Latest / Booked On Rock with Eric Senich / Can A Musician Survive In The 21st Century? [Episode 237]

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Can A Musician Survive In The 21st Century? [Episode 237] · Booked On Rock with Eric Senich

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  Speaker 1: We're totally boomed rock and roll.
• 0:04
  Speaker 2: I mean, I'll leave you. You're reading. Little Hans says
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  Speaker 2: it's time to rock and roll, roll Out, I totally booked.
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  Speaker 1: Welcome back to Booked on Rock, the podcast for those
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  Speaker 1: about to read and rock online. A booked on rock
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  Speaker 1: dot Com of the episode in both audio and video,
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  Speaker 1: exclusive video segments, a blog the latest rock book releases,
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  Speaker 1: and check out the all new Booked on Rock store.
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  Speaker 1: This episode's guest is Eric Drucker, the author of the
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  Speaker 1: new graphic novel titled Naked City. In this long awaited
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  Speaker 1: graphic novel from Drunker, three bohemians, a painter, a street dancer,
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  Speaker 1: and an aspiring musician struggle to answer the question is
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  Speaker 1: it possible for an artist to survive in the twenty
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  Speaker 1: first century. Drunker's drawings and posters are a familiar site
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  Speaker 1: in the global street art movement, and his paintings appear
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  Speaker 1: frequently on covers of The New Yorker. His editorial illustrations
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  Speaker 1: have been seen in Nation, The New York Times, The Progressive,
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  Speaker 1: and more. His first book, Flood, a novel in pictures,
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  Speaker 1: won the American Book Award, followed by Blood Song, soon
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  Speaker 1: to be a major motion picture. His graphic novels have
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  Speaker 1: been translated into seven languages. After designing the animation for
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  Speaker 1: the film Howel, Truker was hired by DreamWorks Animation. His
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  Speaker 1: art is in the permanent collections of many museums, including
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  Speaker 1: the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum,
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  Speaker 1: and the Library of Congress. Let's talk to Eric Drucker
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  Speaker 1: now about his brand new book, Naked City. Eric. Welcome
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  Speaker 1: to the podcast.
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  Speaker 2: Hey, thanks for having me today.
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  Speaker 1: A fellow Eric with the Sea. I like it?
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  Speaker 2: Yes, Eric, unite, that's right. Later later for those Eric's
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  Speaker 2: with a K. Yes, I need to get to the
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  Speaker 2: back of the bus.
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  Speaker 1: They got they gotta go with the sea, Gotta go
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  Speaker 1: with the sea. You not only wrote this book, but
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  Speaker 1: you also do the illustrations. And the word that came
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  Speaker 1: to mind and reading the book and seeing these illustrations
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  Speaker 1: is stunning. I guess, I don't know. I was trying
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  Speaker 1: to come up with even better word to describe it.
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  Speaker 1: It's absolutely phenomenal. I loved it. I loved it.
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  Speaker 2: Thanks. Do you read many other graphic novels or not many?
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  Speaker 1: I'm usually reading the autobiographies, biographies, things like that and
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  Speaker 1: to have the images in front of me. It just
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  Speaker 1: it flowed. The images are outstanding, and that's what I
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  Speaker 1: want to I started on a Sunday morning, and I thought, well,
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  Speaker 1: you know, i'll finish the rest tonight or during the week.
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  Speaker 1: I was done by noon. I was done by nude.
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  Speaker 1: I loved it.
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  Speaker 2: Well, I'm glad to hear that. So it was a
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  Speaker 2: page turner.
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  Speaker 1: A page turner absolutely.
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  Speaker 2: So.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, before I ask you about the storyline, writing and
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  Speaker 1: illustrating is something you've been doing for a while. Now,
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  Speaker 1: tell us about how you got into a career in illustration.
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  Speaker 2: Oh, it was when I was a young man out
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  Speaker 2: of art school. I went to Cooper Union with it
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  Speaker 2: was a scholarship and it was so it was free,
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  Speaker 2: and it was right in the neighborhood, right there on
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  Speaker 2: the Lower east Side. And after I got out that
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  Speaker 2: I didn't really know, you know, how am I going
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  Speaker 2: to continue to pay my rent? I was living in
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  Speaker 2: a cheap tenement on the Lower east Side, and I thought, well,
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  Speaker 2: I should be able to somehow make a living with
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  Speaker 2: my artwork somehow. And I may not be be the
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  Speaker 2: brightest candle on the cake, but I'm not stupid. In fact,
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  Speaker 2: I'm kind of clever in certain regard that I should
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  Speaker 2: be able to figure out a way of making a
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  Speaker 2: few dollars every day. After all, I'm not being paid
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  Speaker 2: very much to work here in this office building under
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  Speaker 2: fluorescent lights, or doing market research or doing my job.
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  Speaker 2: Before that, I was working in a printing factory on
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  Speaker 2: my feet all day. They weren't paying me very much anyway.
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  Speaker 2: So I should be clever enough to figure out a
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  Speaker 2: way of making making that much money just on my own,
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  Speaker 2: you know, through through my through my artwork. So that's
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  Speaker 2: what I how I started out. I was as a
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  Speaker 2: street peddler. I just took my artwork directly on the streets.
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  Speaker 2: This is back in New York from an earlier euro
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  Speaker 2: when well, that the police wouldn't hassle you as much
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  Speaker 2: back in those days. I mean, the police have been
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  Speaker 2: totally militarized in recent years, as we as we know.
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  Speaker 2: But also the rent was more affordable then, I think
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  Speaker 2: more importantly, people like well even even artists and musicians
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  Speaker 2: were able to afford New York City rent. Maybe not
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  Speaker 2: on Park Avenue or Madison Avenue, but there were there
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  Speaker 2: were so many neighborhoods in New York that were affordable,
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  Speaker 2: like the Lower East Side or Harlem or Bedford Stuyvesant
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  Speaker 2: or Hell's Kitchen. I mean, when I was growing up,
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  Speaker 2: New York City was still primarily a working class industrial city,
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  Speaker 2: as difficult as that is to believe now, but there
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  Speaker 2: were still factories, small manufacturing when I was a kid,
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  Speaker 2: and there were all these neighborhoods that were affordable. You know.
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  Speaker 2: The rich folks that, yeah, but they lived uptown. They
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  Speaker 2: were up there on Fifth Avenue on living in Trump
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  Speaker 2: Tower or some penthouse somewhere. But that was it was
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  Speaker 2: understood that that was just a small one percent of
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  Speaker 2: the of the population. I think it still is one
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  Speaker 2: percent of the US population. But a lot of those
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  Speaker 2: rich people have decided to all move to Manhattan Island
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  Speaker 2: in the last couple of decades, or Sam Francisco or.
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  Speaker 1: You know, or packs which is where you're now.
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  Speaker 2: Well, I'm spending most of my time in Berkeley. I'm
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  Speaker 2: in Berkeley Coultage, which is a nice break from a
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  Speaker 2: lifetime in Manhattan Island. But yeah, I got to do
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  Speaker 2: a lot of back and forth. Now, I divide my
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  Speaker 2: time between East Coast and West Coast.
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  Speaker 1: Early on, you decide.
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  Speaker 2: I mean, even though I'm living here on the West
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  Speaker 2: Coast for much of the time. The new book Naked City, right,
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  Speaker 2: it all takes place. It's New York City. That's not
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  Speaker 2: San Francisco or Los Angeles. That's definitely the East Coast.
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  Speaker 2: That's pretty explicit New York City. So to answer your question, Eric,
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  Speaker 2: that's that was the big surprise, is as I'm living
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  Speaker 2: out here on the West Coast, but my artwork is
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  Speaker 2: still all about New York City. It seems like the
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  Speaker 2: farther away I get from home, the more absorbed I
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  Speaker 2: am with the New York City landscape.
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  Speaker 1: Interesting.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's interesting, and I didn't see it coming. It's
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  Speaker 2: as if that isn't there a line from a Tom
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  Speaker 2: Waits song, I never saw the East Coast until I
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  Speaker 2: moved to the west. You kind of hit the nail
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  Speaker 2: right on the air. I felt like I never had
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  Speaker 2: that perspective. When you're born and raised in a place,
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  Speaker 2: especially a metropolis like New York City, you can never
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  Speaker 2: really quite see it for what it is. You're born
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  Speaker 2: and literally born in the middle of it. It's like
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  Speaker 2: being born in the middle of a swarming beehive.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, it's like being living in a particular decade
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  Speaker 1: and you don't realize how cool that decade may be
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  Speaker 1: until later years. Like I wish I lived in the
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  Speaker 1: forties and fifties and my parents were like, yeah, I
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  Speaker 1: was there, I've lived through it. You know it was great.
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  Speaker 1: But it was like you're in the moment, you're just
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  Speaker 1: living day to day. Yes, it's not thinking about You're
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  Speaker 1: not looking and say, well we have some really cool
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  Speaker 1: clothing styles and the automobiles look really cool. You know,
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  Speaker 1: you're just living day to day.
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  Speaker 2: Right, in fact, you got back, you're not even thinking
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  Speaker 2: of it. Is as like the fifties. Ll, right, during
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  Speaker 2: World War Two, we weren't you know, calling it world
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  Speaker 2: War two. It was just the war, the catastrophe. I
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  Speaker 2: think these labels they come years later, we put a
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  Speaker 2: label on them. But at the moment, we're just living.
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  Speaker 2: We're living in it. We're in the moments as it
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  Speaker 2: should be.
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  Speaker 1: So getting back to the initial question was what got
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  Speaker 1: you into illustrating? So you just thought, you know what,
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  Speaker 1: I can figure out a way to make a living
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  Speaker 1: off of this. What inspired you? Did you have it?
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  Speaker 2: Did you I was hustling. I've always been a hustler,
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  Speaker 2: and I think you need to be a hustler in
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  Speaker 2: order to make a living to support oneself and one's art,
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  Speaker 2: whether it's as a rock and roll musician or a
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  Speaker 2: poe or a dancer, or a journalist or anything, and
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  Speaker 2: I suppose even an architect at this point, you really
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  Speaker 2: need to be a hustler in this In this culture,
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  Speaker 2: it's not only is it extremely competitive, but it's not
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  Speaker 2: it's not compensated. They were not really paid. I think
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  Speaker 2: part part of the the uh uh the culture, the
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  Speaker 2: cultural stereotype is that, oh, you're an artist, well you're
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  Speaker 2: you're used to being start You're a starving artist. Artists
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  Speaker 2: are used to being underpaid. It's like this self fulfilling prophecy.
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  Speaker 2: Musicians they're they're always going to be struggling and living
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  Speaker 2: out and you know, living up in Harlem or somewhere
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  Speaker 2: like you know, like Felonious Monk did. It's it just
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  Speaker 2: gets it gets reinforced over and over again. And one
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  Speaker 2: day I ran into a a friend who went to
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  Speaker 2: cooper Union with me. An other artist friend who I
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  Speaker 2: always always thought was one of the best, was able
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  Speaker 2: to just draw like he had this enviable style. It
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  Speaker 2: was part cartoony, but he was able to draw realistically
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  Speaker 2: as well. And he told me that he was starting
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  Speaker 2: to get a job. It wasn't a full time gig,
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  Speaker 2: but he was getting work just doing cartoons and little
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  Speaker 2: editorial illustrations for this newspaper. There were so many more
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  Speaker 2: newspapers back then. I mean, front media has been on
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  Speaker 2: a downward spiral. But that's a whole other story. I
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  Speaker 2: guess it ties into what the you know, the the
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  Speaker 2: larger economic picture that we're discussing. But but my friend
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  Speaker 2: was getting was getting part time work doing the drawings,
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  Speaker 2: doing these illustrations, and I said, really, where are they
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  Speaker 2: Are they still hiring? I said, oh yeah, just come
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  Speaker 2: on by. Here's the guy's number. He's the art director,
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  Speaker 2: you know. Just show him your stuff. If he likes
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  Speaker 2: your style, maybe he'll toss some work in your direction.
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  Speaker 2: So I suppose that's how it started. I was doing illustrating, yeah,
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  Speaker 2: for a newspaper. It was called The Guardian. It was
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  Speaker 2: in Lower Manhattan. It was Their office was a couple
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  Speaker 2: of blocks from Union Square, r at by a Union
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  Speaker 2: Square park, so it was in close walking distance to
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  Speaker 2: my house. Anyway, that my tenement where I was living
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  Speaker 2: was in that general neighborhood. In fact, I was born
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  Speaker 2: and raised in the same twelve block radius, I realized
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  Speaker 2: until I moved out here to the Bay Area. Until
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  Speaker 2: the age of forty, I had lived my entire life
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  Speaker 2: in the same twelve block radius. That is the neighborhood
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  Speaker 2: of Tompkins Square Park, the Topers District in East fourteenth Street.
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  Speaker 2: It was the Lower east Side when I was growing up,
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  Speaker 2: but by the nineteen seventies eighties, the landlords rebranded it
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: the East Village. They came up with a new less
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  Speaker 2: you know, less frightening title for you know, for the
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  Speaker 2: white middle class people who would be terrified to go
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  Speaker 2: anywhere near the Lower east Side. But many, many neighborhoods
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  Speaker 2: in New York have gone through that transformation, and I
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  Speaker 2: assume other US cities too. Things get renamed every few decades,
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  Speaker 2: and it's always named by the landlord. Real estate usually
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  Speaker 2: is who gets who gets to to rename an entire
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  Speaker 2: quadrant of the city, Like Hell's Kitchen, where my uncle
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  Speaker 2: Leo was born and raised. That's you know, West forty
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  Speaker 2: second Street, tom Square. But if you keep going west,
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  Speaker 2: that's the neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen.
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  Speaker 1: That was.
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  Speaker 2: It was renamed Clinton the Clinton District by real estate.
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  Speaker 2: And they're not talking about Doe Clinton or Hillary Clinton.
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  Speaker 2: It was I don't know who know, some other They
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  Speaker 2: probably named it after some big real estate mogul, mister Clinton.
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  Speaker 2: But a lot of us still we still call it
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  Speaker 2: Hell's Kitchen, because hey, come on, why would you want
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  Speaker 2: to give up a name like it's not going to
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  Speaker 2: get any better than that?
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  Speaker 1: That's what I remember.
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  Speaker 2: Why didn't they just rebranded and keep the name, call
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  Speaker 2: it like the new improved, the new, newly sanitized, upscale
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  Speaker 2: look Hell's Kitchen.
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  Speaker 1: Brand, new iteration of Hell's Kitchen. Did you do you
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: remember kats and Jammer? Because my dad's uncle, what, Mike
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  Speaker 1: Senich was one of the Yeah, he wasn't the original guy.
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  Speaker 1: I think the original guy passed away and then he
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  Speaker 1: took over. But this was before I was born. My
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  Speaker 1: dad used to visit him.
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  Speaker 2: Artists and took over the same thing happened with certain
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  Speaker 2: characters like Popeye. The original artist Elsie Seeger who invented
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: pop out of the Sailorman and olive oil and Bluto
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  Speaker 2: and the whole symbol theater as he called it when
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  Speaker 2: it was a newspaper strip back in the nineteen twenties
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  Speaker 2: and thirties. But he did it for decades and then
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  Speaker 2: he got old and sick and died. But people were
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: still jonesing for Popeye. They wanted to read Popeye the
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  Speaker 2: next day at the newspaper, so they hired someone else
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  Speaker 2: to do it keep the ball rolling for the next
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  Speaker 2: couple of decades. It was never nearly as good as
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  Speaker 2: those early Popeye strips, but it was the same thing
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  Speaker 2: with the Kats and Jammer kids. I think started that
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  Speaker 2: it was a German artist. It was this kind of
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  Speaker 2: German slang was used the cops and Jamar kids when
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  Speaker 2: German immigrants. That when German was the big ethnic group
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  Speaker 2: in New York York City, before African Americans showed up
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  Speaker 2: during the Great Migration, or Italians and Jews showed up
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  Speaker 2: in the teens, or you know, the turn of the century,
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  Speaker 2: and in the late nineteenth century, it was German. You know,
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  Speaker 2: the underclass was German immigrants. The Lower East Side. Before
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  Speaker 2: it was a Jewish or Puerto Rican neighborhood, it had
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: been an Irish neighborhood, but then for several decades it
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  Speaker 2: was a German neighborhood, and I think that was the
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  Speaker 2: era that the Kats and Jammer Kids grew out of,
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: and I always loved it. Was way before my time,
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: but I always loved studying that as a famous example
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: of comic art, you know, one of the core comic
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  Speaker 2: strips in history. Just like a painter would study Picasso
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: and Rembrandt and Da Vinci, a comic book artist or
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: a graphic novelist is going to study not only R.
• 15:58
  Speaker 2: Crom and R. Spiegelman and people like that, but they're
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: going to study Windsor McKay and George Harriman who created
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  Speaker 2: Crazy Cat back in the nineteen twenties, and the Kats
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  Speaker 2: and Jammer Kids, I think was even a little bit
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  Speaker 2: earlier than that. I think that's back in the teens,
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  Speaker 2: but the turn of the twentieth century, that's what that's
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  Speaker 2: what they were reading. But the artwork is just phenomenal.
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  Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, I have some of them. My dad
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  Speaker 1: left somebody. Yeah, my dad left me some of his stuff,
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: and it's cool. I go on to Wikipedia and there's
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  Speaker 1: Mike Sennez's like, oh cool.
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  Speaker 2: A little bit. The only thing that looks that you know,
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  Speaker 2: that wild was really the early Mad Mad Magazine or
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: Mad Comics back in the fifties was very influenced by
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  Speaker 2: by Katz and Jammer kids, and you know, kept that
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: over the top mad cap style going. So you'll still
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  Speaker 2: see in Mad Magazine even a little bit to this day.
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  Speaker 2: It is still influenced by that school of cartoony, really
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  Speaker 2: the wacky, over the top school.
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  Speaker 1: Well, you'd love here in Connecticut they have Barker Animation
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  Speaker 1: where they have a lot of that, all those legendary
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: artists to all of their workers in there and hm,
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: it's really really cool.
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: But that Cartoon Museum.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: Cartoon Museum, and remember they had they had the artist
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: just before he passed away, who did Betty Boop? I
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: remember he was out there in the backyard give his beacher.
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  Speaker 2: The Fleischer studios that were on the Lower East Side,
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: Max Fleischer and his brother David Fleischer. I think they
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: eventually moved down to Florida to a sunnier plan. You know,
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: Disney was out in California, but the Fleischer brothers, all
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: Jews that they were, they moved down to Miami and
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: moved the whole comic studio, the animation studio with them.
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  Speaker 2: But yeah, I was Thin that Betty Boop cartoons or
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  Speaker 2: some of the great great cartoons, and they always took
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: place in what looked like the lower Lower east Side.
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  Speaker 2: They were all in black and white, and the background
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  Speaker 2: was always urban, urban tenements behind them.
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  Speaker 1: Podcasts will be back after this. Many great characters, obviously,
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  Speaker 1: like Spider Man and Superman. Is Metropolis is natural, you know,
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  Speaker 1: I mean, there's something about New York City. It's just
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  Speaker 1: there's something about it that just draws people to it.
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  Speaker 2: Storyline true, and that whole culture if you if you
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: study the culture of you know, graphic novels, which has
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  Speaker 2: its roots in comics. The comic strip was a very
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: which was a very American art form the way cinema,
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  Speaker 2: I mean movies really evolved here in Hollywood with people
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  Speaker 2: like Chapelain and Buster Keaton and Max Sennett and some
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: of those early directors. And it was right around the
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: same era too, back around in the teens and in
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: the twenties that comic strips evolved. And just like well
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: with music, with rock and roll music, you could see
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: how it has it has many roots. But one of
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: the undeniable roots is the blues, which was not urban
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  Speaker 2: that goes down south to the Mississippi, Mississippi Delta and
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: places like that in Texas and rural has roots in
• 19:29
  Speaker 2: rural America and with the black population, and that, you know,
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: you could trace it all the way back to Slavery,
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: trace it back to Africa if you really want to
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: get analytical about just the music, the musical form of
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: the blues. But of course, as you well know, that
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: was only one of the roots, one of the big ones.
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: But there were other roots, and there was rockability. There
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: was the whole Appalachian influence. There was marching band influence,
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: there was the jazz influence. I've got many different things
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: went into the went into the mix.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: A book on Carl Perkins that I'm going to be
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: covering soon. The author's coming on to tell you that's rockabilly.
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: He's the there we go, He's a king of rockabilly.
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: Right. I love all those those earliest recordings of Sun music.
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: Oh yes, those are my favorite, I mean, my favorite
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: Elvis recordings by far are those very first ones.
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: Right. You know, it's interesting those two guys were kind
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: of neck and neck, And then I read the book
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: and realized Carl Perkins got into this terrible car accident,
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: he was sidelined for a while, and then all Elvis
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: had the number one single with uh oh, I can't
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: remember Heartbreak Hotel and then Blue Sweight choose Carl Perkins
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: number two, and then all of a sudden Elvis took
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: off because Carl Perkins was laid up, he was out.
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: But all of those early recordings Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash,
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: Howland Wolf, and it was some of the just the
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: seminal recordings. So I'm sure you get into this on
• 21:05
  Speaker 2: many of your shows. So just on a parallel track
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: with the art form that I practice, graphic, novel, sequential art,
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: whatever you want to call it, comics is I like
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: to call it the roots of comics. It's really well,
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: it's just picture, you know, a picture storytelling that goes
• 21:26
  Speaker 2: way back. It's older than written art form. We've been
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: drawing pictures on the walls of caves for thirty forty
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: thousand years now, so we've been drunk pictures, in other words,
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: for much longer than we've been writing words or adding
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: the word balloons or the captions. That's a more recent
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: technology that we've added into the mix, but even just
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: in our lifetimes, in the last twenty or thirty years,
• 21:59
  Speaker 2: comic books like whether It's Spider Man or Mad Magazine
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: has continued to evolve and get more and more ambitious
• 22:09
  Speaker 2: and try to try to attempt to tell longer stories,
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: longer form narratives. And that's really what graphic novels are fascinating.
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: I love it all the graphnaking novel is it's really
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: just a glorified It's a comic book that's not thirty
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: two pages or sixty four pages. It's maybe two hundred
• 22:31
  Speaker 2: pages or Naked City. My latest is three hundred and
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: thirty six pages.
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: It's like a Netflix series. It's like taking a taking
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: a movie and expanding it into a big, longer series
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: where you can spread out the storyline. You have three
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: main characters in this book, right Naked. Let's talk about that.
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: Talk about the storyline. The book opens with the main
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: character Isabelle.
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: She's a she's the protagonist as a young I don't
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: think she gives her age. I don't remember.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: I don't think she's around. Maybe I'm assuming maybe nineteen
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: twenty years old. Maybe nothing like that.
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: As what I was shooting for is it's the first
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: time leaving home. We don't learn till later on in
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: a flashback why she suddenly had to leave her home.
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: But she hitchhikes. We see her on the highway and
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: she's hitchhiking.
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: To December morning.
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: Yes, that's freezing cold. And she realized when once she's
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: out on the frosty highway that maybe December might not
• 23:30
  Speaker 2: have been the best time to try to thumb a ride.
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: But she's out there, and she gets picked up. She
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: gets picked up a bunch of times by the sleazy
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: characters that she keeps having to get out of the car.
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: Finally she realizes, you know what, I'm not going to
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: go into a car unless it's being driven by a woman.
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: As ice Jamaican one.
• 23:51
  Speaker 2: Right, No, I know, last thing I wanted is to
• 23:54
  Speaker 2: be picked up by some psycho. You know, there's already
• 23:58
  Speaker 2: a sketchy situation. I'm here Obama myself. So she's hitchhiking
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: from Detroit to New York City, which is a you know,
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: it's not all the way across the country, but that's
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: a that's a good long distance hike. Hitchhike that that
• 24:12
  Speaker 2: would be a long walk, especially on a cold winter day.
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: And and yes, she manages to get picked up by
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: this Jamaican lady who's very friendly to her, and she
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: drives her all the way to New York. She's the
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: Jamaican woman is on her way to see her son
• 24:28
  Speaker 2: in Brooklyn. I think for the for the winter, for
• 24:32
  Speaker 2: the winter holidays. But she drops Isabelle off in the
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: middle of Manhattan, right in the middle of a blizzard.
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: It's this white out blizzard where it's snowing so hard
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: she can't even see a goddamn thing. Three weeks later,
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: she lands her first gig, well, an open mic actually
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: a hole in the wall in Brooklyn, but it's her
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: first chance to sing in front of a live audience,
• 25:00
  Speaker 2: and she's really right. She's paid, and that she gets
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: to pass her hat around the audience afterwards. In that regard,
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: it's a paid gig, but you're totally excited that she's
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: gonna It's like.
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: She's busking almost in a way, but it's an official.
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: Right, that's right. And then we see her later in
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: the in that first chapter, singing on street corners, playing
• 25:22
  Speaker 2: down on the subway station in chapter two. So yeah,
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: it's really the story of a young busker, someone who's
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: trying to make a living as a street musician.
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: She's somebody based on a real person in your life, is.
• 25:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, she's based on a couple of people I know,
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: a couple of musicians and just young women, one of
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: whom actually did hitchhike across all the way across the
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: country with her dog and made it to Philadelphia, where
• 25:51
  Speaker 2: she took over a building with squatting and had an
• 25:54
  Speaker 2: entire building to herself, fixed it up and invited a
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: bunch of friends in to help her fix it up,
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: and they did all the plumbing themselves. They put up
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: the sheet rocks when he was inviting people in. So
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: I guess Isabelle is a composite character of a few
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: different couple of old girlfriends I had, and just musicians,
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: young musicians I knew, male and female who are trying
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: to make a living and playing on the street if necessary.
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: There's a significance to the title Naked City in the
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: book that characters are literally naked, but also revealing themselves completely.
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: Viewing it from the aspect of a fan of music,
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: that's what makes the greatest artist so great, I would say,
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: revealing all of yourself, risking it all with either no fear,
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: just pushing through that fear for the sake of your
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: ur talk about the significance of.
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: The well, yes, I think maybe you put your finger
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: on it for a moment. This is what a recent
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: definition I've been a working definition that I came up
• 26:54
  Speaker 2: with just in the last couple of months, of what
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: an artist's true. A true art artists is someone who
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: doesn't have a safety net, or someone who lets go
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: of that. Right. Most artists that keep their day job
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: because it's too dangerous. It's too dangerous to operate without
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: a safety net, especially in you know, in the twenty
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: first century. This is this is a question that not
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: just Isabelle, but the other two artists in the story
• 27:25
  Speaker 2: they ask these three bohemians, They're all asking the same question.
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: Is it possible to survive as an artist in the
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: twenty first century. It's always been difficult, right, It's always
• 27:38
  Speaker 2: been challenging at any time in history, just ask Vincent
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: van Go. But it's never been quite like this in
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: the twenty first century, where I don't know too many
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: artists who could afford to pay their rent or afford
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: to pay for art supplies. And you know, the meager well,
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: if we're even going to call it a salary that
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: an artist makes. But so that's what that's one working
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: definition is an artist is someone who's gonna who's who's
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: gonna let go of their safety net and put all
• 28:11
  Speaker 2: of their eggs in that one basket, come hell or
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: high water. And that is an artist as someone when
• 28:20
  Speaker 2: I put myself in this category, okay, they sometimes they
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: pay me really well. If I do a cover for
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: the New Yorker magazine, how one cover will pay my
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: rent for the full year. That's great, ching ching, we're
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: in the money, right, But then most of the time,
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: most of the gigs don't pay that well. And I
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: realized that, hey, you know what, it's not really about
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: the benjamins, for the true artist would be doing it anyway.
• 28:53
  Speaker 2: The true artists, whether they're a musician or visual arts,
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: are people who would be doing this activity anyway. It's
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: wonderful when someone pays you, and hey, I could pay
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: the rent all up front this time, became my utilities
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: and buy food all the same time. This is great,
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: But you know what, I would have been doing this anyway.
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: I would have been working on this song and working
• 29:16
  Speaker 2: on my music and waking up and playing scales and
• 29:20
  Speaker 2: going through this life of a musician.
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: Anyway, I'm so glad you said that because nowadays.
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: Out the money that's just that's just the gravy. If
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: someone pays for it, that's gravy.
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: Because to be a musicians nowadays, a lot of them
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: that have been around for a while will say, why
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: bother making a new album because I'm not going to
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: make any money off of it because of Spotify and
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: et cetera, et cetera. But isn't that who you are?
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: You know, don't you love making music? Don't you want
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: to create? Yes, so there are some who do.
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: And it's a reality that, I mean, we can't ignore.
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: There is the economic reality true. And it was easy
• 29:56
  Speaker 2: for me to say, hey, hey, I'm just going to
• 29:59
  Speaker 2: be living here tenement and somehow I could scrape, scrape
• 30:03
  Speaker 2: by just sell my work on the street. If necessary,
• 30:06
  Speaker 2: I could beg steal or borrow to pay to pay
• 30:10
  Speaker 2: the landlord when he come next time he comes knocking. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: that's easy for me to say when I was a
• 30:15
  Speaker 2: young man. What about when you start getting into your
• 30:19
  Speaker 2: thirties or forties and you have a kid or two
• 30:24
  Speaker 2: who need to be fit, then you know these other
• 30:27
  Speaker 2: these other realities start to sink in. Well, am I
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: gonna be able to really devote enough time on my
• 30:36
  Speaker 2: art to really think of myself as an artist? Or
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: am I just it's going to really be about the
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: day job. And maybe I'll just paint a little bit
• 30:44
  Speaker 2: on Sundays.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: Book on Rock podcast will be back after this.
• 30:48
  Speaker 2: When when patients with the patients absence makes the heart grow.
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: Fonder, Isabelle poses nude for a for money. His character
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: is interesting because I'm wondering if he's somebody you can
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: trust or are his intentions purely artistic hit which they are,
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: but at the beginning, and I think.
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: We don't know that at first.
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, believe who's he based on? Anybody specific in your life?
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah? Again, he's a composite. I mean, he's largely based
• 31:19
  Speaker 2: on you know, yours, truly.
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: The way I draw him, I wondered, Okay, I couldn't
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: help but love the character.
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: He's a caricature of myself. He's kind of a younger,
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: more naive version of myself, I suppose. But he's the
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: comic character. He's the comic relief and the story that
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: otherwise is fairly serious Isabelle's story is in many ways
• 31:47
  Speaker 2: pretty tragic. I mean, as we learn more about her,
• 31:52
  Speaker 2: as the chapters go by and she starts telling us
• 31:55
  Speaker 2: some of her flash we see some flashbacks of why
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: she had to leave the Midwest and Detroit in such
• 32:03
  Speaker 2: a hurry. We realized that, whoa, she's deeply, deeply traumatized
• 32:09
  Speaker 2: from childhood, and she's really running scared like well, like
• 32:13
  Speaker 2: many Americans are nowadays. So that story was which is
• 32:19
  Speaker 2: really the you know, the protagonist's story was so serious.
• 32:24
  Speaker 2: I thought, if I'm going to tell the story, I've
• 32:26
  Speaker 2: got to balance it out with some humor, just to
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: make it entertaining, because otherwise I feel like we're living
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: in such bleak times, are we not? I just didn't
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: feel like I wanted to just be creating another a
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: work of art that was bleak. I feel like my
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: earlier my first two graphic novels and this trilogy, the
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: first two were were I would call them tragedies. They
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: were full blown you know, it's not it's not a
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: comic book, it's a book.
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'd love to read those two now, I having
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: read this one, the other.
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: Two tragedy, but the artwork is very very beautiful. So
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: those are also page turners, you know. Tragedy is also
• 33:13
  Speaker 2: there's something very cathartic about that. And I have no
• 33:17
  Speaker 2: doubt that many artists are working on their masterpieces now
• 33:21
  Speaker 2: that are works of tragedy. And maybe my next story
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: will be tragedy. But for this one that I worked
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: on these last several years, all through the pandemic years,
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: I was very consciously making it a comedy.
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: This is and the.
• 33:37
  Speaker 2: Trilogy I want, the final volume is going to leave
• 33:40
  Speaker 2: them laughing, or at least leave them with a.
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: Hopeful, ending ironic humor. Sometimes too, when you think about
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: the guy the window washer.
• 33:52
  Speaker 2: Yes, that's right.
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: So is that flood in Blood Song? Those the first
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: two right, yeah, but no one is going to be
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: a major motion picture from what I understand Blood Song.
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: Blood Song is being made right as we speak. It's
• 34:06
  Speaker 2: in post production, they tell me in Southeast Asia. The
• 34:12
  Speaker 2: whole story takes place in what looks like Vietnam or
• 34:17
  Speaker 2: Thailand or somewhere like that. We couldn't be certain because
• 34:21
  Speaker 2: there are no words in the story. This is one
• 34:23
  Speaker 2: of my wordless experiments, a three hundred page experiment, but
• 34:28
  Speaker 2: no captions, no word balloons, so we're never told explicitly
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: where we are, but we can see that we're in
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: some kind of tropical landscape that definitely south of the border.
• 34:43
  Speaker 2: A few years after the book came out, I was
• 34:45
  Speaker 2: contacted by a young man or a young filmmaker who
• 34:48
  Speaker 2: wanted to direct a feature length film of Blood Song.
• 34:54
  Speaker 2: And he started working on it, and he's most of
• 34:56
  Speaker 2: the way through, and he's being very faithful to the
• 34:58
  Speaker 2: original source material. I couldn't believe it. This is someone
• 35:02
  Speaker 2: who doesn't even hardly speak English, and yet he was
• 35:07
  Speaker 2: able to follow the story without any difficulty because it's wordless, right,
• 35:12
  Speaker 2: it's a silent narrative, like a silent movie. Of course,
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: even a silent chaplain film is going to have an
• 35:19
  Speaker 2: occasional caption telling you what's happening. This is purely graphic novel,
• 35:25
  Speaker 2: all right. There's no word balloons, no captions. But I'm
• 35:29
  Speaker 2: giving enough information in each illustration. As you go from
• 35:33
  Speaker 2: panel to panel, from page to page. People I find
• 35:37
  Speaker 2: are able to follow the story without any difficulty. In fact,
• 35:41
  Speaker 2: they don't even need to speak English. Sure that the
• 35:44
  Speaker 2: language is not any kind of hang up. It's more
• 35:47
  Speaker 2: of a universal story. Well like music it's a universal language.
• 35:54
  Speaker 2: If you start adding lyrics to it, well, only some
• 35:58
  Speaker 2: people are going to be able to understand early what
• 36:00
  Speaker 2: they're saying, but they could still enjoy the sound and
• 36:05
  Speaker 2: the rhythm of it. So I guess I was very
• 36:08
  Speaker 2: influenced by music for all three of these books. Have
• 36:12
  Speaker 2: music is one of the primary themes woven through the
• 36:16
  Speaker 2: entire trilogy.
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: Book on rock podcasts will be back after this the
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: who are the artists that you grew up listening to
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: that inspired you?
• 36:31
  Speaker 2: Well, it's a pretty eclectic motley crew of music that
• 36:36
  Speaker 2: I grew up just like every other dumb American kid.
• 36:40
  Speaker 2: I was watching television when I came home from school
• 36:43
  Speaker 2: for a couple at least a couple of hours, and
• 36:46
  Speaker 2: I didn't realize until years later that some of the
• 36:50
  Speaker 2: music on the background of those Bugs Bunny cartoons or
• 36:54
  Speaker 2: the Betty Book cartoons. One of the things that I
• 36:57
  Speaker 2: that made those cartoons so wonderful was the music was fantastic.
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: And I didn't realize until I was an adult. Well
• 37:06
  Speaker 2: that's because the music but it was all jazz, and
• 37:11
  Speaker 2: it wasn't just having a jazz soundtrack. It was a
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: vant gard jazz that the Fleischer Brothers were using. They
• 37:19
  Speaker 2: would have like Lewis Armstrong.
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: And Artie Sean, people like that.
• 37:26
  Speaker 2: I mean people on the cutting edge, the really innovators
• 37:29
  Speaker 2: of the jazz medium. They tapped them to do the
• 37:33
  Speaker 2: soundtracks for their cutting age cartoons. After all, this was
• 37:38
  Speaker 2: the cutting edge animation of the day. This is decades
• 37:42
  Speaker 2: before Pixar came along and digitize it all and has
• 37:46
  Speaker 2: having computers doing it. And now it's almost starting to
• 37:49
  Speaker 2: look more and more like AI when you look at
• 37:53
  Speaker 2: these Pixar cartoons. But none of these were all hands drawn,
• 37:57
  Speaker 2: very handmade works of art. Same thing with Bugs Bunny,
• 38:01
  Speaker 2: I mean Fleischer, Betty Boo and Bimbo the clown. They
• 38:06
  Speaker 2: were back in the nineteen thirties. Bugs Bunny came along
• 38:09
  Speaker 2: in the nineteen forties that the World War two years
• 38:12
  Speaker 2: is when the best Bugs Bunny cartoons were coming out.
• 38:17
  Speaker 2: And one of the things, in addition to the amazing animation,
• 38:21
  Speaker 2: which I don't think has ever been as good as
• 38:24
  Speaker 2: it's been in Bugs Bunny or as funny as in
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: Bugs Bunny, but the soundtrack, the music going on in
• 38:32
  Speaker 2: the background, it's people like it. It's Scott Raymond Scott
• 38:42
  Speaker 2: who composed that tune, the jazz tune Powerhouse, other people cover.
• 38:49
  Speaker 2: He also was playing different versions of Ellington. There'd be
• 38:53
  Speaker 2: Ellington riffs that we'd be hearing, just old Bugs. Bugs
• 38:57
  Speaker 2: Bunny cartoons had one of George Grosher one Ellington influenced music,
• 39:03
  Speaker 2: but it was definitely jazz, and it was definitely the
• 39:07
  Speaker 2: cutting edge jazz.
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: So that's the music that inspired.
• 39:10
  Speaker 2: You, that's right. And Raymond Scott composed Powerhouse, and then
• 39:14
  Speaker 2: Carl Stallings. If you look at any of those Bugs
• 39:17
  Speaker 2: Bunny or any of the Warner Brothers cartoons, it always
• 39:21
  Speaker 2: has music by Carl Stallings, and he would incorporate jazz
• 39:28
  Speaker 2: into all of the soundtracks.
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: Hearing jazz in your head when you're doing these books.
• 39:34
  Speaker 3: I.
• 39:36
  Speaker 2: Didn't even realize. I didn't realize that some of the
• 39:38
  Speaker 2: first music I was getting was jazz. It wasn't until
• 39:42
  Speaker 2: like I think, Rubber Soul and Revolver came out that
• 39:46
  Speaker 2: I started buying the Beatles. The Beatles. Listening to the
• 39:49
  Speaker 2: Beatles out of the radio, that's, you know, my generation.
• 39:53
  Speaker 2: I got to hear Motown and the Rolling Stones when
• 39:56
  Speaker 2: it was coming out of the AM radio, and that's
• 40:00
  Speaker 2: you know, that's fantastic. That's music. All that music is about.
• 40:04
  Speaker 2: I thought was about as good as music gets.
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: Because I had you pegged as like a velvet underground guy.
• 40:11
  Speaker 2: That's right. Well, well, I discovered that years later as
• 40:15
  Speaker 2: a teenager, I started to to listen to Lou Reed
• 40:19
  Speaker 2: and and all of that stuff.
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: Do you listen to music when you're illustrating? Does that
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: inspire you to quickly?
• 40:25
  Speaker 2: Yes, I'd say most of the time when I'm at
• 40:28
  Speaker 2: the drawing board or at the easel i'm painting a picture, Yeah,
• 40:31
  Speaker 2: nine times out of ten, I'm listening to something and
• 40:34
  Speaker 2: I have the volume cranked up real loud and have
• 40:38
  Speaker 2: the bass crank way way up high. If I get
• 40:43
  Speaker 2: in a mood where i'm writing, I'm writing the dialogue
• 40:46
  Speaker 2: to one of the characters in one of these graphic novels,
• 40:50
  Speaker 2: I don't want to listen to someone singing. It's distracting
• 40:54
  Speaker 2: to hear the lyrics of Lou Read singing to you
• 40:57
  Speaker 2: about about heroine or clipper ship somewhere. I just listened
• 41:03
  Speaker 2: to purely instrumental music then, and even then, if I'm
• 41:07
  Speaker 2: writing something and the words are really important, I won't
• 41:13
  Speaker 2: be able to listen to music at all. I'll just
• 41:15
  Speaker 2: put on some kind of ambient sound which isn't even
• 41:19
  Speaker 2: quite music. It's just some kind of rhythmic, droning sound
• 41:24
  Speaker 2: that's not going to be throwing off my just the rhythm,
• 41:28
  Speaker 2: the music of the language. You know, when you write,
• 41:31
  Speaker 2: when you write words dialogue, it's almost a form of poetry.
• 41:36
  Speaker 2: You don't have to be William Shakespeare to realize that.
• 41:38
  Speaker 2: Once you're writing, there's definitely a rhythm. Good writing has
• 41:42
  Speaker 2: a rhythm to it, and it doesn't have a lot
• 41:44
  Speaker 2: of extraneous notes like good music. It's just cutting to
• 41:48
  Speaker 2: the chase, just telling you that melody, giving you that line,
• 41:52
  Speaker 2: and it's a real catchy melody, and then it comes back,
• 41:56
  Speaker 2: we come back to it.
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: There's nothing like an old forties film noir where they're
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: playing the jazz in the background. New York City, black
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: and white.
• 42:05
  Speaker 2: Right, So that's the music. Unwittingly, that music that you know,
• 42:09
  Speaker 2: my parents would be watching some old black and white
• 42:12
  Speaker 2: film noir on their black and white TV set in
• 42:15
  Speaker 2: the nineteen sixties or nineteen seventies when I was a
• 42:19
  Speaker 2: kid and I could follow, the storyline typically went over
• 42:24
  Speaker 2: my head, but I was enjoying the music, or I
• 42:27
  Speaker 2: was haunted. Often I was haunted by the music. I
• 42:31
  Speaker 2: noticed that, whoa, that's a really strange melody that they
• 42:36
  Speaker 2: would have, even some of the Bugs Bunny cartoons. This
• 42:40
  Speaker 2: Raymond Scott thing that I was mentioning, Powerhouse. Do you
• 42:45
  Speaker 2: know that? Look up? You could anyone look up me
• 42:47
  Speaker 2: pause this podcast?
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: Yes, me too.
• 42:50
  Speaker 2: Type in Powerhouse by Raymond Scott and you'll recognize it
• 42:55
  Speaker 2: right away. Was used in many Bugs Bunny and Warner Brothers.
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: Cartoon Our House, Raymond Scott.
• 43:02
  Speaker 2: Whatever someone like is working in a factory or anything
• 43:05
  Speaker 2: mechanistic is or industrial is happening. You'll hear this. Dunt
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: dunt dunt dun dunk dun dun dunt dunt dun dun
• 43:13
  Speaker 2: dun dun dun dunk dunk dun dunk. Here we go.
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: Oh, hold on, they're playing a commercial first on YouTube. Yeah,
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: I got to hear though. It's here we go. That's it.
• 43:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, let this play. It takes the wall to get
• 43:29
  Speaker 2: into the recognizable with but this all of this part
• 43:34
  Speaker 2: is great too.
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah.
• 43:44
  Speaker 2: Cartoon music.
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: Ah yeah, but it's jazz, it is jazz.
• 43:49
  Speaker 2: It's it's a vant garde.
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: Jazz, the Raymond Scott quintet.
• 43:58
  Speaker 2: Wowee, leave it on for a couple of minutes, wait
• 44:02
  Speaker 2: till we get to the good part.
• 44:04
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 44:10
  Speaker 2: Even this is familiar. People watch a lot of Warner
• 44:13
  Speaker 2: Brothers cartoons. Yeah, it's very animated music.
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: This is the thirties, right.
• 44:20
  Speaker 2: Thirties, forties. Yes, all saxophones, trumpets, hormbones. That's black music.
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I listen to that drummer.
• 44:34
  Speaker 2: Okay, check this out.
• 44:40
  Speaker 3: Yes, oh I love it.
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: I can always hear me voice.
• 45:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah wow, so interest Yeah it doesn't. I got I
• 45:31
  Speaker 2: got to just hear that my child, wow, going on
• 45:35
  Speaker 2: in the background with the cartoons. So I got lucky.
• 45:38
  Speaker 2: You know, the best music ever recorded was just being
• 45:42
  Speaker 2: used in the cartoons back. So that influenced me in
• 45:45
  Speaker 2: ways that I didn't even realize. You know, this is
• 45:48
  Speaker 2: years before I discovered Velvet Underground or Pink Floyd or
• 45:52
  Speaker 2: any this other music that we all know and love.
• 45:56
  Speaker 2: But it was really my introduction to jazz. When I'm
• 46:00
  Speaker 2: painting or drawing now, I'm often, yeah, often listening to
• 46:04
  Speaker 2: that kind of a music, jazz, Duke Ellington or just
• 46:10
  Speaker 2: be bop music.
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: Glenn Miller was the one my dad turned me on
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: to Glenn Miller is my favorite. Any Goodman, Any Goodman.
• 46:19
  Speaker 2: John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, all of that good stuff. But
• 46:23
  Speaker 2: the first time I heard any of it was really back,
• 46:26
  Speaker 2: as you know, four or five year old kid was
• 46:29
  Speaker 2: coming out of the TV set book.
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: On rock podcast. We'll be back after this.
• 46:34
  Speaker 2: Think about the future. I don't know, then'll we find out?
• 46:42
  Speaker 2: Keep a lid on it.
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: And there are many love songs which leads us to Alex.
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: Isabelle meets Alex along the way. Who's Alex? And how
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: does she influence the.
• 46:54
  Speaker 2: Street dancer who Isabelle encounters one night she's out there
• 46:58
  Speaker 2: after midnight, playing her good on the street. People are
• 47:02
  Speaker 2: occasionally dropping coins into her hat. But she's out there
• 47:07
  Speaker 2: and it's getting windy and cold, and the crowd is
• 47:10
  Speaker 2: thinning out. And just as she's starting to wonder if, hey,
• 47:14
  Speaker 2: you know, this is getting to be pretty late and
• 47:16
  Speaker 2: it's getting pretty cold out here, there's this someone starts
• 47:21
  Speaker 2: dancing around to the music, like someone starts breakdancing to
• 47:26
  Speaker 2: her music and dancing all up and down the sidewalk.
• 47:28
  Speaker 2: Amazing street dancer. And that's how she befriends the Alex,
• 47:37
  Speaker 2: who introduces himself, said, Hey, I love your music. I
• 47:41
  Speaker 2: love your voice. I love your deep voice. I love
• 47:43
  Speaker 2: I love a girl with that. I love a girl
• 47:47
  Speaker 2: with a deep voice. Can I buy you a beer?
• 47:49
  Speaker 2: She walks to the bar right on the corner. They
• 47:51
  Speaker 2: sit down, they get friendly, and they go home together
• 47:55
  Speaker 2: that night, and this relationship kind of blossoms in the
• 48:00
  Speaker 2: second chapter. But then there's some very unexpected things happen,
• 48:04
  Speaker 2: and well, there's a bit of a love triangle between
• 48:09
  Speaker 2: Alex the dancer, Isabelle the singer, and then the painter
• 48:14
  Speaker 2: who's in love with Isabelle. So there's that. But then
• 48:17
  Speaker 2: things get really uh. Things start to get really unexpected
• 48:21
  Speaker 2: when we meet the squeegee man, the window washer who's
• 48:27
  Speaker 2: been watching everything silently through the windows as he cleans
• 48:30
  Speaker 2: everyone's windows. And it turns out that he's he's a
• 48:33
  Speaker 2: type of artist in his own right.
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: Is Alex male or female? Because I thought of first male?
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: And then I'm like, okay, wait.
• 48:41
  Speaker 2: A minute, yeah, well it's kind of it's not so clear.
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: Okay, I just want to make sure.
• 48:46
  Speaker 2: Referred to as a he and his name is Alex
• 48:49
  Speaker 2: after all. But after a while, and then when when
• 48:52
  Speaker 2: Alex is posing for the painter doing some new posy wait, well,
• 48:56
  Speaker 2: well wait a minute, okay, going on?
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: And then we time, I'm like, am I missing something here?
• 49:02
  Speaker 2: Well, for people on know comics, crazy Cat, which was
• 49:05
  Speaker 2: big in the nineteen twenties, sometimes Crazy Cat would be
• 49:09
  Speaker 2: a she. Sometimes Crazy Cat would be a she. It
• 49:13
  Speaker 2: wasn't clear Crazy Cat was of indeterminate gender.
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: Four though that it seemed you know, you know, bugs.
• 49:24
  Speaker 2: Also kept you guessing at times. I mean he was naked, right,
• 49:28
  Speaker 2: you couldn't really see what was going on, and I
• 49:31
  Speaker 2: think that was one of the things that they were
• 49:34
  Speaker 2: playing around with then, was was gender and how the
• 49:38
  Speaker 2: whole thing is so artificial anyway, How it's such a
• 49:41
  Speaker 2: mainstream kind of a well a convention, you know. But
• 49:48
  Speaker 2: then there's artists and tricks, their characters, you know, few
• 49:52
  Speaker 2: of always felt free to play around with that or
• 49:55
  Speaker 2: keep people guessing to be one thing and then turn
• 49:59
  Speaker 2: out to be the other thing. Yes, as a survival
• 50:02
  Speaker 2: mechanism of nothing else.
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: Well, Alex mentioned something to the painter and when Alex
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: does pose nude, Alex says, quote, making art is simply
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: making the invisible visible. What does that statement mean? To you.
• 50:17
  Speaker 2: Well, I think that Marcel Duchamp said that the old surrealist,
• 50:21
  Speaker 2: I think that that's it's a famous quote and artist circles.
• 50:27
  Speaker 2: There are many definitions of art. What is art art? Well,
• 50:32
  Speaker 2: it's very simple. Here's an artist's job is simply making
• 50:36
  Speaker 2: the invisible visible. Oh well, that sounds very simple and
• 50:41
  Speaker 2: straightforward until you try to do it yourself, right. So
• 50:47
  Speaker 2: it's a it's an homage a lot of these kind
• 50:50
  Speaker 2: of It gets more philosophical as it goes on, as
• 50:54
  Speaker 2: we get into the nature of an art and who's
• 50:56
  Speaker 2: an artist and who's just well, who's just clean and
• 50:59
  Speaker 2: window with a squegee that squeegee man who calls himself
• 51:03
  Speaker 2: mister nobody. He turns out to be a very artistic soul. Yeah,
• 51:09
  Speaker 2: and he's such an artist that he doesn't even need
• 51:11
  Speaker 2: to be drawn or painting or making music, because to him,
• 51:16
  Speaker 2: everything is just a work of art. If we just
• 51:21
  Speaker 2: keep our eyes open and our ears open, it's all
• 51:24
  Speaker 2: just one. You know, It's a symphony, is what his
• 51:28
  Speaker 2: That's his approach to life. He ends up being really
• 51:31
  Speaker 2: the secret hero of the story. By the final chapter.
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he seems to know more than than everybody else,
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: and at least more than what they thought they knew.
• 51:43
  Speaker 2: He keeps Yeah, he's the only one who has any
• 51:46
  Speaker 2: real angle on things. He's a little bit older and
• 51:49
  Speaker 2: more experienced, and he's had he's had some hard times.
• 51:53
  Speaker 2: Let's just say he's had a great fall.
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: The use of weather, the winter blizzard, the use of
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: weather in the story that that's interesting.
• 52:01
  Speaker 2: At the end, there's a raining, there's an electrical storm
• 52:06
  Speaker 2: somewhere in the middle of the story. Well, that all
• 52:09
  Speaker 2: creates mood. Right when you're in a certain mood and
• 52:13
  Speaker 2: you've got this, you've got the blues. You'll call it
• 52:15
  Speaker 2: the blues. That's why they call that whole art form
• 52:18
  Speaker 2: the blues. Or you'll be in a stormy mood that
• 52:28
  Speaker 2: there's so many songs that talk about the weather. Well,
• 52:31
  Speaker 2: the song stormy Weather, the Billie Holiday song. So in
• 52:35
  Speaker 2: a work of visual art, likewise, you know you'll use this.
• 52:40
  Speaker 2: These are some of the tools and tricks that the
• 52:43
  Speaker 2: artists will use to create the the mood that the
• 52:46
  Speaker 2: artist is in, to put the reader into the headspace
• 52:51
  Speaker 2: of the different characters. It'll be the you know, the lighting,
• 52:55
  Speaker 2: the angle that the lighting is hitting the character is
• 52:58
  Speaker 2: it hitting them in the face or is it from behind?
• 53:00
  Speaker 2: Are they in shadow? Are they cold? Are they shivering?
• 53:03
  Speaker 2: Is it in middle winter? Is it a warm summer
• 53:06
  Speaker 2: day with all the trees and bloom. So we go
• 53:10
  Speaker 2: through the full range. It's really the whole story takes
• 53:12
  Speaker 2: place in about one year. She hitchhikes to New York
• 53:16
  Speaker 2: on a cold winter day, and then the final the
• 53:20
  Speaker 2: final chapter is also late December. She says it's winter
• 53:26
  Speaker 2: Solstice is when she gives her final concert, the shortest
• 53:30
  Speaker 2: day of the year, whenever December twenty first, the longest
• 53:35
  Speaker 2: night of the year. So that's the format of the story.
• 53:38
  Speaker 2: If people are curious, if they look at my website,
• 53:42
  Speaker 2: I give a lot of examples so you could see
• 53:45
  Speaker 2: get a sneak preview of what the pictures look like.
• 53:49
  Speaker 2: I think I show the first five or six pages
• 53:52
  Speaker 2: right on the landing page. It's just my last name
• 53:56
  Speaker 2: Drooker Drooker dot com.
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: Drunk duck, and I can put some of those images
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: up on the video version of this interview too.
• 54:05
  Speaker 2: There's lots of all of the New Yorker covers. You'll
• 54:07
  Speaker 2: recognize a lot of them. I'm best known for the
• 54:10
  Speaker 2: I've done forty New Yorker covers through the decades, so
• 54:13
  Speaker 2: that's what I'm best known for. But it's these books
• 54:16
  Speaker 2: that I think you know that are really my labor
• 54:19
  Speaker 2: of love. And Naked City is hot off the press,
• 54:23
  Speaker 2: and it speaks to a lot about this moment that
• 54:26
  Speaker 2: we all find ourselves in now, artists, people trying to
• 54:30
  Speaker 2: support themselves through their creativity, or anyone any working person
• 54:35
  Speaker 2: who's trying to support themselves and pay their rent, which
• 54:39
  Speaker 2: is all of us. I think everyone would would relate
• 54:42
  Speaker 2: and identify with the characters in this story.
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: I know I sure do, and people will have to
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: read to find out what happens is abeut does she
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: make it? What happens? She's got quite a journey.
• 54:52
  Speaker 2: That there's a lot of twists and turns.
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: A lot of twists and turns. So the book is out.
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: People can get on the Amazon. They could probably get
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: it through your website too.
• 55:01
  Speaker 2: You can get it if you want to signed copy
• 55:03
  Speaker 2: and I'll draw a special little original work of art
• 55:07
  Speaker 2: just for you if you buy it through my website,
• 55:10
  Speaker 2: Druker dot com. I'm selling hundreds of them through the website,
• 55:13
  Speaker 2: but it's in your local bookstore, any anywhere that where
• 55:17
  Speaker 2: books are sold. You could walk in. If they don't
• 55:19
  Speaker 2: have it, you could order it from your local bookstore
• 55:22
  Speaker 2: or anywhere online. But it's out there. Dark Horse is
• 55:25
  Speaker 2: the publisher dark Horse Books, which is a big graphic
• 55:29
  Speaker 2: novel publisher, and they did a job with this, one.
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: Beautiful, fantastic, fantastic job. Eric Druker, thanks for being on
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: all the best with a book and a congratulations.
• 55:39
  Speaker 2: For having me. Eric's we got to stick together from now.
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: That's where Eric with a C. And next time you
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: read about cats in January, you'll now remember, Hey, I
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: spoke with somebody who's related.
• 55:50
  Speaker 2: Over a century.
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: Yes, all right, Eric, thank you so much.
• 55:55
  Speaker 2: Thanks for having me to be continued, all power to
• 55:58
  Speaker 2: be imagination. That's it. It's in the box.