Speaker 1: Quest Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Ladies and gentlemen. Uh, it's another beautiful week upon us.
Speaker 2: My name is Quest Love and this is Music We Paradise,
Speaker 2: otherwise known as Quest Love Supreme.
Speaker 1: I'm joined here by Fon Tikolo. What's up? Man? Yeah?
Speaker 3: What's going on?
Speaker 1: Man?
Speaker 4: I never thought we would get this interview and being real,
Speaker 4: I know this is real.
Speaker 1: This is a major league shit. I know this as well.
Speaker 5: Just get giddy, when get giddy and Steve, get giddy, Steve.
Speaker 1: We did it. We did it, Ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker 2: Nothing excites me more than when I get to pick
Speaker 2: the brains of.
Speaker 1: A fellow Philadelphia.
Speaker 2: Yehe like, what what can I say about our yesterday?
Speaker 2: He's an absolutely he He's an unsung creative maniac.
Speaker 1: That's what I'll say.
Speaker 2: He's an unsung creative maniac, excelling and songwriting and production
Speaker 2: and engineering and especially engineering with techniques and ideas that
Speaker 2: were planet seated and plant over fifty years ago that
Speaker 2: we're just starting to referral even to this day.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't think it's it's a hyperbolic for
Speaker 1: me to say that.
Speaker 2: You know, Todd probably crawled so that artists like Radiohead
Speaker 2: and Prints and thunder Cat and all stops in between
Speaker 2: can fly. He pushes the artistic envelope that, to me
Speaker 2: is a major understatement. His achievements are it's just beyond description.
Speaker 2: Ladies and gentlemen, stop laughing at me, Steve, I'm very
Speaker 2: excited for this episode. Please welcome the endless flow of
Speaker 2: creation and human form known to us mere mortals as
Speaker 2: Todd run Grit, Shut up, Steve.
Speaker 1: All right, yes, all right.
Speaker 6: To say it.
Speaker 3: Leave now, you know, Steve, It's it's all downhill from here.
Speaker 1: You know, let me tell you something about sugar Steve.
Speaker 2: He will remain silent on everything except for the proper
Speaker 2: mispronunciation of your name.
Speaker 1: He will Yeah, there there, there are.
Speaker 2: Receipts from giving tickets to anyone that's ever butchered your name.
Speaker 1: No, that's run grit like he's leg still not right,
Speaker 1: not right, he got.
Speaker 7: It, He got it right on time.
Speaker 3: There, No, Steve corrected me.
Speaker 1: Like ten years ago, I used to say run run grin,
Speaker 1: like do run run grid.
Speaker 8: No, it's run grin. And there was a period where
Speaker 8: I say run grinnen, but it's run grin.
Speaker 9: So there was a period. Yeah, let it, let us
Speaker 9: have Steve all right? Yeah, Uh, how how are you?
Speaker 9: And uh where where are you right now?
Speaker 1: Sir?
Speaker 3: I'm at home in Kawhi and I'm doing quite well.
Speaker 3: We haven't had a case here in like six eight
Speaker 3: weeks of the deadly grown virus, so we're just waiting
Speaker 3: for the rest of the world to clean up. And
Speaker 3: I'm back on the road again.
Speaker 1: I see, so you're kind of enjoying your.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't get on. I never get this kind
Speaker 3: of time at home, and so I'm feeling a little
Speaker 3: bit guilty about having all the time. But then again,
Speaker 3: so much stuff has piled up in my life that
Speaker 3: I don't get to properly address that. I'm actually enjoying
Speaker 3: this freedom for the time being.
Speaker 4: As most of your time spent is it in on
Speaker 4: the road or like how much of your time is
Speaker 4: spent between like traveling and studio recording.
Speaker 3: Well, a while ago, I would say within the last
Speaker 3: five years, I would be out as much as ten
Speaker 3: months on the road because I'd be doing my thing.
Speaker 3: I would be playing Ringo Star and then there's all
Speaker 3: the other little odd things that get thrown there, and
Speaker 3: you know, sometimes I'll go out on a tour to
Speaker 3: tribute an artist, like I've been out on tours a
Speaker 3: tribute David Bowie, and I'll be doing that again, I
Speaker 3: think in November. If everything goes well with the various
Speaker 3: things that I do, I would get maybe ten days
Speaker 3: at home at a time and then be gone for
Speaker 3: a month and a half another ten days at home then,
Speaker 3: so yeah, I'm settling in.
Speaker 2: Can I assume that, okay, that this is probably the
Speaker 2: longest extended time that you've taken off from working, and
Speaker 2: if so, are you sort of recharging your creative juices?
Speaker 2: Because I'm often curious as to how, like serious creatives
Speaker 2: that I know, how are they using this time off,
Speaker 2: Like are they using this time to absolutely do nothing?
Speaker 1: Are they? And there's time so.
Speaker 2: That they can get more inspiration to create things, because
Speaker 2: oftentimes it's like once you put out your first record,
Speaker 2: then you're in a cyclone of you got to promote
Speaker 2: the tour it and whatever free time you have, that's
Speaker 2: where you document the new ideas, and then you make
Speaker 2: your second record, repeat rents, repeat rents, repeat rents, and
Speaker 2: then once you have eight albums under your belt, then
Speaker 2: you're just in a constant touring swoop, so there's really
Speaker 2: not time to just sit in silence and create. Like,
Speaker 2: how are you getting your creative creative juices off?
Speaker 3: Well, I have an unusual creative process in that I
Speaker 3: don't do what looks externally like a whole lot of work.
Speaker 3: Most of the work that I do is internally, just
Speaker 3: you know, hashing through little musical ideas in the midst
Speaker 3: of doing another collaboration record. As a matter of fact,
Speaker 3: there's going to be a song with the Roots on it.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I actually premiered it already. I did a
Speaker 3: radio show for somebody and I played Godiva Girl. But
Speaker 3: I'm doing collaborations and I was you know, I was
Speaker 3: supposed to sort of deliver earlier in the year, but
Speaker 3: the problem is that everyone's kind of stuck at home,
Speaker 3: so nobody can get in the studio to finish up
Speaker 3: a lot of the stuff that I've been working on
Speaker 3: so lately, you know, from a creative standpoint, I've been
Speaker 3: doing these collaborations, which allow me to work more with
Speaker 3: other people's ideas than just always coming up with something myself.
Speaker 3: It doesn't mean I won't go back to that, but
Speaker 3: this kind of solitude and silence is like what I
Speaker 3: need to be able to write because of the fact
Speaker 3: that it's such an insular and mental process for me.
Speaker 3: It's like I'll be thinking about what I'm going to do,
Speaker 3: and then when I finally get down to finishing a song,
Speaker 3: I'll come up with like the melody and lyrics in
Speaker 3: twenty minutes, almost like automatic writing, Like my handle just
Speaker 3: start writing out lyrics and I won't even have to
Speaker 3: hardly think about it. So yeah, it's just kind of
Speaker 3: I've let my subconscioence take over a lot of the work,
Speaker 3: and then when it's time to actually create, it just
Speaker 3: kind of spills out.
Speaker 4: What would you say is your primary instrument? Because I
Speaker 4: know you pretty much play everything, but what's your primary
Speaker 4: instrument did you use to compose on when you get
Speaker 4: those ideas?
Speaker 3: Well? Keyboard is it is the principal I guess idea
Speaker 3: musical idea creation tool because you've got like all the
Speaker 3: notes laid out linearly in front of you. But that
Speaker 3: doesn't mean that you know the limitations of like the
Speaker 3: guitar aren't also something that's sort of inspirational. There are
Speaker 3: sounds and sort of tonalities that the guitar creates that
Speaker 3: you know, work with certain sort of vocal themes and
Speaker 3: stuff like that. And of course, you know, Norwegian death
Speaker 3: metal would be nothing if it had to play nothing
Speaker 3: but piano on it. So, but from a compositional standpoint,
Speaker 3: I actually sort of I have always considered the studio
Speaker 3: itself sort of a composition tool, because I very early
Speaker 3: on built one for myself in the belief that the
Speaker 3: ideas could happen anytime, and you don't want to, you know,
Speaker 3: have to wait to get into the studio. And conversely,
Speaker 3: if you're in the studio and you're making good progress,
Speaker 3: you don't want to have to get out and make
Speaker 3: room for somebody else. So the studio itself sort of
Speaker 3: became the creative tool because you lay down something, you
Speaker 3: get to hear it back right away and decide whether
Speaker 3: it works or not.
Speaker 7: And what's the don't skip over the most important thing
Speaker 7: that he basically just said, engineers make the best artists.
Speaker 1: Studio. You know what I'm saying, Yes.
Speaker 3: I know what is the That's why I kicked out
Speaker 3: the engineer that I had when I first got into
Speaker 3: the studio. Did my first production exactly never mind never mind,
Speaker 3: I think it was well, it was The first time
Speaker 3: I engineered was a band from Philadelphia called the American Dream.
Speaker 3: It was a brand new record plant studio and they
Speaker 3: had a custom board and nobody in the studio actually
Speaker 3: knew how to use it. So I just got frustrated
Speaker 3: watching one of the engineers fumble around on it. I said, well,
Speaker 3: I don't want to just watch him learn how to
Speaker 3: do it. I'll just learn how to do it myself.
Speaker 3: And subsequently it changed the way the whole way that
Speaker 3: I approached production because I could assume that the sound
Speaker 3: was there because I knew enough about the engineering that
Speaker 3: I you know, if you put the MIC's in the
Speaker 3: right place and that sort of thing, you don't have
Speaker 3: to do a whole lot of messing around, and then
Speaker 3: you can assume the sound is there and then focus
Speaker 3: on the musical part of it, on the performance and whatever,
Speaker 3: you know, kind of details that you want to put
Speaker 3: into the music. So it made the ex sperience, you know,
Speaker 3: for the most part of working with a band a
Speaker 3: lot different, because, you know, productions in the old days,
Speaker 3: you get in the studio and you spend the first
Speaker 3: entire day just getting drum sounds, you know, or something
Speaker 3: like that. You know, and then the next day guitar sounds.
Speaker 1: You know, what's the percentage of.
Speaker 2: Or at least like from from from zero to one
Speaker 2: hundred of the idea that's inside of your head being
Speaker 2: perfectly executed once you put it on tape.
Speaker 3: Very rarely, But that's because I don't often have that intention.
Speaker 3: I don't have the intention necessarily to completely craft something
Speaker 3: in my head and then try and imprint it onto
Speaker 3: the tape. I'm really, as I say, I'm exploring in
Speaker 3: a way, I'm fumbling around. I often when I'm starting
Speaker 3: a new record, I'll go out and do a lot
Speaker 3: of musical research, like I'll ask my kids, you know,
Speaker 3: what are you listening to? Or what do you think
Speaker 3: I should listen to? Then go on YouTube and start
Speaker 3: poking around, and then there's the sidebar. You start out
Speaker 3: one place and before you know it, you're in a
Speaker 3: whole other place.
Speaker 1: You rabbit hole yourself.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, but that's you know. I mean that. I
Speaker 3: really enjoy that because you discover things that aren't in
Speaker 3: the mainstream, which to me is the whole point of
Speaker 3: the Internet, is that everyone gets a platform. Of course,
Speaker 3: not everyone deserves it. Not everyone deserves it. You know,
Speaker 3: and you know, some people are easier to find, but
Speaker 3: it essentially took the music business and flattened it, you know.
Speaker 3: In other words, there's no or very little price of
Speaker 3: admission to participate anymore. All you got to do is
Speaker 3: get yourself a laptop, you know, at a website.
Speaker 1: In the world's your oyster? What part of Upper Derby
Speaker 1: did you grow up in?
Speaker 3: I grew up in the very western part of Upper
Speaker 3: Derby and a brand new post war row housing development,
Speaker 3: a familiar kind of housing in the Philadelphia area and
Speaker 3: Delaware and stuff like that Row Houses, which is essentially
Speaker 3: like an apartment building that fell down. Every house looked
Speaker 3: exactly the same. It was like one of these Levittown situations.
Speaker 3: But it was very lower middle class, so you know,
Speaker 3: I had to share for my entire life that I
Speaker 3: lived at home a bedroom with my brother and my
Speaker 3: two sisters shared a bedroom.
Speaker 1: Okay, how many? How many siblings?
Speaker 3: Again, I have a brother and two sisters.
Speaker 1: Did they have musical interest in what as well? Or
Speaker 1: was it just you?
Speaker 3: Not? Really?
Speaker 6: No.
Speaker 3: When I was in elementary school, we used to have
Speaker 3: a program where you could rent an instrument, and every
Speaker 3: week or so, somebody would come and give you a
Speaker 3: lesson that wasn't like a band or anything. But I,
Speaker 3: for some reason, thought I wanted to play the flute
Speaker 3: when I was like wow, when I was like eight
Speaker 3: or nine something like that. You know, I just liked
Speaker 3: the sound of it. But when I actually got it,
Speaker 3: I didn't realize what a nonlinear instrument it was. You know,
Speaker 3: it's very difficult to learn, and plus when you're young,
Speaker 3: it's difficult to get your mouth to the umbusure, to
Speaker 3: get your mouth to do the right thing. So my
Speaker 3: sister she got a clarinet, and I actually learned to
Speaker 3: play that way better than I learned to play the flute,
Speaker 3: and she never learned to play it at all. So,
Speaker 3: you know, I learned how to play Too Strange on
Speaker 3: the Shore by mister Ackerbilk, and that thrilled my dad,
Speaker 3: you know, because he was into that kind of easy
Speaker 3: listening stuff. But when I first heard I think it
Speaker 3: was walk Don't Run by the Ventures. That's when I
Speaker 3: knew guitar was what I wanted to play.
Speaker 2: Was that the first album that you purchased or like,
Speaker 2: do you remember the first album you ever had?
Speaker 3: Yeah? The first album that well, the first album that
Speaker 3: I ever purchased was like a cut out of a
Speaker 3: cutout bin and it was I'll be like sixty nine
Speaker 3: cents and it was called Boppin' and a bunch of
Speaker 3: artists that you've never heard of. Actually, years later I
Speaker 3: did find run across a few of the artists, Like
Speaker 3: if you go on YouTube, you can actually find performances
Speaker 3: by Dike Watson and the Brown Dots. It was just
Speaker 3: an odd collection of weird fifties rock and roll, proto
Speaker 3: rock and roll, a lot of it. And it was
Speaker 3: still before the Beatles, so I didn't have a whole
Speaker 3: lot of discrimination. I just knew that I was not
Speaker 3: into Elvis Presley because he was a greaser and the
Speaker 3: greasers like to beat me up. So I had no
Speaker 3: interest in Elvis Presley whatever.
Speaker 1: So you weren't the cool kids.
Speaker 3: You like the loaner, Oh, the trouble loaner. Definitely, the
Speaker 3: troubled loaner. Yeah, it was one of those things. I
Speaker 3: had terrible add or whatever it is. They didn't know
Speaker 3: what that was in those days. It was just an
Speaker 3: unruly child. And you know, no matter what where I
Speaker 3: started out in the classroom in the beginning of the year,
Speaker 3: by you know, the end of the first semester, I'm
Speaker 3: in the very back row because I'm creating distraction and
Speaker 3: stuff like that, and I just was I was never
Speaker 3: meant for that kind of that kind of discipline that
Speaker 3: school required. So everything I ever learned, I learned after
Speaker 3: I left school.
Speaker 2: So what was the what was the moment where you
Speaker 2: decided that this is this is my destiny, this is
Speaker 2: my my my moment in.
Speaker 3: Music, Well, I had a high school band, and as
Speaker 3: previously cited, I did so terribly in high school that
Speaker 3: there was no possibility of me going to college. It
Speaker 3: would only have been possible if I had landed some
Speaker 3: kind of scholarship anyway, because my dad didn't make that
Speaker 3: much money. And so after high school graduation, which was
Speaker 3: just around my eighteenth birthday. On my eighteenth birthday, I
Speaker 3: packed all my worldly goods into a typewriter case. At
Speaker 3: that point, I didn't even have a guitar anymore, and
Speaker 3: I left home and went to meet a friend of
Speaker 3: mine who was a drummer and we were going to
Speaker 3: start a band, and he was supposedly in Ocean City,
Speaker 3: So I got on a bus. It was my eighteenth birthday,
Speaker 3: so the first thing I did is I went to
Speaker 3: sixty ninth Street, right across from the sixty nine Street
Speaker 3: station and registered for the draft. Wow and yikes, yeah, yikes.
Speaker 3: And then I got on a bus to Ocean City
Speaker 3: and met up with this guy. Well, I didn't meet
Speaker 3: up with him right away because apparently he and he
Speaker 3: was hanging out with some guys who were stealing park
Speaker 3: benches and hiding them in their garage in Ocean City,
Speaker 3: And so I had to find a place to stay
Speaker 3: overnight till he had his court date the next day.
Speaker 1: And then wait, why would they steal park benches.
Speaker 3: In Ocean City. This is in nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 1: You just did anything, okay, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: And so you know, I went to his house with
Speaker 3: him and his parents. A couple of days later, we
Speaker 3: went to see The Birds and the Shadows of Night
Speaker 3: at a summerstock tent little concert thing. So it was
Speaker 3: the Birds. They were big on radio, The Shadows of
Speaker 3: Night they had a hit, and a local band called
Speaker 3: Woody's Truck Stop. Okay, we were kind of excited to
Speaker 3: see them because I knew about them through seeing a
Speaker 3: picture one of the guitar player. One of the guitar
Speaker 3: players in. It might have been Time magazine or something,
Speaker 3: because he grew his hair long and beat the system
Speaker 3: because I was having trouble all the time. I was
Speaker 3: always growing my hair, and they're always sending me home
Speaker 3: and my dad would send me to the barber. And
Speaker 3: this was just an endless cycle. And he essentially beat
Speaker 3: the system. He was a straight a student, and so
Speaker 3: a judge said, you can't not educate him, so they
Speaker 3: made him. They made the school provide him with private
Speaker 3: telephone line. And there was a picture of him at
Speaker 3: a desk with his long hair and a little speaker phone,
Speaker 3: and I thought, man, he beat the systems, you know.
Speaker 3: And the way he beat it was he said, I'm
Speaker 3: in a band, you know, I have to have my
Speaker 3: hair long. I'm in a band, and so and so
Speaker 3: I you know. I was excited to see them, although
Speaker 3: I had never heard them. I had no idea what
Speaker 3: kind of music they did, but they really like they
Speaker 3: kind of like kicked everybody's ass. They had so much
Speaker 3: energy and they were basically a blues band, blues and
Speaker 3: R and B. They did like I think they did
Speaker 3: a Sam and Dave song, and they did a couple
Speaker 3: of blue songs. And so god, that's that's great. Let's
Speaker 3: go see them when they play at the Artist Hut
Speaker 3: in Philadelphia, which is no longer there. It's a little
Speaker 3: it was a little basement club on Walnut Street, just
Speaker 3: a block past Rittenhouse Square and held maybe eighty people
Speaker 3: something like that, maybe one hundred people if you cram
Speaker 3: him in there. And we went to see the band. Then,
Speaker 3: as it turned out, their drummer was just a stand in,
Speaker 3: you know, they could not seem to find a drummer
Speaker 3: they could keep. As a matter of fact, the drummer
Speaker 3: on the gig was Tim if I could don't remember
Speaker 3: her name. He was became a famous songwriter and he
Speaker 3: wrote Seventh Avenue I think was a hit song for
Speaker 3: art Guardfuncle. But anyway, he you know, they were looking
Speaker 3: for a drummer, and Joe, the guy that I was with,
Speaker 3: he was just, you know, amazing trained drummer, you know.
Speaker 3: So he just sat down on the drum started doing
Speaker 3: all his Buddy Rich stuff, and they said, okay, join
Speaker 3: our band, and he was loyal enough to me for
Speaker 3: some dumb reason. Then he said, okay, but you got
Speaker 3: to hire my friend here, the guitar player as well,
Speaker 3: and they decided, okay, well we can go for that
Speaker 3: because that allowed the so called rhythm guitar player. They
Speaker 3: come up front and play harp, and then the band
Speaker 3: looked exactly like the Butterfield band. And so that was
Speaker 3: my first real gig, first time I ever got paid
Speaker 3: real money. And it lasted for he maybe six months,
Speaker 3: eight months something like that.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: And then I then I formed an ass you.
Speaker 2: You mentioned Upper Darby, I have to ask you, uh,
Speaker 2: if you've spent any time in Val Shieveley's record store,
Speaker 2: which is still open and.
Speaker 1: Up and running to this day.
Speaker 3: Now, where was that.
Speaker 2: Just in relationship to where you catch the l I
Speaker 2: would say it's like two or three blocks away.
Speaker 3: I mean technically that's around the sixth ninth Street area.
Speaker 1: Yeah, around the sixty nine Street area.
Speaker 2: I mean technically, I would say that he's the number
Speaker 2: one forty five distributor end well, at least the SCIgen
Speaker 2: says in the East Coast.
Speaker 1: I'm certain that now in.
Speaker 3: The whole of the East Coast.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you go there and his whe would you say,
Speaker 2: Steve that he has at least like six hundred thousand Yeah.
Speaker 3: He's there, it's still there.
Speaker 2: I'm still open so once a year I'll take a
Speaker 2: maybe a two day trek and get lost in and his.
Speaker 3: Uh, where's that in relationship to the tower theater.
Speaker 2: Across around the corner if you go to if you
Speaker 2: go to a tower theater, I would say it's just
Speaker 2: slightly slightly around the corner.
Speaker 1: It's like walking distance.
Speaker 3: I remember there used to be a place downtown on
Speaker 3: Chestnut Street that was one of those you know, one
Speaker 3: of those places that had like every single, every obscure
Speaker 3: single that you're looking for that.
Speaker 2: Care right now, he's managed to just stay open and
Speaker 2: and you know pretty much people just take pilgrimages there
Speaker 2: and do like.
Speaker 3: Week week long great diggers.
Speaker 6: Yes, exactly, he's okay post Rona.
Speaker 2: Yeah, now he's by he lives aloner.
Speaker 1: You know nine hundred that records.
Speaker 3: He's like Harvey Peacar, Did you know who he is?
Speaker 1: Harvey Peacard now Harvey Pea Carr.
Speaker 3: He used to he would be on the David Lemerman
Speaker 3: show every once in a while. He guy from Cleveland, Ohio,
Speaker 3: like very angry, but his life's work was essentially collecting vinyl.
Speaker 3: And I went to his house once and for an
Speaker 3: individual person, I don't know how he found the time,
Speaker 3: you know, to collect the catalog so much stuff. But
Speaker 3: I guess it's because he had you know, he worked
Speaker 3: at the post office. Okay, so yeah, yeah, you never know.
Speaker 2: So with the net with the NAZ that was your
Speaker 2: when did you guys? You guys got signed in what
Speaker 2: sixty eight?
Speaker 3: I think it was around and the band sort of
Speaker 3: formed the band in the summer of sixty seven, and
Speaker 3: it wasn't too long before we got kind of discovered
Speaker 3: and whisked off to to New York not New York City,
Speaker 3: actually Great Neck Long Island. The guy who took over
Speaker 3: managing us, he he lived in a really nice neighborhood.
Speaker 3: His name was John Curland and he actually lived next
Speaker 3: door to Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary.
Speaker 1: And he was and he.
Speaker 3: Was a publicist. And one of the great things about
Speaker 3: that was and when I would go to his office,
Speaker 3: he was still all of the latest releases, you know,
Speaker 3: like who is this iron Butterfly? And what the hell
Speaker 3: is a Buffalo Springfield? And you know that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: You know, he get wed you know, we'd get the
Speaker 3: records before they ever got into the stores because they
Speaker 3: were promos and in that sense, you know, we were
Speaker 3: always like slightly ahead of whatever was was going on
Speaker 3: in the public musically, but he really didn't know anything
Speaker 3: about managing a band, you know, and he kind of
Speaker 3: stuck us all together in a house in Great Neck
Speaker 3: where and said, I don't want you guys to play
Speaker 3: until you get a record deal because I want to
Speaker 3: be able to set you know, like a high ticket
Speaker 3: price or something like that. And ultimately, you know, that
Speaker 3: philosophy killed the band because you know, the only thing worse,
Speaker 3: you know than being in a band and fighting on
Speaker 3: the road, you know, is being in a band and
Speaker 3: stuck in a house somewhere and fighting all the time,
Speaker 3: you know, because you don't get to break it up
Speaker 3: with any playing. So that to me was a big,
Speaker 3: a big disappointment. And as a matter of fact that
Speaker 3: my time in the NAS only lasted about eighteen months,
Speaker 3: but we managed to get two records out.
Speaker 1: Was there any I was excious to know?
Speaker 4: Was there any crossover overlap between NAZ and Utopia, another
Speaker 4: band you produced. Were there any guys that were in
Speaker 4: NAS that went onto that band.
Speaker 3: Or No, there weren't, But ironically enough, Rick Nielsen and
Speaker 3: Robin Xander of Cheap Trick. Eventually they became members of
Speaker 3: n NAZ for a brief period of time until the
Speaker 3: band changed its name to the Sick Men of Europe.
Speaker 3: Then eventually they left that and and started Cheap Trick.
Speaker 3: And then I did, years later produce a Cheap.
Speaker 1: Trick record, Which one did you produce?
Speaker 3: Next position? Please? Didn't have any big hit singles on it,
Speaker 3: but they didn't have any big hit singles after that
Speaker 3: much anyway, So.
Speaker 4: Right, yeah, my band we h we actually sampled a
Speaker 4: song you produced off Utopia, legally sampled. We sampled Eternal Love,
Speaker 4: off the Good Morning Sunshine, off the.
Speaker 3: Cool Sample Away. I've never that never bothered me, you know,
Speaker 3: people sampling stuff. I always thought it was sort of flattering,
Speaker 3: you know, when someone would excerpt your music.
Speaker 1: Keep that in mind.
Speaker 2: Well it should be it should be noted that, you know,
Speaker 2: many people think that Hello to Me made its debut
Speaker 2: on something anything when the actuality it appeared on the
Speaker 2: NAS record. However, for a lot of black people, hell hell.
Speaker 3: Yeah one of them, but Hello Hello, Hello, Yeah.
Speaker 4: Okay, I'm really showed my age autisty drew. My first
Speaker 4: hearing of that version, it was groove theory liked, not
Speaker 4: like groove theory. They because they covered it in like
Speaker 4: ninety five. I want to say that.
Speaker 1: That was the first time.
Speaker 2: You're telling me that you never had a mom hunt
Speaker 2: or grandma that cleaned the house on the weekend.
Speaker 1: Not to that song. Now, I mean we have lived up.
Speaker 6: Right, It's like top five.
Speaker 1: That was my first time.
Speaker 4: My asley's was like because my mother was younger, so
Speaker 4: Ale was like between between the ces, you know, I
Speaker 4: mean it was I'll give you that. Yeah, it was
Speaker 4: all so yeah. When I heard, I was like, oh
Speaker 4: this is damn did this? Yeah, that was my first
Speaker 4: time heard it.
Speaker 5: Was me feel better I do.
Speaker 2: A fellow Philadelphian, so it's even more full full circle.
Speaker 1: That is hilarious. Wow, that's amazing.
Speaker 7: Some one who got introduced to the song by the
Speaker 7: actual song. Well, like you pointed out, though not the original,
Speaker 7: the original was was on a NAS record, right.
Speaker 3: That's correct, And the original was like you likely wouldn't
Speaker 3: recognize it because it was like a really dirgy tempo,
Speaker 3: really slow and sappy.
Speaker 1: And I prefer that version of the NAS then even.
Speaker 3: And I didn't play guitar on I played vibes. Yeah, no, guitar,
Speaker 3: the version.
Speaker 2: I guess you're the first person that we interviewed that
Speaker 2: even put their footprints into psych rock or what they
Speaker 2: call uh progressive, I mean progressive at least under that
Speaker 2: Under that umbrella was was the basic mind state to
Speaker 2: rebel against whatever the status quo was. Like, what was
Speaker 2: your thoughts on uh, I'm trying to think of like
Speaker 2: commercial albums that push the envelope, like say, uh uh couple.
Speaker 3: Of Old Is Love or the first couple of Yes records,
Speaker 3: you know, with the first couple of Genesis records. We'll
Speaker 3: see there was a whole there was a difference between
Speaker 3: like a so called American prague and English prog rock,
Speaker 3: because English prog rock was inspired by classical music and
Speaker 3: you know, and more classical forms and old maybe something
Speaker 3: to some extent folk music, English type type folk music,
Speaker 3: whereas American prog rock was more informed by jazz and
Speaker 3: acts like Return to Forever and Weather Report, and so
Speaker 3: what we were doing by that time, you know, was
Speaker 3: some weird combination of all of those influences, whether Report,
Speaker 3: my Vision, New Orchestra. Yes, you know, jeneis gentle giant,
Speaker 3: you know, all of those. The English prog rock, which
Speaker 3: was more you know, classically inspired and had classical themes,
Speaker 3: and the American prog rock, which had more jazz it
Speaker 3: was jazz inspired and jazzier themes. So somewhere in the
Speaker 3: middle it met because we had the way that we
Speaker 3: would write with. We would all just sit around in
Speaker 3: the studio and we would just throw ideas out and
Speaker 3: we'd figure out how to glue them together. And everybody had,
Speaker 3: you know, different things that they were listening to at
Speaker 3: the time. John Siegler bass player, he'd probably be listening
Speaker 3: to a lot of return for and but we would
Speaker 3: you know, work other stuff in, like American classics like
Speaker 3: Aaron Copeland.
Speaker 1: Oh wow. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So around that time, like what were what were the
Speaker 2: artists or the albums that were blowing your mind? Like,
Speaker 2: were you anti Sergeant Pepper's.
Speaker 3: Or anti Sergeant Pepper? Well? I was. I had an
Speaker 3: interesting reaction to Sergeant Pepper because I was a teetotaler
Speaker 3: until I was twenty one. I had no drugs, that
Speaker 3: never drank alcohol, had no idea what people were talking
Speaker 3: about when they were high. And when Sergeant Pepper came out,
Speaker 3: I was kind of disappointed in it because the album before,
Speaker 3: which was Revolver. I thought was an incredible record, just
Speaker 3: from the standpoint of the songwriting and the and the
Speaker 3: production innovations that went into it, and it seemed like,
Speaker 3: you know, they were just reinventing music all the time,
Speaker 3: and Sergeant Pepper was just very imitative of English music
Speaker 3: hall kind of yeah, that sort of stuff. Well, you know,
Speaker 3: it's where it was, you know, circus music, that sort
Speaker 3: of thing. Yeah, yeah, and uh. And people will say, like,
Speaker 3: you know, it's a completely different album when you're on acid,
Speaker 3: you know, And I said, well, I don't take acid,
Speaker 3: you know. So it kind of like I thought I
Speaker 3: must be missing something here. And so it never affected
Speaker 3: me the way that it did everyone else. But years
Speaker 3: later I kind of, you know, I got a little
Speaker 3: more into it, and mostly because of the quality of
Speaker 3: the sound. There's a certain there's a space that they
Speaker 3: created in there that I don't think existed on a
Speaker 3: lot of records previous to that, an atmosphere or a
Speaker 3: sonic space. And I grew to appreciate that, and I
Speaker 3: grew to be less offended by things like within You
Speaker 3: and Without You.
Speaker 1: So what led to.
Speaker 2: You leaving NAS and starting your own What was the
Speaker 2: process in starting your own solo work.
Speaker 3: Part of it was, I guess, the inevitability of me absorbing,
Speaker 3: absorbing broader influences than the ones that originally went into
Speaker 3: the NAS. We characterized the NAS as a combination of
Speaker 3: The Who and the Beach Boys. In other words, we
Speaker 3: wanted to do that. We wanted to perform like The
Speaker 3: Who at the dis Yeah and this or everything, but
Speaker 3: be able to do harmonies like the Beach Boys. And
Speaker 3: it's not that much of a stretch because the Beach
Speaker 3: Boys was Keith Moon's favorite band, and that's why Who
Speaker 3: did a cover version of Barbaring. They would let him
Speaker 3: sing that every night on stage. I got completely enthralled
Speaker 3: with Laura Nero and Eli in the Thirteenth Confession when
Speaker 3: that album came out. That just been up the skies
Speaker 3: for me, and I had never heard anyone sort of
Speaker 3: like be so revelatory in their performance, really interesting and
Speaker 3: intricate in the songwriting, and very sophisticated in the harmonics.
Speaker 3: And of course she sang great, and I was so
Speaker 3: kind of like taken with her that I asked my manager,
Speaker 3: John Curland at the time if he could somehow get
Speaker 3: me an audience with her. And so he called up
Speaker 3: David Geffen, who was an accountant at Columbia Records at
Speaker 3: the time, Wow, but was kind of like the contact
Speaker 3: guy to Laura Neiro and managed to She allowed me
Speaker 3: to come up to her apartment in the Dakota and
Speaker 3: she made tuna fish casserole, which is the only thing
Speaker 3: she knew how to make, and that's why her publishing
Speaker 3: company was called Tuna Fish Music. And she played the
Speaker 3: piano and sang, you know, sang all these and played
Speaker 3: the piano and wanted me to sing along, but I
Speaker 3: was just too petrified. But the thing I remember from
Speaker 3: is she let her fingernails grow so long that they
Speaker 3: curled over, you know, Like her fingernails were like at
Speaker 3: least three inches long, and so and so when she
Speaker 3: was playing the piano, it would be this clattering noise,
Speaker 3: you know. And I don't remember hearing that on the record,
Speaker 3: you know. But she called me back like two weeks
Speaker 3: later and went up to visit her again, and she
Speaker 3: asked if I would be her band leader, and I,
Speaker 3: you know, so I have to think about it, but
Speaker 3: I knew that I couldn't because the NASA had just
Speaker 3: signed a record contract and her first album was about
Speaker 3: to come out, but between the first and second albums,
Speaker 3: I started writing like Laura Niro and none of that
Speaker 3: fit and it caused a big debacle. During the recording
Speaker 3: of the second album, which was originally a double album,
Speaker 3: about half of it I was singing and it was
Speaker 3: all Laura Nero songs, and so essentially they cut the
Speaker 3: album in half. And when they did that, I quit
Speaker 3: the band and lived on the street for a while
Speaker 3: until the partner of the guy who was managing the
Speaker 3: NAZ looked me up. He had gone to work for
Speaker 3: Albert Grossman, and Albert said, you know, I want you
Speaker 3: to go out and find some young talent, because everybody
Speaker 3: I got ye is old, you know. He you know,
Speaker 3: he had Bob Dylan, and he had Peter Palm Mary
Speaker 3: and then then he was getting into some more contemporary
Speaker 3: X but the only one that he ever actually signed
Speaker 3: was Jennis Joplin, and within a year she was gone.
Speaker 1: You're supposed to producer, correct, I.
Speaker 3: Was supposed to producer, but you know, all these things
Speaker 3: don't always work out, you know. Some in retrospect, I
Speaker 3: deduced that the problem was that she didn't really like
Speaker 3: making records. She liked performing in front of an audience
Speaker 3: and records, you know, there was no audience there, and
Speaker 3: so it was just like she was lost in the studio.
Speaker 3: It wasn't for her. She needed the response of an
Speaker 3: audience and I'm you know, I'm in the studio. I'm
Speaker 3: just thinking about musical concerns and stuff like that. So
Speaker 3: eventually she got Paul Rothschild to finish the record. And
Speaker 3: Paul Rothschild is one of these producers who knows almost
Speaker 3: nothing about music, you know, but knows how to knows
Speaker 3: how to pump an artist up. You know, It's like
Speaker 3: that was great, you know that was It doesn't matter
Speaker 3: how terrible it was.
Speaker 1: That was just great.
Speaker 3: Can you do another one?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 3: Like that? And they'll eventually accidentally you get the performance
Speaker 3: that you keep. But the whole thing, you know, was
Speaker 3: more psychology than you know, actual musicology. And at that
Speaker 3: time that was my extremely weak suit. I was only
Speaker 3: in my very early twenties.
Speaker 6: And Hey tied you briefly.
Speaker 5: You briefly went over to Struggle, but we do that
Speaker 5: kind of fast. Sometimes you said you were homeless.
Speaker 3: I was, well, I wasn't literally homeless, because I was
Speaker 3: still signed to screen Gems as writer through the contract,
Speaker 3: through the Nazath contract, they had apartments, you know, in
Speaker 3: various major cities in LA and in New York where
Speaker 3: they would just put songwriters up for you know, I
Speaker 3: don't know, songwriting sessions or whatever. They just happened to
Speaker 3: have these places. So I was staying in one, but
Speaker 3: you know, I didn't have a lease or anything like that.
Speaker 3: And at that point I was spending most of my
Speaker 3: time with clothing designers in the West Village. I was
Speaker 3: designing and installing lights in a dance club. I wasn't
Speaker 3: doing no music whatever, stuff like that. When this guy
Speaker 3: discovered me and brought me into the Grossman organization and
Speaker 3: started pairing me up with everybody that was on the
Speaker 3: roster because a lot of the artists were not making
Speaker 3: the transition into the seventies. Some of them hadn't fully
Speaker 3: made the transition into the sixties. But I started doing
Speaker 3: like Ian and Silvia and James Cotton and ultimately the
Speaker 3: Butterfield Band. And the mandate most of the time was
Speaker 3: make the record sound more modern, you know, make the
Speaker 3: record sound contemporary somehow. So I strove to do that,
Speaker 3: and they appreciated that, and then my big biggest break
Speaker 3: probably came when I did well stage Fright with the band,
Speaker 3: because the band was like the biggest band in the
Speaker 3: world at that moment, and so getting my name on
Speaker 3: stage Fright kind of got a whole bunch of other
Speaker 3: stuff right after that. Hall and Oates was among them,
Speaker 3: Graham Funk, Railroad Finger, you know, and et cetera.
Speaker 2: Only because of my affinity for collecting like weird rock
Speaker 2: proc rock stuff for sampling purposes or whatever. So there's
Speaker 2: a there's a group called Paris that that's been stampled
Speaker 2: a lot and in the hip hop community with the
Speaker 2: drummer uh named Hunt Sales.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, the comedian Super Sales.
Speaker 2: Is it true he's on Runt And if he's that's
Speaker 2: the case, he's he was a.
Speaker 3: Kid, Yes, he was a kid. I first met.
Speaker 1: Drumming on your album as what like fifteen something.
Speaker 3: Around that's fifteen sixteen something like that.
Speaker 2: He was in his thirties when Bowie put uh tim machine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's yeah, it's so he.
Speaker 1: Was that dope at the age of fourteen fifteen, he was.
Speaker 3: He was getting drum lessons from well, people don't know
Speaker 3: this probably if you know who Soupy Sales is because
Speaker 3: people probably don't know who super.
Speaker 2: Sales be on Motown, which people don't know that I have.
Speaker 3: To you can do it in your house.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, do you guys know he was a comedian, right,
Speaker 4: he was like he.
Speaker 3: It was a Saturday morning. He was like Saturday morning,
Speaker 3: Saturday afternoon kids show hosts. That's how he got famous
Speaker 3: because his show went coast to coast when he became
Speaker 3: the Soupy Sales Show, right, But previous to that, he
Speaker 3: was a local late night host in Cleveland, and he
Speaker 3: would have you know, he was like Johnny Carson, and
Speaker 3: he would have all the great all the jazz greats
Speaker 3: come in and play on his show and talk on
Speaker 3: his talk show. And so he knew everybody. I remember
Speaker 3: going with him and hunting Tony to see like an
Speaker 3: eighty five year old Gene Krupa play at the jazz
Speaker 3: club that was in the in the Plaza Hotel, in
Speaker 3: the basement of the Plaza Hotel, and it was so funny.
Speaker 3: Jean group of grinning like he always did, but could
Speaker 3: barely lift the sticks off the drum. But you know,
Speaker 3: he knew everybody in jazz, and Hunt got lessons from
Speaker 3: Louis Belson, you know, one of the great technique drummers
Speaker 3: you know of all time, right and one of the
Speaker 3: and the first guy I think to do double bass drums.
Speaker 3: I met them at a place called Steve Paul's. The scene.
Speaker 3: There used to be UH in New York City, and
Speaker 3: in a lot of cities there used to be a
Speaker 3: lot of music clubs where they serve no liquor. For instance,
Speaker 3: the UH the Cafe a Go Go in New York City,
Speaker 3: which was a basement club, very weird configuration. But I
Speaker 3: saw Cream's first gigs in the US. There saw a
Speaker 3: Butterfield band probably four times. There saw John Mayol and
Speaker 3: you know, all of these and and Richie Havens before
Speaker 3: would stuck, you know, you know, all of these greats
Speaker 3: would play in this tiny little club. But the but
Speaker 3: you know, I mean the admission was probably ten bucks
Speaker 3: and the one drink minimum was like a flower vase
Speaker 3: full of ice cream, you know, like a giant milkshake,
Speaker 3: because you know it, these places were all open to
Speaker 3: underage kids. And Steve Paul's aceame was the same way
Speaker 3: was you know, all ages if your mom would let you.
Speaker 3: Because they served no liquor. And it was the same
Speaker 3: kind of place you saw the very first gigs of
Speaker 3: seann Onna, for instance, the very the very with some
Speaker 3: of the very first gigs of just some of the
Speaker 3: strangest acts, like well the Nice, remember The Nice.
Speaker 1: That was.
Speaker 3: Keith Emerson's band before ELP. I saw David Clayton Thomas
Speaker 3: in a Canadian band called Raven before he joined Blood,
Speaker 3: Sweat and Tears.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: The house band was the McCoy's hang on Sloopy.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Rick Deringer and his little brother Randy, they were the
Speaker 3: house band. And since it was all ages and since
Speaker 3: you never knew it was going to play there, especially
Speaker 3: the jam sessions which would happen after the build acts
Speaker 3: came on, they were amazing. You know. I was standing
Speaker 3: on stage on time with I'm trying to remember, but
Speaker 3: it was like Dwayne Almon and you know, the drummer
Speaker 3: from Led Zeppelin and the bass player from another band.
Speaker 3: You know, just the jam sessions were amazing. I never
Speaker 3: got the jam with Jimmy Hendrix because I walked right
Speaker 3: by him as he was coming into the club because
Speaker 3: I thought he was taller than he was, you know,
Speaker 3: but his afron only came up to my nose, so
Speaker 3: I thought, now they can't. Yeah, he's actually kind of
Speaker 3: a short guy, so, uh so I walked right past him.
Speaker 3: I never even got to watch him jam So but anyway,
Speaker 3: that's me.
Speaker 2: You're you're actually confirming the rumor that Hendricks was supposed
Speaker 2: to be n E. L. P.
Speaker 3: I didn't hear that, but that's an interesting it was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there is a rumor that the name of the
Speaker 2: group was supposed to be called Help Hendry DRIs.
Speaker 1: Emerson Powell and it was Lake Palmer. It was Lake
Speaker 1: Palmer Pow.
Speaker 8: I'm some thing of Cole and Powell right now, I'm sorry, Yeah, no, right.
Speaker 3: He was the original drummer in Journey Trivia. Oh we
Speaker 3: love our trivia.
Speaker 2: So anyway, the place for it, you should be all right,
Speaker 2: I'd say we grabbed Todd to be our seventh member,
Speaker 2: of course of coust Love Supreme. So I'm skipping over
Speaker 2: to something anything which, first of all, I know, I
Speaker 2: know back then, at least for for a double album
Speaker 2: to get released was a big deal.
Speaker 1: I mean now it's nothing, but.
Speaker 2: And normally I would think that double albums were a
Speaker 2: thing for uh, I mean proven acts that are you know,
Speaker 2: multi platinum and all those things. But I mean seventy
Speaker 2: two was just the level the level plane field was
Speaker 2: clear and things were being defined. But the risks that
Speaker 2: the artistic risks that you took on that record, Like
Speaker 2: what was your mind stake during that period?
Speaker 3: I was in kind of a great position, and it's
Speaker 3: affected the way I'd think about making records ever since,
Speaker 3: because I was producing records for the Grossman organization, but
Speaker 3: I was still writing songs and I have musical ideas,
Speaker 3: but I had no inclination at all in becoming like
Speaker 3: an actual, you know, bankable artists that had to go
Speaker 3: out on the road and play and stuff like that.
Speaker 3: I enjoyed being in the studio too much, so I
Speaker 3: wanted to get these ideas out of my system. And
Speaker 3: I asked Albert who or whoever I was dealing with.
Speaker 3: I said, can you give me a budget to make
Speaker 3: a record of my own? And they said, well, you've
Speaker 3: been doing all this work for us, Sure we'll give
Speaker 3: you a budget. And then I recorded Runt and they
Speaker 3: were kind of surprised at the result, you know, they
Speaker 3: thought it was going to be a piece of crap,
Speaker 3: and as it turned out, there was a minor hit
Speaker 3: single on it, so that kind of sealed my fate.
Speaker 3: I had to continue making records because I had had
Speaker 3: a single then the next and the first record was
Speaker 3: just a scatter brained effort because I had never made
Speaker 3: an album of my own and I just wanted to
Speaker 3: capture all of these various musical ideas and to work
Speaker 3: with musicians that I really wanted to work with. Then
Speaker 3: I got to my second album. Between the first and
Speaker 3: second album, I discovered marijuana.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 3: An ironic thing is it gave me a much more
Speaker 3: ordered approach to songwriting, you know, in other words, yeah,
Speaker 3: I was. It made me less scatterbrained when it came
Speaker 3: to songwriting. So the next record that I made, which
Speaker 3: was called The Ballad, and that one really fell through
Speaker 3: the cracks because Bearsville changed their distribution from Ampex, which
Speaker 3: was a tape company, to Warner Brothers right in the
Speaker 3: middle of when that album got released.
Speaker 4: So it just kind of so Bearsville was not your label.
Speaker 4: I always always thought that was your indie label.
Speaker 1: Whatever.
Speaker 3: No, that's Albert Grossman's, yeah, you know, since I was
Speaker 3: working for him, I was on it, and so that
Speaker 3: was surprising. And then the second record was just much
Speaker 3: more coherent and much more songwriterly record. And then when
Speaker 3: I got to something anything, I moved to LA for
Speaker 3: a year, got a house so that I would be,
Speaker 3: you know, have nothing to do but make music, and
Speaker 3: I would record in this little studio called ID Sound
Speaker 3: where we did the NASA records during the day. Then
Speaker 3: I go home at night and write and do some
Speaker 3: other recording. I rented an eight track machine and recorded
Speaker 3: some of the more bizarre things from the record, like
Speaker 3: went to the mirror, it sounds sounds of the studio
Speaker 3: and that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: Why and how did you create intro.
Speaker 3: Intro meeting the sounds of the studio? Is that it?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 3: Or the one on the very last side, which is
Speaker 3: found tapes for my high school band and stuff.
Speaker 2: Well, the one on the last side where you introduced
Speaker 2: hissing reverb and.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's that it sounds of the studio.
Speaker 3: Well it was course, you know the analog days, you know,
Speaker 3: and analog had its own sort of issues and responsibilities
Speaker 3: and stuff like that, you know, which nobody nowadays much recalls.
Speaker 3: But before you could do a session, someone would have
Speaker 3: to come in. They would have to clean the heads
Speaker 3: on the machine, they take a swab and swab down
Speaker 3: all of the heads and rollers and stuff on the machine.
Speaker 3: They would lay tone down on the tape reference tone.
Speaker 3: It's kind of like a and for tape ops, you know,
Speaker 3: because which is a lost art. But in the analog days,
Speaker 3: you had to do all of these little rituals like
Speaker 3: cleaning the heads and the pintrollers and laying tone down
Speaker 3: on the tape and being the guy who gets yelled
Speaker 3: at when you accidentally punch in in the wrong place,
Speaker 3: or or the guy who gets yelled at because the
Speaker 3: tape broke or something like that. So, you know, analog
Speaker 3: recording there was this whole other range of issues you
Speaker 3: had to be conscious of that. Of course the music
Speaker 3: consumer never really considers. But since it was analog, you know,
Speaker 3: in all the records I've make, at at least somewhere
Speaker 3: there's an analog glitch in it, you know, something where
Speaker 3: accidentally the tape got pinched or creased, but it's in
Speaker 3: the middle of a performance and you can't do anything
Speaker 3: about it, you know. And it's before digital where you
Speaker 3: could drop in something from another place, you know, and
Speaker 3: so it just goes on to the record, you know,
Speaker 3: and most people. It goes by. Most people don't even
Speaker 3: notice it.
Speaker 2: So, knowing what you know now, having dabbled in both,
Speaker 2: you know the world of analog and digital, what is
Speaker 2: your what is your preference? Do you prefer the beautiful
Speaker 2: imperfection of the analog world or are you consistently still
Speaker 2: working for looking for the best experience of sound that
Speaker 2: you can get in the digital world.
Speaker 3: Well, I think a lot of people forget that, you know,
Speaker 3: the analog world was an entire mailieu. It wasn't simply
Speaker 3: the fact that records were on vinyl. It was a
Speaker 3: fact that portable music systems had not been invented yet,
Speaker 3: and so if you wanted a personal listening experience, you
Speaker 3: had to go to your own home and sit in
Speaker 3: the sweet spot in your own system and listen to
Speaker 3: the record. Ideally, nothing goes wrong in that situation. The
Speaker 3: record does not skip where nobody dances across the room
Speaker 3: and makes the tone arm hop around, or you know,
Speaker 3: or the base on the record does not interfere and
Speaker 3: start to cause a rumble, and other sorts of you
Speaker 3: know artifacts, or the fact that the plain fact that
Speaker 3: the sound on a vinyl LP is worse in the
Speaker 3: center than it is at the outside of the record
Speaker 3: because you're trying to put the equal amount of sound
Speaker 3: in smaller and smaller real estate, you know, as the
Speaker 3: record proceeds. So people tend to forget about all this.
Speaker 5: I'm sorry, I know that to most people that to
Speaker 5: most of you guys, that just sounded like one plus
Speaker 5: two equals three.
Speaker 6: But to me it just went, well.
Speaker 1: Okay, here's the deal, so die in the vinyl world.
Speaker 2: In vinyl world, it's probably to your best interest to
Speaker 2: keep your your time under sixteen minutes.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because that way the maximize on you get the
Speaker 4: best sound.
Speaker 2: So the reason why they make twelve in singles, the
Speaker 2: reason why they make twelve singles is so that you
Speaker 2: can have one song on that record.
Speaker 1: So it's it's louder when it's just when it's a.
Speaker 3: Maximum maximum volume. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, for instance, Side too of Michael Jackson's Off the
Speaker 2: Wall record has six songs on it, So the records
Speaker 2: are the gruves are really smaller as opposed to Side one,
Speaker 2: which is four songs and louder. So if I were
Speaker 2: to play the title, if I would play Off the
Speaker 2: Wall in the club from that album.
Speaker 1: The volume would be very low.
Speaker 2: So that I would have to do, yeah, as opposed
Speaker 2: to so yeah back in the day. I mean the
Speaker 2: reason why we use computer technology now to DJ is
Speaker 2: so that now I can make it loud as shit. Wow,
Speaker 2: it used to be problematic, like if you turn the
Speaker 2: volume up, you would hear.
Speaker 1: Like he lowen feedback and all those things. Yeah.
Speaker 5: How many people y'all just sent back to listen to
Speaker 5: like their old vinyl Like that's that's what okay?
Speaker 1: Yeah, the more the more it's it's problematic.
Speaker 2: Like probably one of the worst records I know that
Speaker 2: has this system times no god, the worst mastered albums ever.
Speaker 2: I was gonna say, uh uh the Deaf Jams initial
Speaker 2: release of Public Enemy Spear of a Black Planet, where
Speaker 2: they actually try to cramp ten songs on one side,
Speaker 2: like they didn't make it a double album. They're just like,
Speaker 2: fuck it, ten songs on one side, ten songs on
Speaker 2: the other side, and thus all this. Yeah, the more
Speaker 2: music you squeeze on a record, the softer it gets.
Speaker 3: Well, it's funny. I didn't discover that record until I
Speaker 3: got it on a on a CD.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it was me.
Speaker 10: I mean's amazing technology.
Speaker 3: That's an amazing record. Though, that's the that's the Sergeant
Speaker 3: Pepper of hip hop. That record. Wow, yeah, that record,
Speaker 3: you know, influenced a white guy like me. You know,
Speaker 3: it's really you know, I thought that, can you do that?
Speaker 3: Can you actually do that?
Speaker 1: Not legally?
Speaker 3: Yeah, well we're doing it. We're not doing it, so.
Speaker 1: You just do it you get caught.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you just know. I just you know, I love
Speaker 3: that record. I go back to it with regularity.
Speaker 1: All right, Wait now you see damn see I don't
Speaker 1: even want to.
Speaker 5: Go to ask them what.
Speaker 2: Well, no, I was gonna leap right to Hermit of Mink,
Speaker 2: but I don't. I don't want to lose faithful and
Speaker 2: all the other stuff. But all right, I know I
Speaker 2: booked you the last time when I asked you about
Speaker 2: But that's just not normal. It's not normal.
Speaker 1: Not normal.
Speaker 2: It's not normal to be making shit like that. Uh yeah,
Speaker 2: long did it take you to make that song? And
Speaker 2: where did you did you just have a sound effects
Speaker 2: record and be like, Okay, I'm going to figure out
Speaker 2: the song.
Speaker 3: Some of them sound effects, some of it as sound effracts,
Speaker 3: and then that's you know, a lot of it's just
Speaker 3: me making noises with my mouth all.
Speaker 2: Right, and itever even bothered me that you would actually
Speaker 2: make the sounds by yourself. I thought, yeah, I thought
Speaker 2: you were just like one by one, like cutting pasting.
Speaker 3: Well, obviously some of the sounds are not human derived,
Speaker 3: so they would have to be sample from something, probably
Speaker 3: from a sound effects record or even me like making
Speaker 3: some foldy for it.
Speaker 2: But well, yeah, what I'm trying to lead to is that,
Speaker 2: I mean, between you and Miles Davis, Well, well, you
Speaker 2: know what with TiO Marcia, uh Marcia's name see Mao,
Speaker 2: with how they craft a bit just brew. I mean,
Speaker 2: these albums that you're making are just they're they're redefining
Speaker 2: what you can do and can't do with technology. So
Speaker 2: was it the fact that you just felt like, I mean,
Speaker 2: were you ever just unsatisfied with the studio? Like what
Speaker 2: studios were you looking for to give you maximum creation?
Speaker 1: And did you everything of a.
Speaker 2: Day would come that something like pro tools would come along,
Speaker 2: like that would make your life easier.
Speaker 3: Well, I got into the idea of having a studio
Speaker 3: of my own on Wizard or True Star because I thought,
Speaker 3: if you're going to go musical exploring, you know, if
Speaker 3: you're going to go musical big game hunting or whatever. No,
Speaker 3: that's that's Paul Simon. If you're going to go musically exploring,
Speaker 3: you need to be able to do things sometimes that
Speaker 3: they won't allow you to do in a regular studio.
Speaker 3: I say, if we own it's a regular studio, let's say,
Speaker 3: but it don't turn that knob past there, you know.
Speaker 3: But if I have my own studio, well that's it's
Speaker 3: because they have to, you know, turn the studio over
Speaker 3: to somebody else when you're equipment. Yeah, it's like, you know,
Speaker 3: it's not just yours to do anything you want with.
Speaker 3: But when you have your own studio, that's exactly what
Speaker 3: it is. So we would put the knobs wherever we
Speaker 3: want it, you know. In other words, we wouldn't even
Speaker 3: look at the meters. We would just listen, you know,
Speaker 3: and turn a knob until it sounded right, you know.
Speaker 3: And sometimes you know, the meters are just pinned in
Speaker 3: the red. But that's how you get that sound. And
Speaker 3: ever since.
Speaker 4: National Feel off that album, it sounds like I love
Speaker 4: that song man.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah. A lot of it is you know, just us,
Speaker 3: you know, not not being not being like you would
Speaker 3: be in a normal studio, like in a normal studio.
Speaker 3: You would have somebody make sure that the noise reduction
Speaker 3: was in the right the switches on the noise reduction
Speaker 3: we're in the right locations, depending on whether you were
Speaker 3: recording or playing back, and we would find ourselves doing
Speaker 3: things like putting noise reduction on something and then bouncing
Speaker 3: it to another track forgetting to put the noise reduction
Speaker 3: into the decode board of it. So essentially it would
Speaker 3: be like the most squishy limitter that you ever heard,
Speaker 3: and the highs would just be the highest highs because
Speaker 3: we were using DBX discolinear compression and I won't explain
Speaker 3: what that is now, but essentially accidents. You know, half
Speaker 3: of what happened on that record was accidents. I was wiring.
Speaker 3: I was on my back underneath the console wiring it
Speaker 3: while the musicians are coming in for the first session,
Speaker 3: you know, and we're just finding channels that work. You know,
Speaker 3: mark that one. I'll fix that later. But we just
Speaker 3: we get enough channels to record everybody. Okay. It was
Speaker 3: like that all the time. It was just gorilla recording
Speaker 3: because you know, we had no studio manager. Nobody ever
Speaker 3: paid anything to use the studio. It was just we
Speaker 3: would contribute to each other's projects and stuff. It was
Speaker 3: a little musical collective. It was great.
Speaker 4: And your your label, your label like Bearsville, How were
Speaker 4: they were they supported because, I mean, cause a lot
Speaker 4: of stuff you were doing, I mean it was really unorthodox.
Speaker 4: And you know, a song like I Saw the Light
Speaker 4: or you know, Cold Morning, like you know just, which
Speaker 4: is some of my favorite songs by you, but like
Speaker 4: those are kind of just, you know, kind of easier
Speaker 4: to digest. But then on a Wizard of a True
Speaker 4: Star you went really kind of heavy.
Speaker 2: But have you ever got John Lennon's reaction to rock
Speaker 2: and roll pussy and.
Speaker 3: No, not that particular thing. Uh, And that was about
Speaker 3: It wasn't particularly about I don't think it was about
Speaker 3: John Lennon, although I can't remember exactly when that press
Speaker 3: manufactured feud was, but yeah, they uh uh, some people
Speaker 3: at the label really freaked out. My friend Paul Fishkin,
Speaker 3: who later went on to found Modern Records, he was
Speaker 3: running the label at the time, and after something anything
Speaker 3: that had like three hit singles on it, I give
Speaker 3: him always a True Star, which doesn't which doesn't even
Speaker 3: have spaces between the songs.
Speaker 4: You know, you know, when that record though I love
Speaker 4: this shit man, Oh no.
Speaker 3: But then you know he is freaking out. You know,
Speaker 3: he's saying, how do I how do I sell this?
Speaker 3: You know, this is the lost album. Now. Meanwhile, Albert
Speaker 3: Grossman is just tickled pink about the whole thing. You know,
Speaker 3: he says, Oh, yet, let's drop the bomb on this one.
Speaker 3: We're gonna we're gonna make this a double gatefold die
Speaker 3: cut album cover. You know, we're gonna do records in
Speaker 3: colored vine Well, we did limited run a colored vinyl
Speaker 3: is something anything, but we're going to do some colored
Speaker 3: vinyl in there. We're going to get Patty Smith to
Speaker 3: do a you know, a little poem on a piece
Speaker 3: of paper and shove it in there. And a postcard
Speaker 3: so we can solicit addresses from people and put their
Speaker 3: names in the next package. These were all his ideas.
Speaker 3: You know, I never had the guts to say, give
Speaker 3: me a double you know, give me a gatefold die
Speaker 3: cut record, you know, to hold only one record. You know,
Speaker 3: it wasn't a double album, but that record also was
Speaker 3: the epitome of that problem with too much program on
Speaker 3: your vinyl. And I think it's either on that record
Speaker 3: or another record. I put something on it, and the
Speaker 3: company let it pass. But it was really sort of
Speaker 3: in violation of general policy. I said, this record, you know,
Speaker 3: there's a lot of music on here. I advised that
Speaker 3: the very first time you play you record it to
Speaker 3: tape and then listen to it from tape after that,
Speaker 3: because you'll be lucky if you get through once on
Speaker 3: the on the turntable.
Speaker 2: So with your your album afterwards, just based on the
Speaker 2: lyrical content and whatnot. What was I mean by this
Speaker 2: point you were an established you know, and an established start. Like,
Speaker 2: how how was it handling the success that you were gaining?
Speaker 2: Because I guess, you know, you said at the top
Speaker 2: of the show that you really didn't have any expectations
Speaker 2: to become, like, you know, a big star or those things,
Speaker 2: and now you're dealing with it, Like what was it
Speaker 2: like to deal with it and too do these songs
Speaker 2: in concert? And well, even with that, like you're such
Speaker 2: a studio wizard, how were you able to kind of
Speaker 2: execute these ideas on stage by this point?
Speaker 3: Well, I had to learn how to sing in front
Speaker 3: of an audience. I didn't. I was never a singer.
Speaker 3: I always delegated the singing to somebody else. The first
Speaker 3: time that I went out on the road was probably
Speaker 3: after after Run, after we Got to Get You a Woman,
Speaker 3: and I put a band together mostly of musicians called
Speaker 3: the Hello People, who were a group of rock and
Speaker 3: roll mimes. And I couldn't make it twenty minutes into
Speaker 3: a set, and in those days a set was like
Speaker 3: thirty minutes. You know, I couldn't make it. I couldn't
Speaker 3: sing for you know, more than fifteen twenty minutes at
Speaker 3: a time. And it took me literally years to develop
Speaker 3: my voice to the point that I could sing a
Speaker 3: whole show. The irony being now that I can sing
Speaker 3: all night, it doesn't seem to affect me.
Speaker 5: Were there any of your peers that you look to
Speaker 5: to kind of did you do it in.
Speaker 6: A way like anybody else? Any other artists that you
Speaker 6: looked at and like, okay, what peers?
Speaker 3: I mean the ones that are still alive. No, at the.
Speaker 6: Time when you how to do it his live thing?
Speaker 6: What fifteen minutes? That's what I meant, Like.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, well, you know, it's not an uncommon thing.
Speaker 3: And what happens is most people see I always had,
Speaker 3: I guess I would write aspirationally, I would write to
Speaker 3: the very ends of my range when I was in
Speaker 3: the studio, because all I have to do is like
Speaker 3: hit the note once and then we'll punch it to that,
Speaker 3: you know, just punch in every freaking note, you know.
Speaker 3: But then you have to go out on the road
Speaker 3: and sing all those notes in a row. And you know,
Speaker 3: I was just wasn't prepared for that. But what a
Speaker 3: lot of people will do, They'll just simply they'll compensate,
Speaker 3: you know, they'll say, Okay, I'll just lower the key,
Speaker 3: or I won't write into that range. You know, I'll
Speaker 3: I won't, I won't strange. I won't strain myself that way. Yeah,
Speaker 3: But I was still always aspirational. I just you know,
Speaker 3: there were singers that I admired that I wanted to
Speaker 3: sound like, and so I just kept trying to do that.
Speaker 3: You know, I was a giant Stevie Wonder fan. You know,
Speaker 3: I was always trying to sing like Stevie Wonder, which
Speaker 3: is an impossible thing to try and attempt in the
Speaker 3: first place. But I got just so much inspiration from
Speaker 3: his singing. And more importantly, you know, it was a
Speaker 3: weird artifact of the way they recorded at Motown and
Speaker 3: particularly the way that he is. His voice got recorded,
Speaker 3: they put so much compression on his voice because probably
Speaker 3: because he's so loud, you know that you could hear
Speaker 3: every breath he took. You could hear every breath he
Speaker 3: was taking in between the notes. And it taught me
Speaker 3: how to breathe when you sing. It's more about having
Speaker 3: wind than it is about, you know, your throat and
Speaker 3: trying to stretch it hard enough to get to those
Speaker 3: high notes, you know. So I just I learned a
Speaker 3: lot from listening to other people' sing. But that was,
Speaker 3: you know, a revelatory moment when I suddenly realized I
Speaker 3: should just go and go in my car, drive around
Speaker 3: for hours, screaming my head off, just drive around screaming
Speaker 3: your head off. And after enough of that, I started
Speaker 3: to gain the stamina, you know, to be able to
Speaker 3: actually hit those notes.
Speaker 1: Is it possible for you to listen.
Speaker 2: To music by other artists and not get in sort
Speaker 2: of the analytical mode of I wonder what mike they used,
Speaker 2: or what tubing or what the engineering was, and there's
Speaker 2: too much compression, and I would have changed this, And like,
Speaker 2: can you just are you able to listen to music
Speaker 2: without dissecting it as you hear it as an engineer
Speaker 2: or as a producer.
Speaker 3: Well, like all things, you know, it really depends on
Speaker 3: the strength of the performance and the music. And this
Speaker 3: is in line with my philosophy as a producer. The
Speaker 3: audience at large doesn't give a damn about so called
Speaker 3: sound quality. They think when they hear it the first time,
Speaker 3: they think that's how it's supposed to sound. They never think, oh,
Speaker 3: was too much reverb on this, or you know, that's
Speaker 3: you know, I can't hear this quite. They may have
Speaker 3: some they may have some subjective opinion about it overall,
Speaker 3: but they don't know enough about the process to be
Speaker 3: able to pinpoint what it is. So for the most part,
Speaker 3: if it's a great song, and if it's you know,
Speaker 3: a vivacious performance, you know, if it's a great performance
Speaker 3: of that song, people don't care at all what it
Speaker 3: sounds like, you know, which is why I could just
Speaker 3: can never get into these high fidelity arguments, you know,
Speaker 3: with Neil Young or whoever. You know that you need,
Speaker 3: you know, two hundred and fifty six thousand bits of second,
Speaker 3: you know, properly hear the sounds. Yeah, use it much,
Speaker 3: you know, there weren't. I don't know. The most hysterical,
Speaker 3: most hysterical part about it is that it's coming from
Speaker 3: Neil Young, you know, who did an album of him
Speaker 3: standing in front of a stack of marshals making feedback.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: So he's talking about, you know, the finer points, the
Speaker 3: audio fidelity. But you know, I've always always maintained that
Speaker 3: that is better to you know, if an act comes in,
Speaker 3: which is one of the reasons why I learned engineering,
Speaker 3: because you don't want to waste a lot of time
Speaker 3: on that. If an act is ready to make the music.
Speaker 3: That's my you know, my number one priority before I
Speaker 3: go into the studio with someone, I want to hear
Speaker 3: the material. I want to know that we're not in
Speaker 3: there like pulling our PUDs, you know, over something, or
Speaker 3: that we suddenly got to call a halt to the
Speaker 3: session because we have to write a bridge, you know.
Speaker 3: So I always want to hear the material before we
Speaker 3: go into the studio to have the confidence that we're
Speaker 3: going to be making music in there and not talking
Speaker 3: about non musical issues. That's the most important thing. Second
Speaker 3: most important thing is, you know, is to get the
Speaker 3: artist in a mood to deliver that song you know
Speaker 3: to actually, you know, which is another reason why I
Speaker 3: like them to have written and ideally have performed the
Speaker 3: material before you get into the studio to record it.
Speaker 3: It makes such a difference because if somebody's reading the
Speaker 3: lyrics off of a piece of paper while they're doing it,
Speaker 3: they're not really thinking about what it means. They're just
Speaker 3: trying to get the words right, you know. And what
Speaker 3: you really want to do is convey the meaning of
Speaker 3: the words with your singing. So number one, yeah, getting
Speaker 3: good singing and good songs that really inspire the performers
Speaker 3: get the performers to be inspired. Nobody really cares that
Speaker 3: much about the sound of it unless you've made it
Speaker 3: incredibly terrible.
Speaker 4: I had a question about about can we Still be friends?
Speaker 1: A lyric? Your lyric?
Speaker 4: I don't know if it was a lyrical as an
Speaker 4: ad lib. Can we still get together? Sometimes? That's like
Speaker 4: one of my favorite part in songing heard like can.
Speaker 1: We are we gounk?
Speaker 3: And this? Can we do it?
Speaker 1: Can we do it? Is it just can we hook
Speaker 1: up and we get some coffee? Some shit? I how
Speaker 1: did you mean that?
Speaker 3: Well? You know, it's it's kind of an open question, Uh, Okay,
Speaker 3: you know, it's just you know, the whole whole tenor
Speaker 3: of the song is you know, a lot of people
Speaker 3: assume it's it's a romantic song. But I made a
Speaker 3: decision at a certain point that most people when they
Speaker 3: use the word love in a song context, they're more
Speaker 3: often talking about either sex or ownership. And I at
Speaker 3: a certain point decided I wasn't going to use the
Speaker 3: word at all. So for many albums, the word love
Speaker 3: does not appear.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: Then I decided that it's okay to use the word love,
Speaker 3: but try and do it in a way that isn't
Speaker 3: doesn't make things so specific that people always think it's romantic,
Speaker 3: that everything is always about a boy and a girl.
Speaker 3: And that's the same way about like can we still
Speaker 3: be friends? It's assumed that it's a guy in a
Speaker 3: girl breaking up, or a guy and a guy or
Speaker 3: girl girl whatever.
Speaker 1: But.
Speaker 3: It isn't necessarily about that. It's like, let's say you
Speaker 3: and a friend of yours worked really hard, you know,
Speaker 3: to build a company up, and then you realize you
Speaker 3: got to leave the company. You know, I can't do
Speaker 3: this anymore. I got to move on to something else.
Speaker 3: That's you know, it could be that, you know, right right.
Speaker 2: No, Yeah, I always uh saw from the standpoint of
Speaker 2: maybe you know, a plea for kind of like a
Speaker 2: post amicable divorce situation or you know, kind of after
Speaker 2: the fire has burnt out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it is a very it is. Yeah, can
Speaker 3: we be civil? It's more like that, you know, it's
Speaker 3: like more like the overriding messages, you know, can can
Speaker 3: we go on? Because there are because there are situations
Speaker 3: that are exactly not the opposite, you know. It's like
Speaker 3: there are people that you know you never want to
Speaker 3: encounter again ever, you know. So, and I have the
Speaker 3: I don't know that I've written that song, but I
Speaker 3: do have, you know, a philosophical thing about it, you know,
Speaker 3: which is, you know, certain people. It's if you'll excuse
Speaker 3: the expression, I call it the tar baby syndrome. If
Speaker 3: you recall from the Song of the South. Yeah, Thorimus saying,
Speaker 3: you know, it's all about Breer Rabbit and brer Fox
Speaker 3: and beer Bear, and these are you know, antagonists. They're
Speaker 3: always at each other, you know, messing with each other
Speaker 3: all the time. And so Bret Rabbit finds this big
Speaker 3: ball a tar and he says, I'm going to play
Speaker 3: a trick on bear Fox and bereer Bear, you know,
Speaker 3: because I know that they were going to they mess
Speaker 3: with strangers and stuff. So dresses it up and close
Speaker 3: and sticks it on a log, and sure enough brea
Speaker 3: Fox and bereer Bear come around start messing with it.
Speaker 3: And what happens is that, you know, all has to
Speaker 3: happen is you stick a finger in there and suddenly
Speaker 3: you got it on you and you can't get it off.
Speaker 3: And then it's suddenly and the next thing you know,
Speaker 3: they're trying to get it off and they're just getting
Speaker 3: more and more of it more on them. And to
Speaker 3: you know, the lesson to me was, you know, there
Speaker 3: are certain situations and certain people you should know beforehand.
Speaker 3: Don't even touch it, you know, don't put a finger
Speaker 3: on it, you know, because you will be paying for
Speaker 3: it for a long time after that. And so there
Speaker 3: have been people in my life which you know, they
Speaker 3: fall under that category. I say, don't even you know,
Speaker 3: you can imagine, oh, everything is gonna be fine, it
Speaker 3: won't be like it was before, and then the next
Speaker 3: thing you know, it's exactly like it was before because
Speaker 3: you changed what they didn't.
Speaker 6: They didn't Oh my goodness, Yes, that is universal.
Speaker 1: That's a word. That's a word, or at least today.
Speaker 2: When when the cover album is made, usually it's a
Speaker 2: period where like maybe people will run out of ideas
Speaker 2: and you run all the way up until uh to Faithful.
Speaker 2: And not to say that you weren't still pushing the
Speaker 2: boundaries because we didn't even get started on the Acapella
Speaker 2: record yet.
Speaker 1: But with Faithful, what was the idea.
Speaker 2: Behind covering those to do those covers, because I mean
Speaker 2: the idea of doing a cover album or conceptual cover
Speaker 2: half album wasn't even practically a thing yet. I mean,
Speaker 2: I know that in the sixties to make records, people would,
Speaker 2: you know, cover whatever, like a Beatles song or that
Speaker 2: sort of thing. But what was your whole ideology behind
Speaker 2: making that record?
Speaker 3: It was actually to demonstrate how much radio had changed
Speaker 3: in ten years of Faithful came out in nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 3: and every song, pretty much every song that I did
Speaker 3: on the cover side of Faithful was on the radio
Speaker 3: in nineteen sixty six, okay, And what I wanted to
Speaker 3: try and do is recreate what it was like to
Speaker 3: listen to radio then where you would go from like
Speaker 3: the Beatles to Bob Dylan to you know, I didn't
Speaker 3: even cover the range of what was happening. But growing
Speaker 3: up in Philadelphia, you know, the DJ's highlight, and there
Speaker 3: was another DJ. I can't remember who he was, but
Speaker 3: I mean, the sixties liberated them and they would play
Speaker 3: you know, Judy Collins, and then they'd play the Beatles,
Speaker 3: and then they played Bill Evans or some other jazz.
Speaker 3: And the radio was just really interesting in those days
Speaker 3: and enabled you to discover a lot more music than
Speaker 3: the kind of formatted radio that eventually happened, Like by
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy six, everything is syndicated radio. Everything's everybody's playing
Speaker 3: the same playlist. So I just wanted to demonstrate, you
Speaker 3: know what, how eclectic music could be on the radio.
Speaker 3: The other side was just a handful of songs. But
Speaker 3: it's funny, a lot of those songs on the original
Speaker 3: side turned out to be standards that I do all
Speaker 3: the time, even to this day.
Speaker 2: So my personal favorite album of your canon is The Hermit,
Speaker 2: A Big Hollow, of which I well, I know that
Speaker 2: you literally did everything by yourself with correct how nerve
Speaker 2: wracking is that process when you are your own engineer
Speaker 2: and your own like, did you have a remote device
Speaker 2: for the tape or did you like did you?
Speaker 3: Well, the thing is, how did you I did not, unfortunately,
Speaker 3: did not have a remote device or the tape. And
Speaker 3: my studio. I was using my my personal studio, which
Speaker 3: was up in Lake Hill, a little bit past Bearsville.
Speaker 3: I had a house, and then I had there was
Speaker 3: a little barn on the property, and the barn had
Speaker 3: a loft in it, and so I enclosed the loft
Speaker 3: and made that the control room. But that meant that,
Speaker 3: you know, every all the instruments of any size, drums
Speaker 3: and such, would have to be downstairs. And so the
Speaker 3: most nerve wracking part, of course is recording the drums,
Speaker 3: because I would get, you know, like into it a
Speaker 3: little ways and then screw up and I have to
Speaker 3: run up the stairs. I was always very stingy with tape.
Speaker 3: You know, you were record over No, no, no, I would.
Speaker 3: I would just you know, if I would mess up
Speaker 3: a take, I would just go back. And a lot
Speaker 3: of people they would buy many reels of tape and
Speaker 3: they would go through make many takes of everything and
Speaker 3: then eventually maybe make a master reel or something. But
Speaker 3: I was always making a master reel. I was always
Speaker 3: like going for the one take, then I would put
Speaker 3: a paper leader in and start recording the rest of
Speaker 3: the reel, you know. And so I was just very
Speaker 3: stingy with tape and don't really never really made a
Speaker 3: lot of outtakes. I mean, well, I either got the
Speaker 3: drums right or I didn't. You know, It's like it
Speaker 3: wasn't the kind of thing eventually, you know, if I
Speaker 3: got three quarters of the way through a take, then
Speaker 3: I would might stop and pick it up from there
Speaker 3: and then do a splice and the tape. But I
Speaker 3: always felt that I had to get as lead ast
Speaker 3: halfway through it before I would consider a splice. Otherwise,
Speaker 3: you know, I would just stop rown stairs, rewind the tape,
Speaker 3: start put it in and record again, run downstairs and
Speaker 3: count it in, start playing again.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: It's one of those things like I learned during something anything,
Speaker 3: the first time I played the drums, the drums have
Speaker 3: to be first, you know. I started out thinking I
Speaker 3: could play the piano part and that would give me
Speaker 3: some guidance about where I was in the song. But
Speaker 3: I could never lock into the piano because the piano
Speaker 3: wasn't actually you know, in any particular strict tempo. So
Speaker 3: I had to teach myself the song in my head
Speaker 3: and sing it in my head, the whole song while
Speaker 3: I'm playing the drums and click tracks. And because I
Speaker 3: couldn't play that, I couldn't play the click track either.
Speaker 3: You know, I couldn't lock to a click track. It
Speaker 3: would just you know, it would be so obvious when
Speaker 3: I was trying to catch up to it, you know.
Speaker 3: But it also gives it more of a sort of natural,
Speaker 3: natural feel. You know, it's amazing. You know, a drummer
Speaker 3: can sound like he's totally locked in time, but then
Speaker 3: you put a click track, and then you find out
Speaker 3: that it's kind of all over the place. You know,
Speaker 3: it's feel you don't notice so much, you know, the
Speaker 3: exact timing of of what the drums is doing. It's
Speaker 3: more about the field. It's a little push and pull
Speaker 3: happening all the time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I you know, I use a click track, but
Speaker 2: oftentimes I have to force myself to figure out how
Speaker 2: to purposely sound like I'm not playing to a click trek.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So you know, even though I consistently hear that pulse
Speaker 2: in my head, I have to now program myself to
Speaker 2: go behind it, go a little bit ahead of it,
Speaker 2: go behind it, go look, you know, just so that
Speaker 2: there's there's a human flow. Yeah, yeah, there's a flow
Speaker 2: to it. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I discovered that when I try to make a temple
Speaker 3: map to go Diving girl. Really, yeah, I discover when
Speaker 3: I you know, when you actually try and you know,
Speaker 3: the tempo map essentially is you change the actual speed
Speaker 3: of the recording as it goes along to match up
Speaker 3: to some something that may not be an e you
Speaker 3: know that might not be following a click track, even
Speaker 3: though the song is mostly all the same tempo. It
Speaker 3: it moves in and out and subtle little ways which
Speaker 3: you don't discover until you try and lock to.
Speaker 2: It, right right, So okay, not knowing the history of
Speaker 2: it because you know, well there's no excuse to say
Speaker 2: I was eleven when it came out, but I purchased
Speaker 2: this record, you know, in the last ten to fifteen years.
Speaker 2: But assuming that the popular tortured ever popular tortured artist effect,
Speaker 2: can I assume that your relationship with the label sort
Speaker 2: of went sour by that point because usually with the
Speaker 2: album titles like that, those things happened. But what also
Speaker 2: happens is. I would assume that that is your mind
Speaker 2: whatever project, and then you mess around and actually have
Speaker 2: because I know, being on the drum is uh being
Speaker 2: the drum all day is on that record.
Speaker 1: And so since that's your last record, am I am?
Speaker 2: I correct in saying that the relationship soured with Bearsville.
Speaker 3: By that point, things were not great with with Bearsville Records.
Speaker 1: It just.
Speaker 3: Albert Grossman was a peculiar personality and tended to go
Speaker 3: hot and cold in some things. And even though he
Speaker 3: had a label called Bearsville, he never really promoted anything
Speaker 3: on it. He expected Warner Brothers, a distributor, to do everything,
Speaker 3: so he would be constantly making deals for foreign distribution
Speaker 3: and then take all the money and instead of promoting
Speaker 3: the records or anything he would build. He would build
Speaker 3: a rest or something with it, you know. So he
Speaker 3: was very much into land ownership. So almost anything that
Speaker 3: you know that brought an income, he would buy something
Speaker 3: and build something on it. I felt that, you know,
Speaker 3: they first of all, weren't taking the whole idea of
Speaker 3: records seriously, but also certainly not my records. It's not
Speaker 3: as if I thought that, you know, there were a
Speaker 3: whole bunch of great hits on my records. You know,
Speaker 3: I've never never striven to do that, so I don't
Speaker 3: force the label, you know, to say to give me
Speaker 3: hits or anything like that. But at the same time,
Speaker 3: I did expect that they would take the record seriously
Speaker 3: because I did have an audience. And in the end,
Speaker 3: you know, it was not as if I was doing
Speaker 3: a spoof of a record. It was just that I
Speaker 3: didn't bother to develop any concept behind it. You know,
Speaker 3: most of the records that I do have got to
Speaker 3: some overarching thing that helps me figure out what fits
Speaker 3: in the overall picture.
Speaker 2: But history will show that artists that you know, and
Speaker 2: this is the case with Shout by the Aisley Brothers,
Speaker 2: is the case with Tequila, is the case for even
Speaker 2: La Bamba, Like sometimes artists will Well, what I'm trying
Speaker 2: to lead to is that were you shacked at all?
Speaker 1: At how it became the sports world took to the
Speaker 1: Benga the trum all day.
Speaker 3: And it was a funny, weird kind of thing that
Speaker 3: happened with that. I think it started with the sports,
Speaker 3: but I'm not exactly sure, and I believe it was
Speaker 3: first like hockey games that they started playing it. Then
Speaker 3: two football teams, the Packers and what was then the
Speaker 3: Saint Louis Rams, started using it as their score celebration
Speaker 3: song because everybody seemed to know it for some reason.
Speaker 3: But it was never a hit single. In fact, it
Speaker 3: was never released as a single. It was a B
Speaker 3: side I Think of Something, and it was never in
Speaker 3: a technical sense written by me. It was a song
Speaker 3: that I dreamed. I was like asleep, I was totally asleep,
Speaker 3: and this song is, you know, playing in my sleep.
Speaker 3: I have no idea what it means or why I
Speaker 3: should care, but I just immediately went down to the
Speaker 3: studio and recorded everything that I remembered from it and
Speaker 3: added words. But you know, the bang, the drump thing
Speaker 3: was all there. It was all complete, you know. You know,
Speaker 3: all I had to do was write it down. Sometimes
Speaker 3: it's not the first time that's happened. I've had other
Speaker 3: songs that have just come to me when I'm asleep,
Speaker 3: completely formed, and then I have to go figure out
Speaker 3: how to remember and capture that. But it was like
Speaker 3: some mystical being wrote that for me and said, you're
Speaker 3: not going to understand now why you're doing this, but
Speaker 3: years and years from now, it's going to make a
Speaker 3: whole lot more sense, right, And then and then it
Speaker 3: actually happened. I mean, people started, aside from you know,
Speaker 3: the public usage of the song, they started people started thinking, oh,
Speaker 3: this is a great party theme to use for our
Speaker 3: movie trailer or party theme to use for our you know,
Speaker 3: advertising something. And they eventually peaked with carnival cruise lines.
Speaker 3: I'm getting six figures, big six figures a year just
Speaker 3: for them to use that song, right, and I would
Speaker 3: still be getting it except they started sinking all those
Speaker 3: boats decided to change their edge.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I was going to say that that song is the
Speaker 2: sound of a kid, a kid's brain and he gets
Speaker 2: extra chicken fingers on his.
Speaker 3: Plate, extra chicken fingers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the sound of a ten year old just
Speaker 2: in this happy place.
Speaker 4: You made a record called Arena and it has the
Speaker 4: song on it called Courage that I just really love.
Speaker 4: I just think it just beautiful changes, just a just
Speaker 4: a really great song. I was curious to know was
Speaker 4: Arena Was that you kind of mocking the arena rock
Speaker 4: kind of thing. Was it like a parody or was
Speaker 4: it a sincere tent? Because I just I mean, I
Speaker 4: love the record, but I know, just from listening to
Speaker 4: your music, kind of your sense of humor stuff.
Speaker 1: So I was like, is this him kind.
Speaker 3: Of No, it was, you know, I was pretty serious
Speaker 3: about it. It was the record was essentially me reacting
Speaker 3: to the fact that I had not played enough guitar
Speaker 3: the last time, you know, the first time I had
Speaker 3: that's to reaction was when I was sometime around something anything,
Speaker 3: and I'm starting to write all my songs on the piano,
Speaker 3: less and less on the guitar, and I'm playing less
Speaker 3: and less guitar, and so I said, well, how can
Speaker 3: I compensate for this? So I started Utopia specifically as
Speaker 3: a project for me to play guitar. So I don't
Speaker 3: play any keyboards and any Utopia records, I play only
Speaker 3: guitar on Utopia records. Essentially, around the period of Arena,
Speaker 3: I started to get the same feeling. You know, I
Speaker 3: spent a lot of my youth trying to learn how
Speaker 3: to play this thing, you know, and now I'm just
Speaker 3: kind of I hardly pick it up anymore. So I
Speaker 3: decided to decided to do something that would basically be
Speaker 3: all guitar written, you know, everything would be written on
Speaker 3: guitars and it would be basically mostly guitars, occasional keyboards
Speaker 3: and other sounds, and to really explore, you know, what
Speaker 3: contemporary heavy guitar music could be like. And when we
Speaker 3: found a distributor for it, they said, okay, well you're
Speaker 3: so into playing the guitar, We just acquired the Robert
Speaker 3: Johnson's publishing catalog and we want you to do a
Speaker 3: cover record of Robert Johnson's song. So I got like
Speaker 3: a double dose of guitar there. I did a record
Speaker 3: called Todd Rungrens, Johnson and Uh and did nothing but
Speaker 3: Robert Johnson songs on it in the sort of sixties
Speaker 3: white English band style, you know, where you wouldn't recognize
Speaker 3: it as a Robert Johnson song, you know, because it's
Speaker 3: really just there to play guitar solos on.
Speaker 7: That's that's when he first came on the show, played
Speaker 7: with the roots for that to promote that record, Johnson
Speaker 7: the Johnson.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like literally I got to ask about a cappella
Speaker 2: because that's your thing, is your I mean, there's a
Speaker 2: bunch of creative zenas, but of of a career of
Speaker 2: creative zeneans, you leave the label, you make this album
Speaker 2: in eighty five, and you're basically using the tools that
Speaker 2: rappers will use.
Speaker 1: I mean, were you one of the first people to
Speaker 1: use an.
Speaker 3: EMU emulator Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, later and an EMU uh synthesizer and all
Speaker 1: these things.
Speaker 2: First of all, going into the eighties, what was your
Speaker 2: thought process. Did you feel as though, like, Wow, the
Speaker 2: world's my oyster now or were you worried.
Speaker 3: Or things were still pretty good for me? Utopia was
Speaker 3: still by nineteen eighty we were still playing you know, arenas,
Speaker 3: and mostly on the strength of our shows and word
Speaker 3: of mouth, not on kind of like huge record sales.
Speaker 3: But we would do spectacular things, you know, flamethrowers and
Speaker 3: falling off the pyramids and that sort of thing. So
Speaker 3: so Utopia was still pretty successful and I was doing okay,
Speaker 3: and there were still productions to be done. So you know,
Speaker 3: it wasn't like what happened at the end of the
Speaker 3: nineties and what has happened ever since in that first
Speaker 3: of all the majors have you know, kind of fallen apart.
Speaker 3: So the kind of funding structure for records changed a
Speaker 3: lot because I was making my living principally on advances
Speaker 3: for producing other people's records and so that as yeah,
Speaker 3: that all started to like fall apart throughout the nineties
Speaker 3: and then in the two thousands, you know, everything got different.
Speaker 3: You know, everything got bifurcated. You either produce your own
Speaker 3: records in your bedroom, or you have five producers on
Speaker 3: one song, like Katy Berry or something like that. You know,
Speaker 3: six songwriters and four producers, you know, because you want
Speaker 3: it to be perfect, I guess. But so you know,
Speaker 3: nowadays I do hardly any production at all. There's no
Speaker 3: demand for it. But yeah, the uh, the guitar, I
Speaker 3: miss it. So but anyway, back to back to acappella.
Speaker 3: I had these I had these concepts that I carry
Speaker 3: around sometimes, you know, every once in a while to
Speaker 3: get to one and follow up on it. And the
Speaker 3: idea of doing an a cappella record or a record
Speaker 3: where all the sound sources were from the voice or
Speaker 3: the body. What's a concept that I had had for
Speaker 3: a while. It has certainly has its challenges, but there was,
Speaker 3: as you mentioned, some new tools like samplers and things,
Speaker 3: so I could do that beatbox stuff that eventually became
Speaker 3: so popular, you know, in other words, overblowing a microphone,
Speaker 3: you know, to make a snare, drum or a bass
Speaker 3: drum or something like that. I would do the noise
Speaker 3: into a sampler and then have there was no MIDI
Speaker 3: yet tying everything together, so I'd have to sort of
Speaker 3: like manually play the drum part, you know, on the
Speaker 3: keys all the way through the song. And that's why
Speaker 3: the time is kind of like a little funny in
Speaker 3: some places, because I'm really just playing the keyboard. There's
Speaker 3: no sequence or anything, right. And then you know that
Speaker 3: with that sampling capability, I could do, you know, things like,
Speaker 3: you know, make an instrument out of my voice and
Speaker 3: play chords with it, something that you couldn't do before.
Speaker 3: Uh So the technology was an enabler. The technology evolved
Speaker 3: to the point that I could do more than just
Speaker 3: simply singing with myself. I could create a broader palalette
Speaker 3: of sounds and make the whole thing more interesting.
Speaker 1: Man, we got to talk about that.
Speaker 4: Out of Hell meant I totally forgot about that, right,
Speaker 4: one of the biggest selling albums, Like, ever, how did
Speaker 4: you meet?
Speaker 1: How did y'all hook up?
Speaker 3: Well, there there are two people involved in meat Loaf,
Speaker 3: or there were two people involved in that was Jim Steinman,
Speaker 3: who essentially wrote all the material and meet Loaf, who
Speaker 3: was the performer. And when they approached me, they had
Speaker 3: auditioned for like every producer in the business, and every
Speaker 3: producer in the business. I told them I don't hear
Speaker 3: it or whatever, which is you know, not that strange
Speaker 3: because the songs were all really long. You know, they
Speaker 3: didn't have traditional forms. You know, Steime intended to write
Speaker 3: backwards sometimes from certain things, like he would leave big
Speaker 3: parts of the songs unfinished, but say to me, okay,
Speaker 3: I would like a giant choir to sing for the
Speaker 3: next thirty six bars, and then I'd have to come
Speaker 3: up with something for it. You know, he wouldn't write anything.
Speaker 3: I just have to come up with some thing that
Speaker 3: played off the themes that he had already done. So
Speaker 3: I go down to a rehearsal studio in New York
Speaker 3: City to see them. I knew who Meatloaf was, I
Speaker 3: didn't know who Steiman was. I'd seen Meatloaf Rocky horror
Speaker 3: Show on Broadway, so I was aware of the fact that, well,
Speaker 3: I wasn't going to be surprised about how fat he was.
Speaker 3: Put it that way, and they essentially performed for me
Speaker 3: meat Loaf, Stimon on the piano and two background singers,
Speaker 3: Rory Dodd and Ellen Foley, and they performed essentially all
Speaker 3: about Out of Hell with just the four of.
Speaker 1: Them the entire album in front of you.
Speaker 3: Well, not everything on the album, but you know, like
Speaker 3: good percentage of the album.
Speaker 1: You know. He's like a moment with Kanye West.
Speaker 10: And.
Speaker 3: I'm listening to this and saying, I want to do
Speaker 3: this record, and the reason why I want to do
Speaker 3: it is because it's a spoof of Bruce Springsteen. Bruce
Speaker 3: Springsteen was like the biggest thing. He was on the
Speaker 3: cover of Time magazine, the Savior of rock and roll,
Speaker 3: you know, And to me, it's just retro music. He's
Speaker 3: you know, it's music out of the fifties. He's singing
Speaker 3: about motorcycles and leather jackets and that's what it junk,
Speaker 3: you know, And that's exactly what Meatloaf is singing about,
Speaker 3: you know. So I thought, this is great. I'm going
Speaker 3: to do a spoof of Bruce Springsteen and this is
Speaker 3: going to be it. And I never told them that
Speaker 3: that's what I was thinking. So they took it. They
Speaker 3: took it totally seriously the whole time, you know, And
Speaker 3: and I was like, yes, yes, this is so Springsteen.
Speaker 1: Old.
Speaker 7: I got to stop right here. So there's actually members
Speaker 7: of the EA Street Band on that record.
Speaker 1: So were they.
Speaker 3: Yes, there are you know were they were.
Speaker 1: They in on the joker? You just called them up.
Speaker 3: Like, no, they were not in on the joke. And
Speaker 3: Stein in the whole time would claim that Bruce Springsteen
Speaker 3: had no influence on him at all, even though he
Speaker 3: wanted he wanted Max and he wanted Roy from the
Speaker 3: East Street Band to play on the record, but otherwise,
Speaker 3: no influence whatever. And so you know that's why it
Speaker 3: has all of that. You know, it's got Springsteen's drummer in,
Speaker 3: Springsteen's piano player on it, so it sounds like Springsteen.
Speaker 3: And after the record was finished, well, the first thing
Speaker 3: that happened was when I agreed to do it, he
Speaker 3: had a label obviously, because I'm not gonna go into
Speaker 3: the studio with somebody who can't pay for the studio
Speaker 3: I we're about to go into. It's like the day
Speaker 3: before we're about to go in, we've been rehearsing up
Speaker 3: in Bearsville. So because we want to do the album live,
Speaker 3: and most everything on the album is live, not the vocals,
Speaker 3: but all of the playing and meet Love comes up
Speaker 3: to me and he says, I want to get off
Speaker 3: my label. I don't think they understand me and whatever.
Speaker 3: I said, Well, I'm not your manager. I can't tell
Speaker 3: you what to do. But you know that's going to
Speaker 3: that's kind of a sticky situation. We're going into the
Speaker 3: studio tomorrow. So essentially, I go to Bearsvielle and say, well,
Speaker 3: you know, if you will underwrite the cost of making
Speaker 3: this record and put it on my tab, you'll have
Speaker 3: write a first refusal when it's done. So we finished
Speaker 3: the record and Bearsville doesn't want it, and neither does
Speaker 3: Warner Brothers, who's distributing Bearsville, and they spend the next
Speaker 3: maybe four to six months looking for somebody to release
Speaker 3: the record. Nobody wants this freaking record, and they find
Speaker 3: a guy, a guy who runs like a label all
Speaker 3: by himself. It's called Cleveland International, subsidiary of like Epic Records.
Speaker 3: His name was Steve Popovich. He had one other artist
Speaker 3: for some reason he believed in the record, and so
Speaker 3: took the record on. They put out a single, Nothing Happened,
Speaker 3: put out another single, Nothing Happened, put out third single,
Speaker 3: and finally something started to happen, and that was because
Speaker 3: MTV came out the same time. Paradise by the Dashboard
Speaker 3: Light got played like once an hour because they didn't
Speaker 3: have enough music videos to fill up, you know, all
Speaker 3: the time on MTV, So they're playing Paradise by the
Speaker 3: Dashboard Light once an hour, just like a regular DJ
Speaker 3: would do, like put on Dark Side of the Moon
Speaker 3: and go up to the roof and get high. But
Speaker 3: you know, it's like seven and a half minutes long,
Speaker 3: and he's touring relentlessly. Meet Love was just touring his
Speaker 3: ass off, and the fact that Steve Popovich just believed
Speaker 3: so much in the record, you know, and wouldn't give
Speaker 3: up on it like a typical record executive, that it
Speaker 3: finally broke, and once it broke, it you know, went
Speaker 3: nuclear out of here, like a bad at of hand.
Speaker 1: What was it? What was it like to record Phil Rizzuto?
Speaker 3: I didn't you know, I didn't know much about Phil
Speaker 3: Rizzuto except for the Money Store, But you know, I
Speaker 3: was not a baseball fan at that point and had
Speaker 3: no idea of his career accomplishments.
Speaker 7: That he's the guy who's sitting on the unpires by
Speaker 7: the dashboard light, who's doing the baseball call?
Speaker 3: Well, he would essentially be the Yankees color commentator or
Speaker 3: something like that. You know, so people who were in
Speaker 3: the New York area and listen to, you know, Yankees
Speaker 3: games would be familiar with him.
Speaker 1: But I was not.
Speaker 3: But Steinman said, oh, hey, you know, we're going to
Speaker 3: get this guy to just read this thing, and we're
Speaker 3: gonna give him five thousand dollars. And I'm like, what
Speaker 3: can't anybody read it? Could when somebody else read it,
Speaker 3: you know, for like five hundred dollars whatever.
Speaker 7: So he was from New York, Like, how did Jim Stee.
Speaker 3: Was from New York? He had no idea what this
Speaker 3: was about. You know, he just read but he read it,
Speaker 3: read it into a microphone, and took his money and left.
Speaker 3: And I think years later he found out the context
Speaker 3: of it and was very upset from what I heard.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was gonna say, what happens when the cat
Speaker 2: was out the bag?
Speaker 1: And like, at what point did they realize, Oh, we've
Speaker 1: been had or what about I've gotten mad?
Speaker 2: Because it's also one of the it's the one of
Speaker 2: the it's the third biggest selling album of all time.
Speaker 3: So yeah, it's yeah, it's up to here, around forty
Speaker 3: million copies or something like that, and it's you know,
Speaker 3: what do they care? It worked right? If I hadn't
Speaker 3: thought that they would have no producer at all?
Speaker 1: How how long was it until they caught on that?
Speaker 3: Wait a minute, Well, I probably said it sometime, if
Speaker 3: you know, once somebody interviewed me about it, I probably
Speaker 3: mentioned it.
Speaker 1: You know, were you approached about producing that? Ada held too?
Speaker 3: I did produce bad out of hell?
Speaker 1: Oh shit, I didn't realize that.
Speaker 3: Yes we did. We made the whole recording, and then
Speaker 3: we went in to get his vocals down, and meet
Speaker 3: Love suddenly went and said, there's something wrong with my voice.
Speaker 3: I can't say. He'd been like singing too hard and
Speaker 3: taking too much cocaine or whatever or something like that
Speaker 3: and permanently screwed his voice up, which you know, lopped
Speaker 3: a couple of notes off the top of his registered
Speaker 3: and made them sound really weird. And the way that
Speaker 3: Steinman would write was, at least the way he wrote
Speaker 3: the first record was what's the highest note you can hit?
Speaker 3: Meat Love? Okay, all write everything from there down, you know,
Speaker 3: In other words, hit that note. You're going to hit
Speaker 3: it a long time. I bout it, you know, and
Speaker 3: so he wrote. When he got to the second album,
Speaker 3: he did the same thing. He assumed Meet Looaf could
Speaker 3: hit all those notes, and he wrote all those notes
Speaker 3: into it, and then we get in to get Meatloaf
Speaker 3: to sing it, and he can't hit those notes. And
Speaker 3: meet Loaf is like, so he's nearly suicidal at this
Speaker 3: point and said, I can't finish this record, you know,
Speaker 3: I don't care what you do with it. And so
Speaker 3: Steinman sang the record and it became Jim Steinman's album.
Speaker 3: It was called Bad for Good and it was it's
Speaker 3: got Jim Steinman with I don't know if you know
Speaker 3: who Corbin is, but he was a comic book illustrator,
Speaker 3: airbrush artist, you know. And he did the first cover,
Speaker 3: which was, you know, the demon flying out of Hell
Speaker 3: on a motorcycle. He also did the second cover, which
Speaker 3: was Jim Steinman's head on top of what looks like
Speaker 3: Arnold Schwarzenegger's body with the semi naked girl like hanging
Speaker 3: onto his legs.
Speaker 1: He's googling.
Speaker 3: The hell yeah yeah, And that album went exactly no place,
Speaker 3: even though it was even though it was all kind
Speaker 3: of like the same stuff, you know.
Speaker 4: Wow, But I was always curious to know how you
Speaker 4: and Dame Funk got together. Dang Funk is as buddy
Speaker 4: of mine, and uh he just always had nothing but
Speaker 4: great things to say about working with you.
Speaker 1: How did y'all hook up?
Speaker 3: I can't remember how I exactly found out that he
Speaker 3: was a fan. It was when I was doing my
Speaker 3: first collab, you know, and I thought, yeah, let's get
Speaker 3: some funkiness thing, and uh so I contacted him and
Speaker 3: we just kind of, you know, struck up a relationship.
Speaker 3: And uh whenever I'm in LA I try and get
Speaker 3: out to his DJ gigs and uh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, next one of my favorite joints. I love that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was you know, it was a fun song.
Speaker 3: He just you know, he sent me what essentially is
Speaker 3: the chord changes and stuff like that and built a
Speaker 3: song around it. It was easy. You know, a lot
Speaker 3: of these things can be really challenging, you know, to
Speaker 3: figure out, you know, what'll work for two artists who
Speaker 3: are just coming together cold. But it it was pretty easy.
Speaker 4: I was gonna say, was that with your collapsed? Was
Speaker 4: that kind of the same thing with you and Trent?
Speaker 1: Trent Resident. How did that?
Speaker 3: Well, I had actually done a remix for Trent a
Speaker 3: couple of years ago, so I had worked with Trent
Speaker 3: before that, and and so I thought, this is, you know,
Speaker 3: a big, great way to sort of balance things out,
Speaker 3: to get him to contribute to my record. And it's amazing.
Speaker 3: He you know, he and his partner Atticus Ross, they
Speaker 3: do a lot of film and TV work, and so
Speaker 3: he they'll just go into the studio and catalog a
Speaker 3: bunch of ideas. So he sent me like, you know,
Speaker 3: like twenty two like musical ideas, you know, to pick one,
Speaker 3: you know, and it was that was the biggest challenge,
Speaker 3: you know, which one could I focus on? You know?
Speaker 3: I actually was sort of for a while. I was
Speaker 3: working on two of them at once, and decided I
Speaker 3: should probably just focus on on the one that we finished.
Speaker 2: And not much as is said about your work also
Speaker 2: in like music video production, like what made you even
Speaker 2: want to get involved in like forms of media outside
Speaker 2: of recording music.
Speaker 3: Well, when I was living alone in New York City
Speaker 3: in the early seventies, one of my principal forms of
Speaker 3: one of my favorite shows that I watched TV because
Speaker 3: I didn't watch a lot of TV. I would, you know,
Speaker 3: make music or I would go out. But you know
Speaker 3: that's in the old days when there was still principally
Speaker 3: just three or four TV stations, and you know, a
Speaker 3: lot of it is just too vanilla, you know. So,
Speaker 3: But there was some couple of shows on public television.
Speaker 3: One of them was called Live from the and the
Speaker 3: Egg Factory, and another one was a VT Videotape Review,
Speaker 3: and there was a movement to use video in more
Speaker 3: artistic ways at the time. It was started by a
Speaker 3: guy named Nam June Pike, Korean guy, and he would
Speaker 3: do things like hold magnets up to the TV and
Speaker 3: warp the picture and things like that, and eventually they
Speaker 3: would develop devices that would do that for shows like
Speaker 3: Electric Company in Sesame Street. But there were a lot
Speaker 3: of experimentalists and video people doing experimental video, and I
Speaker 3: was very much into that. I wanted to do that,
Speaker 3: so I started buying video synthesizers and built myself a
Speaker 3: little video studio and started taking music that I liked
Speaker 3: and putting visualizations to it. And it wasn't pop songs.
Speaker 3: It was like to Meeta's songs from like to Meeta's
Speaker 3: snowflakes are dancing, you know, or you know, classical music,
Speaker 3: you know, reveil a song about a clown. I can't
Speaker 3: remember the Spanish title of it, but classical music and
Speaker 3: stuff like that, and just do weird visualizations to it.
Speaker 3: And I thought this could be you know, legitimate art
Speaker 3: form and maybe someday, you know, be a real format entertainment.
Speaker 3: And so through the years, I just kept accumulating video
Speaker 3: equipment until like I got my check first check from
Speaker 3: meat Loaf, after you know, like almost a year of
Speaker 3: them wrangling trying to get a label, finally getting a
Speaker 3: label and then negotiating you know, my participation and stuff.
Speaker 3: I remember being in the office and getting handed a
Speaker 3: check for seven hundred and thirty thousand dollars. Was the
Speaker 3: first check I got for meat Loaf for Royal Teeth.
Speaker 3: You know, this was a project that I thought was
Speaker 3: just going to be a laugh, you know, and you
Speaker 3: know maybe yeah, and when I you know, and I
Speaker 3: didn't get my advance when I had to get Bearsville
Speaker 3: to finance the record like I usually would have done,
Speaker 3: so I did the record almost for nothing, and suddenly,
Speaker 3: you know, it's the biggest paycheck I ever got. Probably
Speaker 3: the biggest paycheck I ever got since because it had
Speaker 3: accumulated so much royalties without being disbursed. So I took
Speaker 3: that check and I bought video equipment with it and
Speaker 3: built a real video studio, and we started doing what
Speaker 3: it would be more recognizable as music videos, you know,
Speaker 3: videos to pop songs and stuff.
Speaker 2: There's one thing I forgot to ask, and we're going
Speaker 2: to wrack this up, but could you please explain how
Speaker 2: you got involved in producing the New York Dolls debut album.
Speaker 3: It was an interesting time in New York. New York
Speaker 3: was never known to have a sound. New York City
Speaker 3: didn't have a sound. There was the Long Island sound,
Speaker 3: which was very R and B influenced, but New York
Speaker 3: City wasn't to have a sound. And suddenly all of
Speaker 3: these bands started forming, mostly of people who didn't know
Speaker 3: how to play that well. So it was kind of
Speaker 3: almost like a Warhol Andy Warhol inspired, you know, gorilla
Speaker 3: art movement, and a lot of it was some of
Speaker 3: it was good and tergening, a lot of it was
Speaker 3: just crap, you know. But I was about to leave
Speaker 3: New York City and move upstate permanently. I still kept
Speaker 3: a place in the city. But I knew that I
Speaker 3: was leaving, and I thought, before I leave, maybe I'll
Speaker 3: pick one of these bands from this new scene and
Speaker 3: produce a record for them, you know, produce the New
Speaker 3: York sound, and the band that seemed to have the
Speaker 3: biggest following and have it the most together, I guess,
Speaker 3: in a euphemistic way of speaking, was the New York Dolls.
Speaker 3: So it was pretty easy for me to just approach
Speaker 3: them and say, you want me to make a record
Speaker 3: with you. And they had by then gotten a record
Speaker 3: deal with Mercury, and I was probably as hot as
Speaker 3: I've ever been as a producer, so they figured, yeah,
Speaker 3: you guys better do this. It was like managing a carnival,
Speaker 3: you know. The band had so many, so many hanger ons,
Speaker 3: and you know, groupies and press guys. The press loved
Speaker 3: the band because they played a level of music that
Speaker 3: rock writers could imagine playing themselves, you know, because it required.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's a quote for you, ass man.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because it was so unchallenged. They could understand it
Speaker 3: really well. So you know that. Then rock critics started
Speaker 3: forming their own bands after that. But yeah, we somehow
Speaker 3: managed to get through the record without anybody dying because
Speaker 3: soon after we finished the record, they started dying. And yeah,
Speaker 3: it didn't really do anything when they released it. I
Speaker 3: don't think there was any precedent for, you know, how
Speaker 3: to sell this kind of sloppy and what was mostly
Speaker 3: Rolling Stones inspired early Rolling Stones inspired. Most people say, oh,
Speaker 3: they're a punk rock band, but they were really emulating
Speaker 3: The Stones during their drag period, you know, Mother's Little
Speaker 3: Helper and that sort of thing. That's why they all
Speaker 3: dressed up and kind of like semi drag. The lead singer,
Speaker 3: David thought he was Yeah, David Johansson kind of thought
Speaker 3: he was Mick Jagger, you know, even though he sounded
Speaker 3: like an angry Louis Prima.
Speaker 2: One of the weirdest moments in my career was we
Speaker 2: opened for Reunited New York Dolls at like a one
Speaker 2: of those music festivals.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Here's the thing though, when I saw David backstage, I
Speaker 2: was like, oh shit, it's Buster Point Dexter exactly. I
Speaker 2: had no clue, had no clue that Buster Point Dexter
Speaker 2: was in the New York Dolls. And then they opened
Speaker 2: up the show with you know, like I'm one of
Speaker 2: the biggest kids in the hall, fans of All Time.
Speaker 2: So they opened up with that. So I was like, wait,
Speaker 2: like my whole mind was I had no clue.
Speaker 5: You just enlightened, dummy, that the New York Dolls sang
Speaker 5: the same song for Kids in the Hall that you
Speaker 5: just enlightened.
Speaker 1: Okay, thank you, Yes, exactly. Wow, I just learned that myself.
Speaker 1: I didn't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the theme the Kids in the Hall is New
Speaker 2: York Dolls. But you know the thing is that I
Speaker 2: mostly knew of New York Dolls via all the critical
Speaker 2: claim they were getting. You know, Robert Christa, Gals, you know,
Speaker 2: year enlisted all that stuff and Rolling Stones five hundred
Speaker 2: of all Time, you know, And I know that people
Speaker 2: cite them for like at least uh them as a
Speaker 2: group and how groundbreaking they were. I just never heard
Speaker 2: them or anything or just knew the members or any
Speaker 2: of that stuff.
Speaker 3: And so well, essentially they were the they were the
Speaker 3: inspiration for the sex Pistols, and that's why people referred
Speaker 3: to them as a punk band, even though nobody used
Speaker 3: that term in the era. When you know, when we
Speaker 3: did the The New York Dolls record, it was, you know,
Speaker 3: if it was anything, it was the New York sound.
Speaker 3: But when John Lydon heard the record, the accessibility of it,
Speaker 3: I guess inspired him and the nasty attitude and everything
Speaker 3: about it, and it was you know, it was the
Speaker 3: inspiration for the Sex Pistols essentially, and that's how they
Speaker 3: got rolled into the whole punk rock thing kind of
Speaker 3: by backwards inclusion into those.
Speaker 1: Malcolm McLaurin ever reached out to you to ask you
Speaker 1: for tips.
Speaker 3: Or I don't know that. I I may have run
Speaker 3: into him in London at one point in like the
Speaker 3: in the earlier mid seventies, but I not really had
Speaker 3: much content tech with him. Uh, you know, his his
Speaker 3: attitude about this is kind of you know, it is
Speaker 3: that punk rock thing. You know, it's like, let's do
Speaker 3: some care'll that'll just get people all wound up, you
Speaker 3: know the thing. And you know, as a record producer,
Speaker 3: I had longer goals than that.
Speaker 7: Okay, I see, So of all of all your outside productions,
Speaker 7: not including your records or Utopia's records, but records that
Speaker 7: you produced, like some We've mentioned some We have an XTC, Badfinger,
Speaker 7: Holland Oates, Jule Shecher, Patti Smith, just to name a few.
Speaker 7: Which of which of the outside production projects do you
Speaker 7: think was the most rewarding in the sense that you
Speaker 7: learn the most on that project, whether it was technicals,
Speaker 7: something you learned technically, or something about how to be
Speaker 7: a great producer or an effective producer.
Speaker 3: Well, I, you know, I tend to cite skylarking as
Speaker 3: as something. You know, I'm not a person that feels
Speaker 3: like a lot of pride, because that's you know, there's
Speaker 3: not much to be gained out of it. You know,
Speaker 3: I try and be sanguine about the things in the
Speaker 3: past and concentrate on the future, and so I don't
Speaker 3: think of things with pride except for my kids. It
Speaker 3: was an incredible slog to finish the record because I
Speaker 3: was getting so much resistance from certain band members. But
Speaker 3: I also can say that, you know, they never appreciated
Speaker 3: what was going on because Andy went home and before
Speaker 3: I'd even delivered the record, he was telling people in
Speaker 3: the press, who was the worst record they ever made?
Speaker 3: Because he was imprinting his feelings about the experience, and
Speaker 3: the reason why the experience was not pleasant for him
Speaker 3: was because I took it over. You know, I was
Speaker 3: a fan of the band. I was a big fan,
Speaker 3: and so I knew about their records. I knew about
Speaker 3: the evolution their records, and I knew about what was
Speaker 3: happening in terms of the making of the records. And
Speaker 3: when the label approached me, you know that they had
Speaker 3: no the band was lost, and the label said, you
Speaker 3: have to have a real producer. Now, you know, we
Speaker 3: can't let Andy take over this project and turn it
Speaker 3: into an Andy Vanity project again because the records aren't
Speaker 3: selling like they used to. And so I guess the
Speaker 3: one of the A and our guys said, you know, no,
Speaker 3: go with to run and he's notorious for taking control
Speaker 3: of these things, you know, and so so they acquiesced,
Speaker 3: you know, to that, and they came to record up
Speaker 3: in Lake Hill where I was in my studio, as
Speaker 3: they had never recorded outside of a British studio before,
Speaker 3: and we did, you know, like the basics in UH
Speaker 3: up in Lake Hill, and then we went to San Francisco,
Speaker 3: UH laid on drums and other instruments and things like that,
Speaker 3: then finished up the vocals back in in lake Hill.
Speaker 3: During the course of the record, the bass player quit
Speaker 3: the band UH and Andy threatened to cleave my head
Speaker 3: into with an axe.
Speaker 1: UH.
Speaker 3: But so after after old experience, right, Yeah, that's experience.
Speaker 3: But the reason why I look at it, as you know,
Speaker 3: as being maybe more rewarding than other records is that
Speaker 3: record saved their career, that they got a hit record
Speaker 3: off of it, and they continue to record, you know,
Speaker 3: album after album with no hit records after that because.
Speaker 1: The acknowledged that.
Speaker 3: Now they ultimately acknowledged it.
Speaker 2: Yes, I want to let you in on something that
Speaker 2: that record also saved someone else's career.
Speaker 3: H Whose is that?
Speaker 1: All right?
Speaker 2: This is the this is the weirdest is the weirdest
Speaker 2: twist to this story right here? Skylarking, Sonic Sunspot and
Speaker 2: Oranges and Lemons.
Speaker 3: Oranges and Lemons.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the three albums.
Speaker 2: Now, you know, we at the Roots had a hustle
Speaker 2: because we were on Geffen Records as well, and we
Speaker 2: were absolutely starving between nineteen ninety three and nineteen ninety six,
Speaker 2: and an instant hustle would be to go visit Geffen
Speaker 2: Records on a Thursday. Somehow created diversion or you know,
Speaker 2: you would ask the receptionist to go, like, oh, can
Speaker 2: we get orange juice, apple juice or water? And in
Speaker 2: those twenty seconds that she walks away from her desk
Speaker 2: to go to.
Speaker 1: The kitchen. Three roots would then ran sat the.
Speaker 3: Entire record library.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was a.
Speaker 2: CD closet right behind her, of which we learned early
Speaker 2: that the only product that used record stores were interested
Speaker 2: in buying these records from from us was the Ecstasy records.
Speaker 2: You know, at first we were like, all right, all
Speaker 2: these guns and Roses records, all these Nirvana records or whatever,
Speaker 2: and we couldn't give them away. But somehow every cool
Speaker 2: used record store in the village only took the Ecstasy records.
Speaker 1: So it just it came weekly said like, to make.
Speaker 10: It, yeah, no, but to make a quick two hundred bucks,
Speaker 10: you take all the skylarkings, all the suns on spots,
Speaker 10: and all the oranges and lemons and just go to every.
Speaker 3: Records store in the stratosphere too, right.
Speaker 1: Yes, and then that's how I'd have money for the week.
Speaker 3: So thank you. Hi.
Speaker 5: Can I ask before because I know we're about to
Speaker 5: wrap up, but can you please tell us about what
Speaker 5: a virtual talk show is?
Speaker 6: And Todd's honest truth, like, what is a what are
Speaker 6: you doing over here in Hawaii?
Speaker 3: There's been a lot of talk you know, people doing
Speaker 3: you know, virtual things of virtual tours and stuff like that,
Speaker 3: and I would have I would be on a virtual
Speaker 3: tour now if if our promoters had led me, I
Speaker 3: was totally prepared to. You know, my tour was supposed
Speaker 3: to start May first and run to the middle of
Speaker 3: this month. Fact, it would be virtual store. Yeah. In
Speaker 3: other words, we would rehearse the band and do the
Speaker 3: show production and everything like we would normally do, but
Speaker 3: then find a venue in San Francisco where we'd be
Speaker 3: rehearsing and do a live broadcast to every city on
Speaker 3: the night that we would have been there. So, in
Speaker 3: other words, I would have done twenty eight shows, but
Speaker 3: all from the same venue, going to you know, narrow
Speaker 3: cast to all the people who had bought tickets to
Speaker 3: the show.
Speaker 6: Well, each show still be different too.
Speaker 3: Well, it would be different because it'd be a different show,
Speaker 3: you know, I mean the show is the same show
Speaker 3: in that well, they are different because on alternating nights
Speaker 3: we would do either Side Ay or Side be Able
Speaker 3: Wizard a True Star as well as the rest of
Speaker 3: the show. You know, I've been wondering what else I
Speaker 3: can do besides podcasts and things like that, and our
Speaker 3: merch company has since they can't go out on the
Speaker 3: road and sell merch. Anymore, set up this whole sort
Speaker 3: of video broadcasting paradigm thing, pay per view thing, so
Speaker 3: that fans can participate in live events, video events with
Speaker 3: various people. I think Melissa Etherrich has done one. Most
Speaker 3: of the other ones I don't recognize the names. There's
Speaker 3: a Fab four thing, not the Fab Foe, of course,
Speaker 3: but a Fab four Beatle tribute thing. And they said,
Speaker 3: those things sell like people are really, you know, tired
Speaker 3: of being at home, so they want some kind of entertainment.
Speaker 3: So I had an idea for something where I would
Speaker 3: just spiel, you know, I would just get in front
Speaker 3: of a camera and start talking about something really commonplace
Speaker 3: but easily misunderstood, like money or something like that. But
Speaker 3: money is liquefied labor. That's the that's the bottom line.
Speaker 3: But in any case, we pitched that idea and they said, okay, well,
Speaker 3: let's do something a little bit more than that. So
Speaker 3: the show is going to be me hosting live but
Speaker 3: most of the show will be things that I recorded
Speaker 3: already so that they can be so that I can
Speaker 3: make sure that they're like high quality, because a lot
Speaker 3: of the live events, you know, they're you know, they
Speaker 3: lack scripting. They just they don't have energy to them,
Speaker 3: you know, because you're not getting immediate feedback from the
Speaker 3: audience like you usually do. So it's, you know, a
Speaker 3: fine line whether it's actually qualifies as entertainment. And so
Speaker 3: I want to you know, hedge my bets and do
Speaker 3: a lot of different sort of video productions that I
Speaker 3: will then host and do Q and as in between
Speaker 3: and not you know, him to play an hour's worth
Speaker 3: of acoustic material from my couch. You know it's too
Speaker 3: much of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm taking notes. I am taking notes. Okay, Todd,
Speaker 2: We thank you nice. We did it today.
Speaker 1: We thank you so much for.
Speaker 3: It was a major motion picture.
Speaker 2: No, we thank you for seeing your story with us.
Speaker 2: And you know we're we're all massive fans and you know.
Speaker 3: We've been I kind of miss you, guys. I would
Speaker 3: have been in New York and well weeks ago for
Speaker 3: right for all for for about a week, so you
Speaker 3: know it could have stopped.
Speaker 1: By and well this will this mess will be over
Speaker 1: for you will, all right.
Speaker 2: We thank you for sharing your story with us and
Speaker 2: we appreciate it. On behalf of Layah and Sugar Steve
Speaker 2: and font Ticolo and the Great Todd run Grin, Relax, Relax,
Speaker 2: A lot of question anyway, YO, this Quest Love and
Speaker 2: we thank you guys, and we'll see you in the
Speaker 2: next go round of Quest Love Supreme.
Speaker 1: Thank you, m.
Speaker 4: M.
Speaker 1: Quest Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.