Speaker 1: Welcome, welcome, welcome back, But Bob left that's podcast. My
Speaker 1: guest today is music manager, film producer, educator Jonathan Taplin,
Speaker 1: who's got a brand new book, The Magic Years. Scenes
Speaker 1: from a Rock and Roll Life. Jonathan. Great to have
Speaker 1: you here. Good to be here, Bob. Now, I notice
Speaker 1: on your website you say John. Are you Johnny? You Jonathan?
Speaker 1: John is fine by the way you're going through life.
Speaker 1: You know, usually when you're a little kid, you're Johnny,
Speaker 1: and then at some point you become Jonathan. So I'm
Speaker 1: just interested what people normally call you. My friends call
Speaker 1: me John, okay John that I will call you John.
Speaker 1: So how does a teenager end up being the road
Speaker 1: manager from major musical acts. I was a fan of
Speaker 1: Bob Dylan and three sixty four UM. In the summer
Speaker 1: of nine, I had graduated from high school and was
Speaker 1: headed to Princeton and I got a b in my
Speaker 1: bonnet that I would go to the Newport Folk Festival.
Speaker 1: And my brother had a friend named Paul Clayton, who
Speaker 1: was a a friend of Bob Dylan's, was an important
Speaker 1: Ethne musicologist, and he got me a backstage pass at Newport,
Speaker 1: and then he introduced me to a band called the
Speaker 1: Jim Question Jug Band. Uh had a singer named Jeff Muldar,
Speaker 1: and they needed a road manager. And their road manager
Speaker 1: their real manager was Albert Grossman, and Albert Grossman happened
Speaker 1: to manage Bob Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary Paul, Butterfield
Speaker 1: Blues Band, Odetta, pretty much all the important people in
Speaker 1: the folkustic business. So they introduced me to Albert. He
Speaker 1: hired me, and then on a whim on a Saturday afternoon,
Speaker 1: Bob Dylan decided that he would play electric music at
Speaker 1: the Newport Folk Festival. And Mulda and I had been
Speaker 1: watching the Butterfield bluespan do a a workshop and Alan Lomax,
Speaker 1: who was a very famous at the musicologist, tried to
Speaker 1: unplug the electricity from the Butterfield Blues Band, and so
Speaker 1: Muldar told this story to all the artists in the
Speaker 1: Grossman circle in the artists tent afterwards, and Dylan, I think,
Speaker 1: just decided on the spur of the moment, well, hell,
Speaker 1: I'll play electric two. And so they quickly threw together
Speaker 1: a band made up of the Butterfield Route Land Rhythm
Speaker 1: Section and Mike Bluefield and brought in Cooper from New
Speaker 1: York and rehearsed for a few minutes, and then on
Speaker 1: Sunday night came out and played and the reaction was explosive,
Speaker 1: to say the least, um the folk fans. Visually, Dylan
Speaker 1: came out in black leather jacket, a bright orange shirt,
Speaker 1: tight pants, English rock and roll boots, and and it
Speaker 1: was not the blue work shirt Bob they had all expected.
Speaker 1: And then they launched into Maggie's farm. And when Maggie's
Speaker 1: Farm was over, it was just like silent. And then
Speaker 1: eventually people started booing and it went downhill from there.
Speaker 1: And uh so, you know, I was witnesses something, and
Speaker 1: I don't think at the time I really realized how
Speaker 1: important it was, what a breakpoint it was in the
Speaker 1: history of rock and roll. All I knew was I
Speaker 1: like the music. Um, I like Bob's direction. I had
Speaker 1: loved like a rolling Stone on the radio. And uh so, eventually,
Speaker 1: over the years I got closer to that as being
Speaker 1: part of the Grossman family, so to speak. So you're
Speaker 1: at this transcendent rock and roll moment, not that you
Speaker 1: were aware that it was so important. How do you
Speaker 1: end up becoming a road manager Albert Grossman seemed to
Speaker 1: like to having college kids be the road managers or
Speaker 1: or college educated man. John Cook, who was Janice's road manager,
Speaker 1: had graduated from Harvard, you know, a son of Alistair Cook. Uh,
Speaker 1: I don't know. He liked people with a certain way
Speaker 1: of acting, and so uh. I worked for the Question
Speaker 1: Jug band for a year before you get there. Before
Speaker 1: you get there, but you were literally just starting college.
Speaker 1: Was there anybody else in your position? I was. I
Speaker 1: would go on the weekends to do concerts because that's
Speaker 1: the way the concert scene was working. Yeah. I guess
Speaker 1: what I'm saying is for those of us who were fans,
Speaker 1: it seems kind of amazing that someone could walk off
Speaker 1: the street less than twenty years old suddenly have this
Speaker 1: amazing job. And the other thing is, you know you
Speaker 1: in your personality In your book, you were saying you
Speaker 1: were somewhat alienated individual. But I certainly know what it
Speaker 1: takes to be a movie producer. One has to ask
Speaker 1: to what degree you put yourself in the mix and
Speaker 1: asked for that job. Well, I I did ask for
Speaker 1: the job. I wanted. I want very much to be
Speaker 1: part of that world. I didn't know that I could
Speaker 1: a living out of it, but I wanted desperately to
Speaker 1: be I mean, Dylan was to me the most important
Speaker 1: star in the world. Uh he was. He defined what
Speaker 1: a great artist was to me, and I wanted to
Speaker 1: be close to that. It took me a few years
Speaker 1: to get there. I mean, I had to go through
Speaker 1: other bands. I worked for Question, and then I worked
Speaker 1: for Judy Collins, and then I did a little work
Speaker 1: for Jennis Choplin. And then eventually the band which had
Speaker 1: been the Hawks became a group, and then I became
Speaker 1: their tour manager. And then eventually Bob decided and he
Speaker 1: wanted to go out and start playing again, and I
Speaker 1: took them to the Isle of Wight, and so, I
Speaker 1: mean it was a progression. It wasn't immediate, but I
Speaker 1: I made a living all through college to working on
Speaker 1: the weekends, and then once I graduated. Literally, you're there
Speaker 1: at the Newport Folks Festival, your backstage of the backstage pass.
Speaker 1: How do you literally get the job road managing Jim Question?
Speaker 1: Do you send a letter? Do you call Albert? Does
Speaker 1: he tap you? What happens? I a friend of theirs,
Speaker 1: said Paul Clayton. He said, this is John Taplin he's
Speaker 1: a the brother one of my best friends, Randy Taplin.
Speaker 1: He's a good guy. And and Jeff Muldart said, well,
Speaker 1: we need somebody slept this equipment around all weekend, and
Speaker 1: I said, I'll do it. And then so then Muldar
Speaker 1: took me over to meet Albert and I think I
Speaker 1: probably got paid hundred dollars for the weekend. You know,
Speaker 1: it wasn't big money, and that was it. And then
Speaker 1: once that was over, then I was inside the Grossman sir, yeah,
Speaker 1: you've passed the test. So Jonathan Jim Queskin was famously
Speaker 1: a member of the Mel Lineman family. Do you have
Speaker 1: any experience with that? Only peripherally, I mean, obviously the
Speaker 1: mail Lineman kind of cooperative in Roxbury went a little
Speaker 1: crazy start using LC and uh so Mel had dropped
Speaker 1: out of the band by the time I was starting
Speaker 1: to work with them. He was not involved in the
Speaker 1: Question Jug band. He had become a a guru. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you do the Question Jug band. Your next act
Speaker 1: is Judy Collins. Okay, at the time she was a
Speaker 1: quite admired lady. What was it like being a young
Speaker 1: man working with Judy Collins? Well, she had a huge
Speaker 1: fan base. You know, she had done Sue's and that
Speaker 1: Leonard Cohen song and it had been very popular. Um,
Speaker 1: we would play you know, three thousand seats Hall's college concerts,
Speaker 1: things like that. She had a very small group. She
Speaker 1: had a bass player, Bill Lee, who was Spike Lee's father,
Speaker 1: and a piano player named Paul Harris. And you know,
Speaker 1: we just take a plane on Thursday night, get to
Speaker 1: a college town, play a college concert on Friday, player
Speaker 1: another one on Saturday, and come on on Sunday. So
Speaker 1: how close did you get to Judy Collins herself? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean as close as anybody could get. I mean
Speaker 1: she she had a very personal life. She was having
Speaker 1: a romance with Steven Stills at the time. Uh. We
Speaker 1: traveled all over the country for a year and a half.
Speaker 1: I mean we had some good times and we had
Speaker 1: some bad times. Okay, how do you manage being a
Speaker 1: tour manager while you're going to Princeton at the same time. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know, Bob, I don't know how old you are,
Speaker 1: But in in the sixties you could skip a lot
Speaker 1: of classes and still get a good grade if you
Speaker 1: could write a good paper. Um, So I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't I my roommates used to think I didn't take
Speaker 1: my college life very seriously. But I did graduate and
Speaker 1: get my degree, and so that's that's what matters. And
Speaker 1: I ran in some good professors, and so I mean
Speaker 1: it was a very loose time. Okay. So if I
Speaker 1: talked to the other students at Princeton at the time,
Speaker 1: would they say, oh, yeah, that's the enigma, that guy's
Speaker 1: really never around doing his own thing. That would be true. Okay.
Speaker 1: So what was Albert rousemidlike? He was amazing. I mean,
Speaker 1: for a lot of people were kind of intimidated by him.
Speaker 1: I somehow got on his good side right off the bat. Uh.
Speaker 1: He would He had a very different view from most managers,
Speaker 1: which was that you actually shouldn't do a lot of
Speaker 1: public appearances. In other words, he turned down almost every
Speaker 1: television show appearance that was offered to Bob Dylan. Uh.
Speaker 1: He turned down everything for the band until finally Ed
Speaker 1: Sullivan offered them to come on and then we took that,
Speaker 1: you know. So, I mean Albert's thought was most artists
Speaker 1: are out there too much and and you gotta have
Speaker 1: a little mystery to you. And the second thing about
Speaker 1: Albert was he believed that if if if you had
Speaker 1: signed a bad record contract when you were really young
Speaker 1: and somehow now you've gotten really good, then he should
Speaker 1: be able to go in and completely renegotiate that contract
Speaker 1: with the record company. And he did that regularly. Used
Speaker 1: to drive Moaston or you know Oskar men and crazy,
Speaker 1: but he did it all the time. So what was
Speaker 1: his negotiating style. We'll go on strike, we just won't
Speaker 1: show up at the studio. You may have him my
Speaker 1: artists with a really bad royalty rate, but you're not
Speaker 1: gonna have any output. So what good is it doing you?
Speaker 1: And was he a raver or he was he quiet
Speaker 1: and intense? No, he could. He could scream at people. Uh,
Speaker 1: if he got really angry, he would. He could be
Speaker 1: very intimidated. I'd see him throw people out of a room,
Speaker 1: you know. So you know he's he's unfortunately no longer
Speaker 1: with us, and he has a certain reputation. Would you
Speaker 1: consider him, based on your experience, to be a great manager. Yes,
Speaker 1: I'd consider him to me maybe the greatest manager. And
Speaker 1: if you can amplify that a little bit, well, I
Speaker 1: think even David Geffen would probably tell you that he
Speaker 1: learned an awful lot from Albert Grossman. Uh And you know,
Speaker 1: people could argue that maybe David Geffen was the best
Speaker 1: manager for a while. Uh So, I mean he was
Speaker 1: incredibly protective of his artists, and the artist felt that
Speaker 1: protection and in that sense, and he never made you
Speaker 1: do stupid stuff, you know, I mean, never me anybody,
Speaker 1: uh dress a certain way or anything. I mean you
Speaker 1: think of all the stories of Marvin Gay rebelling against
Speaker 1: Motown because they wanted him to dress in certain costumes
Speaker 1: and stuff like that and he didn't want to do it.
Speaker 1: Albert never got into that. Okay. When Albert get involved
Speaker 1: in the music, were only the business, only the business.
Speaker 1: He felt that the artist's job was make the music
Speaker 1: and decide what he wanted to do, and his job
Speaker 1: was just to protect the artists and make sure that
Speaker 1: he got treated fairly. Now, you were in the belly
Speaker 1: of the beast, and then Dylan Jettison, Albert Todd Rundwyn
Speaker 1: did too. What's your viewpoint on those situations? Well, Bob
Speaker 1: leaving Albert had more to deal with the dispute over publishing.
Speaker 1: Albert from the beginning it had owned half of Bob's publishing,
Speaker 1: and Bob didn't think that was fair, and he thought
Speaker 1: he was paying Albert too much money. And Albert, though
Speaker 1: willing to renegotiate any artists contract for the record company,
Speaker 1: was not willing to renegotiate his publishing contract with Bob,
Speaker 1: and so it came to a split. Uh. But then
Speaker 1: almost eight months after that, Jannis Joplin died accidentally, UH,
Speaker 1: of an overdose. And Albert had really invested a lot
Speaker 1: of emotion, heart love into Janis's career, and that really
Speaker 1: killed him. And you know, I just watched him pull back.
Speaker 1: He stopped going into Manhattan, UH, stopped going into the
Speaker 1: office and and just spent all his time in Woodstock.
Speaker 1: Um started building a restaurant called the Bear and of
Speaker 1: recording studio, and it was like, I don't have anything
Speaker 1: to do with this business. Is is too cruel. And
Speaker 1: yet you know, he started spending more time on his
Speaker 1: restaurant than he did on the music business. Okay, So
Speaker 1: when you would be on the road with his acts,
Speaker 1: would you ever get a call from him about this
Speaker 1: and that? Or you were pretty much on your own.
Speaker 1: I was on my own until a critical moment. For instance,
Speaker 1: I mean the story I tell him the book about
Speaker 1: the band's debut at winter Land, right, so that would
Speaker 1: be a moment where Albert would come out on the
Speaker 1: road to be there. And so when Robbie Robertson got
Speaker 1: a hundred and re fever and couldn't keep anything in
Speaker 1: his stomach the day before we were to have our
Speaker 1: debut at winter Land, Albert was there, and Albert was
Speaker 1: the one said we're not going to cancel, and Bill
Speaker 1: Graham was saying, well, I'll get a hypotensis, and so
Speaker 1: they they brought in a hypnotsus and he put Robbie
Speaker 1: in a trance and he told him your stomach will
Speaker 1: feel as calm as a mountain lake, and your head
Speaker 1: will feel like the north wind is blowing on, and
Speaker 1: your legs will feel like springs. And he brought him
Speaker 1: out of the trance and he said, whenever you hear
Speaker 1: the word grow, all those feelings will expand. And so
Speaker 1: Robbie looked around and he felt his head and he
Speaker 1: didn't feel feverish. And Levan said, let's go play some
Speaker 1: rock and roll, and so literally the opening act had
Speaker 1: already gone off the stage, and we got in a
Speaker 1: car and police escort to Winterland got on, played the
Speaker 1: gig and when Robbie came off, he said to Richard Manuel,
Speaker 1: the piano player who the hyperness side, put him right
Speaker 1: behind the speakers, so he had a sightline to Robbie,
Speaker 1: but he was much closer to Richard Manuel. And Robbie
Speaker 1: said to Richard, wasn't that weird? Between every song this
Speaker 1: guy was yelling grow? And of course Richard said, well,
Speaker 1: I never heard a word. So somehow they gotten on
Speaker 1: a frequency together. Okay, so eventually you graduate from Princeton,
Speaker 1: and granted it's a few decades back, but don't you
Speaker 1: say to yourself, well, now it's really my life that
Speaker 1: I want to, you know, set the world on fire.
Speaker 1: You don't really want to be a road manager at
Speaker 1: that point? What's going through your head? No, I was
Speaker 1: having too much fun. I was in Woodstock in nine
Speaker 1: when I grab do it. It was by this time
Speaker 1: I was getting paid a decent amount of money. I
Speaker 1: had a crew of five people that I was managing.
Speaker 1: I had a bunch of musicians in the band that
Speaker 1: I loved and who were making extraordinary music every night.
Speaker 1: And we're on the road a lot. In six nine
Speaker 1: we went to the Woodstock Festival. We went to the
Speaker 1: Isle of Wight with Bob Dylan. I mean, what's not
Speaker 1: to like? Meet the Beatles, you know? I mean? Now,
Speaker 1: I stayed with it for two or three years, and
Speaker 1: then eventually, Uh, most of the artists I cared about
Speaker 1: after I produced the contract for Bangladesh, most of them
Speaker 1: had stopped working, and so I went out to California
Speaker 1: and started making movies and that was different. Okay, let's
Speaker 1: go back to the musical era. How do you end
Speaker 1: up being involved with the band? So? Uh, I was producing.
Speaker 1: I was working for Judy Collins, and Harold Levinthal, who
Speaker 1: was another important manager at that time, decided to stage
Speaker 1: a memorial concert for Woody Guthrie, who had finally died
Speaker 1: after many years of of being in hunting, having hunting
Speaker 1: in his career. And so Harold got Bob and leave
Speaker 1: On and the Hawks as they were known to be
Speaker 1: part of that concert. And Judy was part of the concert.
Speaker 1: And so I was the stage manager for that. And
Speaker 1: so the mysterious Bob Dylan and the Hawks, who had
Speaker 1: been out of sight of everybody since Bob had had
Speaker 1: an accident in the nine six, show up in suits
Speaker 1: with beards and hats and play three amazing what he
Speaker 1: got three songs in this concert. And when it was
Speaker 1: all over, Robbie said to me, because Albert had introduced
Speaker 1: me to Robbie when backstage and told me that I
Speaker 1: had worked for Question and everything, and Robbie said, we're
Speaker 1: thinking of recording our own album and going on the road.
Speaker 1: Would you like to be our tour manager? And I said,
Speaker 1: of course. And so they went off and did music
Speaker 1: from Big Pink. But then Rick Danko drove his car
Speaker 1: off the road into a ditch and broke his neck,
Speaker 1: and so they didn't go out on the road um
Speaker 1: after Big Pink, and that kind of increased their aura.
Speaker 1: They were like, mysterious, who are these people? Nobody's ever
Speaker 1: seen them on stage? And then I took them out
Speaker 1: to California to do the second album at Sammy Davis
Speaker 1: Junior's house, and then after that we did Winner Land
Speaker 1: and then then we were on the road for two years. Okay,
Speaker 1: when they were doing the basement tapes, when they were
Speaker 1: doing the first album, were you around? Are you on
Speaker 1: the road with other people? I was on the road
Speaker 1: with Judy Collins at that time. Okay, sent you that
Speaker 1: personal experience with these people and the people alive, tending
Speaker 1: not to talk, and everybody's dead. Hey, how serious was
Speaker 1: Bob Dylan's motorcycle accident? It was serious. I don't think
Speaker 1: it was. I don't think he he almost killed himself,
Speaker 1: but he hurt himself badly. And you know, honestly, the
Speaker 1: sixties six tour it was pretty crazy in terms of
Speaker 1: that same kind of angry booing and all that nonsense
Speaker 1: that was going on. Uh, and Bob was probably taking
Speaker 1: a fair amount of and fetlemen and uh, I mean
Speaker 1: he told Robert Shelton, the New York Times reporter after
Speaker 1: the accident, that he'd been up for three days when
Speaker 1: he had the accident. So that tells you something. Um,
Speaker 1: So I think he needed to stop. And if that
Speaker 1: was the Almighty telling him watch yourself, maybe that was it.
Speaker 1: But he certainly did slow down, and and then he
Speaker 1: had three kids and four years and started painting and
Speaker 1: then started slowly getting back to making music with the
Speaker 1: band and in Big Pink in the Basement tapes. Okay,
Speaker 1: he's famous for obfiscating tall tales, even the movie about
Speaker 1: the Rolling Thunder review even at Sharon Stone in it.
Speaker 1: So one on one, what was what has been your
Speaker 1: experience with him he was great. I mean I was
Speaker 1: not around on the sixty six tour, which was evidently
Speaker 1: very stressful, so my experiences with him were great. He
Speaker 1: would come out with the band in the summer of
Speaker 1: sixty nine just as a secret special guest artists a
Speaker 1: lot of the time, and so he was very low
Speaker 1: key at that point. Um when we went to the
Speaker 1: Isle of Wight, he was all business. He wanted to
Speaker 1: he wanted to make a great impression. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think the last time he had been in England, uh,
Speaker 1: he had been at Albert Hall and there had been
Speaker 1: a lot of booing, and so he wanted the show
Speaker 1: to be great. And of course, as I say in
Speaker 1: the book, you know, we rented a house on the
Speaker 1: Isle of Wight and set up a rehearsal studio, and
Speaker 1: the night before the gig, the Beatles showed up in
Speaker 1: a helicopter. No, no Paul, but but John, George and
Speaker 1: Ringo and their wives and but instead of you know, jamming,
Speaker 1: Bob want to rehearse and the Beatles hung in there
Speaker 1: and then then eventually everybody started playing you know, rockabilly,
Speaker 1: which was the kind of common genre that leave On
Speaker 1: and John Lennon both knew were you pinching yourself or
Speaker 1: who you ja did at that? I was pinching myself.
Speaker 1: My other one of my other roadies said, oh my god,
Speaker 1: if if we'd had a recorder going, that would have
Speaker 1: been historic. Course, it would have changed it too, if
Speaker 1: we'd had a recorder going, of course. So I mean
Speaker 1: the people I know who work with Bob Dylan today,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of levels of interference in between them
Speaker 1: and Bob. And Bob is uh, let's say, not nonverbal,
Speaker 1: but uh doesn't utter a lot of words. So was
Speaker 1: that your experience with him or was it more of
Speaker 1: a friend experience? No? He he was fairly quiet. He
Speaker 1: doesn't talk a lot. Um. I mean I had a
Speaker 1: few kind of just fun evenings in Woodstock of playing music.
Speaker 1: There was always interesting, um you know what's sucking before
Speaker 1: the Woodstock Festival was very kind of low key. Nobody
Speaker 1: really knew about it and and would so there were
Speaker 1: but A. Grossman had a lot of his musicians living there.
Speaker 1: The jug band was living there, The Butterfield Blues Band
Speaker 1: was living there. Janice was spending a lot of time there.
Speaker 1: The band was there, Bob was there, Peter Yarrow was there.
Speaker 1: I mean it was. It was like a music town,
Speaker 1: but it was a very low key music town. So
Speaker 1: there was a kind of nice late night play, some
Speaker 1: acoustic music stuff that went on, and Bob was very
Speaker 1: good at that. He knew a lot of old songs. Okay,
Speaker 1: now you're working with the band to what did we
Speaker 1: are you if at all involved in the creative level?
Speaker 1: I was not. I was involved in the creative level
Speaker 1: in the sense of when an album was on, I
Speaker 1: helped Robbie do the album covers. I'm a big photography
Speaker 1: collector and so I spent a lot of time on
Speaker 1: trying to find new photographers and so that was part
Speaker 1: of my job. But really my job was to make
Speaker 1: sure that the tours were booked and that that the
Speaker 1: the tours went off. Well, you know, Rick Danko had
Speaker 1: a written on the back of one of his road cases,
Speaker 1: don't bring the entertainer down, and and that's the key.
Speaker 1: You know, the road crew has to make it as
Speaker 1: easy for the musicians to do what they do as possible. Okay,
Speaker 1: we look at the band's career, Uh, first album amazing,
Speaker 1: I believe the second album is even better. Third album
Speaker 1: really good. And then it starts to go downhill, and
Speaker 1: then the band ultimately dissolved. Why do you think that
Speaker 1: they couldn't sustain the mojo? Unfortunately drugs, I mean, uh,
Speaker 1: Richard was a big drinker, and it got worse. He
Speaker 1: became a day drinker. Rick was. There was no white
Speaker 1: powder that you could put in front of him that
Speaker 1: he wouldn't consume as much as he could. And leave On,
Speaker 1: you know, took a lot of valium and eventually started
Speaker 1: playing with arolin. And it was sad, you know it
Speaker 1: just but this is a story of a lot of bands,
Speaker 1: you know. Okay, So there are only two members alive today,
Speaker 1: Robbie and Garth, and leave On ends up beating cancer.
Speaker 1: He writes a book He has conscience at a barn
Speaker 1: in Woodstock, such that the public tends to be in
Speaker 1: one camp or another, and a lot of people are
Speaker 1: anti Robbie Robertson for no other reason. He didn't give
Speaker 1: credit to the others for the songs. What's your take
Speaker 1: on this? Well, I watched Robbie get up at h
Speaker 1: into his studio by nine o'clock every morning. He had
Speaker 1: a piano and a guitar, and he wrote, you know,
Speaker 1: For the first album, he wrote all but four songs.
Speaker 1: The second album he wrote all but three songs. By
Speaker 1: the third album he was writing them all. And quite honestly,
Speaker 1: by the third album, uh, it was hard to get
Speaker 1: leave on out of bed before you know, two in
Speaker 1: the afternoon. N Uh. The idea that Robbie didn't bring
Speaker 1: these songs into the studio fully baked all the lyrics,
Speaker 1: all the melody. Oh yes, maybe Levin would add a
Speaker 1: little bit of different drum feel to it, but that's
Speaker 1: not enough to get a song credit. I mean, I, Bob,
Speaker 1: I don't know about you, but I don't think if
Speaker 1: you had said in nineteen nine the only people who
Speaker 1: will make money in the music industry and the year
Speaker 1: two thousand two will be songwriters, that would not a
Speaker 1: bet you would have made. The musicians were getting larger
Speaker 1: royalty than the songwriters. But what happened was that as
Speaker 1: Napster and the other digital destructive forces came in, as
Speaker 1: CAP and b m I kept collecting money for songwriters.
Speaker 1: You know, whether it was at the gap store or
Speaker 1: the local bar. They made sure the songwriter kept getting
Speaker 1: his money. Whereas if you were going to replace your
Speaker 1: whole record collection as you did in the late eighties
Speaker 1: with c d s. By two thousand, well you didn't
Speaker 1: need to do that. You just go on Napster or
Speaker 1: some other place and get it for free. And so
Speaker 1: the record royalties for a group like the band just
Speaker 1: came to a crashing halt. I mean they had been
Speaker 1: even if they had stopped recording in seventy seven. They
Speaker 1: made good money in the eighties, and they made good
Speaker 1: money in the early nineties too, because everyone kept getting
Speaker 1: rid of their LPs and getting c ds. But that
Speaker 1: came to an end. And then so leave On was
Speaker 1: piste off. And I don't blame him. He was out
Speaker 1: of money. He he didn't have enough money to pay
Speaker 1: for his cancer treatments, and and Robbie was still making
Speaker 1: money as a songwriter. But this was not something that
Speaker 1: Levan would say in ninety nine, Hey give me part
Speaker 1: of that song credit. I mean, when he did do
Speaker 1: something extraordinary like life is a Carnival, Robbie gave him
Speaker 1: a songwriting credit. But this is hindsight. So when you're
Speaker 1: working with the band, how much are they getting a night? Um,
Speaker 1: thirty thousand maybe right. That's what people don't realize, and
Speaker 1: that the value of ticket tells, even with inflation, have
Speaker 1: gone way up. Now. Your book is really unique rock
Speaker 1: book in that most books are just a recitation of
Speaker 1: the history. You put a lot of philosophy, You quote
Speaker 1: famous thinkers evidencing your Princeton education. Was that conscious? Did
Speaker 1: you set? I was saying, this is the book I
Speaker 1: want to write. Yeah, I mean, I didn't want to
Speaker 1: be a rock memoir. This is a book about this
Speaker 1: period of time that I was lucky enough to be
Speaker 1: part of. And what is the meaning of it? What?
Speaker 1: What you know? There's a quote in there from Peter Townsend,
Speaker 1: what did rock music start? That it didn't finish? You know? Uh?
Speaker 1: And to me, the role of the artists in society
Speaker 1: is very important. I I think if I think about
Speaker 1: the earl the sixties, the music that Dylan was making
Speaker 1: and others were making was very hopeful and aspirational. The
Speaker 1: times they are a change in we shall overcome, and
Speaker 1: that sense of hope and of lifting people up is
Speaker 1: something that, at least for the last few years, I
Speaker 1: think has been missing. I find a lot of the
Speaker 1: popular culture today being very neholistic and dystopian. If I
Speaker 1: if I turn on the TV. Ever since nine eleven.
Speaker 1: What have I seen, you know, the Wires, Sopranos, succession breaking,
Speaker 1: bad mad men. They are all these horrible people. I mean,
Speaker 1: the heroes are all bad people who screw up, and
Speaker 1: that's who you're rooting for, and I think that has
Speaker 1: an effect on society, and so I I felt I
Speaker 1: wanted to write about that in the same way that
Speaker 1: the last book I wrote about was how maybe all
Speaker 1: this wonderfulness of the Internet isn't everything that's cracked up
Speaker 1: to be okay? Which came first, though those TV shows
Speaker 1: are their reflection of what was going on. I think
Speaker 1: that's one of the hardest questions to ask. I mean, obviously,
Speaker 1: the Wire started being broadcasts, you know, nine months after
Speaker 1: nine eleven, so one could say that political geopolitical things
Speaker 1: put a moody air. Filmar movies of the early fifties
Speaker 1: came a few years after we dropped an atomic bomb
Speaker 1: on Hiroshima. I mean, you know, Norman Mailer made the
Speaker 1: point that that that had a lot to do with
Speaker 1: what happened to the culture. So, I mean, it's hard
Speaker 1: to tell. But now, after all, we're twenty years, thirty
Speaker 1: years past that we ought to be able to get
Speaker 1: out of that whole that we put ourselves in emotionally. Okay,
Speaker 1: now you grew up an era, and then your book
Speaker 1: is about the sixties when music literally drove the culture.
Speaker 1: If you wanted to know what was going on, you
Speaker 1: listen to a record. You just spoke of television. Everyone
Speaker 1: agrees we're in the heyday of television. Certainly, now there
Speaker 1: are many outlets to exhibit your work, but even before
Speaker 1: that twenty years ago, Why what's your view on music?
Speaker 1: And I certainly don't believe it drives the culture. Do
Speaker 1: you believe it does? And why doesn't it or why
Speaker 1: does it? According to your uh feelings? I don't think
Speaker 1: it drives the culture anymore. I mean, think about what
Speaker 1: was happening this summer, last summer with Black Lives Matter,
Speaker 1: and then into the fall into try to get people
Speaker 1: to vote. Who were the culture heroes that were driving
Speaker 1: that dialogue. It was Lebron James, it was basketball players.
Speaker 1: It was not Jay z. He was too busy negotiating
Speaker 1: a contract to sell his champagne company. So I mean,
Speaker 1: I think the culture, the artists, especially the musical artists,
Speaker 1: ought to try and take it back. And you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that there aren't a lot. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think Kendrick Lamar is doing incredible stuff. I think
Speaker 1: Lizzo is a real talent of you know, Rhiannion Kittens.
Speaker 1: When I go down to the I'm on the board
Speaker 1: of the America on a music association. When I go
Speaker 1: down to americani Fests in Nashville in September, there's always
Speaker 1: wonderful new work that just thrills me, Brandy Carlile, all
Speaker 1: sorts of people. So it's not like there isn't good music,
Speaker 1: but it's not essential to the culture the way it
Speaker 1: was in n Now. I attribute this to income inequality.
Speaker 1: You certainly lived through the era where there was a
Speaker 1: dominant middle class. Starting in the eighties, uh, certainly, with
Speaker 1: Reagan lowering taxes, etcetera, we start to get income inequality
Speaker 1: such that if you went to Princeton today and you
Speaker 1: told your parents, oh, I'm gonna graduate from Princeton and
Speaker 1: be a music road manager, they'd flip out. People who
Speaker 1: go to Ivy League colleges, people who are educated have
Speaker 1: a better sense of what's going on than a lot
Speaker 1: of the prognosticators. They realize life is hard. They want
Speaker 1: to get on the train to their destination right away.
Speaker 1: They don't want to left but be left behind. So
Speaker 1: where is In the sixties you had middle class people
Speaker 1: making music the example I always use Jefferson Airplane up
Speaker 1: against the wall, motherfucker. Today it's traditionally lower classes who
Speaker 1: will do what anybody tells them to do. We talk
Speaker 1: about commerciality, etcetera. You have a take on that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I do. I think that the ability of somebody to
Speaker 1: go get a college education and then leave it and
Speaker 1: take a chance on being a musician or being a
Speaker 1: screenwriter or being a film director or something is still important.
Speaker 1: If if universities are just a big funnel to push
Speaker 1: you into Mackenzie or Golden and Sacks or Procter and Gamble. Uh, Look,
Speaker 1: there's plenty of people to fill those jobs. But I'm
Speaker 1: still hoping that young people who have dreams can take
Speaker 1: a chance and say, I don't know if my Princeton
Speaker 1: education is going to do anything to help me write
Speaker 1: a screenplay, but I'm going to take a chance at
Speaker 1: doing that, even though I may completely fall on my
Speaker 1: butt and have to go get a law degree or
Speaker 1: something like my father wants me to do. Well, I
Speaker 1: find the problem is you'll get I'll get email for
Speaker 1: people said, I'm gonna take two years off to try
Speaker 1: to be a rock star. Otherwise I'm gonna go to
Speaker 1: graduate school. Whereas in the old days, first of all,
Speaker 1: you could live on minimum wage. Not well, but you
Speaker 1: could live. People were in for the long haul. But
Speaker 1: switching gears, Uh, you got a gig teaching at usc
Speaker 1: and you became a expert on digital disruption. How did
Speaker 1: you get the gig? What did you teach? How did
Speaker 1: that all come together? I had started in a company
Speaker 1: called Entertainer, which was the first streaming video on demand service,
Speaker 1: and we got financing from Microsoft and Sony and Intel
Speaker 1: and a bunch of Silicon Valley companies, and we built
Speaker 1: a pretty good product, and we we went out and
Speaker 1: we had licensed because I had been in the movie
Speaker 1: business for twenty years. We went out licensed content from
Speaker 1: Warner Brothers and Sony and Universal and Paramount, and so
Speaker 1: we had a lot of movies on the service. And
Speaker 1: then in two thousand and two, the major's studios decided
Speaker 1: to form their own cartel UH called movie Link, which
Speaker 1: would do exactly what we were doing. And of course
Speaker 1: this was all put forth by Sony which was a
Speaker 1: shareholder of our company and had been uh exposed at
Speaker 1: the board level to everything that we were doing. And
Speaker 1: the next thing I knew, all the major studios stop
Speaker 1: licensing US content. So we had to shut down Entertainer
Speaker 1: and I sued all the major studios in federal anti
Speaker 1: trust court. So need let's say I was not going
Speaker 1: to go back to being a movie producer, and the
Speaker 1: dean of the Annenberg School at uh USC said, well, look,
Speaker 1: I don't care if you're suing all the major studios.
Speaker 1: Why don't you come and teach. You have all this
Speaker 1: knowledge about what the real entertainment economy is about, and
Speaker 1: what the convergence of entertainment and the digital world is about.
Speaker 1: Why don't you come and teach. So I said great,
Speaker 1: because I couldn't be a movie producer. Then three years
Speaker 1: later we won the anti trust suit. Well, I mean
Speaker 1: they settled out of court just before we went to court,
Speaker 1: so then I could afford to be a movie I
Speaker 1: mean a professor. And then I just kept teaching and
Speaker 1: then eventually started the Annaburg Innovation Lab at at Annaburg,
Speaker 1: and ironically, some of the very companies that I had
Speaker 1: sued became sponsors of the Innovation Lab, So that was
Speaker 1: an interesting twist. What do you think about digital disruption today? Well,
Speaker 1: let's take off Facebook and social media. That's all a
Speaker 1: separate topic. But in terms of traditional entertainment movies, music, etcetera. Today,
Speaker 1: what's your take, Well, let's separate the music business from
Speaker 1: the movie business, because I think they're two totally separate things.
Speaker 1: So the music business to me, and I know you
Speaker 1: differ because I read your column religiously, I think that
Speaker 1: YouTube is still a real problem because I think the
Speaker 1: whole key is if the music business is really going
Speaker 1: to become as successful as it could be, more people
Speaker 1: have to be subscribers to premium streaming services. Uh so
Speaker 1: the premium Spotify and Apple Music like that, because those
Speaker 1: pay a decent per stream payment to artists. But whenever
Speaker 1: YouTube puts and YouTube of course claims he doesn't put
Speaker 1: it on, it says it's users put it on. Puts
Speaker 1: a brand new song on YouTube for free, it's it's
Speaker 1: eliminates the need for somebody to go and pay for
Speaker 1: it through a premiums for service. So I think it
Speaker 1: undercuts the whole streaming economy. And because YouTube has this
Speaker 1: safe harbor. So you can never sue YouTube. You can
Speaker 1: file a takedown notice and they'll take down the song,
Speaker 1: and long behold, it goes up the next day from
Speaker 1: some other user. So it's like a game of whack
Speaker 1: the mole. So you can never win against YouTube. And
Speaker 1: it's let's put aside that it's also an extraordinarily destructive
Speaker 1: force in the terms of all the anti vaccine propaganda
Speaker 1: that's on YouTube, all the other nonsense that's on YouTube. Um,
Speaker 1: so that's the music business problem. Well, let's stay with
Speaker 1: the music business for a second. One we do know
Speaker 1: is that YouTube does pay. So there are a few
Speaker 1: people who still want their stuff taken down, but they
Speaker 1: do pay. The argument seems to be how much they
Speaker 1: should pay. Let's also look at Spotify. Spotify has a
Speaker 1: free tier, and as you mentioned earlier reference it pays less.
Speaker 1: If you could snap your fingers, what would be the solution. Well,
Speaker 1: I would like to see the free tiers go away.
Speaker 1: And and by the way, YouTube pays in the sense
Speaker 1: that it pays some advertising revenue, and it's it's essentially
Speaker 1: a gun to the head of every music business executive.
Speaker 1: You know, if you don't want your tune on here.
Speaker 1: It's gonna get on here anyway, so why don't you
Speaker 1: take some advertising revenue? And the payments of YouTube purse
Speaker 1: stream are way below even the payments of Spotify is
Speaker 1: free tier. So I mean, look, I would like The
Speaker 1: second thing I would like to do is see new
Speaker 1: work go on the premium serve us is for a
Speaker 1: certain period of time and then go onto the free tier,
Speaker 1: and that might induce more people to subscribe to the
Speaker 1: premium services. Okay, a couple of things. So if we
Speaker 1: look at your perfect world, unless you pay, you don't
Speaker 1: have access. So the world where everybody can has access
Speaker 1: to everything, now you have to pay. Developing acts might
Speaker 1: say that makes it different, more difficult for us to
Speaker 1: be get known. Philiping and acts could always put their
Speaker 1: stuff up on SoundCloud if they want to. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's not like there isn't ways to get your music
Speaker 1: out for free to people if you want to. But
Speaker 1: if you don't want to, you shouldn't have to. And
Speaker 1: but today, I mean it's it's like I don't really
Speaker 1: have a choice because it's gonna go up on YouTube
Speaker 1: whether I want to or not. And so you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's like an old mafia routine. Okay, the only
Speaker 1: thing I'll say about, uh, you know, behind the paywall
Speaker 1: for a first couple of weeks. Uh, we tried that
Speaker 1: and that drove piracy. But let's just leave that at that.
Speaker 1: Now you're going to move on to the movie business.
Speaker 1: So I think the streaming economy right now is at
Speaker 1: a point of somewhat crisis. So what I mean if
Speaker 1: you think about chord cutting, which is something you've written
Speaker 1: about and I used to talk a lot about, the
Speaker 1: idea was I'm paying Spectrum two hundred bucks a month
Speaker 1: for TV, internet, phone, everything. It's too much. So I'm
Speaker 1: going to cut the chord and I'm going to figure
Speaker 1: out another way to get as much content as I
Speaker 1: used to get. So now I've got my sixty dollar
Speaker 1: a month broadband bill, and then I started adding on Netflix, HBO, Max,
Speaker 1: Disney plus, Discovery plus Paramount plus Free Thing. Next thing
Speaker 1: I know, I'm right back up to my hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty dollars, and then I probably have to get YouTube
Speaker 1: TV because I still want to get you know, sports
Speaker 1: and all that. And I'm right back where I started from.
Speaker 1: So I don't think that the ecosystem can sustain twelve
Speaker 1: fifteen different streaming services, and I think what we'll see
Speaker 1: in the next two or three years is going to
Speaker 1: be a consolidation where you know, you notice that Sony
Speaker 1: basically gave up and said, we're not going to go
Speaker 1: into that game. We're gonna just license to Netflix. And
Speaker 1: I think you're gonna see the big three, which I
Speaker 1: would say would be Netflix, Disney, and HBO probably begin
Speaker 1: to take over the the other laggards, because I doubt
Speaker 1: that Paramount plus will survive another two years. You know,
Speaker 1: Viacom is like a case study of how not to
Speaker 1: run a company, and uh, this is probably one of
Speaker 1: the parts of the case study. Okay, just to go
Speaker 1: a little bit deeper, Why is Viacom that case study
Speaker 1: how not to run a company? Okay? So, Viacom in
Speaker 1: the heyday of MTV had more data and more understanding
Speaker 1: of a young audience than any company in America. They
Speaker 1: had so much data and so much understanding that companies
Speaker 1: used to come to them, like they build a little
Speaker 1: consulting firm just to tell you the MTV generation how
Speaker 1: to explain it to Procter and Gamble. So the world
Speaker 1: of streaming comes along, and the world of digital comes along,
Speaker 1: and Viacom basically says, sue those bastards. So those you know,
Speaker 1: stop it. I heard a very famous story of John Doulton,
Speaker 1: who was the president of Paramount, got a a demonstration
Speaker 1: of ti Vo from the two top executives of TiVo.
Speaker 1: They come to Paramount and Dulgon as this famous big
Speaker 1: conference from on the second floor on the Paramount lot
Speaker 1: where he could smoke the only place you could smoke indoor.
Speaker 1: So they go and they show him this wonderful thing
Speaker 1: where you can record TV shows and everything, and they
Speaker 1: say this is gonna change TV. Can believely. So Tolgon
Speaker 1: goes over to the box after the demonstration, starts unplugging
Speaker 1: it and they're kind of like. He says, I'll tell
Speaker 1: you what you can do with this, and he throws
Speaker 1: the tebow out the window down to the pavement of
Speaker 1: the second floor. That was Paramount Viacom's attitude towards the
Speaker 1: digital age. You know, we're and so they lost all
Speaker 1: their power of understanding young people. They just buried it
Speaker 1: everything that they build up with MTV, and they blew
Speaker 1: it and and and and so I don't know, I mean, look,
Speaker 1: all you have to do is think about if yours
Speaker 1: uh a shareholder and Viacom for the last twenty years
Speaker 1: it was a trail of tears. Okay, we both grew
Speaker 1: up in an era where if you lived in l A,
Speaker 1: you knew who ran the major studios. Now, unless you
Speaker 1: have that job, it seems no one seems to know. Now,
Speaker 1: we know that Netflix was a disruptor, but Netflix is
Speaker 1: a valuable company independent Apple. What we do is has
Speaker 1: unlimited money. Now we have HBO and attendant stuff sold
Speaker 1: to a T and T. As you project outward, who
Speaker 1: is really going to have the power? Well right now next,
Speaker 1: Flix has the power as far as I can see. Um,
Speaker 1: it seems to be able to make both daring choices
Speaker 1: in terms of programming, and it's certainly got the largest
Speaker 1: number of subscribers, and so in that sense, from a
Speaker 1: pure cash flow machine point of view, if you get
Speaker 1: to three million subscribers everybody all around the world paying
Speaker 1: ten bucks a month, that's a fairly serious money machine.
Speaker 1: And eventually you're gonna start to build up a library
Speaker 1: of content. I mean, part of what they had to
Speaker 1: do and why they were spending so much money on
Speaker 1: content was they had no library, which is of course
Speaker 1: what Disney and HBO do have. Um, but I think
Speaker 1: Netflix is very savvy at sensing the taste of its
Speaker 1: public and going there. Um. Disney will continue to pursue
Speaker 1: it's niche, which is a lot younger, and it won't
Speaker 1: make you know, it won't make the Chicago seven Trial
Speaker 1: or you know, it's not gonna make those kind of movies. Uh,
Speaker 1: And HBO Max will be okay as long as A
Speaker 1: T and T figures out a way to slowly pay
Speaker 1: down instet and not just become I'm mean, obviously a
Speaker 1: lot of people have left Warner Brothers in the last
Speaker 1: few months. All they seem to hear about is we
Speaker 1: have to pay down the debt. We have to pay
Speaker 1: down the debt. We have you know, A T and
Speaker 1: T levered itself up to the neck to get to
Speaker 1: where it is. I don't know, and they have a
Speaker 1: very large dividend they have to keep paying. So I mean,
Speaker 1: we'll see. Okay, let's go back. How do you decide
Speaker 1: to break from Woodstock and go into the movie business
Speaker 1: and what are your experiences there? I had done the
Speaker 1: concert for Bangladesh and I had come to the conclusion
Speaker 1: at the end of that that um, there probably wasn't
Speaker 1: a band that was wanting to tour that could support
Speaker 1: the kind of operation that I had built in terms
Speaker 1: of sound systems, trucks, all that stuff. And George Harrison
Speaker 1: didn't want a tour, Eric Clapton was sick, Bob didn't
Speaker 1: want a tour. The band was not touring very much. Uh.
Speaker 1: I did, as you know from reading the book, I
Speaker 1: did a try out with the Rolling Stones and then
Speaker 1: decided I didn't want to do that, and so I
Speaker 1: just thought, well, look, maybe i'll see if I could
Speaker 1: do something in Hollywood. It can't be that hard. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is how naive I was. I thought, well, in
Speaker 1: in the concert business, if something screws up, from a
Speaker 1: technical point of view, you've got twenty people in a
Speaker 1: stadium clapping for the concert to start, you're you're in
Speaker 1: big trouble. But in the movie business, if something screws up,
Speaker 1: you could come back tomorrow. And so somehow I thought
Speaker 1: it would be not that hard. The other thing I
Speaker 1: didn't really understand was you weren't supposed to use your
Speaker 1: own money. You know, the term O P M other
Speaker 1: people's money. Nobody told me that term. So I came
Speaker 1: out to Hollywood. Uh, A friend named Jake has said,
Speaker 1: when you go out there, look up my friend Marty Scorsese.
Speaker 1: He he edited Woodstock and he loves rock and roll,
Speaker 1: and you'll you'll like him. So I met Marty and
Speaker 1: he had this script he'd been trying to make for
Speaker 1: three years called Season of the Witch, which we've renamed
Speaker 1: Mean Streets. And I just didn't know enough not to
Speaker 1: put my own money. And I had a friend who
Speaker 1: had some money too, and so we put up each
Speaker 1: put up two fifty dollars and we made Mean Streets.
Speaker 1: And fortunately for us, Marty made a great movie and
Speaker 1: we were able to sell it to Warner Brothers. And
Speaker 1: you know, I still make money off it fifty years later. Okay,
Speaker 1: did you realize who Score says he was going to become?
Speaker 1: And then you have one movie under your belt? How
Speaker 1: did that change your perspective? And what did you want
Speaker 1: to do? Um? I thought he was incredibly talented. The
Speaker 1: only thing I had to judge on were his student films.
Speaker 1: So I saw these these shorts, The Big Shave, It's
Speaker 1: Not Just You Murray, and a longer student feature called
Speaker 1: Who's that Knocking at My Door? And I just thought
Speaker 1: it was incredibly talented, especially the short code Who's It's
Speaker 1: Not just you Murray? And so that was the only
Speaker 1: basis I made the uh judgment off of UM. Once
Speaker 1: I had made in Mean Streets it, I wanted to
Speaker 1: keep making movies. I had ups and downs like anybody
Speaker 1: making movies. It's hard to get movies made. UM. You know,
Speaker 1: some were good, some were not so good. Uh. I
Speaker 1: think The Last Waltz is a great movie. I think
Speaker 1: under Fire it's a great movie. I think, Uh, Until
Speaker 1: the End of the World is a great movie. I
Speaker 1: think Shine is a great movie. I think To Die
Speaker 1: For is a great movie. And then I made some
Speaker 1: things that I don't think you're so good? So was
Speaker 1: it fulfilling being the movie producer? I mean it's as
Speaker 1: you said, it's a heavy lift. You know, you have
Speaker 1: to go to a million lunches, etcetera, and nothing happens.
Speaker 1: I found it very fulfilling. I found the notion of
Speaker 1: organizing artists and trying to keep the train moving forward
Speaker 1: is not dissimilar from being a tour manager. Uh. You know,
Speaker 1: you just got to keep the show on the road,
Speaker 1: and people will have throw fits, and you know, artists
Speaker 1: will be artists, and you know, oftentimes you would encounter
Speaker 1: the same problems you counted in the movie business. Gary
Speaker 1: Busey was a big coke head on Karney, so was
Speaker 1: Nick Nolty on under Fire. You know. I mean it
Speaker 1: wasn't like these were angels. These are people who had
Speaker 1: their own same demons like anybody else. So you had
Speaker 1: to try and manage through that. Uh but uh I
Speaker 1: found it fulfilling. Yeah I did. Okay, now you say
Speaker 1: that you were the link between the Bass Brothers and
Speaker 1: Disney's okay and disneyse and Turmoil. It's about to be
Speaker 1: taken over. Tell us how you become that lake. So
Speaker 1: I had bought from Robert Altman, a studio called lions
Speaker 1: Gate not to be confused with the lions Gate Films,
Speaker 1: that some big action movie producer. But it's a it's
Speaker 1: a small studio over on Bundy that had a fantastic
Speaker 1: sound mixing stage and the best mixer in Hollywood named
Speaker 1: Mike Binkler. Just one another oscar less the other night,
Speaker 1: um and so I bought it from Almond and I thought, okay,
Speaker 1: maybe I can use this as the core to build
Speaker 1: a small independent production business. So t bone Burnett. Uh
Speaker 1: was from Fort Worth, Texas, and he introduced me to
Speaker 1: a guy named Richard Rainwater who was the Bass Brothers
Speaker 1: investment guru. And I went down to see Richard with
Speaker 1: this idea of like could we make something out of
Speaker 1: Lion Skate films? And he spent a lot of time
Speaker 1: with me. He was very generous with his time, and
Speaker 1: then he said, John, you know, it takes just as
Speaker 1: much energy to do a two million dollar deal as
Speaker 1: a two hundred million dollar deal, but the returns are
Speaker 1: a lot better on the two hundred million dollar deal,
Speaker 1: So why don't you come back to me when you
Speaker 1: have a two hundred million dollar deal? So I went
Speaker 1: home and went back to work, and then about a
Speaker 1: year and a half later, I found myself producing a
Speaker 1: film for Walt Disney UM and I used to go
Speaker 1: up to the executive dining room in the animation building
Speaker 1: where all the executives worked every day, and as I
Speaker 1: had come out, Ron Miller, who was president of Walt
Speaker 1: Disney in was playing poker with three friends every day
Speaker 1: for two hours in front of all the employees. It
Speaker 1: was like and Disney at that point was going in
Speaker 1: the toilet from as a movie studio. So I was
Speaker 1: kind of piste off and I took the ten k
Speaker 1: the financial statement down to Richard and I showed it
Speaker 1: to him and I said, look, I think this is
Speaker 1: maybe the most undervalued company in America. Uh. The whole
Speaker 1: film library was carried on the balance sheet at like
Speaker 1: thirty million dollars, all those classics. So Richard looked at it,
Speaker 1: and we spent a lot of time together, and he said,
Speaker 1: this is a really interesting deal. The problem is we
Speaker 1: own nine point nine percent of Texico, and Texico wants
Speaker 1: to buy Getty Oil and we don't want him to
Speaker 1: buy a Gettar Old, so we may have to go
Speaker 1: to So that's another two billion dollars. So we can't
Speaker 1: afford to do know another deal. So I went home.
Speaker 1: And then about three months later, a guy named Saul Steinberg,
Speaker 1: with the help of Mike Milkin, started a corporate raid
Speaker 1: on Disney, and the Disney management to flipped out and
Speaker 1: in the middle of it said bass and Richard called
Speaker 1: me and said, John, we just sold all our Texico
Speaker 1: sock when we're ready to save the mouse. So I
Speaker 1: went down and talked to Ray Watson, who was the chairman,
Speaker 1: and we managed to get him on a plane to
Speaker 1: Fort Worth, and we made a deal to sell the
Speaker 1: Basses real estate holdings in Orlando to Disney for stock,
Speaker 1: and it put enough stock in friendly hands to block
Speaker 1: Saul Seinberg. And the Basses paid me as their investment advisor.
Speaker 1: So I made more money in two weeks and I
Speaker 1: had made in six years, you know, So it was
Speaker 1: it was a kind of eye opener. And then they
Speaker 1: asked me to go to work for their real investment banker,
Speaker 1: which was Merrill Lynch, and I did and what was
Speaker 1: that experience like? Interesting? At first, it was kind of fun.
Speaker 1: I mean, I've never had that kind of money before,
Speaker 1: and you know, being in the deal business was kind
Speaker 1: of exciting. We did right off the bat, we did Viacom,
Speaker 1: you know, we helped some the Redstone by Viacom. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then slowly it got less interesting, and I began
Speaker 1: to miss the creative life of musicians and directors and writers.
Speaker 1: And by the end, by the late eighties, you know,
Speaker 1: you were you were seeing people like Ivan Bowski and
Speaker 1: it's really people. You you have a meeting and you
Speaker 1: have to take a shower afterwards, and and so I
Speaker 1: I didn't feel good about it. And so a German
Speaker 1: director named Vin Venders said he wanted to make a
Speaker 1: science fiction film called on to All the End of
Speaker 1: the World, and what I produced it and it was
Speaker 1: just like, Okay, I need, I need to get out
Speaker 1: of here. So it's like a perfect skate hatch. And
Speaker 1: I went off and and joined VIM for two years. Okay,
Speaker 1: you get yourself into the Albert organization. You know all
Speaker 1: these musicians, if one reads his book, you seem to
Speaker 1: know every creative person in Hollywood. What's your secret? How
Speaker 1: does this happen? Well? I don't know if I know
Speaker 1: every creative verson in Hollywood, but I I knew a
Speaker 1: lot of good people, and I had a fairly decent instincts.
Speaker 1: And you know, you just have to stay open to change.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know how many careers you've had,
Speaker 1: but I've had a lot of them. And and the
Speaker 1: trick is, if you see a door open and it
Speaker 1: looks like an interesting opportunity, you should probably walk through
Speaker 1: the door and and check it out at least and
Speaker 1: not be afraid that what you're leaving behind is much better. So, uh,
Speaker 1: in that sense, it was. It was interesting for me.
Speaker 1: I mean, I I you know, I didn't make blockbusters.
Speaker 1: I made art films. And there are all of them.
Speaker 1: I I mean almost all of them. I I think
Speaker 1: we'll hold up in the long run of things. Uh
Speaker 1: but you know, you you can't make a living, but
Speaker 1: you can make a fortune in Hollywood. So it's one
Speaker 1: of those feast or famine things. Okay, you say that
Speaker 1: you're great at hurting cats, but in terms of producing
Speaker 1: the film, you also have to sell. So what's your
Speaker 1: magic there? Well, you know, if if you have a
Speaker 1: decent story and and you can put it together with
Speaker 1: a good director, that seems to be the secret to me.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's the script and the director. Then after that,
Speaker 1: if you get that part done, then you can probably
Speaker 1: attract the talent the actors to do it. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, my daughter who produced you know, a lot
Speaker 1: of films more than I have, somehow manages to do it.
Speaker 1: And uh So, I I think it's there's no secret
Speaker 1: to being in Hollywood. It's just good material and good
Speaker 1: artistic directors who have a real point of view. Okay.
Speaker 1: Another element of your book is your love life in marriages.
Speaker 1: So what do you learn and what are the lessons
Speaker 1: for the listeners. Uh, well, my first two marriages, we're uh,
Speaker 1: both ended in divorce. So I guess, um I feel
Speaker 1: I mean, this is a very awkward question for me.
Speaker 1: Somehow I could write about it, but I don't know
Speaker 1: if I want to talk about it. But I would
Speaker 1: say that I thought I was kind of a white Knight.
Speaker 1: Rescuing is slightly artistic hippy girls, and that's never a
Speaker 1: good stance to take. Now, I've been married for twenty
Speaker 1: two years, the Maggie Smith, the photographer, and we have
Speaker 1: one of the great marriages. My friends all think we
Speaker 1: have the best marriage. So I must have learned my
Speaker 1: lessons somehow. Look, another thing in the book is you.
Speaker 1: And I mentioned this a little bit earlier. Up until
Speaker 1: you go to Princeton and you start working in the
Speaker 1: rock and roll business, you talk about your alienations. You're
Speaker 1: difficult with your father, not fitting in in prep school.
Speaker 1: Yet somehow you give the appearance now of being plugged
Speaker 1: in in a member of the group. So what's the
Speaker 1: evolution there. I was an awkward teenager. I was small,
Speaker 1: I didn't grow till I was sixteen seventeen. I got
Speaker 1: picked on. I was a kid from the Midwest sent
Speaker 1: to a boarding school in in Massachusetts. I didn't understand
Speaker 1: the mores of kind of heavy sarcasm the way people
Speaker 1: you know, it's kind of lord of the flies, and
Speaker 1: I didn't really know how to deal with it. So
Speaker 1: it wasn't until I found something to stand on, which
Speaker 1: was the Civil rights movement, that I began to feel
Speaker 1: like I could stand up for myself. And then I
Speaker 1: began to grow and I wasn't picked on quite so much.
Speaker 1: I mean, boarding school is a horrible experience. It's much
Speaker 1: better now because they're co ed, But in the old days,
Speaker 1: you know, you had older students policing younger students and
Speaker 1: a level of cruelty that was unbelievable. Did you send
Speaker 1: your kids to prep school? No? Okay, So now you've
Speaker 1: written this book, what what else do you have a
Speaker 1: hand in these days? Well, I'm doing some business steals,
Speaker 1: but I can't really talk about them right now. With
Speaker 1: some very well known musicians, you know, I'm I'm put
Speaker 1: it this way, I'm interested in the publishing music publishing business.
Speaker 1: Well that's that's a conversation unto itself. Yeah, well maybe
Speaker 1: we can have that in about four months. Okay, So, uh,
Speaker 1: you your book is all about this tumultuous era, and
Speaker 1: we are in a tumultuous era. Now. You talk about
Speaker 1: the optimism of back then the nihilism of today. Is
Speaker 1: there any hope? Yeah? I think there is. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, as I said to you, I go every
Speaker 1: year to this thing called Americana Fest, which is Americana
Speaker 1: is kind of like the non hat part of the
Speaker 1: country music business accepted. It includes the staple singers and
Speaker 1: sacks bold and so there's this kind of weird concnotation
Speaker 1: of Rhann and Giddons and Brandy Carlyle and all these
Speaker 1: different people. And I as pure music, it's extraordinary. It's
Speaker 1: really good. These people are making great songs, are singing
Speaker 1: great and and they're trying. You do also think about
Speaker 1: the traditions that they came up with, whether it's Rhan
Speaker 1: and thinking about the traditions of the banjo and how
Speaker 1: that played a world in in black music in in
Speaker 1: the eighteen fifties. You know, I mean this, these are
Speaker 1: interesting questions. So I have hoped that musicians will continue
Speaker 1: to be exploring and not just you know, look for
Speaker 1: the Benjamin's. I have hoped that filmmakers will continue to
Speaker 1: make interesting movies. I mean, I thought both Nomad Land
Speaker 1: and Uh Judas and The Black Messiah were extraordinarily good movies.
Speaker 1: So I mean it's not like there aren't artists making
Speaker 1: really strong stuff. There are, but there's also a lot
Speaker 1: of junk out there, and part of that I put
Speaker 1: on Mark Zuckerberg's shoulders. You know, I think there's there's
Speaker 1: too much nonsense and disinformation out there, and I think
Speaker 1: people are confused, and you know, there's the information theorists
Speaker 1: that m I T used to use the word entropy,
Speaker 1: which was if you get too much information, everything just
Speaker 1: gets chaotic. And that's probably the world that we experience
Speaker 1: last year, and unfortunately it's still going on because there's
Speaker 1: a reason people are having a hard time getting people
Speaker 1: to go and get a vaccination, just because there's so
Speaker 1: much damn disinformation out on Facebook that people think that
Speaker 1: Bill Gates is trying to implant a microchip in their
Speaker 1: arm when you get a shot. I mean, that's how
Speaker 1: nonsensital get and so we might not get the herd
Speaker 1: immunity just because there's so much stupidity out there. Well,
Speaker 1: staying on the political element, certainly, since artists were very
Speaker 1: political in the sixties. Uh, you talk about Facebook, you
Speaker 1: talk about vaccinations. Where's the optimism there? Well, there isn't
Speaker 1: in that sense. I mean, I I think we have
Speaker 1: to deal with the fact that we have a basic
Speaker 1: disinformation anarchy in and it's affecting a lot of things.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean that in small places, important artists
Speaker 1: can't be beginning to make good work and get it seen.
Speaker 1: I think it can. And so look, there's balance. We've
Speaker 1: lived through four kind of tough years, and I feel
Speaker 1: more optimistic now than I felt in a long time.
Speaker 1: I think the economy is going to come back. I
Speaker 1: think the you know, the sense of pent up demand
Speaker 1: is is a real deal. I mean, I don't know
Speaker 1: about you, but you haven't been to a music club
Speaker 1: probably in a year, right, you haven't heard live music
Speaker 1: in a long time, and and you're probably gonna want
Speaker 1: to do that again as soon as it feels safe
Speaker 1: to do that. And my guess is by the fall,
Speaker 1: you'll feel safe to do that, and so that will
Speaker 1: make the music kind of begin to come back. It
Speaker 1: will build confidence, It will make make us all feel like, okay,
Speaker 1: we can do this again. Okay. That brings us right
Speaker 1: up today you've been listening to Jonathan Taplan who has
Speaker 1: a new book called The Magic Year, Scenes from a
Speaker 1: Rock and Roll Life. As I said, I did read
Speaker 1: the book. It is unique and if you're interested in
Speaker 1: the perspective of the sixties in music as opposed to
Speaker 1: just a recitation of facts, I highly recommend it. And
Speaker 1: it's definitely very readable. And I'm not blowing smoke up
Speaker 1: your rand because that's not my style. But I picked
Speaker 1: it up and I couldn't put it down, and I'm
Speaker 1: certainly interested in that era. So Jonathan, thanks so much
Speaker 1: for taking the time. Thank you so much, Bob for
Speaker 1: all you do. Until next time, This is Bob left
Speaker 1: Sex