Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Such Podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today is Dave dieterwer of the President of
Speaker 1: the United States of America. Dave, it's a thirty at
Speaker 1: the anniversary of your debut album. What do you have planned?
Speaker 2: Not as much as I'd like. We don't play live anymore,
Speaker 2: and we have some nice offers and such, but I
Speaker 2: don't know how much we'll get up to, and we've
Speaker 2: always been I guess you'd have to say laissez faire,
Speaker 2: or you could call it punk rock or you know,
Speaker 2: pickywords wisely, but we just let the music speak for
Speaker 2: itself and hope people respond well. So we don't have
Speaker 2: any kind of blitz scheduled, just try to try to
Speaker 2: do a few things here and there like this. This
Speaker 2: seemed like a good excuse to talk to you if
Speaker 2: nothing else.
Speaker 1: Okay, there are two other members in the original band.
Speaker 1: How do all of you get along?
Speaker 2: We get along unbelievably well. Actually, So there's my bandmates
Speaker 2: are Chris Blue, who's the bald guy and the singer,
Speaker 2: a primary singer, and then Jason Finn, the drummer. Chris
Speaker 2: and I have known each other since middle school. And
Speaker 2: Jason and I have known each other since we met
Speaker 2: at a urinal at a gig at Seattle University in
Speaker 2: about nineteen eighty four and I asked him to be
Speaker 2: in another band I had at the time, and somehow,
Speaker 2: over the course of thirty plus years of playing together,
Speaker 2: we've gotten along famously. We don't really hang out with
Speaker 2: each other a lot outside of playing music, but we
Speaker 2: have this symbiosis whatever when we get together in a
Speaker 2: room with instruments, and then we'll get into it, I'm sure,
Speaker 2: but we have these incredibly lucky to have sort of
Speaker 2: complimentary musical talents and also complimentary, for lack of a
Speaker 2: better way to say it, business or professional skills and
Speaker 2: interests that allowed the thing to work really well and
Speaker 2: still work well thirty years later.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but didn't you stop playing with the band a
Speaker 1: little over a decade ago?
Speaker 2: I stopped our heyday was really ninety three to about
Speaker 2: ninety eight, and then Chris quit as he was starting
Speaker 2: his young family, and then at my instigation really around
Speaker 2: three we started up again. That was when we got
Speaker 2: the rights back to all the rights back to the
Speaker 2: masters to our debut record, our hit record, and it
Speaker 2: was a good impetus to get going again. And for
Speaker 2: a few years at that time, I'd gone back into
Speaker 2: proper white collar work as a public affairs account executive,
Speaker 2: and I had two young daughters and you know, wife
Speaker 2: and a big house, and I was trying to do
Speaker 2: all of it. For about two years, I was working
Speaker 2: full time, being a dad, being a husband, and then
Speaker 2: trying to fly out two to four weekends a month
Speaker 2: to play, you know, one to three gigs a weekend.
Speaker 2: And after about two years of the band being back together,
Speaker 2: maybe in six I just said I never actually quit.
Speaker 2: Actually I said I needed to take a break for
Speaker 2: six months. And a mutual friend of ours, Andrew mckaig,
Speaker 2: lovely guy and great musician, he filled in. And then
Speaker 2: they kept going for a number of years, touring without me.
Speaker 2: But yet we all the three of us, kept running
Speaker 2: the business and managing our managing the records we own,
Speaker 2: and you know, so the whole thing kept rolling. I
Speaker 2: just couldn't do it.
Speaker 1: Okay, when you reform the group and you're flying out
Speaker 1: two or three weekends, is that more of the vanity
Speaker 1: project or you're making any money?
Speaker 2: We were making money, and the challenge is, as you know,
Speaker 2: as a as a musical artist unless you're you know,
Speaker 2: Trans Siberian Orchestra or somebody in the Wiggles or somebody
Speaker 2: who figures out how to clone yourself. Well, there's only
Speaker 2: one of you, and you can only be in one
Speaker 2: place at a time. So the challenge was, is this
Speaker 2: what I want to hang my hat on for the
Speaker 2: rest of my working life? Is you know, maybe playing
Speaker 2: sixty to eighty shows a year and being gone two
Speaker 2: hundred days a year with kids, And I didn't want
Speaker 2: to do that. So it was it wasn't a vanity thing.
Speaker 2: We were making money and could have made a great
Speaker 2: living at it.
Speaker 1: So okay, a band that is you know, ten plus
Speaker 1: years pass its heyday or around that ballpark, you leave,
Speaker 1: you fly out, you come home. How much can you net?
Speaker 2: We sort of put a floor on what we would do.
Speaker 2: You know, I don't think we would take any gig
Speaker 2: for sort of less than ten k after expenses. So
Speaker 2: if we felt like we were each netting before taxes
Speaker 2: three to four grand a gig, or grossing before taxes
Speaker 2: three to four grand a gig, that it was worth doing.
Speaker 2: And then as it evolved, you know, I bailed out
Speaker 2: at a certain point. But as it evolved, you take,
Speaker 2: as you know, in this industry, you get, you know,
Speaker 2: if you want to route a tour all the way
Speaker 2: down the West coast. For us at that point, it
Speaker 2: didn't work very well because some places you get a
Speaker 2: twenty five hundred dollars guarantee, but then you might also
Speaker 2: get the gig at the Rodeo in Houston that's thirty
Speaker 2: five grand. Right, So the things sort of start to
Speaker 2: average out a little bit and you have to put
Speaker 2: some floor on it to be able to make it work.
Speaker 1: Okay, you've always emailed me about your income. Let's start
Speaker 1: with the basics. Was the original deal with Columbia that
Speaker 1: you get the record back or is that a result
Speaker 1: of some kind of lawsuit or something.
Speaker 2: No, we owned the record. So we made the record
Speaker 2: with our friend Conrad Huno, who had what was locally
Speaker 2: a legendary studio, Egg Studio in Seattle for years, and
Speaker 2: he recorded the young fresh Fellows who were sort of
Speaker 2: an you know, Seattle indie icons. Mud Honey records lots
Speaker 2: of other artists, and he had a label called pop Lama,
Speaker 2: and we just did a handshake deal with him in
Speaker 2: sometime in ninety four, as you know, it all happened
Speaker 2: really fast, Bob. We started. Chris and I had had
Speaker 2: bands for ten years, starting in maybe nineteen eighty two
Speaker 2: or eighty three. We were both from Seattle. We started
Speaker 2: playing Me's. We went to high school together. We weren't
Speaker 2: really friends. Right after high school, I was a year
Speaker 2: ahead of him. The year after he graduated, we started
Speaker 2: playing together, making recordings, and we always had this chemistry.
Speaker 2: It was like it was just on from the first
Speaker 2: time we ever sat down together. We played Deer Prudence.
Speaker 2: He was playing keyboards and I was playing guitar, and
Speaker 2: it was like, this is obviously like magic. So over
Speaker 2: of course of ten years, we had all these bands.
Speaker 2: I was going to school, he was going to college,
Speaker 2: and then he was moving back and forth from Denver.
Speaker 2: I was in Denver, excuse me. He was in New
Speaker 2: York and Boston. We'd both come back to Seattle at times,
Speaker 2: and we always had bands. So what happens fallow ninety three,
Speaker 2: he moves back to Seattle for good. We do what
Speaker 2: we always did. I had a rehearsal studio at the
Speaker 2: time with I Think the Posy's, a great band called
Speaker 2: Flop another band seven year bitch I shared with them,
Speaker 2: and I'm like, okay, we got songs, I got a
Speaker 2: rehearsal studio, let's just start playing. And we started playing
Speaker 2: as a duo, and he has really bad tonight us
Speaker 2: and at the time he's like, I don't even want
Speaker 2: to have a drummer. Let's just play as a duo.
Speaker 2: We started playing shows under these other names. We were
Speaker 2: the Lofies, we were Pure Frosting, we were I can't
Speaker 2: remember what else we called ourselves, and pretty quickly, you know,
Speaker 2: this is we got a following, even before we added drums.
Speaker 2: This is in the fall of nineteen ninety three, and
Speaker 2: people dug us. You got to remember, Seattle nineteen ninety
Speaker 2: three is like people move in here from Phoenix, you know,
Speaker 2: and buying flannel and Doc Martin's and every show is
Speaker 2: like a wall of Marshall stacks and long hair and
Speaker 2: super loud and anks, dridden nonsense. And we get up
Speaker 2: on stage and I'm like dorky, preppy guy in a
Speaker 2: you know, a button down shirt and a grow grain
Speaker 2: belt and saddle shoes, and Chris is this spaz bald
Speaker 2: spas with spray painted gold boots. And so the two
Speaker 2: of us plugged into this one, you know, like ninety
Speaker 2: dollars amplifier with our twenty dollars guitars coming out playing,
Speaker 2: you know, iggying the Stooge's tv I with no drummer.
Speaker 2: So I think we stood out right away. And at
Speaker 2: that point we'd been doing it for a long time,
Speaker 2: and I think we kind of knew what we were doing,
Speaker 2: so boom, it just all of a sudden we had attention.
Speaker 2: And then Jason, who was kind of at the time
Speaker 2: known as the popa Pike Street, Seattle's hipster neighborhood. He's
Speaker 2: kind of like the coolest guy in town. He was
Speaker 2: in another band, Love Battery, who were on Subpop and
Speaker 2: at the time had just been signed to A and M.
Speaker 2: And he'd seen an earlier band Chris and I had
Speaker 2: called go and had the joke was the super cool
Speaker 2: rock guy had begged us for three years like next band,
Speaker 2: you're in, next band, you guys have I'm going to
Speaker 2: be the drummer. I'm going to be the drummer. So
Speaker 2: he's begging us, you know, come on, I got to
Speaker 2: join the band, and Chris and I had these big
Speaker 2: heartfelt do we want a drummer Jason joins us, and
Speaker 2: it's even more magical. It's like the thing Chris and
Speaker 2: I had and then just I'll never forget. The first
Speaker 2: rehearsal was like, Okay, this is a thing, and boom
Speaker 2: it takes off. So early ninety four, all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: like we're packing places within a few months, and we
Speaker 2: went in to I don't think you've had him on
Speaker 2: your podcast, you should. Barrett Jones, who was Dave Grohl's
Speaker 2: good buddy from back East and then his drum tech
Speaker 2: for years. He had a little studio and it's a
Speaker 2: long story, but somebody who liked the band gave us
Speaker 2: three hundred and fifty dollars to make a recording. We
Speaker 2: went in and made a ten song cassette and Jason
Speaker 2: was at the time bartender at the Comet Tavern, which
Speaker 2: is kind of the ground zero for hipsters in Seattle
Speaker 2: than in Now. He started selling it from behind the bar.
Speaker 2: Chris takes off meanwhile, to go play bass in Beck's
Speaker 2: band on the Mellow Gold tour for six months, and
Speaker 2: Jason's selling these tapes from behind the bar just like
Speaker 2: he's selling hundreds.
Speaker 1: Wait wait, wait, just how does he even know Beck?
Speaker 2: He knows Beck. That's a long story. I think they
Speaker 2: may have met because they were mutually acquainted with the
Speaker 2: female singer songwriter Mary Lou Lord with him. That's fascinating, Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 2: So anyway, Yeah, Beck came up to Seattle once, did
Speaker 2: a gig. Chris jumped on stage as he will with
Speaker 2: anybody anytime, for any reason, and played a harmonica solo,
Speaker 2: and then I think in the next few days after that,
Speaker 2: Chris went down to Olympia and played some slide guitar
Speaker 2: on what became One Foot in the Grave, and then
Speaker 2: Beck had this weird hit out of nowhere as you know, Loser,
Speaker 2: which broke. You know, Beck was in Seattle because Seattle's
Speaker 2: one of the main places where it broke with Marco O'Collins,
Speaker 2: DJ at K and d D and Yeah, Chris moved
Speaker 2: down to la for a few weeks and hears and
Speaker 2: then went on tour with Beck on the Mellow Gold Tour.
Speaker 2: So at a certain point, Jason and I are calling
Speaker 2: Chris like, we're getting these gig offers, you got to
Speaker 2: come back. We're selling these tapes from behind the counter
Speaker 2: at the Commet and it's just kind of going.
Speaker 1: On, Wait, wait, wait, selling the tapes behind the counter.
Speaker 1: Everybody lies if they say they sell one hundred thousand,
Speaker 1: they sold a thousand. But since you ended up having success,
Speaker 1: you can be honest. How many cassettes did you actually sell?
Speaker 2: Hundreds? Somewhere between five hundred and a thousand.
Speaker 1: That's a lot.
Speaker 2: Having anything going on other than Jason b and you know,
Speaker 2: playing it at the bar and people starting to get
Speaker 2: a buzz around it. So so meanwhile Chris is on
Speaker 2: tour and we're calling him and saying, we're getting all
Speaker 2: these gig offers, when are you coming back? And then eventually,
Speaker 2: this is a good industry story, John Silva, Beck's manager
Speaker 2: fires Chris. I mean I think Beck fired him, but
Speaker 2: because this is when Beck was still super kind a
Speaker 2: dour and super serious and basically wanted to be thirston more.
Speaker 2: It was before he got kind of was doing the
Speaker 2: robot in a captain's outfit and stuff, which he eventually did,
Speaker 2: and being fun. But Chris got kicked out of Beck's
Speaker 2: band for you know, being having too much fun, like
Speaker 2: smiling and jumping around on stage. It didn't fit the
Speaker 2: mo that they wanted to portray. So that was in
Speaker 2: you know, like I don't know. June nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 2: Chris came back and boom, all of a sudden. I mean,
Speaker 2: we are packing clubs and immediately like we are selling
Speaker 2: out the Crocodile Cafe mos which is now new. Most
Speaker 2: these are all like four hundred to seven hundred seat
Speaker 2: rooms where within a month or two they're sold out
Speaker 2: and they are like eight hundred people outside trying to
Speaker 2: get in. And this is not hyperbolic, this is it
Speaker 2: was insane. It was just it just happened. And it
Speaker 2: was not like the hipsters in Seattle didn't think much
Speaker 2: of us, except for a few people like Kim Thale
Speaker 2: always loved us. Everybody was telling you Jet that same
Speaker 2: summer of ninety four, Jason was making Love Battery's major
Speaker 2: label debut for A and M, and everybody's telling him, man,
Speaker 2: you got to just stick with Love Battery. You guys
Speaker 2: are going to do it. Meanwhile, this freight train was
Speaker 2: just gathering steam, and by the end of that summer
Speaker 2: we played an as gap. So this is August ninety four.
Speaker 2: We played an ASCAP showcase the weekend of Bumbershoot in
Speaker 2: Seattle and it was packed and Tim Summers, who was
Speaker 2: an A and R guy at the time for Atlantic
Speaker 2: who signed Hoody and the Blowfish and who weirdly Chris
Speaker 2: knew because they had played a gig together with Chris's
Speaker 2: band and Tim's band, Hugo Largo I think at CBGB's
Speaker 2: years before. Tim accosted us that night and took us
Speaker 2: out for coffee the next morning and on there sitting
Speaker 2: there at Cafe Vita, I think on Pike Street. He
Speaker 2: really was excited about us. He was the first day
Speaker 2: and our guy to be excited and I'll never forget.
Speaker 2: He said, you guys are going to be the police
Speaker 2: of the ninety and Chris just looked at him and said,
Speaker 2: maybe the minute work of the nineties. So from there on,
Speaker 2: all of a sudden, like a week later or two
Speaker 2: weeks later, we were in Hits magazine constantly. There was
Speaker 2: just this industry buzz. We didn't even have a manager
Speaker 2: at the time. We eventually grabbed a friend who was
Speaker 2: managing seven year bitch, Stacy Slater, and asked her to
Speaker 2: manage us. And all of a sudden, We're going to
Speaker 2: do showcases, you know, in LA and New York, like
Speaker 2: every four to six weeks. Every label at that time,
Speaker 2: there were seven or eight majors. Every major but Interscope
Speaker 2: tried to sign us. It was nuts. I was in
Speaker 2: grad school. I was my second year of grad school
Speaker 2: at the time, and I was, you know, managing all
Speaker 2: that and then taken off to New York or LA
Speaker 2: every few weeks to do these you know, play at
Speaker 2: the Viper Room or whatever. It was bizarre, and it
Speaker 2: just kept gathering steam, you know. There was just this
Speaker 2: momentum and Jason eventually he didn't At that time, We're
Speaker 2: getting back to how we own our first record that
Speaker 2: fall of nineteen ninety four, We're like, we didn't even
Speaker 2: know if we're a band like Jason's in this other band.
Speaker 2: They've got a you know, major label deal. Can we
Speaker 2: even make a record together? So we uh made a
Speaker 2: handshake deal with Uno and went into the little pop
Speaker 2: Lama studios in his basement of.
Speaker 1: His Wait wait, wait, wait, wait a little bit slower. Sure, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the three hundred and fifty dollars cassette tape.
Speaker 2: That you're selling Froggy Style.
Speaker 1: Subsequent to that, there's all this major label action, but
Speaker 1: you decide to cut an independent record instead of making
Speaker 1: a major label deal.
Speaker 2: I think at the time, it was all happening so fast,
Speaker 2: we thought, let's just go ahead and make a record.
Speaker 2: And the other thing is we were getting indie. There
Speaker 2: were some other indie labels that were interested in us
Speaker 2: that and we started to get really crappy publishing offers,
Speaker 2: kind of from all corners. And I remember vividly that
Speaker 2: summer Chris and I sat down and had a long conversation.
Speaker 2: We're like, let's either just do the simplest thing with
Speaker 2: people we like, or let's grab for the brass ring.
Speaker 2: If it starts gets to the point where we really
Speaker 2: feel like we have the opportunity to take this to
Speaker 2: as many people as possible, let's do it. But otherwise,
Speaker 2: let's just do what we want to do. We don't
Speaker 2: ever want to you know, we're I was thirty when
Speaker 2: we signed a record deal. We weren't kids, you know.
Speaker 2: We we knew how we wanted to live our lives,
Speaker 2: and that we weren't you know, we were fully committed
Speaker 2: to what we were doing, but we weren't gonna cowtow
Speaker 2: to anybody. We liked what we did and believed in it.
Speaker 1: Okay, so cut that record? Is that the identical record,
Speaker 1: the Columbia Releases or is there any remixing, re recording.
Speaker 2: So that the first record has I'm blanking right now.
Speaker 2: It has four or five songs that are actually from
Speaker 2: the first session with Barrett Jones that we remixed and
Speaker 2: in some case has added things to and then the
Speaker 2: rest of the thirteen songs are from the sessions at
Speaker 2: Egg's Studios. We put that all together as an album
Speaker 2: on pop Lama. It came out in March of nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety five. Where we are just at this is when
Speaker 2: we're playing every show we play, there are two to
Speaker 2: five A and R people there. It's just bizarre. You know,
Speaker 2: it doesn't matter whether we went played in some crappy
Speaker 2: club and Belling.
Speaker 1: Hill, Okay, but everybody's interested. How long is this period
Speaker 1: of time? And why don't you say yes to anybody?
Speaker 2: Because we're this period of time from the time where
Speaker 2: all of a sudden we're in Hits magazine is like
Speaker 2: September of nineteen ninety four and we committed to Columbia
Speaker 2: by the first week in May nineteen ninety five, so
Speaker 2: it's pretty short. I mean, our recording period was pretty.
Speaker 1: Short, okay, And when do you cut the record?
Speaker 2: So We cut the record in the fall of nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety four and it comes out in March nineteen ninety
Speaker 2: five on poplom and it sold about five thousand copies
Speaker 2: in Seattle within the first month or two.
Speaker 1: Okay, if everybody was interested, why did you make a
Speaker 1: deal with Colombia as opposed to anybody else?
Speaker 2: So, as I said, everybody but Innerscope was interested. It
Speaker 2: came down to Colombia and Guio Siri and Freddie at
Speaker 2: Maverick and Madonna, who we met with a couple of times,
Speaker 2: and we were ultimately choosing between those two. And we
Speaker 2: really liked our and our guy at Columbia, Josh Sarabon,
Speaker 2: and also Donnie Einer. He was you know, he's a
Speaker 2: legendary figure for many reasons. But what we liked about
Speaker 2: him was he's very, very direct. He he heard, you know,
Speaker 2: the record was out in March nineteen ninety five. These
Speaker 2: guys are really trying to sign us at this point,
Speaker 2: and he just said, look, you guys, I'll put this
Speaker 2: record out as is the first week in May nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety five. He said, I will have this record out
Speaker 2: by July. If you verbally commit now, it'll take us
Speaker 2: another four to six weeks to finalize the long form contract,
Speaker 2: but I give you my word, we will set the
Speaker 2: record up starting now and we'll give you a full
Speaker 2: push launch by mid July. And he fucking did it.
Speaker 2: I mean that guy has my respect for lifetime. He
Speaker 2: committed verbally in early May. He said, we'll put the
Speaker 2: record out exactly as you want. We actually wanted to
Speaker 2: remix a couple songs and remaster it, and I'll do
Speaker 2: whatever you want. You want to remix it, do it,
Speaker 2: just get it done. I'll have the record out. And
Speaker 2: you know how long in the physical ERAa it took
Speaker 2: to set up a record. It didn't take a month
Speaker 2: and a half. It took six months to really push
Speaker 2: it out. So that's how we ended up in Columbia.
Speaker 2: They just they were really direct with us.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, so now you're making a deal with Columbia.
Speaker 1: It's major. You have one step better than garage management.
Speaker 1: Who is your lawyer making this deal?
Speaker 2: We had a killer lawyer, David Kottako, thank you very much.
Speaker 2: At that time it was Cottaco, Guido and Carol was
Speaker 2: the name.
Speaker 1: So how did you get You're in Seattle, they're in
Speaker 1: New York. How did you get hooked up?
Speaker 2: We got hooked up. I have to say that our
Speaker 2: manager at the time, who Stacey, who's still in the industry.
Speaker 2: Ultimately no offense Stacy. Once we had a hit record,
Speaker 2: she didn't really she hadn't been through that. She didn't
Speaker 2: really know how to max out our opportunities.
Speaker 1: But she was.
Speaker 2: She's my age, she'd been working in the industry since
Speaker 2: she was seventeen. She knew everybody, you know, as we
Speaker 2: went through the courting process. We did not pay for
Speaker 2: a cup of coffee for you know, a year of
Speaker 2: getting flown around and courted and showcasing. So she knew everybody.
Speaker 2: We met with every lawyer you could mention in the
Speaker 2: top five or ten lawyers of that era. Katako was
Speaker 2: the guy we hit it off with best. We felt like,
Speaker 2: you know, you want an asshole, but he needs to
Speaker 2: be your asshole, right, and he felt like our guy.
Speaker 2: Ken Hurtz was somebody we almost tied, and I have
Speaker 2: a horrible story about having to tell him we weren't
Speaker 2: hiring him while playing around to golf.
Speaker 1: Well, we'll tell the terrible stories.
Speaker 2: So we were down to Ken and David Cataco and
Speaker 2: I had made plans to I play golf along with
Speaker 2: pretty much every other sport, and I'd made agreed to
Speaker 2: go play around nine holes with Ken early in the morning.
Speaker 2: We were in LA for four or five days, and
Speaker 2: the night before we were at Canter's actually the band
Speaker 2: and our manager and we all decided we're hiring David.
Speaker 2: And we just had this huge pitch from Ken and
Speaker 2: his partner. Meanwhile, this is really pre cell phone, right,
Speaker 2: this is and so so we'd make the decision at
Speaker 2: like nine thirty or ten at night, and the onus
Speaker 2: is on me, like, Okay, Dave, you got to tell Ken.
Speaker 2: I can't reach Ken. Cannot reach him. He's out at
Speaker 2: an event with his wife, his babysitter doesn't know how
Speaker 2: to reach him, you know, can't really leave this as
Speaker 2: a message. So I meet him at the golf club
Speaker 2: the next day. I think it was Brentwood. I can't
Speaker 2: remember where he was a member. I meet him. He's
Speaker 2: just excited. He's walking out, all smiles, and he's a
Speaker 2: great He was a great guy. He's all smiles. You know.
Speaker 2: I'm on the driving range already warming up, and he
Speaker 2: walks out to the driving range and I got to
Speaker 2: tell him the first thing, like can I'm sorry, we're
Speaker 2: going with David Cottaco. That was the longest nine holes
Speaker 2: of golf I have ever played in my life. There
Speaker 2: was It was brutal. He was just steaming and and
Speaker 2: we got through it. And anyway, Hi, Ken, you're a
Speaker 2: great dude. Sorry it didn't work out.
Speaker 1: I can't believe that you ultimately played. Okay, the record
Speaker 1: was done. You're dealing with plumb, You're dealing with Donnie.
Speaker 1: Doesn't Donnie want to own the record.
Speaker 2: He wanted us badly enough that we were able to
Speaker 2: cut a deal where he didn't own the record. And
Speaker 2: I think in retrospect, you know, David was a good
Speaker 2: enough lawyer, so they we gave them control of the record,
Speaker 2: and I think he felt like there was a weird
Speaker 2: confluence of circumstances that allowed to get it back so
Speaker 2: quickly after it was a hit, which was the deal
Speaker 2: was we got the record back. Basically one of the
Speaker 2: windows of opportunity was five years after the termination of
Speaker 2: the deal, and because we had such a high peak
Speaker 2: and then Chris decided to quit an absolutely adamant that
Speaker 2: he wanted to be dropped from Columbia immediately so we
Speaker 2: were out of our deal very shortly after having a
Speaker 2: hit record, and then there was a five year timeout
Speaker 2: on that and that's how we got it back. So
Speaker 2: eternal gratitude to David Kottako for that.
Speaker 1: What about the second record? Who owns that?
Speaker 2: Columbia still owns a second record which did about fifth
Speaker 2: as well as the first record. It has some good
Speaker 2: songs on it that did well, and then we had
Speaker 2: the two other kind of hits or valuable recordings we
Speaker 2: had are on the third record, which was Pure Frosting,
Speaker 2: which they put out after we split up, which has
Speaker 2: a bunch of kind of stuff we were working on,
Speaker 2: but it has the Cleveland Rocks, which was the theme,
Speaker 2: you know, the theme song for the Drew Carey Show
Speaker 2: for seven or eight seasons. And it has our cover
Speaker 2: of video Killed the Radio Star, which was on the
Speaker 2: Wedding Singer record, which sold really really well.
Speaker 1: Okay, why did he Chris quit the band?
Speaker 2: I think at the time it was a few things.
Speaker 2: You know, the whole ride was pretty intense, and you know,
Speaker 2: he I would you know, it's his story to tell.
Speaker 2: But he always had a fantasy that would sort of
Speaker 2: be the sex Pistols that we'd break up, you know,
Speaker 2: before we even started, that we'd be this kind of colossal,
Speaker 2: colossal success slash failure. I think he also just started.
Speaker 2: He was in his first marriage at the time, and
Speaker 2: his older child was a year or so old, and
Speaker 2: I think he was feeling the stress of that, and
Speaker 2: he'd gone from you know, I'd had sort of you know,
Speaker 2: professional careers in my twenties, but he'd been a guy
Speaker 2: who basically owned a phone pad and a fifty dollars
Speaker 2: guitar and was just making music. Had committed to like,
Speaker 2: I don't care if I have to paint houses and
Speaker 2: count checks in the basement of a bank as a temp.
Speaker 2: I'm going to do this. So he'd gone from that
Speaker 2: to wow, I own a nice house, I'm married, I
Speaker 2: got a kid, And I think he just kind of
Speaker 2: freaked out, and he you know, it was also a
Speaker 2: little bit of a be careful what you wish for,
Speaker 2: and he capped to that to me a few years
Speaker 2: ago over lunch, just like you know, he said, basically, look,
Speaker 2: I was basically ready to quit right as our first
Speaker 2: record became a hit. It just freaked me out. So
Speaker 2: and there's a lot of pressure there too, as well,
Speaker 2: so I think that's why I quit at the time.
Speaker 1: Okay, it's over. Yeah, you know, he's not the first
Speaker 1: person to regret, you know. And Tom Petty Ron Blair
Speaker 1: was the bass player opened a bikini shop in the
Speaker 1: San Fernando Valley. Ultimately, when how we Epstein died, he
Speaker 1: came back.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Christine mcviee was living in the UK for ten years
Speaker 1: and woke up one day, So what the fuck did
Speaker 1: I do? So, you know, usually people wake up, you know,
Speaker 1: when no one when the phone isn't ringing.
Speaker 2: I don't you know, we're weirdos, Bob. I mean, I
Speaker 2: think our approach was always like, we're not going to
Speaker 2: do anything we don't want to do. We always, in
Speaker 2: terms of how we've run our business and personal lives,
Speaker 2: we're all about the margin and the bottom line. And
Speaker 2: we all made a reasonable amount of money, you know,
Speaker 2: in the presidents. Chris went on to have a very
Speaker 2: very successful career doing music back you know, he was
Speaker 2: sort of the first person, I don't know if you
Speaker 2: remember Pump Audio, which was one of the first pre
Speaker 2: licensed music companies. Through a variety of circumstances, he ended
Speaker 2: up getting in early on that so we had thousands
Speaker 2: of tracks out being licensed. Then he started a kid's
Speaker 2: music thing. I mean, he's like a poster child for music.
Speaker 2: Two dot.
Speaker 1: Oh.
Speaker 2: He started a kids music thing, Casper Baby Pants, which
Speaker 2: he's now shelved. But he put out I think eighteen
Speaker 2: records in ten years and became this absolute fixture in
Speaker 2: the Puget Sound area, playing you know, eighty or one
Speaker 2: hundred times a year to kids and honestly made a
Speaker 2: ton of money doing that and had a great time,
Speaker 2: and a whole generation of kids from this region loved
Speaker 2: the Casper Baby Pants record. So he's just a real smart,
Speaker 2: hardworking guy, you know.
Speaker 1: Okay, did he ever have a day job?
Speaker 2: He has not had any day job since since the
Speaker 2: presidents started, nor has Jason and I have only by
Speaker 2: choice really for a number of reasons.
Speaker 1: Okay, So Chris says he wants to quit. What do
Speaker 1: the two other guys say.
Speaker 2: Fuck, we knew, you know, we had agreed in late
Speaker 2: ninety seven that we were going to take a six
Speaker 2: month break. Let's have another meeting in two weeks. This
Speaker 2: was a Jason's house here in Seattle on Capitol Hill
Speaker 2: at the time. Chris walks in the door of the
Speaker 2: next meeting. Two minutes later, he's like, we don't even
Speaker 2: need to have this meeting because I quit. I've decided
Speaker 2: I want to call cottacol right now. I want to
Speaker 2: call Columbia. I want out of the deal now. Since then,
Speaker 2: years later he admitted that this was not the best
Speaker 2: way to make this decision. But he's a he's a
Speaker 2: classic mercual, mercurial that's a hard word to say, artist type,
Speaker 2: and you know, he's the person when he decides something,
Speaker 2: he decides it and commits fully. So I knew there
Speaker 2: was no talking him out of it. Was I was
Speaker 2: also burned out. I just wanted to take a break
Speaker 2: for six months and keep going. The weird thing is
Speaker 2: that is that within nine months of us breaking up,
Speaker 2: we started a new band with the three of us
Speaker 2: and Sir mix a lot called Subset, which frankly should
Speaker 2: have been freaking huge, and for a variety of reasons,
Speaker 2: we had tracks out on Napster kind of that that
Speaker 2: were I think, I'm told down loaded heavily in the
Speaker 2: hundreds of thousands, and we made basically a full album,
Speaker 2: but it just didn't ever come together. So weirdly, he quit.
Speaker 2: But then months later we were in the studio with
Speaker 2: the three of us in sir mix a lot making
Speaker 2: new recordings.
Speaker 1: Okay, you're not the only one involved. There's a manager,
Speaker 1: there's Katakau, there's Donnie and Columbia.
Speaker 2: What did they all say they were? I think they
Speaker 2: felt like they'd had a great run with our first
Speaker 2: record and our second record did okay. I think they
Speaker 2: were very happy to take take the spoils from our
Speaker 2: first record and walk away and enjoy that and not
Speaker 2: sweat it too much. You know, they talked for a
Speaker 2: while they didn't want us to use our name. So
Speaker 2: if you see actually in our last video we made,
Speaker 2: which was for video Killed the Radio Star on Jason's
Speaker 2: kick drum, it says the Quitters and you know, they
Speaker 2: didn't want to let us use our name for anything.
Speaker 2: But I don't think they And they tried to, you know,
Speaker 2: threaten to exercise leaving them or you know, sort of
Speaker 2: exclusivity clauses, but they didn't never really put the hammer down,
Speaker 2: you know, it was there was no I think they
Speaker 2: were very happy to have unexpectedly made tens of millions
Speaker 2: of dollars off our first record.
Speaker 1: Okay, why was the second record not as successful I think.
Speaker 2: I don't think it's I think it's a good record
Speaker 2: when I listen to it now. The first record is
Speaker 2: really an anomaly. It's a very weird record, and I'm
Speaker 2: most proud of having made what I think is a
Speaker 2: highly authentic piece of art with real integrity that became
Speaker 2: wildly popular. I mean even sonically our first record, I mentioned,
Speaker 2: you know, some of the tracks are from the first
Speaker 2: session with Barrett Jones on a little half inch eight
Speaker 2: track machine, which is very low fidelity. Conrad's studio was
Speaker 2: sixteen track, one inch I think, and then we transferred
Speaker 2: all of that at one point to two inch on
Speaker 2: a mobile truck. And even just like the tape hiss
Speaker 2: and the tape compression, just the sound of the record
Speaker 2: is unlike anything else from that era. It's a and
Speaker 2: then you know, we're playing these weird, weirdly strong tuned instruments,
Speaker 2: and I mean, it's the first record is crazy. And
Speaker 2: I think one of the problems with the second record
Speaker 2: is then we had to go out and be like
Speaker 2: a loud rock band on tour, and the second records
Speaker 2: more of like a rock band, and that's not really
Speaker 2: I think our Forte was being like, and I think
Speaker 2: of it as like folk music meets the MC five,
Speaker 2: you know, with a little bit of psilocybin thrown in.
Speaker 2: It's It was a little weirder than direct rock music.
Speaker 2: But I just think, you know, lightning strikes not always
Speaker 2: more than once. You know that there are moments in time.
Speaker 1: Okay, Lou Christie. The record comes out July.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, third week of July nineteen ninety.
Speaker 1: Most people have no idea of the Mailstrom of being
Speaker 1: the act at the center of success. So tell us
Speaker 1: about that.
Speaker 2: Oh god, it was. It was amazing. So I'm finishing
Speaker 2: up at that point, I just, uh, while we were
Speaker 2: in the Bob Lang studio in the Seattle area remixing
Speaker 2: the record, I'm sitting in one of the ISO chambers
Speaker 2: finishing my last work on a master's in urban planning
Speaker 2: for the University of Washington. So we're doing that, and
Speaker 2: then a few weeks later, they're like, oh, yeah, you're
Speaker 2: gonna go. You guys are going to do some promo
Speaker 2: tour thing. I'm like, whatever, I guess I'll write my
Speaker 2: thesis after this promo tour is over. So all of
Speaker 2: a sudden, we start getting this news like the advanced stuff.
Speaker 2: There are a few stations, influenced, influential stations around the
Speaker 2: country picked up Lump, which is the first single you
Speaker 2: know off not even off the advanced single, just stuff
Speaker 2: the advanced CD before they even started pushing the single
Speaker 2: in early July, and that included WHFS in the DC area,
Speaker 2: which was a big taste maker in commercial alternative at
Speaker 2: the time. I think ninety nine X in Atlanta. K
Speaker 2: Rock was probably a little bit behind it. And so
Speaker 2: there's a little momentum, which is great. All of a sudden,
Speaker 2: then we go do this promo tour. So for the
Speaker 2: month of September nineteen ninety five, our month of August
Speaker 2: and September, we did a promo tour in the US
Speaker 2: and Europe, and I've apparently was told it was legendary
Speaker 2: at Colombia because we were willing to do anything like
Speaker 2: the day we did in La Among other things, we
Speaker 2: played in the parking lot at Pink's Hot Hot Dogs
Speaker 2: on Librea. We played on the third Street promenade in
Speaker 2: Santa Monica, and we were doing this every day, flying
Speaker 2: from one city to another. We play on the back
Speaker 2: of a flatbed truck, played on the Beach in San Diego.
Speaker 2: The day we did. I always described the day we
Speaker 2: did in New York to try to give people an
Speaker 2: idea of what it was like. I think we flew
Speaker 2: in from Atlanta, Sony Rep picked us up. We got
Speaker 2: in the car at like ten at night at JFK.
Speaker 2: He turns on the radio and what's the huge top
Speaker 2: forty station in the New York area that it's got
Speaker 2: like a Jillian listeners. I'm blanking on it right now.
Speaker 2: He turns on that station. I'm sorry, I can't remember
Speaker 2: it right now. They're playing Lump. He's clear. I'm sure
Speaker 2: he set it up right, you know, down to the
Speaker 2: minute we go to the hotel. We go over to that.
Speaker 2: It's killing me that I can't remember the name of
Speaker 2: the station. We go across the w you know, New.
Speaker 1: York Change after it was wplj NO, and there was
Speaker 1: k Rock, there was Scott Shannon station.
Speaker 2: It was the big top forty FM station at the time.
Speaker 2: So we go across the river to their place at
Speaker 2: you know, like midnight, and there's still a huge audience
Speaker 2: at the time. We go on there for fifteen or
Speaker 2: twenty minutes, maybe with acoustic guitars, go back to the hotel,
Speaker 2: go to sleep. At one thirty, get up, and this
Speaker 2: is when we still would agree to do morning drive time.
Speaker 2: Get up, Go to one rock station, do an interview,
Speaker 2: play three songs live on the air during drivetime. Get
Speaker 2: in the van. Go to whatever the commercial alternative station
Speaker 2: was at the time. Do an on air segment, play
Speaker 2: two or three songs live on the air. Get in
Speaker 2: the van. Go to five fifty Madison Avenue, the famous
Speaker 2: Philip Johnson AT and T Building, which was Sony headquarters
Speaker 2: at the time. Play a full set before lunch to
Speaker 2: all Sony employees and anybody who's walking by in the
Speaker 2: glass lobby of that building, which is sonically a nightmare
Speaker 2: but exciting. Then go upstairs, have marketing meetings. Somebody remembers
Speaker 2: to give us a sandwich at some point, right, and
Speaker 2: this is August, it's ninety with you know, like ninety
Speaker 2: percent humidity. Then we get in the van. We go
Speaker 2: down to Washington Square Park. And this is all if
Speaker 2: you're lucky to do this right, this is a privilege.
Speaker 2: Go down to Washington Square Park. They have a stage
Speaker 2: set up in generators in full pa. We played a
Speaker 2: full set in Washington Square park for whoever happened to
Speaker 2: be walking by. It's like ninety We're right in the sun.
Speaker 2: There's no shade, no nothing. Then that we do get
Speaker 2: to go back to the hotel for like an hour.
Speaker 2: Then we go to some pizza joint and it's a
Speaker 2: meet and greet with at the time, all the people
Speaker 2: run the one stops and the the you know, the
Speaker 2: tower managers and stuff from the Tri State area all invited.
Speaker 2: So we stand around and drink beer and eat pizza
Speaker 2: and make nice with all the people who are gonna
Speaker 2: determine whether we're on the end caps at tower or not.
Speaker 2: And then we the band, pushed the air hockey tables aside,
Speaker 2: set up a little pa and all our stuff that
Speaker 2: we were flying with, and play another full set to
Speaker 2: this you know this crowd. And then we go back
Speaker 2: to the hotel and I don't know, got up at
Speaker 2: six the next morning for another lobby call and went
Speaker 2: and did that again. So we did that every day
Speaker 2: for two months through the US and Europe, and that
Speaker 2: was before we even started proper touring, and meanwhile the
Speaker 2: record was blowing lump was blowing up.
Speaker 1: Okay, couple of questions in retrospect was that necessary.
Speaker 2: I don't know if it was necessary, but I think
Speaker 2: it helped. I mean some of these things, a lot
Speaker 2: of stations were already playing us. You'd have to ask
Speaker 2: what John Leche was, the guy who I think was
Speaker 2: really the architect of the marketing campaign at the time,
Speaker 2: who I'm still in touch with. I don't know how
Speaker 2: much of a difference it made, but I think our
Speaker 2: willingness to work made a big difference. We were always
Speaker 2: on time, ready to go, ready to kick ass, and
Speaker 2: we would you know an example, some of the stations.
Speaker 2: You know, we went to some markets. Like I said,
Speaker 2: WHFS was playing us already. They had set up a
Speaker 2: thing where we played in the Inner Harbor in Baltimore.
Speaker 2: We had no idea we were doing these things, two
Speaker 2: or three of them a day. We show up to
Speaker 2: do that and like three thousand kids shows up, show
Speaker 2: up the songs. I mean, this place, this Amphitheater on
Speaker 2: the Harbor is packed, and we've got this crappy little
Speaker 2: traveling drum kit where Jason's kick drum is a suitcase,
Speaker 2: and Chris and I have these tiny ams and we
Speaker 2: play at full set to other places. We went to
Speaker 2: other stations in August where they hadn't added the song
Speaker 2: and a couple of those we went into their boardroom
Speaker 2: and set up our gear on their boardroom table and said,
Speaker 2: come intherfuckers and have your lunch. We're going to blow
Speaker 2: your minds. And so I think it had to have
Speaker 2: helped to at least some degree. Would I would like
Speaker 2: to think so, because it was really hard work.
Speaker 1: Okay, the human body can only take so much. Most
Speaker 1: of this is regular roadwork. You're playing to thousands, you
Speaker 1: can't calm down. Then the sun comes up. So there
Speaker 1: are drugs involved alcohol. How did you guys manage this
Speaker 1: physically and emotionally?
Speaker 2: I can speak best for myself. I didn't manage it
Speaker 2: very well physically. It didn't really agree with me. I'm
Speaker 2: a guy who wants to be like I mean, you
Speaker 2: can see my skis on the ceiling behind us. I
Speaker 2: want to be out. My bike's right there on the trainer.
Speaker 2: I want to be out skiing or climbing with my friends.
Speaker 2: That was my whole thing, was doing sports and being outside.
Speaker 2: That's my whole life growing up and with my best friends.
Speaker 2: And I also don't have I certainly don't have an
Speaker 2: iron stomach or an iron constitution. So the whole thing
Speaker 2: really disagreed with me. And I think, you know, at
Speaker 2: least it feels like it took years off my life,
Speaker 2: even just doing it for maybe four years for long.
Speaker 1: Well, did you cope with drugs and alcohol? No?
Speaker 2: I would have coped with alcohol, but my body just can't,
Speaker 2: you like, my digestive system just can't handle it. Or
Speaker 2: I would have drunk heavily.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's go back. You said you were willing to
Speaker 1: do anything. Do you think that was because you were
Speaker 1: older thirty or you were unique individuals? You were college graduates.
Speaker 1: Why were you willing to do anything and do all
Speaker 1: this work?
Speaker 2: I think we had decided, Well, Jason, I would I
Speaker 2: try to speak for the other guys. First. Jason had
Speaker 2: been through this with Love Battery, and the whole time
Speaker 2: we're going through it with the Presidency's like, you, guys,
Speaker 2: you don't understand. This is not how it works. You
Speaker 2: don't just walk in and everybody wants to sign you.
Speaker 2: We were out, you know, Love Battery was out beating
Speaker 2: the bushes, you know, put out three records on subpop,
Speaker 2: toured the country twenty times in a van. He's like,
Speaker 2: this is not normal. So I think he was just
Speaker 2: super psyched to get a shot and do it, you know,
Speaker 2: with with a lot of juice behind it. I think
Speaker 2: for Chris and myself, you know, we, as I said,
Speaker 2: like Chris doing his kids music thing, were people who like,
Speaker 2: if you're going to do something, do it right. Actually,
Speaker 2: you know my dad who has passed, that's one of his.
Speaker 2: When I asked my parents as they've gotten older, my
Speaker 2: other my stepdad, mom are still alive, like, what's some
Speaker 2: advice my dad's his number one was whatever you do
Speaker 2: do it well. You know, if you're going to do something,
Speaker 2: give it everything. So we and I also think we
Speaker 2: felt like we can do it on our own terms.
Speaker 2: So we didn't feel like anybody was pushing us. We
Speaker 2: felt like we're making all the choices here. We're not
Speaker 2: going to do anything that we do. We agreed among
Speaker 2: the three of us we're not doing anything we don't
Speaker 2: all three of us don't want to do.
Speaker 1: So okay, tell me about making the videos, which we're
Speaker 1: all over empty.
Speaker 2: The videos were fun, you know. We did the first
Speaker 2: few videos with Roman Coppola, who was just a lovely,
Speaker 2: awesome dude, and he came up to Seattle. We made
Speaker 2: the Lump video in.
Speaker 1: What was the connection? How did you get cooked up
Speaker 1: with them?
Speaker 2: With Roman? You know? Weirdly, it turned out that I
Speaker 2: went to Colorado College just for one year of my
Speaker 2: freshman year, and it turned out that I one of
Speaker 2: my classmates was somebody he went to high school with.
Speaker 2: So we ended up having a weird connection. But we
Speaker 2: had no connection. We just got set a bunch of
Speaker 2: reels and we loved he had made a couple of
Speaker 2: videos at that point. He might have made a Rentals
Speaker 2: video and maybe a Green Day video. I can't remember.
Speaker 2: We just liked his videos the best, and we liked
Speaker 2: him the most, and we talked to him on the phone,
Speaker 2: and it was a great choice. He was a soup.
Speaker 2: We were totally simpatico with him. We were on the
Speaker 2: same wavelength, so.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, you talked to most acts. It happened
Speaker 1: so fast and retrosect. They said, we didn't really have
Speaker 1: any control. It was the director's vision. It's not really
Speaker 1: what we want or wanted. What did you feel?
Speaker 2: I love the videos. I think that the Lump. There
Speaker 2: are two Lump videos, one of which they wanted We
Speaker 2: Columbia wanted MTV to play both. They wouldn't play the
Speaker 2: second one because it had Chris jumping up and down
Speaker 2: on a tiny battery powered amplifier that was set on
Speaker 2: fire in his backyard while we had a barbecue, and
Speaker 2: they thought that was too violent. But the first one,
Speaker 2: you know, shows us in starts with us in the
Speaker 2: swamp in the arboretum, which is kind of in the
Speaker 2: university area in in Seattle, which is like a mile
Speaker 2: from where I grew up and a mile from where
Speaker 2: Chris and I went to middle school and high school together.
Speaker 2: So and then the barge that we're out on in
Speaker 2: Elliott Bay at the end, that's my stepdad's barge or
Speaker 2: was he was in the tug and barge business. So
Speaker 2: they were out there with my stepdad driving us around
Speaker 2: doing our things. So the whole thing felt very you know,
Speaker 2: natural and like us. And then the Peaches video, which
Speaker 2: you know was we fight the Ninjas and the and
Speaker 2: that was great. Roman came to us and he's like, Peaches,
Speaker 2: do you guys have any ideas? And he just had, like,
Speaker 2: what if we're under a tree and has Kansas Peaches
Speaker 2: hanging out? He's like, yeah, that's great, but that's dumb.
Speaker 2: So that's how it starts. And at the time he
Speaker 2: was super into these you know, b movie martial arts movies.
Speaker 2: He's like, what if you guys fight ninjas at the end.
Speaker 2: We're like, like that found sounds awesome. So we spent
Speaker 2: the day with the Hollywood ninjas and got launched off
Speaker 2: ramps and you know, it was it was blast. I
Speaker 2: don't know, he got our sensibility that we were just
Speaker 2: taking the piss and having a good time. And the
Speaker 2: whole thing. I think our take on the whole thing
Speaker 2: as we went through is that ultimately, you know, pop
Speaker 2: culture is a cosmic joke, right. The art can be
Speaker 2: beautiful and very real and very powerful even if you're
Speaker 2: quote unquote goofy like we are. It's you know, I mean,
Speaker 2: listen to the Beatles, Like one in three Beatles songs
Speaker 2: is Goofy. Chuck Berry's the Goofy is motherfucking lyricist of
Speaker 2: all time and he's still the best. But it's it's
Speaker 2: authentic art. But it's still a piss take, you know.
Speaker 2: That's the fun of it. That's that's what rock and
Speaker 2: roll is. It's supposed to be fun, you know, it's
Speaker 2: supposed to be a laugh.
Speaker 1: Oh, okay, you're on MTV. They're banging these videos. Do
Speaker 1: you start to get recognized?
Speaker 2: Got recognized. I'm a pretty normal looking dude, you know,
Speaker 2: I didn't Chris Jason. Already everybody in Seattle knew who
Speaker 2: was at that time. For a few years, I would
Speaker 2: get recognized in Seattle on the Seattle side of the water,
Speaker 2: you know, kind of in neighborhoods where people are younger
Speaker 2: and hipper. I had moved as soon as we all
Speaker 2: got a big publishing check. I bought a house on
Speaker 2: the east side of Lake Washington. And even just going
Speaker 2: across the water to the suburbs, I would like the
Speaker 2: beer guy at the grocery store would recognize me occasionally,
Speaker 2: but very rarely and the only time sort of will
Speaker 2: maybe get there. But our first record was big in
Speaker 2: the US, but it was absolutely mega in Australia. I
Speaker 2: don't know how many times platinum it is now Australia.
Speaker 2: The first time we went was the one time where
Speaker 2: it was weird where they're like we had aliases at
Speaker 2: the hotels, but there would still be forty or fifty
Speaker 2: kids in the lobby freaking out when you'd come through
Speaker 2: and that for my money. I don't know that. I
Speaker 2: didn't like that. I think that would be miserable to
Speaker 2: be that famous.
Speaker 1: I will okay, So now you start working, do you
Speaker 1: start as a headliner, do you open for other people?
Speaker 1: How frequently are you working?
Speaker 2: We went on tours soon as we finished that promo
Speaker 2: tour in September of ninety five, the next kind of year.
Speaker 2: I actually think we overdid it the first year, and
Speaker 2: that's kind of what killed us because between start of
Speaker 2: August nineteen ninety five and the end of August nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety six, we toured the US sort of two and
Speaker 2: a half times, went to Continental Europe or the UK
Speaker 2: ten times, went to Japan for ten days, went to
Speaker 2: Australia for three and a half week, and recorded our
Speaker 2: second record all in a year or thirteen months. So
Speaker 2: we just went out and hammered and Columbia. You know,
Speaker 2: as at the time, major labels really tried to sequence
Speaker 2: the timing of releases so that the band or the
Speaker 2: artists could go from territory to territory and promote things sequentially.
Speaker 2: I think our record, my understanding, was somewhat blew up
Speaker 2: organically in many many territories at once, and so they
Speaker 2: wanted us to be everywhere at once. So I'm not
Speaker 2: sure that we ever fully capitalized like the time when
Speaker 2: we could have been doing our most lucrative touring in
Speaker 2: the US in early nineteen ninety six. You know, let's
Speaker 2: go back to Germany for the fourth time and see
Speaker 2: if we can break that, because the time they were
Speaker 2: the maybe third biggest market after the US and Japan.
Speaker 2: So we we tried to be everywhere on tour. So
Speaker 2: we started in a van and we always headlined. We
Speaker 2: got offers, you know, I'll never we had offers to
Speaker 2: The best offer when we started out was ac DC.
Speaker 2: That was just the most I just still wonder somebody
Speaker 2: would have climbed on stage and actually killed one of
Speaker 2: us by the middle of the second song if we'd
Speaker 2: been out there opening for ac DC. But for some
Speaker 2: reason they wanted to open for us. We other offers.
Speaker 2: Lenny Kravitz wanted us to open for us, but again
Speaker 2: we just decided, now we want to do it the
Speaker 2: way we want to do it. And a lot of
Speaker 2: the time we had our friends' bands come open for us,
Speaker 2: sometimes probably to the detriment of the bill, and they
Speaker 2: get booed, and you know, we had I don't know
Speaker 2: if you know. He is Jesse Dayton, who's like a
Speaker 2: career honky tnker from Beaumont. Originally we connected with him.
Speaker 2: He was friends with the Supersuckers and I love the guy,
Speaker 2: love honky talk music. We had him open for us
Speaker 2: for like two weeks in Texas and Oklahoma, and you know,
Speaker 2: people didn't get it, but we didn't care.
Speaker 1: You know, Okay, you're on the road. Are you partaking
Speaker 1: of the fruits of the road.
Speaker 2: At that point, I'm thirty, I'm married. My stomach can't
Speaker 2: handle heavy drinking, so now I'm just pretty much trying
Speaker 2: to survive. I was a true blue guy to my
Speaker 2: ex wife.
Speaker 1: I was not.
Speaker 2: I was not partaking. Chris was also married, Jason was not.
Speaker 1: Okay, she's your ex wife. How long were you married?
Speaker 1: Why you divorced?
Speaker 2: Been divorced for a few years and married for a
Speaker 2: long long time twenty plus So what caused the divorce
Speaker 2: just didn't work out? I don't feel like it's I
Speaker 2: have a bully pulpit to tell the story. My ex
Speaker 2: wife does not, So I'll just leave it as the
Speaker 2: gracious thing to say, is I just think it nothing horrible, nothing,
Speaker 2: nobody did anything awful.
Speaker 1: Okay, who wanted the divorce? And it's never mutual?
Speaker 2: Wow, that's a hard question too. If I had to
Speaker 2: answer that question with my life on the line, I
Speaker 2: would say that ultimately I wanted the divorce, but oddly
Speaker 2: my wife was the one who filed.
Speaker 1: But okay, so you're thirty, you're already married. When did
Speaker 1: you meet this woman and when did you get married?
Speaker 2: We had been together for a long time. We had
Speaker 2: been together since we were twenty five and twenty two,
Speaker 2: and we got married.
Speaker 1: So how'd you meet her?
Speaker 2: Just friend? A friend actually you know, weirdly name dropper story.
Speaker 2: She used to go out with one of my best
Speaker 2: friend's younger brothers and their mom lived on the water
Speaker 2: on Lake Washington in a house that Duff McKagan is
Speaker 2: also an old Seattle homie lives in now and bought
Speaker 2: from their mom years ago. Just hanging out at this
Speaker 2: friend's house was down the street from my house, and
Speaker 2: we met her then. We were friends. We're from the
Speaker 2: same social circle. We're friends for three or four years
Speaker 2: before we started going out.
Speaker 1: Okay, you're going to graduate school. What is she doing?
Speaker 2: She was an artist and had gone undergrad in art
Speaker 2: and went to MFAT in California for a year, but
Speaker 2: then was living in Seattle and working and making her paintings.
Speaker 1: What did she think about all of this with the presidents?
Speaker 2: I think she thought it was fun. I mean, she
Speaker 2: liked going on the parts of it that you know,
Speaker 2: Japan's fun. Oklahoma in December is not as fun, but
Speaker 2: you know, I think she thought it was pretty cool.
Speaker 2: She was an artist herself.
Speaker 1: How often did she come with you?
Speaker 2: Usually to the fun places, like I said, you know,
Speaker 2: to go to Europe, go to Australia, go to Japan.
Speaker 2: So a fair amount of the time, as much as
Speaker 2: we can muster she was working for at the start.
Speaker 2: She was still working full time before she quit, so
Speaker 2: once she quit, she came more often.
Speaker 1: Okay, do you have kids.
Speaker 2: I have two wonderful daughters, twenty two and twenty four.
Speaker 1: And what are they up to?
Speaker 2: They are both recent graduates of Enemy of the State,
Speaker 2: Columbia University, and one of them is still living in
Speaker 2: New York working as a paralegal. She's going to law
Speaker 2: school next year, and the others in New York right
Speaker 2: now visiting some friends and her undergraduate degree is and architecture.
Speaker 2: So younger one graduated last spring and older one a
Speaker 2: year and a half ago, and younger ones just hanging
Speaker 2: out and joining life for the moment and figuring out
Speaker 2: what to do.
Speaker 1: Okay, you mentioned earlier that Columbia made tens of millions
Speaker 1: of dollars. Hey, do you think that was that much?
Speaker 1: And how much did you make? And do you think
Speaker 1: money slipped through your fingers you got ripped off?
Speaker 2: I think there are three parts to that question. One is,
Speaker 2: you know, something people don't talk about that's always interesting
Speaker 2: is sort of you know, in the film business they
Speaker 2: talk about box office, right, what's opening weekend? What is
Speaker 2: a move? What box office? That's ticket sales? Right? And
Speaker 2: then sort of as a side card of that, to
Speaker 2: help us think about it, it's often noted that while
Speaker 2: the music business hasn't always been the biggest media business
Speaker 2: relative to film or publishing, it's been the most lucrative.
Speaker 2: And this is why. Is you take a record like ours,
Speaker 2: which costs Colombia nothing to make, right, it was already made.
Speaker 2: It didn't cost them that much to sign us. They
Speaker 2: gave us a few hundred thousand dollars in advance, and
Speaker 2: they spent you know, our marketing campaign was aggressive, but
Speaker 2: I don't think it was very expensive for them, right,
Speaker 2: So let's say they spent under a million dollars including
Speaker 2: probably you know, sunk costs of staff to sign us
Speaker 2: and launch the record. The record sells. I think it
Speaker 2: ultimately worldwide sold probably five million copies. Let's say that
Speaker 2: are accounted for. So retail price of those, if you
Speaker 2: look at the box office, right, that's seventy five million
Speaker 2: dollars right at let's say average price of fifteen dollars
Speaker 2: a ticket. Now, I'm not privy to the exact numbers
Speaker 2: for their their what they got out of the whole
Speaker 2: all on each one of those, but let's say they
Speaker 2: made six or seven dollars a record. If you can
Speaker 2: make you know, thirty five to forty million dollars on
Speaker 2: a six hundred thousand dollars investment, that's pretty good. So
Speaker 2: the record business and the record business is even better
Speaker 2: now because they don't have to fucking make anything or
Speaker 2: ship it anywhere, right, they don't have to do any
Speaker 2: of that. They just you know, press a button and
Speaker 2: release it on all major streaming services. So, yes, Columbia
Speaker 2: made a lot of money off of us, and that's,
Speaker 2: you know, which is great, and we were happy to
Speaker 2: make that, you know, devil's bargain. We went in with
Speaker 2: eyes wide open. We wanted to be everywhere. We wanted
Speaker 2: to reach as many places as possible. So if you
Speaker 2: look at us, we're getting whatever, sixteen points or eighteen
Speaker 2: points on wholesale, on retail, and you know, we the
Speaker 2: first year where the numbers started coming in. I think
Speaker 2: over a couple of years, I probably made just over
Speaker 2: two million dollars before taxes.
Speaker 1: Okay, you're thirty years old. You manage that money well,
Speaker 1: I like to think.
Speaker 2: So I'm comfortable, and I think my ex wife is
Speaker 2: reasonably comfortable, and I think I did. I mean, I
Speaker 2: had good money manager, bought really nice piece of real
Speaker 2: estate in one of the most expensive zip codes in
Speaker 2: the country and which I sold a couple of years
Speaker 2: ago as part of my divorce settlement, and all those
Speaker 2: things seem to have gone pretty well. And then I
Speaker 2: kept working my ass off. I mean I made I'm
Speaker 2: sure I made.
Speaker 1: I probably might ok wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, let's
Speaker 1: let's let's park that for a second. The presidents are dead. Okay,
Speaker 1: just for the record, the band is called the President's
Speaker 1: United States of America because.
Speaker 2: So I told you we were playing as a duo
Speaker 2: in the fall of nineteen ninety three and we're the
Speaker 2: low Fis. We were pure Frosting. Oh, we're the dynamic duo.
Speaker 2: I'll never forget. Chris called me one must have been
Speaker 2: a Sunday morning, because he would have and out Saturday night.
Speaker 2: He's like, I got the name for the band. I
Speaker 2: got the name for the band. I was at this
Speaker 2: party in North Seattle last night and I was just there.
Speaker 2: There were people jamming in the basement. So I went
Speaker 2: down and started jamming with him and there were like
Speaker 2: nine people listening and they were just everybody was super baked.
Speaker 2: And I was just making up a different song name.
Speaker 2: Between every song. I was like, we're the Electric Bunny Rabbits,
Speaker 2: and you know, I was just trying to get a laugh,
Speaker 2: and he's like, finally between I don't know what I was,
Speaker 2: you know, thinking, I just like, between between two jams,
Speaker 2: I was like, we are the Presidents of the United
Speaker 2: States of America. And he's like, all nine stone people laugh.
Speaker 2: So it's great, let's do it. So we thought it
Speaker 2: was great, given that we were this tiny, little as
Speaker 2: I described, these kind of two skinny, dorky guys with
Speaker 2: little instruments and cheap gear and no real show. The
Speaker 2: grandiosity of the name in juxtaposition to you know, the
Speaker 2: the ridiculous tininess and sort of cultured patheticness of what
Speaker 2: we were doing was a great kind of contrast. It
Speaker 2: became a bit of an albatross, but it worked great
Speaker 2: for what we were trying to represent as we were starting.
Speaker 1: Okay, so tell me about it being in albatros.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, then you have to go through the
Speaker 2: whole thing where like the first single comes out in Columbia,
Speaker 2: it's somewhat at our insistence is like, no DJs need
Speaker 2: to call the band by their full name the presidents
Speaker 2: of the United States of America every time they call
Speaker 2: it out, you know, and you know, it's just a
Speaker 2: lot of letters and words. There's a lot of characters,
Speaker 2: and it's you know, the president's is a lot easier.
Speaker 2: And although there was a president's already in a funk
Speaker 2: band I think the seventies.
Speaker 1: But did you have to make a deal with the
Speaker 1: other band, No.
Speaker 2: We had no issues with them. I mean, I guess
Speaker 2: our name was different. We did have one really interesting thing,
Speaker 2: actually that's apropos of current political climate and the current administration.
Speaker 2: In the interior sleeve of our first record when it
Speaker 2: came out on pop Lama is a picture of the
Speaker 2: three of us with Bill Clinton, which was a real picture.
Speaker 2: We met him. We played at his rally in Seattle
Speaker 2: on before Black Tuesday, November nineteen ninety four, when every
Speaker 2: dem in the fucking country lost. He came into the
Speaker 2: rally in Seattle and the posies and we and a
Speaker 2: local gospel choir played before and he walked through the
Speaker 2: room and we got the picture. And then when the
Speaker 2: record came out with Columbia, their legal counsel would not
Speaker 2: let us use it because you can't use the president's
Speaker 2: name and likeness for profit. But it turns out maybe
Speaker 2: that's not the case, based on what we're seeing.
Speaker 1: Now, that's for sure. Okay, let's go back to the
Speaker 1: publishing deal. Yeah, how did you split up the writing credits?
Speaker 2: So the writing credits? We figured that out before it
Speaker 2: became an issue, which is one of the smartest things
Speaker 2: we did. And frankly, I will take credit for that
Speaker 2: because I could see what the problem and we were
Speaker 2: lucky to have friends who had been through it. Right.
Speaker 2: We're in Seattle in the nineties. We know all these
Speaker 2: people who are already famous in huge rock stars, and
Speaker 2: some of them are childhood friends. So I was talking
Speaker 2: to all those people, and I was reading every book
Speaker 2: I could get on the music business. So I was like,
Speaker 2: we need to figure this out now. So Chris's clearly
Speaker 2: the main writer, and he's written jillions of songs, but
Speaker 2: it's also true that we brought the songs to life,
Speaker 2: and the only life they'll probably ever have was in
Speaker 2: the in the way we represented them in our Masters.
Speaker 2: So we just worked it out. You know, we basically
Speaker 2: split things forty thirty thirty where Chris gets a little,
Speaker 2: he gets a little more that acknowledges that he's the
Speaker 2: primary writer. So it's a long story, short version. We
Speaker 2: do have some complications now because, for various reasons, we
Speaker 2: didn't register them that way. Jason already had been signed
Speaker 2: to Universal Music Publishing Group in a bad deal with
Speaker 2: Love Battery where they all got to quit their barista
Speaker 2: jobs for a what scened at the time a huge
Speaker 2: advance to sign away the rest of their rights forever.
Speaker 2: So we had to manage that a little bit, but
Speaker 2: we choose we split them the way we chose to,
Speaker 2: and then we have to manage bringing them in and
Speaker 2: then dividing them in the math.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you're saying, if we looked at the registration,
Speaker 1: it may say something, but in reality it's forty thirty
Speaker 1: thirty roughly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, right around in there. Yeah, And that took
Speaker 2: some doing.
Speaker 1: Took some doing, relative tools, did you.
Speaker 2: Know, personal relationships and Chris Chris wanted to be partly
Speaker 2: felt like he deserved more compensation, but in a lot
Speaker 2: of ways just more recognition too, you know, as being
Speaker 2: the primary songwriter. So it took a lot of it
Speaker 2: took a few deep conversations. Let's put it.
Speaker 1: Well, you said forty thirty thirty, and then all of
Speaker 1: a sudden you said something like.
Speaker 2: That, Well it's like twenty nine and a half. Twenty
Speaker 2: nine and a half.
Speaker 1: Oh, okay, okay, do you own the publishing.
Speaker 2: We own all but the share that Jason controls, which
Speaker 2: he had signed a deal with PolyGram Universal Music Publishing Group,
Speaker 2: still controls it, and we have tried to negotiate with
Speaker 2: them a number of times to just buy it back
Speaker 2: unsuccessfully to date.
Speaker 1: Okay, if there's a licensing deal or anything, does PolyGram,
Speaker 1: whoever the title of the company is today, do they
Speaker 1: have any input or they just get a check.
Speaker 2: They get a check and they've agreed to everything, and
Speaker 2: we it would be nice to have it all right now.
Speaker 2: The share the portions that Chris and I control are
Speaker 2: administered by Cobalt. We've had many different publishing agreements over
Speaker 2: the last thirty years, but we've been with Cobalt for
Speaker 2: a while. UMPG's never had an issue with anything. We've
Speaker 2: wanted the license because if we can get Jason's back,
Speaker 2: then we're completely one stop shop for the debut record
Speaker 2: because control the masters.
Speaker 1: Okay, have you had any offers to buy these songs?
Speaker 3: We have had.
Speaker 2: We have never seriously entertained any offers, but we occasionally
Speaker 2: get offers, and you know, I think we might have
Speaker 2: gotten to this via email that for us, the time
Speaker 2: value equation with money just does and the offers never
Speaker 2: high enough to pay out versus what we make right
Speaker 2: now owning the rights and just taking the income from
Speaker 2: streaming services.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what multiple would you entertain.
Speaker 2: The multiple would need to be It would need to
Speaker 2: be over twenty.
Speaker 1: So if I came, you know, that's hard to get.
Speaker 1: But in the heyday of hypnosis, who may or may
Speaker 1: not have been interested, somebody comes in with a twenty
Speaker 1: three multiple, you're in.
Speaker 2: Maybe maybe the problem is it's pretty easy to do
Speaker 2: the time value. It's easy to look. Okay, let's say
Speaker 2: we do for a multiple of twenty and we get
Speaker 2: million dollars. Okay, we pay taxes on that. We got
Speaker 2: to pay some capital gains tax on it, we got
Speaker 2: to pay various state and federal taxes. We each net
Speaker 2: you know, let's say somewhere in two thirds to three
Speaker 2: quarters of that, our third of that, and Conrad Uno too,
Speaker 2: he owns a quarter of the masters. So we take
Speaker 2: that and then you sort of if you just do
Speaker 2: the math, so like, okay, let's put that in an
Speaker 2: income bearing investment, put it in the market. You can
Speaker 2: take three to five percent a year, right, sort of
Speaker 2: safely while preserving the capital. And that number has just
Speaker 2: never reached what we're each making from publishing and masters
Speaker 2: every year, from the money we're getting from the business.
Speaker 2: It's never even really gotten close. And as Jason pointed
Speaker 2: out the last time we talked about this, he really
Speaker 2: enjoys having a hedge against the markets, right, we all
Speaker 2: have investments in financial markets and or real estate. And
Speaker 2: he's like, well, hey, you know, I'm pretty sure people
Speaker 2: are still going to stream our record during the next recession,
Speaker 2: so it's a way to be diversified. So the multiple
Speaker 2: would have to be pretty high for us all to
Speaker 2: just go yep, we'll take it.
Speaker 1: But also, you're a sophisticated guy. You worked with the Amazon, etc.
Speaker 1: Can you also see in the thirty years since the
Speaker 1: record was a hit that there been more opportunities such
Speaker 1: for monetization that could not have been envisioned. Has that
Speaker 1: been a factor?
Speaker 2: It is a factor, and there are more opportunities for monetization.
Speaker 2: And one of the arguments for selling the asset or
Speaker 2: part of it would be that somebody else could make
Speaker 2: better use of it. Right. Like I said, we're pretty
Speaker 2: laissez fair punk rock. We just basically sit on this thing.
Speaker 2: We don't do much to promote it, and somebody who's
Speaker 2: craftier and I'm not sure it's private equity companies buying
Speaker 2: musical copyrights, but there are certain buyers who are going
Speaker 2: to work the asset. They may be able to Those
Speaker 2: have been the deals that have been more interesting are like,
Speaker 2: maybe sell part of it, but we have an interest
Speaker 2: in the upside if they figure out a way to
Speaker 2: have it make more money from some of these newer avenues.
Speaker 1: Okay, at this late date, overall for the presidents, what
Speaker 1: percentage of the income is from masters and what percentage
Speaker 1: from publishing.
Speaker 2: It's kind of what you'd expect. It breaks down on
Speaker 2: that sort of I'd say seventy thirty to eighty twenty.
Speaker 2: Seventy thirty at most to publishing, probably more like eighty twenty.
Speaker 1: Okay. I realize every year is not identical, but if
Speaker 1: you took an average year and the three of you
Speaker 1: got paid before taxes, is there enough to live on.
Speaker 2: There's enough to live on. Now that I'm a guy
Speaker 2: who has a partner who works, and I'm not paying
Speaker 2: my kids tuition at Columbia anymore, and you know, I'm
Speaker 2: sort of in that contracting phase of my life. I
Speaker 2: think when I was in the expanse of trying to
Speaker 2: raise a family in an upper middle class way, if
Speaker 2: one of us were a solo artist, it would be
Speaker 2: enough for me as an individual, it wouldn't be enough.
Speaker 2: It's a wonderful annuity for me that pays a lot.
Speaker 1: Okay at this moment in time, do you have any
Speaker 1: other income, active income as opposed to investments?
Speaker 2: Nope?
Speaker 1: Okay, so this is it. Okay, let's go back, so
Speaker 1: five years. You essentially get the record, the master back
Speaker 1: in the year two thousand, year two thousand and one
Speaker 1: or whatever.
Speaker 2: Two thousand and three, we got it back two.
Speaker 1: Thousand and three, Different economic landscape, different distribution, etc. What
Speaker 1: do you do now that you have the record?
Speaker 2: Well, first we have a long conversation of do we
Speaker 2: want to just do another deal with Sony and let
Speaker 2: them keep it, which of course they were interested in doing.
Speaker 2: Do we want to you know, get it back ourselves.
Speaker 2: Do we want to talk to other labels? We decided
Speaker 2: because since as I said, we've always taken this fairly
Speaker 2: DIY contrarian let's do it our way approach, well, let's
Speaker 2: do it ourselves. And so we took it back. We
Speaker 2: created our own little label, and we were lucky that
Speaker 2: us getting it back and sort of you know, as
Speaker 2: you would imagine, it took Sony Columbia years to wind
Speaker 2: down their physical you know, inventory and account for all
Speaker 2: of it, and there were a lot of heated exchanges
Speaker 2: where it looked like they were wilfully, wilfully still selling
Speaker 2: it while they didn't have the rights, which I don't
Speaker 2: think was the case. I think it's just, you know,
Speaker 2: as the saying goes, never assume mal intent when simple
Speaker 2: incompetence will explain the problem. So it took a few years.
Speaker 2: But as that happened, the iTunes store launched right, which,
Speaker 2: as you know, was from like four to twenty twelve,
Speaker 2: was the only music store in the world that mattered.
Speaker 2: And at the time we got the rights back, we
Speaker 2: had reformed and we were touring, and we had a
Speaker 2: new management team that included a guy you probably know,
Speaker 2: Mike Tiraney, who was kind of it. He's he has
Speaker 2: my old job at Amazon now actually running music programming,
Speaker 2: but he was he's been at labels, PD easton radio. Everything.
Speaker 1: Just just go back in the hey, hey, who was
Speaker 1: the manager?
Speaker 2: A woman named Stacy Slater, who's oh.
Speaker 1: No, but it sounds like you got rid of her
Speaker 1: at some point now time.
Speaker 2: We were trying to get rid of her. Right as
Speaker 2: we broke up the first time we were we were
Speaker 2: talking to all the people.
Speaker 1: Okay, so she rode the ship to the end. Okay,
Speaker 1: she got a new manager.
Speaker 2: Keep going anyway. So Mike was connected with everybody, and
Speaker 2: at the time he knew somebody at iTunes and we
Speaker 2: were able to get We did a deal with what
Speaker 2: was then Iota that gradually got folded in as part
Speaker 2: of the Orchard, now Kevin Arnold. So we did a
Speaker 2: deal with him for all the other digital distribution, which
Speaker 2: accounted to Bubkas in two thousand and four, two thousand
Speaker 2: and five, and we were lucky we did a deal.
Speaker 2: We were like the last micro label to do a
Speaker 2: deal directly with Apple. Somehow Tyranny knew somebody. We got in.
Speaker 2: We basically had one record on our label. We later
Speaker 2: had two or three more that don't matter that we own,
Speaker 2: and so we had direct distribution to Apple from through
Speaker 2: the whole heyday of the iTunes store, and we were
Speaker 2: just and are you know they were taking their thirty
Speaker 2: percent off the top and we're getting our seventy percent
Speaker 2: on every sale. It was beautiful and that ramped up quickly.
Speaker 2: And what was really interesting was we're still getting statements
Speaker 2: from Sony right. So by by the two thousand and one,
Speaker 2: two thousand and two, we're selling like worldwide, like one
Speaker 2: thousand records a month. Okay, looking at the statements, nothing right,
Speaker 2: and we're getting you know, bupkus on those we're getting
Speaker 2: a buck maybe a year. Immediately with the launch of
Speaker 2: the iTunes store, not only are we you know, we
Speaker 2: own it, so we're getting seventy percent instead of fifteen percent.
Speaker 2: We're our volume. All of a sudden, you're selling like, okay,
Speaker 2: we're selling a thousand records, which is track equivalent maybe
Speaker 2: fifteen thousand tracks a month. Right, all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: we're selling you know, like, you know, tens of thousands
Speaker 2: of tracks a month. You know what that was? The
Speaker 2: bizarre thing was like, I get it, the margin was
Speaker 2: way better, but the vaulme was way higher too, which
Speaker 2: was just mine.
Speaker 1: So what do you what do you think it counts
Speaker 1: for that?
Speaker 2: I think people were it was. You got to give
Speaker 2: credit to Steve Jobs for seeing the appetite there and
Speaker 2: somehow talking the labels in. I don't I was not privy.
Speaker 2: I was not really in the trenches in the digital
Speaker 2: music industry at that time. But I don't know how
Speaker 2: all that went down, But he solved the problem for them,
Speaker 2: and they sort of solved the problem for him. But
Speaker 2: that you know, I think everybody who's had a career
Speaker 2: in at a major label or publisher in the last
Speaker 2: twenty years should like go to Steve Jobs' grave like
Speaker 2: twice a year and put flowers on it. And he
Speaker 2: saved the music industry as far as I'm concerned. He
Speaker 2: just figured out something that was simple, easy to do
Speaker 2: between the hardware and the software. Was any numbskull could
Speaker 2: figure it out. You've got your iPod, you download the songs,
Speaker 2: you put it on there, you take them everywhere.
Speaker 3: You know, it just works as the saying goes okay
Speaker 3: was the adoption. The sales were those up because in
Speaker 3: the physical era, maybe the store didn't have your record. Yeah,
Speaker 3: digitally that's what you think was good.
Speaker 2: I think that. And then there was obviously I've never
Speaker 2: been able to really understand how much piracy there was
Speaker 2: in the nineties and into the two thousands, but I
Speaker 2: know I can say based anecdotally that you know, at
Speaker 2: our peak, we would hear, hey, I was just in
Speaker 2: like the Philippines or you know, Columbia, and wow, your
Speaker 2: record was everywhere, Like yeah, I don't think we got
Speaker 2: anything for that, So God knows how much piracy there
Speaker 2: was in the you know, the the industry only has
Speaker 2: itself to blame. They released music on high quality, unencrypted
Speaker 2: digital format for years, right, like pretty easy to copy that, Okay.
Speaker 1: Tell me about the transition from sales to streams.
Speaker 2: Sales to streams just was gradual, and it was kind
Speaker 2: of I saw it from all sides because I was
Speaker 2: at Amazon Music during that really where that transition took
Speaker 2: off kind of. I was at Amazon Music from twenty
Speaker 2: twelve to about twenty seventeen, which is and we conceived
Speaker 2: and launched the Prime Music and Music Unlimited. Then, you know,
Speaker 2: I think Daniel Leck got it done somehow. I don't
Speaker 2: you know that's there. There's a whole story there that
Speaker 2: I'm sure you can have people on the show who
Speaker 2: can tell better than I can, and I'm not sure
Speaker 2: I can.
Speaker 1: Tell you a lot. But that's not really my question.
Speaker 1: My question is, as it goes to streaming, your income
Speaker 1: go down up or stay the same.
Speaker 2: It's gone up just because because I think more just
Speaker 2: the digital music market grew, right. It's every market has
Speaker 2: kind of an S curve growth, right, It's slow and
Speaker 2: then it ramps up and it's in the steep part
Speaker 2: and then it's now it's leveling off right where at
Speaker 2: the top half half of the S curve now, So
Speaker 2: I think we are seeing more income. But I can't
Speaker 2: tell you if the iTunes store was still dominant and
Speaker 2: just the digital music market had grown. But I don't
Speaker 2: think the digital music market would have grown if we'd
Speaker 2: stuck with ninety nine cent MP three's. I just think
Speaker 2: there were that was a.
Speaker 1: Moment in time, just like we have a moment in
Speaker 1: time for eight tracks, cassettes, et cetera. Right, But leaving
Speaker 1: that in the rear view mirror conventional wisdom, forget about
Speaker 1: knowledgeable people or people who work for these companies. You
Speaker 1: hear it every minute of the day. Spotify is ripping
Speaker 1: me off, They're not paying me, blah blah blah. What
Speaker 1: is your experience with the presidents?
Speaker 2: Yes, Spotify is not ripping anybody off. And Spotify can't
Speaker 2: come out and say you have a shitty deal with
Speaker 2: your label. They can't defend themselves because they'll piss off
Speaker 2: their most important partners. I mean, the whole thing is,
Speaker 2: don't I don't even know why or how. And in Spotify,
Speaker 2: even on their own, they don't disclose everything. But if
Speaker 2: you dig into their website, they pretty much tell you
Speaker 2: exactly how they do business if you want to know
Speaker 2: if you're an artist or a label. So it is
Speaker 2: hard math obviously, if you have one hundred let's say
Speaker 2: that you only had one hundred Spotify paying subscribers, and
Speaker 2: they're each paying ten dollars a month. If you're trying,
Speaker 2: you can't pay a penny rate, right because one month
Speaker 2: those hundred people might stream five songs each, but the
Speaker 2: next month they might stream one hundred songs each. So
Speaker 2: there is some very tricky math to how it all
Speaker 2: works out, and at least so far, it hasn't gone
Speaker 2: the way of the black boxes, you know, some of
Speaker 2: the pros where you're not sure. I think the math
Speaker 2: is pretty clear and fair, and I just don't see
Speaker 2: I don't get it. I mean, I get that somebody's
Speaker 2: resentful because things aren't the way they want it to be.
Speaker 2: But too bad. It's not Spotify or Amazon Music or
Speaker 2: Apple Music that's screwing you. It's most likely, in most cases,
Speaker 2: you have a bad deal with your label or your distributor,
Speaker 2: or no one is listening. Well, there's that's a whole
Speaker 2: other thing. And as I've said sort of started. You know,
Speaker 2: from the start of the digital anybody can make a
Speaker 2: good sounding record in their bedroom now, right. You used
Speaker 2: to have to have a lot of money to have
Speaker 2: a board and a tape machine and outboard gear that
Speaker 2: it took to make a good sounding recording. I'm using Carmela,
Speaker 2: my engineer friend's laptop right now. You can make a
Speaker 2: killer sounding record on this Mac laptop with just the
Speaker 2: like a one in out right and this microphone that
Speaker 2: I'm talking on right now. You can make a major
Speaker 2: label quality record. But just you know whatever. You know, look,
Speaker 2: Marvin Gay would have been a superstar in like fifteen
Speaker 2: sixty eight, seventeen sixty eight, nineteen sixty eight, twenty one
Speaker 2: sixty eight quality. You know. Not everybody's that good, you know,
Speaker 2: I mean, that's that's the reality is. And I'm a
Speaker 2: big believer in the market, the wisdom of the market
Speaker 2: that the cream does actually rise to the top. You know,
Speaker 2: people know what they like. It's yeah, you still have to.
Speaker 1: Be good, Okay. So you know, there are many avenues
Speaker 1: of remuneration. There are certainly streams, there's subscriber streams. I
Speaker 1: don't want to get for paid not paid streams on
Speaker 1: Spotify it's irrelevant. But there's streams on Pandora that are
Speaker 1: radio streams. But there's other places where people license music.
Speaker 1: A what percentage of your revenue is purely from the
Speaker 1: traditional streamers Amazon, Apple, you know? And how much is
Speaker 1: these other areas and what are they?
Speaker 2: That's a great that's a good question because we've beat
Speaker 2: our heads against this wall for twenty years since we
Speaker 2: got the rights back. We don't get a ton of film,
Speaker 2: TV AD licenses. We've had a couple of good ones
Speaker 2: in the last two years. Last summer we had Bush
Speaker 2: Beer licensed Peaches for a peach flavored beer, which I
Speaker 2: don't want to drink. I don't think I don't think
Speaker 2: it was in my market. You'll take the check, yeah,
Speaker 2: But we don't get a lot of licenses of that nature,
Speaker 2: and we've never been able to figure out why. We've
Speaker 2: gone through all the options, and anybody who's in the
Speaker 2: industry will know what I'm talking about. You there are
Speaker 2: people who want an exclusive, and I say, they'll go
Speaker 2: out and pitch your stuff to everybody and they'll get
Speaker 2: you placements. That's never worked for us. Chris, my bandmate's
Speaker 2: done more of this. He's found that it's always opportunistic,
Speaker 2: so you just got to be out there. So we
Speaker 2: just very occasionally get stuff. But I have to say
Speaker 2: depend unless it's a weird year, one in three or five,
Speaker 2: like ninety five plus percent of our stuff is just streaming.
Speaker 2: It's straight up.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: We've had a few anomaloust things here and there. The
Speaker 2: for a while it looked like as you know, like
Speaker 2: Guitar Hero and rock Band were like, whoa, these are
Speaker 2: big checks for like three years and then that went away.
Speaker 2: So I keep waiting for the you know, the nineties,
Speaker 2: the nineties John Hughes style nostalgia film She's Lump, where
Speaker 2: they're going to give us a two million dollar check.
Speaker 2: Use that is the title track. But you know, we
Speaker 2: haven't figured out how to tap into that vein as
Speaker 2: much as i'd like to. Chris has with his own music,
Speaker 2: but we haven't.
Speaker 1: Okay, who actually does the business for the presidents?
Speaker 2: We do it. I mean I get the emails. I
Speaker 2: mean sometimes they still come to Sony if it's a
Speaker 2: master license for our debut record, because because people will
Speaker 2: think that you'll have the CD and it says on it,
Speaker 2: but there Sony's great about you know, we have our
Speaker 2: contacts there, they'll email me. So I do most of it.
Speaker 2: Jason does some. Chris is very happy to let us
Speaker 2: do it. Jason, Chris and I both did go to college.
Speaker 2: Jason didn't. Although Jason is one of the smartest people
Speaker 2: I've ever met in my life. He absolutely brilliant guy.
Speaker 2: So we have plenty of you know, capability and horsepower.
Speaker 2: We do it. We have a business manager, we use
Speaker 2: Summit Business Management down in the Greater LA area, who
Speaker 2: we were introduced to through our friend weird Al who's
Speaker 2: a brilliant, brilliant business person. And we always have a lawyer.
Speaker 2: Our lawyer mostly has been Ed Pearson, who was at
Speaker 2: Warner Chapel for years and up in Seattle for the
Speaker 2: last ten or fifteen years representing Maclamore and Head and
Speaker 2: the Heart and a bunch of artists. So we generally, well,
Speaker 2: we'll have a lawyer and we have a good business manager,
Speaker 2: and that's enough really for us. We don't need a manager.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's go back to the beginning. So you grow
Speaker 1: up exactly where.
Speaker 2: I grew up in the Seattle area, in the northeast
Speaker 2: part of the town called Laurelhurst, which is like a
Speaker 2: you know, when I grew up there, it was stay
Speaker 2: at home moms, university professors, professionals. You know, it's a
Speaker 2: nice neighborhood near the University of Washington.
Speaker 1: And what did your parents do for a living?
Speaker 2: My dad was a PR guy. Actually he went his
Speaker 2: family business is a great story. But my grandpa and
Speaker 2: my uncle ran a fur brokerage business, but my dad
Speaker 2: chose not to go into that business, and he started
Speaker 2: a PR firm right after the World's Fair in Seattle.
Speaker 2: That's this guy Jay Rocky, who was a legend here
Speaker 2: who got the World's Fair on the cover of Life
Speaker 2: magazine twice. And they started a PR firm in the
Speaker 2: early sixties and they ran that for years till my
Speaker 2: dad retired when he was sixty five. So he was
Speaker 2: a words guy.
Speaker 1: Okay, how long has your family been in America?
Speaker 2: Four to five generations?
Speaker 1: Do you know why they came?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's some of them on my dad's side of
Speaker 2: the family. My paternal grandfather was German and they were
Speaker 2: part of US diaspora of crafts people who went from
Speaker 2: Germany sort of the you know alsace lran like the
Speaker 2: the western part of Germany in the mid nineteenth century
Speaker 2: to Tsarist Russia to a particular river valley to be
Speaker 2: craftspeople for the czar and there there I've read a
Speaker 2: book about it. They sort of then dispersed to northern
Speaker 2: US and Canada, and a lot of them in Texas
Speaker 2: as well. You know, if you drive around Texas there Flugerville,
Speaker 2: there are German place names everywhere. So they moved to
Speaker 2: Saskatchewan or Alberta, my great great grand my great grandfather
Speaker 2: on my dad's side, and then eventually to Montana. And
Speaker 2: then my paternal grandfather, who was quite a guy, moved
Speaker 2: to Seattle sort of before the start of the depression
Speaker 2: and worked his way up from nothing to being the
Speaker 2: owner and president of this big for brokerage house. And
Speaker 2: then yeah, mom's side mostly Irish, Irish Catholic. You know,
Speaker 2: I don't know how they ended up over here.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Another side of the family was French, and weirdly this
Speaker 2: is on my dad's side. My grandparents were originally from
Speaker 2: like five miles away from each other in France and
Speaker 2: Germany in that Alsace Lran region, which is just bizarre.
Speaker 2: So they came through Yeah, any homesteading in Minnesota.
Speaker 1: Okay, you say your parents were divorced. How old were
Speaker 1: you when they got divorced.
Speaker 2: I was eight when they split up.
Speaker 1: Okay, how many kids in the family?
Speaker 2: Myself and my sister Claire, who's a writer, and she's older, younger,
Speaker 2: she's two and a half years younger than I am,
Speaker 2: and she's way more famous than I am.
Speaker 1: Now it's okay, But what's it like when your parents
Speaker 1: divorced when you're ead?
Speaker 2: I think it sucked. I don't think at the time
Speaker 2: I was able to really process that. I think I'm
Speaker 2: incredibly lucky that my dad, my mom, and my stepdad
Speaker 2: whom my mom, they're still together and they got them
Speaker 2: getting together as part of my parents splitting up. Are
Speaker 2: all like I thought this was normal, But they are
Speaker 2: all like kind reasonable, rational people who don't lose their tempers,
Speaker 2: you know. I mean, I just I didn't know how
Speaker 2: much I hit the jackpot with my family until I
Speaker 2: got older and saw friends, families and more dysfunction. So
Speaker 2: somehow it was okay. I think, you know, there was
Speaker 2: maybe if anything was missing, it was maybe a chance
Speaker 2: to actually get pissed off when I was that young
Speaker 2: and sort of expressed.
Speaker 1: Me Okay, but you're your parents are divorce in a
Speaker 1: totally different era now, it's all you know in terms
Speaker 1: of back dead. A lot of times the kid lived
Speaker 1: with one parent, usually the mother. You know, there's not
Speaker 1: the co parenting there was. What was it like for you?
Speaker 2: We lived mostly with my mom and stayed in the
Speaker 2: same house that we'd been in, and my dad after
Speaker 2: a year or two moved into super cool house boat
Speaker 2: that my sister and I own now kind of like
Speaker 2: Sleepless in Seattle, down on Lake Union in Seattle. And
Speaker 2: he had some other partners in his life, but never long.
Speaker 2: You know, he never remarried. And we would spend you know,
Speaker 2: one to three days a week with him in the winter,
Speaker 2: like every weekend we went skiing with him. Summertime, we
Speaker 2: go hiking, go to the mountains with him for weeks
Speaker 2: at a time, and so we saw both of them often.
Speaker 2: We didn't split fifty to fifty. We really did live
Speaker 2: at my mom.
Speaker 1: Okay, you have a bad day in school, would you
Speaker 1: call your father?
Speaker 2: I'd call my mom. My mom was my emotional support.
Speaker 2: My dad was a very loving, supportive guy, but my
Speaker 2: mom was definitely my primary parent.
Speaker 1: And what was the story with your stepfather.
Speaker 2: My stepfather, interestingly, is younger. My mom is eight years
Speaker 2: younger than my dad was, and my stepdad is eight
Speaker 2: years younger than my mom, so he he only sixteen
Speaker 2: years older than I am. And he was a pretty
Speaker 2: young guy when he and my mom got together. He
Speaker 2: would have been in maybe twenty four, my mom would
Speaker 2: have been thirty two. And he just turned out to
Speaker 2: be an awesome guy. Just I mean, the whole thing
Speaker 2: on paper is just a fucking disaster if you think
Speaker 2: about it. It should have been horrible, but somehow everybody
Speaker 2: was thoughtful and tolerant, and it was in some ways
Speaker 2: I benefited because I saw even more. We ended up
Speaker 2: doing things through what my stepdad wanted to do that
Speaker 2: I never would have gotten to do, which.
Speaker 1: Was and would your stepdad do for a living?
Speaker 2: He when he and my mom got together, he ran
Speaker 2: He was the production manager for Conley Water Skis. He
Speaker 2: was just a kind of crafty. He had gotten an
Speaker 2: economics degree for the University of Washington, and then he
Speaker 2: was a guy. He's one of those people who just
Speaker 2: can't sit still and is always doing a project. So
Speaker 2: he was the guy who figured out how to you know,
Speaker 2: make a water ski press out of nothing, out of
Speaker 2: a hydraulic machine, and or figure out how to make
Speaker 2: a new mill to cut wood. And then he bought
Speaker 2: a piece of property on Stuart Island, which is one
Speaker 2: of the San Juan islands that doesn't have ferry service.
Speaker 2: And he had grown up his dad was a builder
Speaker 2: or a you know, a carpenter, and so he had
Speaker 2: grown up building houses. So we built a house in
Speaker 2: the summers on Stuart Island over a couple of summers.
Speaker 2: And to do that, we had to build a little
Speaker 2: barge that we towed behind our motor sailor to get
Speaker 2: the wood to the island. And so we did that,
Speaker 2: and then all these people saw the house that he
Speaker 2: built and were like, this is really cool. Can you
Speaker 2: build me one of these? And somehow Larry, my stepdad,
Speaker 2: at some point was in Harbor Town on Puget Sound
Speaker 2: and he saw like a forty five foot tug old
Speaker 2: old wood tug log towing tugboat for sailings, just like,
Speaker 2: I'm going to quit my job and buy that and
Speaker 2: start a business. Than he did, and it was it
Speaker 2: was incredible for me because he eventually turned into be
Speaker 2: a pretty big you know like sand and gravel moving
Speaker 2: operation with barges and tugs. But the first four or
Speaker 2: five years, every summer we would build a house on
Speaker 2: Stuart Island and we did the tug and barge work
Speaker 2: to get the materials over there. And I would get
Speaker 2: up every morning and put on my boots, my shorts
Speaker 2: and my tool belt and go like getting a skiff
Speaker 2: and take the skiff to the job site and dig
Speaker 2: holes or pound nails all day. It was I look again,
Speaker 2: looking back on that, I'm like, seem normal at the time,
Speaker 2: But holy shit, was I lucky to get to do that.
Speaker 1: So how many tug boats and how many barges did
Speaker 1: he end up with?
Speaker 2: He eventually ended up with at the peak of a
Speaker 2: couple of boats and a few barges. And his specialty
Speaker 2: was sand and gravel. And because you know, where you
Speaker 2: have a big waterway like Puget Sound, it's way less
Speaker 2: expensive to move that via a barge than via trucks,
Speaker 2: right if you can put thousands of yards on a barge.
Speaker 2: And then he built this crazy conveyor that could shoot
Speaker 2: material way way way up on the beach, and it
Speaker 2: was unique. So he would and he eventually got to
Speaker 2: the point where he could just park his barges and
Speaker 2: lease it and other people would deliver the material. He
Speaker 2: had this kind of slick set up for getting the
Speaker 2: material way up onto the beach or up onto a
Speaker 2: job site. And he did that for years, and he
Speaker 2: sold business about ten years ago.
Speaker 1: How far is Stuart Island from downtown Seattle.
Speaker 2: Stuart Island is the most northwesternmost point in the contiguous
Speaker 2: forty eight states. So you'd drive, you know, seventy miles
Speaker 2: to anacordis and then you'd have to take a ferry
Speaker 2: to San Juan Island, the biggest ferry service island, which
Speaker 2: takes two or three hours, and then take a skiff
Speaker 2: twenty minutes to Stuart Island.
Speaker 1: So what kind of kid are you growing up? You
Speaker 1: have friends? You don't have friends? Good at school? Not
Speaker 1: good at school?
Speaker 2: I had I was I was never the boss. I
Speaker 2: was always part of a crew. I guess, you know.
Speaker 2: I played sports, so my friends were sporty, sporty kids
Speaker 2: and probably smart kids. I think I was good in school,
Speaker 2: you know, I was usually like in grade school. I
Speaker 2: was always you know, like going up a grade or
Speaker 2: two to read and our grades. I went to public school.
Speaker 2: Through fifth grade, and we had a gifted program. I
Speaker 2: think I was in the gifted program. And then I
Speaker 2: went to I had a really really bad fifth grade teacher,
Speaker 2: and my parents decided that and I was getting in
Speaker 2: a little trouble at the time. I had shoplifted a
Speaker 2: few times, and my parents moved me and actually two
Speaker 2: of my best friends. We all moved to a private
Speaker 2: school in Seattle in sixth grade and I went there
Speaker 2: through high school.
Speaker 1: Was that boys only, No, it was co ed.
Speaker 2: It was a school called the Bush School, which had
Speaker 2: been girls only and had gone co ed in the
Speaker 2: early seventies. And I got really lucky there. I look back,
Speaker 2: I got, you know, a lot of life is luck.
Speaker 2: I ended up at this school that was super progressive
Speaker 2: and had all these aquarian age teachers who were high
Speaker 2: minded and wanted to do stuff with the kids and
Speaker 2: take us out in the woods and you know, share
Speaker 2: their passions with us, and that would just happen again
Speaker 2: a moment in time. That school, for that seven or
Speaker 2: eight years, I got really lucky.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what year are you born in. I was
Speaker 1: born in sixty four, so you're born in sixty four.
Speaker 1: World's Fair is in sixty two. You know, we have
Speaker 1: the blow up of the Seattle scene in the early nineties.
Speaker 1: We have the Seattle pilots before that, who leave. Let
Speaker 1: was talking about this earlier, you know, in the seventies.
Speaker 1: You know, you drive in the West, you're out of
Speaker 1: cell service. I mean there was no cell service. You
Speaker 1: were totally disconnected. Now you're connected everywhere. So it sounds
Speaker 1: like a dumb question, and maybe it's all you know,
Speaker 1: But what was it like growing up in Seattle in
Speaker 1: that time? Let me give you a different experience and
Speaker 1: maybe it might help you Know, I'm growing up fifty
Speaker 1: miles from New York City. There's New York City media,
Speaker 1: all the TV shows, and music is coming from Hollywood.
Speaker 1: You could you know, what's it like living in the
Speaker 1: Pacific Northwest.
Speaker 2: That's a great question, and I I would answer that.
Speaker 2: So it was a beautiful place. You know, as my
Speaker 2: partner Jenna and I talked about it all the times.
Speaker 2: You grew up here as well, like you drive around
Speaker 2: now and there's trash everywhere. There was you know, it
Speaker 2: was clean and people were kind and respectful to each other.
Speaker 2: It was not very crowded. Yet nobody knew about it
Speaker 2: and I mean, one of my ways to answer that
Speaker 2: question is I went to Brown University for junior and
Speaker 2: senior year of college, so I transferred there and I'd
Speaker 2: taken a year off, So I guess they went there
Speaker 2: in the fall of nineteen eighty five, and you know,
Speaker 2: as you said, we weren't connected. I mean, I remember
Speaker 2: people like the first day that late fall it snowed,
Speaker 2: and someone's like, oh, yeah, you're well, you're used to this.
Speaker 2: It's like, you know, they thought Seattle was fucking Alaska, right,
Speaker 2: no idea, like, no, it maybe snow's an inch once year.
Speaker 2: And then that the real moment was so listen to
Speaker 2: a fair amount of jazz growing up. My mom liked it,
Speaker 2: and then I, as I started to play guitar, I
Speaker 2: really liked jazz and listened to it a lot. And
Speaker 2: so I'd listened to like, you know, Miles Davis or
Speaker 2: Joe Pass or this New York City music in Seattle,
Speaker 2: and I dug it. And I'll never forget the Thanksgiving,
Speaker 2: the first joy I was there. I had bought this
Speaker 2: crappy Vovo wagon and a friend invited me to go
Speaker 2: to Thanksgiving at his house in Brooklyn with his family
Speaker 2: and So I drove four of us down, you know,
Speaker 2: down nine ninety five down through Connecticut into the city.
Speaker 2: And as you know, that drive, like if you can
Speaker 2: imagine what it's like if you grew up in Seattle,
Speaker 2: it's like N ninety five is like twelve lanes wide
Speaker 2: as you come in north of the city. We come
Speaker 2: in and we drive basically all the way down you know,
Speaker 2: Broadway right. We went the full length of Manhattan, and
Speaker 2: I will never forget pulling into Times Square and it
Speaker 2: was late, it was probably ten thirty or eleven at night.
Speaker 2: I'll never forget pulling up and right in the heart
Speaker 2: of Times Square to a stop light, and I had
Speaker 2: my window down, and I was like, oh, that's what
Speaker 2: I've been listening to, Like that ride symbol. That's when
Speaker 2: you listen to, you know, any jazz from the six
Speaker 2: fifties or early sixties, that's the sound. That's why they
Speaker 2: were making that sound, because that's the sound of this city.
Speaker 2: You know. Another thing I thought, you know, as we
Speaker 2: were coming down nine ninety five, growing up in Seattle,
Speaker 2: it's like you'd see McDonald's commercials or like a Buick
Speaker 2: commercial in National Geographic, or a Schlitz commercial and you'd
Speaker 2: look at the people in the ad and go, who
Speaker 2: the fuck are these people? These are not the people
Speaker 2: that I'm around ever in the Pacific Northwest. I don't
Speaker 2: know what this is. And I, you know, forty five
Speaker 2: minutes before the jazz moment in Times Square, I remember
Speaker 2: being in that traffic twelve lanes, eight lanes wide and
Speaker 2: just going, Oh, these are the people who buy the
Speaker 2: Schlitz and the Buick, and this is what this is
Speaker 2: all about. This is you know, this is this is
Speaker 2: the market that I've been seeing. So it was lovely.
Speaker 2: It was provincial. You know, That's that's really the big
Speaker 2: downfall with digital media and the Internet is the loss
Speaker 2: of provinciality.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you have the revolution and music in nineties,
Speaker 1: early nineties to mid nineties. Then Microsoft blows up Amazon
Speaker 1: just before the turn of the century. How has that
Speaker 1: changed Seattle? What is Seattle like now?
Speaker 2: It's so radically different. And you know, my dad died
Speaker 2: three and a half years ago, and I used to
Speaker 2: talk to him about it about how wow this is.
Speaker 2: You know, we're sort of stuck in the middle. We're
Speaker 2: not dense enough yet to have all the benefits of
Speaker 2: being a you know Brooklyn or a European city, but
Speaker 2: we've lost that thing where I can just drive my
Speaker 2: car an hour in any direction and lay out my
Speaker 2: sleeping bag on the side of the road. So we're
Speaker 2: sort of stuck. And my dad, he was interesting. His dad,
Speaker 2: my grandpa was a big civic booster. He was involved
Speaker 2: in putting the World's Fair together, and big civic leader.
Speaker 2: And his response was like your grandpa would just he'd
Speaker 2: look around and be pleased as punch. This is what
Speaker 2: he and all those guys were working toward tirelessly, you know,
Speaker 2: for fifty years, was to put Seattle on the map.
Speaker 2: So it's cool that we're on the map, Seattle Metropolitan
Speaker 2: Seattle is sort of unrecognizable because of the influx of
Speaker 2: wealth and wealthy singletons and double income no kid people
Speaker 2: who have no allegiance to the city other than that
Speaker 2: maybe Amazon's you know, they're doing. They're working at one
Speaker 2: or more of the fang companies. They're going to do
Speaker 2: two years at Amazon, then they're going to go to Netflix,
Speaker 2: then they're going to go to Google. So we don't
Speaker 2: have that sense of identity like we did, but you know,
Speaker 2: there is a vibrancy there's live music every night of
Speaker 2: the week. There's all sorts of stuff going on. There's,
Speaker 2: you know, a good tax base, there's the benefit of
Speaker 2: having your property value go up, all that stuff, So
Speaker 2: you know, you can't really fight. I'm a little bit
Speaker 2: of a There was a famous columnist in Seattle for
Speaker 2: the Seattle Post Intelligencer, EMMITTT. Watson, and he was an
Speaker 2: advocate for quote unquote lesser Seattle. He considered himself the
Speaker 2: mayor of lesser Seattle. He was he was always grouching about,
Speaker 2: you know, losing the old flavor. But you know, I'm
Speaker 2: sure they said the same thing during the gold Rush boom,
Speaker 2: you know, when people were headed to the Klong Dyke.
Speaker 1: You can't Okay, I'm gonna ask a dumb question, but
Speaker 1: a lot of people have not been to the Pacific Northwest.
Speaker 1: What would you say the difference is between Seattle, Portland
Speaker 1: and Vancouver.
Speaker 2: Seattle. But we were just talking about this. Carmela, who's
Speaker 2: here engineering the session, lived in Portland for ten years.
Speaker 2: I think of Portland as simultaneously what Seattle was like
Speaker 2: twenty five years ago and what it could have been
Speaker 2: if we'd been a little bit better at urban planning Portland.
Speaker 2: You know, Portland for example, has like an amazing culinary scene,
Speaker 2: and now Portland's I think struggling catching up because as
Speaker 2: they get better at cost of living goes up, property
Speaker 2: values go up. Like if you ever go to Portland,
Speaker 2: go try to go to a show at Mississippi Studios
Speaker 2: in the Mississippi neighborhood, which is kind of in the
Speaker 2: north northeast part of the city. That's one of those
Speaker 2: neighborhoods you look at, like went there where Elbow, Grease
Speaker 2: and sweat Equity could do it, which they haven't been
Speaker 2: able to do it in Seattle for thirty years. It's
Speaker 2: just too fucking expensive, right, you can't be an artist
Speaker 2: and like, you know, live in a squad, which you
Speaker 2: could forty years ago. So Portland's sort of twenty years
Speaker 2: behind us and twenty years ahead of us. Vancouver is
Speaker 2: another world because I think being a crown country, all
Speaker 2: the y two k influx of wealth from Hong Kong
Speaker 2: and or you know, mainland China, they've been way better
Speaker 2: at embracing urban density. It's much more of a futuristic
Speaker 2: kind of urban environment. Although I have to say their
Speaker 2: brilliance was Stanley Park, the big park that sticks north
Speaker 2: of downtown is one of the most along with Central Park,
Speaker 2: is probably the most brilliant piece of civic planning of
Speaker 2: all time to preserve the most beautiful spot right in
Speaker 2: the middle of your city. So, yeah, Vancouver is it's
Speaker 2: like a I don't know, I've spent quite a bit
Speaker 2: of time there. It's like friendly blade runner, I guess
Speaker 2: is what I call it.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's go back. So you're growing up, when do
Speaker 1: you start playing in the instrument? What music are you
Speaker 1: listening to?
Speaker 2: One of my earliest memories is musical. I was in
Speaker 2: the car with my mom. We had a white Ford
Speaker 2: Galaxy five hundred, and I have one of my earliest,
Speaker 2: most vivid childhood memories is getting in the car in
Speaker 2: the backseat, no kids. You know, I was probably three
Speaker 2: or four five at the most, and as you know
Speaker 2: back then, you turn the ignition on and if the
Speaker 2: radio was already on, the radio would come on and
Speaker 2: it was some like I don't know what it was,
Speaker 2: I just remember that. If I think back, I think
Speaker 2: it had to have been like Otis Redding or Wilson
Speaker 2: Pickett or something. But it came on and it was
Speaker 2: some like super high energy, kind of soul music, and
Speaker 2: my mom turned it off, and I just remember having
Speaker 2: a massive tantrum, like, turn it back on, turn it
Speaker 2: back on, turn it back on. So from a very
Speaker 2: early age, I really really liked music. We didn't have
Speaker 2: a piano in the house. Neither of my parents nor Larry,
Speaker 2: my stepdad, played an instrument, but everybody liked music, all
Speaker 2: three of my parents and Larry kind of moved in,
Speaker 2: and he's a little bit younger, right, so his record
Speaker 2: collection was from like the late sixties early seventies. So
Speaker 2: my mom's listening to Bob Dylan on repeat in the house.
Speaker 2: Larry moves in, and all of a sudden, my friend
Speaker 2: Eddie Hewletts comes over and sees led Zeppelin four. We're
Speaker 2: in like fifth grade, and he's kind of a cool dude,
Speaker 2: ended up being a real fixture on the Seattle punk
Speaker 2: rock scene. He's like, hey, deater, chick this out, you know,
Speaker 2: and he pulls it out of the sleeve, puts it
Speaker 2: down and puts black Dog on, and I just I'm like,
Speaker 2: holy shit, that's what I want to do. So from
Speaker 2: that age, I really wanted to do it. And then
Speaker 2: and I didn't start playing imber until I was in
Speaker 2: eighth grade. There was a guy in my class, Matt Bowman,
Speaker 2: who was brilliant ended up going to Yale a year early.
Speaker 2: He's a business guy now. He was like a keyboard prodigy. Actually,
Speaker 2: when he was in ninth grade, Roger Fisher was leaving
Speaker 2: Heart and asked him to join his band. So he
Speaker 2: was really good, and so we put together a band
Speaker 2: in eighth grade. Sagittarius. Bob was the name of.
Speaker 1: The Wait wait, wait, wait, way you left out when
Speaker 1: you picked up an instrument, So.
Speaker 2: Eighth grade that this band was for me. So we're
Speaker 2: going to have a band. Sagittarius. Matt, the brilliant piano
Speaker 2: player is going to play well.
Speaker 1: So you're gonna have a band. And at that time
Speaker 1: you would not do not have an instrument.
Speaker 2: No, don't have an instrument. So somebody has to play bass.
Speaker 2: So two or three of us rent or buy basses
Speaker 2: and start taking lessons. I don't get the gig, but
Speaker 2: I take the bass back and I rent an acoustic guitar.
Speaker 2: And the only lessons I've ever taken really were the
Speaker 2: next one or two years. This great guy rest in peace,
Speaker 2: Chuck Bennett, who was kind of the first call casuals
Speaker 2: jazz whatever guy around town. He was my guitar teacher,
Speaker 2: and I just started taking guitar lessons and you know,
Speaker 2: trying to play with my friends in the neighborhood and stuff.
Speaker 2: And they didn't really maybe have a proper band until
Speaker 2: senior year in high school. Was probably the first real
Speaker 2: band I had. But you know, just music was I mean,
Speaker 2: once we start talking about music, we're going to need
Speaker 2: another three hours because that's getting okay.
Speaker 1: But just to stay on this point, you have a
Speaker 1: band in high school, is it playing gigs? Are you
Speaker 1: getting paid?
Speaker 2: I think that band my senior year, Sandino and the Leftists,
Speaker 2: I think we played one gig at my school and
Speaker 2: probably didn't get paid. And then the next year I
Speaker 2: went freshman year school, all of a sudden, I was
Speaker 2: in a band there in Colorado College, and weirdly was
Speaker 2: the same drummer who had been in Sagittarius in eighth grade.
Speaker 2: We reconnected, and the guitar player in that band I
Speaker 2: gradually learned, you know, started playing whenever I could, and
Speaker 2: you get in bands with people like the guitar player
Speaker 2: in that band had been in a band that really
Speaker 2: played in the Bay Area, were college freshmen and made
Speaker 2: records and stuff, so he actually knew kind of how
Speaker 2: to because it's not about really about playing your instrument,
Speaker 2: it's understanding how all the pieces fit together and how
Speaker 2: to listen to other people. That's really what music is about.
Speaker 2: So then gradually and actually the guy I really had
Speaker 2: a band there, moved back to Seattle, took a year
Speaker 2: off of school, and my best friend Kermit Rosen and
Speaker 2: I had bands for a couple of years in what
Speaker 2: was really like the immediately pre grunge scene in Seattle,
Speaker 2: and we're getting better again. Then I went to Brown
Speaker 2: and I resuscitated this funk band that had fallen apart
Speaker 2: when someone graduated. And the other guitar player in that
Speaker 2: band was the guy whose house I went for Thanksgiving,
Speaker 2: Matt MOONISTERI. He became a well known trad jazz guitar
Speaker 2: player in New York. He was already a he was
Speaker 2: from Brooklyn, but somehow became a bluegrass banjo prodigy in
Speaker 2: like junior high in high school, and he was a
Speaker 2: serious musician, and he was the guy who taught me
Speaker 2: how to play music. We played you know, James Brown
Speaker 2: and current you know, CAMEO funk music, R and B music,
Speaker 2: and he was a task master and he could really play.
Speaker 2: And he was the first guy, and he was a
Speaker 2: bit of a hard ass. He was the first guy
Speaker 2: who just sat me down and said, no, that's not
Speaker 2: good enough. You're going to sit here with me and
Speaker 2: tell we use this metronome and you can actually play
Speaker 2: this in time and make it groove. And he good
Speaker 2: enough is not good enough? Has to be fucking awesome.
Speaker 1: So why did you go to Colorado College? Why did
Speaker 1: it not work out? And then how did you end
Speaker 1: up at Brown?
Speaker 2: Oh? You really? I was enrolled at four schools in
Speaker 2: four years I went. I applied to a bunch of
Speaker 2: school we actually I only applied to Colorado College in Berkeley.
Speaker 2: I got into Colorado College and Berkeley. I decided to
Speaker 2: go to Colorado College because I had some friends there
Speaker 2: and I just wanted to go climbing, honestly, and they
Speaker 2: had you know, they have the block program where you
Speaker 2: go to school for three and a half weeks. I
Speaker 2: just wanted to go climbing for five days every month.
Speaker 2: And I had friends climbing friends from Seattle. One was
Speaker 2: already there and one was going So that was Colorada College.
Speaker 2: I got there, I'm like, this is I don't see
Speaker 2: the point of moving fifteen hundred miles to be with
Speaker 2: like eighteen hundred other kids. This is just not a
Speaker 2: big enough thing for me. So I reapplied to Berkeley.
Speaker 2: They let me back in, and then that summer my
Speaker 2: Kermit and then I started a band, and like a
Speaker 2: week before I was supposed to go to Berkeley. This
Speaker 2: is cal Berkeley, not Berkeley College of Music. I flaked
Speaker 2: out and decided not to go. We kept our band
Speaker 2: going the next year. We wanted to keep playing music.
Speaker 2: So Kermit and I he had gone to uh.
Speaker 1: Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait this being is
Speaker 1: in Seattle.
Speaker 2: Or yeah, yeah in Seattle. Back in Seattle.
Speaker 1: Wait wait how long did you go to Colorado College?
Speaker 2: One year?
Speaker 1: Okay, one year, you go back to Seattle. You say
Speaker 1: you're going to go to Berkeley. You don't go to
Speaker 1: Berkeley because you have this band. Continue with your education.
Speaker 2: Okay, Yeah, I've got the band, and Kermit and I
Speaker 2: are working at this communist pizza restaurant in the university
Speaker 2: district and playing music. Keep playing music. The next year.
Speaker 2: We want to keep playing music in Seattle go to
Speaker 2: the University Washington undergrad for a year, and that also
Speaker 2: felt like I was an English major. I was always
Speaker 2: the one or two of the kids in the front
Speaker 2: row actually engaged going to office hours, and it didn't
Speaker 2: feel that exciting. My girlfriend at the time went to Brown.
Speaker 2: I really liked her, and I thought I need a
Speaker 2: bigger challenge, so I only applied to one school. I
Speaker 2: applied to Brown, and I got in and just went how.
Speaker 1: Long did it you go to Brown? Did it continue
Speaker 1: with the girlfriend? And for how long?
Speaker 2: It mostly continued for the next two years and maybe
Speaker 2: half a year year after that, but it didn't. It
Speaker 2: didn't last forever.
Speaker 1: Well, but you know, when you go to a school
Speaker 1: in the middle, how do you make friends? How does
Speaker 1: it work?
Speaker 2: Well? I knew her and so I had her friend
Speaker 2: group pretty quickly. Somehow I ended up connecting with some
Speaker 2: other transfer students that I hit it off with. That
Speaker 2: was one guy who became the bass player in the
Speaker 2: funk band Dimensioned and was a climber, so we'd like
Speaker 2: totally hit it off on the all fronts. Another guy,
Speaker 2: Andrew Stevens from Columbia, Missouri, who ended up working for
Speaker 2: Richard get part for years. Was just a really he
Speaker 2: transferred from Vassar. Just a fucking hilarious smart guy. You know,
Speaker 2: so I hit it. I'm pretty you know, I'm pretty gregarious.
Speaker 2: I'm not a shrinking violin.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, since you go to Colorado, which is certainly
Speaker 1: different from Seattle, But what do you learn other than
Speaker 1: your eye ninety five experiences? And I'm not talking about
Speaker 1: classroom What do you learn going to Brown that is
Speaker 1: different from what you already know so much?
Speaker 2: And this is all going to resonate with you as
Speaker 2: an East Coaster who moved to the West coast. You know,
Speaker 2: as you said, what was it like growing up in
Speaker 2: the Pacific Northwest? I remember just the first week at Brown,
Speaker 2: Like you know, if you're a Western kid at least
Speaker 2: at that time, Like when you meet people, it's like
Speaker 2: what music do you like? Oh, let's go throw the frisbee?
Speaker 2: What do you like to do? You meet kids at
Speaker 2: an Ivy League school, they're like, where'd you prep? Does
Speaker 2: your dad know my dad? On the street or on
Speaker 2: Capitol Hill. It's like, oh, okay, this is a whole
Speaker 2: different game. This is a game I have no interest
Speaker 2: in it. And to continue to answer your question. That
Speaker 2: was the big value of living there. Two years was
Speaker 2: about all it could take. But I got that view of, Oh,
Speaker 2: these are the people who buy Schlitz and buicks. Oh
Speaker 2: these are the people who are going to run the country.
Speaker 2: These people I'm going to school with, for better or worse,
Speaker 2: are the people who are going to be on Wall
Speaker 2: Street and Capitol Hill in five years, ten years, twenty years.
Speaker 2: So it was a real window into how the oligarchy
Speaker 2: actually functions in the United States. It was a real
Speaker 2: eye opener. I'm really glad I did it.
Speaker 1: It turned out, Okay, you graduate, do you immediately go
Speaker 1: back to Seattle? And why No.
Speaker 2: I knew I wanted to be an high school English teacher,
Speaker 2: and I sent out, you know, not emails letters to
Speaker 2: forty or fifty schools, and my only requirement was the
Speaker 2: school be west of the Mississippi, I'll be totally honest.
Speaker 2: And I ended up at a school in Denver, Kent
Speaker 2: Denver School, private school in Cherry Hill.
Speaker 1: So just because we're this far, where does the euro
Speaker 1: paramour end up?
Speaker 2: She ended up kind of continuing she was an anthropology major.
Speaker 2: She ended up in flag Staff at a museum there,
Speaker 2: and eventually going to grad school in anthropology. And actually
Speaker 2: she's been back in the Boston area for twenty five years.
Speaker 1: So what broke up the relationship pure distance.
Speaker 2: I think just a it just was not She's a
Speaker 2: great person, and honestly was you know, just was not
Speaker 2: the time of life.
Speaker 1: Okay, So you go to teach and you're teaching where
Speaker 1: and what?
Speaker 2: Teaching at Kent Denver School in suburban Denver, and I
Speaker 2: was there two years. I taught English and coach soccer
Speaker 2: and basketball.
Speaker 1: High school.
Speaker 2: Yeah, high school. I had middle school too. Middle school.
Speaker 2: Middle schoolers crushed me, but the high school part I enjoyed.
Speaker 2: Middle schoolers had my number.
Speaker 1: So, okay, you're a teacher for two years, you stop?
Speaker 2: Because I decided after two years there, I did want
Speaker 2: to move back to Seattle. I missed. I was just
Speaker 2: having this conversation with my younger daughter because she's trying
Speaker 2: to figure out what to do with her life, and
Speaker 2: I knew I wanted to be in a community where
Speaker 2: I knew all kinds of people right all ages, where
Speaker 2: I had a deep connection culturally and family wise. So
Speaker 2: I just thought, I'm going to move back to Seattle.
Speaker 2: I'm back to Seattle, and I ended up not the
Speaker 2: one thing I was sure I wasn't gonna do was
Speaker 2: teach at my alma mater. I got back that summer
Speaker 2: and the head of the upper school, who I'd stayed
Speaker 2: friends with, called me, is like, I got a pregnant
Speaker 2: English teacher, you want a job. So I ended up
Speaker 2: teaching English and for another three years and coaching soccer,
Speaker 2: and I did took kids out climbing and you know,
Speaker 2: doing stuff in the woods, and that was great. It
Speaker 2: was really fun three years. So I taught for three
Speaker 2: years and then it was onto the next phase.
Speaker 1: Well what was the next phase?
Speaker 2: The next phase was sitting around thinking, Wow, I'm getting
Speaker 2: better at being a teacher. But one of the big
Speaker 2: problems with being a teacher is if you're an ambitious person,
Speaker 2: you're inevitably going to become an administrator. And being a
Speaker 2: teacher is really really fun, and I think being an
Speaker 2: administrator at a private independent school is maybe less fun,
Speaker 2: pretty hard. You're answering to parents, students, faculty, staff, and
Speaker 2: everybody's kind of pissed off at you all the time. Right,
Speaker 2: So I sort of saw the writing on the wall.
Speaker 2: So I actually made kind of a real conscious decision, like, Okay,
Speaker 2: I've enjoyed doing something where I feel like I'm kind
Speaker 2: of hopefully contributing to the positive side of the karmic
Speaker 2: balance sheet every day. What else do I care about?
Speaker 2: So this is like nineteen eighty nine, and this was
Speaker 2: the start of the influx of chain of out Californians
Speaker 2: and other in Seattle. And I loved the natural environment
Speaker 2: here and grew up out on the water and in
Speaker 2: the mountains, and I thought, well, I want to get
Speaker 2: involved in, you know, natural resource issues. So I spent
Speaker 2: a year applying to law school, because what do you
Speaker 2: do when you're a fucking English major. You go to
Speaker 2: law school, right, You're not going to go back and
Speaker 2: get a PhD and in you know, bioengineering. So I
Speaker 2: did that, and I got all my acceptances and rejections,
Speaker 2: and my dad and I were in Sun Valley skiing
Speaker 2: for a couple of weeks in the spring, and I
Speaker 2: remember after dark going over and sitting on the stopped
Speaker 2: chairlift at the bottom of warm springs and looking up
Speaker 2: at the hill and going, I don't want to be
Speaker 2: a lawyer. What am I doing? So then I spent
Speaker 2: another year working doing some public affairs stuff and applying
Speaker 2: to graduate school in urban.
Speaker 1: So wirebin planning.
Speaker 2: It seemed like the other land use planning seemed like
Speaker 2: the one other professional degree that I could angle my
Speaker 2: way into with an English degree and where I could
Speaker 2: get involved in these natural resource issues that I wanted.
Speaker 1: Well, needless to say, you didn't continue on that path,
Speaker 1: but before you stopped, was it a good experience in
Speaker 1: graduate school?
Speaker 2: It was great. I loved it. I was in the Yeah,
Speaker 2: I was the University Washington graduate school. I was in
Speaker 2: the land use planning track. I was actually writing my
Speaker 2: thesis on what at the time was a fairly nascent
Speaker 2: subject area, which was green or environmentally conscious golf course
Speaker 2: design and management, which in nineteen ninety three was not
Speaker 2: really a thing. Now it's kind of pro forma. So
Speaker 2: my timing was great. I was super excited. So when
Speaker 2: we were, you know, a year and a half later,
Speaker 2: contemplating Columbia's offer, I was actually a really hard decision
Speaker 2: for me. I was like on a path that I'd
Speaker 2: struggled to get on, really had taken some work, and
Speaker 2: I was ready to go do it. And I just
Speaker 2: kind of eventually the advance was big enough. I basically
Speaker 2: made a very calculated mercenary decision, like I can live
Speaker 2: like a grad student for another two years on this advance,
Speaker 2: and the industry's buzzing, and I think something's going to happen,
Speaker 2: so I guess I'll go for it.
Speaker 1: Okay, the band is over.
Speaker 3: What do you do?
Speaker 2: Well? The band is over. We did the thing with
Speaker 2: sir mix a Lot for like a year and a
Speaker 2: half subset, which I really thought was going to be massive.
Speaker 2: It was so good. Mix a Lot is you gotta
Speaker 2: have him on your show. He is the most fascinating,
Speaker 2: brilliant dude. You know he is. He's a he's so smart.
Speaker 2: And that band was you know, me and Chris and
Speaker 2: Jason Keys drums, bass, guitar, mix and one of his sidekicks,
Speaker 2: out of Sight another rapper, and the recordings are out there,
Speaker 2: they're on YouTube, and it was. The shows we played
Speaker 2: were like, I mean the Presidents at their heyday, Like
Speaker 2: playing at the Crocodile and Seattle was insane. This was
Speaker 2: like an order of magnitude. I have never seen an
Speaker 2: audience like these, you know, maybe the thirty or forty
Speaker 2: shows we played. And Mix a Lot was just a master.
Speaker 2: He could just hold the audience in the palm of
Speaker 2: his hand, just for ninety minutes. But it just didn't
Speaker 2: come together. Whether it was timing with the sound or
Speaker 2: our management situation or whatever, it just never got any
Speaker 2: traction organically. It was just on fire. So we did
Speaker 2: that and then I kind of started getting I talked
Speaker 2: to E Music was interested in me doing a solo
Speaker 2: deal with them. That's when they were just starting out
Speaker 2: as an electronic music label, not really a you know,
Speaker 2: a streaming service. I never forgot to have a meeting
Speaker 2: with Sandy Pearlman, who made some of my favorite records.
Speaker 2: I didn't really I did make some solo recordings that
Speaker 2: I still have, you know, sitting around in a box somewhere.
Speaker 2: It wasn't that excited about it. Spent some time you
Speaker 2: asked if we got screwed, spent some time leading our
Speaker 2: auditing of Sony Music and EMI. That was some work
Speaker 2: for a while, and eventually kind of just realized, wow,
Speaker 2: you know, that was a good chapter in my life.
Speaker 2: But I like, the reason I like to work is
Speaker 2: because I like to learn, So I'm going to keep
Speaker 2: doing stuff. So I eventually sort of gravitated back toward
Speaker 2: this public affairs stuff i'd been doing, which was around
Speaker 2: natural resource issues and civic stuff and social justice, and
Speaker 2: ended up back I'd helped in nineteen ninety three start
Speaker 2: this company called Pyramid Communications, which became a big public
Speaker 2: affairs firm in Seattle, and they're still around. Actually the
Speaker 2: first two employees were me and Nicole Vandenberg, who for many, many,
Speaker 2: many years has run Pearl Jam philanthropic efforts and kind
Speaker 2: of co manage them. And so I went back to
Speaker 2: that company and ended up working there for a few
Speaker 2: years and in the meantime on the side. Because I
Speaker 2: was an artist and I've sort of managed the president's
Speaker 2: stuff and I could put two sentences together, I without
Speaker 2: trying became I guess you'd say, a thought leader around
Speaker 2: digital music because I get invited to be on panels
Speaker 2: or to moderate panels at Digital Music Form West or
Speaker 2: East or any of these, you know, all these events,
Speaker 2: and I'd meet people and get invited to be on
Speaker 2: advisory boards. And I got invited to be on advisory
Speaker 2: board of a venture backed company in Seattle called Melodio,
Speaker 2: who had been one of the first to try to
Speaker 2: do MP three downloads to you know, direct to digital phones.
Speaker 2: And I joined the advisory board, and after a few
Speaker 2: years they kept trying to hire me, and at the
Speaker 2: end of two thousand and six, I jumped ship from
Speaker 2: the public affairs thing, went there, helped run that company
Speaker 2: for like four four and a half years. We helped
Speaker 2: we sold it to Hewlett Packard. I did two years
Speaker 2: at Hewlett Packard, which is a whole episode of The
Speaker 2: Office that is another conversation. And then my kind of
Speaker 2: key hire earnout ended there and I ended up at Amazon.
Speaker 1: How'd you end up at Amazon?
Speaker 2: I ended up at Amazon because an old friend, Chris
Speaker 2: de Vore, who I knew from way back to like
Speaker 2: middle school, as an entrepreneur in Seattle, and his brother Andrew,
Speaker 2: who I also knew from childhood, is senior counsel there.
Speaker 2: And I was having lunch with Chris, and he's like,
Speaker 2: you got the other hiring on the music You got
Speaker 2: to talk to my brother. And so I talked to
Speaker 2: Andrew and he put me into the you know, the
Speaker 2: the grinder of the Amazon hiring process, and you know,
Speaker 2: six months later, I ended up getting hired to do
Speaker 2: a job I didn't really want to do at the time,
Speaker 2: which was I got hired to run the licensing team
Speaker 2: to negotiate with the labels, and did that for about
Speaker 2: ten months. And when I joined, we had no plans
Speaker 2: to launch a streaming service, which was a surprise because
Speaker 2: they don't tell you anything when you're interviewing. But in
Speaker 2: the ensuing six months we wrote you know, some of
Speaker 2: these epic legendary Amazon six pages and got approval to
Speaker 2: launch Prime Music. And then as we're getting ready to
Speaker 2: launch Prime Music, it donned on everybody, oh, we have
Speaker 2: no music programming or editorial function whatsoever. So I sort
Speaker 2: of put my hand up and wrote the job description
Speaker 2: to lead that, and led that for the first few
Speaker 2: years and hired the you know, the initial group of
Speaker 2: music programmers and editorial people. And that was a whole
Speaker 2: other adventure that who you know, who knows my kids
Speaker 2: ask you know, who knows what should I do? I'm like,
Speaker 2: you know, if you told me when I was twenty
Speaker 2: three teaching English that ten years later I'd be selling
Speaker 2: millions of records, and then told me ten years later
Speaker 2: I'd be working for Hewlett Packard, like I wouldn't have
Speaker 2: believed any of it, Like, how the hell did this happen?
Speaker 2: And I'm risk averse. I'm not a risk taker.
Speaker 1: Tell me a little bit more about that.
Speaker 2: I'm a fairly self contained, you know, left brain to
Speaker 2: a fault, kind of hyper rational linear thinker. I'm not
Speaker 2: a look before you leap, and I look back on
Speaker 2: what I did, and I'm like, I have no idea
Speaker 2: how and why I made these choices, but they were
Speaker 2: all deeply considered at the time, and I don't know.
Speaker 2: It's a mystery to me.
Speaker 1: Well, you talk about these old friends, Are you a networker?
Speaker 1: Are you the type of person who keeps contact with
Speaker 1: old friends?
Speaker 2: And the older I get, the more I really just
Speaker 2: try to double down on my half dozen closest friends,
Speaker 2: you know. And those are all from high school, honestly,
Speaker 2: really or before, mostly people that I spent time doing
Speaker 2: stuff in the woods with, you know, skiing, climbing, mountaineering
Speaker 2: and that kind of stuff. Those are still my best friends.
Speaker 1: So how does it end in Amazon?
Speaker 2: It ends at Amazon. I did five years on the
Speaker 2: music team and kind of reached a point where there
Speaker 2: wasn't the right job for me there and they needed
Speaker 2: somebody to do BIZDV on the Echo Alexa team to
Speaker 2: do deals with the outside music services. So the last
Speaker 2: four and a half years, I went to the Alexa
Speaker 2: team and I did deals, you know, with to bring
Speaker 2: Apple Music and Apple Podcasts to Echo Alexa, etc. So
Speaker 2: talking to all those Pandora, the obvious partner Spotify, and
Speaker 2: I did that for four and a half years, and
Speaker 2: the last year I was there, I spent I wrote,
Speaker 2: infinitely rewrote one of these six pages on finding ways
Speaker 2: to monetize advertising revenue from sports broadcasting cast over Alexa
Speaker 2: and kind of after iterating a million times, kind of
Speaker 2: reached a dead end with that in terms of whether
Speaker 2: our team could push it through or not. And at
Speaker 2: that point, I'm fifty seven or whatever, fifty eight, and
Speaker 2: I knew I wasn't gonna work at Amazon past sixty
Speaker 2: at the most. And it was just the right It
Speaker 2: was either leave or go to another part of the company.
Speaker 2: And then you really got to double down for a
Speaker 2: few years to prove yourself again.
Speaker 1: So it's just the right time, Okay, Is that the
Speaker 1: last day job you've had?
Speaker 2: It is the last day job, okay?
Speaker 1: Interacting with people at Amazon, it you essentially worked there
Speaker 1: for ten years, and you were referencing this earlier people
Speaker 1: worked for a couple of years they go to Netflix.
Speaker 1: Whatever you hear that.
Speaker 2: It's a.
Speaker 1: Cutthroat is not the right word, but you know, a
Speaker 1: harryd lifestyle. They're working you, you know all the time.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of pressure, not many human concerns.
Speaker 2: What was your experience, my experience. I loved my experience there.
Speaker 2: I loved you know, it's a culture of writing for
Speaker 2: the most part. Now some of this has changed. When
Speaker 2: I joined, there were eight or ten thousand corporate employees.
Speaker 2: Now they're like one hundred and twenty five thousand, right,
Speaker 2: So I would say the culture is got maybe a
Speaker 2: little bit less rigorous. But when I got there one
Speaker 2: it was kind of an eye opener because the soft
Speaker 2: skills that I have that I have worked for me,
Speaker 2: like being charming and gary less and being social, weren't
Speaker 2: worth shit. It was like, put up a shut up
Speaker 2: and write it down. You know, these six pages you write,
Speaker 2: single space, ten point font, tiny margin, write out what
Speaker 2: you want to do. Fortunately, I like to write. I
Speaker 2: grew up in a family of writers, and so I
Speaker 2: loved that intellectual rigor. I totally thrived on that. Also,
Speaker 2: particularly the first four or five years I was there,
Speaker 2: I did not I would have to say, every single
Speaker 2: person I worked with I felt was smarter than I was.
Speaker 2: And that is fun to work with people where you
Speaker 2: feel like you have to raise your own game every day.
Speaker 2: And that's people three levels below me to Bezos, who
Speaker 2: I only had one business meeting with, and he was
Speaker 2: so fucking smart it was scary.
Speaker 1: You know, Well, since you have this experience and you
Speaker 1: realize he was smart. What was that meeting?
Speaker 2: The meeting was it's the final review before we launched
Speaker 2: Prime Music. A few months before we launched it. It
Speaker 2: was his final sign off, So it was him and
Speaker 2: most of the SVP team and then like maybe five
Speaker 2: of us from the music team. And since I was
Speaker 2: leading music programming, I was there to share our music
Speaker 2: programming strategy. And what I remember from the meeting that
Speaker 2: I can share is, you know, you may have heard
Speaker 2: about these meetings there. They're like grad school seminars. You
Speaker 2: come in the room, it's a very dense document. You
Speaker 2: sit in silence for at least an hour and read
Speaker 2: it and annotate it. And so you do that and
Speaker 2: then you start discussing it and marking it up and
Speaker 2: if there are problems with it, Like I was in
Speaker 2: meetings where people are where the SVP or senior leaders,
Speaker 2: Like on this page, page one, this you know revenue
Speaker 2: number is this, and then you cite the same number
Speaker 2: on page four. It's not a different number. So fucking
Speaker 2: fix that, and then we'll come back and have the meeting,
Speaker 2: because why should I trust anything in this document? Anyway,
Speaker 2: our document was okay within the first five minutes of
Speaker 2: the meeting. You know this how complicated this stuff is,
Speaker 2: like the functionality that you can do in a digital
Speaker 2: service versus the penny rate you're paying, and sort of
Speaker 2: the trade offs there and all the negotiation involved, and
Speaker 2: how complicated it is for me, even when I was
Speaker 2: working in it full time, Like I have to be
Speaker 2: doing that part of the job all day every day
Speaker 2: to stay conversant in all the details. And Bezos is
Speaker 2: not a music guy. He doesn't he's not into listening
Speaker 2: to music. He thinks the music business sucked, or he
Speaker 2: did for a long time when it was a sales
Speaker 2: or an acquisition based business. Within the first five minutes
Speaker 2: of the meeting, he asked this question that was so
Speaker 2: inside baseball based on product functionality versus the rate we
Speaker 2: were paying. I just I was like stupefied. Like my
Speaker 2: jaw dropped. I was just like, how the fuck did
Speaker 2: you do that? This is somebody who doesn't even pay
Speaker 2: attention to the music business. And he went like right
Speaker 2: to the heart of the kind of the nexus of
Speaker 2: where the cost met, what the challenges, what we could
Speaker 2: do in terms of what we delivered to customers. It
Speaker 2: was it was mind blowing. It was like watching It's
Speaker 2: like you're running one hundred meter dash and you're watching
Speaker 2: Carl Lewis or Ussein Bolt next to you. It's just like,
Speaker 2: clearly some people are genetically more gifted in as far
Speaker 2: as intelling.
Speaker 1: Okay, when you work for Amazon, is it a nine
Speaker 1: to five job? Is twenty four to seven job?
Speaker 2: It's twenty four to seven. And that's the fun of it, Like,
Speaker 2: you know, for me work because I've always wanted to
Speaker 2: have jobs. I'm making rabbit ears where I'm into it.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you're not into it and you're not learning,
Speaker 2: I've never really cared about title or career achievement. If
Speaker 2: I'm learning and I believe what I'm doing is sort
Speaker 2: of karmically positive and I feel like I'm reasonably well paid,
Speaker 2: then I'm happy, And oh my god, talk about learning
Speaker 2: and also, I you know, different teams are different. The
Speaker 2: music team has incredible retention at Amazon. Steve Boom is
Speaker 2: an awesome dude. He's a great human being and a
Speaker 2: very strong and powerful business leader, which is not always
Speaker 2: the case. Ryan Reddington, who now mostly runs the business
Speaker 2: now that Steve's been promoted, exact same thing, like the
Speaker 2: most down to earth guy, super smart, super humble, actually
Speaker 2: cares about the people who work on his team. So
Speaker 2: I think the music team at Amazon, in particulars has
Speaker 2: been I know a ton of the people I hired
Speaker 2: ten years ago are still there, which is, you know,
Speaker 2: not the norm.
Speaker 1: So does every musician in Seattle know each other.
Speaker 2: Of a certain generation? For sure? Like my generation? Definitely
Speaker 2: there's I mean, we all, okay.
Speaker 1: Sir, mix A lot stayed in Seattle. Duff McKagan went
Speaker 1: to La Guns n' Roses. How do you end up
Speaker 1: playing with Duff mccig.
Speaker 2: So, Duff and I grew up in adjacent neighborhoods, and
Speaker 2: I met him in seventh grade. And when I went
Speaker 2: to private school, the friends that I had from grade school,
Speaker 2: I went to the big feeder public middle school that
Speaker 2: I would have gone to, which is so good that
Speaker 2: I didn't go there because by seventh grade I would
Speaker 2: have been stealing cars with stuff and the other juvenile
Speaker 2: delinquents there because I was into that. I would have
Speaker 2: been all into it. So he became friends with, you know,
Speaker 2: a bunch of my grade school friends. So I knew
Speaker 2: him in like junior high and high school. He went
Speaker 2: to Roosevelt High School, which is my neighborhood high school,
Speaker 2: and we weren't friends, but you know, everybody knew each other.
Speaker 2: We were at the same high school class. And then
Speaker 2: he and I re met the first time the Presidents
Speaker 2: played a show that wasn't a showcase in LA it
Speaker 2: was in the La Times. It was kind of funny
Speaker 2: because he and I didn't really know each other as kids. Mean,
Speaker 2: we you know, we're at the keegar at little Hurst
Speaker 2: Park together and had mutual friends. But yeah, we're playing
Speaker 2: at the Whiskey and I look up in the balcony,
Speaker 2: you know, in the green rooms up there by the cocony,
Speaker 2: and I'm like, I'm like fuck because he had, you know,
Speaker 2: he'd he bought this house in Seattle, like a half
Speaker 2: block from my mom's house, and I'd seen him when
Speaker 2: he was still drinking heavily and stuff, and I was
Speaker 2: just like, see him come out to his car and stuff.
Speaker 2: I'm like, I don't really need to stop and say hi.
Speaker 2: But this point he's sober. It's nineteen ninety five and
Speaker 2: he's up. I'm like, oh, that's tough. And we finished playing.
Speaker 2: We walk up to the green room door and I
Speaker 2: walk over to Duff. I'm like, hey, duff' stave dietere.
Speaker 2: You know, like, you went to school with my cousin Mark,
Speaker 2: and you're best friends with Brian, you know McCarty who
Speaker 2: was you know, we have all these friends in common.
Speaker 2: He's like, oh, fuck yeah. And he was so funny.
Speaker 2: He's like, you know, he has a period of his
Speaker 2: life where he doesn't remember everything, and I'll never forget
Speaker 2: what he said. He said. I looked at that. I
Speaker 2: saw it in the La Times to Day and I
Speaker 2: saw that you guys were from Seattle and how old
Speaker 2: you are, and I was like, fuck, I must know
Speaker 2: one of those guys. So he and I just kind
Speaker 2: of hit it off. And then in the late nineties
Speaker 2: he was living in Seattle full time for a few years,
Speaker 2: so we had a couple bands together. We had this
Speaker 2: kind of mellow duo The Gentleman, and then he had
Speaker 2: this hard rock band loaded, and I played in that
Speaker 2: band a little bit, and then he, you know, was
Speaker 2: I think it was a benefit for I'm going to
Speaker 2: get this wrong, Randy Castillo, somebody from some eighties metal band,
Speaker 2: and that was when he and Slash and Saurim got
Speaker 2: back together and that led to Velvet Revolver. And he
Speaker 2: hasn't been in Seattle as much since then. I think
Speaker 2: he's around most of the time.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: I haven't seen him much lately.
Speaker 1: So to what degree are you still playing music?
Speaker 2: I'm playing more than ever and totally into it. It
Speaker 2: was for like in the mid two thousands when I
Speaker 2: stopped touring, I was really trying to be a great
Speaker 2: dad and a good provider and a good husband, and
Speaker 2: I just there are only so many hours in the day,
Speaker 2: and I'd still play the guitar all the time. But then, like,
Speaker 2: I don't know, it's a few different things. Maybe eight
Speaker 2: or nine years ago, I got invited to an industry
Speaker 2: thing at a n arm They had like an industry
Speaker 2: legends and rockstar jam thing, you know, at the hotel there,
Speaker 2: and I did that a couple of years I'm like,
Speaker 2: I'm in the industry and I used to be a
Speaker 2: rock star. I should be able to do that. Hey,
Speaker 2: do you guys mind if I join you? And that
Speaker 2: was fun. My kids started playing music in high school.
Speaker 2: One of them, a younger one, Lolo, plays the drums,
Speaker 2: and Una, older one played bass, and they're in the
Speaker 2: jazz band. And we formed a little jazz trio and
Speaker 2: we started playing gigs. We probably played fifty gigs in
Speaker 2: a year and a half before Una graduated from high school.
Speaker 2: And then I just started. I'm in a band, a
Speaker 2: kind of like dad band of friends here in suburban Seattle.
Speaker 2: In another band, Megacat. I haven't been playing with as much,
Speaker 2: but I've got a couple of records out on a
Speaker 2: subpop imprint, and that band's getting a lot of buzz
Speaker 2: right now, so much so that they're so busy I
Speaker 2: can't do all the gigs. It's like weirdo instruments like
Speaker 2: krungbin meets the banana splits or something. I don't know
Speaker 2: how to describe it. As killer in a band Bowie
Speaker 2: Rex and his Boogie Army all late seventies through early
Speaker 2: post punk, which is me and a bunch of other
Speaker 2: Seattle pros. It's me and drummers Mike Musburger who was
Speaker 2: in the Posy and the Fastbacks. Other guitar players Tim
Speaker 2: Degiulio who's in Duff's band right now. Just a killer
Speaker 2: band of local season pros. So I'm playing as many
Speaker 2: gigs as I can play. It's like being a kid
Speaker 2: in a candy store again, just for fun.
Speaker 1: How many gigs?
Speaker 2: Is that? It was too many? Last year I actually
Speaker 2: had to back off. I just backed off on Mega
Speaker 2: Cat a little bit. Last summer. I had two or
Speaker 2: three gigs a week for like three and a half months,
Speaker 2: and it was cutting into my recreation time with Jenna,
Speaker 2: who still has a full, full time gig. So we
Speaker 2: need to be out on our bikes and doing stuff
Speaker 2: out in the woods and running.
Speaker 1: And Okay, I think we're gonna put a bow on
Speaker 1: this chapter. As you said, you know, we could go
Speaker 1: deeper into music, but I think this is a good
Speaker 1: stopping point. We've covered the basics. Dave. I want to
Speaker 1: thank you so much for taking this time to talk
Speaker 1: to my audience.
Speaker 2: As an absolute pleasure. Thank you, Bob. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Till next time. This is Bob left six
Speaker 2: Sh