the same exact way. I thought so
• 38:54
  too, because that Freedom Tower looking things sucks. It doesn't look I mean,
• 38:59
  I don't want to the glasses doesn't look great. Nah, but it
• 39:00
  sucks. But it's in It's it's a nice building. I guess I meant
• 39:05
  to represent a new way forward maybe whatever. It's a lovely building, but
• 39:08
  it's not New York City. It's it looks like some a Houston oil building
• 39:13
  or something, you know, And I just it's a tough situation. I
• 39:15
  guess. Yeah. Well no, I mean George Pataki made his high school
• 39:21
  or college roommates architect in charge of it. It was it was you know,
• 39:25
  net bub nonsense, yeah, or corrupt whatever you want to call it
• 39:30
  but crony. So because you're from New York? Was that? How many
• 39:32
  New york Ins what's the term for New Yorkers? New Yorkers? Yeah?
• 39:36
  How many New Yorkers do you talk to who wish they were built the same?
• 39:38
  It's hard to find one that doesn't really, Yeah, real New Yorkers.
• 39:43
  Yeah, like people who like live there when it went down. Yeah,
• 39:45
  they're like, Noah, man, build the fucking towers again. What
• 39:47
  are you kidding me? They do they before building them again now? Or
• 39:51
  is it just too late? Yeah? Do it again. It's New York
• 39:52
  City. You can tear anything down to start over. Yeah, that's that's
• 39:54
  the rule. We do that all the time. We don't have precious se
• 40:00
  like that. We do what we want in terms of the shape and the
• 40:02
  landscape. The whole entire island is artificial. And maybe there was a time
• 40:07
  when we should have left the Native Americans alone. We have completely fucked that
• 40:10
  and missed that opportunity. It's a different place now. It represents something different
• 40:15
  in the world. I used to represent opportunity. Well, I think it
• 40:20
  represents getting out of the shithole that you're in and getting somewhere else, giving
• 40:23
  yourself a chance to yes, get believing in yourself and getting somewhere else,
• 40:28
  getting somewhere else. I guess it's a draw. Yeah, I should say
• 40:31
  that. I'm a person who's in favor of giving several states back to the
• 40:35
  Native Americans in America, right I could. I could do a list of
• 40:40
  states that I think should go back. There's so many broken treaties in America
• 40:44
  that it would be it'd be hard to quantify justice. It's just too much
• 40:49
  tolen. It's the same thing with African Americans who were descended from slaves.
• 40:53
  It's trillions of dollars in reparations that are due, and we'll get it.
• 40:57
  We go to get it right, you know. But I that's said,
• 41:00
  I think that New York City is an iconic place where people leave their horrible
• 41:04
  little life and go find another one. Those towers were important in that,
• 41:09
  and I you know, iconography is always important to humans. It's one of
• 41:16
  the reasons that Church tried to control it so severely. They know, you
• 41:21
  know, iconography is important. See. I was too young to sort of
• 41:23
  really appreciate them when they were still here. I still have memories of laying
• 41:28
  in bed and here mum screamed. She looked at the television because she saw
• 41:30
  the plane hit the second one, and it didn't quite hit Becaud would have
• 41:34
  been. So it was two thousand and one or about eleven twelve ish,
• 41:37
  Maybe I knew something was happening, but it didn't. It didn't sink in.
• 41:40
  But so those towers you're saying, for someone who grew up in New
• 41:44
  York, they represented New York? Was it just those two towers? Were
• 41:46
  they the true symbols? They were the important ones? Yeah? I mean
• 41:51
  they hit the right target. Yeah, you know they knew what they were
• 41:52
  doing. Yeah, not just because of world trade or whatever. You know,
• 41:57
  I'm talking about like Maderna, you know, like and the and then
• 42:01
  the notion of pluralism, these that that two that two opposing ideas can co
• 42:07
  exist in a society, and that we will not choose violence, and now
• 42:14
  we can go into our foreign policy being total shit. You're absolutely right,
• 42:17
  But the notion of pluralism is what we're trying to do ostensibly. Right in
• 42:22
  New York City is a place that I feel pride in in that regard.
• 42:27
  Because this is going to sound a little weird, but it's almost like if
• 42:31
  you're a racist in New York City, you're probably going to fail because you've
• 42:36
  got to put your bullshit aside to live with your neighbors and co exist and
• 42:42
  get to know each other on this in this like mashed together, you know,
• 42:46
  microcosm. And one of the one of my favorite things about the city
• 42:52
  is that you don't have time to judge people on on their background or the
• 42:59
  color of this. You got to fucking move. If they know how to
• 43:01
  do it and you don't, you have to. They become your teacher.
• 43:05
  It doesn't matter who they are, what they do, male, female,
• 43:08
  non non binary, whatever color, whatever, religion. Fucking let's go.
• 43:15
  You know. That was the one thing that kept a better mean when we
• 43:17
  arrived in twenty sixteen was just we got out of the station and it was
• 43:21
  just move, yes, people, let let's go. Yeah, we're here.
• 43:23
  They're doing it on dragon a suitcase. I'm just trying to keep up.
• 43:25
  You know. It was chaos, Yeah, chaos, But but you
• 43:30
  live in that long enough and you realize that you're in the you're in the
• 43:31
  experiment. You're in the grand social experiment. Can we live together? That's
• 43:37
  where it's actually being put to practice. Yeah, you know, and you'll
• 43:40
  get a lot of people from the Red States in America talking about what a
• 43:45
  mess the cities are and ball on. People are just afraid to learn how
• 43:47
  to parallel park. Fucking cowards. Man, I don't have to learn seriously,
• 43:52
  seriously because my wife looked at me, She's like, you don't have
• 43:54
  to parallel park. I was like, I'll learn, man, Yeah,
• 43:58
  yeah, you gotta learn. Yeah, if you're coming to the city from
• 44:00
  somewhere else, you got to learn how other people and other things work.
• 44:06
  And that's terrifying to some people. They won't do it. You know.
• 44:08
  It's like you watch Seinfeld and I have a big episode just about a parking
• 44:12
  space, right, you know, like I always wonder who owns a car
• 44:15
  in New York? I do? Is it? So? When I was
• 44:20
  driving, it was just constant traffic? Are you just is that just?
• 44:22
  Is that just left of you that? Yeah? You learn? You learn
• 44:24
  where the windows are, Yeah, ninety five to eleven fifteen, there's a
• 44:29
  good window. Okay, if you can, if you got to be at
• 44:32
  work early, like I did in the nineties, you jump on the subway
• 44:36
  or you walk. I walked from Avenue being fourteenth Street to Times Square almost
• 44:42
  every day. And I walked at as fast as pace you've ever seen it,
• 44:47
  Like, and I and I had all these hacks, like I knew
• 44:50
  that if if there was like if a street was closed or a sidewalk was
• 44:53
  closed, I knew I could jump in a subway go underneath card like I
• 44:58
  was a rat, you know, a lizard living in a place where rats
• 45:02
  and lizards would thrive, you know, so not lizards so much, but
• 45:07
  they did. My friend John, his father in Bushwick, has a little
• 45:09
  skink living in the backyard and none of us are sure how it's surviving the
• 45:14
  winters. So this is very strange for New York. It's obviously an escape
• 45:19
  pet. But there is a lizard in the in the in the no no
• 45:24
  in. I think they live in Ridgewood, in the border of Queens and
• 45:30
  Brooklyn. So we're always wunning lizards under rocks. Yeah, yeah, that's
• 45:31
  common here, but not New York City. We have a critic here,
• 45:35
  right, yeah, more pigeons, right, pigeons, But the pigeons are
• 45:39
  and now the birds of prey are back. I have bald eagles off of
• 45:43
  off of my apartment. Yeah. Wow do they nest that? Yeah?
• 45:46
  They nest On. Yeah, you can make good money. Just put a
• 45:50
  lot of streaming that ship. Yeah, they're they're they're a bitch to catch
• 45:53
  on camera. They're so fast and there and you know, I mean there,
• 45:57
  I have. I have a few good ones I'll show you or off
• 46:00
  the air, but but they're just so you just you don't you don't want
• 46:04
  to grab your camera. You're like, holy shit, that's the one thing
• 46:07
  I height when you got to gigs now as the cameras. Yeah, you
• 46:09
  think you're never gonna fucking watch this again. You're never gonna put it on
• 46:13
  YouTube? Why are you actually filming this? What is the connection between our
• 46:16
  brains and our fingers going? You have to feel this? Can I tell
• 46:19
  you why I have more patience for that than a lot of people I know.
• 46:22
  I understand why people who are in the arts are like, put your
• 46:23
  fucking camera away and just enjoy it. I get that, right. But
• 46:27
  but the fact of the matter is that the music industry and the arts in
• 46:30
  general, movies, TV, they all thrive and survive because people make time
• 46:36
  for this product when they don't necessarily have that time. People are working two
• 46:40
  jobs and they have kids, and they're running around like lunatics trying to get
• 46:45
  in America anyway, health insurance and like get all their shit together. It's
• 46:49
  rat race. And if somebody has time to show up at my show,
• 46:52
  who the hell am I to tell them how to what to do with it?
• 46:54
  You know, you want to take your camera or take your camera,
• 46:58
  you know, I mean I just think missing the experience. Well, if
• 47:00
  you're watching it through a through a screen, yeah, but what is the
• 47:05
  experience to them? Right, to those people? Right, Like I'm trying
• 47:07
  to put myself in the shoes of somebody who does not have the luxury of
• 47:12
  just like absorbing art all the time? You know, would you have filmed
• 47:15
  and I say, dacy concept with you Find? If you had the capability
• 47:17
  and Monte ninety three or whatever not? The first time I saw them was
• 47:21
  nineteen eighty eight. Would you if you had the capabilities we have now,
• 47:23
  would you have filmed it? Three you Find? Or would you have?
• 47:24
  Just really a good question. I was so shook up by the fact that
• 47:31
  I was in the room with Angus Young. Where was it Madison Square Garden?
• 47:36
  Wow? Fuck, that's without my parents? How were you fourteen thirteen?
• 47:42
  Amazing? Yeah, it was amazing. It was on the on the
• 47:45
  Blow Up Your Video Tour. It's all when Bonton Mill has go to see
• 47:46
  spinal tap, right right. I know I probably not, probably not,
• 47:54
  but you're you're asking an impossible question. It's like it's like the two dimensional
• 47:59
  man getting a three dimensional question because that that technology, the notion of that
• 48:05
  did not exist at the time. But for like video cameras and actual you
• 48:08
  know, snap cameras, and that the idea of bringing any of that to
• 48:13
  this show was just not in my grasp. Like I just didn't have it.
• 48:17
  I didn't have one, didn't have access to one, So it just
• 48:21
  was so far afield what you're talking about. You can't apply the ease of
• 48:25
  access of today to those people because those people didn't understand that ease of access.
• 48:30
  Trying to explain it to my five year old how we didn't get to
• 48:32
  you can choose what we want to watch when we want to watch. It
• 48:35
  just kind of standing. Right. I have this thing that I talk about
• 48:37
  sometimes if I could travel back in time and do anything, I would take
• 48:42
  my iPhone back and show it to Ben Franklin and be like, hey,
• 48:45
  doctor Franklin, this is remember you did the experiment with the key and the
• 48:50
  lightning, Well, we used that force in the universe to make this.
• 48:53
  And here's a picture of you painted on Facebook, right, trying to take
• 49:00
  it all in. I know it's a lot, but like you know,
• 49:01
  we're we're doing this now, you know, and it was you you discovered
• 49:05
  it. So but uh yeah, I can't break that barrier. Time is
• 49:09
  locked. The I go back and tell five year old me that there will
• 49:13
  be a point in time where you'll be able to watch any episode of The
• 49:15
  Simpsons whenever you want at your finger tips. I just don't think I would
• 49:19
  have been able to comprehend it right because it was six pm weight nights,
• 49:21
  that's when it was on here. Yeah, and then I had marathons on
• 49:23
  the weekends on the cable, but it was just six think ours was six
• 49:28
  pm. I don't remember if it was was six pm. I remember it's
• 49:31
  there was a lot of programming there was in Living Color was on Fox back
• 49:37
  then, which was I have to say, you know what, I watched
• 49:39
  that more than I watched The Simpsons. Yeah, okay, that was that
• 49:43
  was more of my alley, do you Jim Carrey fanly huge? But the
• 49:46
  Waynes brothers and David Allen Greer and and I have to say that that was
• 49:52
  the first like it was like the Black Saturday Night Live. It was fucking
• 49:59
  awesome, and it was on earlier, you know, it was on earlier
• 50:02
  than early enough for me to watch it all the time. Yeah, that
• 50:09
  show is great. That show is great, and Fox has become this horrific
• 50:15
  thing. But but but that's just TV in general now that right, I
• 50:17
  guess I'm talking about the news network. Okay, but but Australian man,
• 50:25
  so he sold it, right, I think he sold it. I think
• 50:28
  he's still holding on white knuckled someone there controlling them. When we get our
• 50:34
  society back, it'll be like they'll cut off his dead hand holding onto it
• 50:38
  still, you know in space. Well, here's your society. But we
• 50:43
  can't seem to get this hand off. But uh, but the uh yeah,
• 50:49
  that was a that was an you're talking about having to wait checking the
• 50:53
  TV guide? Do you remember that? Man? Love it? Call me
• 50:57
  a nerd, I don't care. One of my favorite pastimes the weekend was
• 51:00
  when Mom would go shop and she'd become the TV guid and I'd highlight.
• 51:02
  But I'm going to watch for the week. Yeah, oh, man,
• 51:06
  set it in my memory, Tuesday seven thirty, Do not Miss Funnies home
• 51:08
  Videos? Yeah, TV Guide and Reader's Digest. Yeah, Like there were
• 51:13
  just these two little things that were on the coffee table. What is Digest?
• 51:21
  The people would come to your door and say you'd do one for free?
• 51:22
  I'm like, well, still free fucking why not? Exactly exactly?
• 51:27
  Yeah I didn't. Man. Man, how often do you watch The Simpsons?
• 51:30
  Not as much as I used to, like per week since I started
• 51:34
  doing the podcast, maybe two three times a week. Okay, I used
• 51:37
  to go to bed with it on. I was big on the Simpsons commentaries
• 51:38
  when they released the DVD sets. That was sort of my introduct That's where
• 51:42
  podcasting for me started. I think listening to these audio commentaries and movies and
• 51:45
  the Simpsons ones really shock a chord with me. So I'd go to bed
• 51:47
  every night listening to the Simpsons creators talking about the show. I'd watched the
• 51:51
  episodes so many times I didn't need to watch them anymore. I wanted to
• 51:53
  listen to the creators how they made the show. And now I think,
• 51:57
  because I'm critiquing it, it's almost like it's become work a little bit,
• 52:00
  which is a shame because I used to watch it so often and I wanted
• 52:04
  to introduce it to my kids. But I just think I've been talking about
• 52:07
  it all day. There were jokes in this episode that that that I I
• 52:14
  was like, Oh my god, this show was really funny. I laughed
• 52:16
  out loud. You wrote this episode. You're kidding me. So everyone talks
• 52:22
  about the Monty episode, Everyone talks about the Homo goest to college. This
• 52:24
  is the forgotten Conan one. This is the forgotten con So I'm so glad
• 52:29
  because, first of all, I think he's a genius. The second of
• 52:31
  all, the joke that got me was so freaking Conan, like the beard
• 52:37
  of bees. Okay, yeah, I had to stop it. I laughed
• 52:43
  hard enough to mix them to miss the next bit of dialogue, so I
• 52:45
  had to rewind. And then something funny happened with the streaming off our drop
• 52:51
  box? Did I say that? Where where the ride where the audio was
• 52:57
  off was sink with So I watched the rest of the episode after the Beard
• 53:00
  of Beer out of sinc Audia. It was so good, it was like,
• 53:05
  it made me think about it harder. Actually, you know, Yeah,
• 53:08
  but you imagine Colan doing it as a skit on his show, Can't
• 53:12
  You the Beard of Bees? Yeah, you know you're now And then I'm
• 53:16
  sitting here talking about it the way you tied where you tried to tie teenager
• 53:20
  Bag to this episode earlier. It is a lot more like that like it
• 53:24
  than I had originally than it originally float over me. I thought it was
• 53:30
  just cliche, but it's actually more to it. Yeah, there's a little
• 53:32
  bit more to it, especially when Mo shows up with the knife. Shit.
• 53:36
  There's one mistake there though, when everyone knows the Simpsons address and everyone
• 53:39
  seven four to Evergreen terraces right, and but in that call says ten ninety
• 53:44
  four Evergreen Terrorists, And it's just so bizarre that they said the wrong address.
• 53:49
  It's been acknowledged that seven four to two Evergreen Terrorist was their address.
• 53:52
  MO had been to their house, but he says ten ninety four, and
• 53:54
  it's just so weird. That's interesting. It's a glaring error. Maybe they
• 53:59
  had to ignoled she addressed before then. I don't know, is that the
• 54:00
  first time they talked about the address of the actual address. Maybe that's the
• 54:05
  only way I feel like you could talk making see, the thing is the
• 54:07
  problem is that I think I think this is true of phone numbers as well
• 54:10
  in Hollywood. If you accidentally list to somebody's real phone number or address,
• 54:14
  you have to like fix that. Yeah, And maybe they didn't have the
• 54:20
  ability to actually fix that, he knows, because how do you get anyway?
• 54:24
  The most things. Just I just love Jimbo. My pants are shave
• 54:28
  for me, just gonna cautch you. Well, that's another thing. That's
• 54:32
  another thing. It's a cartoon, right, shop owner from where I grew
• 54:36
  up, was coming after you like that with a night would you had to
• 54:39
  run? You know? But uh yeah, just as a as a so
• 54:47
  the dirt bag persona and can talk about that for a second. Right.
• 54:52
  The problem, initially, at least my in my youth in summer of nineteen
• 54:55
  eighty four, was that it could mean it just it was just a misnomer.
• 55:00
  So I was a dirt beck because I was into a c d C.
• 55:02
  Right, and then murder the guy got arrested with an ac DC shirt,
• 55:07
  So, uh, he was into a c d C too. Were
• 55:09
  your parents like, no, you can't listen to it anymore? No,
• 55:13
  my parents liked a c DC because it's reminded them of Chuck Berry good,
• 55:16
  right, but there was concern. I remember my dad coming in when I
• 55:21
  was that's two summers later. I was listening to Lousying this guy with Diamonds.
• 55:25
  I'm a CD player. This was like the first CD we ever got
• 55:29
  was Sergeant Peppers, and I was like rewinding it, rewinding it, rewinding
• 55:32
  it, rewinding it, rewinding, just sitting there with my guitar, like
• 55:35
  listening over and over again. And my dad came in sort of concerned,
• 55:39
  and he says, you know, Brun, it wasn't always about drugs.
• 55:45
  And I was like, what, I'm listening to the kick drum and the
• 55:47
  breakdown? What are you talking like? And oh oh oh yeah, I'm
• 55:54
  right right right. So it's like the eighty parents misunderstanding their kids is something
• 56:00
  that somebody needs to write encyclopedia about because it was profound, but it is
• 56:06
  looking for things to blame. Uh yeah, I mean there was some it
• 56:09
  was V Day games in the nineties, right. So in America, at
• 56:15
  least all these World War II vets and their families moved to Long Island because
• 56:19
  they were scared of the urban centers, right, And you know, they
• 56:23
  call it white flight, you know at the time, and there was a
• 56:27
  time where it was redlining, and these neighborhoods were all set up to be
• 56:30
  like sort of really racist and horrible. But the untreated you know, traumas
• 56:36
  of the World War two generation just rained down on their kids in these newly
• 56:42
  established like you know suburbs, which were brand news for experiment, right.
• 56:47
  So, and behind these closed doors there was no therapy. Everyone's a victimisty.
• 56:52
  Yeah, there's lots of a violent violence and you know, abuse and
• 56:57
  whatever else. And and then you entered drugs like real you know, psycho
• 57:04
  stuff like LSD and mescaline and lots of heroin and then crack and then you
• 57:07
  know there's like you combine that that that's that's that's the eighties. That's where
• 57:14
  they where they where they all where they're all washed up on shore. Was
• 57:16
  the late seventies and early eighties, and so you had these and the economy
• 57:22
  sucked, so these nuclear families had kind of like unraveled and fallen apart.
• 57:27
  Both parents were now working. It was the the baby boomer generation was trying
• 57:30
  to do what their parents did because they thought that was a good idea.
• 57:34
  Who god knows why. And then you had, you know, like the
• 57:37
  latch Key generation, the eighties, kids who parents were never home, lots
• 57:43
  and lots of drugs, lots and lots of violence, you know, spending
• 57:47
  your time in the woods with no money, trying to figure out something to
• 57:50
  do with the other kids. It was like Lord of the Flies. Yeah,
• 57:52
  you know, the Stranger Things. A good sort of interpretation with the
• 57:57
  Eighties would lie. I have to say, I've never watched it, but
• 57:59
  I have had so many people say this is you. You got to watch
• 58:02
  this thing, and I'm like, ah, I don't want to. I
• 58:06
  don't want to books, I don't want to, you know, I wrote
• 58:12
  that song and then but but I got you know, it's cool that it's
• 58:20
  cool that those that those memories. The thing is, like I was talking
• 58:22
  about this before, like dirt Bag is sanitized, you know, Happy Ending
• 58:28
  the cartoon is sanitized in terms of Lisa and the how they're approaching feminism in
• 58:34
  the episode. The real world is not that great to revisit if you're not
• 58:39
  with your therapist. Right, So it's kind of like separating learning how to
• 58:45
  separate fact from fiction and art from from life can be challenging if like,
• 58:50
  if like the imagery of your childhood is is being commoditized over and over again.
• 58:55
  Not that that's necessarily bad. I think that's kind of how the system
• 58:58
  works, right. We're capitalistic, so we picked the bones and resell.
• 59:02
  But but I'd say, like that period of time is also locked away,
• 59:12
  you know, and in a good way, Like that's a good thing.
• 59:15
  It took me a long time to unmaladapt right, Like I thought everybody got
• 59:22
  into a fistfight when they disagreed when I was twenty seven, you know,
• 59:27
  and that's not how the world is. Yeah, I've definitely got issues from
• 59:31
  my childhood that I should probably say a therapist are bad, But I just
• 59:35
  it's the fear of just talking about it. I guess, yeah, yeah,
• 59:37
  you'd be afraid. The problem with me was that it's at some point
• 59:40
  it fucked me up so bad that I was kind of like contemplating suicide.
• 59:44
  Again. I had done that when I was in high school, and I
• 59:49
  didn't attempt, but I was like when you're when you're conjuring up, like
• 59:52
  what's the right way to make sure that there's no coming back kind of thing.
• 59:55
  And this is before it was acknowledged that it's okay for a man,
• 59:59
  it's help. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, No, my dad never
• 1:00:01
  talked about anything, that's what that's never said I love you to me ever,
• 1:00:05
  right, right, I know he does, but he's never said it.
• 1:00:07
  My dad said it. But that's hard to describe, like like do
• 1:00:15
  you are we talking about the same way? Maybe maybe maybe you're Brendan.
• 1:00:19
  Maybe your may in like ten years. Yeah, I think I think that
• 1:00:22
  he My dad was an orphan, right, His mom died of alcoholism when
• 1:00:25
  he was nine, and his father died in an accident at work. Right,
• 1:00:28
  So he was like he was like the red headed step child, kind
• 1:00:30
  of icon archetype kid for for his youth. And I think that the ah
• 1:00:43
  his ability to to teach me things and be a parent was you know,
• 1:00:49
  as limited as you would expect. He didn't experience it any right, right,
• 1:00:52
  So, and I was lucky because my parents stayed together, and well,
• 1:00:55
  some people would say that my mom's alway says she stayed together for the
• 1:01:00
  kids. Right. There was so physical issues or anything like that, a
• 1:01:04
  lot more emotional yelling and screaming. We could go down a rabbit hole on
• 1:01:07
  this. That's really deep we were actually talking about Homer here. Should they
• 1:01:10
  split off, like for the good of the kids would have been better.
• 1:01:14
  We're now reviewing the teen seasons of the Simpsons. We've gone from the start
• 1:01:16
  with out season eighteen, and it came to a point about season ten or
• 1:01:20
  eleven where they just they gave up giving Homer, holding him a cannibal for
• 1:01:23
  his alcoholism. So in the early nineties, in these episodes here you touched
• 1:01:28
  on it earlier that you know, he's always putting the drinking ahead of his
• 1:01:30
  family, things like that, but often enough it would come back to buy
• 1:01:34
  him on the ass and he'd have to be held a cannable and still put
• 1:01:36
  his hand up and say, look, I shouldn't have done that. Next
• 1:01:37
  episode, he's back to doing it whatever. In the teen seasons, we
• 1:01:40
  get what they call jerk ass Homer, where he's never held a cannibal.
• 1:01:44
  He's just a prick to everybody, he's a drunk, he's a horrible father,
• 1:01:49
  and it's just the show's not fun anymore. Really, Yeah, I'm
• 1:01:52
  glad you didn't pick one of those. That's an episode and the listeners have
• 1:01:57
  been just like, I'm sick of you bring this one up, but it's
• 1:01:58
  called Codependence Day. And in the episode, Homer drink drives with margin,
• 1:02:01
  the car crashes, then wakes up in the ditch the cars upside down,
• 1:02:07
  puts her in the driver's seat and doesn't run it and lets her cop the
• 1:02:08
  blame, and that makes her think that she drink drives. Wow. Not
• 1:02:13
  good. Very bad, Yeah, very very bad. So you're talking about
• 1:02:16
  this this episode with an intensity that although you're a Simpsons professional, you did
• 1:02:22
  not approach the episode that I that I was taught here to talk about.
• 1:02:27
  And I think that that means that you definitely need to talk to a therapist.
• 1:02:34
  And they bring this one up in the friendliest, most loving way.
• 1:02:37
  I'm saying it's because my wife did that to me. I shouldn't, no,
• 1:02:40
  but I there's look the way that early psychological psychological damage works, right,
• 1:02:46
  Yeah, your brain forms these neuropaths off of it, and you think
• 1:02:52
  they're okay, and they ain't. No, So you're just like functioning along
• 1:02:55
  with this, like your brain's firing the way that it always has, which
• 1:03:00
  is shittily. And and you come into you develop, you grow up,
• 1:03:06
  your responsibilities increase, your your worldview increases, either money and financial, responsibility
• 1:03:14
  and trickiness all becomes serious. Yes, and you are stuck now in a
• 1:03:19
  place where you realize you're not equipped to get through this without something terrible happening.
• 1:03:25
  And that's when you have to see a therapist, which is actually,
• 1:03:30
  sadly sometimes too late. Right. So with me, I got lucky.
• 1:03:35
  I found the right one. I oh, were you and defend we started
• 1:03:37
  signa therapist twenty ten, okay, yeah, and the childhood trauma yes,
• 1:03:44
  yeah, yeah, very much so. And that was you know, everything
• 1:03:50
  I was taught was that that doesn't work, that's talk, therapy is nonsense,
• 1:03:53
  that that's a bunch of hocus pocus bullshit and lolma if they ever tried
• 1:03:57
  it from people who had never tried it or never would. Right, So
• 1:04:00
  I was raised as a skeptic on that whole thing, reinforced this garbage,
• 1:04:05
  right, and realized that it that I better try something. So I did,
• 1:04:11
  and I was on my own with it. It was sort of like
• 1:04:13
  got an our keyboard player at the time. Gerard gave me a name and
• 1:04:17
  it worked. And I still go to doctor Suzanne Lackman in New York and
• 1:04:26
  once a week if i'm home. Still yeah, yeah, and I don't
• 1:04:30
  roll in there with nothing to say. I do like prep work. I
• 1:04:34
  think hard about, like what's the most embarrassing moment of the week for me
• 1:04:39
  that I wish didn't go that way and get into that one, you know,
• 1:04:43
  like just beat yourself up a little bit and unpeel the onion and trying
• 1:04:48
  to figure out why you're doing what the hell you're doing. Are you a
• 1:04:50
  dweller, I'm a dweller. Dweller absolutely, I'm in a near constant state
• 1:04:57
  of dwelling on something. I've gotten better at juggling moving on my dwells,
• 1:05:02
  yeah, my dwell plates, but now not moving on. I mean if
• 1:05:09
  I if I screw something up, I blame myself forever on stage or just
• 1:05:13
  in life, everywhere, every single thing. And I at the same time
• 1:05:18
  that I'm trying to let myself off the hook, I'm trying to learn that
• 1:05:20
  never do that again, right, which requires a bit of like beat yourself
• 1:05:25
  up right for it. It's it's a fine line, and you're not good
• 1:05:30
  at it. If you're not, if you've been you know, unaddressed issues,
• 1:05:34
  it's just get worse. So that's my opinion, my experience. But
• 1:05:39
  how is that as a musician though, because I feel like we're very much
• 1:05:43
  like perfectionist wise, do you go back into the songs and go fuck?
• 1:05:46
  I wish I had have done this now. Oh yeah, how hard is
• 1:05:48
  it for you to not dwell on that kind of stuff? Impossible, totally
• 1:05:54
  impossible. I do better new stuff, And like when I make a new
• 1:05:59
  album, the Valentine LP or twenty thirteen record, first record I made after
• 1:06:05
  therapy, and could you send a difference. Oh yeah, it's my favorite
• 1:06:09
  one to play live all the where you were in live. No, it's
• 1:06:14
  just free of Like I listened to the first record and I'm like, shit,
• 1:06:16
  man, this is really angry. I was so angry and I had
• 1:06:20
  been ripped off. I missed out on a record deal. Somebody stole some
• 1:06:24
  songs from me and stuff in New York music industry and jerked around and DEMI
• 1:06:29
  dev grow it wasn't but I it was a million dollar deal. Shit that
• 1:06:38
  I missed, and I had done the work for it and was cut out
• 1:06:41
  at the last minute. And I was the first weaatest record I was working
• 1:06:46
  on until then is actually kind of represented by the ten additional songs that we
• 1:06:55
  added to the twenty twenty version. So if you want to hear what the
• 1:06:58
  first Weaedest record would have sounded like, I'm up and screwed around badly.
• 1:07:01
  The twenty songs version has the alternate universe first first Wheatest record on it,
• 1:07:09
  so you wanted to do twenty No no No. I had a different prior
• 1:07:14
  to being ripped off in the nineties. I had a different approach to Wheatis.
• 1:07:16
  I was writing more sort of like emotional like and more emo stuff,
• 1:07:20
  and sort of more a bulliant or a happier, more forgiving place. Who
• 1:07:27
  were listening to at that time? The otis who would count at that point.
• 1:07:30
  I was listening to Everclear, I was listening to Annie DiFranco. I
• 1:07:33
  was listening to Soul Coughing. I was listening to the Indigo Girls a lot.
• 1:07:40
  The Foo Fighter's color in the shape was was part of the repertoire as
• 1:07:45
  I was making the first record, and then I had all these songs and
• 1:07:49
  when the guy when I got ripped off, a lot of them morphed into
• 1:07:51
  these angry pieces. Sunshine is Truffles is really angry? Those truffles is I
• 1:08:00
  wrote when I was thinking about all the shit that kids used to see to
• 1:08:02
  each other in my high school. That's just a document of some of the
• 1:08:08
  more sanitized stuff that kids would say to each other. And my high school
• 1:08:14
  is nasty like about that, you know, we I mean so gnarly.
• 1:08:16
  We're boys' school. And I missed school. But I don't miss the drama
• 1:08:20
  of school. No, I missed the socialization of I get to see my
• 1:08:25
  friends anywhere near is often anymore, being in dad and everything now and working
• 1:08:27
  full time. But I missed the idea of being able to go to a
• 1:08:30
  place and know your friends are going to be there. But the drama and
• 1:08:33
  you put yourself through at school, and you think, why did you do
• 1:08:35
  that? But you're just going through things. You're a teenager, you know.
• 1:08:38
  Yeah, Well, I mean kids are nasty and violent and violent and
• 1:08:41
  horrible to one another. And it was the boys' school I went to in
• 1:08:44
  the eighties was about the pinnacle of that. You know, I'm terrified.
• 1:08:47
  My son's just started school last week. He's five, so I know what
• 1:08:51
  school's like. Yeah. It's just trying to be his dad and guide him
• 1:08:55
  through it. That's the terrifying part of it. I don't have kids.
• 1:08:58
  I'm fifty years old, and I don't have no plan for kids. And
• 1:09:00
  I think one of the reasons is because I'm I almost didn't make it myself.
• 1:09:05
  I'm reluctant, reluctant to assume that I'm prepared to guide somebody else through
• 1:09:10
  that. Do you think you'd have to relive your issues if I wouldn't know
• 1:09:14
  how? And it's going to be a new issue, right, Yeah,
• 1:09:15
  it's going to be like something I could. I could never imagine sending me
• 1:09:18
  photos on my phone exactly, the failure of my imagination based on what I
• 1:09:23
  went through. It's like one of those things is like, no, I'm
• 1:09:26
  not having kids. I don't want to put anybody through that. I I
• 1:09:28
  was almost casualty. I'm not. I'm not, you know. It's a
• 1:09:31
  lot of fear there. Yeah, I also don't. I pursued other things
• 1:09:36
  so so fully that apparent I am not, you know. But yeah,
• 1:09:42
  So it's like it's good you can acknowledge that, though, sure, because
• 1:09:45
  some people don't and they have kids, and they have kids anyway, and
• 1:09:48
  they shouldn't have yeah, and we have some kids shouldn't be born. But
• 1:09:53
  like some kids are brought in for with the wrong intentions. Who who knows
• 1:09:58
  how how these things happen? You know, I mean, I mean I
• 1:10:01
  look at myself sometimes I think, Wow, when you were eleven years old,
• 1:10:04
  you were basically on the like the serial killer path, Like how did
• 1:10:08
  you get off of that? Oh guitar? Oh, that was a close
• 1:10:11
  call, Like like wait, wait a minute, what made you think serial
• 1:10:14
  killer pop? And what why? Is? Oh? I was so such
• 1:10:15
  a dark little kid after the sort of like rougher stuff of you know,
• 1:10:21
  traumatic events. Yeah, I can tell you it was. Ah, I'm
• 1:10:28
  a I'm a sexual abuse survivor, and I uh, I never told anybody
• 1:10:33
  until I was in my thirties. Just imagine being in young mind being shaped
• 1:10:41
  almost permanently by by the worst betrayal or the kind of thing, and and
• 1:10:46
  you're uh and it's you know, being a male and sort of cis ish,
• 1:10:55
  you know, is back then was like you could tell anybody that,
• 1:11:00
  like, you know, no fucking way. And then you get to the
• 1:11:06
  point where you haven't, and later in life you're like, I'm much more
• 1:11:10
  comfortable not talking about it, you know, But you're fucked. You're completely
• 1:11:14
  your your approach to shit is as wrong as it can get. You just
• 1:11:17
  don't know it, and you just have been kind of trudging along trying to
• 1:11:23
  be normal when you're not, like, you know, trying to just like
• 1:11:26
  everyone assumes everybody is normal, right, so you just get on it.
• 1:11:30
  No, there's no normal, but there's there are there are versions of right,
• 1:11:35
  there are versions of not normal that are like way more toxic than others.
• 1:11:41
  Right. So so that was it for me. It was like,
• 1:11:45
  you know, uh, I was just very very dark kid like way dark.
• 1:11:49
  My mother actually referred to it as like my like she referred to it
• 1:11:54
  as my black period where I was just like I wasn't a goth or anything
• 1:11:58
  like that. I just didn't talk like I was just like shut off,
• 1:12:00
  so so shut off. I was just so shut off all through high school.
• 1:12:03
  What got you through that or what not? That got you through it?
• 1:12:08
  But it was only one There was only one effective distraction, and it
• 1:12:11
  was playing guitar every Saturday and Sunday. Yeah. Yeah, I went to
• 1:12:15
  a school. I went to a boys school that wasn't an hour and a
• 1:12:16
  half commute from my local town. Okay, right, So I was on
• 1:12:20
  the train for three hours a day and I was essentially from the age of
• 1:12:24
  thirteen, I was like a New York City commute commuter. Yeah yeah,
• 1:12:28
  and it was three hours of homework when you got home if you didn't do
• 1:12:30
  it on the train. Doing your homework on the train was risky because there
• 1:12:33
  was construction workers and other people who were like, it was this rich kid
• 1:12:39
  on with the tie on the train, you know. So even though it
• 1:12:41
  was like the majority of people who went to my high school, their parents
• 1:12:44
  were cops and firemen. But it was like just just the guitar, always
• 1:12:50
  guitar, always guitar. First it was ac DC when I was ten eleven,
• 1:12:55
  twelve thirteen, and then Metallica and then Rush and Print and more complicated
• 1:13:00
  stuff, and it's very different, so hard, so hard to play print
• 1:13:04
  songs. I remember trying to figure out Raspberry Beret on the guitar forever and
• 1:13:09
  not getting it. Dire straits. But like the control exercise of teaching myself.
• 1:13:15
  I didn't want lessons. I took lessons for three months with a really
• 1:13:18
  nice guy, but I was like, there's something wrong with this. I
• 1:13:21
  want this back. So I took the control of teaching myself how to play
• 1:13:25
  guitar in this sort of like bubble of like if you're not in control of
• 1:13:30
  your life, you don't feel like your control of your own body. Even
• 1:13:32
  then you're kind of like in a place where you have to have some sort
• 1:13:36
  of you have to exercise control over something. And that was for me his
• 1:13:40
  guitar, because you stuff produced all the music and everything. Yeah yeah,
• 1:13:43
  so I'm controlling. I love to be in control of everything. Yeah yeah,
• 1:13:46
  when it comes to my podcasting, I mean yeah, yeah. So
• 1:13:49
  it was like it was like that. It was like that was the distraction
• 1:13:53
  or the positive distraction that got me to a different places. I felt you
• 1:13:57
  could feel like total self satisfaction at having figured out how Angus actually plays riff
• 1:14:03
  raff. That was so much more important to me than anything else. It
• 1:14:09
  was like the most this other world. It was like a transcendent importance,
• 1:14:16
  which no, how did you learn that, because it is before you can
• 1:14:18
  just go on the internet and just look at the colds. I paused the
• 1:14:21
  tape cassette, Ye rewind every thirty ten seconds and nope, nope, nope,
• 1:14:28
  by note, nope, by note. Every time you met him.
• 1:14:30
  No, I had the chance to meet him. We were on the same
• 1:14:33
  label in two thousand and two and They played a show at Roselamp Ballroom,
• 1:14:39
  which was like a twenty five hundred capacity club in New York City in two
• 1:14:42
  thousand and two, and I got a ticket from our A and R guy
• 1:14:45
  at the time at Columbia Records. I will forever owe him. But they
• 1:14:49
  fucking destroyed the place. They hung their true their arena, not arena arena,
• 1:14:58
  PA a twenty five hundred club. So these huge arrays are hanging down
• 1:15:02
  to the hang do you hear me right now? I wore ear plugs the
• 1:15:05
  whole time, and they opened with Helen in a Bad Place to Be,
• 1:15:10
  So for me, that was my favorite ACDC song. Just ripped my ear
• 1:15:13
  plugs out right away and I was like, oh no, no, right
• 1:15:15
  back, hen No, there was no cameraphone. I didn't have a cameraphone
• 1:15:20
  yet, so so I did properly in just two thousand and two. Prior
• 1:15:24
  to you know, cameraphones were around, but they were garbage like you would
• 1:15:29
  never you know, back when you had to pipe for a text message.
• 1:15:31
  Yeah no video, there was no video. Yeah right then, I think
• 1:15:35
  I had a next tell. I had a nextel hip pager. Yeah,
• 1:15:39
  two way, next heel pager. Snake. Yeah, yeah, neat old
• 1:15:45
  stuff. Well, so I got into the meet and greet right, and
• 1:15:50
  I can't understand. Sorry, I was Angus for Halloween in nineteen eighty five
• 1:15:55
  and again in nineteen eighty six. That's kind of kid I was. I
• 1:15:58
  was like, no, this is good enough costume. I'm sticking with it.
• 1:16:01
  And uh, the door swings Over're in the meet and greet area as
• 1:16:05
  this like sort of this like staging area for people who were in the meet
• 1:16:09
  and greet. There's only about twenty people who actually were in the meet and
• 1:16:11
  greet, and uh, the door to the dressing room area swings open,
• 1:16:15
  and I see Cliff with his knee with his leg up against the wall.
• 1:16:20
  And as it's the door swinging back, I see Angus walk out into the
• 1:16:25
  hallway like with Cliff, and I went, nope, really I left,
• 1:16:30
  Yeah, I left. I left because I wanted to keep him where he
• 1:16:33
  was like in like on that stage like so good, like so like so
• 1:16:39
  awesome. I didn't I didn't have anything to say room the teenage doorback,
• 1:16:43
  guy, I really love you, I sang about Iron Maiden, but I
• 1:16:45
  you know you well no, no, no, no, no. It
• 1:16:49
  was like the pretense for being there, like why are you here? You
• 1:16:54
  know? And the reason I was here is because we're on the same label.
• 1:16:56
  I didn't feel like telling him that. I didn't feel like saying any
• 1:16:59
  of that ship to him. If you saw him at a super Michael,
• 1:17:00
  would you say hello? If I thought it wouldn't make him feel weird,
• 1:17:04
  I might, But look, he's just a guy, right. Neil Pierce
• 1:17:09
  talks about this and in these interviews that he did when he was alive,
• 1:17:12
  he loved Keith Moon, but he would never hang out at Keith Moon's hotel
• 1:17:15
  waiting for him to come outside, right, And it's like whether or not
• 1:17:20
  Angus knows that he taught me how to play guitar, like my initial everything
• 1:17:24
  about my pentatonic scales and which technique is, Yeah, my earliest technique is
• 1:17:30
  only Angus. The teenage doorback technique is sort of a Mark Knopfler hybrid.
• 1:17:34
  But but my earliest everything is Angus Young. It's the initial, the first
• 1:17:39
  lessons the grammar school guitar is Angus Young. And I don't know how to
• 1:17:44
  tell somebody that you know that sounded like an obsessed with that sounded like a
• 1:17:48
  like like you're angus. Your neurons shaped my neurons right, like for better
• 1:17:55
  or worse, like whatever happened. That's that's why, that's who I am.
• 1:17:58
  And it's almost like I want to tell me the story that and it
• 1:18:00
  means so much to you. But he's headed a million times before as well.
• 1:18:02
  Yeah, and who cares? Right in the end, I think the
• 1:18:06
  only person who maybe understands is is Axel Rose got to sing with them,
• 1:18:10
  you know, and probably gets it. The two new guys in the band,
• 1:18:13
  they have a new bass player, new drummer, and they just announced
• 1:18:15
  the tour of Europe. Yeah, possibly next year Australia again. Oh man,
• 1:18:19
  Yeah, I'm waiting for New York. I want to see him at
• 1:18:21
  Madis Square Garden again. Actually they probably they probably wouldn't play the garden.
• 1:18:26
  I saw it. The last time I saw them was twoy and sixteen with
• 1:18:29
  Axel at Madison Square Garden. Yeah. Wow, And I was surprised.
• 1:18:32
  Axel did a really good job. He's straightened himself out. He really did
• 1:18:36
  a great job. Man, he killed it. It was obvious to me
• 1:18:40
  that at some point in Axel's life he learned everything from Bond. At some
• 1:18:46
  point bond was his most important sort of focus and because he got it right.
• 1:18:53
  Can't get that right unless that's true. Unless you burn those neuropaths when
• 1:18:57
  you were a kid, you can't do that stuff, you know. So
• 1:19:01
  I yeah, that's that's why. That's why I didn't want to talk to
• 1:19:04
  him about bullshit. Do you dwell on it? No? I know I
• 1:19:08
  made the right decision. Yeah, if professional context ever puts us in the
• 1:19:13
  same room again, it might be different, but only if I feel like
• 1:19:15
  I'm not going to weird him out, because it's just it's just it's I
• 1:19:19
  don't know. I don't want to weird him out. Yeah, I don't
• 1:19:23
  want him to think something of me, But you let me that you ever
• 1:19:26
  think in it. I think maybe maybe he'll just forget who I am in
• 1:19:29
  an instant. But but I you know, I just I like him where
• 1:19:31
  he is. Do you dwell on anything from Teenage Peg? Not from teenage
• 1:19:35
  Starpeck? No got that one right, it did? I feel good about
• 1:19:40
  that one. There are things about the first record that I like, As
• 1:19:42
  I said, like feel too angry for me these days, But that record
• 1:19:48
  is is what it is and couldn't have been anything else. Yeah, and
• 1:19:51
  uh and dirt Peg is you just smile when you listen to it? I
• 1:19:56
  smile. Yeah. I love playing that song. It just takes me back
• 1:19:59
  to a so when I was just happy. Yeah, I mean I'm not
• 1:20:00
  happy. I'm happy now, but it's just it's the nostalgia and it's just
• 1:20:04
  it's a feel good story and it's just kind of a smile. Yeah.
• 1:20:08
  I'm super happy that that happened. I have a career in music, and
• 1:20:15
  that's to me was like this. I remember watching Angus when I was ten,
• 1:20:17
  thinking if I can do any version of this, any version of this,
• 1:20:21
  I'll be okay. Yeah, And maybe that's the distraction I was talking
• 1:20:25
  about, and not the guitar, but but the but the point is only
• 1:20:28
  that, like I look forward to playing that song every night, because I
• 1:20:31
  said, you have a get sick of it, but you don't, No,
• 1:20:32
  never, you can't get sick of it because when it's when it's the
• 1:20:35
  song, you can't be sick of it. We're lucky that way because a
• 1:20:39
  lot of bands from our generation, they had like a cover that they did
• 1:20:43
  or this song that was again our guy's idea, or is a co write.
• 1:20:45
  It's not necessarily their identity song. Tanage Starback is my identity song that
• 1:20:50
  I've worked on for four years and I'm still proud of it. And it's
• 1:20:54
  in four years for this song. Yeah, man, I had that riff
• 1:20:57
  when I was in high school. Really yeah, I was messing around with
• 1:20:59
  that riff all through the colas. When you call the first time you strummed
• 1:21:01
  it the idioh Man so early, so early. I had that riff so
• 1:21:05
  long ago that I probably played it on a Gibson SG that I had when
• 1:21:09
  I was thirteen. It's like Frank Pixies, he comes your man. He
• 1:21:13
  wrote that when he's like fourteen. Yeah, you know, I didn't write
• 1:21:15
  the song, no, but he had the idea of the song, right.
• 1:21:17
  I think he wrote it later, but he could in his head.
• 1:21:19
  I had the riff, an idea of it. Yeah, I had that
• 1:21:23
  riff and and I put the put the song together in my voice, together
• 1:21:28
  with it my finding my voice and learning how to sing it all from like
• 1:21:31
  ninety five to ninety nine. What was it originally? What do you mean?
• 1:21:35
  What was it original? So when you were originally strumming it, what
• 1:21:39
  were you singing a well? So, first of all, it's not strummed,
• 1:21:41
  it's finger from right. But but that that in my head, it
• 1:21:44
  was just a cool guitar part. It was just like a skill on the
• 1:21:47
  guitar that I felt was like, Okay, I've never heard this. I've
• 1:21:51
  never heard anybody do this. You're trying to be original eventually on the guitar.
• 1:21:54
  You're trying to be originally. It's hard. It's really hard. You're
• 1:21:57
  like, you're like, who am I? Why can't Why don't I have
• 1:22:00
  original thoughts? Like you know, and and then eventually you kind of like
• 1:22:03
  you accidentally have original thoughts or synesthesia happens when you're sort of crisscrossing your senses
• 1:22:10
  you're smelling a taste or you're seeing a a sound or something like that,
• 1:22:14
  you know, and that becomes this you know, incepted moment. Right you
• 1:22:21
  can like the first time and go down bong. Right, that's it right
• 1:22:26
  there? You did it, like you figured it out, and can you
• 1:22:29
  recall what was in your mind? Was it excitement? Was it? Well?
• 1:22:31
  So, having had the riff for a while and been sort of cool
• 1:22:34
  with like, Okay, I can write my own guitar parts. I'm a
• 1:22:38
  guitarist, you know, that lasted for decade even more, you know.
• 1:22:44
  And then I was twenty two and I was in just got out of college
• 1:22:49
  or whatever, maybe a little earlier than that, and I'm contemplating, like
• 1:22:55
  no, no, no, no, no, Like you need to sing.
• 1:22:57
  You need to create a story, a short story, narrative with characters,
• 1:23:00
  and you need to develop them, and you need to like this needs
• 1:23:03
  to be a little novella and has to make sense, and you have to
• 1:23:06
  feel good about it. It has to identify you, you know, you
• 1:23:10
  have to. It has to be an identity song. I know that Rush
• 1:23:14
  has Tom Sawyer and a CDC has Back in Black, and there's sort of
• 1:23:16
  like songs in E at the bottom of the guitar, you know, the
• 1:23:20
  open string that are sort of these foundational, like rock songs. It's like
• 1:23:25
  I wanted an E. I wanted to have this that's my E riff,
• 1:23:29
  you know, and then build around it this sort of short story about somebody
• 1:23:34
  who doesn't stand a chance. Yeah yeah, yeah, So that was the
• 1:23:40
  that was where it came from. That's where a narrative came from. And
• 1:23:43
  when I actually got the first melody and the lyric, I was lying on
• 1:23:46
  my futon in Queens at that apartment that I was talked about earlier, where
• 1:23:51
  I was paying two hundred fifty dollars a month, and then my my one
• 1:23:55
  room was identified by the blankets that were hanging. I didn't have a door.
• 1:23:59
  It was just gets yeah, exactly. And I I was lying on
• 1:24:03
  that futon thinking about Metallica and Cyndi Lauper at the same time and just sort
• 1:24:09
  of daydreaming on not even their melodies or their music, just on there.
• 1:24:13
  How the way that they made me feel as records made me feel like just
• 1:24:15
  kind of like letting it simmer in the stew, kind of of feeling emotions,
• 1:24:19
  like without the melody in and while playing that, and then I went,
• 1:24:24
  her name is Noel. I have a dream about Sima. I started
• 1:24:28
  the first verse lying down on my back with the guitar and st After the
• 1:24:33
  first thirty seconds of having repeated it to myself, I sat up and I
• 1:24:39
  turned on the four track and I started to get it down. That's exciting,
• 1:24:43
  yeah, and that and that was that was how Actually I didn't even
• 1:24:45
  have a four track. Then I had a dictaphone. Wow. Yeah,
• 1:24:48
  it was on a dictaphone, little tape cassette dictaphone lost that recording machinery somewhere
• 1:24:54
  in the buried in the world. I think with the masters. The masters,
• 1:24:58
  No, no, no, that that never went to the record label.
• 1:25:00
  That little tape is mine and you still got it. You definitely still
• 1:25:02
  I think it's still there somewhere. Yeah, you gotta gotta unearthed it and
• 1:25:05
  get a dick to phone and play it back then maybe the original yeah yeah,
• 1:25:11
  yeah, you know you you know, you're not thinking that at the
• 1:25:14
  time. You're really like, you're somewhere else. You're like, no,
• 1:25:16
  no, no, no, fuck the tape. I want to where this
• 1:25:18
  needs I need twenty four tracks, you know with expensive microphones. No,
• 1:25:24
  don't show this to anybody. They was sitting there listen to and play right,
• 1:25:27
  you know, right, Yeah, everyone's trying to get bit a million
• 1:25:32
  dollars for Paul McCartney's first like real to Real demo. Yeah no, I
• 1:25:38
  they didn't think of that that way, but I was. I was obsessed
• 1:25:42
  with getting it down because I wanted to play it back to myself and play
• 1:25:48
  along with it, pick up where it leaves off, that kind of thing,
• 1:25:51
  like get another step in the in the puzzle, you know, piece
• 1:25:56
  of the puzzle, and eventually I had verse one, verse one, pre
• 1:26:00
  chorus one, chorus one, verse two. Uh oh no, no,
• 1:26:05
  no, I stopped. I stopped at chorus one. I didn't know what
• 1:26:09
  to say about verse two for a while, and then I got verse two
• 1:26:13
  as soon as I got to feel like I needed to turn violent a little
• 1:26:15
  bit. Verse two. Is that the controversial one? Yes? Yeah,
• 1:26:18
  that was the one that the label was upset about. Yeah. They tried
• 1:26:23
  to get me to change it. Honestly, I was, like I said,
• 1:26:26
  ten or eleven, trying to source an uncut version of the song.
• 1:26:30
  It was difficult. It's funny treasure. Yeah. I felt that way about
• 1:26:32
  a c DC's version of School Days when I was your age or the time
• 1:26:38
  yet. And I was lucky because my parents rented a room to an Australian
• 1:26:43
  student called Lou and she brought me back the Australian TNT release which had school
• 1:26:48
  Days on it, and I was like, I'm the only one and he
• 1:26:54
  probably were one of the other ones. I was probably the only person on
• 1:26:56
  Long Island who had a copy of that. Yeah, but that that line,
• 1:27:00
  though I don't the only way I first heard it. I hired Loser
• 1:27:03
  from the video shop and they played the young cut version at the start when
• 1:27:06
  he's walking to the apartment. That was the first one ever actually heard you
• 1:27:10
  say the words he would a gun to school. Yeah. Yeah, the
• 1:27:13
  links that I would go to just to hear you say that word. It
• 1:27:15
  was like taboo. You can't hear him say that word. And I finally
• 1:27:17
  got to hear you say it. At the time. You will appreciate the
• 1:27:19
  irony. They wanted me to change it because Walmart didn't carry foul language records.
• 1:27:26
  But Walmart did sell guns, so you could get the gun, but
• 1:27:30
  you couldn't get the song that mentions the gun. You can buy them,
• 1:27:33
  you can't use them. It was a time in America. You can buy
• 1:27:38
  them, you can use them on each other, but you can't talk about
• 1:27:40
  them in music. I've always was it. I've always wondered because in the
• 1:27:43
  clip you sort of roll your eyes when you say it. You roll your
• 1:27:45
  eyes. I roll my eyes in every take with more. They picked the
• 1:27:48
  one where I was the least sarcastic looking. Is it because you knew it
• 1:27:53
  was going to be edited anyway? Yeah, I already knew it was edited.
• 1:27:55
  They were playing. I was playing along to the edited version, okay,
• 1:27:59
  and every time I made sure I did that. Yeah, fuck you
• 1:28:01
  guys. I'm glad that's the reason. Yeah. Yeah. And our guy
• 1:28:05
  actually liked that, Kevin Patrick, he was like, oh you oh,
• 1:28:09
  that's great that you're just sticking it to him. Yeah, because it wasn't
• 1:28:13
  entirely his choice either. We're talking about the whole entire apparatus of a multinational
• 1:28:16
  media corporation and their retail outlets that goes beyond the A and R office.
• 1:28:23
  You know, did you have much say in the film clip? Not?
• 1:28:26
  No, not really, But I knew that they were taking the narrative and
• 1:28:30
  that I was kind of okay with that. Yeah. Yeah, because Jason
• 1:28:34
  and you know, on set with you because you're playing at the bowl right
• 1:28:38
  at the end, at the at the prom. My original idea for it
• 1:28:42
  was that we weren't at the prom, that we were outside at a bonfire
• 1:28:45
  in the rain with playing for the kids who didn't go to the prom.
• 1:28:47
  I felt like that would be cooler. But but they I think they did
• 1:28:50
  a good job. It was just always on you know, It's just it's
• 1:28:54
  just it's such a big part of that childhood. Yeah, it's cool,
• 1:28:57
  it's cool. I like I said, we're really lucky, Like we're lucky
• 1:29:00
  at a bunch of idiots whoever came out of Long Island. Me in particular,
• 1:29:03
  because I was unprocessed, you know, damage at the time, and
• 1:29:08
  I was starting fights with everybody who disagreed with me and trying to keep that
• 1:29:13
  control, you know, like trying to make sure nobody damaged anything in my
• 1:29:15
  name, you know, or put something out in my name. That was
• 1:29:17
  something I didn't want to be behind. Plus burned. Yeah, I've been
• 1:29:21
  burned really bad. I knew that. I knew they were scombacks. I
• 1:29:25
  was convinced of it. I didn't have to be taught, you know,
• 1:29:27
  it's like you're the enemy. Yeah, how'd you cope with the fame?
• 1:29:30
  So it was just like overnight, because I know in America it wasn't necessarily
• 1:29:33
  it evolved to that, but in Australia you were just like huge times.
• 1:29:36
  We never felt it. And in Australia, well, because we were here
• 1:29:41
  for a short period of time and it was work, work, work,
• 1:29:43
  work, work, and then we had to go home and home nothing's going
• 1:29:45
  on, so it still nothing was going on when it was a hit here.
• 1:29:47
  No, no, it had come and gone in the States. The
• 1:29:50
  American record label was sort of I remember them being sort of embarrassed about another
• 1:29:55
  territory getting it right, but still kind of like, Okay, this is
• 1:29:57
  good, you're earning money. And and then it blew up in England and
• 1:30:00
  that's when it really got weird with the territorial pissing that was going on between
• 1:30:06
  the two companies, the English office in the American we were assigned to new
• 1:30:13
  E and our guy the American side wrestled it back for the video for a
• 1:30:18
  little respect if you recall that video as Brittany Murphy in it. And then
• 1:30:25
  that was a second hit in the UK, but not here. I don't
• 1:30:29
  think I think Here's much. Leroy was a second sing was the next one,
• 1:30:32
  right, which we filmed here in Melbourne in Melbourne at the High Five,
• 1:30:34
  and then we and then when we were over in England, it was
• 1:30:39
  it blew up really hard over there, and so much so that we were
• 1:30:43
  like playing the Prince's Trust party in the park for like Prince Charles and stuff
• 1:30:45
  is crazy. We were in between like meat Loaf and Beyonce. So it
• 1:30:50
  was it took us on a ride. And then the third single became this
• 1:30:57
  humongous fight and this is where ET comes back. The third single this entire
• 1:31:03
  time was this, He's just waiting for me to tell this story. I
• 1:31:06
  see you, I see you. E T get you home soon enough.
• 1:31:12
  Puppet right, live sized puppet staring directly at me. I'll have you know,
• 1:31:15
  like strategic position, strategically, no chance of me avoiding the eye contact
• 1:31:20
  with e T. Anyway. Uh God, he's still cute though he is.
• 1:31:26
  Yeah, But but the the video for that song, our third single,
• 1:31:30
  Want to Be Gangster, has an ET suited man in it, and
• 1:31:34
  was it designed to look like a or just came out that way. I
• 1:31:39
  don't know, man, I don't know. But the puppet, like,
• 1:31:44
  yeah, I was terrified. So let me say I'll say this. The
• 1:31:47
  guy who did the teenage story Bag video also did they Want to Be Gangster
• 1:31:51
  video? Right, So we trusted him, and the pitch that I got
• 1:31:55
  him, I still would trust him. But the pitch that I got was
• 1:32:00
  see, even George Lucas gets it wrong sometimes right, and it's Pielberg.
• 1:32:03
  So if this is gonna be a cross between Brother from Another Planet and two
• 1:32:11
  thousand and one space obusely, that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna do
• 1:32:15
  this story of like, uh, this person who doesn't belong in this society
• 1:32:19
  kind of thing. Right, Well, you saw what we got and was
• 1:32:25
  it was quite a far away off from either one of those films or any
• 1:32:29
  of these intent behind them. At what point during the shoot did you go,
• 1:32:31
  I'm not sure it's exactly what we had in minds. Right off the
• 1:32:35
  bat, they had these guys like these solo guys dressed up. Yeah,
• 1:32:42
  Like I kind of thought it was racist. I was like, what is
• 1:32:45
  this what? You know? Like it's all out of your hands, by
• 1:32:47
  the way, because the money spent, you know, and you're rolling.
• 1:32:50
  Everyone's like, yeah, this is it, man, you really got you
• 1:32:53
  really got this right now. It's so two thousand by the way, Yeah
• 1:32:56
  yeah, it's really two thousand and and I I I worried. We worried
• 1:33:01
  openly as a band on the set with each other during the filming, like
• 1:33:09
  what is this gonna look like? You know? I don't know, I
• 1:33:11
  don't know, man, Like the you know, the car with the hydraulics,
• 1:33:14
  it's the six or four dropping down with like I just this is not
• 1:33:18
  what we it's not what we wrote, it's not the song we wrote.
• 1:33:21
  We wrote a song about a Long Island guy who's like, who doesn't get
• 1:33:25
  it? You know? So it worked out the way it worked out.
• 1:33:30
  And I've had people say to me that, and I disagree that the video
• 1:33:33
  is so bad it's good, and I don't have to push back on that.
• 1:33:36
  I think it's just so bad it's bad. Do you not blind to
• 1:33:39
  audiology? But something can be so bad that it's good or just this in
• 1:33:42
  particular, I understand why people can fetish something that is that was so horrible,
• 1:33:46
  the way that the room, the film that are you familiars right,
• 1:33:53
  things of that nature. But sometimes bad, it's just really badly bad,
• 1:33:57
  playing bad, you know, regular bad. You know what it was was
• 1:34:01
  we used to have every Saturday morning, my sister and I would get up
• 1:34:04
  we watched the Rage Top fifty and it was the only way to watch unedited
• 1:34:08
  film clips uncensored. But then some kind of gun for some reason. But
• 1:34:11
  anyway, they had the Top fifty no commercial breaks. Was on the kind
• 1:34:14
  of your PBS. It was at ABC. Oh yeah, and they just
• 1:34:16
  play all the songs and it's want to big gangster film clip. It was
• 1:34:19
  just this idea of this alien, was just the either image of it in
• 1:34:21
  my mind, and it was before the Internet. And then like ten years
• 1:34:25
  later, I was like, I remember this alien that looked like ET.
• 1:34:28
  I don't know what it was from what a scene? All the time?
• 1:34:30
  Was it Alpha? What was it? I've got a Google I'm like aliens
• 1:34:33
  that looked like ET. I'm like, what is this? And then one
• 1:34:36
  day popped up and I was like, that's the fucking alien. Yeah yeah,
• 1:34:40
  yeah, it's bad news. It's bad news, very strange. A
• 1:34:45
  lot of views on YouTube though, sadly money you know what you know it
• 1:34:47
  was, you know, it broke my heart the most about that. When
• 1:34:50
  we recorded it the previous August. We recorded it it Abby Rhodes Studios in
• 1:34:58
  room two. We're Sergeant Power. It was made and Bruce Dickinson from Iron
• 1:35:01
  Maiden rode his bike down from his house in London and sang on it.
• 1:35:05
  That's Bruce Dickinson singing and ship yeah yeah, that's him. And I produced
• 1:35:12
  a song in Abbey Road in that room on that gear, I took a
• 1:35:15
  nap where Paul played the fucking blackbird guitar lick and did get did that song
• 1:35:23
  like right to the entrance to the courtyard there, and I was so proud
• 1:35:27
  and so happy that we had reshaped this song because I'm not gonna get into
• 1:35:30
  it. But there were so many alternate versions that the an R guys wanted
• 1:35:33
  that they had sent out to mixing engineers and you know, remixing engineers,
• 1:35:36
  and everyone had this hair brain idea like, oh, this is gonna be
• 1:35:40
  the one. One of them was. One of them was Dear Prudence,
• 1:35:43
  like sampled underneath us, and I was like, I'm not releasing a sample
• 1:35:46
  of deer Prudence in England. You can fucking forget it, like it's not
• 1:35:50
  happening. It's not happening stops and they thought. They were like, oh,
• 1:35:54
  it's a mata, man. You don't want to be rock star,
• 1:35:56
  you don't want to play the game. I was like, fuck no,
• 1:36:01
  no, hell no, man, I'd rather yeah, throw me in a
• 1:36:05
  meat grinder, I read. But then so we got we we wrestled it
• 1:36:11
  back and got brus On to want to be gangster, and we were so
• 1:36:14
  proud of the recording. I'm still proud of the recording. The actual single
• 1:36:16
  version is dope and and then we got this video stuck on us, and
• 1:36:21
  I think that the the video was just sort of like the the vomit of
• 1:36:28
  all of the bad feelings of of getting to that single, which was really
• 1:36:32
  weird too, because we had had two successful ones and there was still all
• 1:36:35
  this like gnarliness about who we were and what kind of music we were making,
• 1:36:41
  so much so that there was an internal disagreement at the label that was
• 1:36:44
  really intense between the American people and the and the UK people. We were
• 1:36:47
  assigned a UK and our guy who was sort of a new metal dude,
• 1:36:53
  which we weren't in any shape or form, and you know, it just
• 1:36:57
  went weird, got weird in a hurry. Yeah. So with the UK
• 1:37:02
  officers taking credit for the success of Teenage over there, oh, that was
• 1:37:06
  a that was a big part of it. What it's like anytime they can
• 1:37:11
  rub New York's nose and it like, we got this right and you fucked
• 1:37:13
  it up. But people, it is people. What do you think it
• 1:37:15
  was about the US audience that it just didn't take off the way that it
• 1:37:19
  was delivered? And there was some radio shenanigans that I won't get into.
• 1:37:24
  Okay, Yeah, that were like you could say that we were being kind
• 1:37:27
  of used as a pawn in there in the larger game of the radio politics
• 1:37:31
  in America and not necessarily for the good of the song or for our careers,
• 1:37:35
  which those politics don't really exist anymore. It's all kind of faded now.
• 1:37:40
  They'll find a new way to screw with people. But but I but
• 1:37:44
  I but that particular version the you know, I know of this for a
• 1:37:47
  fact. People that we worked with wound up testifying before Congress because of the
• 1:37:51
  bullshit they really yeah, yeah it was it went it went big because this
• 1:37:55
  doesn't It just blows my mind. It just wasn't a success in America.
• 1:37:58
  I'm thinking the Teenage JEP the song that was like the song about generation almost
• 1:38:02
  you know, like everyone loved it. Like I said, it's come around
• 1:38:05
  now. One Direction had a big hand in that. Yeah, they tore
• 1:38:09
  it in America to sold out stadiums and gave it to a whole new audience,
• 1:38:13
  bigger audience than than radio has. And there's a lot of rock stars
• 1:38:16
  who be too scared to let a band lop one Direction take their song because
• 1:38:19
  of its one direction, right, they've got a huge audience. But well,
• 1:38:23
  it's a boy band. So the way that that works is that they
• 1:38:25
  can cover it. I have no saying whether or not they cover it.
• 1:38:28
  That's called compulsory license. So you can't stop a cover. No, I
• 1:38:30
  can't stop a cover if it's a dead cover. If it's just they do
• 1:38:34
  the song the way that it is. You can't say anything no that they
• 1:38:39
  have to pay me, okay, right, Like I'm you just can't say
• 1:38:42
  you don't make it, right, I can't say don't make I can't stop
• 1:38:44
  them. I can ask them politely and request that they not cover it if
• 1:38:47
  I don't like it, but I can't stop them from doing it. I'll
• 1:38:49
  cover is a cover, and if they change it that becomes an interpolation.
• 1:38:55
  Then they need my permission, okay, right. So that they didn't change
• 1:39:00
  anything, they went they went in on that song and they did a good
• 1:39:02
  job and they loved they loved the song. I think those kids genuinely loved
• 1:39:05
  the song. And I met them and talked to them about it and great
• 1:39:10
  musicians. Yeah, yeah, amazing. Their band is so smoking. One
• 1:39:14
  Direction band was the best best players in the country at the time. I
• 1:39:16
  think for that age. Bracket still friends with those guys Josh and Sanda.
• 1:39:21
  I played with you right on our bunch of our records. Yeah, yeah,
• 1:39:25
  so you get styles on at some point. I think he's doing his
• 1:39:29
  own thing. But but but yeah, I would love to have him on.
• 1:39:31
  Yeah. Absolutely, he's a great singer. Yeah, he's got a
• 1:39:33
  big depth of knowledge of music. I think for somebody who grew up when
• 1:39:39
  he grew up. He's a guy like all of the Fleetwood mac chops and
• 1:39:42
  like you know, he's he's a smart kid, great actor as well.
• 1:39:45
  Yeah, he's good. Well, I've been holding you long enough me.
• 1:39:48
  I was longer than I thought I was gonna be sorry about that. We
• 1:39:49
  didn't talk about the episode too much. That's fun, is it cool?
• 1:39:53
  Okay? Fun? Yeah? Yeah yeah, but like the one thing I
• 1:39:56
  do want touch about the episode though, sure, the Homer b plood can
• 1:39:59
  eat one of my ba plots of all one of the best side side show
• 1:40:02
  literally a side show. He becomes a side show. Like that's and that's
• 1:40:06
  that's conan, Like, let's make a side plot where Homer becomes a side
• 1:40:11
  plot in his own side plot. We went fishing. Yeah, I really
• 1:40:16
  felt for Marginal. I was like, man, you fucking kidnapped your wife
• 1:40:20
  because you couldn't eat like all the food in the restaurant. You kidnapped your
• 1:40:25
  wife and makes her sit next to him when he becomes the grotesque at the
• 1:40:29
  end in the window. Yeah, he really good illustration of the maniacal the
• 1:40:36
  madness of capitalism. If you get a freebie, you know you're gonna take
• 1:40:41
  it to the place no one could imagine. We're in the wrong here,
• 1:40:45
  though. I Mean, that's what I've always loved about this story. And
• 1:40:47
  I'm like, it technically does say or you can eat. It does,
• 1:40:50
  but but it doesn't say. It doesn't say make your wife sit there and
• 1:40:57
  then be an accomplice in which is alleged to fish. But yeah, yeah
• 1:41:00
  right, like like I mean, homs Homer's piece of ship, Like we
• 1:41:05
  need we need to kind of come to terms with this a little bit because
• 1:41:09
  I think that you were mentioning family guy. I think there are other shows
• 1:41:13
  where the piece of shit Dad is kind of like let off the hook even
• 1:41:16
  more and has become a normalized like you know, swinging a miss there people,
• 1:41:21
  because we had this chance with like we know Homer is not that great,
• 1:41:26
  you know, he's he's a failure. Basically, it's like he's not
• 1:41:29
  doing the right thing. But then they throw moments out like you know,
• 1:41:30
  they do it for her. When he cuts back to it's got funny episode
• 1:41:34
  and Maggie makes three and it cuts to his because no photos of Maggie in
• 1:41:38
  the in the album, right, and it cuts to all the photos of
• 1:41:40
  Maggie in front of his workstations he's got because it says your heat, don't
• 1:41:44
  forget your heat forever, and he's blocked the letters, so that just says,
• 1:41:45
  do it for her with photos of Maggie. And you're like, fuck,
• 1:41:48
  well, what are you confusing me? Because one minute he's an alcoholic,
• 1:41:53
  next minute's doing this shit. You know, I mean, there's writers
• 1:41:55
  doing this to you. You understand you're manipulating. It's a cartoon, right
• 1:41:59
  right, right. Well, so to enlighten me, where is Maggie at
• 1:42:03
  this point in the Simpsons arc, as in in what way? Like does
• 1:42:09
  she exist? Well, she's she's there getting baby seated by Laura. Okay,
• 1:42:13
  because I barely remember seeing her at all in this in this episode.
• 1:42:15
  I think with these episodes, he kind of didn't tend to focus on Maggie
• 1:42:18
  because he wanted the craziness, right Conan. Yeah, this is the more
• 1:42:24
  granded Conan episode, but still you had to have that wacky side plot.
• 1:42:28
  But Maggie, there's so much you can really do with Maggie. She just
• 1:42:30
  has to sort of be a baby on the floor. She's always like pulling
• 1:42:34
  the plug out of the dam. Yeah, you know, like she was
• 1:42:36
  doing something. Yeah, but I still to this day quote that they could
• 1:42:40
  have been me. Still, I still can't get past the beard of bees.
• 1:42:48
  That just floored me. Man, It's so funny my two favors that
• 1:42:53
  could have been me and the sigh. Yeah that was good. Yeah.
• 1:42:59
  Yeah. The visit to Grandpa is a little We haven't talked about that at
• 1:43:01
  all. That's an interesting one. Yeah, he wants he wants the dirt.
• 1:43:05
  He wants to figure out how to do this. Bart's an operator.
• 1:43:08
  Bart's not really a dirt bag. Bart's Bart's is kind of a scumbag like
• 1:43:11
  his father is. Well. Yeah, Bart's a good kid at heart.
• 1:43:15
  He just does He's just not sort of guided in the right way. He's
• 1:43:17
  got a terrible sort of father figure. He's got terrible father figure. The
• 1:43:21
  best. Yeah, I think that Bart's good side is the desire to not
• 1:43:29
  let his mother down. I don't think it's from within. Yeah, I
• 1:43:31
  think Bart Bart is probably on on the bad tracks and like like Homer,
• 1:43:39
  you know, and he missed, he missed the smarts that Lisa has.
• 1:43:44
  So you know, it can like it's a little sad. The sentences is
• 1:43:48
  a bit sad all the time, but always sort of like pretty solid.
• 1:43:56
  Yeah they try, they try, but they're not in the overly eighty style.
• 1:43:59
  No, no, not the good times. Stir of bags told you
• 1:44:10
  it was a fun chat. Honestly, how great was that? I know
• 1:44:13
  we didn't necessarily talk about the Simpsons all that much, but who cares.
• 1:44:16
  We cover so many topics and it was so weird. I'd never met Brendan
• 1:44:20
  before, but as you were just sitting across me, hey, I'm just
• 1:44:24
  thinking there, I feel like I've known this guy forever. We just connected
• 1:44:27
  on so many levels, and yeah, it was just an absolute, absolute
• 1:44:30
  delight to have him in the studio. So thank you Brendan for joining me,
• 1:44:31
  and of course thank you guys for tuning into the show this week.
• 1:44:33
  I hope you did enjoy listening to it as much as I did recording it
• 1:44:36
  with the man himself, Brendan B. Brent Off Wits. As I said
• 1:44:40
  at the start of this podcast, there are still a few remaining dates for
• 1:44:43
  his solo accoustic tour with art from Evercley. You find those dates and tickets
• 1:44:45
  available link for that is the description of this podcast. And we just show
• 1:44:49
  be returning to Australia in April this year for the Pandemonium Festival. I think
• 1:44:54
  there's four dates for that. Pre sale tickets go on sale on January twenty
• 1:44:58
  second. I believe I'll chuck think for that inscription of this podcast as well.
• 1:45:01
  But thank you all again for tuning into this this week's episode of four
• 1:45:04
  Figured Discount. We shall be returning to our normal programming next week where Guy
• 1:45:09
  Davis and I shall be reviewing the Boys of Bummer from season eighteen. So
• 1:45:12
  the way there's going to be work going forward is now we're going to do
• 1:45:15
  our season eighteen reviews of course, plus we're going to be doing having more
• 1:45:17
  guests on the show too, just to chat about some more classic reviews and
• 1:45:20
  just just have a bit of a banter, just have some fun. Check
• 1:45:23
  things up a little bit here at four Figure Discount, I forget check out
• 1:45:26
  all our other shows going down to South Park, the one about Friends,
• 1:45:28
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  talking Sign for Speaking of the Hill tell us if you joun with the movie.
• 1:45:33
  Guys, we do so many podcasts here at four figing a discount.
• 1:45:35
  I love doing it. I consider myself incredibly lucky to be able to do
• 1:45:40
  this for a living. I do not take it for granted. I do
• 1:45:43
  not take it for granted the fact that you guys support us each and every
• 1:45:45
  week as well. So thank you so much for continuing to support us here
• 1:45:47
  at four figure discount. I hope you enjoyed my conversation here with Brendan B.
• 1:45:51
  Brown of Waitus. Next week is The Boys of Bummer. But I
• 1:45:54
  am Dando signing off and I'll catch you guys next week. Cheers, s