Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome. You're listening to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest this week he's Jim Garno. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of parapatetic career in music business. He's been a fan,
Speaker 1: he's been a punker, he's been a promoter, he's been
Speaker 1: a label executive, he's been a manager. He's done it all. Jim,
Speaker 1: Welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Bob. Nice to be here. Now.
Speaker 1: You grew up in upstate New York. Right. I was
Speaker 1: raised in Rochester, New York. Yeah, My both my mother
Speaker 1: and father each had one job and they were worked
Speaker 1: for Eastman Kodak. Really did they move there for the job?
Speaker 1: They were raised in Rochester, New York. We moved out
Speaker 1: here in seventy two for eighth grade. When I was
Speaker 1: in eighth grade, my dad got a transfer. He sold
Speaker 1: X ray film for Eastman Kodak. I often think of
Speaker 1: Eastman Kodek as the original, you know, company that was
Speaker 1: digitally disrupted. You know, of course that's a story, but
Speaker 1: a while you're from Rochester. And but the reason I
Speaker 1: mentioned that is whenever we talk, you talk about your
Speaker 1: sister turning you onto records. That's true, It's true, I'm
Speaker 1: and I uh. I don't remember watching the Beatles. I
Speaker 1: remember the reaction of my parents watching the Beatle, which
Speaker 1: was what they just stood. They stood and watched from
Speaker 1: over in the corner and they did not like it
Speaker 1: at all. I know they didn't like it, and they
Speaker 1: complained about the hair um. And I remember my sisters
Speaker 1: records and I still have some of them. I just
Speaker 1: showed my eleven year old an old Herman's Hermit's record
Speaker 1: and an old Holly's record that that has my sister's
Speaker 1: name on it, that that I still have. I retained somehow. Well,
Speaker 1: it's funny because somebody sent me a turntable replace the
Speaker 1: one that I had was kind of sketchy, and I
Speaker 1: whipped out some of those old records and you always
Speaker 1: wrote your name on it, even had Dimo tape and
Speaker 1: you stuck it right on. They couldn't believe what was
Speaker 1: written on the back. You know, whoever wrote those bios,
Speaker 1: you know, because they are so corny and say you know,
Speaker 1: but there's a charm to it. You know. It was
Speaker 1: of the era. Since we're talking about the Beatles. I
Speaker 1: just remember my mother left in November six to go
Speaker 1: out on a Friday night, she said, you have to
Speaker 1: watch this band on Jack Part Jack Part, the Nightly Show,
Speaker 1: the Tonight Show. But now he had a Friday night
Speaker 1: show that I have this band from England, the Beatles,
Speaker 1: And what it was was a video shot from the
Speaker 1: back of the theater of them doing she Loves You,
Speaker 1: which of course we couldn't understand because there was so
Speaker 1: much yelling. It was we I thought it was we
Speaker 1: loved too, and of course we laughed. And then in January,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, I want to hold your hand
Speaker 1: hit and it was mega. And I remember watching on
Speaker 1: Ed Sullivan where we took out our brownie cameras and
Speaker 1: we shot pictures of the television. People may not know,
Speaker 1: but what you get is a blank screen. I didn't
Speaker 1: know that, no, because the reflection from the flash you
Speaker 1: get nothing on screen. I mean, everything is much more
Speaker 1: sophisticated now. But did you know you were a music fan? No? No, no.
Speaker 1: But one of the little anecdote about my sister in
Speaker 1: the Beatles, she bought me a black light poster Sergeant
Speaker 1: Pepper right on Sergeant Pepper came out and they hung
Speaker 1: it in my room. She hung it up in my
Speaker 1: room and at the same time. I was always a
Speaker 1: newspaper reader. I read the paper every morning. I always
Speaker 1: read the because of the sports scores, probably the sports scores,
Speaker 1: but I remember, you know, we had snow days, and
Speaker 1: I remember I would go downstairs and and and the
Speaker 1: heating events were on the floor, and I'd sit in
Speaker 1: front of the heating bed and i'd I'd read the
Speaker 1: comics probably first, and then kind of venture into sports
Speaker 1: in order. But I read an article about LSD and
Speaker 1: it talked about I couldn't have been more than nine,
Speaker 1: but i'd read and it talked about a guy. It
Speaker 1: showed a picture of his face kind of haywire like
Speaker 1: you'd be tripping, and that he jumped off a building.
Speaker 1: And I remember I went to bed and I had
Speaker 1: read about the Beatles and drugs, and you know, I
Speaker 1: knew what was I had some idea what was going on,
Speaker 1: and I'm not sure exactly how I knew, but I
Speaker 1: woke up having nightmares and my dad had to come
Speaker 1: in and take the black light poster of Sergeant Pepper
Speaker 1: down was terrible. Did you have a drug career yourself
Speaker 1: a career? Did you, I think? Did you ultimately take LSD?
Speaker 1: And what do you worry about jumping off a building.
Speaker 1: I probably worried about it. Yeah, you know, I mean
Speaker 1: that was heavy stuff. It really really was. That was
Speaker 1: you know. I always used to kid with the guys
Speaker 1: that we would do took a day to prepare, a
Speaker 1: day to do it, and then a day to recover
Speaker 1: from it. You know, we would we would find ourselves,
Speaker 1: you know, at Disneyland on Pirates of the Caribbean or
Speaker 1: the or the mon Santo where it was shrinking, you know,
Speaker 1: and things like that. That was kind of the Remember
Speaker 1: going to the cable car Disneyland. That's we used to
Speaker 1: smoke dope, okay, because you went from one end to
Speaker 1: the other. Oh yeah, the people mover. So in any event,
Speaker 1: you're in Rochester, you're reading the newspaper. What else. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I am big sports basketball. I I had that that.
Speaker 1: Uh you know, our block was here, Our church was
Speaker 1: the next block. I went to a Catholic school, you know,
Speaker 1: tie dress up. I served Mass in the morning, would
Speaker 1: walk there, had a paper route in the morning, trudging
Speaker 1: in the snow, doing all those kind of things. I
Speaker 1: remember vividly going next door to Kevin dowt Our next
Speaker 1: door neighbor's house and I would open the porch and
Speaker 1: you'd smell the newsprint and you had to take the
Speaker 1: wire cutters and pop and it would go bam and
Speaker 1: it would explode. And I'm telling you, if you were
Speaker 1: anywhere near, it would take your eye out. And you
Speaker 1: had to fold the newspapers into thirds and put them
Speaker 1: in your bag because you had to open the storm
Speaker 1: door and throw the paper up and then get the
Speaker 1: door shut, because that they didn't just throw him on
Speaker 1: the driveway in the snow, you know, you had to
Speaker 1: deliver it inside the storm door. And so he would
Speaker 1: leave me three rows of numbers. The first row of
Speaker 1: numbers my street, totally comfortable, no big deal. I know
Speaker 1: that second street, Verena Drive, I kind of knew it
Speaker 1: was okay. The third street, glenn Ellen Way, kind of terrifying.
Speaker 1: It's still dark, I don't know the houses. You have
Speaker 1: to kind of navigate to find the number, and it
Speaker 1: was a little bit scary by the time I would
Speaker 1: get there. But I would finish up on glenn Ellen
Speaker 1: Way and it would end right near this bar, and
Speaker 1: I remember the smell of the bar and that alcohol
Speaker 1: on the ground and it's stunk and as I walked
Speaker 1: behind it, I would cut and there would be an
Speaker 1: opening in the alley and there was Dunkin Donuts, And
Speaker 1: if I had a paper to left, I'd stand out
Speaker 1: front Dunkin Donuts and I'd sell the paper and I
Speaker 1: go sit at the count and have a hot chocolate.
Speaker 1: And I thought I was grown up. Did you get
Speaker 1: a paper route because your parents told you to earn
Speaker 1: money or you wanted money? I wanted money. I wanted money.
Speaker 1: They didn't. I never got an allowance as a kid.
Speaker 1: You know, paper route you can actually make some decent money.
Speaker 1: And so what did you do with the money? I
Speaker 1: saved it. I remember I bought a Shwin ten speed
Speaker 1: that it was a hundred five dollars. I said, saved
Speaker 1: all that and bought a Shwin ten speed. My parents,
Speaker 1: I never felt wanting for anything in terms of the necessities.
Speaker 1: But they were never going to give you the stereo
Speaker 1: like the other kid got. There was no way, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean? What about your own kids? You
Speaker 1: make them work? No, no, they do chores and things.
Speaker 1: But I'll tell you the interesting thing. I've had this
Speaker 1: conversation with quite a few people about raising kids who
Speaker 1: have a lot of stuff. They want their money. You know,
Speaker 1: where they will I think find their ambition and motivation
Speaker 1: is they do not like to come to me to
Speaker 1: ask for stuff, and they don't like being told no,
Speaker 1: and they don't like they don't like my input. They
Speaker 1: want their own, you know, And I can see it
Speaker 1: where that will be the motivating factor for them. You know,
Speaker 1: you think that, well, gosh, if a kid got a
Speaker 1: car when they were sixteen, how are they ever going
Speaker 1: to be motivated to do anything in life? Why about
Speaker 1: the car? When they want another one, they're gonna buy
Speaker 1: the car. And they don't like coming to you and asking,
Speaker 1: That's the thing, you know, they really don't. And I
Speaker 1: see it with my two oldest ones nineteen ones almost seventeen.
Speaker 1: They want the autonomy and the independence of not having
Speaker 1: to ask their parents for stuff. So we'll see that's
Speaker 1: a big experiment parenting and we could right. So when
Speaker 1: you hear that you're going to be moving to California,
Speaker 1: is that a good I'm super excited. The Los Angeles
Speaker 1: Lakers are my favorite basketball team. It's the Wilt Chamberlain
Speaker 1: Jerry West seventy two season where they go sixty and
Speaker 1: thirteen I'm a huge Wilt fan. I remember the game
Speaker 1: he played against the Bucks with Louell Cinder and it
Speaker 1: goes into overtime and he's got five fouls and he
Speaker 1: blocks Kareem shot, and he has one of the greatest
Speaker 1: records of all time. He's never felled out of game
Speaker 1: in high school, college, or his professional career. And he's
Speaker 1: still on the court and he blocks a shot, and
Speaker 1: that's an incredible statistic. So I was a big fan
Speaker 1: of his. He could rebound, he could do assists, he
Speaker 1: could do anything. I loved Will And I'm coming to
Speaker 1: the land of the Lakers. Did your father take you
Speaker 1: to the game? Never? Never took me to a game.
Speaker 1: Did he come to your sports when you were growing up? Occasionally,
Speaker 1: my dad traveled. He spent about ten days a month
Speaker 1: on the road. Later on, when I was at one
Speaker 1: of my son's baseball games, he said, I really regret
Speaker 1: not having done that. I said, Dad, you were born.
Speaker 1: He was born on his kitchen table. My father was
Speaker 1: raised with two foster kids in his home. He had
Speaker 1: two brothers, but his parents took in foster kids to
Speaker 1: make ends meet. My mom was raised off and on
Speaker 1: in Catholic orphanages and foster homes. So they had a
Speaker 1: tough you know. And I said, Dad, your point of
Speaker 1: view was not, Hey, how do I go hang out
Speaker 1: and do all the contemporary parenting things. You're concerned? Am
Speaker 1: I gonna have enough money? Get my kid to school?
Speaker 1: We're gonna have clothes? Are We're gonna That was a
Speaker 1: legitimate concern for you. And because of that, I said
Speaker 1: to him, I don't ever think about those things. I
Speaker 1: always know I was gonna be Okay, that's a gift.
Speaker 1: You didn't have that gift. So you moved to southern California.
Speaker 1: Were exactly do you move? Fullerton, California. Now that's far
Speaker 1: from the beach home of the electric guitar. It's a
Speaker 1: straight shot down brook her Store Beach Boulevard on the O. C.
Speaker 1: T D by the way, So it's not horrible that
Speaker 1: gets you into Huntington Beach. Okay, So how did you
Speaker 1: get into music? Really? My sister played a big, big part.
Speaker 1: I was really really a fan. I remember going to
Speaker 1: singer you know, the sewing machine shop, and uh, I
Speaker 1: want to say, Easy to Be Hard was my first
Speaker 1: single that I bought, you know, And and I started
Speaker 1: collecting singles, and she had her record player, and I
Speaker 1: had a record player, and uh, I would connect multiple
Speaker 1: speakers to it, so I'd have like eight speakers in
Speaker 1: my room. I thought I was like creating some sort
Speaker 1: of audio system, you know, but it was just I
Speaker 1: just remember, you know, I really didn't know a much
Speaker 1: about electronics, right, And I hooked up the external speaker
Speaker 1: without an Apple fire and blew out the whole house.
Speaker 1: Did you really? Absolutely? Oh, I have a photo I'll
Speaker 1: show you when we take a a moment. You can
Speaker 1: see basketball posters in my bedroom, and then you see
Speaker 1: a David Bowie poster and Jimi Hendrix, and the transition
Speaker 1: is coming, you know what I mean. You can see
Speaker 1: the the sports stuff moving off the wall and the
Speaker 1: rock stuff starting to happen. Okay, now, but you say
Speaker 1: that you grew up with these people and you were
Speaker 1: part of the punk rock scene. Well that's that's years later. Okay,
Speaker 1: So then a little bit slower, So you suddenly are
Speaker 1: getting into music. You're in a high school, you're just
Speaker 1: living a regular high school life. Or does music become
Speaker 1: your passion? Music's everything? Music is? You know, when when
Speaker 1: you want to say freshman year, was the first time
Speaker 1: where all of a sudden, buddy of mine looked and goes,
Speaker 1: you want to try pot? Yeah, what do we do?
Speaker 1: You know? In your fourteen your kid, let's talk to
Speaker 1: this guy, you know, and you go and and you
Speaker 1: get your little yellow zigzag papers and your four finger
Speaker 1: bag of really bad you know, but I remember when
Speaker 1: Bucks was the good stuff in You know, when you
Speaker 1: talk about this a lot, and I've talked about this
Speaker 1: with you a lot, all of a sudden, you're part
Speaker 1: of a community. There's something going on. You're bonded to somebody.
Speaker 1: Because in three it's still a criminal offense. It's not
Speaker 1: been decriminalized. This is a This is not an era
Speaker 1: where people are saying, oh, I smoked, but I didn't
Speaker 1: Inhale or multiple presidents have admitted to it. It's like
Speaker 1: a problem. You're bound to that community and you find
Speaker 1: that when you go to a concert, that whole community
Speaker 1: is there. You're all together. Okay, So where did you
Speaker 1: go to concerts? Oh? You go to Anaheim Convention Center.
Speaker 1: You know there. I remember seeing Crosby and Nash there
Speaker 1: and James Taylor there and Peter Frampton before broke out,
Speaker 1: and it'd go to the Long Beach Arena. I remember
Speaker 1: going to Long Beach Arena for the Forum, right, and
Speaker 1: where did you get the money? And how did you
Speaker 1: get there? There's always somebody that could drive, you know.
Speaker 1: I remember going to see Queen and Thin Lizzie at
Speaker 1: the Forum and I had no ticket, and we walked
Speaker 1: up and we thought we might be able to get
Speaker 1: one because we've seen that happen. And there's a guy
Speaker 1: standing on the corner with the tickets. It worked out
Speaker 1: really well. I had many that did work out as well.
Speaker 1: But I walk up and he's trying to sell the
Speaker 1: tickets and a cop walks up and grabs the tickets
Speaker 1: out of his hand and says, are you scalping these? No, sir,
Speaker 1: And I said I was getting ready to buy them
Speaker 1: at face value, officer. And the cop looks at me
Speaker 1: and I'm a kid. I'm dealing with, you know, older kids,
Speaker 1: so you know, I mean people in their twenties, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean. I'm just a kid, and he goes,
Speaker 1: do you have the money? I go right here a
Speaker 1: game and we got like twenty throw seats to seek
Speaker 1: Lizzie and Queen, and it was fantastic. I think that
Speaker 1: time of my life was. Everything was just a brand
Speaker 1: new experience. It was amazing. It was amazing to go
Speaker 1: see the Who at Anaheim Stadium. It was amazing to
Speaker 1: all of it. I just I couldn't get enough of
Speaker 1: the live music thing. The live music thing was extraordinary
Speaker 1: to me. How often did you go to shows? Don't remember?
Speaker 1: You know what I mean? As often as I could.
Speaker 1: But I was a kid. I was in high school
Speaker 1: and I could only only do so. Did you have
Speaker 1: any lightbulb go off in your head say this is
Speaker 1: something I want to make a career out of. I
Speaker 1: never thought. And that's where punk rock comes in. I
Speaker 1: would read the Sunday calendar section, of course, and you'd
Speaker 1: get it was the tabloid it in the Los Angeles times.
Speaker 1: You go to the Pacific Stereo ad in the middle,
Speaker 1: of course, and then you'd turn and you'd start to read,
Speaker 1: and it felt so distant, and uh, I didn't have
Speaker 1: a great high school career. A little deeper. That means
Speaker 1: what I was truant frequently. And then where I went
Speaker 1: to school, you couldn't get away with that. How did
Speaker 1: you get away with it? Well? I didn't. By the
Speaker 1: halfway through my junior they wanted to send me to
Speaker 1: the continuation school, and I dropped out and I took
Speaker 1: the g E D. And at this point, I'm moving
Speaker 1: out of my parents house. Okay, wait, wait, wait wait.
Speaker 1: Your father comes from a background that's somewhat hard. He's
Speaker 1: got a good job and he's on the road. How
Speaker 1: are you getting along with your parents? Not well? And
Speaker 1: the issue is what well they had? At one point,
Speaker 1: my mother moved my dresser and I would always take
Speaker 1: out the bottom drawer and that's where I would keep
Speaker 1: all my you know, hash pipe and my rolling papers
Speaker 1: and everything. And she found it, and to someone in
Speaker 1: my parents era, the difference between marijuana and heroin was
Speaker 1: non existent. She thought I was a drug addict. And
Speaker 1: my father approached me and said, we're going to the
Speaker 1: police right now, or you're going into therapy. And I said, well,
Speaker 1: this is an easy call. How old were you? And
Speaker 1: I'd gotten in a couple of scrapes similar uh with
Speaker 1: the law, but like what well, when I was fourteen,
Speaker 1: I was learning to drive, but I hadn't taken driver
Speaker 1: head yet. I just used my parents car and I
Speaker 1: got caught and I got arrested doing that. And then
Speaker 1: when I was sixteen, I was smoking some weed with
Speaker 1: a buddy of mine and got caught doing that, and
Speaker 1: it just turned out he had some cross tops and
Speaker 1: emphetamines with them, and I was like, oh god, this
Speaker 1: isn't good, you know. And so that was, you know,
Speaker 1: high school was chaos for me. Okay, But these are
Speaker 1: choices you made. Is that part of your personality? We say,
Speaker 1: what are you a limit tester? Are you willing to
Speaker 1: do the thing that other people might pooh pooh or
Speaker 1: be too scared of. I don't know. I don't think
Speaker 1: that was the reason I was doing it. I was
Speaker 1: doing it because I was having fun. I mean, plain
Speaker 1: and simple. I was just having fun. It was like,
Speaker 1: let's let's smoke a point and go see altered states.
Speaker 1: Let's go. You know, you know, what are you doing?
Speaker 1: You know? After school? I don't know what do you
Speaker 1: want to meet and go? You know? It was just
Speaker 1: what I was the nineteen seventy three or seventy four.
Speaker 1: It's just what you did, okay. So you felt like
Speaker 1: you went to the therapist. What did the therapist saying
Speaker 1: after why? I said, you seem like an okay kid,
Speaker 1: you know, And and he met with my parents. He said,
Speaker 1: you seem you seem okay, you know, but but I
Speaker 1: definitely was straining. There's no question that I was experiencing
Speaker 1: the generation gap. Everything my parents stood for. Everything they
Speaker 1: liked I didn't like. They didn't like long hair, they
Speaker 1: didn't like the fact, you know. They just didn't like
Speaker 1: how I addressed. They didn't like how I conducted. And
Speaker 1: there was a point in our relationship where there was
Speaker 1: a break, I mean a big break, particularly when it
Speaker 1: came to curfews and things like that would be like
Speaker 1: I'm going out. When we would be back, I don't know,
Speaker 1: and that would be Friday night, it might be Saturday
Speaker 1: afternoon I had come back. And it got to the
Speaker 1: point where I think they would define it now is incorrigible,
Speaker 1: where it was just like I wasn't going to be
Speaker 1: told to do. And I moved out of my parents
Speaker 1: house once when I was sixteen, and then for good
Speaker 1: when I was event where like an apartment with what
Speaker 1: money I was working now I left school at that point.
Speaker 1: I think I was a Mason's tender. Where's what It's
Speaker 1: an awful job of something that that really no one
Speaker 1: would want to do. But I moved all the stone
Speaker 1: and brick off of trucks for the mason to set
Speaker 1: around pools. And I made the cement and would bring
Speaker 1: it to them, and it was backbreaking work. And I
Speaker 1: was seventeen years old and a d thirty five pounds
Speaker 1: and I'm dealing with grown men with beards. And I
Speaker 1: eventually got the clue and said, this sucks. I need
Speaker 1: to go back to school. I'm never going to meet
Speaker 1: a girl any girls. I would finish work and I
Speaker 1: would just have one beer in my apartment, go, oh,
Speaker 1: this is wonderful. I have my own apartment, and I
Speaker 1: would just fall asleep. I was so fatigued. Okay, so
Speaker 1: the school said, hey, you're not going and you literally
Speaker 1: dropped out and took the g ding And how long
Speaker 1: before you went back to school? Within six months. I
Speaker 1: went to junior college as a seventeen year old, and
Speaker 1: you're still living in your own apartment and you're paying
Speaker 1: for yourself because it's cheap. Then it was really cheap.
Speaker 1: It wasn't bad at all. I mean it wasn't. It wasn't.
Speaker 1: And and college at this point, within college, within the
Speaker 1: community college system, you paid a five dollar health fee
Speaker 1: and your books and you're in and all those units. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I transferred sixty units to U C Irvine
Speaker 1: and got my degree from U C Irvine years later,
Speaker 1: many years later. So how many years later, Well as
Speaker 1: it would have been if seventeen, that would have been
Speaker 1: U seventy. So I didn't graduate college till eighty five. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you're still living in your own apartment, you're still
Speaker 1: paying your own bills, and now you're going to community college.
Speaker 1: And what are you doing for work? Then? Just a
Speaker 1: hodgepodge of different jobs. I went back to work at
Speaker 1: a supermarket. I had worked at supermarkets. I had worked
Speaker 1: at Ralph's when I was sixteen years old, and Fullerton
Speaker 1: I went and started working for Vaughan's, you know, at
Speaker 1: that point. And these were great jobs because it was
Speaker 1: a union job, you had health benefits. Uh, they paid
Speaker 1: time in half on Sundays, and and I could make
Speaker 1: enough money working part time to pay my bills. But
Speaker 1: nothing had really started to come together as it relates
Speaker 1: to music yet at this point, I'm still going to
Speaker 1: a lot of shows. Punk rock has hit and now
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, I'm starting to go to clubs,
Speaker 1: and that's a big shift. At least it was for
Speaker 1: me when you've been going to concerts and concerts and
Speaker 1: they're big, and then you find yourself in a club
Speaker 1: and the music is much more visceral, and you're right
Speaker 1: there and the local Los Angeles scene is exploding. Of
Speaker 1: course it's going. It's amazing, you know. And I remember
Speaker 1: I spent the night on Lancashire Boulevard and saw Elvis
Speaker 1: Costello at the Palamino around the Armed Forces tour. I
Speaker 1: spent the night on Sunset Boulevard and saw Tom Petty
Speaker 1: at the Whiskey. I I was there the night that
Speaker 1: Excine's sister died, when X released their debut record. This
Speaker 1: was so exciting to me to see music in that
Speaker 1: small format. And that is where I all of a
Speaker 1: sudden got in where all of a sudden, I'm going
Speaker 1: to Shifted and I'm going to Fullerton Junior College and
Speaker 1: I ran for student office, something I'd never done in
Speaker 1: my life. I've never been to a dance in high school,
Speaker 1: like I literally, what was your motivation? I wanted to
Speaker 1: bring bands to school. I wanted to be able to
Speaker 1: somehow bring bands to school. And I made really cool posters.
Speaker 1: I used pop art graphics. You know, Beatles jumping in
Speaker 1: the air vote for gym. It was really embarrassing. I felt,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, because promoting yourself is really
Speaker 1: it takes a certain kind of person that can do it. Well.
Speaker 1: I'm not that person. I felt like a colossal douche
Speaker 1: bag the whole time doing it and I lost. But
Speaker 1: the guy who became president said, hey, you know, there's
Speaker 1: a stipend position for an events director. I've never even
Speaker 1: heard the word stipend before, and I said, what does
Speaker 1: that mean? He goes, you can bring concerts here what
Speaker 1: you wanted to do, and we'll pay you fifty a
Speaker 1: week to do it. And you can have access to
Speaker 1: the phones. And I phone is a big deal. That's
Speaker 1: what people don't understand, long distance calls. It is a
Speaker 1: big deal. But there was a nightclub called Ichabod's in
Speaker 1: Fullerton on Sunday nights. They were dark. Occasionally they would
Speaker 1: bring a band in and I approached the manager and said,
Speaker 1: can I do the bookings? And I got to do
Speaker 1: the bookings. So I'm booking the cramps, I'm booking suburban
Speaker 1: lawns and booking. I told Social distortion, wait, wait, wait, wait,
Speaker 1: you're living in your own apartment. Do you have any
Speaker 1: contact with your parents at this point? Okay, it's kind
Speaker 1: of normalize. It does what goes off in your head.
Speaker 1: You're saying, I can be a book or I can
Speaker 1: do this. Well, I had had done a T. S
Speaker 1: o L show at my college, and so he did
Speaker 1: college shows before the Ichabod stuff. Yes, had done one,
Speaker 1: just one. It was a nightmare, but by the same token,
Speaker 1: to do one in the college, you're talking to so
Speaker 1: many middle agents whatever. You learn a lot in that
Speaker 1: one show. Yeah, Well it was just T. S O L.
Speaker 1: And they were local, and I forget how I made contact,
Speaker 1: but it was interesting, you know, I made I made
Speaker 1: some friends in that situation. And then I had seen
Speaker 1: Dennis to L, the guitar player of Social Distortion. We
Speaker 1: were both in court for something. I don't know what
Speaker 1: I was in court for, but I remember seeing Dennis.
Speaker 1: He was wearing a green suit, he had saddle shoes on,
Speaker 1: and he was reading up and down with the rolling stones.
Speaker 1: And I'd seen Social d and I love Social Distortion.
Speaker 1: I thought they were great. They were very Lodi. They
Speaker 1: reminder me much more of the Buzzcocks than thrash music.
Speaker 1: They are Generation X. They were very melodic, and I
Speaker 1: approached my said, can get you a gig at Kabots
Speaker 1: And he said they won't let us play there because
Speaker 1: they wouldn't let punk bands play. And it goes, I
Speaker 1: can get you a gig there, and I got them
Speaker 1: a gig there. You'd already spoken with the guy at
Speaker 1: Nikabots or you said if I have this in my pocket,
Speaker 1: I'd already spoken, And so I was starting to do
Speaker 1: bookings there and it was great because it meant I
Speaker 1: got to see the shows for free. It also meant
Speaker 1: that I got to hit the bar for free. I
Speaker 1: got to by my friends drinks for free. It was
Speaker 1: like it was It was amazing. So you book a
Speaker 1: social dy, that's your first show at Nickabo. No, it's
Speaker 1: not my first show. I don't know what my first
Speaker 1: show was, to be honest with you, were they all successful? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I never lost money? And how did you get the
Speaker 1: word out Flyers? You just did Flyers. The punk rock
Speaker 1: thing was very rapid community because there was very little
Speaker 1: that you were permitted to do in terms of venues,
Speaker 1: Like you couldn't go and play at the Rock Sea.
Speaker 1: And I remember I started booking bands. Up and down
Speaker 1: the coast, and in different places, you couldn't get to
Speaker 1: the stone in San Francisco, Bill Gret they wouldn't let
Speaker 1: you book these so you wind up calling as you
Speaker 1: started booking around the country, you call the Victor Brothers
Speaker 1: and Phoenix and they would put you with the Knights
Speaker 1: of Pitheus Hall. And then you'd call Tom bunchdown in
Speaker 1: Texas and he had a place where and you started
Speaker 1: networking all these people because they all had these scenes
Speaker 1: and they knew how to where to put the flyers.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining me on another episode of the Bob
Speaker 1: Left Sets podcast. I hope you've enjoyed going down the
Speaker 1: rabbit hole with me. You never know who's gonna stop
Speaker 1: by the studio. I've already had the chance to talk
Speaker 1: the legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk, Grammy nominated songwriter and bal
Speaker 1: Oscar nominated songwriter Diane Warren, and we're just getting started.
Speaker 1: Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on tune in,
Speaker 1: Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Back to
Speaker 1: my conversation with Jim Garrino. Okay, so let's go back
Speaker 1: your bookingabas. How do you then morph that into booking
Speaker 1: up and down on the coast. In other so, what
Speaker 1: winds up happening is I wind up transferring to UC Irvine.
Speaker 1: And at the same time I meet Gary Tover. I'm
Speaker 1: blown away. He's got this thing called Golden Voice, and
Speaker 1: they're doing shows on a much larger scale than seems
Speaker 1: that one should be able to do. Like, you can't
Speaker 1: do shows this big punk rock shows. You're gonna get
Speaker 1: shut down, Like I feel like I'm getting away with
Speaker 1: something doing an Ichabod show here and there. Jerry Roach
Speaker 1: has already had his troubles with the Cuckoo's Nest that's
Speaker 1: been shut down. Everything in Orange County has been shut down.
Speaker 1: And I meet Gary and I don't know how I
Speaker 1: weasel my way into it, but I get Gary to
Speaker 1: let Mike Vrainey, who's the manager of the Dead Kennedy's
Speaker 1: and t s o L and me I'm now handling
Speaker 1: Social Distortion, open a booking agency for him. And so
Speaker 1: we book Agent Orange forty five Grave the Dickies, Dead
Speaker 1: Kennedy's TSL Social Distoration, and we start booking him. When
Speaker 1: he would bring a band in from England to do
Speaker 1: his concert at the Olympic auditorium. We would then book
Speaker 1: them up and down the coast for him. Okay, how
Speaker 1: do you become the manager of Social Mike? The band
Speaker 1: breaks up, the manager leaves for Las Vegas, he splits
Speaker 1: the rhythm section, leaves the band. Mike. I don't know
Speaker 1: the exact sequence, but he winds up coming to live
Speaker 1: with me when he gets clean. He winds up, you know,
Speaker 1: Dennis and I have found him o'ded a couple, you know,
Speaker 1: many situations where there's big problems and he's having serious,
Speaker 1: serious drug problems. But he gets clean and he comes
Speaker 1: to live with me, and he's trying the whole time
Speaker 1: to do the band. We go through four or five drummers,
Speaker 1: but it's really not coming together until he gets clean.
Speaker 1: And then we kind of get an established lineup and
Speaker 1: I'm managing them, and I put together a distribution deal
Speaker 1: through Enigma Records, Bill Hin and we pay for and
Speaker 1: record this record, Social Recording. It's not there's another one
Speaker 1: that came out before that that that this is their second,
Speaker 1: you know, full length album, but it's the first word
Speaker 1: Mike's claim and where we end to have a cohesive
Speaker 1: thing going on where we can say we're gonna be somewhere, Mike.
Speaker 1: Let me tell you. We book Gary Tovar book Social
Speaker 1: Distortion in the Olympic Auditorium. They do five thousand people. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're probably eight three. We get there to do the show,
Speaker 1: we have no gear, Mike's pond at all. It's gone.
Speaker 1: It's gone, and we're headlining. Okay. And I remember seeing
Speaker 1: this guy, Don Burnett the band plane wrap and said,
Speaker 1: I think he was the opening act. He might not
Speaker 1: have been, it may have been a different act. But
Speaker 1: we say, we'll give you a hunter Bucks if we
Speaker 1: can use your gear. You're applying. We'll be here late,
Speaker 1: you know, Yeah, no problem. We give him a Hunter Bucks.
Speaker 1: Now we have a gear to play through. End of
Speaker 1: the night, we're all hanging around partying. Guy walks up
Speaker 1: and goes, hey, where do you put my gear? Fucking
Speaker 1: Mike has taken his gear and hocked it and it's
Speaker 1: in the pawn shop. Just like that, it's gone. He's
Speaker 1: stolen the gear again. And that's what it was like,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. Meanwhile, this guy is selling
Speaker 1: five thousand tickets. You can't get a major label deal.
Speaker 1: So when he cleans up the band records this record
Speaker 1: prison Bound. The song goes number one on k Rock.
Speaker 1: It literally is number one. We put the record out
Speaker 1: through Enigma as a pressing and distribution deal, which was
Speaker 1: the only deal you could get. Back then nobody recognized
Speaker 1: the brilliance of it, that you own the masters and
Speaker 1: that you get the lions share the money. It was
Speaker 1: just like, well, nobody will give us a deal, so
Speaker 1: we'll just make it ourselves, and you know, do that
Speaker 1: and they would do the pressing and they charge you back.
Speaker 1: But it turned out to be great because they wound
Speaker 1: up owning owning their masters. It goes number one on
Speaker 1: k Rock. Epic winds up signing him. But that's you know, Okay,
Speaker 1: you're the manager, you make a deal with Enigma, You
Speaker 1: and Bill hind sit down, or you get a lawyer.
Speaker 1: At this point, I do everything. I have no lawyer,
Speaker 1: and I have come out of you see your vine.
Speaker 1: There's a little bit of backtracking. I meet Steve Rennie
Speaker 1: at u C Irvine. He has a company called Steve
Speaker 1: Rennie Presents, which we affectionately used to call Steve Renny
Speaker 1: Resents because nobody wanted to do much bisy this with him.
Speaker 1: But he gets hired at Avalon. At the time, they're
Speaker 1: doing four nights of Bruce Springsteen at the Colisseum eighty thou.
Speaker 1: They're the biggest there is in l A. They own
Speaker 1: l A. And Renny gets hired by Avalon, and we've
Speaker 1: been doing concerts. I'm at u c Irvine. This is four.
Speaker 1: I don't graduate till Lady five. So we bring Wingo
Speaker 1: Boingo for two shows in one night. We bring the
Speaker 1: Cure in two shows in one night, turned the house.
Speaker 1: We do all these concerts, and he realizes he can
Speaker 1: rely on me. So they hired me for two fifty
Speaker 1: dollars a week to drive from Coasta Mesa to Encino
Speaker 1: when Bruce is coming to do his four nights at
Speaker 1: the Colisseum. They called it the Bruce Excees. We'll need
Speaker 1: a little extra help, and so I get I get
Speaker 1: hired to do that. Uh, and so you know, all
Speaker 1: this is kind of going on. At the same time,
Speaker 1: I'm continuing to do work for Gary Tovar. I was
Speaker 1: doing his graphic arts. I would do his l a
Speaker 1: time Sunday calendar ad with rub out letters, throw a
Speaker 1: few skulls in there, take it and get a line
Speaker 1: stat v locks and then I drive it down to
Speaker 1: Bobs upreds In at the l A Times and Gary
Speaker 1: give me a hundred bucks a week to do that. Okay,
Speaker 1: but let's go back to socialty. If you're selling five
Speaker 1: thousand tickets forgetting that Mike's not clean, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of money somewhere. Is any of that money floating down
Speaker 1: to you? Oh yeah, I'm getting fift at this point
Speaker 1: of that, you know, but it's not a lot of money.
Speaker 1: In in four it was a flat guarantee. It might
Speaker 1: have been three four thou dollars. Ticket ticket prices were
Speaker 1: not what they are. You know, we're talking about keeping
Speaker 1: ticket prices under ten dollars. When I started managing the
Speaker 1: Offspring in ninety four, they wouldn't go over a ten
Speaker 1: dollar ticket. That's nine four. This is ten years before that.
Speaker 1: So okay, so you're slapping up to the cino. You're working.
Speaker 1: So that was only for the four days with Bruce
Speaker 1: or did you can? I worked the entire time from
Speaker 1: the literally the moment I graduated. I started the following Monday.
Speaker 1: I never had to do a resume. Started. I sat
Speaker 1: on the couch and I would go up there. They
Speaker 1: have all on office and CEO Brian Murphy. I thought
Speaker 1: was the coolest guy I'd ever seen that works at
Speaker 1: a G But it's a long time at L a promoter,
Speaker 1: and Bob, you can't imagine seeing this guy sit there
Speaker 1: on the phone. And I've told this story before, but
Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell it again because most people haven't heard it.
Speaker 1: I'll never forget when he's getting ready to announce Bruce Springsteen,
Speaker 1: his tickets are going on sale. He's calling Cynthia Fox
Speaker 1: at Camyte and he's going to go live on the air. Now,
Speaker 1: that's just unbelievable. And I'm sitting there watching a little
Speaker 1: bit of Remember I mean, I'm sitting there watching him,
Speaker 1: and I'm like quiet, like I gotta be U watch.
Speaker 1: He's got his Diet Coke there in his Marlborough lights,
Speaker 1: and he's got his jacket on, jeans, white tennis shoes,
Speaker 1: and Murphy looks cool as hell. And he picks up
Speaker 1: the phone. He gets ready to do the phone call.
Speaker 1: It's a couple of minutes before he's going to go
Speaker 1: in there, and and I just remember him going, Hey, Fox,
Speaker 1: what's happening? And I'm just like, oh my god, this
Speaker 1: guy is so cool. Because yeah, we're bringing Bruce l
Speaker 1: A And I'm just like, this is the greatest thing ever.
Speaker 1: I'm just in awe of it. You know, there's nothing
Speaker 1: like being on the inside. It was, and I'm just
Speaker 1: you know, I'm a week or two out of school
Speaker 1: and he let me sit on his couch in his
Speaker 1: office because there's no desk for me. I mean, he
Speaker 1: was very I'd met him over the years because I
Speaker 1: had interned and done stuff and helped out. But it
Speaker 1: was really really cool. And what was your theoretical job?
Speaker 1: I did store reports. I would call Moby Disc and
Speaker 1: I would talk to Bob Say and I would say, hey,
Speaker 1: what's selling this week? You know, what do you got going?
Speaker 1: What's going on? And a lot of things were you know, again,
Speaker 1: it was kind of a for me. It meant a
Speaker 1: lot to all of a sudden be able to say, Hey,
Speaker 1: the Smiths are selling really well, that's gonna that's something
Speaker 1: we should book, or this is doing well. This is
Speaker 1: something we we had to deal with the palladium. So
Speaker 1: we're doing the Palladium shows. And we had a venue
Speaker 1: in San Diego, the open air Amphitheater at San Diego
Speaker 1: State about a four thousand theaters. So you know, I'm
Speaker 1: calling all these records store, I'm talking to X and
Speaker 1: I'm I don't know what I'm doing, but people are
Speaker 1: talking about music and they're telling me bands that I
Speaker 1: like that, how they're selling and what they'll do, and
Speaker 1: and they'd say, I'll never forget any saying me, so
Speaker 1: what do you think the Smith's Palladium? Is it one
Speaker 1: or two? And I'm like, you're asking me, you're asking me,
Speaker 1: this is awesome, right, how long are you I beend
Speaker 1: a couple of years there, and uh, we start managing
Speaker 1: Drama Rama, Steve and I and at this point Moss
Speaker 1: Jacobs is still there, and we would split the money
Speaker 1: four ways. So I did a P and D with
Speaker 1: Important Now and they had a blowtorch hit called Anything
Speaker 1: Anything on k Rock. It was huge, and I start
Speaker 1: booking the band. I do all the booking at this point,
Speaker 1: I make all the calls, college bookings, and we split
Speaker 1: all the money. And it's like I have to ask
Speaker 1: you a license agent at that time, not at all,
Speaker 1: of course, No, not not at all, you know, And
Speaker 1: and that's going on, and I found another club in
Speaker 1: Orange County that very similar to an Ichabod's Thing, and
Speaker 1: I changed the name of it when I book it
Speaker 1: that night, and I call it pretty vacant after a
Speaker 1: sex pistol song and book Jane's addiction in their Red Laura,
Speaker 1: Yellow Lauria, a bunch of Geiger bands and uh, that's
Speaker 1: mark now ahead of music and very pivotal in my career.
Speaker 1: But Reny decides that he wants to form a management
Speaker 1: company within Avalon and he's going to be the head
Speaker 1: of it. Now, all the money has to go into
Speaker 1: this management company, and I don't like that very much
Speaker 1: because well, because we're splitting it four ways, and at
Speaker 1: this point I'm doing the bulk of the work. It's like, okay,
Speaker 1: but you know, I'm young and arrogant about it, like
Speaker 1: this is bullshit, you know what's going on? Okay. Also,
Speaker 1: I'd gotten a raise. I went from two fifty dollars
Speaker 1: a week to something more, but it amounted to thirty
Speaker 1: three thousand dollars a year. And they had given me
Speaker 1: that raise four months before, but I hadn't seen it yet,
Speaker 1: and I complained to complained the complain They said, Okay,
Speaker 1: we're gonna do it, but it's not going to be
Speaker 1: retroactive to the time. Well, right around this time, Mark
Speaker 1: Geiger has put my name in with Larry Vallen who
Speaker 1: turned me onto The Left Sets Letter and Ja Marciano,
Speaker 1: and they invite me to the Hamburger Hamlet and I
Speaker 1: sit down and they say, we'd like you to come
Speaker 1: over to the Universal Lamp Theater. I'm like, wow, because
Speaker 1: the Universe Lamp Theater, that's to me, the big time,
Speaker 1: like I've seen before. They put the roof on, I've
Speaker 1: been there. It is veep to me, preeminent music venue
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles. And they explain what it is and
Speaker 1: how they do their thing different. Do you remember what
Speaker 1: they said that was different. Well, they booked a venue
Speaker 1: and I had been in the four wall business, which
Speaker 1: as we go in, you know we had irvine meadows,
Speaker 1: but we treated it like a four wall business. We
Speaker 1: would go in explain what a four wall business. You
Speaker 1: basically go in and you rent the four walls and
Speaker 1: you charge let's say ten dollars at the door, and
Speaker 1: a hundred people show up, you have a thousand dollars
Speaker 1: and you have some to pay the ban or whatever
Speaker 1: is left over you keep. Well, they own that building now,
Speaker 1: so there's the parking, the peanuts, the concessions, and they're
Speaker 1: running a much different operation. It is truly the contemporary
Speaker 1: concert industry. And I feel like wow. And they're getting
Speaker 1: ready to build one in Denver, and they have one Atlanta,
Speaker 1: and and Irving, by the way, is running it right.
Speaker 1: Of course, Irving had left management after the Eagles broke up.
Speaker 1: That's Irving as off and he got hired to run
Speaker 1: m c A Records, which was a dump at the time,
Speaker 1: and he started this concert business and let Ja Marciano
Speaker 1: run around the country and building these venues. That's right.
Speaker 1: And for those who don't know, Ja Marciano now runs
Speaker 1: a g one of the two concert powerhouses in the world.
Speaker 1: That's right. And they bring me in to do what
Speaker 1: to book the new bands. I'm the new band guy.
Speaker 1: Whatever that thing is that you guys do at the Palladium,
Speaker 1: we needed to bring here. And I'm going to tell
Speaker 1: you something. Larry Vallen, in as many chances as he had,
Speaker 1: would always say, Jim came up with the idea of
Speaker 1: party in the pit, take the seats out of the pit. Really,
Speaker 1: he would say that he would give me credit for
Speaker 1: having done that, so that there would be a general
Speaker 1: admission to give some of the stiffness of the universe
Speaker 1: lamp there. It was never my idea. It was always Larry's.
Speaker 1: And I'm telling you the guy, I'm like, Larry, this
Speaker 1: is You're the one who came up with the idea,
Speaker 1: you know. But He's like, yeah, we came up with
Speaker 1: it together. And then it would be you just came
Speaker 1: up with it alone. The generosity of that guy, he
Speaker 1: was fantastic to work with, you know. I mean, he
Speaker 1: was really, really, really terrific. And Jay Jay had a
Speaker 1: vocabulary of music that was foreign to me. He would
Speaker 1: be booking Stephanie Mills and he had booked the the
Speaker 1: Theater on and he had a musical vocabulary that was
Speaker 1: four to me. He would just sit there and these
Speaker 1: guys the Beverly Theater, right, And so they would sit
Speaker 1: there and they do five nights of Earth, Wind and Fire,
Speaker 1: and they bring in George Benson, and they bring in
Speaker 1: the Whispers and Stephanie Mila and Larry was doing all
Speaker 1: these Latin things and I started to go, Okay, they're
Speaker 1: doing things that are outside of just my sphere of understanding.
Speaker 1: They know how to do the business and I started
Speaker 1: to grow up a little bit, you know, and uh,
Speaker 1: and that's when he gave me my first left set.
Speaker 1: So I'm like, what is this? Okay? So how long
Speaker 1: do you work at Universal? Ten months? I hate it.
Speaker 1: You hate it because because it was very corporate and
Speaker 1: the guy who was the boss of Larry and Jay
Speaker 1: I had booked you Be forty into Fiddler's Green, the
Speaker 1: new venue in Denver, and I did it with Ian Copeland,
Speaker 1: who ran the FBI agency. And they had a lot
Speaker 1: of acts. Everybody from the police and Squeeze to the
Speaker 1: go goes, all sorts of different acts. And Ian was
Speaker 1: a great guy. He was one of the pioneers of
Speaker 1: music that I loved recently to see. And the show
Speaker 1: wasn't selling great. And he said, you go back and
Speaker 1: tell him what if we were giving him X. He said,
Speaker 1: give him half off X. He said, I can't do that,
Speaker 1: so you gotta do it. I know I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: do it. This is the corporate guy. Yeah, and it
Speaker 1: just really was awful. I haven't heard from him in
Speaker 1: thirty years, probably heard about him for thirty years. But
Speaker 1: it just wasn't comfortable, and so I wasn't willing to
Speaker 1: do that. And at this point Mark Geiger shows up
Speaker 1: again and he goes, wall, wait before you get there,
Speaker 1: the show played. How did it do? We made money?
Speaker 1: We made money. So Geiger at this time when he
Speaker 1: shows up again, what is he doing? I think he's
Speaker 1: he's the hot guy at Triad probably, which is another
Speaker 1: agency that morphs into some other agency and you know,
Speaker 1: kind of repopulates itself. But he shows up and he goes, hey,
Speaker 1: you know A and m is looking for somebody, and
Speaker 1: I'm like, what is that? What was the job description?
Speaker 1: It was the head of artist development. And so Michael Leon,
Speaker 1: who's the head of the East Coast office, comes in
Speaker 1: and he says, I want you to meet Gil Freezing.
Speaker 1: We'd like to talk to you about this job. And
Speaker 1: I'll never forget that because if there is a mentor
Speaker 1: for me in the business, it was Guil Freezing for sure.
Speaker 1: I go in, I sit down, and and I say,
Speaker 1: what is artist development as well? Jim, That's how Gil talked.
Speaker 1: You'll tell us now, won't you. That's so guilt. So
Speaker 1: so the Gil unfortunately is not with us either. But
Speaker 1: and I was like, this guy is just weird, you know,
Speaker 1: just so uncomfortable you know what I mean. And uh,
Speaker 1: And my experience with record companies are you'd call somebody
Speaker 1: in the promotion department, because I'm a concert promoter, to say, hey,
Speaker 1: do you want to help promote. I didn't realize promotion
Speaker 1: was they call radio stations. I was like, we're going
Speaker 1: to promote, and they wouldn't help you at all, and
Speaker 1: they'd be there the night of the show taking pictures.
Speaker 1: I didn't like record company people as a rule, but
Speaker 1: I was not happy where I was and I wanted
Speaker 1: something new, and I went to A and M and
Speaker 1: I took on this job. And at the time when
Speaker 1: I start the job, it's primarily making copies of videos
Speaker 1: and sending them to the local video shows. Artist development
Speaker 1: is video promotion. You remember the year that you go
Speaker 1: to work at and I'm like, this is videos, making videos.
Speaker 1: I didn't understand that as artist development in my mind.
Speaker 1: But I also controlled the promotional budget and the tour
Speaker 1: support budget, and I see that as as something. And
Speaker 1: we're signing bands, and I remember eight is when I
Speaker 1: met Tony Hawk. I took Social Distortion up to Seattle
Speaker 1: to do the Gotcha Grind and we had just signed
Speaker 1: this band called Sound Garden and the manager called me,
Speaker 1: Susan Silver, and she said, I'd like to talk to you,
Speaker 1: and we're going to go to the new music seminar
Speaker 1: and we like to see if we can open for
Speaker 1: Iggy Pop. And Iggy Pop at the time is on
Speaker 1: A and M. And I said, I'm gonna be in Seattle.
Speaker 1: Why don't we meet each other in person? So we
Speaker 1: do and she shows up with this long haired Hessian
Speaker 1: and of course I don't realize it's Chris Cornell, you know.
Speaker 1: And I meet Chris and Susan for the first time.
Speaker 1: I'm with the drummer of Social Distortion. I'm there is
Speaker 1: the A and M rep but also managing Social Distortion.
Speaker 1: They let me keep Social Distortion. That was a big thing.
Speaker 1: Gil said, yeah, you can continue with them, because nobody
Speaker 1: thought they were anything. That didn't matter. It turns out
Speaker 1: they signed an epic and you know, I'm not managing
Speaker 1: a band on Sony, you know, from like that's crazy.
Speaker 1: So anyway, it's eight and I start to encounter these
Speaker 1: younger bands. This is pre Nirvana, whether it's Soul Asylum,
Speaker 1: Sound Garden, but bands that they're not getting a lot
Speaker 1: of attention at the time. There's a general manager there
Speaker 1: by the name of Bob Rightman. He's like, Sting doesn't
Speaker 1: need your help, don't worry about that. There's somewhere that
Speaker 1: find the bands that are excited, that want to talk
Speaker 1: to you. And I thought it was really good advice
Speaker 1: because within a label, which is pretty big, there are
Speaker 1: these little orphaned bands that are kind of just lingering.
Speaker 1: And I needed something to do, and I need somewhere
Speaker 1: to hang my hat and something to to work on.
Speaker 1: And so these bands start to become important. And I
Speaker 1: remember having a meeting with Sound Garden and Susan and
Speaker 1: we're sitting there. I had suggested that they bring an
Speaker 1: extension cord and clip on lights when they go on tour,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, why, I said, your T shirt sales
Speaker 1: will go up. And that was like the moment where
Speaker 1: I realized this is what artists develop him in. Is
Speaker 1: this is where you shift away from sending videos out
Speaker 1: and all that nonsense to you're gonna do this like
Speaker 1: a concert promoter. You're gonna try and you're gonna try
Speaker 1: and build bands on the road. So you knew that
Speaker 1: about the extension corp. From being a promoter, from being
Speaker 1: a manager, of Social Distortion. That's how we sold more
Speaker 1: T shirts because we did all our own merch And
Speaker 1: I'd done that now with Social Distortion for five years.
Speaker 1: I'd managed them through the clubs, through the all the places.
Speaker 1: I'd done what these bands are getting ready to do,
Speaker 1: I've been doing for five years. And I said, if
Speaker 1: we can grow you at a certain point to where
Speaker 1: you can tour on your own and make money, at
Speaker 1: some point, you'll have success. Now, I didn't know what
Speaker 1: it would become. I you know, I mean, it looks
Speaker 1: great in hindsight. Yes, the market moved a little bit.
Speaker 1: Sound Garden has black Hole, Sun It Works, Blues Traveler,
Speaker 1: you know a number of bands. But I knew that
Speaker 1: the touring thing was going to be very important, and
Speaker 1: it seemed to also correspond with the kind of artists
Speaker 1: that I liked and that could have long term success,
Speaker 1: that would create catalog and all the things that felt
Speaker 1: like buzzwords for this word label that I'm starting at.
Speaker 1: You know, I saw with the Police that was the
Speaker 1: kind of template. Okay, so at this time, a lot
Speaker 1: of crazy stuff happens at A and M and M
Speaker 1: is sold to poly Graham. Jerry Moss leaves not right away.
Speaker 1: Jerry gil leaves right away, but Jerry and Herbs stay on.
Speaker 1: They run up for about a year, and at this
Speaker 1: point there's heavy turnover. And I've been there for a
Speaker 1: few years now. I had become the head of marketing.
Speaker 1: I think at this point Alcaferro had been the general manager.
Speaker 1: When Jerry leaves, he becomes the president. I become the
Speaker 1: general manager. And we had been really cold for a
Speaker 1: long time, like it had been been bad. But we
Speaker 1: start to things start to happen. We start to sell
Speaker 1: some records. We start to have Amy Grant, Brian Adams
Speaker 1: goes on Fire and Aaron Neville. We have the C. C.
Speaker 1: Peniston single, the Gin Blossom. Zo and I had had
Speaker 1: a discussion over Temple of the Dog, Sound Garden Blue.
Speaker 1: You know, Cheryl Crow. We get hot, you know, we
Speaker 1: get hot. And like everybody, any any executive, you're only
Speaker 1: as good as the clients you have and the people
Speaker 1: you work with. That's what you do. And so Al
Speaker 1: goes away for six months. Okay, I'll len Leavey who
Speaker 1: runs PolyGram sends him to Harvard for educational purpose, Harvard
Speaker 1: Business School, and I get to take over for six
Speaker 1: months and I've got a great group of people, but
Speaker 1: it's uncomfortable because I'm young. I'm without question have the
Speaker 1: shortest tenure in the record industry. But I just say
Speaker 1: that to everybody. I know, this is uncomfortable. I got
Speaker 1: the shortest tenure. But we got a job to do.
Speaker 1: We got we gotta get this done and we've got
Speaker 1: to nail it. We've got to keep these PolyGram dogs
Speaker 1: at Bay because they're very corporate. Now it's simultaneously it
Speaker 1: becomes a big factor. You become involved with the offspring.
Speaker 1: How does that happen, Well, that doesn't happen until and
Speaker 1: at this point, my feeling about A and M has
Speaker 1: gone sour. I've been approached by Sony to come work there.
Speaker 1: I've had a couple other approaches from some people. I
Speaker 1: don't take anything, but I'm not happy where I'm at
Speaker 1: because the PolyGram influence has really come in. It really
Speaker 1: hits uh a point. First off, I have to say
Speaker 1: Alc Farroll gave me a tremendous amount of just latitude.
Speaker 1: He gave me. I don't know why, but he did,
Speaker 1: and and we had success. And so he continued to
Speaker 1: but theyre reached a point where he was spending so
Speaker 1: much time dealing with PolyGram, and they were interfering so
Speaker 1: much with our operation. I was starting to lose people.
Speaker 1: I was starting to not be able to pay people.
Speaker 1: I was starting not to build bonus people. They came
Speaker 1: up with a certain point where they weren't honoring contracts,
Speaker 1: and it hit between Al and me when we had
Speaker 1: our Grammy tickets. We had fifty tickets and I had
Speaker 1: made the list of who they should go to. I
Speaker 1: sent it to him for approval, and all of a
Speaker 1: suddenen day calls because they want forty six of them back.
Speaker 1: I said, for what he goes for Wall Street people,
Speaker 1: he can't let him do that. Now he's dealing with
Speaker 1: PolyGram directly in a lan can't him do well? We
Speaker 1: have no choice And I said, then you got forty
Speaker 1: eight tickets. I'm not going. And I said, and you
Speaker 1: shouldn't go either. And that was kind of arrogant, asshole
Speaker 1: move on my part, but it was what it was
Speaker 1: at the time, you know. And I realized that my
Speaker 1: time was up there and I was ring to have
Speaker 1: this sense that I just don't want to do this anymore.
Speaker 1: I'd gone from that point where you're making two fifty
Speaker 1: dollars a week and loving every minute to making a
Speaker 1: lot more money than I ever thought I would make,
Speaker 1: and just not enjoying myself. And I wanted to change
Speaker 1: my life, and so I quit bob here. When I'm
Speaker 1: not interviewing industry titans and learning about how they made
Speaker 1: their mark in their fields, all write about music, tech,
Speaker 1: current events, and everything in between. Subscribe to the Left
Speaker 1: Sets later at left sets dot com to find out
Speaker 1: what's on my mind. Back to my conversation with Jim Garreto,
Speaker 1: I thought that Offspring had success before you quit. April
Speaker 1: of ninety four, I start managing them. So what had
Speaker 1: happened is in I get a phone call and I'd
Speaker 1: always been taught. I don't care whether it was Bill
Speaker 1: Elson or Toma Ross. You return every phone call. And
Speaker 1: this guy calls me and it's Dexter Holland and he
Speaker 1: explains he's in a band and he's going to USC
Speaker 1: and he's this, and uh, do I want to manage him?
Speaker 1: And I said I can't. I'm the general manager of
Speaker 1: Van m you know. And he goes, can you help
Speaker 1: me get on a Fugazi show at the Palladium with
Speaker 1: Golden boys, and I said, well, here's Paul Toilett's phone number,
Speaker 1: you know, reach out and he got on the show.
Speaker 1: And the following year he calls me because we've got
Speaker 1: another record and it looks like A Rock is gonna
Speaker 1: start playing it. Larry Weintraub was my assistant at the time,
Speaker 1: and I was like, dude, this record is amazing, and
Speaker 1: I'm just uncomfortable enough of what I'm doing that I say,
Speaker 1: you know what, I'm gonna have this guy come in.
Speaker 1: And so he comes in and I love him. He's
Speaker 1: a real genuine sweetheart. He's a gentleman, he's polite, and
Speaker 1: the records amazing. You know, it's amazing, and it goes
Speaker 1: through the roof at A Rock and I say, I'll
Speaker 1: start managing you. So that's April ofission. No. At this
Speaker 1: point I really don't care. I wind up quitting in July.
Speaker 1: Was there any pressure this this was literally the biggest
Speaker 1: hit on K Rock at that time. Was there any
Speaker 1: pressure for me? And Am absolutely absolutely? And there were
Speaker 1: pressure from internally. Bob Score Mercury want to sign him.
Speaker 1: I'm hearing from Danny Goldberg. He wants to sign everybody,
Speaker 1: all all the people I know want to sign them,
Speaker 1: And I'm saying to the band, They're like, we don't
Speaker 1: want to meet anybody. We don't want to meet anybody,
Speaker 1: we don't want to talk to anybody. We're not going
Speaker 1: to take a meeting. We want to be on Epitaph.
Speaker 1: They turned down Saturday Night Live, they turned down all
Speaker 1: these things. They're just like, we don't want to participate
Speaker 1: in any of that stuff. We think that's all lame
Speaker 1: and don't want to do it. In retrospect, good or
Speaker 1: bad move? In retrospect bad move, because um, well, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: it's a mixed grade. They weren't ready for it. For sure.
Speaker 1: Had they been where they are were several years later,
Speaker 1: they would have been able to deliver the goods. But
Speaker 1: at this point they've never even sold out the whiskey.
Speaker 1: They're not at that point where you need to be
Speaker 1: at the premier television show playing because it would have
Speaker 1: been too soon. They would have tanked. Frankly, I don't
Speaker 1: think they would have been very good. You know, they're
Speaker 1: they're just getting ready to go out and do their
Speaker 1: first real touring and start to develop their chops. And
Speaker 1: in a weird way, that's the irony of a band
Speaker 1: like that. They kind of broke off a pop music
Speaker 1: model more than a mat Alica model or social distoration
Speaker 1: or sound Garden. They almost broke more of a pop
Speaker 1: model where the song got huge. They sell eleven million
Speaker 1: records on Epitaph, and they're just growing into being a
Speaker 1: good band. They haven't fully realized that yet. Well, it's
Speaker 1: fascinated because it's today's marketplace. You know, it used to
Speaker 1: be up until like five years ago, cream would rise
Speaker 1: to the top on the Internet. Now there's so much noise.
Speaker 1: So the question is do you take the opportunities do
Speaker 1: not take the opportunities. It's more gray than ever before.
Speaker 1: But I think these are important questions. I think they
Speaker 1: are too and I'm not sure whether it's the cred
Speaker 1: question that would be each specific situation, but you definitely
Speaker 1: have to be able to be ready when you do
Speaker 1: get the shot. You can undo your shot very quickly
Speaker 1: if you suck. It's funny because I've been living through
Speaker 1: this with Greta van Fleet, which the label is Jason
Speaker 1: Flom and the agent his guide whether you push the
Speaker 1: button or not, and whether it eventually happened. So how
Speaker 1: does it ultimately go down with a and M I
Speaker 1: decided to leave. I decaid I'm gonna move to Laguna
Speaker 1: Beach And they say, what would say? You're gonna leave?
Speaker 1: Really you're the gentleman, like why? But at this point
Speaker 1: there's enough strife between Al and me. Then he's like, yes,
Speaker 1: probably time for him to go. It's probably time for him.
Speaker 1: You know, we're we're definitely butting heads, you know, on
Speaker 1: a pretty regular basis. And again I say that with
Speaker 1: all due respect because the guy gave me such a shot.
Speaker 1: But subsequent to that, they really never had another hit.
Speaker 1: Who's that? And m Cheryl continued, you know, I'm talking
Speaker 1: about a new act. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure we
Speaker 1: could go through, but relatively speaking, they got colder and colder. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think so. I think that that that the the
Speaker 1: PolyGram influence was inevitable, and sooner or later it just
Speaker 1: choked him off. And I really do think that. You know,
Speaker 1: at some point, you know, you've got to have the spirit.
Speaker 1: I remember going in Dalla's office say I want to
Speaker 1: spend two hund fifty thousand dollars on Cheryl Crow TV.
Speaker 1: He's like, really, yeah, I think it's time. I think
Speaker 1: we gotta go okay, and I brought him Bill Gilbert,
Speaker 1: who was the Grizzly sales guy from Boston. He was
Speaker 1: like twenty years older than May. And whenever Billy and
Speaker 1: I walked in Dalla's, obviously just threw santhem because lee
Speaker 1: me alone. Guys, whatever you want, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: It was, and it was great. Once Billy left, it
Speaker 1: really changed for me. You know, when Billy left, the
Speaker 1: whole game really changed because there was nothing in between
Speaker 1: Al and me. You know, So when you go to Laguna,
Speaker 1: if you already have a deal with Clive, what's the story. No, No,
Speaker 1: if this goes you go to Laguna, you're just gonna
Speaker 1: manage social Dan, You're just gonna be in the draw offspring.
Speaker 1: Not that there's not enough money there honestly, but my
Speaker 1: calculus was, you can either make more money. Okay, you
Speaker 1: make more money, you get more stuff and you create
Speaker 1: your own prison, or find a way to live off
Speaker 1: a hunter Grand. And that's what I was saying to
Speaker 1: my friends at the time. I'll find a way to
Speaker 1: live off a Hunter Grand. You know, I'm single at
Speaker 1: this point, I'm thirty five years old. Move, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: make it simple I'm gonna simplify my life, you know,
Speaker 1: I want to have fun again. I don't want to
Speaker 1: approach the music industry like it's a chore. We all
Speaker 1: know these people, you know, you reach a certain age
Speaker 1: where it's like God, all they do is complain about there.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to be that. I wanted to make
Speaker 1: Flyers again. I wanted to get involved with the video.
Speaker 1: I wanted to do that, and I just wanted to
Speaker 1: enjoy myself doing it again. And so at this point
Speaker 1: I moved to Laguna. Did you immediately read the office
Speaker 1: you ultimately did? Oh? No, no, no, not at all.
Speaker 1: I stay at my house in Sherman Oaks until September
Speaker 1: of ninety four. And then Peter Harper, who now works
Speaker 1: a ticketmaster, had found a two bedroom house down on
Speaker 1: Victoria Street, and we took one of the bedrooms and
Speaker 1: converted it and I slept in the other bedroom. And uh,
Speaker 1: I didn't even see it. I was on tour at
Speaker 1: the Offspring. I come home, directions to my house or
Speaker 1: my new place are are on the seat of my
Speaker 1: new jeep, Grand Cherokee, which I had bought before I left,
Speaker 1: and sitting in my garage in Sherman Oaks. I drive down,
Speaker 1: It's like, Wow, this is it. And it was challenging
Speaker 1: because all of a sudden, you know, I would come
Speaker 1: home from work and it would be quiet, and I've
Speaker 1: done one of these guys. I was out every single
Speaker 1: night now VISU and I don't know where to go.
Speaker 1: And it was what I needed at that point in
Speaker 1: my life. If I wanted to change my life, I
Speaker 1: knew I wanted something different. I didn't know what it was,
Speaker 1: but I knew if I just kept filling that void
Speaker 1: with activity, it was nothing going to change. I was
Speaker 1: just gonna keep doing the same ship over and over
Speaker 1: and over until I was in my sixties. Okay, So
Speaker 1: was the next step the deal with time Bomb with
Speaker 1: Clive Davis. The next step was Michelle Anthony, who had
Speaker 1: been Soundgarden's lawyer, had gone to Sony and she said,
Speaker 1: Donny's gonna call you. I said, what She goes, Donnie
Speaker 1: and Tommy want you to come to New York. They
Speaker 1: want you to be the president of Columbia Records. I'm like, oh, wow,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, that's a big gig if you've
Speaker 1: been a career music person. It was a This was
Speaker 1: sixty three days after I moved to Laguna. I'm like,
Speaker 1: and at that point, you know, I've got the offspring.
Speaker 1: I had had a good career as a record guy.
Speaker 1: I'm having my moment and Clive wants me to come
Speaker 1: in and I had met with Danny about some stuff
Speaker 1: and it's kind of going like you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: like I'm I'm in the mix. And this is the
Speaker 1: point where I'm kind of quasi down shifting, you know,
Speaker 1: And all of a sudden it's heating up. And they
Speaker 1: fly me into New York and I go to New
Speaker 1: York and I sit down and they tell me what
Speaker 1: it would be to be president of Columbia Records. The
Speaker 1: youngest president, you know, and the biggest label, and it's
Speaker 1: Yankee Stadium, it's Harvard and you know, like in the
Speaker 1: five Madison building, you know what I mean. And it's
Speaker 1: it's impressive and I go right along with it. And
Speaker 1: Dave Johnson comes in, he starts writing the contract. And
Speaker 1: I get home and I tell a friend of mine,
Speaker 1: this girl I worked with it and m Emily Kay,
Speaker 1: I tell her, yep, I'm gonna go be the president
Speaker 1: of Columbia and she goes, what is wrong with you.
Speaker 1: She goes, that is just the opposite of what you said.
Speaker 1: I didn't picture you being doing something like that just
Speaker 1: for the money. And it's stung because it was true.
Speaker 1: It was one of those roads not taken moments where
Speaker 1: you go, you know what, I'm doing it because I
Speaker 1: think you'll think it's cool. I'm doing it because they'll
Speaker 1: think it's cool. I don't want to go to New York.
Speaker 1: My mom and dad are probably in their eighties at
Speaker 1: this point. You know, they live nearby. I've got a
Speaker 1: phenomenal relationship with them. I love living in Laguna Beach.
Speaker 1: I've got a life. And it was just enough where
Speaker 1: I called Michelle and I said, I don't want to
Speaker 1: do it. She was really and Tommy called mint it,
Speaker 1: I can't believe this is the stupidest thing anybody's ever
Speaker 1: done in their life. And I said, it may be,
Speaker 1: but it's what I need to do, you know. And
Speaker 1: it was really, really, really a big moment because it
Speaker 1: was also a moment where I said I'm not going
Speaker 1: to live through my business card. I'm going to have
Speaker 1: an adult relationship with my job. Up to that point,
Speaker 1: my job had been my life. My job had been
Speaker 1: who I was and how I was defined, and at
Speaker 1: that moment it was like, you know what, it's time
Speaker 1: to put the big boy pants on. You know, this
Speaker 1: is a good job. I like what I do for
Speaker 1: a living, but it's just a job. It's no longer
Speaker 1: going to be what it was when I was twenty
Speaker 1: one or fourteen, when I'm listening to Quadraphini and it's
Speaker 1: my religion and everything rolled into one. And I think
Speaker 1: that's what happens is there's attention as you get older
Speaker 1: where it's like, Okay, that doesn't feel right. I have
Speaker 1: other things that I'm growing into that are interesting to me,
Speaker 1: Like I like to read books to you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. There was a point where it's just I
Speaker 1: just wanted to go to a show every night, and
Speaker 1: if I party three out of five nights a week.
Speaker 1: When going whatever, it was just life on the run. Well,
Speaker 1: now in thirty five and I don't want to do
Speaker 1: that anymore. But you move to look at a beach
Speaker 1: and you don't have any solill infrastructure, have no social infrastructure,
Speaker 1: and that's when the walls come in and all of
Speaker 1: a sudden it's like, Okay, I'm not going to rely
Speaker 1: on that anymore now concurrent with Sony approaching me. Clive
Speaker 1: had approached me, but he had said, you should just
Speaker 1: do your own label. And Sony had told me I
Speaker 1: can have my own label too well being the president. Um.
Speaker 1: But once I told him I didn't want to be president,
Speaker 1: they weren't putting forth the idea of a label. And
Speaker 1: so I agreed to do with Clive, you know, and
Speaker 1: I wasn't sure about it, but I had seen what
Speaker 1: Brett Kurwitz had done with Epitaph, and I was very
Speaker 1: impressed with Brett, and I was just the way he
Speaker 1: talked about it, the way that you when you start
Speaker 1: a label. Again, this is gonna sound goofy, but I
Speaker 1: didn't have my own assistant. I didn't need an assistant.
Speaker 1: If I'm gonna book travel, I'm gonna use the travel
Speaker 1: things on the internet, in which is all new, and
Speaker 1: I'm gonna compose my own letters, because to write it
Speaker 1: out longhand and then have somebody type it and then
Speaker 1: correct it it was just inefficient. So there was there
Speaker 1: was starting to be this shift where technology would create
Speaker 1: these efficiencies if you're starting your company now, and so
Speaker 1: I figured I want to adopt what Brett's mindset was,
Speaker 1: and I want to do that. And we signed a
Speaker 1: bunch of great bands, you know, whether it was Social
Speaker 1: Distortion who came aboard and the Vandals we put out
Speaker 1: in Amazing Crowns and Sunny Day Real Estate and Death
Speaker 1: in Vegas and all sorts of great x. But none
Speaker 1: of them hit. You own those records. I was a
Speaker 1: joint venture, so I owned half of them. Why do
Speaker 1: you think they didn't hit? There weren't hits. It wasn't
Speaker 1: a matter of not having enough infrastructure to promote them. No,
Speaker 1: at this point, here's what infrastructure looks like. Okay, what
Speaker 1: is required. You call Kevin Weatherly, if he agrees with you,
Speaker 1: it goes on k Rock. If it gets hot, it
Speaker 1: picks up ten markets the next week. Once you get
Speaker 1: those ten markets, you call Rick Krim and he's like,
Speaker 1: if he agrees with those ten markets, you're on MTV. Wait,
Speaker 1: we did that gag over at A and m over
Speaker 1: and over again. You know, but you had to have reality.
Speaker 1: And the beauty about what was going on in the
Speaker 1: record industry at this point was what Mike Chalotte had
Speaker 1: created with sound Scan. You now knew when something was real.
Speaker 1: You now knew right away you could see that thing
Speaker 1: that would happen. If Drama Rama had hit in ninety
Speaker 1: four instead of eight five or eighty six, with anything Anything,
Speaker 1: you would have seen the sales explode out of Bob
Speaker 1: Says store, and and it would have been more visible,
Speaker 1: it would have been more more legible to the powers
Speaker 1: that be that controlled the media. And so those just
Speaker 1: weren't hits. They would get on the air and they
Speaker 1: would be passive. What did you learn in that process?
Speaker 1: I learned having hits is very, very hard, and when
Speaker 1: when you find them, you know, it's it takes a
Speaker 1: certain genius to find acts, or be patient long enough
Speaker 1: for a black hole sun to come along, or for
Speaker 1: social distortion to have a These are years in the
Speaker 1: making these bands. You bet on the band and then eventually,
Speaker 1: but at this point things are starting to turn into
Speaker 1: a bit of a microwave in the record industry, and
Speaker 1: there's an expectation of it happening a little bit quicker.
Speaker 1: Certainly there was for me. How long did you do
Speaker 1: it with Clive Well, through him leaving, you know, through
Speaker 1: him leaving you know, I mean I was still with
Speaker 1: BMG at the point when Clive left you're talking about
Speaker 1: when he left Arista informed J. Yeah, So how many
Speaker 1: years was that? I don't remember exactly, Okay, but today
Speaker 1: do you remember presenting my time bomb stuff right after
Speaker 1: Puffy one time at a BMG thing And it was
Speaker 1: torture because he was so big and it was such
Speaker 1: a monster, and I'm coming in with all these little
Speaker 1: indie bands being like, oh gosh, and it owns those
Speaker 1: records today now Concorde owns it. At some point BMG
Speaker 1: wanted out and they said, you can keep the Masters,
Speaker 1: but we want to terminate the deal, and so I
Speaker 1: got the Masters, and then years later sold him to Concord. Okay,
Speaker 1: and how was your experience working with Claude Davis? Well?
Speaker 1: He was a trip. What I was trying to do.
Speaker 1: I don't think he understood really, but he gave me
Speaker 1: a lot of room to prove that I was right,
Speaker 1: and I didn't prove that I was right many people
Speaker 1: from the rock world because splitting his ten ures in half,
Speaker 1: you had the era of Columbia. Then he went to
Speaker 1: aristad Face soon after Patti Smith and a few of
Speaker 1: the Kinks whatever. He went very pop sure and the
Speaker 1: people from ROC and went to work for Clive ultimately
Speaker 1: complained that it became a pop sensibility where's the hit
Speaker 1: micro management? And they were not happy and they were
Speaker 1: not given much leeway. But it seems that your situation
Speaker 1: was different. It was much different. He gave me a
Speaker 1: lot of leeway. He was very curious. I remember one
Speaker 1: time him grabbed me in the elevators. Time Bomb is
Speaker 1: not the right name for your label, you know, And
Speaker 1: I wanted something that evoked the stacks vault, you know
Speaker 1: type thing. I wanted something like that that you can
Speaker 1: make a great T shirt out of. And and I've
Speaker 1: got the great time Bomb logo and it looked really
Speaker 1: really cool. I'm like wow. But that kind of was
Speaker 1: was a bit of a non secret of the conversation.
Speaker 1: He gave me as much room to operate and resources
Speaker 1: to operate. I just didn't hit it. I just didn't.
Speaker 1: I failed at it. You know. I would love to
Speaker 1: have had one of those records hit and been able
Speaker 1: to say, ah, proof of concept, but I didn't. But
Speaker 1: the deal, if you were there that long, how to
Speaker 1: be renewed. It was renewed. So thank you. You know,
Speaker 1: he gave me a great oportunity. So at what point
Speaker 1: do you start picking up other acts from management. Well,
Speaker 1: at this point I had become very very close with
Speaker 1: Chris Cornell through Sound Garden and he's getting ready to
Speaker 1: leave Sound Garden, and I don't know exactly how it
Speaker 1: came up with Susan, who's still one of my best friends,
Speaker 1: but she says, I'm not going to manage your solo career,
Speaker 1: Jim should do it. And it was like the three
Speaker 1: of us, you know, I mean like we would meet
Speaker 1: and talk about them purchasing their first home, like this
Speaker 1: is how you're gonna do it, you know. I mean
Speaker 1: we're really really, really close. And so I'm like, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: you know, and and so I start managing Chris and
Speaker 1: then I take on Ran said they're on Epitaph. They
Speaker 1: were getting ready to leave to go to Epic Records.
Speaker 1: Michael Goldstone was signing them, and ran into them at
Speaker 1: a Fillmore show that the Offspring were doing. And at
Speaker 1: this point, they're kind of personna on Garrata at Epitaph
Speaker 1: because they're leaving and they're really unhappy, like you could
Speaker 1: just see the strain on them. And I see Tim
Speaker 1: and I see Lars. I'm like, guys, what's the deal
Speaker 1: and just you know, this is hard and while then
Speaker 1: why are you leaving? You know, clearly the Offspring have
Speaker 1: shown you can have success, and they're like, well, it
Speaker 1: feels like we're too far down the road, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: never too far. And so within a month they had
Speaker 1: had reached out to me and said would you manage us?
Speaker 1: And I said, yeah, I love the band. I think
Speaker 1: they're great and I love the guys, and um I
Speaker 1: called Brett up and I said, hey, listen, they're not
Speaker 1: going to go to epic. Do you want him back?
Speaker 1: And he was are your kidding? Because he was heartbroken.
Speaker 1: I think it was his favorite band of all time
Speaker 1: on epitaph. And I said, yeah, here's you know what
Speaker 1: it would look like to do, and if you're agreeable
Speaker 1: to that, let's meet with the guys in the next
Speaker 1: couple of days. He's like, you're not joking me, and
Speaker 1: I said no. I said, We've seen through the Offspring
Speaker 1: that anything that they can have success. You guys have
Speaker 1: sold a lot of records on a worldwide basis. There's
Speaker 1: no reason, you know. He goes wow, you know, And
Speaker 1: so it was a really great moment where they kind
Speaker 1: of returned was that the right choice, no question, because
Speaker 1: they're still there by the way, and they've had opportunities
Speaker 1: to leave. You know, that's where they're kind of heart
Speaker 1: and soul is. You know, they were that kind of band.
Speaker 1: So we complete that record cycle, record called Let's Go,
Speaker 1: get a video called Salvation on MTV, come out without
Speaker 1: an outcome the Wolves, and it sells two million copies.
Speaker 1: So it worked, you know, and they were doing really
Speaker 1: really well. Okay, So now you have RANSD Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then Chris Social Distortion in the Offspring. Suddenly you're a manager.
Speaker 1: You're comfortable with that because you're someone who's always evaluating
Speaker 1: your direction. Yeah, I am. I'm I'm okay with it
Speaker 1: because I love the bands that I'm working with, and
Speaker 1: I'm comfortable with it. By this point, I've I've gotten married.
Speaker 1: I get married in ninety seven and we start having kids.
Speaker 1: We have Jessica in October. Uh, and I'm a dad too.
Speaker 1: So life is kind of all all over and and
Speaker 1: and changing for sure, and I'm having a I'm having
Speaker 1: a good time with it. In the back of your mind,
Speaker 1: are you plotting it all saying this is where I
Speaker 1: want to be next, but this is what I want
Speaker 1: or you're just going with the flow. I'm going with
Speaker 1: it at this point. I'm really, you know, trying very
Speaker 1: hard to remain in laguon a beach somewhere between Crown
Speaker 1: Valley and Broadway, you know, and like I'm really trying
Speaker 1: not to travel. One of the things that I would
Speaker 1: say to everybody along is getting big z easy. Staying
Speaker 1: small as hard. Saying no is hard to do because
Speaker 1: what do you say no to at that time? More opportunities,
Speaker 1: more bands, because everybody wants you to manage a band.
Speaker 1: You can only do so much before you lose a
Speaker 1: connection with them. So I think it's ninety eight that
Speaker 1: I pick up No Doubt, you know. And what is
Speaker 1: the status of No Doubt at that time? Well, they
Speaker 1: they had Tragic Kingdom and they sold b zillions of records.
Speaker 1: Tom Attensio right, right, So how did it end with Atensio?
Speaker 1: I don't know exactly. I think they mutually agreed to
Speaker 1: part ways, is what I understand. I've known Tom because
Speaker 1: he was managing New Order back in the day. Geiger
Speaker 1: was the agent. Tom was the manager, and I was
Speaker 1: promoting the shows. Uh. In a lot of instances, uh,
Speaker 1: And you know, Tom was a very capable guy. So
Speaker 1: but at that point, they're on the open market. And
Speaker 1: I've met him over the years just because I grew
Speaker 1: up in Orange County and I've done social distortion, the
Speaker 1: Offspring John Boyle. You know, my first meeting with boy
Speaker 1: Hill is Offspring sublime, no doubt. You know, Big Snow
Speaker 1: Show in ninety four or maybe it was early, you know.
Speaker 1: I remember Gwen coming back and thanking us for having
Speaker 1: them on it. She was really really polite, you know,
Speaker 1: And they were great, great guys. So they become available,
Speaker 1: and every single manager is in the hunt. I mean,
Speaker 1: it is ridiculous. Like every manager you name a person,
Speaker 1: they were in a meeting with him. And it came
Speaker 1: down to myself and Andy Slatter, and I think there
Speaker 1: were a little resistant to me because I was the
Speaker 1: Orange County guy. Because of those things. It felt like
Speaker 1: tow Sammy Sammy. Yeah. But I felt like I also
Speaker 1: was able to communicate my experience to Gwen working with
Speaker 1: Cheryl Crowe and the amount of time I'd spent with
Speaker 1: Cheryl and what that looked like and being able to
Speaker 1: work with a girl and and understanding that and and uh.
Speaker 1: And I think I proved that pretty quickly. I brought
Speaker 1: in this really terrific publicist, Luke Berland. When got her lane,
Speaker 1: I said, Luke, I've got to give this girl her lane.
Speaker 1: She's like busting at the seams and it's a problem
Speaker 1: with the band, and you know, Gwen getting her solo.
Speaker 1: It's the traditional thing that we've all seen a million times.
Speaker 1: She's oh, this is easy. I'll just get her in
Speaker 1: all the girls magazines and all the fashion magazines. The
Speaker 1: boys don't want to be in those anyways. And I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: my god, your genius. And that starts Gwen down that road.
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean to say that she hadn't had any fashion,
Speaker 1: but that really gives her lane independent of the guys.
Speaker 1: And so we're managing them. And then I take on
Speaker 1: Beck and it's like, wow, we're a real management company.
Speaker 1: You know. Isn't this fun? You know? I had a
Speaker 1: great time, but I'm starting to get a little older.
Speaker 1: I'm starting to have more kids. And another one of
Speaker 1: those pivotal moments, as I said, I'm gonna be home
Speaker 1: at five o'clock for dinner. I will be home every
Speaker 1: night at five o'clock for dinner. And I make a
Speaker 1: point to be home every night at five o'clock for dinner.
Speaker 1: Nless I have to be in New York or you know,
Speaker 1: there's something going on, you know. But I say that's
Speaker 1: going to be part of my daily routine, and I
Speaker 1: start moving my clock back, and I start getting up earlier,
Speaker 1: waking in the morning and taking care of New York
Speaker 1: and Europe. But five o'clock and I give, you know,
Speaker 1: the receptionist, the list of these people. If they call,
Speaker 1: call the house, no body else, just send an email
Speaker 1: and I'll check it at the end of the nine
Speaker 1: If it was urgent, I'll deal with it. And that
Speaker 1: was good for you. Do you think it hurt your
Speaker 1: business at all? I don't think it hurt my business. Initially.
Speaker 1: I think it probably contributed to losing nine inch nails.
Speaker 1: I think it probably contributed to losing, no doubt. And
Speaker 1: those were the first jobs I've ever lost. I've never
Speaker 1: been fired from a job before. And I realized afterwards,
Speaker 1: when somebody would say, like, wow, what they're going to
Speaker 1: come back. You did a great job for those bags,
Speaker 1: never come back. I remember saying, they can offer me
Speaker 1: double And it wasn't because I was angry at them,
Speaker 1: because I'm not angry at them, but I realized I
Speaker 1: no longer was that guy. I wasn't the guy that
Speaker 1: was going to eat, sleep, breathe, snort, rub into my belly,
Speaker 1: do everything possible for a band. And they need that
Speaker 1: and they deserve that, and so I kind of went
Speaker 1: like they did the right thing by getting rid of me.
Speaker 1: They did the right thing. I think I did a
Speaker 1: better job than anybody else could have done for them.
Speaker 1: Don't mistake me. I don't think anybody you know, and
Speaker 1: I've had many people come to me and say, oh,
Speaker 1: you do such a good job. Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 1: That isn't what was on the list of needs, though.
Speaker 1: The need was. It had to be everything, and they
Speaker 1: deserve that. This is their one career, and I wasn't
Speaker 1: willing to give that. I couldn't divide my loyalty by
Speaker 1: the same token. It must be quite a blow when
Speaker 1: these bands move on. It was initially the first time,
Speaker 1: particularly with Trent, because he was like a brother. I
Speaker 1: talked to the guy every day, you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: I talked to him every single day. I love Trent.
Speaker 1: I think he was the real deal, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think he's extremely talented, he's unbelievably funny. I mean,
Speaker 1: I had so many great times with them, and it stunned.
Speaker 1: But as I said, you know, it's his name up there, man,
Speaker 1: and he's got a feel that he's got somebody who's
Speaker 1: he's comfortable, is giving everything. And I don't think he
Speaker 1: felt that way with I'm guessing he didn't feel that way.
Speaker 1: Now a couple of questions in retrospect. Were there signs
Speaker 1: that these acts were going to move on? For sure? Absolutely?
Speaker 1: Any time you have an argument over money that you're
Speaker 1: being paid with a client, that's a tell. And I
Speaker 1: walked in the very next day and said, we are
Speaker 1: not going to be managing Gwen. I knew. And then
Speaker 1: the next thing becomes any contact with these acts thereafter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: actually both of them. In fact, I just heard from
Speaker 1: Trent right around the holidays, not for a long time
Speaker 1: and not consistent. I heard from Gwen and I said,
Speaker 1: I just want to thank you for everything you did
Speaker 1: for me and my family. I thought it was very,
Speaker 1: very nice. And I heard from Trent recently said, you know,
Speaker 1: we should get together. It's been a while, you know,
Speaker 1: So now those two acts are gone. Social distortion, you're
Speaker 1: not as involved. I'm not involved at all. I had,
Speaker 1: I had stopped managing them. There was a point where,
Speaker 1: after twenty six years, I just said I had spotted
Speaker 1: in myself what I would ultimately spot post nine inch
Speaker 1: nails and and no doubt where it's time for them
Speaker 1: to move on. It's time for Mike to assert a
Speaker 1: greater role. It had always been like, you do everything
Speaker 1: on stage, I do everything else. Well, he started having
Speaker 1: opinions about the business and I resisted that, like, I
Speaker 1: don't know, I don't think that's a very good idea.
Speaker 1: I had spent so much time with this guy. I
Speaker 1: just wasn't willing to alter my mode of how I
Speaker 1: was going to do that at this stage of my life.
Speaker 1: And I said, I think it's time for us. It
Speaker 1: was at my uh suggestion. My son boxes over at
Speaker 1: this gym, and Mike boxes at the gym, and he's
Speaker 1: amazing with my son. You know, he gives the T shirts,
Speaker 1: he gave him some boxing shoes, and I've stayed very
Speaker 1: close contact with him. And a guy in my office
Speaker 1: who was the day to day guy started managing them.
Speaker 1: So in your office, now your peak, how many people
Speaker 1: were working there and how many people now one you well,
Speaker 1: one more Larry, okay, and so what are you guys
Speaker 1: working on now? Well, we continue to manage the offspring.
Speaker 1: If Robbie ever has anything he once done, I'm always
Speaker 1: available to Robbie because I love Robbie. Um. I'm getting
Speaker 1: ready to teach twenty four ap US history courses UH
Speaker 1: to eleventh graders at a UH school in Orange County,
Speaker 1: and I love doing that and that's my third year
Speaker 1: doing that, so I'm preparing me. We've talked about this.
Speaker 1: Tell us a little bit more about what the course
Speaker 1: is about. Well, it's based on the sixties, and it's
Speaker 1: a p U s history. So it's not like, hey,
Speaker 1: tell me what Donovan meant when he said, you know,
Speaker 1: electric banana. You know what I mean. Although that's part
Speaker 1: of the sixties and you have to understand that, but
Speaker 1: is not the core thing. I start off in the fifties,
Speaker 1: and I start off, you know, really all the way
Speaker 1: back in when when Russia gets nuclear capability and what
Speaker 1: the flip was, how did they become not an ally
Speaker 1: and they became that? And how the Cold War starts.
Speaker 1: And I take through the Cold War through sput Nick,
Speaker 1: through ury Gagar and through the fact that they can
Speaker 1: put rockets in the air and we can't. What does
Speaker 1: that look like? In nineteen sixty, when John Kennedy is
Speaker 1: elected by point, most people say he stole the election
Speaker 1: out of Chicago. And you know, I say this to
Speaker 1: my students. He won by d twelve eight hundred boats.
Speaker 1: I'll do this with you. I'll play the gag with you.
Speaker 1: He wins nationally by a hundred twelve thousand, eight hundred boats.
Speaker 1: Cook County, one county in the US that houses Chicago.
Speaker 1: How many votes does he beat Richard Nixon by there?
Speaker 1: I would guess a hundred twelve four hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: thousand and one county. So you've got a guy coming
Speaker 1: out of World War Two where it's not nine eleven
Speaker 1: worth three thousand people die, or San Bernardino where fourteen
Speaker 1: people die World War two or somewhere between sixty and
Speaker 1: eighty million people die, and you've got Isis on steroids
Speaker 1: called Russia with nuclear weapons, you know. And so do
Speaker 1: you go to Vietnam or not? And that's why I
Speaker 1: say the kids, do you go to Vietnam? And that
Speaker 1: which looks like an inevitable thing? In nineteen sixty how
Speaker 1: does it become a big mistake by nineteen sixty sixty seven?
Speaker 1: And so we have a lot of fun doing that.
Speaker 1: And I love doing this the same way that that
Speaker 1: I probably, you know, obsessed over the B side of
Speaker 1: an import Jam single in nineteen you know eighty. I
Speaker 1: love being able to do this and and use media
Speaker 1: and and and how to do all those things. So
Speaker 1: I'm having a lot of fun doing that. Also, you
Speaker 1: did a book with Robbie Robert I did. We did
Speaker 1: it with Robbie and his son Sebastian and Jared Levine.
Speaker 1: And uh, when I did that book, it was interesting.
Speaker 1: We had the Scholastic book fair at my kids school
Speaker 1: and the person who was running it came up and said, hey,
Speaker 1: we have authors. Come, You're an author. Like I laugh,
Speaker 1: because I don't feel like an author, do you know
Speaker 1: what I mean? Like I just did that, you know.
Speaker 1: And it was legends, icons, and and rebels, twenty seven
Speaker 1: artists that changed the world. And you would talk about
Speaker 1: these artists in the context of what they were doing,
Speaker 1: you know, and what why it was different? Why Sam Why? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Bob Dylan going electric is a big deal. But Sam
Speaker 1: Cook leaving the church why is that so big? Way,
Speaker 1: he goes on to form a record company before Barry
Speaker 1: Gordy first, you know, African Americana doing that who by
Speaker 1: the way his an arguiser, Lou Adler and Herb Albert,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. And he starts a publishing
Speaker 1: company and the night before Ali defeats Listen, he's in
Speaker 1: a hotel room with Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali and
Speaker 1: they're talking about and and you know, you kind of
Speaker 1: put them in in the context of that. And so
Speaker 1: I went and did the presentation for the book, and
Speaker 1: I decided I'm gonna do it kind of rock and
Speaker 1: roll stone. So I do a bunch of media, and
Speaker 1: so I have video clips from Louis Jordan and Louis
Speaker 1: Armstrong and Billie Holiday and Elvis and Little Richard and
Speaker 1: the Beatles, and I take people kind of out of
Speaker 1: end of century marching band John Philip Sousa all the
Speaker 1: way up to Bob Dylan and the band and I
Speaker 1: and I talked about the book in that and that
Speaker 1: became a forty five minute lecture that I've done probably
Speaker 1: fifteen of them, you know, at various schools. Bring me
Speaker 1: in and and I'll do these lectures separate of the A.
Speaker 1: P U. S history, But I love doing that too.
Speaker 1: So I'm finding a little little niche of fun stuff
Speaker 1: for me to do. And and it may only be
Speaker 1: that I sit in front of fifteen students and talk
Speaker 1: about this, but it's mine, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: It's mine. It may not be on a scale of
Speaker 1: seventeen million records sold, but it's mine, and I feel
Speaker 1: proud of it, and I like it, and I feel
Speaker 1: that that when a kid comes up to me at
Speaker 1: the end of the year and it was my favorite
Speaker 1: class I took all year. Yeah, okay, I remember various
Speaker 1: points in our relationship. You were really the first person
Speaker 1: to talk to me about the potential of the internet,
Speaker 1: both in terms of communication and distribution. You were always
Speaker 1: on the tip temple of the dog. You turned me
Speaker 1: onto that, you know, before it came out. You gave
Speaker 1: me the book Generation X. And the reason I put
Speaker 1: all those markers in the landscape is where this is.
Speaker 1: We'll get a little deeper. But where do you think
Speaker 1: we're going now? I would argue that the baby boomers
Speaker 1: are still alive. They haven't passed away, even though as
Speaker 1: we talk here that Neil Diamonds now got Parkinson's going
Speaker 1: off the Road. We have a lot of classic rockers
Speaker 1: who are dying or can no longer perform, but the
Speaker 1: people who lived through that era are still alive. And
Speaker 1: what do we know. In the sixties music drove the culture.
Speaker 1: There were very few outlets. Most markets only have three
Speaker 1: television stations. You live by the radio. Uh, there was
Speaker 1: being in the sixties. Music was the equivalent of social media.
Speaker 1: But my kids can pull up today and kind of
Speaker 1: network was you hearing? Ohio? That was our connectivity, that
Speaker 1: was our social media. So the music is intertwined in
Speaker 1: that time and Needles just say it blew up financially, etcetera.
Speaker 1: Music has had a couple of ups and downs since then,
Speaker 1: certainly the CD era than the MTV era simultaneous with
Speaker 1: that and the napster going up and down. Now there
Speaker 1: are many people who say today's music is just as
Speaker 1: good as the music before. I don't really want to
Speaker 1: get into a debate of that, but culturally, where is
Speaker 1: music in this great pot of life where there's so
Speaker 1: much else in the landscape, and as a culture, in
Speaker 1: youth culture in it, where do you think it's going?
Speaker 1: What do you think are trends that are going to
Speaker 1: impact the future. Well, that's a lot of a question.
Speaker 1: I have four kids nineteen, seventeen, fourteen, and eleven. Music
Speaker 1: is so important to them. And you go, oh, well
Speaker 1: that's because what you do, Jim, And that's true. Okay.
Speaker 1: So they can tell you Ray Charles songs and Otis
Speaker 1: Redding songs. But lilus e virt I don't know. I
Speaker 1: didn't turn them into it, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: And and every one of them knows lit lousy vert,
Speaker 1: you know. Or I remember three years ago going to
Speaker 1: see Flume. I'm like Flume, it's the guy with the
Speaker 1: computer wave in his hand. Really it was amazing and
Speaker 1: it was really really exciting to see. So I realize
Speaker 1: I am exactly where I need to be. As I
Speaker 1: turned fifty nine this year, I have no idea. I
Speaker 1: have no idea where it is my kids. I can't
Speaker 1: believe hip hop is rock and roll period. The rockers
Speaker 1: can't handle it. They can't handle it, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. And that's just fine. That is okay, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean, because it's a shift. Sorry, get out.
Speaker 1: You had your time, Dad, you had your This is theirs?
Speaker 1: Is it? My No, I don't go home and throw
Speaker 1: hip hop on. That's not what I do. I'd rather
Speaker 1: hear it Joe Cocker sing Darling Be Home Soon. But
Speaker 1: do you think the times were friend? But we're investigating
Speaker 1: a little bit where the music when hand in hand
Speaker 1: with anti Vietnam were peace rallies, etcetera. We have not
Speaker 1: hit that moment in an era of great discord. And
Speaker 1: you think that was a moment in time when we
Speaker 1: haven't found the right record. It's not necessary now. It
Speaker 1: was necessary then because when you and I, and you're
Speaker 1: just a few years older than main, when you and
Speaker 1: I we only had those three stations. That was the
Speaker 1: modus operandi of communicating between people. How do you raise
Speaker 1: the consciousness? Well, now you have this the phone since
Speaker 1: two thousand seven. You know you have better vehicles for
Speaker 1: that than than just music. You have things that are
Speaker 1: far more immediate, that are visual, that are communicating. Back then,
Speaker 1: the best you had was to communicate the alienation of
Speaker 1: somebody with their parents. Is is she's leaving home by
Speaker 1: the Beatles and you go, oh, I know that feeling.
Speaker 1: You know, fun is the one thing that money can't buy.
Speaker 1: I relate. Well, now you can have that within seconds. Okay,
Speaker 1: you don't have to wait for a record. It's been displaced.
Speaker 1: The need for it has been displaced. It doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that it doesn't exist. It just means that the need
Speaker 1: for it it's not as pronounced as it was for us.
Speaker 1: For us, the only thing we could count on I
Speaker 1: was putting that needle down. We couldn't see Wizard of
Speaker 1: Oz unless you wait until Easter. Okay. You couldn't watch
Speaker 1: a movie, you couldn't do play a video. You can
Speaker 1: do anything. We could control that. We can put that
Speaker 1: and if we're really clever, we take the arm off
Speaker 1: and it will play it a second time. That was
Speaker 1: the best we had. Okay. So last night I was
Speaker 1: comparing the media based charts, which are the radio airplay charts,
Speaker 1: to Spotify, and in many cases they're different. In our
Speaker 1: era of the business, radio drove consumption. Okay, now where
Speaker 1: were they different? What was that? What was the I
Speaker 1: know what the Spotify looks like. I have no idea
Speaker 1: what radio looks like. Things. Certainly, if you look at
Speaker 1: the media base top forty, it's more pop. But there
Speaker 1: are records in all of their charts that are very
Speaker 1: successful that are not in the U s Top fifty
Speaker 1: on Spotify. So my question ultimately would be, what do
Speaker 1: you believe the future of the paradigm is relative to
Speaker 1: radio streaming on demand? My kids, my two older kids,
Speaker 1: have never heard KROK and they have never seen MTV.
Speaker 1: I have no idea what it is they get in
Speaker 1: the car. What do they do for entertainment? They put
Speaker 1: something on on their phone through the system, whether it's SoundCloud,
Speaker 1: which my older daughter has turned me onto so much
Speaker 1: music through SoundCloud. She finds stuff on SoundCloud or through Tumbler,
Speaker 1: you know, all these different places. But who wants the commercials?
Speaker 1: Who wants I'm with you totally, I mean. But the
Speaker 1: reason it's fascinating to me is two fold. We live
Speaker 1: in a disinformation community where a lot of traditional outlets
Speaker 1: focused on these old things which will ultimately be decimated.
Speaker 1: And of course we've also learned in the Internet world
Speaker 1: you can be too early. So the key is making
Speaker 1: that transition. But it's fascinating because we have a major
Speaker 1: media that missed the nationalistic uprising which we've seen around
Speaker 1: the world ultimately resulted in Trump getting elected. Shifting to
Speaker 1: another gear because I know you're a student of this
Speaker 1: In terms of the tech, I would say for the
Speaker 1: last twenty years tectro of the culture. But I believe
Speaker 1: that is done. We have four major companies, the whole
Speaker 1: thing of you know, a new app every week, a
Speaker 1: new device. We don't have that. What do you think
Speaker 1: drives the culture or what the next thing we're going
Speaker 1: to be rallying around is. Well, I really don't know, Bob.
Speaker 1: I mean, I really none of us know. But you
Speaker 1: you tend to be a student giving an opinion. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, I love the marvelous Mrs Mizelle.
Speaker 1: How am I sitting there watching a television show on
Speaker 1: Amazon Prime on my iPad? Well, I'm on a recumbent
Speaker 1: bike and having a great experience doing it. You know,
Speaker 1: you hold your phone two inches from your eyes. It's
Speaker 1: as big as a sixty inch television set. When you're
Speaker 1: sitting to anything away, you know, people are like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's too small screen. I prefer to watch on the
Speaker 1: I I find it more intimate. I love it, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, and I can choose to do it when
Speaker 1: I want to do it. So I think our our
Speaker 1: consumption of media is going through the roof. It's going
Speaker 1: through I'm watching more than I've ever watched. But it
Speaker 1: fits in the niche of when I can watch, you know,
Speaker 1: whereas previously would be just like, oh no, I haven't
Speaker 1: seen that yet. Oh I have a chance, you know.
Speaker 1: And so I don't think any of that is necessarily
Speaker 1: really going to change, you know, I really, well, do
Speaker 1: you find yourself I don't want to box you in
Speaker 1: a corner here, but you find yourself keeping up more
Speaker 1: on TV than you do on music? Yeah? Probably? Do
Speaker 1: you keep up on music? I do? But I am
Speaker 1: unique in that I have three teenagers and I am
Speaker 1: spoon fed NonStop of of what we've got to see.
Speaker 1: Brock Hampton at Coachella. Okay, you know, I mean I
Speaker 1: better check that out. I better get the Coachella playlist.
Speaker 1: I better sit there and I just sit there and
Speaker 1: I'll review all that stuff because once the Coachella set
Speaker 1: times come out, I gotta make my because I got
Speaker 1: to overlap. I gotta see the ones that I share
Speaker 1: with my kids, which ones they'll actually let me see
Speaker 1: with them, and which ones I'll have to go stand alone.
Speaker 1: You know that's cool. I'm okay with that. Why, as
Speaker 1: I say, the music that can be overwhelming. There's a
Speaker 1: station on the satellite serious x MU, and you'll tune
Speaker 1: that in. You'll here's something good, and then you'll say
Speaker 1: to yourself, am I the only person who ever heard this?
Speaker 1: It's a very weird experience. We want community, which is
Speaker 1: what you know. It costs much more to make a
Speaker 1: television show than to make the average record, so there's
Speaker 1: a limited amount of product, but you can discover something,
Speaker 1: own it, and discuss it with people. It's an amazing community.
Speaker 1: And you know, to what degree has television usurped the
Speaker 1: power of music? Yeah? I don't think so. It's interesting
Speaker 1: because I see it with my again, with my kids,
Speaker 1: with me for sure. Not with my kids, no way.
Speaker 1: Now they appreciate television, but music is portable. It's on
Speaker 1: the go. They can do this, and their community is
Speaker 1: much more activated around music experience. They're going to shows,
Speaker 1: They're unbelievably active. But it's a world apart from me.
Speaker 1: For sure. I want to see Kodak Black. They come
Speaker 1: on at you know, really, Okay, what's Kodak Black? I
Speaker 1: have no idea, Like, I literally have no idea, idea,
Speaker 1: and then I have to go check it out. It's like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's hit hip hop thing, you know. But they're all
Speaker 1: over it, you know what I mean? And their friends
Speaker 1: are too, They all know it. How about the identity,
Speaker 1: since you're the expert, certainly, I don't have any children. Um,
Speaker 1: when we grew up, there was a very clear delineation
Speaker 1: of who was talent, who was famous, and who was not. Theoretically,
Speaker 1: you could try to jump through hoops, get a record deal,
Speaker 1: you could try to be an actor on television. That
Speaker 1: was very rarefied here, whereas today, you know, they're Instagram
Speaker 1: stars people. To what degree do you feel that your
Speaker 1: kids or kids in general, adore the anointed stars or
Speaker 1: want to be stars themselves. I don't see them wanting
Speaker 1: to be stars themselves. I don't see them falling for
Speaker 1: the quote unquote anointed stars. But I see them all
Speaker 1: over social media picking up on people. If somebody tells
Speaker 1: them it's cool, they sense it right away and smell
Speaker 1: a rat there's something, you know. But if all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, there on Instagram and they see stuff or
Speaker 1: on a snap story or something that they're following, like,
Speaker 1: how do you know this? Well? I follow on Instagram
Speaker 1: and the one that I discovered this year the fence
Speaker 1: to account. You know, everybody has a fence to account.
Speaker 1: Really yeah, fensta fake in? Okay, Okay. So if you
Speaker 1: had to do it all over again, and although I
Speaker 1: think I know the answer, but I'm gonna ask it anyway,
Speaker 1: would you do anything differently? Well, of course not. But
Speaker 1: the one thing I regret is what I put my
Speaker 1: parents through. I made it rough on them. They had
Speaker 1: a rough time. Forget now that because I'm a parent.
Speaker 1: I felt this way before I had kids. You know,
Speaker 1: they were overmatched. When you talk about that generation gap,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't think it's easy to convey to
Speaker 1: kids today what that look like, where there was such
Speaker 1: a splinter where they looked at you, like, where did
Speaker 1: you come from? What happened? You were? We were good parents,
Speaker 1: We we we did right, you know, and and you're
Speaker 1: just off the rails, you know. And I think that's
Speaker 1: really a sign of what the seventies look like, not
Speaker 1: just the sixties, because the seventies. I always used the
Speaker 1: example of Silence of the Lambs where the FBI agent
Speaker 1: is talking to Claris and he says, remember the first
Speaker 1: thing they do is covet So go to the first thing.
Speaker 1: And I think for people like myself. I coveted the sixties.
Speaker 1: I coveted being in Orange County, Hollywood, in l A.
Speaker 1: And so your passion gets kind of turbocharged for those things,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean? And I think people who
Speaker 1: were teenagers in the seventies very much wanted to be
Speaker 1: kids at the sixties. You really are, like, I missed it.
Speaker 1: I can't believe by that much, you know, I missed
Speaker 1: that the greatest ever. I never saw the Beatles like
Speaker 1: I can't believe. I've still pissed at you for seeing
Speaker 1: Laura Narrow a few times. Okay, And in the thirty
Speaker 1: odd years you have left hopefully anything you'd want to achieve.
Speaker 1: Do I still think there's something here having to do
Speaker 1: with education and the passion I have for education. I
Speaker 1: like that. I like being able to communicate. I love
Speaker 1: when you can sit there and still have those moments
Speaker 1: where you get excited about ideas and things like that,
Speaker 1: and to see people come up with different ideas. I
Speaker 1: never want to be that guy on the other side
Speaker 1: of the glass where Matt Damon slaps the thing or
Speaker 1: the is the Harvard guy who just uses information to
Speaker 1: club other people over, you know, and he goes, what's
Speaker 1: wrong with you? Do you have an original idea? You know?
Speaker 1: I don't want to be that. I'd like to hope
Speaker 1: that I find a voice in all this where it
Speaker 1: isn't just regurgitating it. You know. It's funny, Bob, this
Speaker 1: is a great time where all of a sudden, it's like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't know. I'm open to a
Speaker 1: new idea. I'm open to something new because if I
Speaker 1: use what I've got, I'm in a feedback loop. I'm
Speaker 1: just self referencing again. I need to be open to
Speaker 1: the idea that I don't know what's next, you know.
Speaker 1: And if I close myself off and say here, this
Speaker 1: is what it needs to be, I'm just using the
Speaker 1: experience i've already got. I want to have a new experience.
Speaker 1: I'm not done. You know. Well, this has really been
Speaker 1: wonderful for reasons that were unanticipated by me. Because I've
Speaker 1: had interactions with a lot of these people and sometimes
Speaker 1: acted differently. And I'm running through my brain. I remember
Speaker 1: I was at Beverly Hills Hotel and a bungalow with
Speaker 1: a meeting with Donnie Ironer and Michelle Anthony, and I
Speaker 1: remember they showed me a video for the Bob Dylan
Speaker 1: under the blood Red Sky out and I said, it's
Speaker 1: a staff and you don't tell him what to do.
Speaker 1: And then Donnie called me like a week later and said,
Speaker 1: you really fucked up. You were there, We were gonna
Speaker 1: offer you a job, blah blah blah. I didn't even know. Okay.
Speaker 1: And as I've gotten older, you know, you think of
Speaker 1: how to play these things. But as many people we
Speaker 1: discussed here, so many are out of the business. Okay.
Speaker 1: It's like Donnie, I used to interact with him about
Speaker 1: ten years ago, and then he ultimately retired, and you
Speaker 1: make the choices, and then there are other things you're saying,
Speaker 1: and I say, okay, you know, these are spots that
Speaker 1: maybe I would have wanted to have been in or
Speaker 1: been a little bit said my personality never could have worked.
Speaker 1: So this has really been you know, insightful, edifying. Thank
Speaker 1: you so much until next time. Is That was Jim
Speaker 1: Garanto on the Bob Left Sets podcast. Thank you Jim,
Speaker 1: Thank you Bob. That concludes this episode of the Bob
Speaker 1: Left Sets Podcast. It's really been a thrill learning how
Speaker 1: some of the biggest acts of our time broke through
Speaker 1: and hearing directly from the movers and shakers who made
Speaker 1: it happen. I hope I've been able to add a
Speaker 1: little more context to some of your favorite music memories.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, and catch you next time on the
Speaker 1: Bob Left Sets podcast