Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to Bob Left That's podcast. My
Speaker 1: guest today is John Weet, who has a new documentary
Speaker 1: which will be released on December six. John, good to
Speaker 1: have you on the podcast. Why now, Why a documentary? Uh?
Speaker 1: I don't know. It just happened. I was stiving to
Speaker 1: an old friend of mine in Poland the Black Lives
Speaker 1: Matter protests that that turned into a riot and they
Speaker 1: were burning potland and he lived up there and I
Speaker 1: I called him up to see if it was all right.
Speaker 1: And we got talking and he said, you know, you've
Speaker 1: got such an interesting life and history and you're still
Speaker 1: out there doing it. This is making a fabulous movie,
Speaker 1: you know. And I said, well, you know, that's so
Speaker 1: very well. But who would want to make it? You know?
Speaker 1: And he called me back a month later with the
Speaker 1: backing and yeah, I just fell into it. I did.
Speaker 1: I just fell into it. It just it wasn't planned.
Speaker 1: It just happened. So how much money did it take
Speaker 1: to make the movie? I have no idea, you see, Um,
Speaker 1: I know it's a consumerable amount. It's like a full
Speaker 1: budget documentary. But I had nothing to do with any
Speaker 1: of the personnel or the choices of footage. I just
Speaker 1: showed up for the interviews. Uh. It was simplicit in
Speaker 1: the deal that I I wouldn't ask to see anything
Speaker 1: before it was finished. I didn't want to have any
Speaker 1: kind of input on a on what it looked like.
Speaker 1: If it's going to be a documentary, and it's certainly's
Speaker 1: objective viewpoint of view, um or subjective. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: what it is. That's a that's a documentary. And I
Speaker 1: had enough for expect for the medium, so no, I
Speaker 1: thought it would be ridiculous to get involved. You know, Well,
Speaker 1: it's interesting because, in the light of high deaf cameras
Speaker 1: on your phone, seemingly every musician has a documentary and uh,
Speaker 1: but yours is radically different. It's just not an embellishment
Speaker 1: of your career, really gets down into the nitty gritty
Speaker 1: of your identity, your struggles. So it's a great watch,
Speaker 1: even for someone who is not familiar with his career.
Speaker 1: But since you had no involvement, now that it's finished, yet,
Speaker 1: what's your assessment. Well, it took me three months to
Speaker 1: watch it. It sent me a finished company and I
Speaker 1: just refused to watch it. And then one night I
Speaker 1: drank about the wine and said to nice tonight, you know,
Speaker 1: and I watched it and I was kind of dumb struck,
Speaker 1: and I thought, well, what's that? And then the next
Speaker 1: day I watched it again, completely sober, and I thought, well,
Speaker 1: there you go. You know, um, I think it's uh,
Speaker 1: it isn't like it's like a nonlinear thing. It starts
Speaker 1: off uh in the present, and bounces back to the babies,
Speaker 1: and then it moves forward to my parents and he
Speaker 1: going to art school, my love of Western music as
Speaker 1: a kid, and then it's sort of it shoots too
Speaker 1: bad English and then winds up in the present. So uh,
Speaker 1: it's still of a style that somebody's personality that I
Speaker 1: find it hard to critique. When he certainly makes a
Speaker 1: movie about you, you can't really say anything, can you, Bob?
Speaker 1: If they if they made a documentary in your life, Um,
Speaker 1: how would you react to that? Well, you know, this
Speaker 1: is something that's interesting because John Winner, who started an
Speaker 1: own Rolling Stone, he hired someone to write a book
Speaker 1: about him, and then he wasn't happy and he wrote
Speaker 1: his own book, which really undercut his identity because if
Speaker 1: somebody else who writes it can say, well you have
Speaker 1: plausible deniability. Yeah, yeah, the memory has us as some
Speaker 1: really convenient edit points, you know, And I've found that
Speaker 1: with with the documentaries I've actually watched, Uh, people skip
Speaker 1: over the dark stuff and it's all promotional, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's the tool to sell more records. It's
Speaker 1: the tool to promote the artist. And I just said
Speaker 1: no interest in that. I mean, you know, I uh,
Speaker 1: you know how often this is happening in a lifetime. Somebody,
Speaker 1: you know, knock on the door at dawn and you
Speaker 1: open the door and there's a film crew. You know,
Speaker 1: it's just the artest thing. I mean, I think anybody
Speaker 1: outside of the situation with know more about it than me.
Speaker 1: I just tried to tell the truth and keep it
Speaker 1: straight first, you know, Okay, having watched the MO movie, Uh,
Speaker 1: how's your state of mind? The movie was filmed during
Speaker 1: COVID when you weren't working, and you were not happy
Speaker 1: about that. It caused tensions in your relationship. Now that
Speaker 1: you're back on the road, is everything hunky dory or
Speaker 1: you know, we live in a completely different era. You
Speaker 1: had great breakthroughs in the MTV era, and it's in
Speaker 1: the movie where you're a household name around the world.
Speaker 1: You almost can't leave the you know, go to the supermarket.
Speaker 1: But what's it like for you today? Uh? What you
Speaker 1: mean fan wise? After the Well, let's start inside your head.
Speaker 1: Are you depressed? Are you optimistic? Well no, I'm always optimistic.
Speaker 1: It's the one thing that's probably kept me up and
Speaker 1: running is that I always think today it's going to
Speaker 1: be a great day, and I never even think about it.
Speaker 1: I believe in it, you know, and uh, you can
Speaker 1: stumble across something that makes the great or at least
Speaker 1: the best you can do. UM. I think the pandemic
Speaker 1: was very difficult for everybody. Relationships, uh, the lot. I mean,
Speaker 1: when you're sort of locked into a life of um
Speaker 1: not being able to go outside and connect with people,
Speaker 1: or being a musician, UM, not being able to transmit
Speaker 1: all those ideas and have that exchange, it's bound to
Speaker 1: have a negative effect. I mean, it was very depressing.
Speaker 1: It's how to look back on it. Interestingly enough, I
Speaker 1: don't really remember much about it. It's like it's just
Speaker 1: the same day over and over again. So it was
Speaker 1: a terrible time, you know. I but I think we
Speaker 1: came out swinging at the end of it, you know,
Speaker 1: I think it was it was great to be back.
Speaker 1: And we haven't stopped working since. We came out early
Speaker 1: like last July and played a couple of private shows
Speaker 1: and then we just hit the road and played right
Speaker 1: through the rest of the year. And this year we
Speaker 1: started started off making up for the gigs that have
Speaker 1: been rescheduled, did a complete American tour, went straight from
Speaker 1: there to Holland, and came back like three weeks ago
Speaker 1: and played another show in Massachusetts and then we're off again,
Speaker 1: I mean St. Louis today. So there is something about
Speaker 1: moving and taking stock and re evaluates he what's going
Speaker 1: on and where the work is and what least to
Speaker 1: to be done to move forward. You know, a lot
Speaker 1: of acts had financial issues, not working, the had overhead,
Speaker 1: they had bands. Was it a struggle for you or
Speaker 1: did you have enough in savings? No, I've certainly had
Speaker 1: nothing in the bank. I've been taken care to stopped
Speaker 1: by as much many as I can since I got
Speaker 1: control of my career to make up for lost time.
Speaker 1: You know. Um. The unfortunate thing, just sort of like
Speaker 1: the sideline, is that now that Spotify is streaming artist
Speaker 1: music and paying such a minimal royalty, ya, the artist
Speaker 1: as usual falls back on working live to make up
Speaker 1: for that to get through, and with a pandemic that
Speaker 1: was taken away as well. So a lot of musicians
Speaker 1: really got hurt in that situation. But I was looking
Speaker 1: that I had enough royalties coming in and enough in
Speaker 1: the bank not to worry about it. Okay, when Napster
Speaker 1: came in and royalty started going down in the earlier
Speaker 1: part of this century, were you still having a significant
Speaker 1: payment in recording royalties that fell off? It just maybe
Speaker 1: by about sevent I mean, at one point, you know,
Speaker 1: I had so many hits, like with the Babies and
Speaker 1: with the solo stuff about English and recently you know,
Speaker 1: with the with the stuff that's getting played on radio.
Speaker 1: But once uh Spotify came in, that was the end
Speaker 1: of that. It was just like a piece of Peter
Speaker 1: Framptons said, if he's gets a million streams, he gets
Speaker 1: like a hundred dollars. You know, it's an absurd small
Speaker 1: amount that's been sort of but surely given to the artist. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's talk about all your records. Who owned those records?
Speaker 1: Obviously your recent solo ones I believe you own, but
Speaker 1: the stuff on crystalists and stuff with bad English are
Speaker 1: those still owned by the record company or those owned
Speaker 1: by you. Well, the baby stuff will always be with
Speaker 1: Christmas and the first solo. Um, I've got the publishing
Speaker 1: back on everything forward of that, Uh I have, while
Speaker 1: I own with the rest of about English about English stuff. Uh,
Speaker 1: that will come back to me probably this year. I mean,
Speaker 1: so no letter he comes back to you. I mean
Speaker 1: I did try and get that. I did. I really
Speaker 1: did try and get some of it back from Christmas.
Speaker 1: But uh, it's just technicalsis. You know, there's lawyers involved,
Speaker 1: and it goes to cool and they have bigger lawyers
Speaker 1: than I do. Okay, you know you made multiple records
Speaker 1: with Chrysalis, and the way the game works, many acts
Speaker 1: sell millions of records, but they still don't get any
Speaker 1: royalties because the record company says they're still in the red. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Do you happen to know if you're in the red
Speaker 1: or the black with Chrysalis Um And definitely as far
Speaker 1: as they say in the red. So there's a point
Speaker 1: you get with that, we just say keep it. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't want to get down on that level where
Speaker 1: it's like, I mean, it's a squabble, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's had its head day. We were all young and crazy.
Speaker 1: Me had careers out of it, and you have to
Speaker 1: be philosophical about it and say, well, it gave me
Speaker 1: a name and I was able to go forward from
Speaker 1: that point and and do very well. So at some
Speaker 1: point you just don't want to cloud your life with it. Really, well,
Speaker 1: that's a great philosophy. I wish everybody had that. But
Speaker 1: needless to say, from when you broke in a mono
Speaker 1: culture to today, you know, if you're the biggest act
Speaker 1: in the world from that era and you put out
Speaker 1: a single, it still gets no traction. So how do
Speaker 1: you feel about making new music when it's so hard
Speaker 1: to be noticed? Well, I think honestly, Um, you spend
Speaker 1: six months right in a record and getting the right musicians,
Speaker 1: the band and engineer, the right studio. It's very hard
Speaker 1: work and there's a lot of commitment to it. The
Speaker 1: songs have to be a really high caliber. You're not
Speaker 1: messing around things, and you spend all the money like
Speaker 1: fifty ground or whatever it is, which is a reasonable
Speaker 1: amount of money to make a great record. If you
Speaker 1: can't make a great record for fifty ground, there's something
Speaker 1: wrong with you. And the idea is to do first,
Speaker 1: second tax and fix things, but not do it like
Speaker 1: it used to be done, which is like recording every
Speaker 1: uh instruments separately and all that kind of crap. It's
Speaker 1: just really and but you put it out and in
Speaker 1: this kind of day and age, it's only in the
Speaker 1: spotlight for like a week and then it's gone. And
Speaker 1: if you don't make records, your fans are kind of
Speaker 1: annoyed it you for not doing anything new. So um,
Speaker 1: it's a pleasure to make the albums, and it's a
Speaker 1: pleasure to play them to the audience. And that you
Speaker 1: really sell a lot of those albums at gigs, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean nobody really buys CDs anymore, but they people
Speaker 1: buy them. It shows because there are thousands and thousands
Speaker 1: and thousands of CDs. It shows. But I think the
Speaker 1: music business, as that's what we thought it was, just
Speaker 1: simply doesn't exist anymore. It just does not exist. Okay,
Speaker 1: you go on the road at merch table, you sell
Speaker 1: c ds? What else do you sell? And do you
Speaker 1: personally get behind the merch table and sign it? It's
Speaker 1: all signed. We do a meet and great. I try
Speaker 1: and spend time with each person that comes that, I'll
Speaker 1: just swheel them through. Uh, the very sincere, genuine kind
Speaker 1: of They always met their effort to meet you. So
Speaker 1: I've found that I could be quite social and put
Speaker 1: people at their ease and talk to them for quite
Speaker 1: a long time. And I can't imagine doing it any
Speaker 1: other way. If you get behind the merch table, you're
Speaker 1: gonna get mobbed. Oh it's going to get out of control.
Speaker 1: It's gonna but everything signed. We have t shirts, CDs, buttons, lyrics,
Speaker 1: pieces of art, I pen so you can buy all
Speaker 1: sorts of things. We try and keep the price down.
Speaker 1: I will say that instead of it being a fifted
Speaker 1: on a T shirt, it's a twined on a T shirt.
Speaker 1: Instead of it being a forded on the c D,
Speaker 1: it's a twined on CD. And I think that's part
Speaker 1: of the deal with the audience come to see you
Speaker 1: and they stick with you to thick and thin, and
Speaker 1: I'm not going to gouge my audience to two make
Speaker 1: a profit. You know, it makes a profit, but it
Speaker 1: isn't stupid, you know, but it's enough. So you're talking
Speaker 1: about these hardcore John Wade bands, Do you actually know
Speaker 1: some of them? Yeah, you know, over the years. You know,
Speaker 1: you do see those spaces coming um in the front
Speaker 1: row and you you know, give him a wink and
Speaker 1: a smile and say hello. But it really is, you know,
Speaker 1: it's like it's that thing I talked about the documentary
Speaker 1: about the exchange. It really is. It transcends just going
Speaker 1: out and playing and you know, being rock and all that,
Speaker 1: there's something going on with music. You don't write music
Speaker 1: to put in a vault and nobody here is that
Speaker 1: you share it. In a perfect world, music really would
Speaker 1: be free. You know, you can't hire a band, take
Speaker 1: them out on the road and pay for the hotels
Speaker 1: and airplane flights and not charged people. But there's a
Speaker 1: middle ground where you can really bring it to the
Speaker 1: people and celebrate that thing, and there is a feeling
Speaker 1: of almost family about it. People show up and travel
Speaker 1: from all of the world. You know, it's amazing. At
Speaker 1: least I can do is show up and and share
Speaker 1: it in a fair way. So prior to the pandemic,
Speaker 1: going forward, how many days a year do you work, Well,
Speaker 1: we were doing about seventy two a c days a year.
Speaker 1: But this year we went to Holland, we did a
Speaker 1: major American tour. We cliff the first half of the
Speaker 1: year making up days. I would say we're about seventy
Speaker 1: now and we have like twenty more days to go,
Speaker 1: so we're probably about twenty more days ahead. As things are,
Speaker 1: I think with the documentary coming out, we'll probably do
Speaker 1: more days. Know, and you know, there are different styles
Speaker 1: of going on the road based on income. There are
Speaker 1: people who take private jets, there are people in station wagons,
Speaker 1: people people and tour busters. How you doing it these days?
Speaker 1: But we fly in, we're all flying from different places
Speaker 1: and we meet at the airport. There's a van. Tim
Speaker 1: runs off against the van. He picks us all up.
Speaker 1: We thought the guitars in the back, goes to the
Speaker 1: hotel or find some Indian food, then goes to the hotel.
Speaker 1: We drive as much as we can. Everybody has to fly.
Speaker 1: Flying in the airport and security just kills the vibe
Speaker 1: of being out there. So we drive and if it's
Speaker 1: a five hour drive, we'll leave after the show and
Speaker 1: knock a couple of hours out and stay in a
Speaker 1: hotel on the highway and then wake up, only get
Speaker 1: back in the van and tracks the next game. It's
Speaker 1: it's low impact. I think We've got it down to
Speaker 1: a science. I really do. Um, everybody gets on, there's
Speaker 1: always jokes, you know, everybody's sort of knows what to do.
Speaker 1: So it's the best it can be. It's really, Uh,
Speaker 1: of all the touring I've done, this has been the easiest,
Speaker 1: and in some ways it's open to the most things
Speaker 1: going wrong. But we we just seem to sort of
Speaker 1: like roll with the punches. There's a movie Paul Simon made,
Speaker 1: I believe it was One Trick Pony and they're these
Speaker 1: seems driving in the van where they're playing games like
Speaker 1: Dead Rock Stars, et cetera. When you're in the van,
Speaker 1: is their conversation or is everybody in their own world? Um? Well,
Speaker 1: I hope they're not gonna play Dead brook Star because
Speaker 1: fairly soon it's gonna be me. Uh let me see
Speaker 1: no we we you know, it stunded off like a
Speaker 1: lot of chassis, you know, and then we were playing
Speaker 1: like Bill Evans, which feel like Bill Evans. And then
Speaker 1: then it was Ell Fitzgerald and it was kind of like,
Speaker 1: you know, free, and then it got more obscure, and
Speaker 1: when it's cream and a bounced that we love. And
Speaker 1: now everybody's start of reading the book or sleeping. You know.
Speaker 1: I think there's a kind of nervous energy where you're
Speaker 1: trying to communicate all the time, and that can get
Speaker 1: in the way of the communication later on in the day.
Speaker 1: I think if you if you can keep in your
Speaker 1: own space mentally, you're gonna go to offer when you
Speaker 1: actually get into that musical conversation on stage. Okay, so
Speaker 1: let's assume you do a gig you end at eleven o'clock. Yeah.
Speaker 1: What people don't realize is a musician is really wired
Speaker 1: after that because you've given it all. You're all So
Speaker 1: let's say it's a drive. So how long after the
Speaker 1: gig are you gonna get into the van? And how
Speaker 1: long before you personally can come down from the gig? Well,
Speaker 1: that's you know, the adrenaline. Being a singer, me and
Speaker 1: the drummer have the hardest gigs because it's a very aerobic,
Speaker 1: kind of physically demanding thing. Yea, how it's going like
Speaker 1: a like a steam house. You come off stage, you
Speaker 1: shake hounds, people, signs, some stuff, get in the valan
Speaker 1: drive and you can still when you get to the hotel,
Speaker 1: it's a strange room. You know, you check into a
Speaker 1: different world. Um you can be awake till three in
Speaker 1: the morning. You know, it's just the way it is.
Speaker 1: I listened to audiobooks a lot. Uh. You can't take
Speaker 1: anything to help your sleep because it's gonna affect your vocals.
Speaker 1: You know, it really gets in the way of performance.
Speaker 1: So you really can't um use anything to to knock
Speaker 1: you out. But audiobooks work, you know, they really do you.
Speaker 1: The moment you're in the book, you're asleep. Okay, since
Speaker 1: you're a connoisseury, give me two good audio books that
Speaker 1: you can recommend. Um. Well, I was listening to George Simono.
Speaker 1: Um uh, the Magrade books, the French Detective they're very,
Speaker 1: very good and they're a different worlder in France. And
Speaker 1: the John Nesba Harry Hole Detective books that incredibly well written.
Speaker 1: And uh, you know Harry Hole, I mean you just
Speaker 1: kind of go with it's strategic, but it's very agergic.
Speaker 1: But you know, the French Revolution not getting you get
Speaker 1: into that young Stalin. You know these you know, it's
Speaker 1: anything that's gonna take your mind away from where you are.
Speaker 1: The further away from where you are, it's gonna it's
Speaker 1: gonna open that door. And you're gonna crash. You know,
Speaker 1: it's great. Okay, let's be very specific, gig games to
Speaker 1: the leven. What time do you get the hotel on
Speaker 1: the road. Well, it could be if we're staying in
Speaker 1: the neighborhood within an hour, but if if you if
Speaker 1: you have six hundred miles to go. He generally just
Speaker 1: pounded the van and drive for three hours, like I said,
Speaker 1: crashing in a hotel on the way, a holiday inn,
Speaker 1: and get up the next stage and finish the drive.
Speaker 1: But it's good, you know. I mean, what else you
Speaker 1: gonna do? You're gonna go hang out? I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: it's not you don't want to party do it? And
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff. They haven't been really younger.
Speaker 1: It doesn't work. I mean, I don't know how the
Speaker 1: hell we got through some of that stuff when we
Speaker 1: were kids, because nobody got any sleep and it was
Speaker 1: just impossible. But it was romantic and we all loved it,
Speaker 1: you know. But I think as you get older, the
Speaker 1: work is absolutely the first thing on the menu. The
Speaker 1: good time thing comes to maybe third. You know, it's
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's it's enough of a good time
Speaker 1: to rip out it with a great show. Okay, but
Speaker 1: do you end up getting enough sleep? Now? Never? But
Speaker 1: you're running on empty. You know. The one thing, the
Speaker 1: two things on the road that you need more than
Speaker 1: anything is sleep and coffee, and the two opposite ends
Speaker 1: of of what it takes to get through. But we
Speaker 1: change during coffee, you know, we um coffee is just
Speaker 1: the thing. We just thought coffee up and you'd be surprised,
Speaker 1: you know, you could be. You know, sometimes to make
Speaker 1: it work, you do four if I gigs in a row,
Speaker 1: and on the fifth gig, it's like, Holy Christ, you know,
Speaker 1: how are you gonna pull this off? You know? And
Speaker 1: your voice is scratching, and you walk out there and
Speaker 1: within ten seconds everything's in focus. You have all the
Speaker 1: energy in the world. The audience give you all this
Speaker 1: stuff and you immediately give it back to the audience
Speaker 1: and aware you go and it could be the best
Speaker 1: show you're gonna play off the five. You know, it's
Speaker 1: always that thing you walk out from the moment you
Speaker 1: leave the wings to walking towards the microphone too, holding
Speaker 1: the microphone, plugging in the guitar. That something is transformative
Speaker 1: in those twenty paces and you just you're in flight,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's why you can. Let's say you
Speaker 1: do a run, a date and you fly home. How
Speaker 1: long does it take you to calm down from those dates?
Speaker 1: That's that's a good one. Um, yeah, that's a rough one.
Speaker 1: Know I was younger, it was almost impossible. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: come back from a baby's too, and I'd just rattle,
Speaker 1: you know, I'd be looking for things to do, and
Speaker 1: at night it would be just terrible. And you kind
Speaker 1: of sitting and watch TV. These days on the way
Speaker 1: back from the airport. Uh, me and my girl probably
Speaker 1: go and get a lot of Indian food and you know,
Speaker 1: eat a gigantic amount of food and have a beer maybe,
Speaker 1: and that seems to calm things down. I mean at
Speaker 1: some point, you know, you have to. You learn, really,
Speaker 1: you learn how to step back, you know. Okay, you
Speaker 1: live in Santa Monica, I do. Yeah, So where's good
Speaker 1: Indian food that you get? Uh there's one on Pico
Speaker 1: There's I think India's other. It's like really just a
Speaker 1: small hideaway in a strip mall. But the great people,
Speaker 1: the seeks, the chef is were like a beautiful, bright
Speaker 1: yellow turban and stuff and that the nice people I know.
Speaker 1: But you know, you could. You can really fast good
Speaker 1: stuff and in the in the Sana Monica area, that's
Speaker 1: a very good Indian restaurants. Okay, do you own your
Speaker 1: own home Combomidium Red? Yeah? How long? How long did
Speaker 1: you buy? By? About twenty years ago? Good investment? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, I know, I was. I was living in
Speaker 1: New York City, which is probably home, but I've been
Speaker 1: there quite a long time, living on Madison Avenue. And
Speaker 1: I had a record coming out. My manager was living
Speaker 1: in l A. And I thought, well, I'm going and
Speaker 1: spend a year in l A. And I went on
Speaker 1: tour and for some strange reasons made a lot of money,
Speaker 1: and I was like, what am I gonna do with
Speaker 1: all this money? You know, and being someone that's seen
Speaker 1: the bank account go down to you know, in the red,
Speaker 1: I had enough sense to buy something. So I bought
Speaker 1: this really beautiful condo for the going right, which was
Speaker 1: pretty affordable, and you know, yeah, I own it now.
Speaker 1: One element of the movie is this girlfriend you have
Speaker 1: and she says that you've known each other the better
Speaker 1: part of twenty years, but you just started to live together.
Speaker 1: What's the back story there? Well, we met um um
Speaker 1: walking through Central Park, she was on a soap opera
Speaker 1: called The City Janie Allen, and that she was walking
Speaker 1: west and I was walking east, and she asked me
Speaker 1: how to get out of the park because Central Park
Speaker 1: in the middle of it. It's like an obstunalely illusion.
Speaker 1: It sort of makes you think you're going in one day,
Speaker 1: actual well you're not. It's very cleverly laid out. And
Speaker 1: you know, we were on and off again for years
Speaker 1: and years and years, and when I moved to Santa Monica,
Speaker 1: I was I was on the bike path going south. No,
Speaker 1: she was going to south and I was going north,
Speaker 1: and we sort of almost bumped into each other. So
Speaker 1: it's kind of like it's like one of those you know,
Speaker 1: it's a Tom Hanks movie, all you know, rock and roll.
Speaker 1: But she liked the idea that you that you said
Speaker 1: she was well endowed. She's just a very skinny do
Speaker 1: better being better. But okay, I have to ask because
Speaker 1: the movie was shot during the pandemic, and there are
Speaker 1: a couple of moments where she's expressing tension in the
Speaker 1: relationship and frustration that you've internalized because you can't go
Speaker 1: on the road. Now that you're back on the road,
Speaker 1: how you getting along well with trying? I think with
Speaker 1: every every relationship, it never stops. You know, you're trying
Speaker 1: all the time. Uh, there's part of me, to be
Speaker 1: really honest, there's a solitary kind of first, which is
Speaker 1: probably why I lived in New York City for so
Speaker 1: long and loved it. Is that you can just come
Speaker 1: and go and I'm always thinking about something of reading
Speaker 1: a book. You know, I can be further distant. So
Speaker 1: we always have to work on me being distant. But
Speaker 1: we're still together, you know. Okay, So you're a creative person.
Speaker 1: You know. It's what people don't realize. It's the very
Speaker 1: outgoing extroverts who are the businesspeople, and the introverts are
Speaker 1: the artists. And it's a very different mentality even though
Speaker 1: they intersect. So but in music one has to network
Speaker 1: and work it. So how do you get those two
Speaker 1: sides your personality to work. One wants to be at home, internalized,
Speaker 1: being creative. The other one has to go out, get
Speaker 1: a job, get a band. Ether. Yeah. Yeah, but it's
Speaker 1: like I said before, but it's like you don't write
Speaker 1: music to keep it to yourself. Um. Alison Krauss was
Speaker 1: told me we were both shy people. I was very
Speaker 1: shy as a kid, cripplingly shy, and I was a
Speaker 1: base player all basically as a kind of like that.
Speaker 1: But Allison Cross says she had to overcome a shyness
Speaker 1: to do what she loved the most. And I think
Speaker 1: that person that's kind of introverted or introspective is the
Speaker 1: word that writes that stuff, that performs those songs. Um,
Speaker 1: you can't just keep it yourself at some point, you have.
Speaker 1: The whole point of music, of art is to share something.
Speaker 1: It's and you know, when I was in the Babies,
Speaker 1: I mean I didn't want to be sense of stage.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to be the singer. I was the
Speaker 1: only guy that could do it. So I put it
Speaker 1: all to once side said come on then now or never,
Speaker 1: you know, and I stepped into that persona and then
Speaker 1: it became easier and easier. And it's like I said
Speaker 1: about the meet and Greed. I can walk into a
Speaker 1: room full of people and I think, honestly put them
Speaker 1: at their ease almost immediately. And I think it's a
Speaker 1: sincere thing to it. It's not like something you learn.
Speaker 1: It's I think I'm naturally friendly and I and I
Speaker 1: respect people, and I want them to have a great
Speaker 1: time when they come and see me play. If I
Speaker 1: can spend fifteen minutes to our nestility and it turns
Speaker 1: the world around. I mean, what a joke, you know,
Speaker 1: as answer the bird and said, you know what a jump?
Speaker 1: I make people happy. And some of the songs are
Speaker 1: desperate and they're dark, and they're not something you want
Speaker 1: to listen to if you want to. You know, part
Speaker 1: of your brands up as people relate, you know. I
Speaker 1: think we're all going through the same things as we
Speaker 1: get older, and I think there's a conversation going on
Speaker 1: between the audience and the artist, and it's it's a
Speaker 1: worthwhile conversation. Okay, let's talk a little bit more about
Speaker 1: your personality. Hypothetically, I call you John, We're going to
Speaker 1: a party. There's gonna be fifty people there, come along.
Speaker 1: Are you going to say? Give me the address? You're
Speaker 1: gonna say? I don't really, I just know I wouldn't go.
Speaker 1: I really wouldn't. Michelle Peiffer said once that she when
Speaker 1: she got invited to parties, she'd wind up in the
Speaker 1: garden playing with the dog, you know, And I thought
Speaker 1: that was very endearing. But I'm like that. I mean,
Speaker 1: I like people, but I don't have to go out
Speaker 1: and hang around in Boston meet people and sort of
Speaker 1: you know, I I really value the time by myself.
Speaker 1: I read a lot, and I pin and I write
Speaker 1: a lot, and I'd like to keep the two worlds
Speaker 1: kind of separate. I mean, once you're on the road
Speaker 1: with the band, you know, it's Camaraderie's is a lot
Speaker 1: of fun, and then there's the show and all the
Speaker 1: people you meet. It's a very positive thing. But I
Speaker 1: need to go back into my roots to recharge. I
Speaker 1: can't stay in the spotlight too long. So let's say
Speaker 1: you're in your house and you're in a room and
Speaker 1: you're painting or something and your girlfriend interrupts you. Are
Speaker 1: you cool with that? Or you're saying no, no, I'm
Speaker 1: in my zone. You got no no, no, no, I'm not.
Speaker 1: But it's it's I will be looking for something to do.
Speaker 1: That's that's kind of I've just recently started to write stories,
Speaker 1: like short stories, and I've kind of got a knack
Speaker 1: for it. I just ran off something that was like
Speaker 1: just on a computer, just tapping out the words, and
Speaker 1: these things are not like, um, it isn't like I'm
Speaker 1: a boy genius. It's just what I do in my
Speaker 1: often time. Some people watch TV. I don't. I can't
Speaker 1: watch TV. I can watch a movie, but I can't
Speaker 1: watch I just I'm not good at taking time off
Speaker 1: listen doing something. So you talked about wanting to share
Speaker 1: your art. Now that you're writing these short stories, are
Speaker 1: you looking to share those? Well? I would like to
Speaker 1: get better. I dashed up this five piece UM show
Speaker 1: story about a guy looking for his brother and he
Speaker 1: goes on a bender and so drinks hisself into the floor,
Speaker 1: gets on the d yet ferry to France, gist and
Speaker 1: knife fight with two apaches. The calling in France, uh
Speaker 1: the street because he gets killed. Um And it's a
Speaker 1: five part story, you know. I read reread it again
Speaker 1: two weeks ago, and it's all sorts of editing. And
Speaker 1: at first I thought I've stumbled across some rare talent,
Speaker 1: you know, But I have nothing but respect for writers.
Speaker 1: That's a whole different thing. That's the command I mean
Speaker 1: writing songs is you have the chords behind it too,
Speaker 1: to color the words. If you if you say a
Speaker 1: certain word like trend and you play in a major
Speaker 1: it's a beat. It's a train, you know, train tran
Speaker 1: If you play an air minor, the train could be
Speaker 1: going to hell, you know, it's like that. That's the different.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of things in play. But just to
Speaker 1: write this is why I'll never do a memoir. I
Speaker 1: could never do it. I could never get that right. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's just go back for a second to being on
Speaker 1: the road. Um, did you ever have a time being
Speaker 1: on the road using drugs and alcohol to calm down
Speaker 1: from the geleration of the show? Yeah? And did it
Speaker 1: ever get into a territory that you look back now
Speaker 1: and say, what the hell was I doing? Or was
Speaker 1: it always under control? No? I think on the road
Speaker 1: if you start doing that kind of stuff. I mean
Speaker 1: we're talking about cocaineously, but I mean if you in
Speaker 1: the old days, it would be a couple of lines
Speaker 1: of glow and people would do it. They would have
Speaker 1: a shot of brandy or whatever, go to a club,
Speaker 1: get up and sing with the band. Anything at all
Speaker 1: could happen after that, and you would work up with
Speaker 1: a hangover after travels for the next gig. And if
Speaker 1: the band is any good and you have any sense that, oh,
Speaker 1: the other three or four guys are gonna grab you
Speaker 1: by the back of the color and stay knock it off.
Speaker 1: This is how the lives too. You know. If you
Speaker 1: start self destruct, usually get bounced out of the band.
Speaker 1: It happens in a lot people drink themselves to death,
Speaker 1: and it's the time off that's the problem. Because you
Speaker 1: looked at the film Disvoid with something that's electrifying, you know. Well,
Speaker 1: that is one serious moment in the movie where uh,
Speaker 1: there's an altercation with the guitarist who's ultimately fired. So
Speaker 1: give us a little bit more on that. Well, his
Speaker 1: personality was flamboyant to say the least, and uh, I'm
Speaker 1: sort of working class and he was very much up
Speaker 1: a middle class and had a whole different take on
Speaker 1: what he was there for. And he barely spoke to me.
Speaker 1: I mean, I tried to write songs of him, you know,
Speaker 1: tried to buy maturing, you know, but he had made
Speaker 1: his mind up that I was the competition of something
Speaker 1: and I, just like I said before, I didn't even
Speaker 1: want to be in the center of the stage. But
Speaker 1: it all came to a head on one of the
Speaker 1: gigs when he smashed the guitar and screamed funk off
Speaker 1: at the audience, and we just like looked at each other,
Speaker 1: like we have no idea, at what point? How far
Speaker 1: it's been so bad? For so long? I actually remember
Speaker 1: having a glass of grand Mania at the end of
Speaker 1: this table and smoking a cigarette. I mean, I remember thinking,
Speaker 1: just another day, you know, it's just what goes on.
Speaker 1: But it starts to get wilder and wilder, and by
Speaker 1: the time we got on the bus, he was in
Speaker 1: full meltdown. And in the movie it, you know, we
Speaker 1: talked about finding stuff, but there was so much money
Speaker 1: riding on the band and investment, not only from the
Speaker 1: business spent, but from all of us, the hardship we've
Speaker 1: been through to get that far. And then one guy
Speaker 1: is trying to actually like, you know, really seriously injury
Speaker 1: with an instrument. You know, it's like kind of like, wow,
Speaker 1: know what is that? I mean, what is this bound
Speaker 1: worth to me? You know, I don't want to go
Speaker 1: through life with no eyesight. I don't want to you know,
Speaker 1: maybe bleed to death on the floor because he's going
Speaker 1: to broken ball. But it's the point where you look
Speaker 1: at it, you like, Jesus Christ, ma'am, how do we
Speaker 1: get to this. We're all trying to get to the
Speaker 1: next level, and you're trying to kill me. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know what to say to that, you know,
Speaker 1: because I mean it's not something I enjoyed talking about.
Speaker 1: It's still a mystery to me that I put up
Speaker 1: with it for so long. But it did explode. And
Speaker 1: when you fired him, what did he say? Oh, he
Speaker 1: thinks that he was like the record company fighting and
Speaker 1: but I mean that's like saying I didn't try and
Speaker 1: funk you up at the bottom. It's the record company.
Speaker 1: Don't like which that unreality thing comes into it, where
Speaker 1: you think you're really dealing with somebody that's got a
Speaker 1: different take on absolutely everything. You know, he was incensed,
Speaker 1: but that should show you where he was. I mean,
Speaker 1: at what point do you really try and mess someone
Speaker 1: up with the broken body? Have you ever encountered him since? No,
Speaker 1: he's he goes off on the internet and he's like,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm a star, You're not all this kind
Speaker 1: of crap, And I just know at some point you
Speaker 1: just go, I did the best for you. I really
Speaker 1: did know pret up with that for years and years,
Speaker 1: and that's your answer to me. So what do I
Speaker 1: do Okay, you grow up in northwest England. What's that like? Oh,
Speaker 1: it's beautiful. Lancaster is a castle and our school that
Speaker 1: was built that I went to to be it and
Speaker 1: our school as like glass roofs for life class and
Speaker 1: print rooms. It's not like that anymore. It's some sort
Speaker 1: of building for different things tourist board. It's a very
Speaker 1: very antiquated old city with the cobbled streets and houses
Speaker 1: from the thirteenth century at the priory church next to
Speaker 1: the castle, the foundations for a thousand years old and
Speaker 1: it's laid out really beautifully. It's like a really incredibly strange,
Speaker 1: very very British thing started about fields and we had
Speaker 1: a university come about thirty five years ago and it's
Speaker 1: it's taken over the town, so it's it's kind of
Speaker 1: changed quite a long but Lancaster really is something. I
Speaker 1: go back there as much as I can. And how
Speaker 1: did your family end up there? Oh? They were born there.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, in England could go back five
Speaker 1: hundred years. Do you know how many generations your family
Speaker 1: was there? Um? Well, my my father's mother h her
Speaker 1: family Um. In the Doomsday book, that's King John's Uh,
Speaker 1: account of who owns what where the farm belongs to it,
Speaker 1: you know, Um, they we call AGM so they go
Speaker 1: back that they're like York, and that my mom is Lancashire,
Speaker 1: and there's Irish blood in me somewhere, um from my
Speaker 1: grandmother's mother. And there's some Maltese but apparently from a
Speaker 1: generation or two before that. But it's pretty much Church
Speaker 1: of England straight on, you know. I mean everybody comes
Speaker 1: from somewhere in Britain. It's like you know, it's it's Celtic,
Speaker 1: or it's Norman, or it's you know, angloss action. And
Speaker 1: what did your parents do for a living? Well, my
Speaker 1: mom was a nurse that the piano could tap pants,
Speaker 1: all that kind of thing. She was great, she still is,
Speaker 1: she's ninety seven. My dad he was a mechanic, but
Speaker 1: there's also a chess player and extremely well right. He
Speaker 1: was supposed to be the most well read man in Lancaster.
Speaker 1: Also didact know because from the war camp you couldn't
Speaker 1: go to university. But I think if the war hadn't happened,
Speaker 1: he would have gone to university. Was he was an
Speaker 1: absolutely incredible of the books and very smart man. And
Speaker 1: how many kids in the family. I have a brother
Speaker 1: called Joe. He was a really, really great guitar player
Speaker 1: who had learned an enormous amount from now he's all,
Speaker 1: he's all, he's four years older than me. Okay, So
Speaker 1: you start going to school. What kind of kid are you?
Speaker 1: Were you like the life of the party had outcast,
Speaker 1: just one rob. I was pretty popular. I really was
Speaker 1: a popular kid. You know that the bullies would always
Speaker 1: come around and give you a really bad time, especially
Speaker 1: when he got about fifteen. You know, I had long hand,
Speaker 1: I dressed differently, and I didn't fit in at school,
Speaker 1: but the girls like me, and I had a lot
Speaker 1: of friends, you know. I would say I was a
Speaker 1: really popular kid. I was looking back and it was
Speaker 1: really wonderful, you know, but there's always those bastards in
Speaker 1: the corner that I want to show you what'swa and
Speaker 1: I took it very hard in the last couple of years.
Speaker 1: It was just rough. Good student, bad student. Did knew
Speaker 1: anything I couldn't. My Matthew is almost nonexistent. I had dyslexia,
Speaker 1: so my bees and bees were backwards, which is ironic
Speaker 1: being a lyricist, you know. But I love to read.
Speaker 1: I love literature and I lived out, so they let
Speaker 1: me just do art classes for my final year to
Speaker 1: build up a portfolio so I could gainst our school,
Speaker 1: which is very kind of it really was because I
Speaker 1: really was the odd man out of school. I was
Speaker 1: kind of the bohemian kid. But it was great and
Speaker 1: like I said, I was kind of popular, so uh
Speaker 1: you know, although there was a couple of moments of
Speaker 1: extreme craziness with a couple of the really big kids,
Speaker 1: I mean I got through it pretty well. Really. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you're in the UK where the Beatles break a
Speaker 1: couple of years earlier. Were you a big fee of
Speaker 1: music before that or was it? So how did you
Speaker 1: get into it? Well? Yeah, you would just see a
Speaker 1: cowboy music, uh you know Marster Robbins trilled fighter bellas,
Speaker 1: uh couldn't fight a bellas and trail songs. That was
Speaker 1: a big album and I'd hear in occasionally on the
Speaker 1: radio or in stores. We didn't have a record play
Speaker 1: we couldn't afford on, but my my cousin Carol at
Speaker 1: a radio gram and some records that she had Brenda
Speaker 1: Lee Everybody Loves Me. But you remember hearing that was
Speaker 1: about six and falling in love with Brenda Lee. But
Speaker 1: it was a little country in Americana, but specifically Western songs.
Speaker 1: I mean, Ghost Riders in the sky Man, you know,
Speaker 1: it's that the barrettone guitar and cowboys. You know, he
Speaker 1: just got through being a kid listening to you know,
Speaker 1: David Crockett and stuff, and then it became the sexy
Speaker 1: and things. You start to inch forward into being an
Speaker 1: older kid, and you'd see the symbol some and there
Speaker 1: was nothing more important than America when you're like five,
Speaker 1: and it's, like I said, Davy Crockett, Cowboys and Indians
Speaker 1: and then this music that could hear every once in
Speaker 1: a while, and that led straight into the Beatles, and
Speaker 1: from that point on there was absolutely no question about
Speaker 1: what I would do. Really, So how did you first
Speaker 1: hear the Beatles? Into what degree were you a fan
Speaker 1: of the Beatles? Well, I remember, um, I remember, I
Speaker 1: must have been about eight, but I remember watching this
Speaker 1: TV show and they came on and they played Love
Speaker 1: Me Do, And then the next week I think it
Speaker 1: came back and did Please Please Me? But I saw
Speaker 1: it on Granada Television. We lived in a tiny cottage
Speaker 1: that first into the countryside. If you can imagine like
Speaker 1: some little kid watching the Beatles in this cottage with
Speaker 1: the trees outside in the fields. I mean, he said,
Speaker 1: it's it's a it's a it's a strange picture. But
Speaker 1: it was like the Northwest. They came from Liverpool, which
Speaker 1: is only set in miles of Lancaster, and they were
Speaker 1: the most different thing you've ever seen in the world.
Speaker 1: But the sound of it itself, the sound was incredible
Speaker 1: and the songs were you know, as we all know,
Speaker 1: and it took us along with it. Uh. The next
Speaker 1: seven years were like um, I mean, it was like
Speaker 1: being given something. Every album that came out you couldn't
Speaker 1: wait to hear it, and everything you heard made your
Speaker 1: hairstand the band, I mean it was the most incredible thing.
Speaker 1: And it was working class, which was really something you'd
Speaker 1: never really seen that before. Hardcore, working class, black and
Speaker 1: white Liverpool Lean and the best thing you're going to
Speaker 1: hear for the next fifty years. You know, you know,
Speaker 1: I only have an American perspective. The Beatles came, and
Speaker 1: then there was so called British invasion, which was reething,
Speaker 1: you know, hard edged on one level, like the Stones,
Speaker 1: and then people who really weren't rockers like Freddie and
Speaker 1: the Dreamers. On the other hand, so how do you
Speaker 1: do you do? So? Were you a fan of all
Speaker 1: those acts or was it more like, you know, no,
Speaker 1: I just remember the other day, you know, people asking
Speaker 1: me these questions. But I and I you go, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: the Beatles, yeah, you know, you know, go st yeah,
Speaker 1: you know. But I remember having a Pretty Things EP
Speaker 1: with Don't Bring Me Down, Big Boss Man. Uh right,
Speaker 1: last week City, I think it was on there. But
Speaker 1: I remember having that EP. And I was only eight,
Speaker 1: and I haven't got a record player, and my mom
Speaker 1: would send me down to my grandmothers on a Friday
Speaker 1: to visit, you know, and um, I'd say the CP
Speaker 1: and I'm playing the Pretty Things at eight, So I
Speaker 1: was probably heading towards the Yardbirds and Free and the
Speaker 1: Jeff Bett Group and and all the and Jimmy Andrews,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean Cheese and but all those acts,
Speaker 1: you know, were they were more hardcore, but more importantly,
Speaker 1: we were all inspired by African American music, blues and soul.
Speaker 1: And the really fascinating part about the whole thing is
Speaker 1: as I was singing as a kid, I was singing
Speaker 1: in a blue style. I didn't learn that from anybody.
Speaker 1: I didn't know about Muddy Water still as about fifteen.
Speaker 1: You know, I knew about Hunk Williams, but that isn't
Speaker 1: blue singing. But I sang in this and I phrased
Speaker 1: in exactly the same way as I do now. I
Speaker 1: didn't learn how to sing. I've always sounded like this,
Speaker 1: and it's a mystery to me to know where that
Speaker 1: comes from. But maybe it's just something you're born with.
Speaker 1: And maybe I did hear something that was like just
Speaker 1: it all came from black music. I don't know. Okay,
Speaker 1: at what point did you learn how to play an instrument?
Speaker 1: And then how did you end up on the base?
Speaker 1: My brother had a telecaster, the first telecaster in the Northwest, really,
Speaker 1: he got it on on payments, and I was playing gigs.
Speaker 1: It was a really good guitar player, still is, and
Speaker 1: I think I went to the base because, um, he
Speaker 1: was the lead guitar player. I probably boten prayer that
Speaker 1: would start about together, because when you sing with your brother,
Speaker 1: you really do sing like you harmony and stuff. There's
Speaker 1: a magical thing between brothers. But I started to fall
Speaker 1: a lit with the best when I you knows Andy
Speaker 1: Frazer and this Jack Bruce and there's Renis Garrison. There's
Speaker 1: just fine. The bass is like there's an instrument. It's
Speaker 1: that the cello. You know, I love the cello. I
Speaker 1: love best notes. I like the way the best move
Speaker 1: behind the chords. I mean on the Beatles first album,
Speaker 1: you hear former Can't Go, How good a dass with another?
Speaker 1: And he was boat, the boat, the boat. It's like
Speaker 1: a passing note, you know, I was. I was maybe
Speaker 1: fourteen when I heard that. Blew my mind how anybody
Speaker 1: could be that clever to put a passing on in
Speaker 1: a rock and roll So nobody's ever done that. And
Speaker 1: it was just an elegant instrument, you know, and it
Speaker 1: looked beautiful. dB three is still a thing of enormous
Speaker 1: beauty to me. Or they done electoral along Home. They
Speaker 1: were all beautiful instruments to base instruments. So when did
Speaker 1: you start playing in bands and what did that look like? Well?
Speaker 1: I sang in my brother's band when when he was
Speaker 1: about seventeen and I was thirteen. I'd go around to
Speaker 1: the rehearsals and seeing Walking the Dog, Blue Seal, Mabel,
Speaker 1: those kind of songs. Um And then when I was
Speaker 1: at art school. We needed a band to play the
Speaker 1: Art school dance and I got my brother to get
Speaker 1: his trauma and we just played for like three hours
Speaker 1: blues and shuffles. That was my first time out. But
Speaker 1: from that point on, towards the end of my state
Speaker 1: at art school, I actually put it bound together. It
Speaker 1: was my own and we were out playing dates. So
Speaker 1: you know, I um man, when you get the bug,
Speaker 1: whatever you call it, there's nothing going to stop you.
Speaker 1: You know, I've slept on floors and I've been in
Speaker 1: the back of a truck for like you know that was.
Speaker 1: But you do it and you love it, and none
Speaker 1: of its work. You're in the middle of a romantic thing.
Speaker 1: It's what you want to do. Whether you are pay
Speaker 1: to do it or it's not the matter, but you
Speaker 1: certainly don't want to be anywhere else. It's all the matters,
Speaker 1: you know. So how do you get from Lancaster to
Speaker 1: London by bus? But being okay, keep going. It's two
Speaker 1: hundred two miles. And the first time I joined the band,
Speaker 1: there's a guy called Ali Alco. It was like a
Speaker 1: really genius guitar player from the Northwest. He played reading
Speaker 1: festival at a band called Universe. It was a big deal.
Speaker 1: It wasn't signed, but he was a big deal. And
Speaker 1: he saw me play and asked me for wanted to
Speaker 1: go to London. And I actually got almost arrested about
Speaker 1: six weeks before for a jewel robbery which I did
Speaker 1: not do. But the police came to a sound check
Speaker 1: and the Seahorse bar in more com tapped me on
Speaker 1: the shoulder and then took me and my band down
Speaker 1: the police station and grilled us for like two hours,
Speaker 1: three hours, and they were they thought that I was
Speaker 1: a bad lot. The band was dealing hash. Me and
Speaker 1: this guy, Martin, the roadie was signed. This interrogation room
Speaker 1: and Martin, they leave us addressing all these questions and
Speaker 1: Martin pulls out a lumper hash and starts eating it.
Speaker 1: And I thought, yeah, you know, I thought, well there
Speaker 1: goes my life. You know. I think I'll you know,
Speaker 1: I think I'll just get a job now or maybe
Speaker 1: go to jail whatever. And that accuse me of stealing
Speaker 1: Lonnie Donigan's drum cases when we played with Londie Donegan
Speaker 1: about three months before, and uh, what would I be
Speaker 1: doing with drum cases? Were the drummer was very light fingered,
Speaker 1: so I would think all fingers would point to the drummer,
Speaker 1: but I think he was pointing at me. So this
Speaker 1: window opened for me to go to London with Ali
Speaker 1: on the old car and live in West Hampstea with
Speaker 1: the roadie and Ali in a room that was eight
Speaker 1: by ten and live in London and it was spectacular.
Speaker 1: You know, I had no money. I was signing on
Speaker 1: the door, getting like four pounds a week living off
Speaker 1: gun knows one. But it was fantastic London to the
Speaker 1: early seven He's going to the Marquee Club, seeing these
Speaker 1: bands that were just incredible, Stone the Crows and you know,
Speaker 1: Humble Pie, Steve Mary. I saw Steve Mary had seen
Speaker 1: at the London Palladium, you know, I mean just just
Speaker 1: the whiless stuff. But um, that's how I got to London. Yeah,
Speaker 1: long story. And were you playing in any band before
Speaker 1: you join the Babies? Yeah? That was you know, that
Speaker 1: was with England. It was called who were playing festivals
Speaker 1: and the Marquee Club and eating of living out and uh,
Speaker 1: I went to America to join the band in Cleveland
Speaker 1: that look, we're looking for a bass player. That blew up.
Speaker 1: I came back a little bit a little bit slower.
Speaker 1: How does a band in Cleveland find you in London
Speaker 1: and then you go? Well, the singer, the original singer
Speaker 1: from England, a Scottish guy called Phil Ray Jesse. Ray
Speaker 1: didn't work out with Ali, so he left and I
Speaker 1: stayed with Ali, and he somehow got to Cleveland. I
Speaker 1: was in a band, uh and they needed a bass player.
Speaker 1: And I left all this because we were going nowhere,
Speaker 1: went home and I couldn't get a job. I didn't
Speaker 1: want a job. My dad wasn't pleased to see me
Speaker 1: coming home. He was starting to to get a life,
Speaker 1: you know, and I was just desperate. And this lesson
Speaker 1: came from Cleveland, do you want to come and play bass?
Speaker 1: So I I packed up the old kicked back and
Speaker 1: somehow got a visa and I went to Cleveland for
Speaker 1: like four months and we played all over some of
Speaker 1: the small clubs there and trying to get a record
Speaker 1: deal that fell through. And then I came back to
Speaker 1: London and the baby started. Okay, had you been anywhere
Speaker 1: other than you know, the UK? What was it like
Speaker 1: being Cleveland? Of all? Remember that book um Diary of
Speaker 1: a Rock and Roll Star by Ian Hunson. Of course, yeah,
Speaker 1: fantastic book. On the bus home from London, I read
Speaker 1: that book and it was just about Cleveland, about the
Speaker 1: scene Um, about kid Leo, about MMS the bussard all
Speaker 1: you know. I was like whoa. And the scene that
Speaker 1: was happening in in Cleveland was a mirror of what
Speaker 1: was happening in London. Really, so when it came through
Speaker 1: that could go to Cleveland, it was like, wow, I'll
Speaker 1: take a show. And there was a ballsy move, you know.
Speaker 1: But I wasn't done anything to be in a boundary.
Speaker 1: I just wanted to play. Okay, so that doesn't work out.
Speaker 1: You come back to the UK. Uh. You know it's
Speaker 1: talked about in the movie with Adrian Lilar, but a
Speaker 1: little bit slower. How do you end up in the Babies? Well?
Speaker 1: It was his mutual friend called Golden the Works Shaftbury Avenue,
Speaker 1: a guitar village and he knew Mike Kobe. It was
Speaker 1: the guitar player and Mike had a manage your gold
Speaker 1: agent and they were looking for somebody they could write
Speaker 1: songs and sing and play bass. Would I be interested
Speaker 1: in taking a meeting? And would I you know? So
Speaker 1: I went for point a beer on a Friday night,
Speaker 1: I think at Sir Richard Steele's pub on have a
Speaker 1: stock Hill and we talked about it, and you know,
Speaker 1: it was like it could happen, you know. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you can get a record deal, it's unbelievable. And
Speaker 1: I went home and told my girlfriend. I said, look,
Speaker 1: it's you know, painting the sky. It's just too much.
Speaker 1: But Asian was very tenacious, you know, and he must
Speaker 1: have seen something in me because it took about fifteen months,
Speaker 1: but we eventually got a record deal and I wrote
Speaker 1: songs and I sang them and I became person. You know.
Speaker 1: So in those fifteen months, what were you doing and
Speaker 1: what was the band doing to ultimately lead up to
Speaker 1: this record deal. Well, we had a there was two
Speaker 1: artists from the Royal College that owned a warehouse on
Speaker 1: tool the Street, which is just south the Thames, and
Speaker 1: Adrian knew him. There were eccentric guys that were great,
Speaker 1: but he had this rehearsal space called Base in the
Speaker 1: in the basement of this great, big tea warehouse, and
Speaker 1: we used to go down there and audition people or
Speaker 1: just you know, go to the pub next door and
Speaker 1: have a beer and talk about it even more it
Speaker 1: was all you know, it's like, um, we talked about
Speaker 1: it more than we were it. You know. It was
Speaker 1: like and I went home and wrote songs and then
Speaker 1: I came back in and we'd work them all up.
Speaker 1: We got Tony down the drummer. It was a hot
Speaker 1: drummer in London, and then we had something. We had
Speaker 1: a three piece bound, so we were in the studio
Speaker 1: and cut demos. It was unbelievable, you know, it was
Speaker 1: actually moving forward in a sort of like it was weaving,
Speaker 1: you know, but it was moving forward, and eventually we
Speaker 1: got we got signed through doing a video, which was
Speaker 1: very unusual. And man, this is about fifteen lifetimes ago.
Speaker 1: It really is. You know, it's hard to it's hard
Speaker 1: to look back without being misty eyed. But it was.
Speaker 1: It was rough. You know. We didn't have anybody to eat.
Speaker 1: It was all handsome mouth. It was desperate, you know,
Speaker 1: and London cold and rainy, no heating, no hot water.
Speaker 1: You know, it was kind of you know, it was
Speaker 1: it's chance in a million that it turned out like it.
Speaker 1: Did you signed with Chrysalis? Did you just walk in
Speaker 1: a room and sign or do you hire a lawyer
Speaker 1: or how did that happen. Well, the band had a lawyer,
Speaker 1: but the band was certainly provided the lawyer by Adrian.
Speaker 1: I mean, I knew it going in. You know, if
Speaker 1: you sign on for something, you can't start blaming people.
Speaker 1: It was a raw deal for me and a good
Speaker 1: deal for them. But I came as part of the package.
Speaker 1: And but it was a huge signing and we got
Speaker 1: some money and an allowance. You know, this is a
Speaker 1: big deal too back then, and we got on with it.
Speaker 1: We just I kept thinking, no matter what happens, if
Speaker 1: you just keep you know, punch it, you're gonna You're
Speaker 1: gonna come through somewhere. I just thought that was always
Speaker 1: going to be the way out. It's just stay with it.
Speaker 1: And it was fantastic, you know, coming to America St.
Speaker 1: Louis recorded St. Louis and seeing the arch and the
Speaker 1: whole thing, and and New York City in the seventies,
Speaker 1: you know, wow, l A. And then going through Cleveland
Speaker 1: where I just you know, cut my teeth and it
Speaker 1: was all kind of meant to be. It was ridiculous
Speaker 1: for me. Okay. So one of the big points in
Speaker 1: the movie is you work with Bob Ezrin. It hasn't
Speaker 1: done Pink Floyd the Wall at that point. But did
Speaker 1: lou Reid's album, did all the Alice Cooper records, and
Speaker 1: you talk, what a bad experience that is. He just
Speaker 1: didn't get it. I mean you really, I don't want to, like,
Speaker 1: you know, make a meal out of it, but it
Speaker 1: was I don't I don't know how he missed it.
Speaker 1: But in the Andy stuff coming to the studio, you know,
Speaker 1: it was we're being produced by the engineer. It's kind
Speaker 1: of unbelievable because I know he's got a great track record,
Speaker 1: but my experience wasn't good, okay, and he's normally in Toronto.
Speaker 1: Did he cut it in London or in Toronto? In Toronto?
Speaker 1: We went all the way Toronto to the studio, which
Speaker 1: costs a lot of money by time you're done, so
Speaker 1: you talk about the record, you're not happy, but you
Speaker 1: put it out anyway, So what to like starting with
Speaker 1: a record you don't believe him? Well, it's the weirdest thing.
Speaker 1: We took it back to England. Everybody here everything about it,
Speaker 1: and I think the record company thought about it and
Speaker 1: decided just to go. I mean in London, those posters
Speaker 1: on the on the sides of busses. You know, we'd
Speaker 1: be talking to somebody in the street like in Pickadilly
Speaker 1: Circus and the bus that go by Young Ambazon you
Speaker 1: get out of the subway, the underground that posts of
Speaker 1: the battle that you know, and we were on the
Speaker 1: major TV shows. It was like out of life of
Speaker 1: its own and I suppose you wish that people are
Speaker 1: gonna see it for more than it is, but I
Speaker 1: think we would have made a much better record with
Speaker 1: a different producer. Okay, Now, one other element in the
Speaker 1: movie is you're in the UK. It appears that Adrian
Speaker 1: Miller is going to fight with the label and he
Speaker 1: instructs all of you to come back, but you don't, right,
Speaker 1: So what was the real story there? Well, the real
Speaker 1: story is that, I mean what was what what was
Speaker 1: going on with him in the label on it was
Speaker 1: being threatening. I think he based his life on being
Speaker 1: one of the greatest twins, you know. It was one
Speaker 1: of those kind of Eastern gangster kind of like alright,
Speaker 1: my how you do it? Taken facing tif in night
Speaker 1: you do it all say? You know, it was like
Speaker 1: it was unnecessary, but that was part of his persona,
Speaker 1: and I think he went to talk with the company
Speaker 1: and wanted more money, and the company had already spent
Speaker 1: an aminal leg on the album. And then how does
Speaker 1: in America doing a twelve day promotional tour. We did
Speaker 1: all the major TV shows, played live, let the press, uh,
Speaker 1: record signings. We were in the middle of a whirlwind
Speaker 1: promotional thing and it was going well. And we were
Speaker 1: at the highest in Westwood in a suite and the
Speaker 1: phone rang and it was Adrian and Uh, it was like,
Speaker 1: pack your backs, you're coming home now. It was like,
Speaker 1: what the fund are you talk to me like that?
Speaker 1: For you know, it's you know, I'm the singer, I'm
Speaker 1: the writer, and I've just spent two years living off
Speaker 1: you know, French fries and milk, and you're telling me
Speaker 1: I'm going to get out a plane because Shervan Arow
Speaker 1: with the record company. Can't you sold it out? And
Speaker 1: he was just that. He went straight to Adrian number two,
Speaker 1: which is kind of like, you know, you'll do what
Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell you to Samuel manager and we just
Speaker 1: looked at each other. He got us all on the
Speaker 1: phone one by one and said, you know, you've got
Speaker 1: to come home now, and I just said, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean you can make that what you want. But
Speaker 1: if we had gone back, would have wound up without
Speaker 1: two the street, we wouldn't even a clubhouse, would have
Speaker 1: all disappeared back into our lives. It was over. It
Speaker 1: was a hard decision to make on some level. And
Speaker 1: I never felt right about saying no suation because he
Speaker 1: was he was the guy without Asian. There had been
Speaker 1: nothing but this part of him. There was always about
Speaker 1: more money and we weren't getting any, you know, so
Speaker 1: it was kind of like survival, you know, That's what
Speaker 1: it was. It was survival. So what did he say
Speaker 1: when you I mean, you do you ever basically say
Speaker 1: you're fired? How did that go down? Well, you know,
Speaker 1: we just the record company says us, what do you
Speaker 1: want to do? You know we could we're in the
Speaker 1: middle of this. Said well, we'll funk it. We're coming out.
Speaker 1: That's it. What what what do we do? And they
Speaker 1: put us in a house in Beverly Hills. Uh, and
Speaker 1: Adrian rang up the FBI or the police or something.
Speaker 1: But the FBI knocked on the door about four days later, um,
Speaker 1: wondering if we've been kidnapped. I mean, it was just wild.
Speaker 1: You know, you couldn't make this stuff up, and we
Speaker 1: had Bill Graham and a least like really huge managers
Speaker 1: coming to the house to see if we're consider being
Speaker 1: managed by that and stuff. I mean, it was something
Speaker 1: a matter of a sign before it exploded anyway. But
Speaker 1: without Adrian, we wouldn't be having this conversation. I wouldn't
Speaker 1: be where I am. There'd be no solo career, missing
Speaker 1: you or anything. None, none of the big success of
Speaker 1: the biggest success to the baby said, none of it
Speaker 1: would happen. I just wish you would be more amicable,
Speaker 1: you know, more more able to deal with other people
Speaker 1: to get what he wantsed you know, how'd you end
Speaker 1: up with Rob Stone? Um? He came by the house
Speaker 1: with Elliott Roberts and Elliott made me laugh. I mean,
Speaker 1: we had one guy show up. We looked like Perry
Speaker 1: Como and he had this like sweater on the button
Speaker 1: at the front and like a sports shirt and it's
Speaker 1: really bad haircut, like a Republican haircut. And he said,
Speaker 1: and I said, well, you know, who have you worked with?
Speaker 1: You know, because I was pretty much the spokesman. This
Speaker 1: guy said, A little band you might have heard of him,
Speaker 1: the Beatles, And yeah, you know, so he was immediately
Speaker 1: shown the door. You know, it was like, get the
Speaker 1: fuck out, get away from me. But Elliott was funny
Speaker 1: and very intelligent and Ron me and Ron just we
Speaker 1: just became great friends. We've been friends, I suppose on
Speaker 1: and off he is and uh, you know, and they
Speaker 1: were very connected. They had Neil Young, and Neil Young
Speaker 1: was to me like, uh he was my Dylan really
Speaker 1: at that point, and Joni Mitchell and they had the
Speaker 1: cars and I think they had Devo. But they were
Speaker 1: players and they were respected and we hit the ground
Speaker 1: running with them and we really had a ball. And
Speaker 1: then there was an argument between them and the record
Speaker 1: company of the money and that was the end of that.
Speaker 1: So money kept looming. It's oh what happened between Lookout
Speaker 1: management in the label and how did you end up
Speaker 1: partying ways with them? Well, I think Elliott went then
Speaker 1: and said, listen, we can't move forward this motion debt.
Speaker 1: You know, let's just call the debt experience and let's
Speaker 1: kick it off for the new you know, we're in now.
Speaker 1: And they had a big rather record company and it's
Speaker 1: just wouldn't work with them, and so that was it.
Speaker 1: You had to get a new manager. Yeah, and who
Speaker 1: was that manager? Well, that was Renaissance, manishment, that was Renaissance.
Speaker 1: They had Ray Davis, they had the Kinks, and we
Speaker 1: hit the road. I mean after the incident with the
Speaker 1: guitar player, we got Jonathan Cannon and Ricky Phillips expanded
Speaker 1: the band. Bab became the singer. Just decided to do
Speaker 1: Baby Smart too really and went out and and toured relentlessly.
Speaker 1: Great fund that he went nowhere. Okay, so the second album,
Speaker 1: how do you end up working with ron nevison Um?
Speaker 1: He was He just came along when we got to
Speaker 1: l a We we were staying in l a Um
Speaker 1: after the Adriaan thing and doing the odd TV show
Speaker 1: and ron was a series of one of different producers
Speaker 1: that we were introduced to. You know, he worked with
Speaker 1: towns End. That was a big, big Townsend fan, and
Speaker 1: you know he had an authentic rock track record. So
Speaker 1: now you're in the studio for a second time. First time,
Speaker 1: you have a bad experience. How is the experience overall?
Speaker 1: And there's a big focus on the making of Isn't
Speaker 1: It Time? Well, isn't It Time? As the song we
Speaker 1: didn't write, it became apparent that we needed to hit single,
Speaker 1: or the company thought we needed to hit single, and
Speaker 1: Yon had this piano demo and it was we're all
Speaker 1: kind of good at arrangement, but we told we tore
Speaker 1: it to pieces and remade it as as what became
Speaker 1: like a soul Brittish rock classic. But um runket engineer, well,
Speaker 1: we had the big room at the record plant and
Speaker 1: we were using a mobile unit out in Malibu in
Speaker 1: a in a ranch house. Um it worked. You know,
Speaker 1: it's still not what I saw as what we were,
Speaker 1: but um it worked, and those records stand up today.
Speaker 1: So how do you feel, and you know, you're a
Speaker 1: bass player, you're a singer, you're a writer, how do
Speaker 1: you feel about having to do someone else's song and
Speaker 1: that becoming the hit. Well, it didn't please me. I
Speaker 1: thought the songs were that I wrote were better. There
Speaker 1: was a song on the third album, call You. It
Speaker 1: was like people still shout for it now and I
Speaker 1: wrote that one weekend, like and it's really well, I
Speaker 1: look at it, I think how did I do that
Speaker 1: at that age? But there every company hated it. You know,
Speaker 1: you go up against these people that think you should
Speaker 1: sound like something when you don't, and you're a drift.
Speaker 1: You know, you're just fighting the record company all the time.
Speaker 1: I don't know anybody that that hasn't had that problem.
Speaker 1: So how does it end with the babies? Um? I
Speaker 1: left Jonathan can get off the trub With Journey, we
Speaker 1: hadn't had a hit record. Um the big record we
Speaker 1: had we said first the third record, and we had
Speaker 1: every summer I think of you and head first on
Speaker 1: a M and F M simultaneously. Was as big as
Speaker 1: we would ever get. It was fabulous, you know, and
Speaker 1: we were playing to sell that place. It's so opening
Speaker 1: for bigger bands and leaving everybody on their feet. We
Speaker 1: were at the top of our game and the record
Speaker 1: company just couldn't do it, and I just wore out
Speaker 1: and I went back to England. Really okay before we
Speaker 1: get there, you worked with Keith Olsen. Yeah, of course
Speaker 1: is no longer with us, but had great success with
Speaker 1: the Fleetwood back with Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Yeah.
Speaker 1: How was that experience relative to Ezra and Nevison, Well,
Speaker 1: it was more me and potatoes, you know. I think
Speaker 1: at that point we were used to playing live on
Speaker 1: stage as a four or five span and nailing it.
Speaker 1: There were no effects on it. It was just like
Speaker 1: a really tough band and we wanted to sound like
Speaker 1: that in the studio and he made that possible. You know,
Speaker 1: he was passive, he didn't have a lot of input
Speaker 1: on the music, but he was there, you know, through
Speaker 1: the long hours of recording and getting it right. And
Speaker 1: you know, he was a good guy. So when you
Speaker 1: go back to England, you're worn out. What's your plan? Well,
Speaker 1: I got married, I you know, and I lived in
Speaker 1: the countryside in a tiny cottage and I had no
Speaker 1: interest in coming back and doing it again. But it
Speaker 1: worked out that I would. Well what a little bit slower.
Speaker 1: The woman you married, how did you know her? Well,
Speaker 1: she was my girlfriend when I was seventeen and we'd
Speaker 1: come to America together with the babies. We moved to
Speaker 1: California and then she went back. She didn't like it,
Speaker 1: and you know, it was just a natural thing. I've
Speaker 1: known it for ten years. Okay, and you're out of
Speaker 1: the babies. Are you thinking, well, I'm gonna have children,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get a straight job. What's going through your mind? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I had no idea. I had like six grand or
Speaker 1: something in the bank and this little cottage and shared
Speaker 1: a job at local paper, and I just didn't Honestly,
Speaker 1: I never thought further ahead than two or a few months.
Speaker 1: I don't know why, because you know, I'm cool enough
Speaker 1: to look forward, and you don't want to provide for
Speaker 1: a family whatever, But it I just don't know how
Speaker 1: we survived it. But I got off at a record
Speaker 1: contract with the m I and I went back and
Speaker 1: I have missing you, and everything just blew up again.
Speaker 1: Okay when you went back and got married, how much
Speaker 1: were you and out and how much were you disillusioned? Oh?
Speaker 1: I was through with it, you know, I was really
Speaker 1: through the music business. I didn't ever want to sing again.
Speaker 1: But I did go back, and I say I made
Speaker 1: a solo record for Christmas. I moved to New York
Speaker 1: City at a small tidy crash battle sent the Second Street,
Speaker 1: made the Ignition record with Neil Geraldo and and then
Speaker 1: I quit and went back to it. So, you know, Bob,
Speaker 1: you should have done the documentary because you know this
Speaker 1: is like, you know, this is in depth. Man, I'm
Speaker 1: sure there's only you and I vaguely interested in the
Speaker 1: past life. Well, you know this is I won't make
Speaker 1: it about me it's about you. But as I say,
Speaker 1: I resonate with a lot of what you're saying. I'm
Speaker 1: not a successful musician, but the internalization and wanting to
Speaker 1: be heard. But moving forward. Okay, you're when you were married,
Speaker 1: you've never had children? Correct? No, know, is it something
Speaker 1: that you thought you would have or you were kept
Speaker 1: kicking it down the road, or is something I'm so
Speaker 1: dedicated to my career I don't want any Yeah. I
Speaker 1: think it was finding the right person at the right
Speaker 1: time when things weren't falling apart. I mean, it's a
Speaker 1: journeyman profession. You're flying by the seat of your pounts
Speaker 1: all the time and you're on the move, and it's
Speaker 1: a you know, I look back at it now, I go,
Speaker 1: how the hell did I do that? Or go without
Speaker 1: this and do that and make that happen? And you know,
Speaker 1: I was in a relationship a few years ago with
Speaker 1: a girl that had a kid, and you fall in
Speaker 1: love with the kid, and we spent enough time around
Speaker 1: the kid, it's just a natural thing to start suggesting stuff.
Speaker 1: You know, you start becoming somebody's dad, and it's a
Speaker 1: it's a nice experience, you know, Um, it will never
Speaker 1: happen now, and I think long in the tooth now,
Speaker 1: So it's kind of like I wouldn't want to leave
Speaker 1: some kids alone. He was ten when I just put
Speaker 1: my clocks, you know. Okay, let's go back to the
Speaker 1: woman you marry that's also in the movie. How does
Speaker 1: that end? It just endswered me being away so much
Speaker 1: that we became strangers, you know, and she the same thing.
Speaker 1: You start living different lives, you know, you really do.
Speaker 1: When I also have to ask, because rock and roll,
Speaker 1: were you being a bad boy. I was a young
Speaker 1: man and I was an idiot, you know, but I think, um,
Speaker 1: I think that the marriage was definitely on the rocks
Speaker 1: long before we started full. I think we're just different people.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'd taken it to America and she really
Speaker 1: didn't like it, and what did you go home? So
Speaker 1: I think I was going to have to spend a
Speaker 1: lot more time in America. Let's do what I was doing,
Speaker 1: and you just spend You're just on the move. You're
Speaker 1: trying to make things work, send money home, the whole thing.
Speaker 1: You know, I just naturally he falls upon. Okay, so
Speaker 1: now you're back in the UK. You've made this album
Speaker 1: that was not commercially successful with Neil Girraldo did you
Speaker 1: know Neil Giraldo? How'd you hook up with him? No?
Speaker 1: He he came forward at some point I was looking
Speaker 1: for producer and said I'll do it, you know, and
Speaker 1: we we had long conversations, went for a couple of
Speaker 1: walks at a few drinks. I was working with Ivan
Speaker 1: Kroll for Patty Smith's band and Iggy Pop and Frankie
Speaker 1: l Rocco Um had a really crack New York band.
Speaker 1: It was. It was a edge, edgey band, you know,
Speaker 1: And I think, left to my own devices, I would
Speaker 1: have gone off and works with Chris Spenning. Me and
Speaker 1: Chris were talking about doing a band with Buster Jones.
Speaker 1: And but Neil what a guy. I mean, he was
Speaker 1: between me and the record company. It was all of
Speaker 1: lost sort. So she me in the record company. I
Speaker 1: hear they heared me. But we made a great record.
Speaker 1: It was really a record that stands up, you know,
Speaker 1: and both power. You know. If it was good. So
Speaker 1: you go back to England, you think you're done, Yes,
Speaker 1: what is the trigger to come back? Well? I met
Speaker 1: this lawyer in tracks on seventy two Street before I quit,
Speaker 1: and he kept in touch and when I went back
Speaker 1: to England. But what's the name of that lawyer? Rick Smith? Okay?
Speaker 1: And then there was another guy called Stephen was shot
Speaker 1: and they became partless and they got me out of
Speaker 1: my deal with Christmas. They got me out of my deal.
Speaker 1: It costs an armon of leg that I got away,
Speaker 1: and they got me signed to E M. I and
Speaker 1: everything just changed. The sun burst through the sky, you know.
Speaker 1: It was like they took me seriously amid the record
Speaker 1: of White to make. I produced it and we had
Speaker 1: number one single overnight. Okay, although you go into it,
Speaker 1: tell us here the story of writing missing you. Well,
Speaker 1: I was around at somebody's house. We'd we'd finished the record,
Speaker 1: and I knew we hadn't got the single. We were
Speaker 1: having a bone in the studio. We were writing songs
Speaker 1: for me and the guitar player, Gary Myrick. We just storming. Wait, wait,
Speaker 1: I have to ask you something. I was a huge
Speaker 1: fan of that first record, She Talks in Stereo. I
Speaker 1: bought it. Yeah, I went to see him at the Roxy.
Speaker 1: How did you cook up with Gary Myrick through Gary
Speaker 1: Gersh at E M I. I think I think Gary
Speaker 1: Gersh was s tiking to Gary Myrick about doing a deal,
Speaker 1: and when I was looking for guitar player, Gary said,
Speaker 1: you know, he should meet Gary Merrick. It might be interesting.
Speaker 1: You know, he's he's so out there, but he's great.
Speaker 1: And I said, okay, sure. I mean Gary showed up
Speaker 1: and we had the Trauma from Tom Petty's band sitting
Speaker 1: and Flee was on base Uh and Gary and we
Speaker 1: hit it off. It was just like magical. It was like,
Speaker 1: let's go, and we've made the record in record time,
Speaker 1: like in six weeks from meeting. Off the plane too mixing,
Speaker 1: and I knew we hadn't got a single. I knew.
Speaker 1: I knew enough about the business now it worked to
Speaker 1: know that come and go so fast. You get a
Speaker 1: great review in Rolling Stone and then people go back
Speaker 1: to what they were doing. And I wanted a hit single.
Speaker 1: And I was working on this song with this guy
Speaker 1: in his studio and we've been there a couple of
Speaker 1: days while they were mixing, and he hadn't put any
Speaker 1: colde on the tape. So he's hitting play and forward
Speaker 1: and reverse and play, and he couldn't find the song
Speaker 1: worked on the night before and he hit the playboaton
Speaker 1: at the wrong time, and this thing had been working
Speaker 1: on like an eight note field with terrible phony drums
Speaker 1: and some good guitar plan but it was the backing
Speaker 1: track for What's a Nice to Be Missing You? And
Speaker 1: I said, let me have a crack at that. Just
Speaker 1: let me have a go. You know, I'm always gamed
Speaker 1: to do that kind of thing. I was good at
Speaker 1: that in the Babies, you know, I could make stuff
Speaker 1: upon the mic, and I got it. We ran through
Speaker 1: it once, he didn't record it, and then he read
Speaker 1: He recorded the second one, and I got the whole
Speaker 1: first verse, and of course, you know, I mean every
Speaker 1: road that I've been ever been on led me to
Speaker 1: that moment, and I knew it was number one. And
Speaker 1: that was my next question. People don't understand when you
Speaker 1: do something that's on the leven you oh, you know exactly.
Speaker 1: You touch something like a microphone in its life, and
Speaker 1: you got like this, you know, it's like getting a shot.
Speaker 1: And I hadn't even it was like sleepwalking. I've used
Speaker 1: every time I Think of You as the first line
Speaker 1: because it was a baby sun every time I think
Speaker 1: of you, And so I had no idea what I
Speaker 1: was going to sing, and so I sang that first
Speaker 1: line and the rest of it just happened. I always
Speaker 1: catch my breath and I'm still standing here in your
Speaker 1: miles away, and I'm wondering why you left. And there's
Speaker 1: a storm that's racing through my frozen heart tonight. You've
Speaker 1: missing you at all since you've been going away in
Speaker 1: one piece. And yeah, I always could do that. Most
Speaker 1: of my lyrics come from that place. Have just close
Speaker 1: your eyes, step forward, don't overthink, just open up. You
Speaker 1: can't count on it. It's a very feminine thing. If
Speaker 1: you go there too often, or you disrespect and thank god,
Speaker 1: I'll take care of that tomorrow, it goes away, it
Speaker 1: ignores you. And if you save it for the right moments,
Speaker 1: it's almost like having a a secret lover. Is somebody
Speaker 1: that's just waiting for you. You know. It's intense, But
Speaker 1: I'm sure that something is brilliant as fast Car by
Speaker 1: Tracy Chapman. I'm sure she sat down. She's going doom
Speaker 1: doing doom ding. You've been a fast is it faster?
Speaker 1: You can find one? You know. I'm sure that all
Speaker 1: the really beautiful songs in the world that are really
Speaker 1: heartbreak come from that kind of and and the really
Speaker 1: tremendous rock and our songs. You know, watching Paul McCartney
Speaker 1: right get Back in the in the recent mood, you
Speaker 1: know you can see him, you can seem like zoning out.
Speaker 1: The other two are looking at him. What was he doing?
Speaker 1: And the next thing, you know, get Back evolves out
Speaker 1: of like two courts, two courts. It's magical. Okay, you
Speaker 1: write the song, you know you have something. Are you
Speaker 1: worried about nailing it in the recording? Uh? I never
Speaker 1: worry about that. That would be I'd be making that out.
Speaker 1: I really am in controlling the steet, you know, I
Speaker 1: really I know when it's not working, I don't know
Speaker 1: what it is. Um you know, I mean I was
Speaker 1: pushing myself so hard. Does it say one that rightcord?
Speaker 1: I would prob these same things twenty times. Oh so
Speaker 1: it was what I wanted it to be. So it's
Speaker 1: a completely different era. You have a new label, it's
Speaker 1: a new era MTV. You have a song that is
Speaker 1: obvious smash. Does everybody say get let's get behind this,
Speaker 1: let's make a video, or do they put the record
Speaker 1: out and say, well let's see what happens. Oh no,
Speaker 1: Jim Marsa Jim Marsa was the head of the company.
Speaker 1: Gary Gersh was the n R guy, and French Shi
Speaker 1: Gautier the late French shiputy. It was the art department.
Speaker 1: They were they knew what they've got. I think it
Speaker 1: was a lot of good will towards me at that point.
Speaker 1: I think people would watch Christalists and they're like, oh man,
Speaker 1: And then with a solo album, I think there was
Speaker 1: a certain empathy, you know, people want to see me succeed.
Speaker 1: What about the video, Well, I used the same guy
Speaker 1: that I used for Change, and I was very happy
Speaker 1: with that video, so I suggested him and he came
Speaker 1: along and made a great, great video. The to tell
Speaker 1: you about am I and Gary Gersh, I mean, I
Speaker 1: was in New York City mixing the record, staying at
Speaker 1: the Mareflower, and we went to see a David Bailey exhibition, me,
Speaker 1: Stephen Michelle and Gary Gersh. David Bailey is like the
Speaker 1: premier photographer of the sixties, you know, and this is
Speaker 1: a crazy wins Paul mcconde and meet Chuck the Shrimp,
Speaker 1: you know, you know, it's just fabulous stuff. And I
Speaker 1: turned around to Gary and said you should do the
Speaker 1: album cover. The next thing. I know, I'm in the
Speaker 1: Concorde flying to London to work with David Bailey. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's that's what my life was like. I mean, you
Speaker 1: think you think this is like I mean, never, Sary,
Speaker 1: you asked me a question. I can give you like
Speaker 1: four stories that led to that. You know the answer.
Speaker 1: But you know, hey, you know, Gary, you should do
Speaker 1: the album cover Concorde, here we go, you know, and
Speaker 1: working with David Bailey, he shot the album cover. I
Speaker 1: mean's just this times, just things cover less they do
Speaker 1: sometimes the only energy in the world that's that you've
Speaker 1: been looking for to to lock together like a wooden puzzle,
Speaker 1: you know, and it just clicks and it did. What
Speaker 1: was it like seeing yourself on TV ad infinitum um. Well,
Speaker 1: it became a bit much because you know, I think
Speaker 1: Missing You was like number one on MTV for like
Speaker 1: fifteen weeks, and there's a point where you want to say,
Speaker 1: that's really great, thank you, you know. And I was
Speaker 1: still a bit shy about it. I couldn't do out
Speaker 1: in New York, whereas before I could go out, but
Speaker 1: now when I went in a bar would put Missing
Speaker 1: You on the tube box and started buying many shrinks
Speaker 1: and stuff. It was just different and I didn't didn't
Speaker 1: really know how to deal with it at first. It
Speaker 1: wasn't that comfortable because it was really a step forward
Speaker 1: from being famous to really famous. You know, a different world.
Speaker 1: And the reason I love New York is that just
Speaker 1: disappearance the ground. So it's a different world for me.
Speaker 1: And how much pressure was there on the follow up album?
Speaker 1: No question? He offered me a large amount of money,
Speaker 1: which I needed better. I hadn't go any money. Um
Speaker 1: as seen how someone it's to bias. It just gives
Speaker 1: a record and I just looked at my cattle and
Speaker 1: looked what I've got, went to work with Ivan, banged
Speaker 1: up some songs and made Damascus Smiles album. It's a
Speaker 1: different album completely. There's there's like four or five extremely
Speaker 1: strong songs on that one. But I wasn't shooting to
Speaker 1: replicate successive Missy. That would have been in basilic, you know,
Speaker 1: it would have been just stupid. It's like, write something
Speaker 1: that sounds like missing. It wasn't gonna happen. Once you
Speaker 1: reach that pinnacle, to what degree are you striving to
Speaker 1: replicate the success And to what degree you're disappointed when
Speaker 1: you don't reach the holy grail once again. Well, it
Speaker 1: didn't bother me. I honestly thought if I could be
Speaker 1: and it's in the documentary, but I meant to, if
Speaker 1: I could establish myself as a singer, and right then
Speaker 1: I could make any kind of recordsitant to make every
Speaker 1: other year. I wasn't going to be on the Merry
Speaker 1: go round. I could write my own ticket. There always
Speaker 1: be money coming in. It wasn't going to be do
Speaker 1: or die. It was just art, you know. I didn't
Speaker 1: see any reason to be Madonna, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's that's a that's a whole different thing. Man. That's
Speaker 1: like that's a day job in itself. And you specifically
Speaker 1: said that's not me. Well, yeah, no, I honestly did.
Speaker 1: I want you to just make great records and have
Speaker 1: a follow me. I mean, what else is there? I mean,
Speaker 1: after a couple of years of being top of the pops,
Speaker 1: if you follow that path, you usually finished. But if
Speaker 1: you do the Richard Thompson thing or whatever, it is,
Speaker 1: like it sounds and so well, you know, you try,
Speaker 1: and you know, give the best you've got for the
Speaker 1: period you're in, but it's it's if you can make
Speaker 1: it last for five years. You've done something almost impossible.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm here after forty years. It isn't chance,
Speaker 1: you know, so I know chance to Emford's old is
Speaker 1: publishing your interest in missing you go with it or
Speaker 1: you still have I got it back in last year.
Speaker 1: I finally got the publishing back on Missing You last year.
Speaker 1: So now it's it's you know, it's it's really worth
Speaker 1: something there and you plan to hold on to it.
Speaker 1: Or if someone made as if somebody comes out that
Speaker 1: would work in obviously twenty million for my publishing. I
Speaker 1: would certainly put down my coffee cup and and turn
Speaker 1: around and talk to him, you know, I certainly would,
Speaker 1: And at this point in my life that would just
Speaker 1: give me complete freedoms do anything. I won't really Okay.
Speaker 1: And so you're making these records with E M I America.
Speaker 1: And one other theme is on the in the movie
Speaker 1: is whenever you really are an inch away you have
Speaker 1: great product, something happens with the record company. So what
Speaker 1: happened with E M I? And then certainly a mob
Speaker 1: go there after that field? So tell us about those situations.
Speaker 1: E M I. I had this record call will always returned.
Speaker 1: We have a number one single in our and our
Speaker 1: records and whatever it is radio and record Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: in the older and I went to Germany. Were run
Speaker 1: by Robert Kardashian. No, yes, the big Kig right special
Speaker 1: k but yeah, and I went to Germany to do
Speaker 1: some TV to promote the single. I came back and
Speaker 1: the record had gone from number one to like And
Speaker 1: what had happened is the E M I man in
Speaker 1: My America and overnight become in my Manhattan. And they
Speaker 1: changed the head of the company, that changed the offices everything,
Speaker 1: and it was really great. I have nothing. Joe Smith
Speaker 1: came in. He was great. He tried to salvage everything.
Speaker 1: But the team gets broken up and you can't blame
Speaker 1: on anybody. It just is how business goes. And they
Speaker 1: tried everything that made the right videos and I got
Speaker 1: truly grain to manage for me and it was like
Speaker 1: here we go, but he couldn't. You can't selve me
Speaker 1: something like that. It's a train wreck. I mean, even
Speaker 1: to get involved this heroic and I E M. I
Speaker 1: were nothing but great with me. They were just stupendous.
Speaker 1: The new regime was cool. Everything was cool. They were
Speaker 1: nice people. But yeah, sometimes it happens. You know, you
Speaker 1: might go, I had a hit single. I had a
Speaker 1: song in the true Romance movie Quentin Tarantino. Uh Tony
Speaker 1: Scott shot the video filmmaker and Monument Valley, and that
Speaker 1: was really my best work, best fan I've ever been in,
Speaker 1: best songs, the whole thing, and a month out, imago folds.
Speaker 1: It just happens. All this stuff just happens. You can't
Speaker 1: take it personally. A couple of years later, I bought
Speaker 1: the record and re released it, so I own it
Speaker 1: and so I don't have to watch the record just
Speaker 1: get cooked in weeds. I can still promote that record,
Speaker 1: and I'm proud of that record. Well, you're very upbeating
Speaker 1: philosophical about all this in the movie, you don't seem
Speaker 1: quite as settled. What do you want snow? That was
Speaker 1: the pandemic? How about anti antidepressants therapy? And they come
Speaker 1: in no no alcohol, boy, it's it's I think it's
Speaker 1: it's the pandemic. You know, when when you have that
Speaker 1: much time to think and everything's going wrong, I'm sure
Speaker 1: it's gonna have a shared let's do it. But you
Speaker 1: get pragmatic when you go. You know, if you've been
Speaker 1: around the block a few times. You learned to live
Speaker 1: with the stuff that happens. So how does that English
Speaker 1: come to be? Well? I was. I went to Epic
Speaker 1: to get a record deal, and the A and R
Speaker 1: guy I didn't like my songs and I really wanted
Speaker 1: to be on Epic. And Trudy Green, my manager, would
Speaker 1: have liked me to be there. She was the biggest
Speaker 1: best brutalist in the classiest record level. And me and
Speaker 1: Trudy left the me scene and I was going like,
Speaker 1: I can't work with that guy. You know, he doesn't
Speaker 1: even like me. And I remember walking down Madison Avenue
Speaker 1: and saying to Trudy, I'll start a band. I'll start
Speaker 1: a band and we'll we'll be on Epic, but I'll
Speaker 1: be the singer in the band. Was just starting the
Speaker 1: Richard Griffith R. Yeah, yeah, yes, it was. You said
Speaker 1: you're gonna start a band. Yeah. I went all of them.
Speaker 1: I went to England looking at guitar players. I was
Speaker 1: going to track down Johnny Mark to see if you
Speaker 1: knew anybody, and none of that happened. I didn't do
Speaker 1: any of it night In the end, I I want
Speaker 1: to work with Jonathan Kane Neil Sean, Ricky Phillips, and
Speaker 1: dinkashanovo Um. It's said about five months to arrive at
Speaker 1: that point or four months, and from that point on
Speaker 1: he just took off. Well, you had a history with
Speaker 1: Jonathan Kane. How did you get Neil Shaan involved through
Speaker 1: Jonathan Kane? And Neil was just like, Journey is not happening.
Speaker 1: I'm in Well yeah, I mean, you know, I mean
Speaker 1: I think they always had problems there. They're always seems
Speaker 1: to be very political, and nothing was happening with them.
Speaker 1: And Neil just wants to play, you know, he just
Speaker 1: wants to plug in and play. So now you go
Speaker 1: back with the band and what is what do they say? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I knew it, you know, you walk in with those
Speaker 1: guys and yeah, you know, guy, I'm gonna like to
Speaker 1: STWN And it was like, we love it, We'll sign it.
Speaker 1: He's a very large check, you know, and can we
Speaker 1: have your publishing? And you know, how are you doing?
Speaker 1: Can we have dinners tonight? You know, it's just like
Speaker 1: it's certainly in a different level. And I got a
Speaker 1: huge publishing advance from Sony and everything was back on track,
Speaker 1: you know, And how did you end up doing the
Speaker 1: Diane Warrens song. Well, we've done the whole album and
Speaker 1: the this is a great story and the A and
Speaker 1: our guy left us alone. Who is they say in
Speaker 1: our person? It was done Grayson, Okay, yeah with us,
Speaker 1: so you can sell I don't want to, you know,
Speaker 1: it's a nice guy. And and I went to the
Speaker 1: ban and said, listen, Don's been really great. You know,
Speaker 1: he staid out the way most of the time, and
Speaker 1: he's he's trying to be as flying on the wall
Speaker 1: as possible. And he asked his song, and I know, Diane,
Speaker 1: it would be great if you just tried the song,
Speaker 1: you know, at least you know, it would be just good.
Speaker 1: And he said okay, and so it went in at
Speaker 1: the eleventh thound. Could when I see you smile just
Speaker 1: to sort of show the company that we were capable
Speaker 1: of working with them when we liked doing and everything
Speaker 1: was cool. And we just looked at each other like,
Speaker 1: oh no, you know, it's at it. And the big
Speaker 1: question was then at Frontline h K Management, was do
Speaker 1: we not do this song um or do we have
Speaker 1: a number one single? It was like that that awful
Speaker 1: folk in the road, you know, Okay, Well, it ends
Speaker 1: up being a huge hit. Yeah, but then the band implodes.
Speaker 1: Why does the band implode? Well, I think it's a
Speaker 1: lot of tension, a lot of egos, a lot of um,
Speaker 1: too much business not of music, you know, and when
Speaker 1: the band falls apart, you say another day in music
Speaker 1: business or you're pretty disillusioned depressed about I went back
Speaker 1: to my house in pound Ridge and that was the end.
Speaker 1: I really didn't want to do anything else or ever
Speaker 1: again with the music. You know, I had enough money
Speaker 1: coming in at a lovely house in a wood and uh,
Speaker 1: it was just like I just didn't care. It wasn't like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's sacrifice. It was like I just want
Speaker 1: to get out. And then I got, after about a
Speaker 1: year and a half, Agot offer to deal with him
Speaker 1: algo and I did all these songs, you know. So
Speaker 1: I went back in to make one lass solo record
Speaker 1: about New York City, and like I said before, Temple
Speaker 1: Bar was toldly my best record. Okay, but then the
Speaker 1: being the label blows up. Yeah, so how do you
Speaker 1: get pulled back in one more time? Well, ron Stone,
Speaker 1: ron Stone, I I see making Temple Bar, it was
Speaker 1: like the watershed moment. I went back to be a writer.
Speaker 1: The slightly corporate element of bad English and nauseate me.
Speaker 1: But I was I didn't want to do with myself,
Speaker 1: and I thought I had to redeemed myself. That's the truth.
Speaker 1: And I saw. I wrote the record the Downtown out
Speaker 1: More in God's Shadow, Glittering Price. This this was like
Speaker 1: the best I ever got, and it reawaked my interest
Speaker 1: in writing. I couldn't stop. I felt like I'd become
Speaker 1: an artist together, and uh, I wrote a record. I
Speaker 1: drove across America when the record company went down. I
Speaker 1: went to New Orleans. I drove in a cheap Cherokee
Speaker 1: down to New Orleans, sent up through Kentucky to Ohio,
Speaker 1: and then east to New York City back home. But
Speaker 1: I wrote most of that album When You Were Mine
Speaker 1: on that trip. And I've fallen in love with country
Speaker 1: music again, as with Temple Buds, a slight country influence,
Speaker 1: baritone guitars and stuff. I'm so lons I could tries
Speaker 1: on that, but on When You Were Mine, it's really
Speaker 1: a bluesia, more folky kind of approach. And uh, you know,
Speaker 1: there's no choice. You have to make this, these these albums.
Speaker 1: It's not like a great. You know, it's not biblical,
Speaker 1: it's what I do. It's just making music. So how
Speaker 1: do you end up getting hooked up with Alison Krause
Speaker 1: which is in the movie but We Got You Now? Well? I, Um,
Speaker 1: I was in Nashville, I was writing songs. I was
Speaker 1: doing a Goodest It's album and I was re recording
Speaker 1: some songs and I got to Missing You and I thought, well,
Speaker 1: I can't do anything else with Missing You that I
Speaker 1: haven't been already. And I thought, well, I'll do with
Speaker 1: youuet who would I like to sing with? And I
Speaker 1: was watching the American Music Channel and Alliston was on
Speaker 1: that with New Favorite when I became aware of them
Speaker 1: and my manager wearing her manager and said, John would
Speaker 1: like you to sing I Missing You? And she said yes,
Speaker 1: Well she said yes. The record was very successful in
Speaker 1: the country world. But you continue to have a connection
Speaker 1: with Allison Ryan. Yeah, we're friends and um yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean we did another done limp so um laid down
Speaker 1: beside me and I was living in Nashville. You know
Speaker 1: we were close. Was it ever a romance? Um? You
Speaker 1: know that would be nice, okay? And then another big
Speaker 1: thing in the movies, you go out with Ringo. What
Speaker 1: you said, one and done. Now, Ringo historically goes out
Speaker 1: with different people. Oh, the band is somewhat solidified in
Speaker 1: the last couple of years. So you got to play
Speaker 1: with Ringo and meet Ringo, which of course is amazing.
Speaker 1: But in the everyday experience of doing it, how did
Speaker 1: you feel? Well? It was tough. You know, it's extremely
Speaker 1: competitive with the All Stars. Everybody's trying to do the
Speaker 1: right thing and shine, I'm just trying to play bassis.
Speaker 1: Shut up. I would have just played bass and not
Speaker 1: some if I could have, because if you look across
Speaker 1: the station there he is a strangoes stuff, you know.
Speaker 1: And it was stressful, you know. I mean, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean I'm pretty I played through a high standard. But
Speaker 1: he played with Paul McCarthy and so I had to
Speaker 1: go back to playing the base and nothing but respect.
Speaker 1: I mean, how could you have anything? But I was nervous,
Speaker 1: you know, But it was it was it was very demanding.
Speaker 1: It was really demanding. It. I think that the fact
Speaker 1: that there was Paul Carrock, Sheilary, Colin Hay, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of very famous individuals on stage, and I think
Speaker 1: we go there first to play with more musical kind
Speaker 1: of situations. That's what I think. And when did you
Speaker 1: realize you didn't want to do it again? What the ring?
Speaker 1: Yeah they won't. Well that's why I'm asking. So when
Speaker 1: I went through your head, you showed up a rehearsal
Speaker 1: and he said, what the fund did I sign up for? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know it's tough. It's a tough gig. Everybody's like
Speaker 1: joking and everybody's like, you know, I didn't do that.
Speaker 1: It's like getting the funk out, you know, where I
Speaker 1: would stop a song and Sam, I, it's just the
Speaker 1: right note, you know? Am I playing the right note?
Speaker 1: Here in the bottom is this is this isn't the
Speaker 1: right key. People just walk away stuff, And I'm going,
Speaker 1: like Jesus Christ, can we just sit down and him
Speaker 1: through this stuff? But there's the thing about it being
Speaker 1: um low impact. I think there's the thing where you're
Speaker 1: supposed to show up and play made people smile, shakegounds
Speaker 1: and walk off, you know. But I think he's he's
Speaker 1: got a really good cool band now and uh we
Speaker 1: was on a bit of a perfectionist. I would like
Speaker 1: to think that I'm a perfectionist in that situation. Okay,
Speaker 1: going back to the songwriting. You started out doing it yourself,
Speaker 1: but if you look at your credits, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of co writes. Was that something you were pushed into?
Speaker 1: Is something you don't? You know? I found myself. I
Speaker 1: can write by myself standing on my head, but I
Speaker 1: don't really do a good trouble of it. I think that,
Speaker 1: uh is it a d D when you can't concentrate?
Speaker 1: What is what they call a d h D? Yeah? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I've got that. If I have somebody in
Speaker 1: front of me and the only play like two chords,
Speaker 1: and I take everything from that point and run with it,
Speaker 1: do the lyric can write the rest of the song
Speaker 1: of the mountain and the whole thing. As long as
Speaker 1: I have somebody in front of me, I'll write a song.
Speaker 1: It's either that are extreme lessons, you know, and it
Speaker 1: could be that too, But I need a sounding board.
Speaker 1: I need someone to bounce off to entertain. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: a show off too, I don't know. But if somebody
Speaker 1: plays me a minor chord and I play something in
Speaker 1: the base, that isn't necessarily what you would think was
Speaker 1: going to happen between the minor code and the Madge goode.
Speaker 1: I'll suddenly have a song, but I won't get that
Speaker 1: input without the guy playing the minor chord. So it
Speaker 1: would much preferred seven days a week to write a
Speaker 1: song with somebody. Me and Glenn Burnar toll to till
Speaker 1: and write stuff that makes me wonder how we did it.
Speaker 1: But it's like completely spontaneous, and I am best at
Speaker 1: being spontaneous. I keep a lot of notebooks, write down
Speaker 1: phrases all the time. If I'm reading a book, I
Speaker 1: see a passage go by and go that's great. How
Speaker 1: did you think you know? I'm very about words. I
Speaker 1: love them. But when I'm singing and when I'm writing songs,
Speaker 1: a lot of it just happens to the back of
Speaker 1: my mind. I must have made a mental note, or
Speaker 1: I must have keyed into some image that would go
Speaker 1: over another image. But you don't know that you start singing.
Speaker 1: But I get the melody the words at the same time,
Speaker 1: and I have no idea how I do it. I
Speaker 1: can't take any credit for anything I've done there was
Speaker 1: any good, because I'm just making it up as I
Speaker 1: go along. I might take it home and finish it
Speaker 1: and polish it. I mean, sometimes the story songs like
Speaker 1: Bluebird Cafe or Masterpiece of Loneliness. They have real themes.
Speaker 1: And I don't know what's good and what's not anymore
Speaker 1: unless I believe it. And if I believe it, it's good.
Speaker 1: If I don't believe it, it's ships. Well, someone like
Speaker 1: Burton Dick, who played with sticks but lives in New Jersey.
Speaker 1: How do you hook up with all these people you
Speaker 1: meet Bernick? I need Bernick for I needed a guitar
Speaker 1: player when I was in New York and Uh, he'd
Speaker 1: been a fan that he'd actually lived next to us
Speaker 1: me in l A when I was staying with the
Speaker 1: babies and never said alone. But we got introduced. There's
Speaker 1: a great guy, and we started writing songs and we
Speaker 1: wrote Downtown, which is probably one of the most penultimate songs.
Speaker 1: It was just like Downtown. We wrote that on a
Speaker 1: beat offul Steinway at Sony. He had cigarette burns on
Speaker 1: it and he's missing. It's all attitude. And I was
Speaker 1: trying to write a song for true romance. I wrote
Speaker 1: a song with another guy, um Mark Spiral, called in
Speaker 1: Dreams to Go in the movie, but it was true
Speaker 1: romance the song and there's this beautiful irish, wasted lonesome
Speaker 1: East Coast, New York Manhattan thing on this Stein Way.
Speaker 1: It's all otta tune and Glenn's playing these chords and
Speaker 1: I would just jump up and um the engineer with hippocorde,
Speaker 1: that's sing the first line, and then he'd keep playing
Speaker 1: the songs about how about you know the most and
Speaker 1: then I would just shoot out of my seat again.
Speaker 1: You you can find me in the temple ball and
Speaker 1: and it's not making a cheeksil really. Sometimes it doesn't
Speaker 1: come out in one piece, it's just lines. But this
Speaker 1: thing comes out of the mist and I have no idea.
Speaker 1: There's no cleverness to it, there's no guile, there's no talent.
Speaker 1: It's just like completely it just comes out of nowhere.
Speaker 1: But at the same time you're editing, it's such a clear,
Speaker 1: focused way. I mean, I really knew where that song
Speaker 1: was going. And it's about scoring trunks, you know, and
Speaker 1: people think it's about all this sort of stuff, but
Speaker 1: it's a it's a very dark song. But you don't
Speaker 1: know what you've got, so you finished it, okay. So
Speaker 1: the movie has a lot of live shots from the
Speaker 1: present day. How long is this band been together? How
Speaker 1: did you find them because you mentioned earlier they all
Speaker 1: live in different locations. And then sometimes it's acoustic and
Speaker 1: sometimes it's elected. So tell me about all that. Well,
Speaker 1: I met Tim Hogan, the best player in Carmines Italian
Speaker 1: restaurant fifteen years ago. Okay, on Santa Monica Boulevard. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well no, no, no, no, no no no, in Times Square,
Speaker 1: oh that car yeah alright, hey, more than one common
Speaker 1: and uh yeah, And he offered me his coat. He
Speaker 1: was snowing outside and he said, to my coat, hadn't
Speaker 1: got a cold. And we became friends, and he became
Speaker 1: the best player. Uh, and became part of the organization
Speaker 1: and just to stellar human being. And then Mark was
Speaker 1: shouted was working in a guitar shot as a friend
Speaker 1: of Tim's, and we took Mark on. We couldn't get
Speaker 1: a steady guitar players, so I said, okay, let's you know,
Speaker 1: we have to play these shows. Let's give it all
Speaker 1: to Markam Mark. It's given a huge amount big shoes
Speaker 1: to step into. It took him a while, but he
Speaker 1: arrived um in spades. You know, he's a tremendous guzapa
Speaker 1: and and he's he's gone from being a guy that
Speaker 1: works in the guitar shot to a tremendous guitar player.
Speaker 1: And Alan Chiles was in the no Brakes dound that
Speaker 1: you see um at the beginning of the documentary, a
Speaker 1: young Alan childs with Karmene Rojas and Elsli, Tommy Mandel.
Speaker 1: They were all in the North Breaks. But I met
Speaker 1: Alan in Las Vegas a couple of years ago. He said,
Speaker 1: if you ever need a drummer, called me, and I
Speaker 1: called it. So that's it. And some of the days
Speaker 1: we do, like in theisis like storytellers and it's two acoustics,
Speaker 1: electric bass and drums, and you stop the show and
Speaker 1: you do requests, so you talk to the audience. You
Speaker 1: play these keys again, Downtown, Saint Patrick's Day, Masterpiece of Loneliness,
Speaker 1: Bluebird Cafe, in God's Shadow, in Dreams Missing You. It'sn't
Speaker 1: it's good, you know, I mean the songs that you
Speaker 1: can really I know, it's not even singing. You sort
Speaker 1: of like sharing a story and people are like, you know,
Speaker 1: looking at you. Let they're listening to a story. And
Speaker 1: then the other version of the band, this would come
Speaker 1: out two fisted, all electric, and it's it's an entirely
Speaker 1: different anymore. But we do stop in the middle and
Speaker 1: do Bluebird Cafe Acoustic no matter where we are. If
Speaker 1: they're gonna throw a ship, they can throw it. But
Speaker 1: we've tried that this year on to about seven thousand
Speaker 1: people at night and you could hear a pin drop,
Speaker 1: you know. That's that's why how I get out of bed.
Speaker 1: That's because that isn't synthesizers and bullshit and big drums
Speaker 1: and it's like it's a it's a simple acoustic guitar
Speaker 1: and vocal. And if you can get seven eight thousand
Speaker 1: people to go completely quiet and listen to that, then
Speaker 1: you're in the right place at the right time, you know.
Speaker 1: And do you have a manager? You do it all yourself. No,
Speaker 1: me and Tim we have if work comes to me,
Speaker 1: have an Asian and they ring up and sim says johnah,
Speaker 1: go and play this gig for this much. We can
Speaker 1: do that. We can do this gig the next time
Speaker 1: and say yeah, oh no, can we go and do it?
Speaker 1: Who's the agent um Blue Raven? With Blue Raven at
Speaker 1: the moment? So do you ever go to do you
Speaker 1: ever go to them and say, well, you know, I
Speaker 1: want to work from April through June, just book something now,
Speaker 1: it's not like that, you know, you you you can
Speaker 1: get to the point where you're just playing ridiculous places.
Speaker 1: You know, we want to keep it sort of classy.
Speaker 1: Want to play thesis and interesting listening rooms and sheds.
Speaker 1: You know, spent enough time playing out the way places.
Speaker 1: I mean, I want to play like the City Winery
Speaker 1: kind of thing that those kind of gigs are great,
Speaker 1: But they know they can't just go out there and say, okay,
Speaker 1: we've got to book it right through tune in July
Speaker 1: and August. You know, it doesn't work like that. And
Speaker 1: you talked about playing the seven thousand people. How many
Speaker 1: to the time do you go out alone? Where do
Speaker 1: you go out in the package? Um, well that was
Speaker 1: the package. That's Vix Strength fielding men at work. But
Speaker 1: we do a lot of gigs with Neil Gerraldo on
Speaker 1: pap bennettson UM and then we play like thousands seat
Speaker 1: headline maybe more. Uh, you know, it's it's not one
Speaker 1: thing all the time. You can maybe do four gigs
Speaker 1: being the opening act for a band that's really establishing
Speaker 1: your plans to Seventh Town some people, and then you
Speaker 1: can go on the next night and play a headliner. Uh,
Speaker 1: and your pens a fift hundred people and maybe on
Speaker 1: the third night there's a six hundred listening room. It's
Speaker 1: like an art sense. So we can do the unflipped
Speaker 1: thing and you love all that and then you go
Speaker 1: back to the opening for somebody or whatever. You put
Speaker 1: it together. But the idea is to play the best
Speaker 1: places possible and bring it. You know, if you're playing
Speaker 1: so out the word places of God for a bit
Speaker 1: of club, a low club, you know, it's like, man,
Speaker 1: you're supposed to bring it, and you know those kind
Speaker 1: of places you don't want to go there. So do
Speaker 1: you have enough money saved and income that theoretically you
Speaker 1: can stop working or you're working to live? Oh? No,
Speaker 1: I've got money in the bank. And like I said,
Speaker 1: I own my own place at publishing and we're working,
Speaker 1: and I own most of cattle. Like you know, it
Speaker 1: wasn't almost like that. I came back up from really
Speaker 1: being kicked out of the music business. I was. I
Speaker 1: was just stubborn. I wasn't going to go down and
Speaker 1: stay down, my dad. I'm always to write songs to
Speaker 1: sing and here I am. Are you gonna die on
Speaker 1: stage or at some point, I hope no. People keep
Speaker 1: saying there's a great line in Steve Elle's song um
Speaker 1: fort Worth Blues, and he says, you always said the
Speaker 1: highway was your home, but we both know that that
Speaker 1: ain't true. That's a wonderful couple of you know, it's
Speaker 1: just really there are romance of going kicking the bucket
Speaker 1: on the road to me is bullshit. You know, you
Speaker 1: want to be somewhere where you're really happy and look
Speaker 1: back at your life and said, okay, so what would
Speaker 1: it take for you to stop? I'll let you know.
Speaker 1: I think there's a moment, honestly where you put your
Speaker 1: hand up and said, thank you, it's been great tonight,
Speaker 1: and you walk off and yes you might change your clothes.
Speaker 1: You walk out, it's the parking lot, get in the van,
Speaker 1: and in your heart you know that's your last show,
Speaker 1: and I don't want to be around you know. I mean,
Speaker 1: you see some of these pants. You know there's a
Speaker 1: same amount of sex in votes in rock and roll,
Speaker 1: and the only you get. I mean, it's nice, you know,
Speaker 1: to see all the people play, But I think that's
Speaker 1: the point where you know you just should make yourself scarce.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of people went to get on stage.
Speaker 1: So the movie opens on December six. Where can people
Speaker 1: see it? I don't know. Like I said before, I
Speaker 1: had absolutely nothing to do with it. I did the interviews,
Speaker 1: I knew the guy that brew all together, but I
Speaker 1: I've had no input. Somebody told me that the different
Speaker 1: cable's stations it's gonna be on, but I didn't make
Speaker 1: a note of it. Okay, And uh, there's certainly a
Speaker 1: website the hard Way the movie something very similar to that.
Speaker 1: If you google John Waite in the hard Way, you'll
Speaker 1: certainly come right up. And I think it's gonna be
Speaker 1: on demand on multiple platforms. And as I say, the
Speaker 1: movie is excellent, not because I'm blowing smoke, but otherwise
Speaker 1: I wouldn't be talking to you. And it's intriguing. One
Speaker 1: is with whether one is a fan or not. But
Speaker 1: in the back of your mind, do you think that
Speaker 1: this will be a boost for your career? Yeah? I
Speaker 1: think Like I said before, and you called it, how
Speaker 1: do you over think was it? How do you say? Uh,
Speaker 1: what you wrote about it and what you wrote about
Speaker 1: constant so mar of the entertainment business and people getting
Speaker 1: ahead and the ephemeral thing that comes. You know, I
Speaker 1: couldn't have agreed with you more. If I was better
Speaker 1: with words, I would write all that down aside roads,
Speaker 1: I thought it was quite brilliant. And I'm not blowing
Speaker 1: smoky but but I thought, honestly, that's how I see it.
Speaker 1: And I've always had a pretty good fan base. I've
Speaker 1: just been through I mean the shadows, you know. But
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm working a lot, and every time we
Speaker 1: show up, it's like, you know, it's great, but I
Speaker 1: suppose it will um, I don't know, you know, I
Speaker 1: don't worry about anything like that, Bob, I really don't.
Speaker 1: I just sort of like get up, have a goot
Speaker 1: of coffee and start the day. I don't plan ahead,
Speaker 1: and I saraily don't plan ahead moored than six months.
Speaker 1: I have to a big point at the beginning of
Speaker 1: the movie is how difficult you are and it has
Speaker 1: to be your way and it doesn't uh bode well
Speaker 1: for relationships with our business relationships. I'm talking to you now. Oh,
Speaker 1: I don't hear any of that. So he said, we're
Speaker 1: not making We're not making art, you know. I mean,
Speaker 1: if if you were producing me and I had this
Speaker 1: song and I had this music in my head and
Speaker 1: I could hear this sound that I wanted, and I
Speaker 1: knew where the lyrics should go. And you're saying a hi, John,
Speaker 1: nobody uses that word. Use something else. They go like, no,
Speaker 1: it's a beautiful work. You got, like, oh, come on, now,
Speaker 1: you know I go no, and then you know things
Speaker 1: go to the next level. But but that's you know,
Speaker 1: I don't believe in any of that. I think, you know,
Speaker 1: when you produce a record, everything live and let the
Speaker 1: artist have his head. If he's worth going in the studio,
Speaker 1: he's going to deliver the goods. But I don't want
Speaker 1: to be the flavor of the week or or like
Speaker 1: somebody suggests I do a certain kind of song because
Speaker 1: it's like happening now and the kids dig it. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm not interested. I'm just not And yeah, if that
Speaker 1: makes me difficult, and that's what I am, Well, you're
Speaker 1: having how thin. Seeing the movie, it sounded also the
Speaker 1: way it was portrayed that part of your personality makes
Speaker 1: just everyday relationships difficult. I mean, are you the type
Speaker 1: of person who goes and calls friends, hangs with friends,
Speaker 1: or you're basically in your own head until you go
Speaker 1: out to work. Yeah, um, I think I'm pretty hot. Surrage.
Speaker 1: Sometimes there's a lot going on. I wish there wasn't,
Speaker 1: but I tend to be You know, half of my
Speaker 1: mind is writing a song all the time, always thinking
Speaker 1: about a line from a book, Oh, cowboy music, you know,
Speaker 1: and whatever it is. But half of me is always
Speaker 1: away elsewhere. You know you're happy? Are you happy the
Speaker 1: way that things are? And you'll continue to do your
Speaker 1: gig until you have that moment referenced earlier or in
Speaker 1: the back of your mind. Is there one big goal
Speaker 1: or achievement that you still or a bar that you
Speaker 1: want to reach. I've been doing it all my life.
Speaker 1: I honestly feel like I've been a success at every
Speaker 1: step in my life, even if people were not there
Speaker 1: to witness it. Oh, he didn't sell a million records,
Speaker 1: bout ten thousand records. I've always done what I wanted.
Speaker 1: That's been a success. It really is. I know it
Speaker 1: sounds like a speech, but I've been about the great
Speaker 1: luxury of loving what I do. Oh my life, and
Speaker 1: you can't buy that. And I've had a wonderful life.
Speaker 1: I haven't missed the bills I once, so I believe
Speaker 1: in what I've done all my life. I'm very, very lucky. Well,
Speaker 1: it's been wonderful talking to you. It's you know, you're
Speaker 1: very forthcoming and honest. You don't hold back. You can
Speaker 1: feel the integrity and the motion coming through. So John,
Speaker 1: I want to thank you so much for taking the time.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Bob. It's um, it's it's um. Since you
Speaker 1: reviewed the documentary, UM, we've had like suonomi of interest
Speaker 1: because you have such credibility. But uh, doing the interview
Speaker 1: and reading your review, UM, I think we're pretty much
Speaker 1: alike mind and it's a pleasure for me to talk
Speaker 1: to you too. Well, I'm smiling and my shinees makes
Speaker 1: it hard to uh come back. But thank you so
Speaker 1: much for that. God bless you. Thanks for everyone. Until
Speaker 1: next time. This is Bob left Steps