Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today is Yon Winner, who's got a new
Speaker 1: book of interviews entitled The Masters. Yon. How'd you decide
Speaker 1: who's going to be in the.
Speaker 2: Book, Well, first off, it's good to be here with you, Bob,
Speaker 2: and I'm had to be glad to be welcomed and
Speaker 2: welcomed and welcomed. You bet. Surely I picked the interviews.
Speaker 2: I didn't choose the interviews. They chose me. They are
Speaker 2: the ones I did over a fifty year period rolling Zone,
Speaker 2: and they were just the people who I was totally
Speaker 2: interested in the most of talking to and finding out
Speaker 2: what they were thinking and about how they did, what
Speaker 2: they were doing, what they thought about rock and roll.
Speaker 2: So it wasn't every deliberate. I didn't decide even to
Speaker 2: do this until last year when I look back and
Speaker 2: saw this collection of people represent a really great selection
Speaker 2: of the of the men not women unfortunately, who made
Speaker 2: rock and roll and over this last fifty years made
Speaker 2: it what it was today. They mainly were people, you know,
Speaker 2: they were old. These are people who have been around
Speaker 2: for a while, but they weren't sense The Masters, the Stones, Dylan,
Speaker 2: the Beatles, you know, Bono, the Dead, Bruce Springsteen to who.
Speaker 2: These are the great names of our times. They're not
Speaker 2: all of them, it's not complete, but these are the
Speaker 2: ones I gravitated to, and it turns out to be
Speaker 2: a great selection.
Speaker 1: So who was left on the cutting room floor?
Speaker 2: Well, nobody was left on the cutting floor. I mean
Speaker 2: there's a few interviews I did that I did were
Speaker 2: done with the kind of gravitass and length and intensity.
Speaker 2: I mean I did leave a Hendrix's interview on the
Speaker 2: cutting room floor, because you know, looking back, I was
Speaker 2: like nineteen sixty eight. I just went he was in
Speaker 2: San Francisco, and I went over to his hotel room.
Speaker 2: We sat aroun all afternoon, smoking dope and playing with
Speaker 2: the tape recorder. It just wasn't that good. It's not
Speaker 2: very much one. It's going to last a long time.
Speaker 2: And then I'm one of the very first sentenced with
Speaker 2: a guitar named Mike Blomfield, who was a great guitarist,
Speaker 2: somewhat obscure but also not a great think about rock
Speaker 2: and roll and all the issues that were attacked to
Speaker 2: it in terms of youth culture and the politics of
Speaker 2: the United States.
Speaker 1: Okay, The interviews ranged from nineteen sixty eight with Pete
Speaker 1: Towns into today twenty twenty three with Springsteen. Did you
Speaker 1: always have in the back of your mind this fifty
Speaker 1: five year old interview with Townshend or did you have
Speaker 1: to go back and review what interviews you had done.
Speaker 2: I always had it in mind. Once the idea that
Speaker 2: I would do this book came, I didn't do that.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is this is most of the work
Speaker 2: that I did, because I didn't do interviews as a
Speaker 2: general thing. I was busy running a magazine. But if
Speaker 2: there was somebody I was really interested in, wanted to
Speaker 2: talk and wanted to learn from, wanted to just soak
Speaker 2: up the vibe, I understand, why is it that we're
Speaker 2: all so excited about this music? I would I would
Speaker 2: go do interview them with so I knew that they
Speaker 2: were there. Of course I read them again, but it
Speaker 2: was clear to me which they were. These were all
Speaker 2: of them, really, except for Hendricks and Bloomfield. Okay, but
Speaker 2: I used to interview the presidents too. I interviewed Obama
Speaker 2: and Clinton and gal Go and so forth. But this
Speaker 2: is about music, not about politics.
Speaker 1: Just staying with the politics for a second, could you
Speaker 1: get straight? I mean, I read these interviews were in
Speaker 1: when they were in the magazine Rolling Stone, of course,
Speaker 1: but when you're there sitting down with them, are they
Speaker 1: answering honestly or are they always weaseling? And how do
Speaker 1: you nail them.
Speaker 2: Down about musicians or politicians? Politicians politicians are not weasling
Speaker 2: or lying or if you try to ask them stuff
Speaker 2: that is kind of got youa question or is going
Speaker 2: to get them in trouble. You know they're not going
Speaker 2: to answer you. Number one, because the slightest mistake they
Speaker 2: make can be used by the opposing party. Now, these
Speaker 2: are interviews I did in the middle of elections. You know,
Speaker 2: the slightest little mistatement and the other guy's going to
Speaker 2: jump on you. And the other guy being Republican, they're
Speaker 2: usually merciless, you know, I'm thankless, and they're ability to
Speaker 2: distort and anything. So there's a danger in it. So
Speaker 2: also I find those areas boring. You know, the gotcha
Speaker 2: question is never interesting in the end what I'm trying
Speaker 2: to do. And also the other thing is that because
Speaker 2: the politics are so rough these days and the communications
Speaker 2: around us, media is so intense, you know, focus on everything.
Speaker 2: They are really pretty carefully rehearsed about everything they're going
Speaker 2: to say. Not rehearse in the sense of rehearsal for debate,
Speaker 2: but their practice. They know their positions on stuff. They've
Speaker 2: been vetted, They've discussed the stuff with their advisors. It's
Speaker 2: a product of a lot of policy stuff. They've decided
Speaker 2: already what they're going to stand for, and what they're
Speaker 2: going to campaign, and what they're going to stand for,
Speaker 2: and what's the best compromise of interests, say between unions
Speaker 2: in the coal industry and you know, environmentals. They've come
Speaker 2: up with their ability how to satisfy all the interests
Speaker 2: where they want where they want to be on a position.
Speaker 2: So you're not going to get them to make any
Speaker 2: breakthroughs there. So what I do is when I interview
Speaker 2: them is I want to try and get to know
Speaker 2: them a little better. I want to know a little
Speaker 2: about how they feel about things. How do you feel
Speaker 2: about you know, when you go to the Arctic, like
Speaker 2: say Obama did or whatever. Do you worry about your
Speaker 2: own kids and what's going to happen you know in
Speaker 2: twenty years, where's your level of compassion about this anything?
Speaker 2: And just trying to get the personal aspect. You have
Speaker 2: to know those persons. I always ask them, of course,
Speaker 2: what's their favorite music? And not to me that's fascinating
Speaker 2: and it tells you a lot about the individuals. I mean,
Speaker 2: I can tell you exactly these people are almost by
Speaker 2: type because of the music they listen to. You know,
Speaker 2: al Go is a total Beatles fan, you know, Bob
Speaker 2: Dylan fan. The new Dylan record come out, he listened
Speaker 2: to thirty times. I know, I know that person. You know. Uh,
Speaker 2: Obama was a big Stevie Wonder loved the Rolling Stones,
Speaker 2: picked all the right albums, you know. Quoted Dylan to me,
Speaker 2: but not the when Obama said that's one of his
Speaker 2: favorite spoke to him during his campaign. The Dylan. He
Speaker 2: didn't say blowing in the wind or the times that
Speaker 2: you know, or how many roads must say. He said, well,
Speaker 2: it's Pizza's, you know, Maggie's farm. In others, I ain't
Speaker 2: going to work on Maggie's farm no more. And which
Speaker 2: is a song about, you know, it's working on plantation,
Speaker 2: you know, black people being I mean, he was deep
Speaker 2: into it, you know, and he's getting the real anyway.
Speaker 2: That's the politician thing not to say. You know, you
Speaker 2: asked about issues and a lot of serious stuff. But
Speaker 2: I think the issue with my interviewing, well, I like
Speaker 2: about my interviews with the musicians and with the politicians.
Speaker 2: I am not there to challenge you, you know, or
Speaker 2: hold you up on the cross for your sins imagine. Otherwise,
Speaker 2: I'm there to find out what you think you know,
Speaker 2: and what you believe, and what's influenced you and where
Speaker 2: you came from, and what your vision is for yourself
Speaker 2: and for our country. And I find those things much
Speaker 2: more interesting, harder to get and rare to find. And
Speaker 2: I think that's one of the things that's so special
Speaker 2: about my interviewing and style and about the book I
Speaker 2: just wrote or just put out.
Speaker 1: Just staying with politics for a minute, Jimmy Carter was
Speaker 1: constantly quoting Bob Dylan other rock lyrics. Was friends with
Speaker 1: the Allman Brothers. Was that fake or was that real?
Speaker 2: So that was real? You know, I mean that was real.
Speaker 2: You look talked to re endorsed him, Hunter, fell in
Speaker 2: love with him, but talked to Bob about it, for example,
Speaker 2: you know who spent all this time with Carter talking
Speaker 2: to him, you know, and uh, discussing all the concerns
Speaker 2: that they would have in his lyrics. I mean, Jimmy
Speaker 2: Carter is the real deal, you know his I'm very
Speaker 2: unusual for president to be so direct and open, you know,
Speaker 2: and candidate about stuff. And you know, he paid the
Speaker 2: price for that a little, you know, he paid the
Speaker 2: price for his times. He I don't you know, he
Speaker 2: van against Reagan. He had the hostage christ. I mean,
Speaker 2: I think that could have all worked, and he would
Speaker 2: if he had been in reelected. It wouldn have gone
Speaker 2: through even greater things, you know, but in of itself,
Speaker 2: I think he would have did was so important. Okay.
Speaker 1: There are two Dylan interviews in the book. One is
Speaker 1: classic Dylan in the Yobs the Skates. One is more honest,
Speaker 1: what was your experience like in terms of getting some
Speaker 1: level of truth, getting anything at all from doing well?
Speaker 2: Bob is the trickster, you know, he's a the joker man.
Speaker 2: He's the you know, a song and dance guy. He's
Speaker 2: very funny, he has and a great wit was he
Speaker 2: like says, and he also it's an attitude which is
Speaker 2: I don't he doesn't really want to explain a lot
Speaker 2: of stuff to you, you know, I mean he's reluctant
Speaker 2: to give it up, and what do you need to
Speaker 2: know it for? And also he's been bugged all his
Speaker 2: life by people who have found such deep meaning and
Speaker 2: views about life that are so more important to them.
Speaker 2: I mean, he understands the role he's played in people's
Speaker 2: life and people's lives, in our country's life, and he
Speaker 2: gets all that. And I think he understands where where
Speaker 2: he stands in poetry and literature, and almost exactly where
Speaker 2: he stands. You know, he would never admen any of that.
Speaker 2: He would profess I don't know, you know this. I
Speaker 2: just can here to amuse people. I'man here to sing
Speaker 2: songs or amuse people, or I'm a song and dance
Speaker 2: man or stuff like that, which is patently untrue. And
Speaker 2: he knows that, but he and he just likes playing games.
Speaker 2: So I think when I read over the first interview,
Speaker 2: the one you're referring to it as a classic, and
Speaker 2: the one that's which he seems to be most evasive,
Speaker 2: read a little more carefully. He's not that evasive. If
Speaker 2: he doesn't want to answer a question, he won't answer it,
Speaker 2: and he'll say so, you know, I mean, it's or
Speaker 2: where was that one about? Or I say, well, we'll
Speaker 2: have to see about that. I mean, he gets out
Speaker 2: of it not by lying, you know, but by kind
Speaker 2: of amusingly, you know, softball in the question, throw any
Speaker 2: question away, or hitting with the side of his hand
Speaker 2: in a gentle and very funny fashion. And at that period,
Speaker 2: at that time, for that period, that was as straight
Speaker 2: as he was ever and again straightforward with people in interviews.
Speaker 2: So but I know what you're saying, and so you
Speaker 2: know these he's difficult to interview. But the thing about
Speaker 2: that partic an interview I thought was really great is
Speaker 2: it felt so much of that time and place. It's
Speaker 2: so recalled that Bob Dylan. You know, you could just
Speaker 2: hear it, you know, that was him. Then it was
Speaker 2: so authentic, you know. And he was also reading again
Speaker 2: readingting in life. He was very personal about stuff, you know,
Speaker 2: because I was kept asking, how do you feel about being,
Speaker 2: you know, the so called youth theater and he said
Speaker 2: I don't. And he says, I don't want to. I
Speaker 2: wasn't meant for that. You know, there are people in
Speaker 2: that position. I could lift every burden. I would, but
Speaker 2: that's not me. That's not my job. But then so
Speaker 2: I find it such an interesting document. I mean, just
Speaker 2: that preserves Bob in that period so brilliantly, and it's
Speaker 2: a better and nicer Bob than you see and don't
Speaker 2: look back. And then in the second one, which we
Speaker 2: did in two thousand seven, I think because the day
Speaker 2: this is of course very much sure Bob. I mean,
Speaker 2: he's got modern times out at that time, and he's
Speaker 2: just much more reflective and deep and thoughtful about everything.
Speaker 2: But it's that funny thing. It starts off with a
Speaker 2: tease he's doing to me, you know, like saying, well,
Speaker 2: I don't you know, like I'm not gonna hang I
Speaker 2: can't you know what? You know? Like just putting me
Speaker 2: through the ringer a little. And by that time we
Speaker 2: gotten to know each other and trust each other, and
Speaker 2: it's reflective of that.
Speaker 1: Okay, you leave the grammatical errors in Bob's language in
Speaker 1: the book. Is that an affectation? Does he really know
Speaker 1: the right word to use or is it him being uneducated?
Speaker 2: What is it? I don't think I leave the grammatical
Speaker 2: errors and.
Speaker 1: Well, no, he'll say them instead of they Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, I think think when you edit a verbal interview
Speaker 2: for reading, you have to now turn into something as readable.
Speaker 2: And if you always get this, if you get a
Speaker 2: constant repeating thing all the time, or misuse of grammar,
Speaker 2: you know, I gintly take it all out, unless somehow
Speaker 2: you're learning something from that or there's something idiomatic or
Speaker 2: special about that. But the repetition of stuff can become cliched. Also,
Speaker 2: like and the ones who are hardest. It took a
Speaker 2: lot of editing, particularly Jerry Garcia, because here's a lot
Speaker 2: of a man's and old man and wow, and you know,
Speaker 2: a lot of that kind of hippie stuff. And when
Speaker 2: you listen to the tape you don't even hear it,
Speaker 2: but if you see it on the written page, you know, Jesus,
Speaker 2: there's five wows in one sense, you know, in seven us.
Speaker 2: And so you want to clean up as a courtesy,
Speaker 2: but without changing any meaning and also leaving enough in
Speaker 2: so you can get the sense of the person, the
Speaker 2: way they talk and who they are.
Speaker 1: So striking a balance. Okay, what's fascinating to me is
Speaker 1: in your talk with Dylan and your talk with Bono,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of accolades for bringing it all back home.
Speaker 1: Whereas conventional wisdom is highway sixty one, which has like
Speaker 1: a rolling stone and then blonde on blonde thereafter. So
Speaker 1: in your own personal hierarchy from that early era, the
Speaker 1: pre seventy or the pre so called motorcycle accident era,
Speaker 1: what is the greatest work?
Speaker 2: Well, it's that's a hard and say. But say in
Speaker 2: that era if you want to talk about that pre
Speaker 2: John Mussey Harding, pre motorcycle accident, and you're saying, really
Speaker 2: the bawd I'm blombering out back Home or or Highway
Speaker 2: sixty one. I mean it's a matter of personal preference really,
Speaker 2: or maybe when you first heard it, I'm a Highway
Speaker 2: sixty one guy. Yeah, but the other two are just
Speaker 2: genius as well. Bono as an intellectual guy, so he
Speaker 2: he likes bringing it All back home, you know, and
Speaker 2: they're grateful dead first Jerry and those people came into
Speaker 2: it during Bringing It All Back Home, during that kind
Speaker 2: of folk era. But like Bruce says, he's listened to
Speaker 2: I Was sixty one of one hundred times, you know.
Speaker 2: I mean that's where he got his rock. That's when
Speaker 2: he grew up and he came into it. Was it
Speaker 2: that record he didn't renewed Bringing All Back home and existed.
Speaker 2: He just heard that rock and roll sound on sixty
Speaker 2: one with Mike Bloomfield and Al Kubernet Band and went nuts,
Speaker 2: as did I. So they're all it's hard to say.
Speaker 2: They are great records, you know, and they continue to
Speaker 2: be records.
Speaker 1: Okay. So were you aware of the first Dylan album
Speaker 1: on Columbia which was mostly covers or did you come
Speaker 1: in on free Wheeling? Where did you come in?
Speaker 2: I came in on Bringing It All Back Home, and
Speaker 2: I suppose Highway sixty one more than anything.
Speaker 1: Okay, So how did you become aware of Bringing in
Speaker 1: It All back Home? Because of course there were covers,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't until Highway sixty one that Bob was
Speaker 1: on top forty radio and this is prior to the
Speaker 1: breakthrough of underground FM radio.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, the first big, big Dyn't hit song
Speaker 2: was Mister Tambourine Man by the Birds, and so once
Speaker 2: you heard that, which was a breakout song, you know
Speaker 2: in this writing and what was saying and take me
Speaker 2: on a trip on your wellness spaceship whatever you know,
Speaker 2: through the smoke brings of your mind with that so
Speaker 2: called folk rock twelves Dring, Jim mcguinnac companyment. You know,
Speaker 2: you merely sat up and said, where'd this come from?
Speaker 2: And let me find out about it? But also your
Speaker 2: friends were telling you about it, and it just you know,
Speaker 2: everybody's discovering you know, a lot of people were discovering
Speaker 2: Bob Big at that particular point, you know, and the
Speaker 2: more populars that song broke broke Bob through to the
Speaker 2: rock and roll audience and broke through folk rock and
Speaker 2: set the stage for a sixty one.
Speaker 1: Okay. There's a lot of debate fifty odd years later
Speaker 1: as to how extensive Bob's motorcycle accident was, whether that's
Speaker 1: an issue of retiring from public observation, or whether he
Speaker 1: was really banged up. What's your opinion.
Speaker 2: I think he was really banged up. You can get
Speaker 2: pretty banged up in a motorcycle accident. But I also
Speaker 2: think it came at a time where he needed to
Speaker 2: be slowed down because I think he was taking a
Speaker 2: lot of speed then a lot of drugs, and I
Speaker 2: think it's kind of evident in his behavior and his lyrics.
Speaker 2: You know, I'm just you know, this just an intuitive,
Speaker 2: non experts opinion. This is an expert opinion. The UH
Speaker 2: and he needed to slow down. He's forced to slow down,
Speaker 2: you know, by the hand of God or whatever by
Speaker 2: taking a turn or too fast. And he understood it
Speaker 2: as such that it was a sign signal, you know,
Speaker 2: they wouldn't been out there recklessly motorcycles. So I think
Speaker 2: it was key and critical to his work. I mean,
Speaker 2: I think what he did next, because he did John
Speaker 2: Wessey Harden, right, which is a complete turn from you know,
Speaker 2: thirty minutes songs on blonde and Blonde I'm talking about,
Speaker 2: you know, amphetamines and pearls and your magazine husband just
Speaker 2: has to go and stuff like that to a very
Speaker 2: very classic restrained country album made National, which is a
Speaker 2: beauty and said, you know, it's a different Bob. After that,
Speaker 2: I think it was very real.
Speaker 1: Okay, in a different era where there are limited media sources,
Speaker 1: Rolling Stone broke the story of the basement Tapes, the
Speaker 1: Great White wonder, how did you become aware of that?
Speaker 2: I had forgotten that I had done that I had
Speaker 2: and I read it somewhere in its very small world
Speaker 2: then of the music industry and music people and music scenes.
Speaker 2: Somebody gave me a copy of this tape that they
Speaker 2: had sent out for Demos to as Demos started selling songs,
Speaker 2: and it was circling around at A few people know
Speaker 2: about it, and here here's something special. Was well, had
Speaker 2: no public visibility whatsoever. And I heard it and loved it,
Speaker 2: and then I thought, this is an album. I mean,
Speaker 2: this could justifies easily being released on I wrote a
Speaker 2: thing in Rolling Stone and like issue fifteen or fourteen
Speaker 2: or something, say debate and said the Basement Tapes must
Speaker 2: be released, you know. And and I reviewed what was
Speaker 2: on there and said why it should be released, And
Speaker 2: soon enough they released him.
Speaker 1: Okay, in the fall of seventies, I believe you printed
Speaker 1: a whole story that was a hoax about this album.
Speaker 1: What was the genesis of that?
Speaker 2: I had nothing to do with it. It was greal Marcus.
Speaker 2: It was a very distinguished Craig was our record review
Speaker 2: headed there, and he and some of the other his friends,
Speaker 2: and there were also some of the critics decide they
Speaker 2: put together. It was an album called the Masked Marauders
Speaker 2: or was it called Yeah, Great Much Wonder the Hottest.
Speaker 2: The name of the album was A Great White Wonder.
Speaker 2: This is after this is uh at the era of
Speaker 2: the super group. So called it was when you know,
Speaker 2: uh Bloomfield was playing. I forgot which the groups were.
Speaker 2: Traffic may have formed in or maybe it was Cream
Speaker 2: was around then, and they started guest musicians with other bands.
Speaker 2: Was very unusual then it didn't happen. You had to
Speaker 2: have the actual permission of the record company that you
Speaker 2: were signed you to participate. I mean so antique. It's
Speaker 2: these these are long ago days, feel And so they
Speaker 2: wrote a spoof. They did a spoof for the super
Speaker 2: group and they reviewed it. I mean, they didn't do
Speaker 2: the right They wrote a review of the Great White
Speaker 2: Wonder and said that Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger and Paul
Speaker 2: McCartney or whomever had all assembled secretly in Hudson Bay, Canada,
Speaker 2: you know, and put together this great record and it
Speaker 2: was flying out the shelves or whatever. People. So we
Speaker 2: started getting phone call with the office asked how do
Speaker 2: you get the record? How do you get in touch
Speaker 2: with the group? You know, managers calling record comings balling
Speaker 2: there because they want to get a hold of it. Well,
Speaker 2: of course, so Greal said, whether they go ahead and
Speaker 2: record the album? And then Warner Brothers signed it, you know,
Speaker 2: no as a just general good time goof okay. In
Speaker 2: the second Dillon interview, nowadays throw you in jail for
Speaker 2: violenting your copyright.
Speaker 1: The second Dillon interview, you talk about the Endless Tour,
Speaker 1: although it's not referred to under that moniker. Whereupon he
Speaker 1: rearranges the music and he the classic tunes. Anybody who
Speaker 1: goes to the show knows that he may play a
Speaker 1: classic tune and you may not even recognize it. Bob
Speaker 1: gives his explanation. Do you buy his explanation, and do
Speaker 1: you still enjoy the modern day concerts which are not faithful?
Speaker 2: Well, I forget his explanation and just refresh me on that.
Speaker 1: Well, it's basically he says, the song deems to be
Speaker 1: played that way, that ultimately you start with the recording,
Speaker 1: then the song evolves and every night there's a different listen.
Speaker 1: It's a facocta explanation. That's why I asked you.
Speaker 2: There's a you know, there's a grain of truth in
Speaker 2: that explanation, but that's all. That's about what there is
Speaker 2: on that beach. I think that there's a couple of
Speaker 2: things work. He has more fun doing it differently rather
Speaker 2: than singing at the same time. Eighteen million time in
Speaker 2: a row, and then there's a period in there where
Speaker 2: he would I thought, did it deliberately just to confuse, frustrate,
Speaker 2: you know, do whatever kind of strange thing is in
Speaker 2: his mind. I mean, he has got to have known
Speaker 2: that the audience comes to hear some of the big
Speaker 2: hits as well his new stuff, and it's a disappointments
Speaker 2: to people not to hear one of their favorite Bob
Speaker 2: songs done in a way you expect to hear, and
Speaker 2: then to not regulariz which he knows they're not recognizable,
Speaker 2: and we called them on it, and I'm sure a
Speaker 2: lot of other people that I remember even walking out
Speaker 2: of a Dylan show years ago because of that. You know,
Speaker 2: it's just so you know, you don't want to know
Speaker 2: that the song is you know, you barely recognize it,
Speaker 2: and it's frustrating and it's and it's disrespectful of his audience. Well,
Speaker 2: somewhere along the line, you know, about ten years ago,
Speaker 2: he changed that and he went back to doing this song.
Speaker 2: So now he does something really interesting. He does a
Speaker 2: couple of versions of the old songs in generally the
Speaker 2: old style or the familiar style, you know, a little
Speaker 2: a little better, a little that which is really satisfacing.
Speaker 2: They don't take a few, he'll really rework them in
Speaker 2: a way that's so amazing. He will turn something, you know,
Speaker 2: a ballot into a stately, dignified, aching, beautiful song of
Speaker 2: something like like don't Think twice, you know it just
Speaker 2: it becomes a gospel tune almost. I mean, they're beautiful
Speaker 2: what he does with it. And now what he's doing,
Speaker 2: and that is he's really singing primarily his new records
Speaker 2: and his new songs, which he's got a lot of now,
Speaker 2: and he doesn't have the voice for the old songs,
Speaker 2: you know, it's not they don't suit him anymore, and
Speaker 2: it's better for him to stay away from them because
Speaker 2: he can't do you know, tambourine man or blown in
Speaker 2: the wind like he used to in the way you want.
Speaker 2: It's got to be in a different way. And he's
Speaker 2: doing that with real taste and style of imagination now
Speaker 2: and he's accepting, you know, his new voice. It's kind
Speaker 2: of blown out and horsemen smoking, but nonetheless quite beautiful.
Speaker 1: Let's switch to Jerry Garcia.
Speaker 2: What do we know?
Speaker 1: Had four albums, well, three albums before Live Dead, and
Speaker 1: if you opened up Live Dead from nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 1: you saw the Grateful Dead playing in the streets of
Speaker 1: San Francisco. The real breakthrough was working Man'stead and then
Speaker 1: American Beauty. But since you were living on the West
Speaker 1: Coast prior to Working Man's Dead. In the book, Jerry
Speaker 1: gives a relatively complete delineation of his history and his
Speaker 1: history of the band. But were you aware of the
Speaker 1: Dead back then and what was their cultural impact? Oh?
Speaker 2: Well, I was aware of the Dead before I even
Speaker 2: started Rolling Stone. I mean they were part of this
Speaker 2: kind of like hippie drug scene that I was getting into.
Speaker 2: A few people in Palo Alto near Stanford, doing me
Speaker 2: in Berkeley, and a bunch of kids in San Francisco
Speaker 2: State And so everybody in each of those three scenes
Speaker 2: was taking drugs and aware of the people in the
Speaker 2: other scenes and go back and forth. That was the
Speaker 2: genesis of it all. So I happened to because of
Speaker 2: that run into the Dead. In nineteen sixty sixty five,
Speaker 2: I went to a Rolling Stones concert in San Jose
Speaker 2: and next door to the you know, or in that
Speaker 2: same neighborhood. The very first as well, so the very
Speaker 2: first asstest was being and I went to that and
Speaker 2: it was The Dead was playing in the living room
Speaker 2: of this big kind of college attorney or something like that.
Speaker 2: And it was the first night they'd ever performed as
Speaker 2: the Grateful Dead. They had been Mother McCurry's jug band
Speaker 2: up until that, and that was the first night they
Speaker 2: were using that name. It was just in somebody's living room,
Speaker 2: but it was the group. It was them, and and
Speaker 2: I went up to it was either less or we
Speaker 2: Are and I said, well, wow, you guys, and I'm
Speaker 2: taking acid at the time. You guys are like, oh
Speaker 2: my god, mind blowing. What is your name? And he
Speaker 2: turns around and goes, we are the Grateful Dead, and
Speaker 2: well what is that? Okay? But then so anyway, I
Speaker 2: would see them a lot before starting rolling the Stone,
Speaker 2: and once I started Rolling Stone, they were, of course,
Speaker 2: you know, part of what we did. One of my
Speaker 2: best friends was the best friend of the Bill Kreisman,
Speaker 2: a drummer, and kind of managed them on the road
Speaker 2: for a little bit. And so you know, I saw
Speaker 2: a lot of them, you know, And I'm a dead head.
Speaker 1: And what about keys? You were you aware? Have you
Speaker 1: read one flew overs the Cuckoo's Nests and the Acid
Speaker 1: tests and was he a presence or did you have
Speaker 1: to wait for Tom Wolves book to find out what
Speaker 1: was really going on?
Speaker 2: Oh? I didn't have to wait for Tom's book. I
Speaker 2: we keasey how I was aware of Keysy. I went
Speaker 2: to acid tests. I've been down at his house. We
Speaker 2: uh uh. Everybody knew his books and there were brilliant,
Speaker 2: great books, I mean great books. And he was just
Speaker 2: a key member of that that tripartina was part tight
Speaker 2: scene I was talking about. He was in Stanford. He
Speaker 2: participated in the first LSD experiments conducted by some government
Speaker 2: agency with Stanford under contract to Stanford, and part of
Speaker 2: that group of guys go, who this stuff is fantastic.
Speaker 2: I don't know what they're trying to test for, and
Speaker 2: turned on the Grateful Dead and a lot of other
Speaker 2: people to the acid around there. And so keysys in
Speaker 2: a way the v godfather of the San Francisco scene
Speaker 2: and asked tests and you know, just sort of one
Speaker 2: branch of the hippie thing. Ken later, you know, became
Speaker 2: a regular contribute to Throwing Stone. I mean, I think
Speaker 2: I cut it up. He wrote about I think twenty
Speaker 2: seven pieces for Rolling Stone over the years, and you know,
Speaker 2: He's a hero of mine, and in a way I mean,
Speaker 2: I think he's I said, the god of the sea.
Speaker 2: He is a great man, great American novelist.
Speaker 1: Okay, so to what degree did electrocool aid acid test
Speaker 1: have an impact upon you personally?
Speaker 2: He didn't personally impact I'd already been there and done that.
Speaker 2: It impacted me on that. I was so impressed with
Speaker 2: Tom and how he was able to catch what I
Speaker 2: consider such an evanescent scene, you know, something that's ephemeral
Speaker 2: and ethereal and hard hard to get, and he got it,
Speaker 2: and it made me all the more impressed with him.
Speaker 2: So I just one of the first things I did
Speaker 2: when I started rolling stones try and find him, seek
Speaker 2: him out, and to get the right to get to
Speaker 2: get him to write for us. And I did, and
Speaker 2: he did write for us, and the history came out
Speaker 2: of that.
Speaker 1: Okay. Unfortunately Tom has passed, But in the aftermath and
Speaker 1: a little bit during his leader years, people said that
Speaker 1: he was a Republican right winger. Would you agree with that?
Speaker 2: Uh? You know, I never talked politics with Tom in
Speaker 2: that way, partially because I suspected or new he was
Speaker 2: very conservative individual, but not he wasn't concerned in this
Speaker 2: hard right sense that people are now. Tom was a humanist,
Speaker 2: you know, he liked people. He liked weird people, you know,
Speaker 2: and weird culture. I mean, by no means was he
Speaker 2: kind of one of those William F. Buckley type haters.
Speaker 2: He was kind of snobby Tom. You know, he could
Speaker 2: be very he was very elegant, aristocratic his thing. He
Speaker 2: was very conservative. He's old fashioned. He's a very old
Speaker 2: fashioned gentleman. And he was a great gentleman from the south,
Speaker 2: from Virginia. But he wasn't a radical, you know. I
Speaker 2: mean he would never go for something like Trump and
Speaker 2: would be terribly imus this is my Trump. But uh yeah,
Speaker 2: he was conservative. I think he was politically conservative, yes,
Speaker 2: but not in that way that you hate people these days.
Speaker 1: So the Dead have this burst of popularity in the seventies.
Speaker 1: They ultimately have an MTV hit on earst in the eighties,
Speaker 1: but there becomes this whole new wave of fans before
Speaker 1: Jerry dies. Of course, we have the incident at the
Speaker 1: gig where the stands, where people die, etc. But as
Speaker 1: someone who has been there from day one, what do
Speaker 1: you think about the latter day deadheads? Let me go
Speaker 1: a little bit further. If I say anything about the
Speaker 1: Grateful Dead, people correct me, even though I saw him
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy and they weren't even born yet.
Speaker 2: Wells shown your age. I mean, what what is exactly?
Speaker 2: What is the question there?
Speaker 1: How do you feel do you feel that the latter
Speaker 1: day that it's an affectation that the gen xers have
Speaker 1: latched on to the grateful Dead? Let me go one
Speaker 1: step further. Springsteen, who's in your book and very eloquent
Speaker 1: in your book. You know I saw Springsteen. I bought
Speaker 1: the first album, saw Im the bottom Line in seventy four,
Speaker 1: the year before Bla to Run. What I always say
Speaker 1: about Springsteen is I have no problem with Springsteen. I
Speaker 1: just hate his fans. Same deal with the dead, their authorities.
Speaker 1: You can't say anything negative, etc. Now the Grateful Day,
Speaker 1: since you were around back then, they would play for
Speaker 1: four hours. One hour would be unlistenable, one hour would
Speaker 1: be great, and two hours would be so so. But
Speaker 1: you can't even say that the dead have been iconized
Speaker 1: at this point in time. So with your perspective, how
Speaker 1: do you feel about the dead and the modern day
Speaker 1: interpretation of them?
Speaker 2: Well, I mean I love the classical Dead, The Dead
Speaker 2: before anybody, before they made their first record that was
Speaker 2: The Dead. I grew up with herd gotten indelible and
Speaker 2: was made indelible in my mind, whether Pig Pens blues
Speaker 2: playing or Jerry's Garteit guars. Jerry's wonderful guitar playing, and
Speaker 2: I liked where they evolved too, but they got to
Speaker 2: a point for me that's hard to say. When I
Speaker 2: got so involved with Rolling Stone Range in New York,
Speaker 2: I kind of lost track for a while there. But
Speaker 2: there's a period there that they just like I lost
Speaker 2: Got two Jazzy too, prophevizational and I think that came
Speaker 2: to go too many drugs, So I think I lost that.
Speaker 2: Even to this day, I prefer the more structured songs
Speaker 2: uh and uh, you know, where they're tight and they're
Speaker 2: bluesy and you can really hear the guitar playing and
Speaker 2: really act as a good rhythm section. I can kind
Speaker 2: of get lost in China Cat Sunflower, you know, and
Speaker 2: just I love to listen for Jerry's Garcian garci Is
Speaker 2: guitar playing and it's really wonderful voice. But you know,
Speaker 2: have a limited there's a limited range of dead stuff.
Speaker 2: I like today the band of the last several years
Speaker 2: with John Mayer and it I went. So it was terrific, actually,
Speaker 2: and I think it's really shaped up. I think a
Speaker 2: lot to do with John Mayer being there. I mean,
Speaker 2: he's a wonderful interpreter, non imitator of Jerry, but I
Speaker 2: think he bought some kind of missing structure and professionalism
Speaker 2: to the band. You know that this set is organized
Speaker 2: and tighter, and they're kind of thing more responsible to
Speaker 2: the audience, and they still deliver the long jams and
Speaker 2: they still deliver all that, and you know, but it's
Speaker 2: the essence of it. I have no problem with the fans.
Speaker 2: I mean I look at it, and you know, I
Speaker 2: just see people, you know, when I see it, I
Speaker 2: see people having a good time and trying to recreate
Speaker 2: the old days or trying to live another live in
Speaker 2: another era. And you know, whether they felt it deep
Speaker 2: in their soul or where it came from, where his
Speaker 2: style or whatever. I just think it's all sincere and
Speaker 2: have a good time and looking strange and you know,
Speaker 2: celebrating an era which was wonderful. I mean, it's great
Speaker 2: to be a fan of something, you know. I mean,
Speaker 2: I'm a more I'm a big fan, you know, of
Speaker 2: lots of particularly Stones and Bruce and Bob and the
Speaker 2: people I've had here in the Dead and you know,
Speaker 2: it's deep into the trivia of it and the passionate
Speaker 2: about what song is better? Alb and you liked one. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's fun. It's good to do that. And I think
Speaker 2: with a group like that which has stands for such
Speaker 2: positive stuff, you know, and with the music is so
Speaker 2: interesting and fulfilling, I think it's great, you know. And
Speaker 2: uh so I don't distain him and am I and
Speaker 2: you know, half the time in their opinion, some random
Speaker 2: fans opinion is as good as mine, you know. I mean,
Speaker 2: Bruce plays for three and a half hours, the Dead
Speaker 2: plays for three and a half hours. Stones just to
Speaker 2: two and a half. I'm ripped off, you know. But they,
Speaker 2: on the other had put fortunate to at fucking stage,
Speaker 2: you know. Okay, just staying with John Mayer, Dead End
Speaker 2: Company was tighter and more together than The Grateful Dead
Speaker 2: with Jerry ever were, although if you say that, you
Speaker 2: know you're a heretic. But let's switch to John Lennon.
Speaker 2: You have an edited version of what came out as
Speaker 2: a book as Lennon remembers. Now supposedly Lennon was pissed
Speaker 2: that he gave you this interview that you turned into
Speaker 2: a book that you sold as a book. Was that
Speaker 2: your understanding and what was going on there? Well, the
Speaker 2: book as it now is out is the full and
Speaker 2: complete thing, and the interview that is in the book
Speaker 2: that I'm just publishing. I cleaned up a lot for
Speaker 2: as you mentioned before, for you know, verbal tics, and
Speaker 2: I took a lot of stuff out there was just
Speaker 2: not relevant, you know, some discussion of apple business. There's
Speaker 2: things that are current then and names that don't mean anything.
Speaker 2: They're just you know, focusing more stuff, and and uh,
Speaker 2: the reaction, the reaction after the book came out was
Speaker 2: pretty stunny. You know. It was like became worldwide headlines
Speaker 2: because it was the first time that any Beatle talked
Speaker 2: openly about what it was like to be in the Beatles,
Speaker 2: who they were, what they did, let alone, you know,
Speaker 2: who wrote what, and all the kind of musicianship questions.
Speaker 2: But nobody had pierced or gone inside the Beatles. They
Speaker 2: were sealed off. They were the most famous group in
Speaker 2: the world. They had lovable mop tops kept behind glass barriers,
Speaker 2: and all stuff. So this breaking of the silence and
Speaker 2: this kind of and also saying that they were breaking up.
Speaker 2: And in this interview he detailed the breakup and while
Speaker 2: they wake up upset lots of people, and he was
Speaker 2: harsh about McCartney. Any case. Reaction was amazing. I mean,
Speaker 2: it was headlines around the world, every even in Tibet,
Speaker 2: you know, the Laws of Laws of Daily covered in
Speaker 2: the front page. You know, it was everywhere because the
Speaker 2: Beatles were everywhere. They were the Beatles. So I think
Speaker 2: it shocked John, and John did not want to see
Speaker 2: it reissued as a book, and I did and uh,
Speaker 2: because no more that was already published tonight, it was
Speaker 2: my right to do so, uh, And I went ahead
Speaker 2: and did it. And I regretted the bad feelings that caused,
Speaker 2: but you know, because I didn't, I hated, you know,
Speaker 2: doing that. I mean, John meant so much to me personally,
Speaker 2: and he had done so much for Rolling Stone, including
Speaker 2: giving us this interviews and earlier stuff that put Rolling
Speaker 2: Stone on the map. You know, I don't. I don't
Speaker 2: know how I would have done it today. You know,
Speaker 2: today I might have done it differently. You know, today
Speaker 2: I maybe didn't. I don't need the money, you know
Speaker 2: I needed need it then or whatever it was. But
Speaker 2: so anyway, customer. But we reconciled and we start corresponding again,
Speaker 2: and Rolling Stones always backing him on everything he was doing,
Speaker 2: and he was always writing us letters and uh, you
Speaker 2: know in the end, Gabe, you know, I was giving
Speaker 2: another huge interview view to you know, to Rolling Stone
Speaker 2: at that time, and he was show me another cover.
Speaker 2: So you know, I mean I we would become friends again,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 1: So okay, so have you seen the extended let it
Speaker 1: be get back on TV?
Speaker 2: Know? I haven't.
Speaker 1: Well, I would say, and as he had lenin Fiend,
Speaker 1: he comes across as an asshole. Yeah, so what was
Speaker 1: your experience one on one with him? Well, John was
Speaker 1: a had a sharp tongue. It would be very tough,
Speaker 1: you know, constantly going on. You know, I've talked all
Speaker 1: the time and just sharp.
Speaker 2: You know, one of those people's can't act just they're
Speaker 2: with you know, they're saying something funny is more important
Speaker 2: than any feelings or friendship. You know, if it's a
Speaker 2: clever line, let's do it, you know. And if you're
Speaker 2: not strong enough or tough enough to take it, too bad,
Speaker 2: you know, and the when I saw that, when I
Speaker 2: saw Well, I did see a little bit of that
Speaker 2: movie though, but let it be uh well, the first
Speaker 2: time I saw as I saw with John and his
Speaker 2: things after is Oh, it's just Paul's point of view.
Speaker 2: This is an edit that came out years ago and
Speaker 2: I guess had a limited releasing with drawn or something
Speaker 2: like that. He felt it was Paul doing his selections
Speaker 2: of the stuff and the material. This point Paul's point
Speaker 2: of view, and I was always kind of sympathetic to John,
Speaker 2: and because I've been listening only to John about there
Speaker 2: were conditions. But once you see that movie, see John
Speaker 2: looks like he's trying to sabotage the whole session, difficult
Speaker 2: to reign and difficult to pay attention, you know, always
Speaker 2: making cutting remarks not available, slumped in the side of
Speaker 2: the room, and Paul is desperately trying to organize this
Speaker 2: session and make people show up on time and doing
Speaker 2: all the things you do as a leader. It and
Speaker 2: the movie is fantastic, but I saw a very I
Speaker 2: saw a forty vinement selection of clips that were admittedly
Speaker 2: assembled by Paul, and that he showed you a bunch
Speaker 2: of friends and he had the director Peter Jackson put
Speaker 2: this together as a private thing. And your first thing
Speaker 2: is you told swept away by that history, by that
Speaker 2: time that placed those songs down there, made the magic
Speaker 2: of the entire thing is alive and full blast. Then
Speaker 2: as you as you're a Beals fan like I am
Speaker 2: was will always be, and you start parsing it for
Speaker 2: the details of the relationship and things you're learning, and
Speaker 2: things you thought this and all the little stuff that
Speaker 2: goes along with it, and what every move of a
Speaker 2: hander indicates or something like that. You see that you
Speaker 2: know Paul, John was dealing. Paul was dealing John who
Speaker 2: was trying to sabotage the session, you know, somewhat consciously.
Speaker 2: Somewhat self consciously he'd had it. He wanted to make
Speaker 2: it rough for Paul. You know, okay, Paul, if you
Speaker 2: want to take this thing over, go right ahead, you
Speaker 2: take it over. You run the sessions, you do, let's
Speaker 2: do your material and you know, make me work, you know,
Speaker 2: pay for it. You know. Meantime, I think he and
Speaker 2: the open corner taking junk, which doesn't help anything, and
Speaker 2: Paul's trying to get it to going. Having said all that,
Speaker 2: at that album that came out of that, but It'd
Speaker 2: be is their worst record for the obvious reasons. You
Speaker 2: can see it in the studio. You know they're trying
Speaker 2: to patch it together. Okay, that record.
Speaker 1: Was legendarily remixed and added to by Phil Spector. Right,
Speaker 1: forget Phil Spector's crimes and going to jail. Whatever, where
Speaker 1: are you at with Phil Spector and his work with
Speaker 1: the Beatles?
Speaker 2: Okay, I think you're gonna want to critique that album
Speaker 2: and I can. And people just said that's not such
Speaker 2: a bout, And I say, okay, well, let's go through
Speaker 2: the playlist. Can you tell me? Shall I bring it up?
Speaker 2: Or is this pointless?
Speaker 1: Well, let me be specific to you. The strings on
Speaker 1: long and winding winding road, good or bad?
Speaker 2: Soupy, soapy, you know, sentimental. Here's here's the songs. I'll
Speaker 2: let it be. You tell me A few things is
Speaker 2: a great be The Two of Us.
Speaker 1: Two of Us is a good It's a minor George
Speaker 1: Harrison song, but with the intro and the acoustic guitars,
Speaker 1: I'm down with who two of Us?
Speaker 2: Sweet? It's a sweet song. It's a long and minding road,
Speaker 2: long winding road.
Speaker 1: I have no time for.
Speaker 2: Across the Universe, No time for one after nine oh
Speaker 2: nine better, that's.
Speaker 1: A song from before where they really were the Beatles.
Speaker 2: It's okay, that's oh no, but it's not for you
Speaker 2: Blue for.
Speaker 1: You Blue is once again. It was the flip side
Speaker 1: I think of Long Winding Road. Whatever or get back.
Speaker 1: It's got an interesting sound. It's a George Harrison album track.
Speaker 1: Doesn't belong on that album.
Speaker 2: It's my okay, get back. We all agree that's good,
Speaker 2: right right? I mean mine? I mean mine.
Speaker 1: No, it's strained.
Speaker 2: Let it be. We can say that's a good one too.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: I don't love that feeling. I got a feeling I love.
Speaker 2: I love.
Speaker 1: It's a it's just you know, everybody had a good time.
Speaker 1: Everybody let their hair down. When you get John going underneath,
Speaker 1: I dig that.
Speaker 3: You dig it. But it's a great song. But wait,
Speaker 3: dig it dig a pony, Maggie. I agree with this
Speaker 3: is this is my album.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's go. It's got three songs that they're worth it.
Speaker 2: You know, they got a lot of nice tunes, you know.
Speaker 2: But that's anyway.
Speaker 1: But the question, let's stay with Phil Spector, what's your
Speaker 1: view of instant Karma.
Speaker 2: I love that song. I mean it's powerful, but that's
Speaker 2: John song. I mean, what they'll do it echo, But
Speaker 2: the way.
Speaker 1: The drums are the drums don't sound like anything on
Speaker 1: a Beatles truck. I'm not talking about the ability, but
Speaker 1: the way they sound. They like he's hitting cardboard. It's
Speaker 1: got a different feel.
Speaker 2: Phil is a genius. He means a genius producer, and
Speaker 2: he can strip it down. I mean, I like that.
Speaker 2: But they did terrifically. You know what else did they
Speaker 2: do together? Didn't Phil produce Imagine? It seemed to produce.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Phil worked with John. I always thought Imagine was
Speaker 1: so obvious that I thought that John was laughing behind it,
Speaker 1: although that doesn't seem to be the case. Sometimes when
Speaker 1: something is too direct, it really kind of, you know,
Speaker 1: rubs me the wrong way.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, it's such a simple song, Imagine. It's
Speaker 2: got such a simple track, and it's just a piano really,
Speaker 2: and the notion that it's gonna be so spare and
Speaker 2: Instacarma is very spare too. I mean, and if Phil
Speaker 2: was a great producer turned into a crazy man, I'm,
Speaker 2: you know, sorry to hear him go. I don't think
Speaker 2: that he did pretty great work with the Beatles, you
Speaker 2: know you Yeah, he's nuts. I enjoyed Phil sort of.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's stay with the Beatles before we get back
Speaker 1: to Phil. So if I snap my fingers and you
Speaker 1: have to get either McCartney's seventies output or John's seventies output,
Speaker 1: what would you take if you could only pick one?
Speaker 2: If I had to only, I mean of their solo
Speaker 2: output post Beatles solo output, I'd be going for John.
Speaker 2: I think Paul wrote wonderful songs and still does, and
Speaker 2: they're pretty, but the major ones that live in history
Speaker 2: are by John.
Speaker 1: Okay, the plastic on would be in the first album.
Speaker 1: You guys gave great reviews. It was not as commercially
Speaker 1: successful as McCartney's first solo album, McCartney with Maybe I'm Amazed.
Speaker 1: Of course, it had mother and it had other songs.
Speaker 1: Do you think that and there was recently a re
Speaker 1: release remix. Do you think that album was unfairly overlooked
Speaker 1: or do you think that people really get that album today?
Speaker 2: I think I don't think it was unfairly overlooked. It
Speaker 2: was just not a commercial album in any sense, you know.
Speaker 2: I mean, there's one pretty song you know, maybe Boy
Speaker 2: was that it or so Paul's was the difference between
Speaker 2: the two them in that thing. Paul's was a commercial album,
Speaker 2: is pretty you know, it's easy to take Paul's out.
Speaker 2: John's album was much more interesting, much dealt with much
Speaker 2: more complex subjects, much better writing, and frankly better melodies.
Speaker 2: But it was a hard album to listen to. It
Speaker 2: was a confrontational album. You know. It wasn't about Moon
Speaker 2: and June and Spoon and you know, maybe I'm amazed.
Speaker 2: It was about mother, you did this to me, did
Speaker 2: that to me? And the Beatles are over and just
Speaker 2: everything was tough. You know, it came out of as
Speaker 2: he said, I had a lot of pain. And it's
Speaker 2: a great piece of work. That's the one that will
Speaker 2: have a living history, no matter even if it wasn't
Speaker 2: successful commercially.
Speaker 1: When did you first hear the Beatles?
Speaker 2: My first real awareness of the Beatles was seeing him
Speaker 2: in Hard Day's Night. I totally missed the Sullivan Show
Speaker 2: appearance and was told about it, but I wasn't on
Speaker 2: my radar at that point. For whatever reason. I had
Speaker 2: just gotten to college. When I saw Hard Day's Night.
Speaker 2: I just that was a you know, real Road to
Speaker 2: Damascus moment. That was a what do they call those things?
Speaker 2: My age is getting it's a real revelation. It was
Speaker 2: an epiphany. It was an epiphany for me.
Speaker 1: Okay, for many boomers, and you're just a little bit
Speaker 1: older than that. The Beatles were a line of demarcation.
Speaker 1: You had Chuck Berry, you had Elvis in the fifties,
Speaker 1: then we had the drek of Fabian slightly better with
Speaker 1: Bobby Darren, and in the sixties we get the fourth
Speaker 1: season and Beach Boys. Then the Beatles hits for you.
Speaker 1: Is it just one long continuum or do you see
Speaker 1: that as a vast turning point.
Speaker 2: It's a vast turning point because it wasn't just the Beatles.
Speaker 2: It was Beatles and Bob together and that changed it
Speaker 2: all around, as well as the fact that but it
Speaker 2: was also continuum. I mean, how can you say that
Speaker 2: it was a continuum of Chuck to the Beach Boys
Speaker 2: Elvis that all led to the Beatles. Limits It's a continuum, obviously,
Speaker 2: but it was a huge pivot point. It wasn't an
Speaker 2: abrupt start. It was just in the beginning of the
Speaker 2: book The Matches, I wrote along essay about this and
Speaker 2: about how the music of the fifties led into the
Speaker 2: music of the sixties from a social and cultural point
Speaker 2: of view, not from musical point of view. I don't
Speaker 2: get in there and think it's to say how Chuck
Speaker 2: Berry's song became Stone Songs and the Beatles, and I
Speaker 2: don't that's you know, kind of obvious, but that it
Speaker 2: was continue these people set the stage, you know, I
Speaker 2: mean Jeredy Lewis and Elvis, and it just led right
Speaker 2: to the Beatles, you know.
Speaker 1: Okay, So if you speak with people today, and I do,
Speaker 1: many people say, oh, it's the same as it ever was,
Speaker 1: or to quote you know, Paul Simon or paraphrase, every
Speaker 1: generation puts an act on the pop chart. What do
Speaker 1: you think about music's place and impact in society compared
Speaker 1: to the sixties in the early seventies.
Speaker 2: We have to be a little more specificed about that,
Speaker 2: but I think it all this particular music rock and
Speaker 2: roll as a continuum from its origins in the fifties,
Speaker 2: go back even from its origins as black music, but
Speaker 2: from its origins is teeny pretained teen white music in
Speaker 2: the fifties too. To days has this in every step
Speaker 2: of the way, has had this enormous impact on the
Speaker 2: people who grew up with it, and the people do
Speaker 2: it now. But the people grow it stood for liberation,
Speaker 2: to for liberation and sexuality. It's for literation, styles and
Speaker 2: fashion and thinking. When you get to the college years
Speaker 2: in the early sixties and the mid sixties and the
Speaker 2: Baby Boom coincide. The Baby Boom and its knowledge of
Speaker 2: civil rights and awareness with all the injustice there and
Speaker 2: the assassination of Kennedy and going to worm, it coincides
Speaker 2: neatly with this music. Now that they've all their lives
Speaker 2: have loved and led and spoken to him now really
Speaker 2: speaks from in a big, broader, deeper sense. And these people,
Speaker 2: the Beats and Bob Millen coming along and articulate that.
Speaker 2: Yet it continues as this musical form, and I think
Speaker 2: it becomes just more and more important and more and
Speaker 2: more profound, more moving, more powerful as you go on
Speaker 2: and on, as the group's more popular and widespread, and
Speaker 2: as technology comes with it, the technology of the long
Speaker 2: playing record, that then the technology of the single, than
Speaker 2: then the technology of the tape and the tape deck,
Speaker 2: and now the a tract tape and the cassette and
Speaker 2: all of a sudden the CD, and as we keep
Speaker 2: on going, the music becomes bigger and more popular and
Speaker 2: more widespread than ever. And today you can hear any
Speaker 2: song ever written any place around the world that you
Speaker 2: are at anytime free. So I mean, I think the impact,
Speaker 2: the influence of the music is so broad and the
Speaker 2: content was so important and real in people's lives, people's
Speaker 2: personal lives emotionalized of how do I love two people ones?
Speaker 2: Or how do I treat somebody I've wronged? Or you know,
Speaker 2: just the deep or the personal moral level, plus the
Speaker 2: political level, where do I Where do I stand? Where
Speaker 2: I do in such an unjust as side that's been
Speaker 2: so adjusted to its black population, or these unjust wars,
Speaker 2: you know, and where we're destroying the plant. I mean,
Speaker 2: So this music has spoken to it all all that
Speaker 2: and for a generation and to the issue. And I
Speaker 2: think two more than just a generation. And I think
Speaker 2: it's it's influenced that generation, moved that generation and guided
Speaker 2: that generation. And that has been the whole premise of
Speaker 2: Rolling Stone, one of the whole one of the premises,
Speaker 2: the key premises of Rolling Stone from the beginning that
Speaker 2: these people and these people have interviewed in the book
Speaker 2: that I call the masters, you know, were the poets,
Speaker 2: were the truth tellers of you know, the gatekeepers of truth,
Speaker 2: is what I call them. You know, any people have
Speaker 2: come out and tell the truth about society, you know,
Speaker 2: which you could learn more about what was going on
Speaker 2: in America from Bob Dylan or The Grateful Dead then
Speaker 2: and today from Bruce then you learn from any of
Speaker 2: the poets, from any of the politicians or the preachers,
Speaker 2: you know, or the the entertainers. You know, that truth
Speaker 2: was coming out of these mouths. So now these eyes,
Speaker 2: Is rock dead today? No, not at all. I mean again,
Speaker 2: it depends how you want to define rock. Are you
Speaker 2: talking about rock in the fifties, you're talking rock in
Speaker 2: a broader sense? Is the musical I don't know. I
Speaker 2: still love it. I'm still totally taken by it. I
Speaker 2: know that thousands of my children and hundreds and thousands
Speaker 2: of other people listen to it and love it because
Speaker 2: they can hear it all the time. You have to
Speaker 2: pay for it. So the Beals is still probably the
Speaker 2: most popular group in the world, you know, of all
Speaker 2: the things, and is its forefront of mine as it
Speaker 2: was then. Now when we have these pop groups, in
Speaker 2: the rap groups Domini and Charles all the place, which
Speaker 2: we did again earlier on. You know, we had Fabian
Speaker 2: and as you were talking about earlier, we had all
Speaker 2: the teen groups. So I don't I don't think so.
Speaker 2: I don't think music as a form is dead or
Speaker 2: less influential in the lives of people who love it.
Speaker 2: I think they' ill lots and lots of messages and
Speaker 2: lots and lots of concern it. I mean it's a
Speaker 2: passionate music. Music in and of itself, all the arts
Speaker 2: is the most passionate and soulful because it's not articulable
Speaker 2: and something you feel. Yeah, it's not something you visualize
Speaker 2: and see a painting. It's not something you read. You know,
Speaker 2: you feel that stuff and has that.
Speaker 1: Okay, In the sixties, seventies and even eighties, it was
Speaker 1: anathema to sell out. Now everybody says credibility is not
Speaker 1: an issue. Everybody accepts that everybody sells out. Where are
Speaker 1: you on that?
Speaker 2: Well, I don't know again what you mean by selling out?
Speaker 2: Do you mean accepting Curs's commercial sponsorship for scour or
Speaker 2: selling your song for a car commercial.
Speaker 1: Sell your car for a car commercial? Brand extension into clothing, perfume, etc.
Speaker 2: I to me, it has not affected the quality of music,
Speaker 2: what they've written, or my belief in the music. And
Speaker 2: when I see Dylan doing a Jo Van commercial, you know,
Speaker 2: or I think when I.
Speaker 1: See the Stone started with the jove on for that
Speaker 1: too was their first one.
Speaker 2: But let's start. Let's go back to what I consider
Speaker 2: the beginning of it in our era, which is the
Speaker 2: Jefferson Airplane lent their music in nineteen sixty seven sixty
Speaker 2: eight to a commercial for white levis. Now is that
Speaker 2: selling out? Well, if we go.
Speaker 1: Back into history and it's all on YouTube, most of
Speaker 1: these acts on the way Up did commercials for soft drinks,
Speaker 1: et cetera. It was only when they reached ubiquity that
Speaker 1: they said.
Speaker 2: No, well I don't like who. I don't know, I
Speaker 2: don't I'm taking the who did commercials?
Speaker 1: Everybody did commercials on the way up.
Speaker 2: I don't think that who. They had one commercial, I
Speaker 2: think that was it. But the reason I used to
Speaker 2: watch Jeffers start Airplane and as a examples that that
Speaker 2: is the very culture which started this whole bitch about
Speaker 2: selling out and making it a nathma and making it
Speaker 2: wrong thing to do and lack of conscience and good
Speaker 2: vibes and you're now a hippie capitalist and you don't
Speaker 2: subscribe to the new system of love is everywhere yet
Speaker 2: And there was some bitching, not a lot, but that's
Speaker 2: where the bitching started. And then bitching started right there
Speaker 2: and over that particular use of that particular song. I
Speaker 2: think it might have been White Rabbit. Now, I just asked,
Speaker 2: looking back at it, I said, oh, well, yes, of
Speaker 2: course they did accept money from a corporation for the
Speaker 2: use of their you know, this beautiful music that it
Speaker 2: is supposed to be their treasure and their special thing.
Speaker 2: But what what did what did they harm? Did it cause?
Speaker 2: What was the harmit did then or now? I mean,
Speaker 2: you heard the music, you thought about why the VI's
Speaker 2: you know, it wasn't that they weren't selling cigarettes. They
Speaker 2: weren't telling you know, bad you know, uh cushion, bad
Speaker 2: safety cush for cars, I mean, and so so the
Speaker 2: Stones were letting their name to a perfume or Bob
Speaker 2: Dylan is selling It was just I don't I mean,
Speaker 2: in the end, I don't mind it at all, you know,
Speaker 2: And I see the people I do it. These are
Speaker 2: among the people who are have got the most integrity
Speaker 2: of everybody I know, whether it's Bruce or Bob or
Speaker 2: Neil Young, and they all do have their different things,
Speaker 2: you know. You know Bob never did it. You know
Speaker 2: you two does it with with iPhones or iTunes, which
Speaker 2: is not a bad product at all, but you know
Speaker 2: that's their attitude towards it. And they're relentlessly commercial bottom
Speaker 2: and see a bigger audience coming from it, and see
Speaker 2: most and all this sudden. If it doesn't bother them,
Speaker 2: frankly doesn't bother me. I'm quite used to it. I
Speaker 2: think it's harmless.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's switch gears to Towns and who opens the book.
Speaker 1: You interview them just before Tommy? Are you a Tommy
Speaker 1: guy or a quadrophenia guy?
Speaker 2: I have not thought in those terms. I'm not that
Speaker 2: passionate on it.
Speaker 1: Okay, then what was your motivation for opening the book
Speaker 1: with Townsend?
Speaker 2: He was the first real interview that I did, and
Speaker 2: I thought, and I mentioned before I did Hendrix, and
Speaker 2: that I mentioned I didn't air clapped into early on,
Speaker 2: before Rolling Still started. This is the first attempt to
Speaker 2: do a kind of deep dive. A lot of research
Speaker 2: interview with the Rocks. You know that it was the
Speaker 2: first one there, and it was nineteen sixty eight, and
Speaker 2: it was so clearly of its time and era, the
Speaker 2: way we were talking, what we were talking about, the passion,
Speaker 2: the confidence, you know, a stuff. And I published a
Speaker 2: whole book in chronological order, so it gives you a
Speaker 2: sense of the growth of rock and roll and the
Speaker 2: growth of the time period, the history of my own
Speaker 2: history and what I was looking for and how we
Speaker 2: all do and grow up. And really the epilogue is
Speaker 2: Dinner with Bruce Springsteen, which I did just this year,
Speaker 2: this last summer, this summer because I wouldn't put out
Speaker 2: a book called The Masters without brucing it. And he
Speaker 2: just happened to be a guy who I never got
Speaker 2: around the interviewing while I was doing it, while I
Speaker 2: was running Rolling Stone. I mean, the last one I did,
Speaker 2: it was like six or seven years ago, was Bono
Speaker 2: and uh by now and I just so it was
Speaker 2: nice to sit down Bruce's house and let's look back
Speaker 2: on all this. Now, remember when we were young and
Speaker 2: we did that, what do we think today? So it
Speaker 2: was the reason I put Pete first was to suggest
Speaker 2: a kind of a history, a kind of historical pursessive
Speaker 2: and that you could read this book also is a history.
Speaker 1: Okay, this is audio only, but in video on zoom,
Speaker 1: I can see you. You look young for your age,
Speaker 1: but you're not taking any steps to forestall the physical
Speaker 1: image of your body, whereas many of these acts they
Speaker 1: play the people who are in their seventies, yet they
Speaker 1: have plastic surgery and hair pieces. What do you think
Speaker 1: about these aging rock acts? Do you lament the fact
Speaker 1: that they haven't gotten older and instead of singing about
Speaker 1: Moon and June, they haven't sung about divorce and other
Speaker 1: issues that affect people who are older.
Speaker 2: Well, I don't think that's wholly true. First off, of
Speaker 2: the people we're talking about here the message, I'm just
Speaker 2: trying to think who might have had plasic. First off,
Speaker 2: they're all thin as could be to begin with, Yeah,
Speaker 2: except for Bond.
Speaker 1: Well, you know when I say Mick Jagger rehearsing for
Speaker 1: a tour in a ballet studio dancing, that's a turn
Speaker 1: off for me.
Speaker 2: It is I look at it as my age. I think,
Speaker 2: my god, this guy is several years older than me
Speaker 2: and amazing shape. And same with Bruce. I mean younger
Speaker 2: than me. But these guys are an amazing shape because
Speaker 2: that's their profession. They I don't have to go up
Speaker 2: on the stage and dance around for two and a
Speaker 2: half hours. I don't have to look sexy and look
Speaker 2: good and stay in that kind of shape to do that.
Speaker 2: These guys do. That's their job, so I don't grudge
Speaker 2: any of it. And Mick is not shot and plastic surgery.
Speaker 2: Mick has not done plastic surgery. They take one look
Speaker 2: at Mick. That's not a plastic surgery type person. And
Speaker 2: I don't know anybody here I think that has done plastics.
Speaker 2: This has done plastic surgery. You know they live well.
Speaker 1: Well, I know things that I'd rather not reveal. But
Speaker 1: my point is that we have aged, and some of
Speaker 1: these acts, their major impact upon society in terms of
Speaker 1: new material is in the past, and therefore one go
Speaker 1: and have nostalgia. But aren't some of these acts frozen
Speaker 1: in the ember? They're just playing the same songs. Let
Speaker 1: me go one step further. Ruce Springsteen makes two solo albums. Okay,
Speaker 1: you've been touching Lucky Town. The audience says, you can't
Speaker 1: leave the EA Street behind Eastream being behind. Then he
Speaker 1: reunites with the Eastreet Band. For me, that is giving
Speaker 1: the audience what they want. One of the great things
Speaker 1: about Dylan. I don't want to see him anymore. I've
Speaker 1: been to the never ending tour, but he's making it interesting.
Speaker 1: He's still pushing the envelope. But he's one of the
Speaker 1: very few.
Speaker 2: All right, let's first off, that's a lot of stuff
Speaker 2: I have to deal with you, okay. And first off,
Speaker 2: plastic surgery and looking at your age. I would submit
Speaker 2: that Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger all look more than
Speaker 2: their age. They look look their age. I haven't seen
Speaker 2: Pete Laley, but I don't think he's gone for anything
Speaker 2: radical anything. Secondly, but the bigger point is responding to
Speaker 2: your audience in and of itself bad. Listen to the audience,
Speaker 2: you know, listen from.
Speaker 1: From subterranean home, pick blues you know, uh, don't follow leaders,
Speaker 1: watch the parking meters.
Speaker 2: Great.
Speaker 1: Are you supposed to be independent?
Speaker 2: What do you mean? He is independent? He writes whatever
Speaker 2: he wants. He's not paying attention to his audience right now.
Speaker 1: He's writing, I say, Dylan is a beacon. I'm talking
Speaker 1: about these other racks, giving the audience what they want.
Speaker 2: All right, so we're talking about let's talk about who
Speaker 2: do you want to have Bruce? You mentioned Bruce's talk
Speaker 2: about Jakay, Okay, okay, let's talk about Mick. Mick is
Speaker 2: every each one of them is different. There's no rule
Speaker 2: applies them all. Mick has got a new record coming out.
Speaker 2: He's got some really great stuff on it. Okay, He's
Speaker 2: not had plastic surgery. He stays in shape. He is
Speaker 2: His whole thing is has to do with his audience.
Speaker 2: It's from the beginning of time to now. You know.
Speaker 2: He gets out there and he's a performer and he behaves, behaves,
Speaker 2: he creates the rules for performing and the relationship with
Speaker 2: the audience. That's his thing, you know. So he's still
Speaker 2: doing it and he deserves praise for being able to
Speaker 2: sing fucking jumping Jack Flash is good today as then,
Speaker 2: and also his new records and blowing it away. What
Speaker 2: is it? That's his job, the audience. He's not being
Speaker 2: told to do by anything. That's what he can do,
Speaker 2: and he enjoys doing. He loves getting out there. We're playing.
Speaker 1: Did you watch the UH press conference with Jimmy Fallon?
Speaker 2: I saw a business diough it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, didn't it look sad to eighty year old
Speaker 1: guys out peddling their music with the jokester? These were
Speaker 1: this was a this was a band that was dangerous
Speaker 1: cutting edge at one point.
Speaker 2: Excuse me, Well, I don't know how old you are,
Speaker 2: but I'm seven. Okay. They were in their twenties, sixtyears
Speaker 2: years long on sixty years later, on sixty years. They
Speaker 2: may be less cutting edge, they may be less good looking,
Speaker 2: they may be doing not but they're still there. They're
Speaker 2: still performing in as pressively ever. They're still loving rock
Speaker 2: and roll. They're still loving their life and then bringing
Speaker 2: joy to all of ours. Hey six years wait, wait, wait,
Speaker 2: you're a guy.
Speaker 1: You're a guy who started Rolling Stone the music was
Speaker 1: religious sixty actively, and now you're basically being long in
Speaker 1: the tooth. Well, these off the cockers they're out there
Speaker 1: doing I got to give them some credit.
Speaker 2: No, I'm doing more than that. They're doing some of
Speaker 2: their best work. They're still performing nearly at the top,
Speaker 2: nearly at the top of their game. Wait, we're still
Speaker 2: mark let me finish. They're still doing work that's vile,
Speaker 2: that's pertinent to today. The things that are singing about
Speaker 2: Ian Bruce is singing about this last album. He's singing
Speaker 2: about death, and he's dealing with the concerns of being
Speaker 2: his age and with death and going old and looking
Speaker 2: back and the stulves. I mean, he's he's vitally involved
Speaker 2: in the issues that are relevant to him and may
Speaker 2: not be irrelevant and are going to be irrelevant to
Speaker 2: his audience. I mean, I think you're I understand where
Speaker 2: you're coming from. I've heard this point of view often. Yes,
Speaker 2: we are getting old, b we look old. Yeah, see
Speaker 2: we walk old, but we're still alive and we're still kicking,
Speaker 2: and we're still kicking his shit out of everybody else.
Speaker 1: Well, one of the think one of the time, one
Speaker 1: of the things you popularize via your serialization of what
Speaker 1: became the right stuff was the concept of pushing the envelope,
Speaker 1: Chuck Yeger pushing the envelope, and that's what this music did.
Speaker 1: If you wanted to know what was going on, you
Speaker 1: listen to a record. I don't think that's the case anymore,
Speaker 1: even in the hip hop. And therefore, I mean it's
Speaker 1: if I watch streaming television, okay, and I watched some
Speaker 1: of the Morgan Okay, Danish show on Netflix. I got
Speaker 1: an impact in it and a feeling that I don't
Speaker 1: get from most of the music. Doesn't mean there aren't
Speaker 1: great records.
Speaker 2: Which the music, which music. The music we're talking about
Speaker 2: the masters of the music today that's coming out by
Speaker 2: currently hot selling rocket records.
Speaker 1: Currently talking about We're not talking about classic records. So
Speaker 1: you're talking about new music. Okay, good, keep going, all right,
Speaker 1: you want my response to that? Yes, basically, first and
Speaker 1: first off, you're fucking seventy years old, and this is
Speaker 1: the music being made by twenty and thirty year old,
Speaker 1: so of course it won't it's not going to impact you.
Speaker 1: You don't look at these people as being your contemporary,
Speaker 1: you know the real their concerns are much groomer than
Speaker 1: yours ours as seventy. That's one number one, Okay, Number
Speaker 1: two is, boy, have the times changed? And I'll tell
Speaker 1: you when this music came out, when the stones and
Speaker 1: stuff that moved us that I'm celebrating here that I
Speaker 1: think is still so great. Look at the media landscape.
Speaker 1: Then there are three networks. You know today there was
Speaker 1: no digital Today everything in the world is available instantly
Speaker 1: by camera, by the social media, by Google. By it,
Speaker 1: I mean there's no place in the world where something
Speaker 1: has not already been articulated. And now, all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: because of this new freedom of media, the media has
Speaker 1: it's able to deal with the most avant garde issues,
Speaker 1: the most sensitive topics, the most extreme stuff, the weirdest stuff,
Speaker 1: whereas in back in the day you weren't allowed to
Speaker 1: do that, but now it's everywhere. So it makes the
Speaker 1: music that makes the music in this environment less vital
Speaker 1: and important impactful that it wasn't in an environment fifty
Speaker 1: years ago when you couldn't hear a lot of the
Speaker 1: stuff expressed on TV or newspapers or magazines, when Rolling
Speaker 1: Stone didn't exist, when the network, when the Internet didn't exist,
Speaker 1: where when CDs and exists. So it's in a much
Speaker 1: different context, and you're a much different audience. You're not
Speaker 1: the audience for today's music. So I mean it makes sense.
Speaker 2: I say, you know, I say you should sit back
Speaker 2: and enjoy and celebrate how great this music wasn't how
Speaker 2: lucky you were and I was to be alive in
Speaker 2: a period in the sixties and seventies, some of the
Speaker 2: eighties where all these brilliant fricking musicians and writers and
Speaker 2: singers were all together about the same time, creating it
Speaker 2: that same period, listening to each other, impacting each other,
Speaker 2: influencing each other, driving each other along, you know, by
Speaker 2: by competition or by inspiration. And what a rare period
Speaker 2: this was in not just American history and musical history
Speaker 2: that just love little genius, but in world history. You
Speaker 2: know where we were present during one of the great
Speaker 2: renaissances of our times and of world times. And it's
Speaker 2: not something you see very often. Mean, Uh, it's easily
Speaker 2: fully comparable to what we've seen to Paris in the
Speaker 2: twenties when there are all these painters, matists, cause, etc.
Speaker 2: When hemy Me and Fitstcher were there. But even and
Speaker 2: as good as all they were, and this may sound
Speaker 2: a extreme claim, they're change. The change they brought to art,
Speaker 2: the revivocation of art, bringing along modern art were you know,
Speaker 2: all art and writing by that time it become classical
Speaker 2: and stale and borant. But this was also a company.
Speaker 2: What we did does not only revived, but it came
Speaker 2: along a time of great political, social, technological change in
Speaker 2: the world. And this is this era was when the
Speaker 2: world is transferred from that old world pre nuclear world
Speaker 2: to this new world of destruction, of internet, of an
Speaker 2: unfathomable number of things that have changed. The world has
Speaker 2: more than shrunk. It's all a different place. It's not
Speaker 2: a bunch of isolated different countries around the world after
Speaker 2: World War Two. It's all We're now so unified as ever.
Speaker 2: And it's comparable of the change in the world. It
Speaker 2: took place, you know, in Greece, you know, or in
Speaker 2: Italy and Venice in this in the classical era of
Speaker 2: that era, or during Elizabeth Elizabethan England when they came
Speaker 2: out of these countries were hugely powerful within the world. Venice, Greece,
Speaker 2: you know which they were, and England they ran the world.
Speaker 2: They were the richest countries in the world. They educated populace,
Speaker 2: they had this sense of mastering, achievement and domination, and
Speaker 2: they weren't charge themsel a bunch of stuff is more
Speaker 2: and more complicated to tease out. But that's what this
Speaker 2: period I think was about, you know, And and I
Speaker 2: think that's what this work stands for. You know. It
Speaker 2: had that relationship to its times, you know. And it
Speaker 2: wasn't painting, it wasn't writing. It certainly took advantage of
Speaker 2: the technology of the times. This is based on the
Speaker 2: technology of the times, both the reproducing spread it, the
Speaker 2: way that the printed word at one time reproducing spread
Speaker 2: that and so forth. So I mean, that's the long view,
Speaker 2: and we're just older now, you know.
Speaker 1: No, I think that's very well articulated, that we don't
Speaker 1: live in a monoculture. And you mentioned the word renaissance,
Speaker 1: which I wholly agree with. There was a Renaissance hundreds
Speaker 1: of years ago. People have painted and sculpted since then,
Speaker 1: but there's only one renaissance, right, just going through the decades. Though,
Speaker 1: to what degree do you believe our change in culture
Speaker 1: and the attendant income inequality was driven by Reagan, who's
Speaker 1: been canonized by the right, And to what degree has
Speaker 1: that changed our society and left us where we are now?
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, I think all these changes are afoot
Speaker 2: despite without Reagan. I mean, this is all happened without him.
Speaker 2: He's almost irrelevant to them. But Reagan was it, you know,
Speaker 2: a gentle, easy to swallow salesman of a really increasingly
Speaker 2: putrid influence on society, most particularly in what he did
Speaker 2: with income taxes and taxes where the extreme wealth divide
Speaker 2: which plagues us now started under him, under reduction of
Speaker 2: gutting of the union starting under him. And uh, the
Speaker 2: empowering of the religious right started under him from modern times.
Speaker 2: And so he made it all seem smooth and wonderful.
Speaker 2: But I don't view him as a hero or a
Speaker 2: very good president or you know, but a funny, charming guy. Uh.
Speaker 2: But all these things, I mean, I think, all the
Speaker 2: worse stuff in contemporaries. It's not that it hasn't happened before.
Speaker 2: You know, this kind of his warmart, the religious right
Speaker 2: or income disparags haven't happened before in history. They've all
Speaker 2: of this. Truth've had many religious awakenings, We've had many
Speaker 2: right wing crusades, We've had many cuses berries wealth before
Speaker 2: in modern times. Reagan was the first instrument of it,
Speaker 2: and it just continued under you know, Bush senior, Bush
Speaker 2: junior and Trump. Of them, all the worst has been
Speaker 2: was Bush junior, George W. Bush. Uh. So I mean,
Speaker 2: I I the Republican has been terrible. And I think, yes,
Speaker 2: it's been a fight against the Republican ideology.
Speaker 1: So you believe it's somewhat secular that these things wouldn't
Speaker 1: have happened without Reagan? What was in the culture that
Speaker 1: was driving these things?
Speaker 2: Reagan that the regiaction is that the history of America.
Speaker 2: I mean, America has been a weird place. We start
Speaker 2: off burning witches, we start off flee you know, kind
Speaker 2: is it pure in society? You know, there's very harsh
Speaker 2: religious strictures in the society. We say we're a society
Speaker 2: free of religion, but we had the puritanical stuff, and
Speaker 2: so it's just been we were a slave society. We
Speaker 2: I mean, how do you how do you account for
Speaker 2: putting men in chains and whipping them in the way
Speaker 2: they were treated. We fought a fucking warm which because
Speaker 2: a couple of nine people died, I think the worst
Speaker 2: over the issue of slavery. Well, how you treat your
Speaker 2: fellow man? That war's never been resolved, you know, So,
Speaker 2: I mean it's been lurking under the American surface as
Speaker 2: part of the modern dilim for years. We've created great
Speaker 2: good good in the world and great evil. And I
Speaker 2: think that this kind of empowered this generation of America
Speaker 2: has been called on to kind of look back and
Speaker 2: sit back on that because we can't go on any longer.
Speaker 2: As we've been going on. If we go on any
Speaker 2: longer this, the planet's over, you know, by environmental destruction
Speaker 2: and nuclear war. You know. So we need a change
Speaker 2: in consciousness, you know, not we have to do this thing,
Speaker 2: loved one another. We have to all these bromides that
Speaker 2: we've heard in Wrock and all they're true, you know,
Speaker 2: and we're where to point. If you don't do that,
Speaker 2: you know, we're going to We're gonna some awful things
Speaker 2: are going to happen. But I'm wondering whether that was
Speaker 2: the question or not.
Speaker 1: Well, no, you we answered, But let me let me
Speaker 1: just go to the present. So in your crystal ball,
Speaker 1: what happens in the future.
Speaker 2: Jeez, I don't know, could go to me, It could
Speaker 2: go either way, you know. I mean, there's great progress
Speaker 2: are being made. We have great knowledge, great ability. Everybody
Speaker 2: knows what the problems are, you know, we know essentially
Speaker 2: how to technically solve all these things, what should be done,
Speaker 2: what should be right. But they'll take you know, it's
Speaker 2: a change in political will and consciousness and right and wrong.
Speaker 2: I think al Gore expresses, really, once we see the
Speaker 2: environmental question and all these questions as issues of right
Speaker 2: or wrong, then We're going to solve them because we'll
Speaker 2: know what's right to do, we'll know what's wrong to do,
Speaker 2: and so patently clear what's right and what's wrong. And
Speaker 2: if people just get on the side doing the right thing,
Speaker 2: you know. I mean, he keeps saying political will is
Speaker 2: renewable resource. I hope so. But you've got powerful But
Speaker 2: on the other hands, Bob Filne says to me, and
Speaker 2: the last time, he's just human nature hasn't changed fundamentally
Speaker 2: in three thousand years. You know, it's still greed power.
Speaker 2: You know, the dim side is greed driven, is power driven?
Speaker 2: How do we break that cycle? These are powerful interests
Speaker 2: and powerful wealthy people and corporations were up against you know,
Speaker 2: and their hands. They're deeply involved in social structures. Now
Speaker 2: things run. I mean, it's not just the greed of
Speaker 2: the oil business, but it's greed of all the people
Speaker 2: who underline it first, people who work there, let alone
Speaker 2: people at Morgan Stanley who finance it. You know, the
Speaker 2: Bank of America pay for and loan them billions of
Speaker 2: dollars every year to keep fun. So that's hard to know,
Speaker 2: but I think that in the end you have to
Speaker 2: live with hope and optimism, and you have to take
Speaker 2: the hopeful approach. I don't think you have any choice
Speaker 2: but to do that, otherwise it's impossible to live.
Speaker 1: Okay, you're a student of the game. We remember the
Speaker 1: sixties when you didn't want to have long here south
Speaker 1: of the Mason Dixon Line, red Knicks. Whatever's going on
Speaker 1: is much further to the extreme. Now, what accounts for
Speaker 1: the hardcore belief in Trump, irrelevant of the indictments and
Speaker 1: other accusations.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean two things. Once again, I would bring
Speaker 2: you back to American history and this kind of these
Speaker 2: kind of people have been a constant part of American history.
Speaker 2: I've just guessed it's been thirty percent of American history
Speaker 2: at the beginning. Remember again, we fought the Civil War.
Speaker 2: We had hundreds of thousands of you know, millions of
Speaker 2: people public fighting for slavery, like sacrificing our lives for slavery,
Speaker 2: you know. And then we had Father Coughlin and the
Speaker 2: pro Nazi movement keep America out of the war. We
Speaker 2: have McCarthyism, so there's a and the religious. We've always
Speaker 2: had this strain in American, in American culture. So obviously
Speaker 2: I think Trump is tapped into that strain. It's a
Speaker 2: big strain and it uh, it's gonna be loyal to anybody.
Speaker 2: You know, it's loyal to me. And you cannot going
Speaker 2: to change your minds. You know, there's no man of logic,
Speaker 2: no man of grand jury, indictment. It's nothing that's going
Speaker 2: to change their mind I mean not even as sinning
Speaker 2: bastard Trump and his five wives and you know, on
Speaker 2: and on whatever, even that doesn't turn these people off.
Speaker 2: Who are the fundamental any abortion religious people, God fearing
Speaker 2: you know, these are the least Christian people in the world.
Speaker 2: You know, Trump's supporters, they're the most negative. They're they're
Speaker 2: demeaning and of poor people. They're racial. I mean, let
Speaker 2: me back off this. The other thing is that we've
Speaker 2: got this economic disparity going on, this huge thing where
Speaker 2: people are making you know, thirty thirty forty billion dollars,
Speaker 2: I mean, excuse me, three hundred million dollars a year.
Speaker 2: They're worth billions of dollars. The wealth is spread around
Speaker 2: in the country is the wealth. The wealth. Wealth is
Speaker 2: big and it's enormous and people, most people have been
Speaker 2: cut out of the system. It's they don't live unions anymore.
Speaker 2: They don't have highways ers, they don't have two cars
Speaker 2: in their garage, intelligence and get their summer vacation. So
Speaker 2: people are feeling deprived of the system, you know, they
Speaker 2: take it that they haven't received the benefit system. Even
Speaker 2: then they work their ass off. And it's been done
Speaker 2: historically in the last thirty forty fifth years by Democrats
Speaker 2: as well as Republicans, less so by the Democrats, more
Speaker 2: so by the Republicans. But today it's stunning. The Democrats
Speaker 2: are saying, let's lower debt, drug prices, let's give equitable
Speaker 2: medical care, and the Republics are tooth and nail against
Speaker 2: lowering dut prices. Let the farmer companies make billions of profits.
Speaker 2: So they feel justly deprived, and so they're going to
Speaker 2: go with the burst presertion like Trump, who have however,
Speaker 2: in however inaccurately, he portrays it none less channels the
Speaker 2: frustration of the swamp, even though he's part of the swamp.
Speaker 2: These people are so angry, they're going to believe that
Speaker 2: because they don't look beyond that. They want to blame.
Speaker 2: So I'm getting fucked over by the establishment, you know,
Speaker 2: by those people, and Trump says, I'm going to save you,
Speaker 2: and that's it, and there's reason for it for him
Speaker 2: them to think that.
Speaker 1: Just going to the opposite. For twenty odd years, we've
Speaker 1: had Fox News, We've had this incredible hammering of Democrats
Speaker 1: in the left. We have the DNC operating on the
Speaker 1: traditional principles nomine Hillary Clinton doesn't win. We have the
Speaker 1: same DNC saying, well, biden't be Trump once. He's our man,
Speaker 1: even though he will be eighty six if he serves
Speaker 1: the second term. What would you advise the DNC and
Speaker 1: Democratic Party?
Speaker 2: Tell her the truth, stick to your guns, don't be
Speaker 2: intimidated by these assholes embraced byen. He's great, That's what
Speaker 2: I would say. Are you troubled at all by his age? Well,
Speaker 2: of course everybody's troubled by the fact he's old. But
Speaker 2: I'm not troubled by he is. I think he's the
Speaker 2: most common person out there to run the country. He's
Speaker 2: certainly better than any other Republican being discussed or in
Speaker 2: the process. Now, I wouldn't trust one of those people
Speaker 2: for throating the country, you know, but I trust Biden.
Speaker 2: He's got the experience and the wisdom and knowledge. Look
Speaker 2: what a great job he's doing right now. Look at
Speaker 2: the legislation he's gotten past, which was stuck there all
Speaker 2: these years. He's fighting both China and Russia at once,
Speaker 2: you know, doing a hell of a job of that.
Speaker 2: This looks to me like a fully confident, prepared, knowledgeable,
Speaker 2: strategic present And he doesn't get roughed his feathers u
Speaker 2: gruffled by the latest criticism or whatever. If you get
Speaker 2: into the news cycle responding the criticism all the time,
Speaker 2: then you're a dead duck. Then you're playing the other
Speaker 2: person's game. I think Fox is definitely a new part
Speaker 2: of the equation these years, and it's just been It's
Speaker 2: just poison. It's like a fear factory, you know. It
Speaker 2: goes out and creates fear wherever and drives this people along.
Speaker 2: But you know, I like Biden. I like what the
Speaker 2: Demorats are doing.
Speaker 1: Okay, it used to be Rolling Stone spoke to a generation.
Speaker 1: In the last handful of years, exacerbated by the COVID era,
Speaker 1: all these magazines are going out of business. I'm always
Speaker 1: weary of subscribing to a magazine. It will go out
Speaker 1: of business. Used to happen in the past, like the
Speaker 1: Manhattaniak Clay Felk or whatever. But now Entertainment Tonight doesn't
Speaker 1: publish Entertainment Weekly. Excuse me, what is the future of
Speaker 1: the magazine business. You're an expert as much as anybody.
Speaker 2: Well. The fact that the magazines are doing so poorly
Speaker 2: is that there's no economic model left for them. The
Speaker 2: Internet has taken away all the advertising without compensation. It
Speaker 2: stole all the material there was the magazines and newspapers
Speaker 2: assembled paid all this money for it. They took it free,
Speaker 2: put it on their websites and sold advertising on it,
Speaker 2: and took away the advertisers that the magazines needed to
Speaker 2: survive on the newspapers and the news business what I
Speaker 2: could call, by the way, the free press, which is
Speaker 2: vital to this country, and they've replaced it with this,
Speaker 2: you know, the Internet group of quick hits and no restraints,
Speaker 2: no laws governing it, no laws requiring it to be
Speaker 2: not libels or that be truthful and accurate. They somehow
Speaker 2: immunized themselves from all those rules, you know. But they're
Speaker 2: the most powerful press in the country. But this question
Speaker 2: about there's no economical of there's no advertising left, so
Speaker 2: you know, it's a more powerful medium more better meetum
Speaker 2: for advertisers because you can target. Not only can you
Speaker 2: target down to the person, you can also send them
Speaker 2: add TV advertising on the internet on your phone, you know,
Speaker 2: visual advertising. So those the magazines and the newspapers pre
Speaker 2: newspaper prepress was supported by advertisers. That's gone. And so
Speaker 2: there's there's going to be room for specially magazines and
Speaker 2: trade journals. And there'll be room for some magazines that
Speaker 2: are really highly visual, the highly art trated. But I
Speaker 2: don't think you're gonna have mass magazines anymore. You're not
Speaker 2: gonna have general interest magazines like Rolling Stone anymore.
Speaker 1: Okay, you have Margaret Sullivan, who was the ombudsman for
Speaker 1: the New York Times then went to Washington Post now
Speaker 1: at the Guardian, wrote a whole book how to save
Speaker 1: the news industry. In my observation, whenever you try to
Speaker 1: save something, you can't. It's only you have to progress
Speaker 1: to the new thing in the future. Do you believe
Speaker 1: newspapers need to be propped up or do you have
Speaker 1: to let the economic system work itself out and go
Speaker 1: into the future.
Speaker 2: I think they can be and should be propped up.
Speaker 2: First off, what is the Internet, which is his main commination.
Speaker 2: But a government subsidized thing. And great part they've been
Speaker 2: exempt from taxes for the longest period of time. They're
Speaker 2: exempt from regulation that I was just speaking of of
Speaker 2: content regulation by under the rules of the free press.
Speaker 2: They were financed and support initially by the government, which
Speaker 2: paid for the beginning of the Internet and invented the Internet,
Speaker 2: and still subsidizes it with all kinds of tax breaks
Speaker 2: and all kinds of contracts from the Defense Department, Higher Education,
Speaker 2: you know, paying these companies enormous months of money. So
Speaker 2: if you want to talk about a subsidized industry, you know,
Speaker 2: it's the Internet. Now they've got billions and billions and
Speaker 2: hundreds of millions I was sitting in their bank accounts,
Speaker 2: which ought to be repurposed. That's tax money they should
Speaker 2: have paid into the system. I'll repurpose. And you could
Speaker 2: do things that that you call it artificially propping up.
Speaker 2: And I agree with you about how you can't save
Speaker 2: a dying dog, but you could give the magazine newspapers
Speaker 2: and mail them free. If we're going to give the
Speaker 2: internet freedom of the public airwaves and the public utilities,
Speaker 2: and they don't pay for that, then the newspapers and
Speaker 2: magazines maybe should get some of the same. So if
Speaker 2: you take away the calls of postage for them, you know,
Speaker 2: and subsides by the government, that's a start, you know.
Speaker 2: And I can think of a bunch of other ways,
Speaker 2: you know, and which share subsidies, which would be good.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm not talking about I'm talking about subsidizing
Speaker 2: something here that like the British subsidies of BBC. I mean,
Speaker 2: we have MPR, could go further than that and such.
Speaker 2: But this medium, the press, the free press, was deemed
Speaker 2: by the founding fathers to be absolutely vital to the
Speaker 2: function of democracy, that a well informed public was necessary
Speaker 2: to make to elect the politicians that we wanted, and
Speaker 2: to make the decisions and policy decisions that we wanted.
Speaker 2: And I think that judgment they made was absolutely correct
Speaker 2: in the first place, that when the public turns on
Speaker 2: something and they properly formed public opinions, absolutely paradis to
Speaker 2: public policy. And we're not getting that now. It was
Speaker 2: so important that they made it the first Amendment to
Speaker 2: the United States that you could not inhibit the practice
Speaker 2: of the free press. We need that and we need
Speaker 2: to restore that.
Speaker 1: Okay, Lena Kahan, who is our antitrust point person, is
Speaker 1: being more aggressive. Do you have a viewpoint on antitrust.
Speaker 2: I think we all enforced the laws. I think every
Speaker 2: time you've seen UH this kind of like anti competitive
Speaker 2: uh combination of elements of manufacturing or initial elements, whether
Speaker 2: it was the three collar makers or the three UH
Speaker 2: broadcaster network broadcasters, or the telephone company or you name it.
Speaker 2: You know Microsoft yourself, you raise prices and you stultified
Speaker 2: innovation and competition. Since we broke up the telephone companies.
Speaker 2: Look what's happened as the baby bills in the competition
Speaker 2: and started financing cellular service, same with Microsoft. That could
Speaker 2: happen a thousand internet companies bloomed and all this you
Speaker 2: know other stuff. The three networks are terrible enough to all,
Speaker 2: you know they but they'll get back to one good
Speaker 2: thing they did. But in terms of they're programming the
Speaker 2: liberality of it. You know. Also now you've got and
Speaker 2: the three carding manufacturers because of their stifling of competition,
Speaker 2: you know, because they were such a monoplist didn't have
Speaker 2: to be. That led the open the market to Japanese Germans.
Speaker 2: All the people denovated and did better cars, far better cars.
Speaker 2: The problem wasn't how clever the Japanese were. It was
Speaker 2: the fact that we were so retarded. We made clunky cars.
Speaker 2: The doors didn't fit properly into the you know, into
Speaker 2: the doorframe. No, they just didn't do good cars, and
Speaker 2: somebody else came along. So I think if we had
Speaker 2: some the history of competition is good for us. But
Speaker 2: I say this about it. Regulated competition capitalism cannot be unregulated.
Speaker 2: There has to be supervision, has to be managed properly
Speaker 2: because unready to competition where greed conguers all ain't gonna
Speaker 2: ain't good for us, and that's what happens. So we
Speaker 2: need regulated capitalism. What the networks did when there were
Speaker 2: three of them and there wasn't all this kind of
Speaker 2: crazy Internet stuff, is we were able to unify society,
Speaker 2: you know, with standards of everybody agreed upon. We could
Speaker 2: agree upon standards of truth, of fact and all this
Speaker 2: Internet crap that goes on, the unregular, unregulated crap. If
Speaker 2: we're really regulating that networks even more of that by
Speaker 2: the FCC about objectivity, you know, fairness, truth, we would
Speaker 2: have more results like we just had in the Fox
Speaker 2: versus dominion case that they've been so unsupervised. Did they
Speaker 2: emit damaging society? So I want to we need managed
Speaker 2: cap We cannot cannot have monopoly capitalism, that'll ruin us.
Speaker 2: We need managed combolists.
Speaker 1: Okay, you have a new book coming out. Fifty years ago,
Speaker 1: you had your own publishing company, Straight Arrow Lennon remembers
Speaker 1: came out on that Bill Owen Suburbia. What you learn
Speaker 1: in that venture.
Speaker 2: The book publishing has its own very special business that
Speaker 2: requires its own intuitive touch and it's own time frame
Speaker 2: and rhythm. And that wasn't my business. My business magazines
Speaker 2: and news.
Speaker 1: Okay, switching to you, you ultimately got involved with US.
Speaker 1: You purchase US. Is gossip a fundamental element of society?
Speaker 1: Is it more powerful? Now less powerful? There's certainly much
Speaker 1: more information online. By the same token, It's not like
Speaker 1: the old days where you went to the supermarket and
Speaker 1: you saw it just a couple of magazines. So I
Speaker 1: headline and everybody knew those.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, I was thinking I missed the very question.
Speaker 2: The first part of that, the premisey.
Speaker 1: The bottom line with US magazine is gossip something that's
Speaker 1: institutional that just transcends time. Or are we in a
Speaker 1: waning era? And it's ironic because we have much more information,
Speaker 1: yet nothing has the penetration of the way it used to.
Speaker 2: Is eternal. You know. Uh, it's been with us since
Speaker 2: the beginning of time. I mean, what's the world's oldest profession, right,
Speaker 2: we say that's prostitution. What's the world's second oldest protests?
Speaker 2: Professionals talking about who's doing it? Right? So, I mean,
Speaker 2: you're gonna have gossip forget, don't don't you know, it's
Speaker 2: too much fun. Everybody likes it. We're told not to,
Speaker 2: you know, that shall not whatever. But the nature of
Speaker 2: it has changed so much, the the that there's it's
Speaker 2: first of it's sound the internet, it's everywhere, you know,
Speaker 2: so you don't have any filters on it anymore. And
Speaker 2: you've got different sets of people, and frankly, more people
Speaker 2: are more interestedout gossip in among their these people in
Speaker 2: the real world or these in celebrities, or these influencers
Speaker 2: or people you know, they're not mostly they're not made
Speaker 2: by movie studios or or even you know anymore. I mean,
Speaker 2: what movie starts with television? Do you care about their
Speaker 2: lives that muchmore? I don't know because I'm your age
Speaker 2: and we I don't know who they are, but they're
Speaker 2: not the great unifying people. These are. There's thousands of them,
Speaker 2: you know. And it's the result of reality TV. It's
Speaker 2: the result of as Andy Warhol said, everybody will be
Speaker 2: famous for fifteen minutes, you know. So everybody is famous
Speaker 2: for fifteen minutes, and we now have the technology that
Speaker 2: enables it.
Speaker 1: So do you read the new J. Penske controlled Rolling Stone?
Speaker 2: Yeah, of course I see it. Yeah. Do I read everything? No,
Speaker 2: but of course it's Yeah. What am I supposed to say?
Speaker 2: It's not in my era anymore?
Speaker 1: Okay, but if you see it, if you could snap.
Speaker 1: Conventional wisdom is that Rolling Stone missed the Internet. It
Speaker 1: was one of many companies that was accused of that.
Speaker 1: If you look at Rolling Stone today and you snap
Speaker 1: my fingers and you're in charge, what would you do differently?
Speaker 2: Well, I think that the first question. I think every
Speaker 2: publishing company missed the Internet, except for The New York Times,
Speaker 2: which seems to have really did finally figure it out.
Speaker 2: I mean, God, bless uh, nobody, none of the no Hurst,
Speaker 2: no Disney, Condie, Nasty Murdoch. Remember my my Space for
Speaker 2: a half a billion notes. Nobody figured out and nobody
Speaker 2: you know, so you can't turn around a big old
Speaker 2: you know, you're running a big old battleship. Nobody you
Speaker 2: can't the new thing. It's hard to figure that out.
Speaker 2: So but I must say I'm the only We're the
Speaker 2: only company didn't lose millions and millions of dollars on
Speaker 2: it by saying we're not going to jump into this prematurely. Uh.
Speaker 2: And if I could snap my fingers, I would put
Speaker 2: myself back in No. I would say, well, if you were,
Speaker 2: if you were back in charge, what would you do.
Speaker 2: I don't. I don't think I should be back in charge.
Speaker 2: I think it's time for new group of people to
Speaker 2: do it. And they're doing it, and they're doing for
Speaker 2: that kind of a newer audience and in a newer way.
Speaker 2: It's very Internet oriented now, more than magazine oriented. And
Speaker 2: I wouldn't have made those I would. I'm a magazine
Speaker 2: person on the Internet person. So you know I'm the
Speaker 2: wrong person.
Speaker 1: Okay, but if you look at MTV, MTV.
Speaker 2: I wouldn't. I wouldn't. I wouldn't say out there, I
Speaker 2: wouldn't accept the job.
Speaker 1: Okay. MTV famously decided they were going to stick with
Speaker 1: a demo as supposed to stick with their audience. They
Speaker 1: fired the original vj's Rolling Stone certainly evolved. Was that
Speaker 1: something where you sat down and say we have to
Speaker 1: change or was it something happened unconsciously? What was going
Speaker 1: on for those fifty years? Well, oh my fifty years
Speaker 1: were fifty years talking about you.
Speaker 2: We we basically followed the news. What was in the
Speaker 2: news was most people with the movies or was it
Speaker 2: music stars or there's politics or whatever it is. We
Speaker 2: you know, both in terms of what we put on
Speaker 2: the cover and the stories we covered inside of an election,
Speaker 2: So we were always with what the most people were
Speaker 2: interested in. You know, it was a new music star
Speaker 2: like Taylor Swift who was causing us, we put her
Speaker 2: on the cover. You know, it was you know old
Speaker 2: Coot running for office, Hillary Clinton, we put her on
Speaker 2: the cover. If it was you know, a movie star.
Speaker 2: You know, so we we did all kinds of things,
Speaker 2: but basically, what were people who in our culture We
Speaker 2: wanted to influence our generation and leaders of our jertion
Speaker 2: and the people what were the most interested in and
Speaker 2: seeing through the primise prism of culture, you know, using
Speaker 2: culture as a filter for it. So whether it's the
Speaker 2: actual culture or the value of that culture, what that
Speaker 2: culture stood for, what I thought the value should be
Speaker 2: that we should stand for. And we probably covered everything.
Speaker 2: I mean, we we've covered all Team Pop, whether it
Speaker 2: was you know, Brittany and Justin back in the day
Speaker 2: up to Taylor Swift under when I was there, we
Speaker 2: did we had done at least three Taylor Swift covers.
Speaker 2: You know rap we had. We had every raps are
Speaker 2: worth imagining, you know, worth worth it on the cover.
Speaker 2: We never gave us up an inch in our coverage
Speaker 2: of that. And I had the best coverage of any
Speaker 2: magazine of the country on rap, including Vibe and and
Speaker 2: UH almost besides Vibe the source UH and UH and
Speaker 2: politics absolute vital perforce in politics and national politics. We
Speaker 2: had a role of voice in that so and I
Speaker 2: like that. But obviously, you know, things are different now.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think without that unique mix and all that,
Speaker 2: the centrality of a magazine was diminished. And then because
Speaker 2: the impact of the importance of the Internet was so
Speaker 2: much greater, and it kind of diminished the voice. But
Speaker 2: you know, we were unusual, highly unusual.
Speaker 1: You know, Tom will famously disparage The New Yorker. What's
Speaker 1: your take on the New Yorker?
Speaker 2: But I mean his thing was funny at the time.
Speaker 2: I mean The New Yorker was one of my favorite magazines.
Speaker 1: Okay, do you miss scheme?
Speaker 2: I shouldn't. I do, yes, but I'm reconciling the fact
Speaker 2: that I can't. But I loved it. I put years
Speaker 2: of my life into it. Just great joy and pleasure.
Speaker 1: So rumor was that if you heard it was good,
Speaker 1: you would fly out the sun Valley for the weekend
Speaker 1: ski the powder. Was that true?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 1: So how many days did you get in a year?
Speaker 2: I would do an average of about sixty to seventy
Speaker 2: if you season for about twenty seasons.
Speaker 1: Oh, very much.
Speaker 2: So that's why you'd asked that question last year.
Speaker 1: Last year I got fifties. Well, I went to college
Speaker 1: in Vermont at Middlebury. College had its own ski area.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was a starving freestyle skier in Utah at Snowbird
Speaker 1: for two years. Oh but my girl, those those were
Speaker 1: seventy five and seventy six.
Speaker 2: Interesting. Yeah, I was, yeah going to stay because.
Speaker 1: Seventy seven, just to be clear, since we're going was
Speaker 1: the bad year there wasn't another bad year after that
Speaker 1: till twenty twelve. That was when you know, the skiers
Speaker 1: tell your rye closed for a while. But my girlfriend's
Speaker 1: families had a place in the lodge a Veil since
Speaker 1: the seventies. So although the skiing is not that difficult,
Speaker 1: it veil, that's where I spend most of my time,
Speaker 1: not all of my time. I had Aspen before that,
Speaker 1: I hit Little Cottonwood, Candy a little bit, Sun Valley,
Speaker 1: phenomenal mountain. Just they don't get that much snow, but.
Speaker 2: They got your best nomaking now absolutely absolutely. And the
Speaker 2: season last year, yeah, I yeah, so good. Well, god,
Speaker 2: let's fifty eight days, a lot of skiing, as you
Speaker 2: know what that's like. And I'm sure I could have
Speaker 2: been more of an empire builder and made more money
Speaker 2: and you know, on and on if i'd paid me,
Speaker 2: But I you know, what's life about. You know, it's
Speaker 2: enough money and I had so much fun and my
Speaker 2: kids are all great skiers now, you know, still family time.
Speaker 1: And was it primarily sun Valley?
Speaker 2: Yeah, once you end up in a plate, I mean
Speaker 2: it was. It was Aspen at first was my favorite. Well,
Speaker 2: I grew up in San Francisco. So I ski Squaw Valley,
Speaker 2: in Hemley Valley and the Sugar Bowl, and so as
Speaker 2: a kid, my met on a ski trip. So I
Speaker 2: was really tell me that story. In the forties, they
Speaker 2: were both in your early forties, and my one of
Speaker 2: them put up a note as ski start saying, looking
Speaker 2: for rides this weekend to Hunter a mountain or whatever.
Speaker 2: And that's how they hooked up as skiers, you know,
Speaker 2: and that's how they met. So we as kids who
Speaker 2: were living in San Francisco at the time, naturally we're
Speaker 2: taking up skiing. Every vacation, we went skiing, you know,
Speaker 2: every Christmas, everything, all the time. We went to Squad
Speaker 2: and they were just about to build a house there
Speaker 2: when they decided to divorce instead. So it just it
Speaker 2: just got in the blood, you know, just all of
Speaker 2: this was a family thing. And I picked up again
Speaker 2: as an adult, you know, I skilled till about college,
Speaker 2: and I stopped and started again as an adult. Coinciding
Speaker 2: with starting with Hunter, who lived in Aspen, and he
Speaker 2: was no great help for schime. Terrible terrible, terrible influence.
Speaker 2: If you can't if you stay at two o'clock in
Speaker 2: the morning, you're not going to ski. I mean, that's
Speaker 2: not but started skiing and Aspen and finally when I
Speaker 2: decided I'm going to do this for a good long
Speaker 2: time and now it's time to buy a house, checked
Speaker 2: out the various other ski yeers. Now I've been skiing Aspen,
Speaker 2: Jackson Hole and Snowbirds as a trio. But I'd never
Speaker 2: been to some valley. But I went and looked around
Speaker 2: it tell your ride and Big Sky and Sun Valley
Speaker 2: in some valley was the place that had the best mountain,
Speaker 2: the kind of skiing I like to do, the nicest environment.
Speaker 2: I wanted to get away from Asspen on the drug
Speaker 2: trade and from the living in a big high society culture,
Speaker 2: like the kids were going to grow up anyway, and
Speaker 2: it was just a family place, you know, world class
Speaker 2: skiing with family values and great places.
Speaker 1: So if you skied sixty or seventy days a year,
Speaker 1: would you park your ass in ketch them or would
Speaker 1: we just go out? You get in your plane whenever
Speaker 1: the conditions were good.
Speaker 2: Well, at first I would first few days, first first
Speaker 2: few years, I just parked my ass and you know,
Speaker 2: just get a condo and catch them and all that stuff.
Speaker 2: And as I realized I was doing this more and more.
Speaker 2: I said, we just have to buy a house. We
Speaker 2: bought a house in Hailey, Okay. And it started, and
Speaker 2: I realized that the thing was to spend two Actually,
Speaker 2: if I started scheduling in advance my appointments in stuff
Speaker 2: I do in New York and made it inviolable, then
Speaker 2: I could actually spend hanks of time in Sun Valley
Speaker 2: rather than going out on the spur of the moment.
Speaker 2: So I just converted my thinking too, you know what
Speaker 2: I'm gonna live, I'll think of it as living there
Speaker 2: and coming back to New York the occasional break. I
Speaker 2: started doing that successfully, and after that then I gave
Speaker 2: up the plane because I wasn't commuting back and forth. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean I didn't get up right away, but I
Speaker 2: was going out there to live for the season, coming
Speaker 2: back for two or three periods that First they'd be
Speaker 2: two weeks at a time, then it'd be a week
Speaker 2: at a time, and then finally I came back just
Speaker 2: one week, you know, and so and I was, well,
Speaker 2: what are you the kind of guys with coincid? Anybody
Speaker 2: with technological progress like the Internet really helped, you know,
Speaker 2: rather than having things fedexed out overnight and having any
Speaker 2: approved layouts like that.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what would your schedule be? Would you take
Speaker 1: the calls from Europe before you went out there, you know,
Speaker 1: with a high speed list the run two and a
Speaker 1: half times faster. Nobody skis from Bell to Bell. What
Speaker 1: was your schedule?
Speaker 2: I was skiing from Bell de Bell and I was
Speaker 2: exhausted at the end of it and couldn't do the
Speaker 2: work really because I was the only one going up
Speaker 2: after lunch and I haven't got idiot, you know, but
Speaker 2: I as a much warmer. Yeah. And then also I
Speaker 2: was getting into smoking pot skiing and if you do that,
Speaker 2: and I can't smoke it. So I had cookies and
Speaker 2: then they just stay in you all day and then
Speaker 2: you're so tired when you get home. Somehow, I as
Speaker 2: I got older, I just said it wasn't I couldn't
Speaker 2: ski Bell de Bell anymore. That was for young people.
Speaker 2: I stop. I had to finally stop taking cookies because
Speaker 2: I couldn't concentrate. But I got in the morning. First thing,
Speaker 2: I visa to the lifts, and then when I might
Speaker 2: put my young here's what we have, here's what you
Speaker 2: look at in the last over the last ten fifteen years.
Speaker 2: I put my younger kids into school there and not
Speaker 2: in New York City. So in the winters we go
Speaker 2: to community school and ketch them. So I get up early,
Speaker 2: about seven o'clock in the morning and take them out
Speaker 2: to community school and catch them from where we lived
Speaker 2: a half an hour away, drop off school, go over.
Speaker 2: I had a condo at the base of the mountain,
Speaker 2: at the base of Baldy, where I would do some
Speaker 2: phone calls, do my half an hour Internet stuff and
Speaker 2: then go meet be on the first leve at eight
Speaker 2: thirty or nine.
Speaker 1: Was your condo? Worm Springs?
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, the totally at the base of Warms right right.
Speaker 1: We're allowed to do And where where do you like
Speaker 1: to ski? At Sun Valley?
Speaker 2: Those my favorite? Well, skipping the powder days, you know
Speaker 2: when you always want to go to the bowls or
Speaker 2: do some things. I mean skiing. Worm Springs itself is
Speaker 2: just great straight shot down Warm Springs, which you could
Speaker 2: do most of the time. You can do a NonStop
Speaker 2: if you're in shape. Nobody's there except in the holidays.
Speaker 2: I loved that. I liked, you know, squirrel, I think
Speaker 2: was cool great, you know, I mean orange Springs was
Speaker 2: the thing for me, you know, and then I love
Speaker 2: Midriv and uh, what's the next midriv? What's that call?
Speaker 2: I think of it in the second of My memory
Speaker 2: is so shot these days. Uh, and those those are
Speaker 2: the great Those are the great runs. I mean mid
Speaker 2: Rive and worm Strings. You can just haul fucking ass
Speaker 2: so fast, unbelievable. And skin of bumps in the bowl
Speaker 2: is also great. Yeah, it's just that's so fun when
Speaker 2: the conditions are good. Well.
Speaker 1: The great thing about Sun Valley, unlike any other place,
Speaker 1: is the slope starts at a certain pitch and that
Speaker 1: doesn't flatten out until you get to the lift there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is the magic. No other is. There's no
Speaker 2: other mountain you can think of like that.
Speaker 1: None.
Speaker 2: And if you're combine that the fact that nobody's there,
Speaker 2: and if patrol doesn't stop you, if nobody's around, you
Speaker 2: can do whatever you want. I mean, the days you
Speaker 2: go up there and warms is just empty for like
Speaker 2: nearly all day. It's just your mountain, your mountain.
Speaker 1: Did you go to other places? Did you go to
Speaker 1: South America? Did you go to Europe?
Speaker 2: We went to you. No, I never went to South America,
Speaker 2: but we went to Europe several times, and that was
Speaker 2: a lot of fun. But it's in the end it's
Speaker 2: not as good as Hunt Valley.
Speaker 1: No it's not.
Speaker 2: I mean the food is better, but even then, and then,
Speaker 2: you know, we went over to Jackson a couple of times,
Speaker 2: and I went back to Aspen a couple times, sealed
Speaker 2: friends and ski a little bit, by and large. Once
Speaker 2: you're settled in, you know, you get to go to
Speaker 2: your own home. You know, as you get older, it's
Speaker 2: more about the comforts than you know, the adventure of
Speaker 2: finding a new spot and you know, are you going
Speaker 2: to finally take culberts which I never did? And uh,
Speaker 2: it's just easier staying home.
Speaker 1: And to what degree did your health problems fuck you
Speaker 1: up mentally?
Speaker 2: I don't think they They make you sit back and
Speaker 2: really think about your life like they always do. And
Speaker 2: I thought that was good. That was helpful for me. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that didn't fuck me up at all. It made me
Speaker 2: think twice, which is great.
Speaker 1: Well, moving forward, to what degree are you impact your
Speaker 1: every day in life impacted by your health issues?
Speaker 2: Well, I'm not, you know, physically active at all. You know,
Speaker 2: I don't going out as a you know, pain any
Speaker 2: ass because they've got bad leg and use a cane.
Speaker 2: But you know, mentally, I'm having totally tons of fun
Speaker 2: and enjoying it, I think, much more than I ever
Speaker 2: have in a way. You know. I've got the kids around,
Speaker 2: which are wonderful to have that life and that engagement around.
Speaker 2: And I'm going to write another book. I'm going to
Speaker 2: try and write another book as soon as I got
Speaker 2: this one out, and mm hmm, just have me a
Speaker 2: great time to love listening to music and learning and
Speaker 2: listening to classical music a lot these days and really
Speaker 2: enjoying that enormously. Uh the new you know, I'll look
Speaker 2: forward to the new Rolling Stones record. Bottom way know
Speaker 2: is cooking one up, and Bob and all my favorites
Speaker 2: are got records going on. Bruce has got one in
Speaker 2: a can two he's working on right now. And uh
Speaker 2: so I'm fulfilled, you know, great marriage, and you know,
Speaker 2: watch my kids throve. It's wonderful. I've me a great time.
Speaker 1: How much do you listen to music?
Speaker 2: A lot a lot, But I don't listen togainst temporary music.
Speaker 2: You know, I listen to my old things. I love
Speaker 2: and the love for a long time, you know, I'll
Speaker 2: go on a kick and I'll listen to Mark Now
Speaker 2: for for three months, you know, and then I'll switch
Speaker 2: and say, oh, it's kind to go back to the
Speaker 2: early Rolling Stones, and it goes around around. This is
Speaker 2: Sergeant Peppers this weekend, and I mean, I forgot. It's huge.
Speaker 2: It's amazing record.
Speaker 1: You know, people have forgotten that talking about Abbey Rude,
Speaker 1: which I don't think is as good that the White Album,
Speaker 1: which is great and uneven. Sergeant Pepper was such a
Speaker 1: breakthrough in those songs, it's unreal.
Speaker 2: I mean, but go it. Yeah, listen to it, go
Speaker 2: back and listen to it carefully, and then you realize
Speaker 2: what was going on before this. Nothing like that was
Speaker 2: going on before. Those are other good songs and good players,
Speaker 2: but nobody had composed this whole thoughtful thing good morning,
Speaker 2: good morning bad and you know it was genius.
Speaker 1: One forgets and also it was in retrospect such a
Speaker 1: short period of time. Yeah, So what do you use
Speaker 1: to listen to? You listening to vinyl, You listen to files,
Speaker 1: listen headphone speakers.
Speaker 2: Anything goes to the yearbuds. They're the easiest, most convene thing.
Speaker 2: I haven't used a pair of really high quality headphones
Speaker 2: in a long time. I just you know, can lay
Speaker 2: down and listen to music, you know what, I and
Speaker 2: anywhere and anyway. It's the quality is good enough for
Speaker 2: me because headphone quality is just in of itself. I
Speaker 2: this is what my latest happens. I go to sleep
Speaker 2: every night, but in Heaven's Melissa Roberson. I made it
Speaker 2: the next tape of roverson I Loves Unbelievable.
Speaker 1: You know, I think that's also being a little bit older. Crying.
Speaker 1: I was too young for crying. Pretty woman is really
Speaker 1: when I came in. And so tell me about your
Speaker 1: two top pinch me moments meeting people.
Speaker 2: Wait a minute, Roy Everson, first of he had two
Speaker 2: records of the modern era, Mystery Girl and Mystery Girl
Speaker 2: and what was the othering? What they call it? Not
Speaker 2: California Blue. Anyway, this last two records. Got to get
Speaker 2: those two records. Okay, they're produced in the modern way,
Speaker 2: and so all the modern and instrumentation is more modern.
Speaker 2: And get a guitar players my mother. So their beautiful
Speaker 2: records have some great great songs on it, and if
Speaker 2: you like them on Traveling Little Berries, it's kind of
Speaker 2: like that, Okay, I urge you to get those records.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, just while you're on this top anything else.
Speaker 1: Personal favorites that are overlooked by me or other people.
Speaker 2: Oh, I can't. That's too long. That's way too long.
Speaker 2: And I have to know what you overlooked, because I'm
Speaker 2: most of my personal favorites are popular stuff anyway, because
Speaker 2: that the best stuff usually gets to be the most popular.
Speaker 2: But Roy, and then if you go back and listen
Speaker 2: to the classic Roy the late fifties and sixty seventies,
Speaker 2: his singing is unbelievable. He's good, his voice is matchless, peerless.
Speaker 2: But the arranging is so wonderfully classic and old fashioned
Speaker 2: and detailed, you know, in the amount of stuff that's
Speaker 2: in the track, and the way they use the strings,
Speaker 2: you know, and how soaring strings and the vocals it's
Speaker 2: just some fonic you mean, other beautiful Go listen carefully
Speaker 2: and then the whole thing. I find it very soft
Speaker 2: and in a way that it's smooth. That's soothing, as
Speaker 2: was what I find. You know, rock is jangling music.
Speaker 2: It's a hard music, things like the who you Know
Speaker 2: and stuff like that. I mean, I'm more into the
Speaker 2: ballady thing. That's why I love Mark Knolfler and our
Speaker 2: straits for that, and Bob does. It's a balancing anyway.
Speaker 2: But two tingling moments, I mean they're all tingling. You know.
Speaker 2: Bob gives me tingles, Mick gives me, I mean all,
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't you know they're tingling moments.
Speaker 1: How about a non musician, It's.
Speaker 2: Hard to say. I mean, I got so accustomed to
Speaker 2: meaning presidents that I don't get tingles out of that,
Speaker 2: you know, seeking the most of meeting people, I mean, god,
Speaker 2: you know, Bob, John Lennon, Mick.
Speaker 1: Okay, so do you have the same access, do you
Speaker 1: miss access? Do you care about access?
Speaker 2: I do. I have the same access. But those people,
Speaker 2: as I've always had, they are friends and colleagues. I mean,
Speaker 2: you know they you know, with Bono with their family,
Speaker 2: his family, and with the Springsteens, a very family relationship
Speaker 2: with those people. You know, they're you know, our families
Speaker 2: are involved with each other. We're involved with our kids
Speaker 2: and our vacations. You know, our social lives are entwined.
Speaker 2: You know, really they're younger, but they're like I don't know,
Speaker 2: for years, you know, up until recently, Uh, you know,
Speaker 2: we're deeply involved with Yoko and Sean. I'm Sean's godfather,
Speaker 2: Sean Yoga's godfather, and one of my kids, Shawn has
Speaker 2: got other to one of my younger kids. And Mick
Speaker 2: I just had lunch with me a couple of weeks ago. Month,
Speaker 2: a couple of weeks ago. So I mean I'm in
Speaker 2: regular contact with everybody. I mean, Bob's not a social
Speaker 2: be and Pete is I don't Pete, I don't see.
Speaker 2: But the rest of the do Are you regularly a
Speaker 2: social being?
Speaker 1: An extrovert or moore of an introvert? Want to be
Speaker 1: home reading both?
Speaker 2: I love them both?
Speaker 1: And to what you wrote an autobiography. Now you have
Speaker 1: this interview book you're talking about another book. To what
Speaker 1: degree are you concerned about legacy?
Speaker 2: I don't pay attention to it that much. Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: not and it's not my issue. My issue is raising
Speaker 2: the kids and by myself. Now you know, let me
Speaker 2: a good, fruitful, productive life now, doing what I can
Speaker 2: to help people, trying to stay healthy and get bring
Speaker 2: happy is my life and others.
Speaker 1: Okay, Yoan, I want to thank you. As far as
Speaker 1: the book, the only interview I hadn't read was the
Speaker 1: first with Townsend, and it's really very interesting to see
Speaker 1: the insight and the intelligence of the different people. I mean,
Speaker 1: Dylan certainly comes across as intelligent. They all have different
Speaker 1: personalities and whatever the reason behind making the book, it's
Speaker 1: no hype that when you sit there, it really brings
Speaker 1: back the era. You know, sets the constellation right. I
Speaker 1: was surprised, not that because I thought it'd be negative,
Speaker 1: but everyone's publishing a book, but it really brought the
Speaker 1: era and the people were part of the era alive.
Speaker 2: It's it's a way, it's a real history as well
Speaker 2: just an anthology collection. When I did it and read off,
Speaker 2: it was just shocked by how much good stuff is,
Speaker 2: how much people really spoke their mind. I mean, it
Speaker 2: had been years since I've read these things, and what
Speaker 2: was really there, I mean it was you don't get
Speaker 2: this at all today, And added all up, I felt
Speaker 2: that I'd taken a trip to my life until next time.
Speaker 1: This is Bob left Stets