Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: Hey everyone, it's justin Richmond. As a broken record listener,
Speaker 2: you get to hear from some of the most talented
Speaker 2: and creative musicians around. But every so often a performer
Speaker 2: feels just a cut above the rest. They're particularly fascinating,
Speaker 2: and I include Steve Martin in that category. He's an
Speaker 2: incredible actor, writer, comedic, performer, musician, and it turns out
Speaker 2: even has an eye for art. For decades now, Steve
Speaker 2: Martin's been a pure creative force, and now, through Pushkin,
Speaker 2: Steve has his own original audiobook that I'm excited to
Speaker 2: share an excerpt of with you today. It's called So
Speaker 2: Many Steve's, and it's an exploration of Steve Martin's many
Speaker 2: creative lives and conversation with his friend and New Yorker
Speaker 2: writer Adam Gotnik. In this preview, you'll hear Steve Martin
Speaker 2: and Adam talk about Steve's music career. You'll even get
Speaker 2: to hear him score their conversation on banjo. Check out
Speaker 2: the audiobook on pushkin dot Fm for the complete conversations,
Speaker 2: and in the meantime, enjoy this excerpt of So Many Steves.
Speaker 3: Chapter five Music Man, You did a whole record that
Speaker 3: had one whole musical side right in there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but that's a long story. That's because that's because
Speaker 4: I was out of comedy material, just really out of it.
Speaker 4: And I was at a roadblock of writing more at
Speaker 4: that time in the early eighties, and I had these
Speaker 4: songs that I'd recorded like eight years earlier. Oh really
Speaker 4: they yeah, And I thought, well, maybe this will work.
Speaker 3: The record Steve is referencing is called The Steve Martin
Speaker 3: Brothers and it was released in nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And you know, it's not the smartest thing, because
Speaker 4: if you're buying a comedy record, you don't want a
Speaker 4: music record, and if you're buying a music record, you
Speaker 4: don't want a comedy record. But anyway, so I didn't
Speaker 4: consider myself a music act. And you know, while I
Speaker 4: was making movies, I just sort of kept the banjo enough.
Speaker 4: You kept it in the trailer with you, Yeah, kept
Speaker 4: it in the trailer and everything. Didn't write any songs.
Speaker 3: Steve is a man of many ambitions, but if one
Speaker 3: electric current or strand of DNA, depending on your pet metaphor,
Speaker 3: runs through it all, it's his love of music, in particular,
Speaker 3: his love of the kind of American music we more
Speaker 3: ignorant folks call bluegrass. I have already learned that the banjo,
Speaker 3: which I had foolishly imagined as a kind of deliberately
Speaker 3: camp instrument, was in fact a source of passion and
Speaker 3: satisfaction to Steve. He loved its tone, the American trail
Speaker 3: that left behind, its jangling sound and its Civil War
Speaker 3: campfire integrity. And yet, as you just heard, at the
Speaker 3: height of his conventional fame, he had stopped playing the
Speaker 3: banjo entirely. I want to know why he'd stopped, and
Speaker 3: how this improbable instrument had made him begin again and
Speaker 3: drawn him back in and then opened him to an
Speaker 3: even larger world of music and composition.
Speaker 4: So around two thousand, Earl Scruggs was doing some kind
Speaker 4: of anniversary record and he said, would you.
Speaker 3: Earl Scruggs, Master of the American that's.
Speaker 4: A great master. Changed the instrument, absolutely changed the instrument.
Speaker 4: And he said, I'm doing a seventy to fifth anniversary album.
Speaker 4: Would you play Foggy Mountain Breakdown with me? You know,
Speaker 4: we're getting a lot of celebrities. I said, sure, you know,
Speaker 4: because I can play Foggy Mountain Breakdown, and.
Speaker 3: Remember Steve had performed this very same song with Scruggs
Speaker 3: earlier in his career.
Speaker 4: So I go to this recording session and they put
Speaker 4: it on. They have the track I'm gonna play along with.
Speaker 4: It was so fast I couldn't believe it.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 4: I could get it back up to speed, but it
Speaker 4: took some doing, and I thought I'm rusty, and so
Speaker 4: I started getting back into the banjo. That began the
Speaker 4: second period of my musical life. And so I started
Speaker 4: writing these songs. But I didn't write songs with lyrics
Speaker 4: because I didn't know how. I thought, Okay, I can
Speaker 4: write a banjo song with a melody, but I don't
Speaker 4: understand how the next melody lays on top of that.
Speaker 4: So if I'm playing in CEA, I don't because I
Speaker 4: don't know music. I don't know what note, I don't
Speaker 4: know what fits. I don't And then I was talking
Speaker 4: to Earl Scruggs. I heard him be interviewed one time
Speaker 4: and he said, well, he said, I'd just play the melody,
Speaker 4: and I thought, oh, my songs have melodies. Why don't
Speaker 4: I make that the melody and just find lyrics that
Speaker 4: go along with that, and then subordinate the chords the
Speaker 4: top line. Just take off the top line, and then
Speaker 4: I was able to write songs. I don't think I
Speaker 4: wrote some pretty good ones for the genre.
Speaker 3: With that inspiration from Earl Scruggs, Steve felt newly empowered
Speaker 3: with the ability to write the top line for his songs. Soon,
Speaker 3: Steve's next record came out, his first in decades, and
Speaker 3: it was all music, no comedy at all. Released in
Speaker 3: two thousand and nine, it's called The Crow New Songs
Speaker 3: for the five String Banjo.
Speaker 4: I was very proud that they were new songs for
Speaker 4: the five string banjo. So we recorded them and John
Speaker 4: mckewan produced it. And then my agent, a great agent,
Speaker 4: Mark Geiger, said you've got to go on the road.
Speaker 4: I said, I can't go on the road, and he said, now, look,
Speaker 4: you got to go on the road. So here's the options.
Speaker 4: You're going to either hire a pickup band, which means
Speaker 4: every time you go on the road you have to
Speaker 4: find five new players who to learn all the songs,
Speaker 4: et cetera, which is possible because these players are great.
Speaker 4: Or you just team up with an existing band because
Speaker 4: they'll either be all available or not all available. And
Speaker 4: I said, well, I only know one band because I
Speaker 4: had met the Steep Canyon Rangers in North Carolina at
Speaker 4: a party. I thought, wow, they sound great, so I
Speaker 4: asked them if they wanted to team up not lugging Away.
Speaker 4: My best friends all had worn not blugging Away. Even
Speaker 4: your mom said you were nuts and dreams. You wear
Speaker 4: a red cape ban a pitch, not wlugging away.
Speaker 3: Jumilationday.
Speaker 4: And then I'm talking to this other friend, Pete Warneck
Speaker 4: is a banjo player, and he was helped me out
Speaker 4: quite a bit early on with the negotiating the bluegrass world.
Speaker 4: And I said, I don't know what to do in
Speaker 4: the show. I guess we just play the songs. He said, no, no, no,
Speaker 4: he says, you've got to do comedy. I said, I
Speaker 4: don't have any. I don't have any. Well, if you
Speaker 4: don't do comedy, they're gonna be disappointed. I said, why
Speaker 4: it's a music show. Why He says, because they'll be
Speaker 4: disappointed if they're expecting you to do comedy. And I went, oh,
Speaker 4: I mean, like I should have known that. Yeah, But
Speaker 4: it worked out because I loved and eventually just loved
Speaker 4: working out humor for that touring banjo show. This actually happened.
Speaker 4: I had a book call it was an omnibus of
Speaker 4: bad poetry. It was a big, thick book.
Speaker 3: It's called The Stuff.
Speaker 4: Now, yeah it is. That's right, that's right. So I thought,
Speaker 4: just as a joke, I thought, I'm going to write
Speaker 4: some bad poetry. So I wrote some bad poetry about
Speaker 4: a kid and his dad played the banjo and blah
Speaker 4: blah goes on and on and on and on.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 4: And I looked at it and I thought, you know,
Speaker 4: this is some pretty bad poetry, but it might make
Speaker 4: a good country song. It actually did. It was called
Speaker 4: Daddy Played the Bad Joe.
Speaker 2: Daddy played the band, Open the Yellow Tree. It right
Speaker 2: across the backyard and old town mellow.
Speaker 3: Bad poetry often makes good lyrics.
Speaker 4: I mean that absolutely absolutely.
Speaker 3: Steve was about to meet someone who would become central
Speaker 3: to his work as a musician, and that was Edie Brokel.
Speaker 3: Edie Brokel, as you probably know, is a pop and
Speaker 3: tree star, and latterly she had gotten married to Steve's friend,
Speaker 3: the great songwriter Paul Simon.
Speaker 4: One time I was at a dinner party and Edie
Speaker 4: came up to me and she said, you know, I
Speaker 4: heard a song you wrote I think it was Daddy
Speaker 4: played the banjo, I think, and she said, it's so
Speaker 4: kind of knocked me out. Would you ever like to
Speaker 4: write songs together? And I didn't know anything about writing
Speaker 4: songs together, and I said, well, sure, you know here
Speaker 4: yeh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think We met at
Speaker 4: Edie's house and I didn't know anything about collaborating at all,
Speaker 4: and kind of got a few things. But eventually it
Speaker 4: worked out that I would send the banjo line line,
Speaker 4: the form and everything, and then she would lyricize it
Speaker 4: and often change the licks so it'd have the two
Speaker 4: counter melodies. You'd have the banjo counter melody and her
Speaker 4: melody on top of it. And that's how we started
Speaker 4: writing them. And she was the exclusive writer of the lyric.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: I thought we were going to collaborate on lyrics, but
Speaker 4: she had an insight. Yeah, she has had an insight
Speaker 4: into lyric writing, you know. So that's how that happened.
Speaker 1: She had a child by that man from the bank.
Speaker 1: He was married with the song. All of her family
Speaker 1: said give that child away, chat.
Speaker 2: To erase what you do.
Speaker 4: We went on a tour with Edie and the Rangers
Speaker 4: and worked in comedy and it was a big show
Speaker 4: and it.
Speaker 5: Did well, you know, and traveling bluegrass, yeah, but in
Speaker 5: a bus.
Speaker 4: And then one day we were just talking and we
Speaker 4: said how much we both like musicals.
Speaker 3: Now Steve loves musicals. We talk about them all the time.
Speaker 3: West Side Story, the Bernstein Sondheim Classic, Gypsy, the Julie
Speaker 3: Stein and Son Time Classic were have.
Speaker 4: Always I wept through the whole thing, just from oh
Speaker 4: this song, Oh that song, Oh this song, you know,
Speaker 4: it's so sweet.
Speaker 3: And Meredith Wilson's one of a kind nineteen fifty seven
Speaker 3: show The Music.
Speaker 5: Man was.
Speaker 3: What did you ever pursue the idea of playing Harold Hill?
Speaker 4: You know, it was always in the back of my mind.
Speaker 4: But I have a big problem. I can't sing there
Speaker 4: were bells on the Hill. I don't have that voice.
Speaker 3: Steve is a true connoisseur of classic musicals, and yet.
Speaker 4: I still don't really understand Oklahoma in what sense the
Speaker 4: story is so weird it's insane.
Speaker 3: Oklahoma, I should say, was the first Rogers and Emerstein show,
Speaker 3: and it was based on a play called Green Grow
Speaker 3: the Lilacs. The spirit of Oklahoma is all very Americana,
Speaker 3: but the play itself has some very weird and strange
Speaker 3: turns within it. There's a whole sequence where the hero
Speaker 3: accidentally murders the very misunderstood villain.
Speaker 4: I mean, when I saw it recently, I really enjoyed it,
Speaker 4: and I still thought, so they kill him, and I
Speaker 4: don't know.
Speaker 3: It takes such a bizarre turn into darkness and then
Speaker 3: sort of leaves unrecognized the turn that it's taken at the.
Speaker 5: End, and that it ends with Okay.
Speaker 4: But the songs are great.
Speaker 5: The songs are great.
Speaker 3: You know. The song out of My Dreams gorgeous, such
Speaker 3: a gorgeous Oh my God. Tis The musical Steve went
Speaker 3: on to write with Edie Brokel is called Bright Star.
Speaker 3: It premiered on Broadway in twenty sixteen. Steve wrote what
Speaker 3: musical theater people call the book, in other words, the play,
Speaker 3: and he and Edie Brokell wrote the music, while Edie
Speaker 3: wrote all the lyrics to those songs.
Speaker 4: You know the best part of any of these things
Speaker 4: is the rehearsal and you're hearing your song sung by
Speaker 4: really good voice. Yes, you know. I was never happier
Speaker 4: than when we were working on Bright Star. And I'd
Speaker 4: get on a bicycle in the summer and bike downtown
Speaker 4: to the rehearsal hall and get to see things brought
Speaker 4: to life. And that's the thing. You write a song
Speaker 4: and you're just staring at it and it's like a
Speaker 4: banjo melody in your stupid little voice, and then you
Speaker 4: hear somebody who can really you can really do it, it,
Speaker 4: can really play it, who could kill it? And you go, wow,
Speaker 4: I can't believe that happened. I mean, our ears, you know,
Speaker 4: the writers were going genius. You know, we actually based
Speaker 4: it on a story that Edie discovered, a true story
Speaker 4: about a baby in a suitcase thrown from a train
Speaker 4: in a suitcase and a couple heard the cries walking
Speaker 4: along the railroad track, found him, took him home and
Speaker 4: raised him, and he became the boy from the train.
Speaker 4: So we wrote a song about it. She wrote the
Speaker 4: lyrics Sarah Jane and the Iron Mountain Baby. It's called
Speaker 4: the Iron Mountains.
Speaker 3: Sarah Jane being the mother, who is Sarah Sarah.
Speaker 4: A moment of the Boy from the train, and that's
Speaker 4: our big closer, and eventually we cut that song. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 4: the problem of course with the song is that it
Speaker 4: told the story that we just told.
Speaker 3: Bright Starr had only a short run on Broadway just
Speaker 3: about three months, but in the years that followed, a
Speaker 3: national tour gave it a second vibrant life. In twenty sixteen,
Speaker 3: it was nominated for multiple Tony Awards, including Best Musical,
Speaker 3: and those awards are in line with Steve's successful career
Speaker 3: as a musician. He really wasn't a comedian, just dabbling
Speaker 3: with melodies and top lines. He won three Grammys, performed
Speaker 3: a duet with Paul Simon on SNL, and even wrote
Speaker 3: a song of his own for Vince Gill and Dolly
Speaker 3: Parton to sing they Nevertheless, when it came to making
Speaker 3: Bright Star, I think Steve was, if not exactly repelled,
Speaker 3: then at least a little stunned by how much coordinated
Speaker 3: teamwork has to go into the creation of a musical.
Speaker 3: It's the exact opposite it of, for instance, stand up comedy,
Speaker 3: which is essentially you and at most to microphone and
Speaker 3: an audience. In a musical, every single time you make
Speaker 3: a change, two hundred other things and two hundred other
Speaker 3: people have to change with you, because the second bassoon
Speaker 3: in the orchestra has to change its note, and the
Speaker 3: singer has to change her syllables. And on and on
Speaker 3: and on. A musical is a kind of great ocean
Speaker 3: liner of a work of art. And I think Steve
Speaker 3: was in some respects, if not short tempered, then at
Speaker 3: least stubborn in the face of all of that composite resistance.
Speaker 4: As a comedian, you want everything to work, everything to work,
Speaker 4: and so you know, you're patching holes and fixing this,
Speaker 4: and that's why it's always been on everything. By the way,
Speaker 4: it's nothing made that wasn't fixed to some degree. But
Speaker 4: like you say, there's so many moving parts to it.
Speaker 4: If you want to change a line in a musical,
Speaker 4: the director will say, legitimately, well, we'll get to it
Speaker 4: next week, and I say, no, it's just one line.
Speaker 4: It's just one line. No, Yeah, because their focus is
Speaker 4: somewhere else, or it's authoritarian, and often means well, we
Speaker 4: have to change the music, we have to cut two bars,
Speaker 4: we have to think it scene as longer though thought.
Speaker 4: And it goes on and on and on, and you know,
Speaker 4: if it was a gigantic, monstrous hit, by the way,
Speaker 4: it's still being done. It's done a lot, but I'm
Speaker 4: sure I think differently about it. Yeah, but there's a
Speaker 4: struggle a struggle, a struggle, you know, and then nine
Speaker 4: months later you're closed. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I hate to say this, Steve, because you'll reject anybod
Speaker 3: it occurs me. Three Amigos would make a very effective musical.
Speaker 4: There on it. Oh really yeah? Yeah? John Mulaney's been
Speaker 4: signed up to write it.
Speaker 1: Is that right?
Speaker 3: Three Amigos, of Course is a nineteen eighty six comedy
Speaker 3: directed by Jonathan Landis. Chevy Chase, Martin Short, and Steve
Speaker 3: star as actors mistaken for gun slinging heroes in Mexico.
Speaker 1: Oh.
Speaker 5: I had no idea that, but.
Speaker 4: That was my instant response. Would say, would you like
Speaker 4: to write it? Said? No way, yeah, because I know
Speaker 4: what that means. It's like three years every night down
Speaker 4: there with heartbreak.
Speaker 3: Steve is adamant that he does not want to do
Speaker 3: another musical. So why I wonder had Steve chosen to
Speaker 3: write a musical in the first place. Some of it,
Speaker 3: I suppose, was part of his usual search for the
Speaker 3: next thing, the new self. The musical comedy was a
Speaker 3: kind of great white whale of American entertainment. Everyone wants
Speaker 3: to write or perform in one sooner or later, But
Speaker 3: it also involved a kind of fascination with a particular
Speaker 3: line of Americana. That kind of music represents an authenticity
Speaker 3: that largely escapes us. Now Bright Star, the musical that
Speaker 3: he and Edie Brokel would write together represented an attempt
Speaker 3: to summon up some of that authentic American musical energy,
Speaker 3: and it was part I felt, however, subliminally, of Steve's
Speaker 3: place in what I always think of as the comedy
Speaker 3: of American Resistance. You see, I have a unified theory
Speaker 3: of American comedy in the twentieth century, which is doubtless
Speaker 3: as flawed is all unified theories of anything always are.
Speaker 3: But it's one in which two kinds of comedy made
Speaker 3: themselves felt in the first half of the century and
Speaker 3: then on through the rest. One was the comedy of invasion,
Speaker 3: and the other the comedy of resistance. There's the immigrant
Speaker 3: and yes mostly Jewish comedy of energy, entrepreneurial mischief, anything
Speaker 3: Goes anarchy, a comedy of enterprise and noise. The Marx
Speaker 3: Brothers are obviously supreme here, but it's a vein that
Speaker 3: runs right up to Phil Silver's Sergeant Bilko swindling the
Speaker 3: simpleton officers at the army base, and it's telling that
Speaker 3: Steve trying to become Bilko never really worked. But in
Speaker 3: response to that comedy of invasion comes the comedy of
Speaker 3: an older American resistance to all that immigrant energy and explosion,
Speaker 3: struggling to hold on to order and decency and gallantry.
Speaker 3: It's a comedy exemplified by W. C. Fields struggling to
Speaker 3: sleep on his sleeping porchain. It's a gift while the
Speaker 3: neighborhood around him explodes refuses to quiet down. The division
Speaker 3: extends even onto the written humor of the period, with
Speaker 3: James Thurber the model of the uncomprehending and baffled midwesterner
Speaker 3: nostalgically watching Civil War values passing, and S. J. Prowman,
Speaker 3: the cynical navigator and of necessity commercial participant in the
Speaker 3: endless ocean of American vulgarity. Steve Martin has a place
Speaker 3: in this story, I think as the model of the
Speaker 3: modern wasp resistor. It's there everywhere. It's in the double
Speaker 3: takes he offers at the accented extravagances of the Martin
Speaker 3: short wedding planner character in the Father of the Bride series.
Speaker 4: A kick, Frank is flower and water. My first car
Speaker 4: didn't cost twelve hundred dollars.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the nineties, mister Baum.
Speaker 3: It's there in the dumb doggedness of his character in
Speaker 3: the La story, who accepts the absurdities of La as
Speaker 3: a fact to be coped with, not something to be
Speaker 3: polemical about it.
Speaker 4: With a great lunch and animum thanks.
Speaker 3: It's there in the weary, beautiful bafflement he offers us
Speaker 3: again and again. It's there even in the underlying cheerful
Speaker 3: premise of the guy in the white suit, an entertainer
Speaker 3: who doesn't know that what he's doing no longer quite
Speaker 3: counts as entertainment.
Speaker 4: Because I am a wild and.
Speaker 3: Crazy making a bluegrass musical might be a way of,
Speaker 3: at however unconscious a level, a way of participating in
Speaker 3: this tradition. It referenced the mystic past to Lost America
Speaker 3: trains and banjos and steamer trunks another time, not at
Speaker 3: all in a reactionary manner, but out of deep affection
Speaker 3: for disappearing sounds and stories, or at least that's what
Speaker 3: I chose to think.