-
Unknown A
Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan experience during my day.
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Unknown B
Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. What's happening, man? Good to see you.
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Unknown A
Thank you for having me back.
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Unknown B
My pleasure. How many times a day do you get bombarded by the whole Bill Burr thing?
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Unknown A
When it gets into the family and people I haven't talked to for 20.
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Unknown B
Years, then you have to break character and tell the truth.
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Unknown A
No, you know, the thing is, this is what's crazy, okay? You want the whole setup story. So where I take my podcast is in one of Howie Mandel's buildings, and he has another building in this area. So I was working on something, and I was supposed to go on Howie show that day, and they said, how we meet you out in the street or something for whatever reason. So I got on the street. The first thing how he says to me when he sees me, he goes, here comes Bill Burr. And I go, you, too? Like, do you know this story? And he said, no, I don't know about it. I said, you know what? Heck with it. I'm just gonna tell it on your show, so don't ask me anymore. And I want to show. And I told the story about my. How 10 years ago, my stepmother came to me and said, do you know who Bill Burr is?
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Unknown A
I never heard of Bill. Didn't know who he was because I don't really consume much, you know, popular culture. I know he was a famous comedian. He could have been the lawnmower guy. Looked up Bill. First thing I saw was like, my God, he looks just like daddy. When I was 18 years old and I hot on my 18th birthday, my father told me, you, you have a half brother that I sired at the same time as you, whose name is Bill. So suddenly these facts come together. My mother telling me these stories. I talked to my dad subsequently about it, and he was very cagey about it. And when I said, why won't you tell me where this person is or who this person is? He said, I'm trying to protect you. So when my stepmother had told me, it kind of made sense, like, well, if my half brother is the super famous comedian, my dad, in a way wouldn't want me to know because he wouldn't want me to feel like I was number two because Bill's so famous.
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Unknown A
I know, it sounds crazy, right?
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Unknown B
That's why he's trying to protect you.
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Unknown A
Well, I don't know. So. So fast forward to how he's saying something on the streets. I was like, you know, I'm just Going to say something, and I swear to God, hand in my heart, last time I was with you in California, I almost pulled you aside after we were on and I was going to tell you the story because I knew you knew Bill, and I was going to back channel, see if there was anything to the story from Bill's side.
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Unknown B
Wow.
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Unknown A
So imagine seven, I think six or seven years since we talked on your show.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
I don't hate 2018. Somebody said to me, david, so anyway, start talking. But the point is, is so here I am, fast forward. I'm just sick of seeing memes in my face with Bills. And so I just decided on spur of the moment, you know, so Howie, of course, loves it, but I said on, on how we show the first time, I don't think Bill's my half brother. I don't think. I don't think there's anything there other than like an uncanny resemblance. Fast forward the thing comes out, it gets a little bit of social media and it goes away. And I think, good. And Bill didn't say anything. So I figured Bill was kind of like, whatever it was a mild amusement, you know, he could have made, made a joke about the whole thing, and he didn't. So then how he calls me, I'm in la working recently, and how he's like, we come on the show Bill's gonna be on.
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Unknown A
And I said, is Bill cool with it? Oh, yeah, no problem. So then I go there and it's like, it turns into this thing that you see happening on camera. It's like, it's weirdness times. It's like a skit, but it's real. And Bill's on me, then Bill's on Howie, and it gets to school. Okay, So I just told you basically everything I know, okay? I have people I've known for 20, 30 years coming up to me going, what do you think? And I said, I don't, I don't. I don't think we're related. I mean, yeah, there's a resemblance, but I don't think we're related. Well, did you get a DNA test? And I'm like, no, I don't. There's nothing to get a DNA test for. Why? I think he's your brother. So people that know me and I'm telling him, I don't think he's my brother, now they want a DNA test to prove it.
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Unknown A
That's how much it's taken out.
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Unknown B
I think it's just because they want a DNA test because it's fun. If he's your brother?
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Unknown A
No, they're convinced. For real?
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Unknown B
For real?
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Unknown A
Yes, really for real. I swear to God. I mean, people are close to people that were in my wedding. I'm like. They're like, no, you need a DNA test.
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Unknown B
Did Bill's dad know? Well, did your dad know Bill's mom?
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Unknown A
No, my father wouldn't talk to me about it at all. Okay, some more context.
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Unknown B
Okay.
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Unknown A
My stepmother, in that same time, 10 years ago, when she told me that she thought Bill Burr was my half brother. Jesus. This guy don't know, right? I mean, just match up. Okay. Hey, you know Joe Polanski, right? And you look up as a famous comedian. That's, you know. So in that same thing with my stepmother, she told me that she thought my father had sired 12 children.
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Unknown B
Whoa.
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Unknown A
You know, all over the place. All over the place. He was traveling, musician and a. To his own admittance, so it kind of makes sense. He once told me he slept with a thousand women. So 12 out of a thousand, you know. Yeah.
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Unknown B
The math, that's pretty good.
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Unknown A
Yeah. And so when I went to my father and I told him what my stepmother had said, he got really cagey. Wouldn't tell me anything. He promised me that he would write down the names of the. Of the illegitimate children on a piece of paper so I could find them after he died.
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Unknown B
Oh, my God.
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Unknown A
And he died. He's died, and there's no paper.
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Unknown B
Oh, my God.
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Unknown A
So now I got people wanting DNA tests because they're convinced that Bill is my half brother.
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Unknown B
Is Bill willing to do a DNA test?
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Unknown A
I think that's ridiculous. You know what I'm saying?
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Unknown B
It's like, no, you have to do it.
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Unknown A
No, no, that's what I'm saying. I mean, first of all, to Bill's credit, he's been. You could. Everything you saw on camera was his. I think his general irritation on the thing. But he also kind of finds it.
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Unknown B
Funny because I thought it was a skit. I thought you guys put together a skit. I really did. I thought you got. Because I thought, you know, Bill does a lot of acting. I thought you guys were just around. You like pro wrestling. I thought you guys just decided to control the world.
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Unknown A
Let me put it to you this way. Have you ever seen it? And. Well, I'm assuming that you tell me if I'm wrong. Two guys get in a ring to roll around a bit, right? Okay. They're bros. They're gonna roll around a bit. Emotions kick in, and next thing you know, somebody's tapping somebody out Right, right. You ever see that happen?
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Unknown B
For sure.
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Unknown A
Okay.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
So in the. In the heat of that moment with Bill and Howie egging it on, you know, like the emotionality of the thing came out because it's sort of. It's sort of a weird thing where, like, we're suddenly in the middle of a situation. It's like a meta situation.
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Unknown B
Right.
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Unknown A
So, yes, on some level, we were playing along, but then it starts to become like, wait, this is kind of weird. And then it starts to kick in and then Billy Bush is in there and it just. It took out a life of its own. So what I'm saying is, is there's enough there that people are all over me to come up with more answers. But you see what I'm saying, it's spun out of control into its own thing. Now it's a DNA test problem, which is a bit on its own. Like, we're gonna do like a live stream. We'll do it here. Me, you and Bill. You know what I mean?
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Unknown B
Well, people would trust you if the two of you got together and just both took a DNA test and found out you were brothers.
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Unknown A
I don't think Bill's my half brother. He. He looks.
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Unknown B
Well, listen, there's a simple way to find out. I'll finance it. How much is a DNA test? How much does a DNA test cost to find out someone's your sibling, Jamie? Let's find out. It can't be that much money. It's 20, 25.
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Unknown A
Maybe we get sponsored.
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Unknown B
Yes, maybe 23andMe. But it didn't sell out to somebody. Somebody buy them 200 bucks.
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Unknown A
There you go.
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Unknown B
I'll pay 200 bucks to find out. Why would you want to know if I thought he was my half brother? I believe.
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Unknown A
I don't think it's necessary.
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Unknown B
I found out Sebastian Manisalco was my half brother, I'd be like, kind of. I could kind of see that. Maybe.
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Unknown A
Again, all I know is I don't think, but when I look at him, he looks just like my father.
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Unknown B
Right. This.
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Unknown A
He doesn't look. We look similar. Ish. But when. When I look at him, he's got the same thing as my dad had. I don't know how you would know something look like that. So that's where it's freaky for me.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
And. And, you know, if you want to play the game one step further, you got two world class communicators. People might argue against me, call myself world class communicator, but I've been doing it for over 30 years.
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Unknown B
You're world class.
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Unknown A
So it's not too crazy that you have one guy go this way. One. You know what I mean?
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Unknown B
Not at all. No. Especially when you consider how many different ways you've gone. Like not just smashing Pumpkins, but pro wrestling, you know?
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Unknown A
And now. And now I'm enter your game. Just podcasting.
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Unknown B
This episode is brought to you by Better Help. Being independent is good, but you should never be afraid to ask for help when you need it. After all, we're only human. We can't know everything. That's. That's why it's crucial to have a support system. People you can go to. When it gets rough, think of friends, family members, your partner, hell, even your dog. When you're feeling down, spending time with a furry friend can be a good pick me up. But I get it. Sometimes you don't want to or can't go to them for help. For these moments, try therapy. It can be a good source of support in any area of your life. Whether you're working on personal relationships, job stress, or something else. Therapy can teach you a multitude of different things to help you be your best self. Like how to set boundaries, when to let go of toxic relationships, and what to do when you feel overwhelmed.
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Unknown B
And even more importantly, you can do it in a safe space. If you think therapy might be a good option for you, a good place to start is BetterHelp. They have a diverse network of therapists and everything is online, which can be very convenient. Convenient if you need a last minute session. It's also very easy to switch therapists if it's not working out. Build your support system with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com jre to get 10 off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P.com jre so you're in all kinds of stuff and you easily could have been a comedian as well.
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Unknown A
I don't think I'm that funny.
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Unknown B
But you're funny. There's a lot of people that are professional.
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Unknown A
I assume you know Carrot Top. Sure.
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Unknown B
Very well.
-
Unknown A
Okay, so Carrot Top and I become friends recently.
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Unknown B
He's great.
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Unknown A
Love him. This is total sweetheart. Sweetheart.
-
Unknown B
Genuine.
-
Unknown A
Just a great guy to know.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
But as you know, because you do this for a living, suddenly everybody wants to start pitching you bits. So I made the mistake of pitching Carrot Top a bit. I thought I had a good bit for him and he didn't respond. You know what I mean? And then I texted him like an hour later and said, hey, just get that bit extended. Yeah. That's why I didn't respond.
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Unknown B
Yeah. People get tired of that also. It's like most comics, they want it to be their idea. Like, the whole idea, what you're doing on stage is essentially like, here's the words.
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Unknown A
In my eyes, it's like, somebody tell me how to write a song.
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Unknown B
Right. It's one thing for another, comics give each. We give each other tags. Like, if someone says something, I said, you know what else you get out of that? At this.
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Unknown A
Oh, I see.
-
Unknown B
A buddy of mine was doing this bit on the. The guy who tried to shoot Trump. And we were bantering back and forth and we came up with, like, the perfect line.
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Unknown A
Like, oh.
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Unknown B
But it was already his premise and his bit. Comics add to stuff for each other, for fun. It's like we just. We sort of. You're tossing the ball around in the green room, and then someone will come up with a new line for you. We'll do that. But no one ever says, hey, you should go on stage and talk about this.
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Unknown A
Yeah. So that's. I. So I've had a couple professional comedians care at top preeminent among them. Kind of let me know. You're not that funny.
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Unknown B
It's probably not that you're not that funny. It's. First of all, you sent a text. Premises and texts are terrible.
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Unknown A
Oh, right. Okay.
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Unknown B
You really have to be.
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Unknown A
Tone. Tone is big.
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Unknown B
Yeah, it's everything. And you really have to be there with the person and you really have to, like, say it the way you thought it and then they get it. Because text is just. Unless it's just genius. Unless it's just, like, rock solid structure. Like, oh, my God, this joke can't fail.
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Unknown A
We do have a movie idea that we're working on.
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Unknown B
Oh, yeah.
-
Unknown A
And it's a good one.
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Unknown B
What is it?
-
Unknown A
I can't give it away, I'll tell you privately, but it's a good one. Yeah.
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Unknown B
Oh, nice.
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Unknown A
That he likes. He likes my. My movie idea.
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Unknown B
Yeah. I'm telling you, a lot of it is that comics don't like people coming to them with a premise. They don't. They only want. And they only want help from other comics generally.
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Unknown A
Okay, I get that.
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Unknown B
Yeah. It's just one of those. And even then, it's touchy. Like, I would never help someone. I don't know. I would never go up to him, hey, you should say this, like, never, never, never, never. It's gotta be like, your friend, they know you love them. You can you around, you talk, you can say. Did you ever try and say that, you know, you know, you left out like, you forgot, like, oh, I forgot about that. Yeah, that's a big part of the bit.
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Unknown A
Yeah. I never tried stand up so that's.
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Unknown B
You can do it.
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Unknown A
It seems terrifying to me.
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Unknown B
So singing on stage, you could do it.
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Unknown A
It's a lot easier to scream with, you know, 50,000 watts behind your voice, you know, than tell a joke because.
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Unknown B
You could suck at that. And then it's terrifying too.
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Unknown A
Yeah, yeah.
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Unknown B
I mean, it's all hard to do anything at the highest level.
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Unknown A
It's hard to do. That's true.
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Unknown B
You're doing arena shows. I've watched a lot of people perform in front of arenas singing. It's hard. That's a hard thing to do. Most people freak the out.
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Unknown A
Yeah. I don't know. That part doesn't bother me strangely.
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Unknown B
Well, that's why I get it right.
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Unknown A
I feel like I kind of know what I'm doing up there for some reason.
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Unknown B
Well, also, I think it's like there's a build up, right. You start working in small clubs, you make your way to larger places, and then eventually you sell more and more records. Like Smashing Pumpkins is like, they burst on the scene and sort of keep. You guys kept getting more and more popular, so you kind of got accustomed to it.
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Unknown A
Yeah, you do normalize to the insanity of standing in a 10,000ft comedy.
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Unknown B
You normalize.
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Unknown A
What's the biggest show you've ever done? Comedy.
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Unknown B
25,000.
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Unknown A
That's a lot of people.
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Unknown B
Yeah, me and Chappelle, we sold out the Tacoma Dome and we were standing backstage. I'll never forget it. He looked at me like right before he goes on stage, he goes, not a lot of motherfuckers get to do this. We were just laughing. How fun, much fun we were having. 25,000 people was crazy. In the round too. In the round.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
It was very fun though. It was very fun.
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Unknown A
I actually know Dave from way back in the day.
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Unknown B
He's the best.
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Unknown A
When he first. First kind of burst on the scene, we used to hang out a little bit. So I feel like it's cool that I knew him.
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Unknown B
Like, what year is this?
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Unknown A
Like, like, remember he did like a couple things on snl, like really early on he was kind of around tv. It was like the first year he was on television. I remember I'd see him in New York and he was hanging out with some other. Maybe it was because he was hanging out with SNL people and I'd see him out in New York back as, like late 90s.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
Early 2000s. And so.
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Unknown B
Okay.
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Unknown A
I knew him when. I don't see. He's a nobody. But he wasn't. He wasn't a known. I seen my tv, but he was like a household name like he is now.
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Unknown B
Right, right.
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Unknown A
So there was this one night where I was out. I did a benefit for Roger Waters and in the military. That's amazing. In New York, it was all these guys who were like, single double entry amputees playing Pink Floyd music. It's like, did this concert with them with Roger. So afterwards. So he came. So Chappelle's in this hotel, you know, and I hadn't seen him for a years, and I said, I know him. And you see people think like, you don't know. You know what I mean? So when he came back, ah, you know, it's like that moment, like, you know, so. What a great guy. Such a.
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Unknown B
He's a genuine person.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
He's another sweetheart. Just a sweet, sweet guy. Easy to hang out with. Very fun.
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Unknown A
Yeah. I mean, guys with that kind of mind is just. It's just. It blows my mind because they just. I mean, you could. I just don't know. I could sit, listen to for hours.
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Unknown B
He's also. He's kind of a legend for what he did, you know, left Comedy Central in the height of Chappelle show, passed up on a $50 million deal, went to Africa, hung out there and then came back and didn't do stand up for 10 years.
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Unknown A
I didn't know that he didn't do stand up for 10 years.
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Unknown B
He would do stand up occasionally for free. Okay. So what he would do is he'd bring like a speaker to the park and, like, set up a mic in the park in Seattle and just start doing stand up. And everybody like, holy.
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Unknown A
Is he changing money or is.
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Unknown B
Nope. Just living off of his Bell show money. He had a ton of money.
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Unknown A
I didn't know that part.
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Unknown B
He made millions of dollars from the show. Passed up on 50. But probably remember that and, you know.
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Unknown A
It became a conspiracy thing.
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Unknown B
Yes, it became a conspiracy.
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Unknown A
He was saying no to the Illuminati.
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Unknown B
Right, right, right. That's always fun.
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Unknown A
You feel like, what?
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Unknown B
Are you sure that's what happened? I kind of know what happened because the. The people that were running Comedy Central back then, I had dealt with.
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Unknown A
There were.
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Unknown B
It was. It was nice. Folks shouldn't have been running comedy. They shouldn't have been telling comedians what to do, and they wanted to tell.
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Unknown A
Comedians what to do.
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Unknown B
It was a situation where a bunch of non creatives had gotten involved in the process. I'm sure you're familiar.
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Unknown A
This is so, so dear to my heart. It's disgusting.
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Unknown B
It's the worst, the worst aspect to show business. You start dealing with money people, and they start doing something that they're not supposed to be doing, which is like adding, changing, directing, moving ideas, and then you're dealing with literal morons that somehow or another got this job and they're telling you how to do what you're doing, which is what is the best sketch show in the world.
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Unknown A
It's still popular.
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Unknown B
It's as good as any sketch show that's ever existed. They only did two seasons. So he just decides, I'm just gonna be an artist. I'm just gonna hang out, I'm not gonna make any money. He would do like, show up at open mic nights. So they had open mic nights for, like, musicians, play folk songs. And at the end of, like midnight, he would pull up and start talking. And by 15 minutes in his set, everybody told everybody that Dave Chelles, there's that place packed.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
They did this for like 10 years. Yeah, he just fucked around. He'd hear about him just showing up places and fucking around.
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Unknown A
I love that.
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Unknown B
And then somewhere, I think it was like 2013, 14, starts doing stand up again and then boom. Yeah, that's. That's really how it all went down.
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Unknown A
It's. It's really a testament to his power, of his talent. Because my wife, who's 32, she loves him. And it's so cool because, like, we went to see him, I think, at Radio City Music hall. And it's so cool because it's like, you know, I'm 57, she's 32. It's like that he can speak to both of us. So, yeah, right to the heart. It's really a rare gift. I mean, you got a picture out there. Richard Pryor, who was, you know, from Illinois, like myself and my father loved Richard Pryor. And so because of my father's love, Richard Pryor paid a lot of attention to Richard when I was. When I was a kid. And he strikes me, he's got that. That transcendent ability to somehow almost heal the country.
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Unknown B
Right.
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Unknown A
With his messaging. Yeah, he had that too, in his own way. But to Mel is more in the prior mode of like, somehow he can address issues that are uncomfortable.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
And I know a lot of people have issues with what he says, but I ultimately see what he's trying to do is heal things.
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Unknown B
Yeah. Very much like Prior. Whereas Eddie Murphy was just really, really funny, you know, Just really, really funny. And he's still to this day. I'm like, why hasn't that guy come back? He did this one thing. We got the Mark Twain Award where he did this whole impression of Bill Cosby finding out they had to give away one of his awards because he was caught up in the scandal. And so he's doing a Cosby impression. It's fucking genius. It's dead on. He's doing, like, brilliant stand up. And he hasn't touched stand up in 25, 30 years.
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Unknown A
Yeah. I mean, you would think he would just do one victory lap tour if he wanted to.
-
Unknown B
It would be sold out. Oh, my God. And I guarantee you that guy would be the best. He was so fucking talented. But just decided it was just too much. I'd rather just do movies.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
Which is kind of crazy. Which Prior never did. Obviously. Prior kept doing.
-
Unknown A
Has anyone ever tried to pull you in the movie? Movie orphan?
-
Unknown B
Yeah. Yeah.
-
Unknown A
Action hero or.
-
Unknown B
Yeah. I'm not interested. I'm not interested.
-
Unknown A
They only offer me parts like a serial killer. So I always turn it down.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, there's been a few tempting ones, but no, I don't have that kind of time. And I also don't have the desire to do it. It's not something I enjoyed.
-
Unknown A
Like, sitting on that set all day seems like it's a lot of work.
-
Unknown B
It's hard. And to be a real good actor, like a really good actor, you know, the rehearsing and the practicing and going over the character. It's like, I couldn't do it because I don't have the time it would require. Everything I have.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
If you really want to do it. Right. If I really wanted to do a role in a movie where I played somebody, I would have to fucking really spend time not doing anything but that, you know?
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
-
Unknown B
It's just not. That's not my jam. There's people out there to do it. I'm glad they do it because I love movies.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
-
Unknown B
But I don't want to do it.
-
Unknown A
Did you watch the Oscars?
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Unknown B
I did not. I never watch award shows. I don't think you should give away awards for art. I think it's silly. I don't get it. I think it's dumb. I think it's all really. Who's making money is the people that are putting on television. That's really what it is. It's just a big money grab. They're all just selling advertising. Everybody's wearing a tux.
-
Unknown A
It's like, well, certainly the public's growing disinterest in awards shows is some indication that people no longer believe in either the integrity of the process or the. Or the maybe the intent of the process.
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Unknown B
Right. The integrity of the process and the intent are both compromised. Right. Because there's people that, you know, like, you could kind of guess just by the subject of some movies, whether not they're winning an award because, you know, people feel obligated to address this very important message.
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Unknown A
The guy who won Best Picture I was actually in talks with about five years ago because he made some really cool movies. Made one on Cell Phone's call, I think it's called Tangerine, about prostitutes working the streets in la. And he got two street workers, I believe, and then he cast them. So it was a movie, it wasn't a documentary. It was really beautiful movie. And then he did that movie called the Florida Project where he. At the end of the movie, they actually snuck into Disney World and shot stuff and somehow Disney let it go.
-
Unknown B
Really?
-
Unknown A
Yeah. It was kind of about the social milieu around a place like Disney World, like what goes on outside the gates. People living in motels and kind of perpetual tourist economy kind of living hand to mouth and kind of using the tourism, the white whale of tourism to just get enough money because there's always some turnover, you know, trying scams and stuff. So he made a really beautiful movie about that as well. So I was in talks with him for a while about doing something and then just going like, what kind of scams? I can't remember because it's been a few years since. It's just the idea that anywhere there's a tourist economy, there's money to be made. Right. You know, there's a guy standing on the corner selling brochures or hustling you into a van to see where the stars live. It was kind of about that.
-
Unknown B
Right, right, right.
-
Unknown A
About a cast of characters living in the shadow of. Of this idealistic place.
-
Unknown B
Right. Just like those Hollywood tour people that you would get in la. Yeah, yeah. Those were the weirdest fucking people.
-
Unknown A
I always get offended when I walk down Hollywood Boulevard and they think, I want to go on it. You know, it's like, I don't know what it is. I feel like I don't want to go on your tour.
-
Unknown B
You look like a guy totally. Get on a tour, got off the boat.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
-
Unknown B
Just came here from Nebraska.
-
Unknown A
Totally. Yeah. Like, gee, I wonder where the stars live.
-
Unknown B
You know, that's such a creepy thing to do. Just drive around and point. That's where Ben Affleck sleeps.
-
Unknown A
But they've been doing it since the 30s.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, forever.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, I mean I have some of the old brochures, you know, see where Greta Garber lives and all that stuff.
-
Unknown B
It's just always been weird. Well, back then it was even weirder because those are the first stars.
-
Unknown A
Well, back then, I mean they, they went way out of their way to turn them into gods. You know, they airbrush the, out of every photo and they cover up scandals. There's that one famous scandal where one of the top male stars maybe was Gary Cooper. Carrie Grant ran somebody over a car. Really? You know about that? No, you want to look that one up?
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Unknown B
I know the faz.
-
Unknown A
No, it was a top a level star. I think he was drunk, ran over somebody in a car and somebody from the studio went to jail for like seven years and took the rap so that the star could stay out. And the studio paid the guy like a stipend to go to jail. It's a very famous story. So some guy did seven years or something.
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Unknown B
That's crazy. You know, there's a similar story about that in China with the bodies exhibit. You know the.
-
Unknown A
Oh yeah, yeah.
-
Unknown B
There was a woman who was married to a mayor of one of the cities in China and this woman who was married to this mayor, the, the mayor was having an affair with a TV newscaster and she got the tv, he got the TV newscaster pregnant. And apparently there was a confrontation between the woman and the wife and, and the lady winds up missing. She gets scrubbed from the Internet. I mean, she scrubbed. There's only like a photo of her on the Internet. And then all of a sudden in the body works exhibit, there's an eight month pregnant woman who they believe is this newscaster. Here's the other part. The woman who's the mayor's wife is also the manager of the local plastination factory where they take the bodies and they emerge them, they immerse them in these solvents and turn them into statues. This woman was the manager of the place that produced the woman with the eight month fetus in her body.
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Unknown B
And you can still see it like it's on tour. Can go see this lady who was most likely murdered. So then she didn't just kill that lady, she poisoned some British businessman. So she poisons this guy and she has to go to trial. Well, she doesn't go to trial. Some other woman goes to trial who doesn't look anything like her. Raise her right hand, the whole thing goes to jail. So she probably paid some family off. Some poor family. I'll give you a million dollars. Give up your daughter, she goes to jail, everybody's rich. It's not a bad jail. She's going to do yoga, play checkers.
-
Unknown A
Have you heard the ones where, like, because there's so much plastic surgery in Asia where guys are suing their wives because they marry, so they get hot and then the kid comes out and gets that regular.
-
Unknown B
Jawline's totally different, different nose. Yeah. There's a lot of plastic surgery over there in Korea. It's nuts. They do their eyes and it's like, strange.
-
Unknown A
How many saw me as much as 75% of the women in South Korea. Is it really somebody who's Korean told me that. I don't know.
-
Unknown B
Who's that? Jamie, we need to find this out. This is important information because last time.
-
Unknown A
I was in Korea, I was like, wow, these women here are really hot. Like, this was like woman after woman after woman. Somebody said, bro, that's like, that's just all plastic surgery. That's not real.
-
Unknown B
Wow. One third as many as up to 50 or higher. Maybe. Some people have said a lot of liars. A lot of them ladies are lying about it. Up to 50 or higher. Well, higher could be like 75%.
-
Unknown A
I like, I like this whole new business of like plastic surgery tourism where it's like cheaper to get on plane. Yeah. Somebody was recently trying to talking to go to South Korea to get some work done on my face. It's like I said, like what?
-
Unknown B
I guess the idea would be you could go recover over there your neighbors don't have to see with bandages over your head.
-
Unknown A
I think it's cheaper. Yeah, cheaper, Cheaper and better because they can do stuff there that we can't do here yet.
-
Unknown B
Oh, really? What can they do there?
-
Unknown A
Apparently they have some new thing. That's unbelievable.
-
Unknown B
What is it?
-
Unknown A
Something it's. They try to explain to me. Doesn't make any sense. Some kind of new facelift. That's not a facelift or something. It's like a non invasive facelift. It's a relative of mine through marriage, Chinese relative, and he's in that business and knows the Koreans over there in la. And Allison, he was saying, he was saying five years, this will be the number one thing, so you might as well get to Korea now. The stuff I hear when I'm sitting around the hot pot dinner, you know.
-
Unknown B
Non invasive face off. And that's weird that, like, one of our biggest fears is that your face sags.
-
Unknown A
I don't know. I mean, I don't know how it would feel if I wasn't in the entertainment business. Right. I mean. I mean, you're in a cosmetic business.
-
Unknown B
At some level, you know, it's not necessarily uglier.
-
Unknown A
You know, I never thought of you. I'm not. I'm not attracted to men, per se, but I never thought you weren't attractive.
-
Unknown B
Definitely less attractive than I used to be. That's just time and booze.
-
Unknown A
Success creates a glow around him, right?
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
A little bit of a little swagger.
-
Unknown B
Well, just age beats us all. You don't win, nobody wins. Everybody looks worse at 80 than they do at 20.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
-
Unknown B
Just how it goes.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. I'm 57, so you kind of look down. Are you.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
When's your birthday? August. Okay. I'm older than you in March, but, you know, you look down that. That road and you're like. Like, like, am I gonna be all right when I get 80? You know, very few people are.
-
Unknown B
You know, there's a few people that.
-
Unknown A
You'Re calling UFC, like, 972, or, like.
-
Unknown B
The number would be. But I'm worried about Bruce Buffer, because Bruce Buffer, he puts out so much energy. I was telling the guys the other day, one day he's just gonna be in the middle screaming someone's name, and he's just gonna fucking check out, like, right in the middle. It's time. Boom.
-
Unknown A
His eyes will roll back, but that's a burning performer. That's what you go out. You go out on your shield. Right?
-
Unknown B
That would be amazing. I don't want him to die. I love him. But if he did die that way, I'd be like, what a legend. What a legend.
-
Unknown A
The Buffers, right? Both of them.
-
Unknown B
Oh, yeah. Isn't it crazy that they didn't know each other until they were, like, 30? UFC 313 is back in Vegas. It won't be paradise for one of the light heavyweights in the main event. Don't miss out on any of the action at DraftKings sportsbook. The official sports betting partner of the UFC, Alex Barrera, defends his light heavyweight title against Magomed Ankalaev. But that's just a cherry on top of an amazing night of fights. It's super easy for first timers to get started. Try betting on something simple, like picking a fighter to win. Just go to DraftKings sportsbook app, select your fighter, and place your first bet. It's that simple. And if you're new to DraftKings, listen up. New customers bet $5 to get $150 in bonus bets. Instantly download the DraftKings sportsbook app now and use the code Rogan. That's Code Rogan for new customers.
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Unknown B
Get $150 in bonus bets when you bet just five bucks only on DraftKings. The crown is yours. Gamb.
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Unknown A
Call 1-800-GAMBLER in New York.
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Unknown B
Call 877-8-HOPE&Y or text HOPE&Y 467369 in Connecticut. Help is available for problem gambling. Call 888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org Please play.
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Unknown A
Responsibly on behalf of Boot Hill Cassino and resort in Kansas. 21 and over. Age and eligibility varies by jurisdiction. Boy. In Ontario, new customers only, bonus bets expire 168 hours after issuance. For additional terms and responsible gaming resources, see dkng.co audio I only have one Michael Buffer story if you want to hear.
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Unknown B
Sure.
-
Unknown A
So I went to see Holy Field Lennox Lewis at Madison Square Garden.
-
Unknown B
Oh, wow.
-
Unknown A
And I was hanging out with all the cool people at times. I'm in the fourth row and it was infamously a draw. It was almost all English tourists that had come in for the fight, they were booing the national anthem. I mean, it was a pretty riotous atmosphere. And, you know, I don't know anything about fights, but it was a pretty boring fight. And Lewis seemed to be a little bit more agile because of youth and all that. Anyway, so right when I, you know, whatever they're doing, hbo, they're over there in the corner, they're doing their bit, you know, I mean, they're talking before they go to the scorecards and a guy leans forward, the ref to tell someone in the second row might have been Don King. And I heard him go, it's a draw, right? So I knew it was a draw like 60 seconds before they announced it.
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Unknown A
And I was with a lot of well known people and I said, run. And they're like, what do you mean? I said, we gotta run. And I started grabbing people. We ran out of Madison Square Garden and we're almost totally out the building, you know, kind of we get to the concourse part and you hear the decision and it's like. And people start like, here comes the riot vibe, really. So somehow we ended up getting it.
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Unknown B
Because the decision was bad.
-
Unknown A
Well, the English people didn't like that it was a draw.
-
Unknown B
Oh.
-
Unknown A
Because Holyfield was on the older Side and right. It's not a well renowned fight.
-
Unknown B
I can't remember it.
-
Unknown A
It was just a draw. It was a stone cold boring fight. But because it was a draw and all these English people were mad, Don King was involved. So it was like all that typical brouhaha was going on anyway. So because of the suddenly the riotous or potentially riotous situation, the police started, like, making people go different ways, like funneling traffic or something. It was almost like they got like, code red or something because, like, suddenly got really weird. So then we couldn't get out of the building. So somebody was like, somebody recognized somebody in our parties. Follow me. And so then next thing we know, you know, we end up like, in the VIP backstage part where it's safe and there's. And there's, you know, Michael Buffer on a chair. And he wasn't talking to me. He was talking to somebody, and I heard him go, that's bullshit.
-
Unknown A
Like, in that voice. That's all I remember. That's bullshit.
-
Unknown B
So was he talking about the decision?
-
Unknown A
He said the decision was bullshit. You know, a lot of man's card was heavy for Lewis.
-
Unknown B
Wow. 117, 111. Harold Letterman, who's always dead on the money. Harold Letterman was always right. So they're saying, as I got called.
-
Unknown A
Like, this is a travesty. Yeah. I mean, again, I'm not a. I mean, I'm not a fight aficionado, but I thought Lewis was slightly better.
-
Unknown B
Wow. I forgot about this fight. I completely forgot about this fight. There's so many fights from this era that were incredible. That was an amazing era for heavyweights.
-
Unknown A
And this is when Don King was still running everything.
-
Unknown B
Did they have a rematch?
-
Unknown A
I don't. I honestly don't remember.
-
Unknown B
You don't think so?
-
Unknown A
That's. There's a lot.
-
Unknown B
He's still trucking. He's still trucking. He still announces huge because you ever.
-
Unknown A
Get that, like, somebody wants you to do a bar mitzvah or anything? You ever get those requests? No, you come to my bar mitzvah.
-
Unknown B
Who won this one?
-
Unknown A
Is that the rematch? Had to be Lewis, right?
-
Unknown B
I would imagine.
-
Unknown A
Similar Letterman card.
-
Unknown B
Similar card. Let's see if they robbed him twice. They gave it to him.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. Yeah. Well, they got the. Got the rematch. No, you get this thing like, hey, will you come do my. I wonder what Michael Buffer gets to show up somewhere, you know?
-
Unknown B
Yeah, it's probably like Saudi Arabia. They have him come over there and.
-
Unknown A
Introduce someone's half a million. Half a million, probably more.
-
Unknown B
Depends, you know, I mean, like, you.
-
Unknown A
Know, we could become privates.
-
Unknown B
Right. I saw Stone Temple Pilots. They played Dana White's 40th birthday party.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
-
Unknown B
And there was no one in the room other than UFC employees. And they put on a show like it was a fucking sold out arena. I mean, full blast went. They didn't go through the motions at all. It was a phenomenal.
-
Unknown A
That means they paid him.
-
Unknown B
Yeah. Yeah. I love those guys, but they were so professional. It was like, it was so impressive. And because they were so, like, powerful on stage, everybody just started paying attention because it kind of broke out in the middle of this party where. This birthday party. While standing around tables eating food.
-
Unknown A
I've got a few things that's always a bit awkward.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
Which is weird because they're all paid gigs.
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
But something about a paid, paid gig feels different.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, It's. There's a lot of entitlement it's attached to, like, someone paying you to come perform.
-
Unknown A
Well, then you see the guy's wife going, who's this?
-
Unknown B
Right. There's that. To the people that aren't fans. Like, oh, no. Yeah, yeah. Those are weird gigs. Because then you go, how much? I got one shitty night for a million dollars.
-
Unknown A
I mean, I'd like to tell you I haven't been there, but I've been there.
-
Unknown B
Ron White did one last year in Vegas and he was talking about. He's like, I don't. I didn't want to do it. I kept saying no. They kept going higher and higher. Eventually got to a point where I go, fuck it, I'll do it. And he goes, it wasn't worth it. It was one of the worst fucking nights of my life. He goes, all the time I'm doing it. I shouldn't have fucking done this. He said, they didn't laugh. They barely paid attention. It's like, why am I here? But if, like, you're a giant fan. Like, say if you're a giant Ron White fan and you hire Ron White, but you're like, officer doesn't give a about comedy. And they just want to, like, have fun and drink and eat hot dogs.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. I went to a billionaire thing once. The guy hired Diana Ross.
-
Unknown B
Whoa.
-
Unknown A
Had at least be a million dollar gig for her and maybe 700, 800 people.
-
Unknown B
Wow.
-
Unknown A
You know? And you're like, wow. I mean, basically a private concert with Diana Ross. I mean, that's pretty dope if you're really into it.
-
Unknown B
People pay attention to probably fun, small, intimate.
-
Unknown A
I've got them where they're fun yeah, yeah.
-
Unknown B
What percentage?
-
Unknown A
Less than 50. We don't get that to be fair. Not fair. We don't get asked to do a lot. I don't think we're on most people's bingo scarred for a private event. Yeah, I think. I think my. My rent precedes me.
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Unknown B
You know, it's like a Beyonce thing.
-
Unknown A
Although, I mean, she does. Have you ever heard some of the numbers that some of those pop people could get come out of Saudi Arabia?
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
14 mil and.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
You know, I mean. Yeah, I take that phone call.
-
Unknown B
Well, that's one of those things if, like, who's that? The richest man in India. His son.
-
Unknown A
A birthday.
-
Unknown B
It was like the most extravagant birthday.
-
Unknown A
They spent 50. 50 mil on entertainment alone. Something crazy like that.
-
Unknown B
God, it's so crazy. That's so much money.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. I mean, I wish there was a perfect formula before it, but there isn't, because that's what I mean. I mean, we play. Every time we play, we basically get paid.
-
Unknown B
I think it was a wedding, not a birthday party, right? It was a wedding.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. Yeah.
-
Unknown B
Let's lose. Was the announcer.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
-
Unknown B
It's just. That's a weird world of extravagant amounts of money. Like unbelievable amounts of money, where you want to hire 100 million. That's what spent over 100 million for Anant's sister Isha's wedding in 2018. The ceremony feature performance by Beyonce.
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Unknown A
If I'm Beyonce's manager, she's not going over there for less than 20, 25.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
Why not?
-
Unknown B
They have so much money, they don't even notice it. They'll make it back tomorrow in the stock market.
-
Unknown A
I don't know. I'm saying that.
-
Unknown B
So when she get to that goofy hunt. That was 100. How many million? 190. No, I'm sorry, billion. How much is it worth? 116. Yeah. You're making $20 million every day, probably. It's like rolling in constantly.
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Unknown A
I mean, you've mentioned. I mean, you just had a billionaire in here a couple days ago. Yeah, I mean, you've met your share of billionaires. It's always an interesting thing how they. How they. How they spend or don't spend their money.
-
Unknown B
It's.
-
Unknown A
There's no consistent guide for billionaires.
-
Unknown B
No, I like the Jeff Bezos wear. Wear tight shirts, get a yacht, have a hot girlfriend. Let's go. That's what you're supposed to do when you've got $250 billion. You're not supposed to be a fucking weirdo and wear a sweater and Go visit Haiti. No, you're supposed to be balling. Go to the Mediterranean, popping corks with models. Let's go get a. Get a million dollar watch.
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Unknown A
I might have million dollars to make that decision, right? I'm not there yet.
-
Unknown B
Well, the weirdest one is billionaires that compare themselves to super billionaires and they feel poor. Like, Brian Callum was telling me about his buddy who's worth, I think, $3 billion, and he's like, I really need to fucking up my game. Because he's friends with a guy who's worth $80 billion. So he feels poor compared to his 80 billion dollar friend.
-
Unknown A
Boy, I'd like to be poor like that.
-
Unknown B
The forest for the trees.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, not this lifetime, I don't think.
-
Unknown B
It doesn't seem like fun. It seems like the amount of stress and energy that must be required to acquire that much fucking money.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. Jimmy Chamberlain of the Pumpkins, the drummer, is friends with Jimmy John the sub. The sub kid.
-
Unknown B
Oh, okay.
-
Unknown A
So I know Jimmy John will do. And we were at dinner one night in Nashville at a place he owns, Circle with other people. And when my body started pitching him on, like, some kind of money thing, and I just saw his face change because everybody in the world wants to go back to pitching ideas. Right?
-
Unknown B
Of course.
-
Unknown A
And. And Jimmy John knows this mutual friend, so it's not as rude as it might sound coming out of my mouth. But at some point, he looks at me, goes, tommy, you know how I got that money? I made a lot of fucking sandwiches. That was the way he shut him down. Like. Like I know how. I know what I had to go through to make that money. Like, you just. You just see me as a walking atm.
-
Unknown B
Yeah. Well, it just changes the dynamic of the friendship now, too. Now he's not gonna be able to trust a friend.
-
Unknown A
Well, there's always nobody. Nobody trusts Tommy.
-
Unknown B
Tom's a mess.
-
Unknown A
Tommy's infamous, actually.
-
Unknown B
Infamous mess.
-
Unknown A
I've literally been walking down the street in foreign countries, and strangers will come up to me and say, oh, you know Tommy. He's like. He's just a legendary character in the industry.
-
Unknown B
What was he trying to pitch Jimmy John on?
-
Unknown A
Some kind of investment scheme or something? Because my friend Tommy collects billionaires. Oh, boy. I call it. He plays billionaire lotto. He's hoping that when one of them knocks over, they'll leave him, you know, have a taste.
-
Unknown B
How bizarre. Is like a vampire familiar.
-
Unknown A
Well, what's interesting about Tommy is his uncle was the founder of Hard Rock Cafe. So he Grew up in a family with money. So instead of somebody who we figure was poor and aspirational want to hang out with billionaires, he actually came from money.
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
So he knows how to speak the language of wealthy people. And so he's kind of generally welcome in those circles where I, you know, I grew up pouring the suburbs. I don't have a role in that world. And so, yeah. But yeah, Tommy, I think he's probably about seven or eight billionaires that he counts as friends.
-
Unknown B
And what does he do for a living?
-
Unknown A
No one knows.
-
Unknown B
No one knows.
-
Unknown A
That's the legend of Tommy. Really? Yeah. And in fact, I pitched Tommy once. I'm making a documentary called who the fuck is Tommy Litnick? That's his name, Tommy Litnick. And he doesn't like the idea. Yeah.
-
Unknown B
I wonder why I just outed him.
-
Unknown A
But I mean, we don't have time for it. But I can make you a list of 50 people that are super famous, like Bono on down, who have pulled me aside and go, what's the deal with Tommy? Right? And just the fact that we're talking about Tommy will really please Tommy, but he'll take umbrella. In fact, I have to tell you story about my father, but he'll take umbrage with the way I'm portraying him.
-
Unknown B
I'm sure he will.
-
Unknown A
This I want to tell you about my father was when I was on your show, I told you a story about how I found a double barreled saw, a shotgun under my father's bed. It was in a guitar case.
-
Unknown B
Right?
-
Unknown A
Well, my father heard the show about a month after I told the story on your show. And so I get this text from my father's when he's still alive, obviously. And he goes, yeah, I heard what you said on Joe's show. And I'm like, you know, you're looking at your phone like, here it comes to me. He goes, there's one thing you left out of the story. Reading text. The shotgun wasn't loaded. That's all he wanted me to know. Like, somehow made it better.
-
Unknown B
How bizarre. Your father sounds like a character.
-
Unknown A
He was unbelievable. Unbelievable.
-
Unknown B
What? What did he play?
-
Unknown A
Guitar. Great, great, great musician. Really, truly great musician. He's, he's the classic guy that should have made it. It didn't. So when I made it, it made the whole thing really weird.
-
Unknown B
Oh.
-
Unknown A
Because he looked at me and said, how did my schlubby kid make it? And I didn't. Wow, he must have gotten lucky. He must have done something. Because if it didn't work for me. How could it work for him? So that was a weird. A weird thing. But he was talented. He really was talented.
-
Unknown B
That's great. Did he. Did you get. Did you feel resentment? Did you get along with him after that?
-
Unknown A
My father had a lot of issues with drugs. It was always kind of like a candy with addicts. It was like depending on the day, one day he would tell me I was the greatest thing that ever happened to him and I was the number one son and da, da, da. And two weeks later he's telling me he wished I'd never been born. I should have been aborted. So it was a weird. It was weird. It was a weird thing. So that's why. That's why that story's funny to me. Because he didn't mind that I told you about finding a saw off shotgun. He minded that I implied it was dangerous when he made sure that it wasn't loaded, so it was okay. That's the way his brain worked.
-
Unknown B
Do you believe him? That it wasn't loaded?
-
Unknown A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he was. He should have been an arch criminal or something, but he didn't have the nerve.
-
Unknown B
So he just became a guitarist.
-
Unknown A
No, he was. He was a drug dealer and he used to run drugs and guns for the mob. I mean, really. Oh, he. He would do stuff like. Melrose park is kind of an infamous city just outside the Chicago city limits where a lot of the mob wise guys lived. And he was friends with the kid of a wise guy. And the kid would dabble because he was protected, because his father was a made man. So we go over that guy's house for hours and just hear these crazy stories about the mob. And my dad would pick up something in a satchel and deliver it. You know, like, that's, that's. I was eight years old going through all this.
-
Unknown B
Wow, what a crazy environment. So you're eight years old, he's running drugs and guns.
-
Unknown A
Oh, yeah. Wow.
-
Unknown B
Did you see, like, a lot of.
-
Unknown A
I saw a lot of stuff, but it was like, you know when adults are trying to hide stuff from you, but not really, huh. You know, so like, for example, they would stay in the basement all night, party, whoever he was with musicians, whatever, Right? So come down at night and coke everywhere and rolled up 20s on black Sabbath mirrors. I was like 7, 10.
-
Unknown B
Oh, my God.
-
Unknown A
So I had a feeling, call it intuition. I had a feeling that he wanted me to clean up, but not the mirrors. And he was. And I was like, what's on the mirror that you know, that you left behind. He was like, oh, that's have a cold or something. But yeah, the studio didn't get rid of it. Why do you need the rolled up 20? Oh, it's just easier to, you know, it's like. So you knew it was bullshit, but you're 10, you don't know what coke is. You don't have any concept of what they're doing, but you know something's going on.
-
Unknown B
This is constant.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, my dad would do stuff. Like he'd take me to lunch with his mistresses and stuff and introduce Mrs. Friends and wow. It was all kind of in plain sight weirdness. But, you know, you'd be driving down the street and suddenly we were in a drug deal and it was, whoa. He told me. He told me he was shot at nine times and stabbed three times.
-
Unknown B
Holy.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, you want to hear? It's one of my favorite stories.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
So the band had a van. He had a van and we bought it off him. It was our band band for a while. And then after we were. We didn't need it anymore because we got too big. He wanted to buy it back, so we sold it to him. So one day I went over to his house and. And if, you know, this is the driver's thing. Well, right behind the driver's where the driver's head would be, but in the middle of the car was a bullet hole. So I said, did somebody shoot at you? He goes, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. What happened exactly? He's like, yeah, I was. I was stopped over there on Narragansett and some guy came up and I thought he needed something like a dollar, so I rolled down the window. As soon as I did, he put a gun through the.
-
Unknown A
Put a gun through the window of my head. And then, you know, I hit the gas and sped off. And so as I went to try to shoot me, but then he missed and the bullet went behind my head and I got away. That's the story he told me at the time. So years later, the story came back up somehow. He goes, oh, that wasn't the real story. Here's a real story. So, same setup. He's sitting somewhere, but it was a drug deal. He rolls down the window to make the drug deal. Guy puts a gun at his head. He does hit the gas. The guy does try to shoot him, but because my father's mad now, he spins the van around, he tries to run the guy over, and the guy's trucking down the street and the guy ran into a gas station. So my dad Came barreling the gas station at full speed in this van.
-
Unknown A
He was going to run the guy over, and he said he reached a point where the guy was going to. If the guy stopped, he would run him over. But the guy left a fence and the only way to kill the guy was to have to run the fence and ran into a house that was next to the gas station. So he hit the brakes and run the guy over. That was a real story. So back to the kid thing. Excuse me. That's why it's so hard to pin this whole thing down, because there's so much smoke, you know?
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
Like he did tell me there was another kid named Bill. That's a real thing. And when he told me when I was 18, he lied and said he didn't know where the kid was. Well, when my stepmother brought up the whole Bill birth thing later and I asked him, he admitted that he didn't know where the kid was, but he didn't want to tell me.
-
Unknown B
What did Bill think about this? Like the possibility that his mother had an affair with your dad?
-
Unknown A
I don't think Bill gives it any credence. That's my sense of it.
-
Unknown B
Okay. He just thinks it's.
-
Unknown A
I don't know. Honestly, I don't know what Bill thinks. You know, I mean, because.
-
Unknown B
Because I can see how you would think it'd be possible, because your dad was insane. Your dad sounds like a fucking maniac.
-
Unknown A
I mean, the only way. The only way.
-
Unknown B
Maniac.
-
Unknown A
Well, put this way, if a person doesn't believe that somebody is their father, not their real father, that they grew up with, and I do know people had. That they grew up with somebody. And in fact, it just happened in my family.
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
The cousin found out that her father was not her father, and she's in her 60s because of a DNA test.
-
Unknown B
Oh, my God.
-
Unknown A
So it is possible that people can find out later in life. Oh, by the way, that guy that you thought was your dad, he ain't your dad. Here's your real dad. Right. So it does happen. But I don't get any sense from Bill that he believes that's possible. So the only way would be possible if Bill grew up in some kind of weird lie. You see?
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
And I don't believe that.
-
Unknown B
Right, right. Well, I don't know. He's. I don't know how much he's talked about his family, but that's. I just can't imagine a kid coming downstairs and seeing Coco over the mirrors and Black Sabbath albums and people blacked out and empty booze everywhere. Like. Like, this is a normal thing at your house to have these wild parties.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
-
Unknown B
And you're like.
-
Unknown A
To be fair, I think a lot of people grow up in that atmosphere. I think we just don't hear about it.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, but not a lot of people grow up with dad is wearing guns and drugs for the mob.
-
Unknown A
That's true.
-
Unknown B
That's true.
-
Unknown A
That is true.
-
Unknown B
That's so insane. That's such a crazy way.
-
Unknown A
Like, we would have conversations. Like, we would have conversations because, you know, as you get older, you start to ask questions, right?
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
So I'd say, dad, aren't you worried, like, if you get pulled over, you know, because we carry, like, a lot of fucking weed in the car. Just for his own personal use. He smoked constantly, like, my whole childhood. Like, I mean, I just remember joining after joint all day at the dinner table in the car, I'd contact High Point. I said, daddy, aren't you worried about if he pulled over and he, like, popped the engine? You know, old cars, you know, when he pops trunk. What is it called? The hood. He had figured out some system where you could. If you put. If you put weed in a. In a. In a thing full of whiskey, he said that the dogs couldn't pick up on the scent. So there was like a compartment in the engine compartment, like a thing that was full of whiskey.
-
Unknown A
And then he would put a waterproof baggie with the weed in the whiskey. And so if the dog came around the car, it would never, never smell it.
-
Unknown B
That's hilarious.
-
Unknown A
So it was like life lessons, you know, from pop.
-
Unknown B
But dogs can only smell one thing. They're only looking for one thing. When you train a dog, you train a dog either for a bomb or you train for heroin. You don't train a dog for everything. Like, what do you got, three barks for? Coke. The way they train dogs, it's one thing that they're trained for.
-
Unknown A
They have one.
-
Unknown B
Yeah. If they're looking for bombs, they're only looking for bombs. They're not going to stop you for weed. Which is, like, the dumbest thing to train a dog for. Train a dog for weed?
-
Unknown A
I mean, well, now, yeah, now it's.
-
Unknown B
The dumbest, but they still. Do they still have weed dogs? Yeah, yeah. If they smell weed, they'll call the weed dog.
-
Unknown A
Is weed legal in Texas?
-
Unknown B
It's not. It's weird. It's decriminalized. There's actually a lawsuit that Ken Paxton tried to stop Dallas from decriminalizing weed. And they just Lost in court. So, Dallas, now marijuana is decriminalized for personal use. It's stupid. It should be the whole country. It should be league. Just like whiskey is. Don't do it if you don't want to do it. But, you know, you should probably know what the effects are. And we should probably study what the actual correct dose is per person. Like, we know with drinks. Like, one drink is one drink, right? You know what it is. You go to the bar, you get a shot of tequila. That's what it is. It's one shot of tequila. Everybody's pretty much. It's standard with weed. You don't know what, though.
-
Unknown A
I see. Yeah.
-
Unknown B
You don't know what's the right amount? Like, should I take two hits or three hits? You can build up a tolerance. Like your dad, you're smoking weed. Like, if I smoke weed all day long, I'd be a mess. I'd be paranoid and freaked out.
-
Unknown A
I'd be like, everybody wants to get me.
-
Unknown B
They just kept doing it. That's even crazier. Weed back then was not weed. Today it's. You probably could get some weed that's commensurate with weed today. Acapulco gold or something wacky.
-
Unknown A
But generally they have all these crazy strings now, right?
-
Unknown B
Isn't that now they have scientists, botanists got involved in the game and they're making super weed.
-
Unknown A
I noticed one thing because I was in LA for a couple months this winter, and when they first whatever decriminalized in la, it seemed like everywhere you went, everybody was smoking weed. It became like a thing. You couldn't go anywhere without smelling, you know, the telltale smoke. And now it seems to have calmed down. And I think it's almost like now it's like Holland back in the day, where it's so normal. It's no longer a thing to, like, openly smoke weed. So I think it's gone back to a. Oh, it's not that big a deal. Which I think is probably best, because there was a year there where you would go there and everybody was stoned. You couldn't get service at a restaurant. Like, I mean, it was like people were staring off into space edibles.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, well, for sure you're gonna have, like a normalization period after a while where it's like, weed's normal. It's just like everyone's not drunk all the time. Even though you get liquor everywhere, you choose when to imbibe and when not to or not to at all. That's. You're supposed to have choices. You're an adult. You're adult human being. The analogy I always make is, imagine it was the three of us in a room, just. Just us three. And we're the only people on Earth. We lived on an island. And Jamie just decided he doesn't want to smoke and weed. And so Jamie passed a law and he wants to lock us up if we smoke weed.
-
Unknown A
Oh, I see.
-
Unknown B
That's just as ridiculous as 300 million people. And one adult decides that the other 300 million people should be allowed to smoke weed. Like, do if you want to do it, don't do it if you don't do it. But you can't. Putting people in a cage for doing something that they want to do that harms no one but you don't want them to do is insane. It's just insane.
-
Unknown A
I grew up because of my father's life. I mean, I don't know what age I became conscious about my father doing drugs constantly. But let's say I was five years old. That's 1972. So I've been in weed culture since 1972.
-
Unknown B
Jesus. So I always thought it was Vietnam War days.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. And I met all those guys, too, you know, these guys with PTSD and all that stuff.
-
Unknown B
Wow.
-
Unknown A
So I guess what I'm after is I never understood what the big deal was. And the only thing freaks me out are people that are really into weed. Like, you know, I mean, like. Yeah, like that's their identity that freaks me out.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, it's a crutch for some. It's a tool for others. You know, it's a creativity tool for a lot of people. You know, Carl Sagan was one of them.
-
Unknown A
Carl Sagan was a stoner. Oh, yeah.
-
Unknown B
Huge donor. He's got one of the best quotes on states of consciousness that are. That are available to people under cannabis that are not available any other time. See if you find that quote. It's a brilliant quote. Yeah. Carl Sagan, I mean, he kind of had to keep it under wraps a little bit because marijuana was really illegal back then. But you still want to talk about it? Sometimes, just. It depends on the person. It's like everything else. There's some people that should not drink. They drink and then their eyes turn to shark eyes, they're gone and they go away. That's it. The illegality of cannabis is outrageous impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world. That's not the quote. That's a quote. But the, the other one had to do with states of consciousness that were.
-
Unknown B
That you could achieve.
-
Unknown A
See, it's a very stoner like thing to say.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, well, I'm sure he talked about a bunch, but either way, he was a regular cannabis user. It's supposed to be like everything else, you know, like you can have wine in your house. It doesn't mean you're drink wine all day every day. You know, just. It should not be high all the time.
-
Unknown A
I just don't let the 420 people. Here we go.
-
Unknown B
Well, it's like those, those people like the MAGA people or like the Insane Clown Posse people, like, it's just like it becomes their whole thing. That's the thing. Something wrong with going to Insane Clown Posse show. But if you want to be a Juggalo and that's your whole identity is being a Juggler.
-
Unknown A
Juggalo is a whole. You know, we've done this because of the nwa, we've done business with, with the, the Juggalos.
-
Unknown B
They seem like fun guys.
-
Unknown A
They're great. No problem with them. You know, Violent J, as he's known, I was in the NWA for a hot second.
-
Unknown B
Oh, really?
-
Unknown A
He's kind of refired his, his promotion. Juggalo, I guess. JCW Clown Promotions or something. A lot of my wrestlers wrestle for him too.
-
Unknown B
Oh, okay. I didn't even know he had a wrestling promotion.
-
Unknown A
They did back in the day. They used to wrestle. I know they wrestle for WCW and tna. So they were, they were wrestling at the highest level for a while when they were sort of the 90s times when they were on MTV and all that stuff.
-
Unknown B
I just love that they have like a carnival of outcasts. You know, they like all the Outcasts have a home in the Juggalos and they're all like, they have these gatherings of the Juggalos. They look like they're having the best fucking time. Like they're all like minded people all partying together.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, but it's freaky when people admit to secretly being Juggles. Have you ever had that experience?
-
Unknown B
They play aside.
-
Unknown A
A friend of mine, former former porn star Sasha Gray, like sent me a picture of her like 17 in the Juggalo makeup.
-
Unknown B
Oh, wow. 17.
-
Unknown A
And you're like, this is so out there.
-
Unknown B
Juggalo makeup. Do they dress?
-
Unknown A
They do very specific makeup.
-
Unknown B
Are the Juggles, they have different makeup than the same Clown Posse or is it the same kind of makeup?
-
Unknown A
It seems to me there's, there's Kind of a particular way they do the Juggalo makeup.
-
Unknown B
Jamie, can you please Google Juggalo makeup?
-
Unknown A
Yeah, I think it's a black and white.
-
Unknown B
I don't know if there's rules, but it's.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, clown makeup.
-
Unknown B
What does it look like? Like that guy right there.
-
Unknown A
Yes, that's smiling J on top there. But like, they'll do their makeup kind of like how J is.
-
Unknown B
Okay. So some of the people in the audience choose to make their face up. I don't see anybody there with face makeup though, in that picture.
-
Unknown A
It's hot summer.
-
Unknown B
Oh, yeah, there you go. Sweating. Washed off. Sweating off.
-
Unknown A
See like the girl there, that split.
-
Unknown B
Tongue, that dude in the middle. That's a commitment. That's a commitment for. To never have a real job up top. That's a lot. You gotta really hate your parents to split your tongue like that.
-
Unknown A
How about the guys who split their. Have you ever seen that?
-
Unknown B
Yes.
-
Unknown A
Who does that?
-
Unknown B
Do you remember the early days of the Internet? I don't know how much you were on the Internet in the 90s, but there was a page called the Style Project. Do you remember that?
-
Unknown A
Don't remember that.
-
Unknown B
It was all like some of the most up thing things that this dude could find on the Internet and he had a whole website and you would go to style projects, you'd get like just insane up stories about people. And one of them was Body Modification Extreme. And I became friends with the guy who ran the site, who's actually that arm wrestler, Devin Laur. I think that was his brother or someone he's related to. Shannon Lauret. I became friends with him and he gave me access to his website and it was like a members only access where you could like, you got the.
-
Unknown A
VIP tier of Split Cox.
-
Unknown B
Oh, my God. It wasn't just Split Cox. It was crazy stuff. Like some people, they decided that they wanted to get their arm chopped off or their hand chopped off, so they devised a guillotine. It was body modification Extreme. So it was all different people doing different things like putting like horns in their head and splitting their cock and put. And one of them was this horrible story about this guy whose boyfriend turned him into a eunuch, wanted him to cut his dick off for him and be a slave and like, oh, my God. It's like detailing how this guy cut his cock off. Yeah.
-
Unknown A
Johnny Fargo, who was a famous wrestler, he was famous for him as a party trick. He would put a nail through his cock.
-
Unknown B
Ah, that's not nice. You know, I had a David Blaine on and Made me stick an ice pick through his arm. Yeah, he's got this trick that he does. It's not a trick, though. I really stuck an ice pick through his arm. It's like, you can call it a trick, but a lot of things David does is just. It freaks you out. It feels like you should, but, you know, you can survive an ice pick through your arm. But I had to back it out because I had a nerve, and he made me reinsert it, and so I reinserted it, and then the original one started bleeding and got, like, a little bit of hematoma start swelling up. We had to get the medics, and we had seals work for us, so.
-
Unknown A
They checked it out because of all this body talk. My wife loves all sorts of weird body talk, and she. She wanted me to send you a message because she's literally about to have a baby, like, right now.
-
Unknown B
Oh, congratulations.
-
Unknown A
So we were somewhat concerned coming in because it was possible I may not be able to come because of her about to have this baby. So when we were talking last night, I said, please don't have the baby today. You know, Joe's show. And she said, you tell Joe that if I start to have the baby, I expect him to give you some of his net checkpoints so you can get home. It's a very, very rich person joke.
-
Unknown B
That's hilarious. What does that have to do with body modification? Nothing.
-
Unknown A
Because she loves talking about this text.
-
Unknown B
Why did she like talking about this stuff?
-
Unknown A
No, it's like, in my family, we didn't talk about anything. Sex, you know, it was all just kind of implied.
-
Unknown B
Oh.
-
Unknown A
Saying I grew up in a family where nobody hugged and we kissed, everyone hated each other, and nobody talked about secrets of life, you know, good or bad. It was all kind of in the shadows, you know? And she grew up in a family where it's like she has five brothers and a sister. So they talk about everything, like, to the point where just like at dinner, like, you're talking about this weird body stuff. I don't want to be graphic because it turns me off. You know, they seem to think it's funny.
-
Unknown B
When did you learn to hug people and be, like, outwardly nice?
-
Unknown A
Um, it's funny you asked me that. I didn't grow up with my mother. Um, my mother went crazy when I was 4, and I never lived with her again. And we started to become close again when I was in my 20s. And I remember this one time where I walked through her door, and it was that thing where I wanted to hug her because I never really hugged her my whole life. And I just made this decision at 24, like I was gonna hug my mother and give her a kiss on the cheek.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
And it was like that was the opening of this other life where people hug and kiss each other, you know, I mean, I mean, obviously I had fool around with girls, but it was only within the context of being romantic. I had no physical affection in my life outside of that. Now my kids are all over me and you know, nine and six year old, so it's like I'm used to kids like rugrats climbing all over me. But I didn't grow up in that at all. Like I had no, the idea of affection was, was alien. In fact, when I first started chasing girls at 17, 18, you know, girls want to hold your hand or hug you in the car. And I was like, it was so freaky to me.
-
Unknown B
When did you relax?
-
Unknown A
I'm not sure.
-
Unknown B
Well, I gave you a hug when I saw you today. It seems very.
-
Unknown A
No, I, I, I'm actually very naturally affectionate person and it was, it's nice to give you a hug and it's nice to you and it's nice to love on people that you admire and are your friends. And that's the great stuff of life. But I came very late. You can even see I'm just uncomfortable, you know. I'm sure you know Howie Mandel. You must, I mean Howie with his. I made the mistake of hugging Howie once. And I mean, I mean, I killed this cat, you know. Yeah.
-
Unknown B
Or Howie, you tase him, the poor bastard. It used to be you touch knuckles with him.
-
Unknown A
He'll touch knuckles.
-
Unknown B
He will.
-
Unknown A
I'm close to knuckles again. I'm close enough to touch knuckles.
-
Unknown B
He stopped touching knuckles. And then he would do elbows. He would touch elbows and then he got to air elbows. He would just kind of like do that and then put it down.
-
Unknown A
I'm a lead singer, so I do.
-
Unknown B
Do some of these things. He's hanging out with us in the green room at the Comedy Mothership. And then he's going on stage and there's people comic before him has the same microphone. They're spitting into it. He's holding onto it.
-
Unknown A
See him. I'm, I think I'm secretly a germaphobic.
-
Unknown B
Really Secretly. We just talked about it.
-
Unknown A
You know how he's like, that's another level.
-
Unknown B
He talks about it though. He knows it's a problem, he just can't overcome it for whatever reason. And he manages to sort of like have it and still work his way through life. Like, he was fun to hang out with. It's not like he's freaking out about other stuff. Like, he's cool hanging out with. Just talking.
-
Unknown A
I had him on my podcast. We did talk about it. He hasn't aired yet, but we talked about all his. I guess phobias would be the word. Conditions. I mean, there's all these letters, you know, adhd, ocd.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
He's very open about it, to his credit.
-
Unknown B
Yeah. No, he is. Yeah. He talks about it and it's, you know, it's been a battle for him, but it's just like, it's so odd because he's so personable. Like, you expect that someone like that would be like a recluse. Wouldn't like people, like, get away from me, everybody. But he's not. He's, like, super friendly. Super friendly.
-
Unknown A
Somebody puts you in front of a professional comedian who's kind of irritated that you're Baron's claiming you're his half brother.
-
Unknown B
Oh, yeah. That was probably a bad pairing. I feel like both of you are kind of a lot. In a good way. I would have one of you on by the. I wouldn't want you and Burr together.
-
Unknown A
He's such an alpha. I mean, he's. He's just one of those guys. He just can't help it.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, well, he has to make fun of everything, too. My wife said, oh, yeah, that's a fucking great idea. What about this, right? He can't help himself. Yeah.
-
Unknown A
Like, when he looked at me, I actually was wearing this coat. He goes, where'd you get that? Like a Moroccan bazaar. It's like. It's a very expensive coat.
-
Unknown B
It's like a normal coat. I understand that seems normal. Looks a north face.
-
Unknown A
But. But I asking you this in an empathetic way, but because you're a professional comedian, so maybe it's different. But when a professional comedian puts their death ray on you and wants to make fun of you.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
It's a very particular feeling. It's like getting carved up by a chef.
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
You know what I mean? They're so good at.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
You know, it's kind of cool. It's kind of cool. It's like I'm being insulted by Bill Burr. You know what I mean? It's like this kind of honor.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
You know, but at the same time, it's like it's really up because, like, they know exactly where to poke you.
-
Unknown B
Also, you can't fire back. You'll get killed.
-
Unknown A
Right.
-
Unknown B
If you fire back.
-
Unknown A
That's what I'm saying.
-
Unknown B
He's gonna chew you apart. Yeah.
-
Unknown A
What am I gonna tell him? Like, make a little joke?
-
Unknown B
Yeah. There's not much you can do other than laugh along with it. You just have fun with it. Just let. Let him make fun of you. No fun. Yeah, that's all you can do. Like Bill, who's a really good.
-
Unknown A
He's like the meanest comedian who ever kind of walked horns on you.
-
Unknown B
The meanest at that kind of stuff. But he's one of my best friends is Tony Hinchcliffe. He's the best at it. He's the fucking. I just found out. I just found one the other day from quite a while ago. I'm gonna send you this because this is like young fresh face Tony Hinchcliffe. It's fucking hilarious. And this is just like, off the cuff. They bring in these dudes and he starts roasting them.
-
Unknown A
Just random dudes.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, just two guys. And they're. They're. They team up and they start talking shit to him, and he just eats them alive. Put your headphones on. This one's hilarious.
-
Unknown A
Here we go.
-
Unknown B
He's the best roaster on planet earth. Nobody's better than Tony Hliff. That's why Kill Tony's so funny. Part of the reason is he's so fast. Did you get it, Jamie? Okay.
-
Unknown A
Wrestler.
-
Unknown B
What the.
-
Unknown A
Got all wrestling shoes. You guys are mean. Jimmy Neutron. Grand right here. You guys look like a before and after. For a product that doesn't work.
-
Unknown B
What does ADD stand for?
-
Unknown A
A dose of diabetes, Wearing sweatpants and sweat skin. You guys just completely given up on me? I'm out here, doughboy. Wait, what?
-
Unknown B
Yeah, I got a B O.
-
Unknown A
B O. Yeah, I had a feeling. You misspell it. You got your favorites, Two chins and asap. Rocky road.
-
Unknown B
Wow. Just off the cuff, out of nowhere. And he does that all day long. So he'll do that in the green room. He just turns on people in the green room. It's amazing. We have, like, when we do these shows, like, Tuesday, Wednesday night, or whenever we're there where everyone's in the. Like, Tuesday, Wednesday nights are really good night at the club because all the comics that are traveling on the road on the weekend, they come into the club to hang out during the weekday. And so they're like eight or nine of us in the green room just talking about each other. And Tony's just cutting up left and right. This one, that one. It's. Oh, it's so much Fun. He's the best at it, though. You do not want to fuck with.
-
Unknown A
I'm going to say right now, I don't think he's my brother.
-
Unknown B
He's definitely not really. Like, it's a completely different gene line now.
-
Unknown A
Make fun of me for saying I'm not his brother.
-
Unknown B
So did Bill know you were going to be there with him or was it just like how he just decided to put two of you together?
-
Unknown A
I got the feeling that. That Bill wasn't really given a heads up. Yeah, probably it was a little bit irritating to him.
-
Unknown B
Bill gets easily irritated, but that's also why he's so funny. Like, he's. He gets mad, gets mad at everything.
-
Unknown A
You know, my mind doesn't work like that, so it's hard. Like, I would have a better time understanding like. Like a rocket scientist than a professional comedian. I think.
-
Unknown B
Really?
-
Unknown A
Because. Because the professional comedians I've known personally a little bit like a Bobcat, Goldthwait and Carrot Top, their minds are so different than the average human mind. I think the way they process information and they're looking for something that almost like a mean, like coalesces a whole set of ideas and that's what makes it funny. Right. You can. It works on all these different levels at one time. The great comedians, like Dice, to me is the greatest. And. And Dice will tell a joke. It works on like eight different levels. You know, it's like high, low, middle.
-
Unknown B
Do you know what Dice's best stuff is? You want, like, people don't understand that. Dice is literally one of the best live performance artists. Just random street artists.
-
Unknown A
I watch him. Anyone just goes up and pretends that.
-
Unknown B
These people want a photo with him and they don't know who is the face. You want the picture? And he just goes. So it's so uncomfortable to watch. You start pulling your clothes off. Like, no, don't do this. Like, what are you doing? He's the best. And he does that for zero money. This is. He's only doing that for fun. That's it. He's just being an artist. Like there's no money in it at all. And he spends all this time wandering around the streets, going to bars and restaurants and just bothering people. Wandering people up to people on the street in New York City. They're waiting for the light to turn green. You want the picture?
-
Unknown A
I just love that. He'll just double and triple and quadruple down on the. On the bit. Yeah, he just won't give it up. He won't give up as the mood is the same thing, but the. With, you know, Tony Clifton, just like the discomfort of it all.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, well, Dice is the only guy ever in the peak of his fame to try to bomb on purpose and then release it as a 2 CD set.
-
Unknown A
Is that the night comedy died? Yeah, that is so the day of the day after that, Rick Ruben produced.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, Rick, who's a fucking maniac. Loved the idea. He loved it. He's like, what a great idea. This is going to be amazing. Dice is selling out Madison Square Garden, like, more than anybody alive. Like, he's just selling out everything. The height of this, he decides to record on a night where no one knows he's going to be there and bomb no material. There's talk off the top of his head sometimes. Don't even try to be funny.
-
Unknown A
I've listened to it multiple times and it's one of the funniest things I've ever heard.
-
Unknown B
It's performance art. It's like him on the street going, you want the picture? You know, and if, look, if he couldn't kill regular way, I wouldn't respect it because there's people that do comedy that pretend they're doing like anti comedy because regular comedy's too easy. The problem is they're not good at regular comedy. If you're like hilarious at regular comedy and then you say, I'm gonna freak these people out by hitting them with stuff. He would do this thing at the Comedy Store. He would go on stage and see how long he could not talk.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, I saw him do it once, five minutes.
-
Unknown B
And no one knows what to do.
-
Unknown A
People are like nervously laughing.
-
Unknown B
But he also could fucking kill. Like in the Roddy Dangerfield special, you know, when he did Dice Rules, like he could destroy an arena filled with people. So it was a choice.
-
Unknown A
Who's your favorite all time comedian? I'm just curious.
-
Unknown B
God, I don't think I have an all time favorite. I think Prior probably is the greatest of all time. Not living with Chappelle being the greatest living. I think that you have to. You have to give credit to Lenny Bruce though, because he really started the art form because before Lenny Bruce, comedy was just a series of jokes. It was just jokes. And Lenny Bruce came along and all of a sudden he had social commentary, cultural commentary that he turned into humor. The way he described relationships, the way he described marriage, the way he described it was like completely different. It's like, what is this guy doing? And then I think Prior took that and made funnier. Prior took that and that honesty.
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Unknown A
I never connected that dot. But it makes sense when you say it.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, because he was just funnier prior was just better at it and. But the door was opened up by Lenny. It didn't exist before Lenny. So Lenny comes along the 50s and he's getting arrested all the time in 60s. Like he was getting arrested.
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Unknown A
Remember the whole thing where he was just going to read his court transcripts?
-
Unknown B
Yeah, that was the end.
-
Unknown A
That must have been really out there.
-
Unknown B
I watched the videos of that.
-
Unknown A
I watched the actual.
-
Unknown B
Oh yeah, yeah, I bought it. I bought a VHS tape that was Lenny Bruce on stage. I forget what place it was. I think it was somewhere in San Francisco. And he was just talking. He was reading his court transcripts and talking about the case. And some of the audiences go, we want Dirty Lenny. He's like, I mean, man, it's not about that, man. So it's about this. You gotta understand what they're doing here, man. Like. And he would go into the. Go back into the court case, but it wasn't funny at all. It was just him on stage for a long time, just talking about his court cases. But you have to. The thing about comedy is a lot of comedy, like, even from the 80s, it doesn't hold up. It doesn't mean that it wasn't funny at the time. It just means the concepts and the culture has shifted so much and they become so commonplace.
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Unknown B
That's not shocking or funny anymore. But it was maybe in the 70s or maybe in the 80s and much more so with Lenny Bruce because you go back and listen to his stuff and people are dying, laughing, and you don't even find it funny. Like it doesn't even make you Chuck. It's hard to laugh at Lenny Bruce's stuff, but it's because we can't put ourselves in the context of being alive. Watching this guy perform in 1962, the Red Fox.
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Unknown A
And he's still funny, though, still funny. But like his stuff holds it.
-
Unknown B
Yes, his stuff holds.
-
Unknown A
Mom's Made Believe.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, some people, some people still hold up, you know, Robin Harris still holds up. There's some, some old school comedians, like from the 70s and 80s that are just, still like, just. You could tell. There's Eddie Murphy, he was special. He was like a special talent like his that still holds up today. But some of the stuff doesn't. And I think like the next big shift, the big change was Kinnison. Kennedyson was a giant change. Did you know, I saw him live a few times.
-
Unknown A
I was gonna say, I think Age, wiser practice.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, no, I was about 21 when I saw him live. I saw him live once when I was 19, when I was a security guard at Great woods center for the Performing Arts in Mansfield, Massachusetts. So I got to see him live there, and then I got to see him live at some. I think it was like some weird place in the middle of nowhere. It was like half empty. And it was. This was like 88, 89. So by 89, he was kind of falling off because he had just done so much drugs and partied so hard that he was huge in like 86. And then by the time 88 came around, the material kind of dropped off. And then by the time I saw him was like 89 or 90. It wasn't so good anymore. And then he died in like. He died like 92. I think he died in 92.
-
Unknown A
Car crash.
-
Unknown B
Yeah. Drunk driver, ironically, because he had jokes about drunk driving. But he just. I was always hoping he was gonna come out a new album and he would be back. You know, he'd be back to the Kinnison of 86. But just the party and the coke and the women and the no time to write. His brother wrote about it. There's a great book called Brother Sam.
-
Unknown A
Okay.
-
Unknown B
His brother Bill, his. Bill wrote it. Bill wrote about the childhood, about him getting hit by a car and becoming his maniac. He's like the victim of a head injury.
-
Unknown A
Okay.
-
Unknown B
And that's what turned him into that maniac.
-
Unknown A
The childhood preaching is part of the.
-
Unknown B
Childhood preaching, tent revival preaching. And he brought that kind of energy to comedy, you know, he was a different thing. I remember the first time I saw him, like, oh, wow, that's comedy too. Like, this is crazy. I remember, like thinking, like, well, this is a completely different thing. I never thought this was stand up comedy.
-
Unknown A
He felt he was like. To me at the time, it was like he was the rock and roll equivalent of comedy or something.
-
Unknown B
Yes.
-
Unknown A
And Guns and Roses take him on tour or something. There was some seem to remember, like, something like that.
-
Unknown B
I think Bon Jovi, too, I think was hanging out with those guys too. He was just. I think Bon Jovi was one of. In one of his music video called Wild Thing.
-
Unknown A
I remember he sing.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, he's kind of trying to be a rock star for a while, but it's a quick fall from grace, man. Because in 86, he's one of the best comics that's ever walked the face of the earth. And by 89, he's like a caricature of the guy he was three years ago. And I think it's just. It's really hard to maintain, especially in the 80s when no one was famous. Like, how many famous comedians were there? Like, five, ten at the most. Now there's hundreds, but back then, like, nobody was famous.
-
Unknown A
So it's all about getting Carson. That was. That was the thing, right?
-
Unknown B
It was about getting HBO Special. That was the big. Carson was big in the 80s, but for a guy like Kinison, even though he got on Letterman, he had one of the most brilliant sets ever. His Letterman sets, fantastic. We played it on the show once. It's really good. But I think with Kinnison, it was really the HBO special. It was Rodney's. Ronnie Dangerfield's Young Comedian special first, and people got to see him on that. And then he did his own hour special.
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Unknown A
You're right, because when Eddie Murphy did his HBO special, that was when he just like, delirious leather suit.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
High school. Everybody was like, I've been looking at.
-
Unknown B
You and I know you've been looking at me. Yeah. He was.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
-
Unknown B
I mean, it's like there was only a few back then, though, you know? And then Dice came along. And Dice had a completely different element to it because people wanted to repeat the lines. What's in the bowl? Oh, the whole crowd would go crazy. It was like they. It was rock and roll. Like, they sang along, you know, Shot through the heart.
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Unknown A
It was like.
-
Unknown B
It was like rock and roll. Like everybody was singing along. You give love a bad name the crowd wanted to say that, and the crowd wanted to say Little Boy Blue. Oh, he needed the money.
-
Unknown A
Oh. I tried to talk my wife into seeing if we could hire Dice to do our wedding. She wasn't having it.
-
Unknown B
Who knows what he would have done.
-
Unknown A
My division I had. My wife wanted to do kind of an after party of the wedding. We had it at my house. So the idea was, you know, when half the crowd bangs off because it's been a long day, there's still be a. Probably gonna hang out and just party.
-
Unknown B
And then Dice shows up.
-
Unknown A
And then Dice shows up at 1am and then takes them, goes. Puts the death ray on me. Right? She just was not having it.
-
Unknown B
We used to call it. We used to say Dice had two dices. But my favorite Dice was Mean Dice. Because Mean Dice would, like, find a guy in the audience he knew who could take it, who couldn't, who's smiling, laughing along. He'd be like, look at you and just start tearing this poor fool apart. Fun back Then the beautiful thing was the Comedy Store had no audience, so he could go on unannounced. He would show up at, like, you know, midnight on a Monday night or something like that and just torture people for fun. Just for fun. He was only fucking around.
-
Unknown A
He was. I'm having Bill Burr T. Ptsd because that feeling when they put the death rate on you, it really bothered you. No, it didn't bother me. It's just uncomfortable. Why? I'm not. I'm not gonna. What do they always say? Don't. Don't bring a knife to a gunfight.
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
What am I gonna say? You know what I mean?
-
Unknown B
Why was he picking on you?
-
Unknown A
I think because he was uncomfortable about the whole setup. Because at the end of the day, it's my fault. I'm the one who said something in public, right? So at the end of the day, I do bear the responsibility for initiating this insanity.
-
Unknown B
It's taken a life of its own.
-
Unknown A
Because, I mean, I walk through public now, and people are like, hey, it's Bill Burr's brother. So he's got to be getting it the other way. You're the brother of that. That weirdo from the puppets, you know, Like, I don't know.
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Unknown B
We were talking about the other night at the club in the green room. We were convinced it was a bit that you guys were doing together. We were convinced. No one disagreed. No one was like, I think it's real. Most people are like, nah, I think they're around. I think it seemed like they made an agreement.
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Unknown A
It's. It's. It's. It's somewhere between a bit and reality. And I think that's where it gets confusing. That's why I would use the word meta. There's this moment, if you watch it back, where how he splits and just leaves me and Bill alone. And. And how he's. You know how he has a band that plays when he does a show? So. So that the gentleman runs the band, starts playing a really sad piano, and Bill just starts riffing. It's just me and him in this room alone. I mean, I don't know Bill at all. And he starts talking about our shared dad. And it gets really weird because on some level, it's like, it's possible, right? Even if it's 1%, it's not a zero, right? So that's where it gets kind of. That's why I said meta. It's like you're looking down a hall of mirrors and you start almost playing with your mind.
-
Unknown A
You think like, well, Could. It could be possible.
-
Unknown B
It's also, the two of you guys doing this publicly is very pro wrestling, which is what you love. There's something about.
-
Unknown A
I brought a wrestler with me today who runs the promotions for the nwa.
-
Unknown B
But you know what I'm saying? It's like. There's something about it. It's like, is this kayfabe? You know, is this real? Is this a shoot or is this a work? Like, what is this?
-
Unknown A
You know, Tommy Dreamer.
-
Unknown B
I know the name.
-
Unknown A
Famous ECW wrestler, went on to work for WWE Networks for tna. Tommy's the classic salty veteran. You know, seen it all, done it all, you know, been split in half and the whole thing. So nothing Tommy hasn't seen. And. And, you know, Tommy will say something like, it's all the work. It's all work. Like, basically, it's the cynical view that everything you see in the world is. Is fake. Well, if you're the president's fake, the, The. The. The. The news is fake. It's all the work. So once you go there cynically, it's hard to back out of that.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
So I like the discomfort. The artist in me likes the discomfort.
-
Unknown B
Yes. That's what I'm getting.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. Yeah, I really do like the discomfort. I remember watching Andy Kaufman on Saturday Night Live circa 78 or whatever, and it's that idea that you can. You can create a vibration in the room between what's expected and where you're willing to go.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
I have this one friend who was a performance artist, and she would do stuff, like when she was in college, she would just walk in the cafeteria and take off all her clothes, and she would stick a camera in the corner, just film people's reaction. And it was interesting to watch because one guy would just keep eating his food and. No, sell it. Like, I'm just gonna eat my salads, pretend this isn't happening. Like, every human being goes in a different direction with the weirdness.
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
So as an artist, you know, on a stage, you know, there is this kind of crazy power that you have because depending on what comes out of your mouth next or what you do can affect thousands of people and then obviously, through a digital medium, even more. So there's something about flirting with the. The uncomfortable. But what makes it uncomfortable is there's always. It always has a foundation of truth. You know what I'm saying?
-
Unknown B
Yes, I do know what you're saying. Yeah.
-
Unknown A
If it didn't have a foundation of truth, it would just be silly.
-
Unknown B
Right, Right.
-
Unknown A
The discomfort comes from, like, Oh, I reckon there's something you're doing that I recognize in myself or I know somebody that's like this. Yeah.
-
Unknown B
Well, it makes it much more interesting if it's. There's a 1% chance that it's true. If I just think you guys are running a sketch. It's kind of funny. But if it might be true, then it gets to that weird place.
-
Unknown A
Okay. So if I walked out of that room that day after meeting Bill for the first time, and it was a 1% chance if now that I walk through life, we're up into like the 10 percentile in the public's mind.
-
Unknown B
Yes.
-
Unknown A
10% of the public is convinced. For brothers, even if I said that I told. No, it's not true.
-
Unknown B
More now.
-
Unknown A
That's okay.
-
Unknown B
But now after the show.
-
Unknown A
But that's why. That's why it's like when you say it's a bit. Yeah, it's a bit. To the extent that you're playing with the idea.
-
Unknown B
Yes.
-
Unknown A
Do you know what I mean? It would be like if I sat down and said, you know, I'm sure you remember last time I was on your show, but, you know, I met you when I was 12 and I told you this whole story about how I met you. Like, Carrot Top in his show tells this whole story about meeting Gallagher when he's a kid. Have you ever heard that?
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Unknown B
No.
-
Unknown A
Gallagher's is the Carrot Tops hero. Sure. And even does a thing at the end of his show in tribute to Gallagher. He kind of does a watermelon bit or something like that. But he tells this thing in the show about how me and Gallagher, when He was like 14 years old, and Gallagher, like, actually gave him some advice that inspired him to be who he became. So. But I mean, for all you know, it's a bit.
-
Unknown B
Right, right.
-
Unknown A
He says it with such earnestness. And it does have some. It feels right, but for all I know, it's just another bit.
-
Unknown B
Everything's a work.
-
Unknown A
That's what's excited I came here. Oh, Joe, you know, I met you when I was 12. You were at airport. You were so nice. You signed an autograph. You know, there's a party. That would be like. Like, it's possible. I mean, you know what I mean?
-
Unknown B
I got a pretty good memory. I'd be like, what happened? Where were we? I never. I never been there.
-
Unknown A
Sorry, I just played.
-
Unknown B
But if you have that. Tommy's perception that everything's work, the whole world gets really weird.
-
Unknown A
I think we're there.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, we definitely are. When it comes to politics in the.
-
Unknown A
News, I think our whole culture has been turned into, like, where are we?
-
Unknown B
Right?
-
Unknown A
Like, you know, that's why I started calling it, like, five, seven years ago, post truth era.
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
I mean, we've all been in that situation where somebody in our inner circle will bring up something that we know from a factually presented basis isn't true. I heard so and so did so and so. And you go, no, that's not true. Let me show you the YouTube clip. You know, I mean, this didn't happen, or no, so and so made a left, not a right. But because of what they've heard, they. They believe it. And you can literally show them something saying, no, no, look. And like, well, that must be AI or edited. It's like, once. Once somebody becomes convinced this culture, it's really hard to unconvince them.
-
Unknown B
Right?
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Unknown A
And so from a performing point of view and somebody who's now also in the podcasting sphere, it's like. It's like, is it better to play into. Into what people want? Like, I. I really appreciate. In Bruce Springsteen's Broadway special, when in the first five minutes, I think he basically says, I'm not really Bruce Springsteen. Have you ever seen it?
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Unknown B
No.
-
Unknown A
It's really worth watching. He. In the first five. It's when he did his long Broadway run. You know about that. He did this thing where it was like he would talk and then to play songs.
-
Unknown B
No, I didn't even.
-
Unknown A
Oh, yeah, it was huge. It was. He went on this massive Broadway run.
-
Unknown B
Huh.
-
Unknown A
And HBO did it and put it on as a special. But he literally, in the first five minutes of talking, and it's about 1200 people night, so it's a live audience, and he says, in the first five minutes, by the way, I'm not Bruce Springsteen. Like, I'm. I mean, that's my name, but the Bruce Springsteen, you think he's like, I don't know how to fix a car. I've never been a factory in my life. Serious.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
Now, I knew that as a performer, I could. I knew that what I was watching wasn't real, but people want him to play John Wayne so bad that he. He puts his finger there. So, okay, you want to be John Wayne, I'll be John Wayne.
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Unknown B
Right? That's audience capture, right?
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Unknown A
Yes, but. But now we're in the business of it. I mean, there's obviously examples, historical antecedents over the last hundred years of media where people would figure it out, right? Charlie Chaplin or something. I mean, like, they Wanted him to be the tramp. So he became the Tramp.
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
He wasn't that guy at all.
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
He fed into it and obviously connected something real in him. But he wasn't really a tramp. He was a complete rich Lothario.
-
Unknown B
Well, you really see it in the Dictator, that movie. The Dictator, yeah. Has that insane speech at the end, uniting the world. Yeah, yeah.
-
Unknown A
He was out and out socialist, basically.
-
Unknown B
And a brilliant guy, like, which is really crazy when you think about how silly his character was. His character was this, like, bumbling, stumbling goof.
-
Unknown A
That's what I'm saying. What is more. What is more valuable? What the public wants from you or what is true in the entertainment world? We're used to it, right?
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
Like, you could play Joe Rogan, the comedian at the drop of a hat, because you've done it. And Joe Rogan, the UFC announcer, you know, just. I'm not saying it's not who you are, but it's an extenuation. We say wrestling, you turn the volume up to 11, right? It's still Joe Rogan. I can't even think of one time I've ever seen you in any media. I thought that he's not playing. He's not Joe Rogan. You know what I'm saying?
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Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
I've done it. I've played other people. So what I'm trying to say is now we're in this thing where, like, everybody's doing it. I mean, everybody. We've all looked at some girl on the Internet, said, that's not how she really looks. And you gotta go through the Instagram and, like, you find the real picture.
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Unknown B
Right.
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Unknown A
Like, everybody's kind of become comfortable with, like, a filter over everything. So that's why we're in a post truth world where the impression is becoming more valuable than the reality. That's really, I think, unprecedented.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, I think so too. But I also think that authenticity is more valuable now than ever before because it's hard to find.
-
Unknown A
Well, that would be my argument for why my band has risen back up. Because we're one of the only bands left that sort of represents some ideal that's long abandoned.
-
Unknown B
Right, right, right. You're not a corporate creation.
-
Unknown A
No, we never were.
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
And we were.
-
Unknown B
And there's so many of them now. You feel like, you know, like. You ever seen Kinnison's bit about the Monkeys?
-
Unknown A
The band Monkeys? Yeah.
-
Unknown B
Well, it was a bit about Manson. It was. And then, you know, he does this bit about the monkeys, about they weren't a Real band, like, because, you know, they were pieced together by a corporation. The Monkeys like one. Which were great. The Monkeys are great. I'm a believer. They have some great songs, but they were kind of one of the first corporate creations.
-
Unknown A
But I actually on my podcast recently interviewed Mickey Dolan's.
-
Unknown B
Oh, wow.
-
Unknown A
We talk a lot about this very subject. It hasn't aired yet, but. But he was less interested in the discussion than I was. Because my argument would be is that the Monkeys are actually the template that came our whole life. The Monkeys were dismissed as an anachronistic thing that went against the integrity of the Beatles.
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
But if you actually look now, Beatles versus Monkeys, the Monkeys are more accurate of what came in the Beatles.
-
Unknown B
In what way?
-
Unknown A
Because authenticity is less and less and less important. Those who establish authenticity, and I would include myself amongst that and I include you in that. They're very valuable. But you also know because of your public things have gone on, you've had to stand there and take a lot of. Because just even speaking your own truth is inconvenient in a post truth world.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, right.
-
Unknown A
So. So it's actually more politically expedient to create a character that can navigate this new world. And by the way, change on the dime.
-
Unknown B
Right?
-
Unknown A
Does it make sense the way.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, no, it does make sense.
-
Unknown A
So my argument would be, from a rock and roll historical point of view is that the Monkeys are actually more relevant now in a particular way. The Beatles are this preeminent band. That's not the argument I'm making. I'm saying is the model of the Monkeys, which was always held up as for a form of mockery. Right. See, this is what you get when you make plastic music. No, no, we live in the age of plastic music now.
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
The Monkeys are the. Are the four, are the grandfathers of this thing. Right.
-
Unknown B
Wouldn't it be shocking today if the Corporation put together a band? No one would dismiss the band because a bunch of people, they cast it together with a bunch of good musicians and created a band.
-
Unknown A
No, I mean I. I used to want Aerosmith.
-
Unknown B
We used to want Steven Tyler and Joe Perry Young coming up together playing music. That's what we used to want. Used to want the Beatles. They all got together, they formed the band, they played at Humberg until they tightened it up.
-
Unknown A
I used to work with the musician and I was. I was in therapy at the time and I was having a lot of problems with musician. And the musician was from a wealthy family, but he always. He didn't bathe and he wore junky clothes. He wanted people to believe he was somebody that he wasn't.
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
You know, I was actually from a poorish family. He was from a rich family pretending to be poor.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
And my therapist had a great line about him. He said he looks like a junkie, smells like a junkie, but he doesn't have the guts to be a junkie. So if you can, if in this culture you can pick up anything you want and adapt it without the downside of actually becoming it.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
Well, you can see why so many people without courage or chops, it puts them in a game. It puts them in the social mew that we all sort of have to navigate. So now we're into this place where we're talking to a lot of people who believe that they're, they're, they're furry. Number 463. Because that's all, that's all. Their status comes from their digital online group. Yeah, you know, I'm 57, I got two kids, another one on the way. I work with animal charities and I have a tea house and a wrestling company. And I'm still fighting at 57 with people who want me to be this guy that they believe I am from 30 years ago. Right. And no amount of empirical evidence will change their minds. Right.
-
Unknown B
They're upset with you because you're connected to something that's different than what they want you to be connected to. Like they don't care what you really are, they don't want you like pro wrestling.
-
Unknown A
Sam Kenison's second action have been get sober, get straight and go on another hellacious run.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, I suspect Sam was very mentally ill. I never met him, but I think one of the reasons why he was self medicating so hard was probably that head injury that he got when he was a young kid. Probably really fucked him up. Cause I know quite a few people with some pretty significant head injuries and they're wild and impulsive and aggressive and they do crazy things. Like some of them, like they just go off on benders, they disappear for days. Like I think it's common with people with severe CTs.
-
Unknown A
CTE, because I'm on the board, I'm on honorary, on the board of the Concussion Legacy foundation, which I'm sure you know has some tie to FC2 because, you know, Kristen Winski, who runs it, is my friend. One of the main things that happens with people who start to get CTE early in life is lack of impulse control. So suddenly you have a 40 year old retired professional Athlete who's faster and stronger than 99% of the population, can't control his temperature.
-
Unknown B
Right, right.
-
Unknown A
That's what makes that situation so frightening for the families because they lose the ability to kind of keep it all reined in.
-
Unknown B
Right, right. That happens a lot with fighters, football players. I'm sure it happens with pro wrestlers. Probably happens with a lot of.
-
Unknown A
It's getting better. I think with wrestling, the awareness is helping. In our. In our organization, we forbid headshots.
-
Unknown B
That's good.
-
Unknown A
You know, the classic chair to the head does none of that.
-
Unknown B
Good, good. You don't need it for what? Yeah, the pain of watching people deteriorate is so awful that the pain in their eyes where they just can't navigate life anymore. And every day they have a headache and just in hell and they just want to kill themselves. They just can't take it anymore. And it gets to a certain point where it sort of accumulates over time, where it does get better, it gets worse.
-
Unknown A
Well, I think also I'm not speaking from experiences, but I've heard the stories. You take people who are held up as almost like masculine ideals. That fall isn't just the fall physically. It's the fall of like, I'm not the person, I'm not the hero that you've made me out to be anymore.
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
I'm broken and I. There's nothing I can do to put the pieces back together.
-
Unknown B
That's a very hard journey for championship fighters when they are the fucking man. They're on top of the world and then they have to just integrate society and be one of us. When they used to be the Dom. And then they go to the fights, they sit there with a paunch and, you know, a little bit of a belly. Sit there, watch people doing what they used to do. They don't know how to make a living outside of fighting. They don't know what to do. It's very few of them figure out how to transition into some other stage of life. If the thing about athletics is by the time you're 40, you're essentially done. Unless you're a rare Tom Brady type character or Randy Couture who can compete into their 40s. Yeah, Bernard Hopkins, great example. But at a certain point in time, it's over.
-
Unknown B
And you have to know when it's over. And then what? You put all your eggs in this one basket. Where to be a championship fighter, like a Lennox Lewis or Vander Holyfield, you have to be all in. You can't have like a side gig In a blues band, there's no room for you writing books. There's no room for you, you know, fucking selling things on Etsy.
-
Unknown A
I know this is a leap of discussion, but that's one of the discussions that's going on internally in my band is I'm 57 and one guy's 56, and one guy's think 61. You know, it's like, at what point do you start to dial the thing down? My brain is wired. I'm gonna go until I run to.
-
Unknown B
A brick wall, right?
-
Unknown A
And they're more like, well, things are pretty good, you know, I mean, like, we have to keep throwing ourselves into the maw of the public, you know, My argument is like, it'd be like going into a UFC fight and not fighting to win.
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
Fighting not to lose. That seems to me far more dangerous. And that's kind of my argument is, it's like, in order to be in the arts, you've got to. It's a pell melt. All. All. All in, all in or all out? That's the only gear I know.
-
Unknown B
Yeah. This is the thing that happens to bands when they get to a point where they never make any new music. Right. And they just tour on the old music.
-
Unknown A
You're touching on the nerve of my life.
-
Unknown B
Yeah. How do you navigate that?
-
Unknown A
I just keep working. I refuse. That's it. In my case, back to my daddy. For a second, I watched my dad play songs he didn't want to play. I watched him doing drug deals rather than make money for music. I watched him give up on his talent, his dream, all of it. It destroy my father. And then, if you want to even go further, in a kind of a mythical way, my success destroyed him again. So if you watch that. Well, I've been. I was lucky enough to have kids late, Late in life. My first kid came when I was 48, and we're about to have one again. 57. Once my kid came, I was like, this kid is not going to look at me how I looked at my father. Like, shoulda, woulda, coulda.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
So I had to get myself up off the couch and, like, get serious again and again. That's that mentality, that killer mentality. Like, I can still go, I'm gonna go. So until somebody stops me, I'm gonna go.
-
Unknown B
Well, that's what got you to the dance, right?
-
Unknown A
Well, even doing the podcast, this is, you know. You know, it's just. It looks easy to just sit and talk, but it requires prep and mental focus, and it's It's a lot harder than I would have thought, you know, and, you know, I got money. I could sit home. I like being in the game. I like the Hustle. I like having to learn things. I like having to.
-
Unknown B
What do you enjoy about podcasting? Why'd you decide to get into it?
-
Unknown A
The quick story was I did. I did a podcast based on an album that we put out that was 33 songs, and I did it for iHeartRadio, and they were fine, everything. But when it all finished, I started kind of enjoying a bit, and I poked around YouTube to see if anybody was interested, and it was. It was like crickets. Nobody gave a. About me being a podcaster, like, at all. And if any kind of response came back, be like, well, if you want to tell stories about the 90s and get other 90s artists on to talk about the 90s, would be cool with that. But other than that, we have no use for you. So I just thought, okay, not for me. Like, not meant to be. And then I did Club Rand with Bill Maher, and as soon as I was done with the episode and shaking everybody's hands, they said, bill, starting a podcast network, would you be interested in doing this?
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Unknown A
And I said, only if I could do whatever I want to do. And they said, tell us what it is. And I pitched them the idea that is the show called Magnificent Others. Now, I said, I want to talk to everyone to talk about whatever I want to talk about, but here's the reason. And the reason to the heart of your question is I feel there's a lot of people in this culture that don't get celebrated in the way that I would celebrate them because. Because we become so skewed with influencers and people who are famous that don't do.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
And I think there's a lot of value in American culture that can be celebrated. So you're talking about, like, a retired fighter or something. There's a lot we can learn from a retired fighter.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
You know, you have a shogun armor out here. You know, I mean, to me, a retired fighter's like, you think, I don't want to sit down with a retired shogun. Right. And ask them about what it's like to be in there alone.
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
Recently interviewed Steve Vai, great guitar player. And I, for some reason, I had this idea of. Of, you know, like the classic Sergio Leone. Two guys at the end of the street with a gun.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
So I said to Steve, by, who do you fear? At the end of, like, who's the faster gun, you know, I mean, that's his right. Not. I'm projecting, but I'm saying we all have that moment. Like, who do we not want to be in the Octagon with?
-
Unknown B
Is it Eddie Van Halen?
-
Unknown A
Who was it for, me or for him?
-
Unknown B
Steve Vai.
-
Unknown A
He didn't. He didn't want to say it, really. Well, I think he's a top guy. So why would you want to create heat where there's no need to create heat? I mean, he's at an elite level.
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
I'll tell you what, I wouldn't want to be at the other street with him. Steve Vaian, on the other end of the street. Greenvey. Those guys are like insane shredders. I mean. Yeah. I mean, I'm an amateur, you know, compare to those guys. I wouldn't want that.
-
Unknown B
There's something about that kind of shredding, too, that's just, like, so stunning.
-
Unknown A
Freakish.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
I mean, you. Do you still train MMA or.
-
Unknown B
I still do martial arts.
-
Unknown A
Okay.
-
Unknown B
So I don't spar, though. I don't get hit in the head anymore.
-
Unknown A
But. But there's gotta be those times where you see a fighter that just. They just get it.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
And it looks easy for them. You're like, how is that Autism? Okay. God bless what I'm saying. That's the way to screen with other musicians sometimes. Right. I look at a guy like Steve Iron, Eddie Van Halen. Like, how do you do that?
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Unknown B
Right. Like, what it must have been like when Hendrix burst onto the scene.
-
Unknown A
My dad had a story, actually.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
He's. He was playing a club in Wisconsin. He never heard of Jimi Hendrix, and Jimmy Hendrix was playing the night before. They were playing the same club. So one of his boys said, why don't we go up, watch this new guy, Jimi Hendrix. We'll hang out, we'll play the gig. The next time, we'll drive back to Chicago. So imagine my dad's in a club in Wisconsin with like, a thousand people in 1966 or 67, and I watch Jimi Hendrix. Wow. My dad said he'd never even heard his music, so it split his mind. And he said it was so shocking the way he played and how masterful he was at it. He said when he got on stage the next night, he felt like he couldn't play the guitar at all.
-
Unknown B
Wow.
-
Unknown A
It was like. It was like an alien instrument. That's. And Clapton talks about it other, like, Jimi, Henri, Blue, Clapton's mind. And whenever Robert, how it was. He was like, oh, my God. What the hell is happening? Yeah.
-
Unknown B
He's like, what am I doing?
-
Unknown A
And this is when people were spray painting on the walls in London, clapped in his guide. And here comes here shows up this guy who was on the chitlin circuit is what they used to call playing for Little Richard and the Isley Brothers. And he was just in the backup band.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
And he shows up in England. Chaz Chandler, the bassist from the Animals, goes, this guy could be a star. Gets him a record deal. He shows up in England, and next thing you know, he's like, hey, Joe is the number one hit and he's on tv. And it's like, I imagine that.
-
Unknown B
Wow.
-
Unknown A
So, yeah, there are those people that's like. It's so shocking. Van Halen was the same way. I got to interview him once and sit in the studio for four hours. He would just play the guitar and you'd just be like, I don't understand how this is possible. You're doing inhuman things. And I know. I know how to do what you do.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
And I can't even come close to doing what you're doing. Shocking.
-
Unknown B
It's always interesting, too, that people have a specific sound. Like you can hear them and you know who's playing the guitar. Like Steve Ray Vaughan had a sound. Like you could hear him. Like when he was doing Voodoo Child, like, oh, that's a Stevie version. Like, he played music. No.
-
Unknown A
So the one thing I'll tell you, guitar player to non guitar players, the thing you learn about the great guitar players, it's. It's all in their hands. Everybody focuses on what amp with guitar, the gear. It's. It's somehow. It's the way they hit the strings. I couldn't even explain it to you.
-
Unknown B
We call it.
-
Unknown A
I have no idea. Stevie Juan, for example, he played his strings purposely high. He made it harder to play the guitar, really, and still played at that level. Now, there's a belief with certain guitar players that the higher you put the strings, the more you have to dig out the notes. And then so it becomes more emotive. So imagine he's doing it at that level, even hard. He's making it harder to do what he's doing. And he's doing it at that level.
-
Unknown B
Wow.
-
Unknown A
Unbelievable. Incredible talent. I mean, shocking. Again, shocking. It's like, where does that come from? Just has it.
-
Unknown B
We have a photo of him in the tunnel leading up the stage in my comedy club of him on stage at that club in 1980, or the same place. Yeah, I think it's 88, 86. Somewhere. Somewhere in the 80s he's on. Maybe it's 83, but early in the. Sometime in the 80s. And it's like Steve Ray Vaughan on stage at that club. And it's wild. It's just wild to think that he was in this room. You know, he's awesome where he's from.
-
Unknown A
And think about this, because he talked about it. There was a point in his life where he was dropping rocks of coke, whiskey and drinking it and rotten his stomach out. And he got sober, like, in the last year. So it's like. And he played even better, Right. If you listen to the recordings that he made live, particularly in the last year or so of his life, he's playing even better. So that's why I say about Sam Kinison. Imagine if he cleaned up, was able to make that left.
-
Unknown B
And I think, like I said, though, I think Sam was dealing with something. I think his demons were internal. The Steve Ray Vaughan thing. What's fascinating to me is, well, first of all, he's the only guy that can play Voodoo Child other than Hendrix. Like, if you're, like, at some upstart and you want to release Voodoo Child today, like, Jesus Christ, like, what are you doing? You're trading. You're trading on hollow ground, you know, like, maybe you can do all along the Watchtower. Because that was actually Dylan song, right? Maybe.
-
Unknown A
But you know why? You know, this is my opinion, but you know why he plays Voodoo Charles so well? Why? Because he had studied the same guys that Hendrix had studied. So he's not imitating Hendrix. He's coming from the same wellspring of information. Albert King, B.B. king. Albert King. You know, it's. It's Muddy Waters. It's understanding the way those guys played. So he's not imitating Jimi Hendrix. He's playing from the same spot.
-
Unknown B
Have you ever heard of Johnny Thunder?
-
Unknown A
You mean talking about from the New York Owls? No.
-
Unknown B
Johnny Thunder was an artist in the 1960s, and he put out a song called I'm Alive, and I think it was 1969. It was also covered by another band, but his version is insane. It's so good, you can't believe he didn't make it.
-
Unknown A
Can I play for you?
-
Unknown B
Right, that's right. His versus the COVID What was the other version of it? Tommy James and the Shawn Dells, their version. But Johnny Thunder put that. Another new commercial I've heard recently. Yeah, well, we started talking about it, like, a year, so my friend Brian Simpson played it for me. And he goes, you're gonna love this. And he goes, this is a one hit wonder from 1969.
-
Unknown A
Never heard him. I'm usually all fantastic, right? Yeah. I don't know where he's from. I can't even identify where he's from by.
-
Unknown B
The song's fantastic. It's so good. It just, it stuns you because you hear something like that and you go, how did he not make it? What hope is there? Imagine if you were around in 1969. You see that guy of the whiskey. Go, go. He gets on stage and plays that song like, holy.
-
Unknown A
To be fair, I, I saw those people in the 80s and I saw those people in 90s, and I, I couldn't imagine that they were going to make it. They didn't. Yeah.
-
Unknown B
Isn't that weird?
-
Unknown A
And that was part of the vibe that my father put on me, which was like, well, how the hell did you get out?
-
Unknown B
Right. Of course. Well, the resentment must have been astounding. You know, when you're, you know, trying and kind of half assing it and your son comes along, all of a sudden he's doing arenas. You're like, what the.
-
Unknown A
This interview from Rolling Stone by Bob.
-
Unknown B
Dylan literally almost has what you guys just quoted, like, never heard of it. I can't believe it. Right? We talked about this. Yeah. Bob. What year was this?
-
Unknown A
1969.
-
Unknown B
Yeah. And that crazy. That's right. We talked about this. Bob Dylan. So he discovered it and was asking.
-
Unknown A
John Winner if he'd heard of it.
-
Unknown B
That's so crazy that even Bob Dylan couldn't make it.
-
Unknown A
Use 1968. Okay.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
On the radio.
-
Unknown B
Wow. And then disappeared. That's incredible, man. Incredible. Because you feel like a guy who make a song that's that good. Oh my God, all you need is good songwriters. And that guy's gonna be huge. There's a billion dollars in there waiting for you. Dig it out.
-
Unknown A
But that's, that's kind. What I was saying before. It's like it's. It's a curious thing. Why certain people make it, certain people don't. My father, before he passed away, he told me, you had the one thing that I didn't have, which was ambition. Like, he wanted it. He said, I didn't really want it. I just wanted to come. Come to me.
-
Unknown B
Well, also, I think if you're involved in life, a crime like that, a lot of cocaine, and first of all, there's a lot of bad karma that you have. But also it's like you're, you're too distracted. Like, you're too. In that life. You're never going to really be able to go all in on music as an artist. So you never really be able to reach your full potential. Right.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, that's. That's kind of. That's what he was saying. He was admitting to me that he had made some sort of internal decision that. That he didn't want to do whatever he had to do to do it. He made certain excuses involving the mob. He did say that back then. It is a known thing in Chicago that in order to be successful in Chicago, you had to basically sign contracts with the mob.
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
You know, there's always been rumors about the band Chicago that they were mob ties with their. With their world.
-
Unknown B
I'm sure there was a lot of that going on.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
-
Unknown B
Was the whole Hendrix thing. You ever know that conspiracy?
-
Unknown A
Well, yeah, I've read about that. That's. That gets into other types of complications, and I'm not. I don't have an opinion on it. It's just. It's like saying there's no way to separate the two things at the time. Right. Anybody back then, you know, any clubs at the time, particularly in Chicago, they were all mob.
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
Connected.
-
Unknown B
And Los Angeles as well.
-
Unknown A
Sure. So if you were a comedian or, you know, I mean, an MC or whatever you were doing, like, here's Lola the dancer. You know, you're connected. There's a white guy standing there. And everybody knew they were. Because that's how they did their business. Because if you didn't like what Johnny Rocco was doing, you were gonna get in trouble. And you didn't wanna get in trouble. Yeah. And I went to school with a bunch of the mob. Wise guys, kids and grandkids.
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Unknown B
I worked in a mob club in Connecticut. I worked. I did stand up in another one in Long Island. There was where the guys were connected by the mob. And in Boston as well, in Boston, Knicks comedy stop. They would offer to pay you in cocaine or money.
-
Unknown A
We played a club on Long island once where crowd was moshing. And in the middle of the fourth song, the guy on the side of the stage that worked for me was waving like, stop playing in the middle of the song. And I stop playing. Got a thousand people out front of me. And he kind of did one of these. And there were two. Two wise guys with standing with suits on, kind of like, you're getting in trouble with these guys if you don't stop. And I said, I don't give. And I kept going. So they waited one more song and Then they came out between songs on stage with their backs to the audience, and they pulled their coats open and showed me a gun. So you better calm the down. Whoa.
-
Unknown B
Because of washing?
-
Unknown A
Yeah, because it was one of. We used to come brass and fern bars, you know, like the brass bar and the ferns.
-
Unknown B
Right, right, right.
-
Unknown A
You know that bar, right?
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
And we were playing one of those places for some reason, and the crowd was going, babe, shit. They're bouncing off the wall. So they were blaming us for the reaction of the crowd. So they wanted us to bring the crowd down. But how do you bring the crowd down? So they. They literally showed me a gun and said, you better calm the fuck down.
-
Unknown B
So what did you do?
-
Unknown A
I just kept going. We were gonna kill me on stage.
-
Unknown B
Jesus Christ. What happened when you got off stage?
-
Unknown A
They were gone.
-
Unknown B
Really?
-
Unknown A
I. I mean, there might have been a problem if somebody done some real damage or something, but there was no problem. But they. They definitely threatened me on stage.
-
Unknown B
How did this know about.
-
Unknown A
This is me, like 180 pounds in, like, long hair and bad attitude.
-
Unknown B
That's hilarious.
-
Unknown A
I don't think they ever seen anything like mo. This is like 92. This is very, very new phenomenon to the outside world.
-
Unknown B
But moshing was going on before that.
-
Unknown A
Oh, but it's only in the underground clubs is what I'm saying. He's like, that's what I'm saying. You're in a. You're in a wise guy's club on Long island with brass rails and ferns.
-
Unknown B
And I dated a girl in the 80s who went to see the Cramps and came home with a concussion. Yeah, from the mosh pit.
-
Unknown A
Her Poison Ivy. She was the guitar player for the Gramps.
-
Unknown B
Oh, right.
-
Unknown A
So great.
-
Unknown B
Yeah. Bad music for bad people.
-
Unknown A
Did you ever kind of encounter the alternative scene when you were kid.
-
Unknown B
Not really. No.
-
Unknown A
Just not. Not for you. The freaks.
-
Unknown B
I didn't go to very many. I mean, I went to a few concerts when I was a kid, but not like, I went to Jay Giles band. I saw George Thorogood.
-
Unknown A
Not exactly there.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, no, I never really saw a lot. And then once I started really getting into comedy, I didn't really go to see anybody perform. I was mostly just performing myself. So I never got to see anybody. I didn't really become friends with band people until I moved to Hollywood. And, you know, then like in the late 90s and 2000s, I met a bunch of band people. It was always weird, you know, hanging out with them was always odd. It's like, oh, that's that guy from that band.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. It's a lot of. A lot of like. What do you call it? When the brain. When the brains don't connect the brain hemispheres. Bipolar. A lot about bipolarity in musicians. Oh, yeah.
-
Unknown B
Particularly high levels.
-
Unknown A
My theory is the reason they become musicians is they overdevelop one side of the brain.
-
Unknown B
Oh.
-
Unknown A
You know. You know, you probably don't. Somebody knows what they're talking about. But the idea is that if people's. Their brain hams. And that's why a lot of musicians do coke, because it helps the polarities work. It helps the brain communicate. Left, right. Really? Oh, yeah. It's a known thing that coke really helps that. If you have that bipolarity.
-
Unknown B
Huh. Do people. Is that a medication for people that are bipolar to give them Adderall or anything like that?
-
Unknown A
I don't know. I mean, I've worked with people are bipolar and they've talked about their medications and stuff, you know. Huh. And it's still kind of an inexact science. Bipolarity.
-
Unknown B
It's crazy to think that coke helps fix some things.
-
Unknown A
I think it helps. What I've heard is it helps the brain communications. Anybody I've known that's bipolar. As a musician that did coke told me they felt normal. It's the first time in their life they felt normal, that their brain worked normally.
-
Unknown B
What a terrible thing.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, it does work. Right.
-
Unknown B
Imagine if that's the thing that keeps you together, is cocaine. I wonder if what coca leaves would do, because there's a lot of people, like the high altitude hurting populations. And, you know, like people in Peru, they chew coca leaves just for energy. And apparently it's a very different thing. Like the chewing of the coca leaves.
-
Unknown A
Like a tea. Coca tea, Yeah. I was just in South America.
-
Unknown B
I've had that. Yeah. Yeah.
-
Unknown A
A little bit of clarity.
-
Unknown B
But the chewing of the leaves is like, it's so normal for them and it's illegal over here.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. But back to the theory. The idea is if you have one side of your brain overdevelop, it makes you good at something that you wouldn't.
-
Unknown B
Necessarily be good at and then bad at life.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, probably. Right.
-
Unknown B
So you need to handle like else.
-
Unknown A
If you're meeting a successful musician, they're the graduating class of the bipolarity.
-
Unknown B
Oh, okay. That makes sense.
-
Unknown A
So there's some functional level of acumen.
-
Unknown B
That makes sense. That makes sense.
-
Unknown A
That's why through the years, as I've heard that people give rumor to any number of famous rock stars. It's like, I Recognize all the behaviors. Most people treat it like, oh, can you believe so and so did this and made this erratic decision? It's like, no, that's. That's a musician. That's how most of their brains work.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
I don't know what it is, and maybe there's a comedic parallel, but it just strikes me that the reason there's such consistent bad behavior with musicians is because their brains don't work right. And I'm sure somebody's getting mad at me for saying that, but I mean, it's a compliment. It makes them good. It's something that they maybe wouldn't necessarily be good at and maybe. I don't know. I've never been tested. I don't think I'm bipolar.
-
Unknown B
But yeah, I probably. I would imagine a lot of like, motivational speakers would not be awesome band members. You know what I mean? Like, people who are completely dialed in with their life.
-
Unknown A
Tony Robbins.
-
Unknown B
They get up in the morning and they do their exercise and yoga and eat well. They stare at the sun as it rises. And they got their whole life dialed in. They probably wouldn't be the best band members.
-
Unknown A
Well, especially. There's no good band members. That's the problem.
-
Unknown B
How do you guys. How do you keep it together for all these years? Like, what's the key to.
-
Unknown A
That's, that's the thing. I mean, we broke up in 2000, and then the drummer and I brought the band back in 2007. It only lasted two years. And then I soldiered on alone. Is the only Original Member From 2009 to 2015. And then the drummer came back and then the guitar player, who I didn't talk to for 16, 17 years, came back in.
-
Unknown B
Jesus.
-
Unknown A
2018. So we've been an intact three quarter unit since 2018.
-
Unknown B
How come you guys didn't talk for so long?
-
Unknown A
It's real heat. It's real heat.
-
Unknown B
Yeah. That sucks.
-
Unknown A
No, it's all, it's all resolved now. I mean, it's all good. I mean, I mean, I think if you don't talk to somebody for 16, 17 years, there's a beef there that. You know what I mean? Yes.
-
Unknown B
A real one. But it's interesting to me how people can manage like that. It's always like, as comics, we always look at band members going, imagine if all of your fucking success depended on this guy showing up, that guy showing up, this guy's girlfriend not getting in the way, this guy's uncle not trying to manage you guys. Like, you have all these fucking people and you're trying to put together songs and you're trying to like, get out, come on, get a tour. I don't want a tour. My mom needs me to help her with the business and. What are you talking about, man? We're in a band. We gotta. We have a record deal.
-
Unknown A
I'm nodding my head because this is every. This is my Life experience for 35 years.
-
Unknown B
As comics, we always talk about, thank God. We're like a one man show. Thank God. All we need is other comics to work with us.
-
Unknown A
The problem with the band is, is the band members have no idea why it works. We're clueless as to the mystery of why people are attracted to us as a unit. We. We can certainly conceptualize. Like, I write good songs and I play good guitar, but there's something about bands that creates a kind of a magical P. Townsend referred to as a gang, a game that you want to be in. That's what makes bands attractive people. That was his opinion. I don't totally. I don't disagree. It's. There's something that goes on in those relationships that's kinetic enough that it sustains past whether or not you have a good song.
-
Unknown B
Right, Right. Yeah. It's a. All the pieces make the puzzle together. It's not one piece as an individual, it's all of them together make. Led Zeppelin.
-
Unknown A
Yes, all together. So if you're lucky in this new world, you know, you got the Stones playing in their 80s. So the economy of music has changed where it's like you're in an elongated state of success, which is totally unprecedented, by the way. There's no. There's no what's going on with rock bands in their 50s and beyond. There's no prior parallel in 100 plus years of recorded music. There's not even one instance you can point to and say, it worked that way then. So we're all in uncharted territory and there's nobody that can even really advise you. There's always the material thing, like, well, you're gonna make a lot of money. And, you know, you got this IP and the band. But it's like the actual sort of the nuts and bolts of how to hang together. So for us it's been really. It's. I call it the family of the band.
-
Unknown A
There's some sort of pride that's emerged with, like, we've all survived. Our relationships are intact enough for us to get on a stage. And somehow it benefits our families individually. So it's allowed us to sort of pride, you know, because it's less about our relationship and more about our relationship with our families. That's allowed us to have sweetness between the three of us that we didn't have when we were young.
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Unknown B
Oh, that's cool. Well, also probably just growing up and being more mature and appreciate.
-
Unknown A
You're really going on a limb there with the growing up.
-
Unknown B
That's your gratitude.
-
Unknown A
Perpetual adolescence over here.
-
Unknown B
Well, that is part of the fun, though.
-
Unknown A
And you do. Wait. You know, it's funny, you know, when I say something like this, there's already some guy getting ready to go on Reddit, but there's a day you wake up, you look at me like I'm a rock star. This is cool.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
And there's another day, you know, I don't have to get off this rockstar train if I don't want to.
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Unknown B
Look at the Stones. I saw the Stones at Coda at the Circle of Americas here in Austin a couple years ago. It's insane. It's insane. I. I was almost like having an out of body experience. Because you can't believe you're really seeing Mick Jagger. Like, when he's out there dancing. I swear to God, I feel like I was on a drug. I was like, my friend Bobby and I were. He's the one, he owns that place, the Circle of the Americas. And I was standing next. I'm like, I can't believe they're really here. Like, there's certain people that just get weirded out by being like, Bill Murray was here the other day.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
-
Unknown B
And I've told him. I'm like, I'm weirded out. I'm weirded out that you're here. Like, it's just there's a lot of people that I don't. I mean, I've met a lot of people. I don't freak out about too many of them, but Bill Murray I freaked out about. But seeing Mick Jaggers, I didn't even.
-
Unknown A
Get to meet him.
-
Unknown B
But seeing him on the stage, like, this is nuts. That's really Mick Jagger.
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Unknown A
Yeah, well, the mythical part. See, in his case, the mythical part of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards is integrated. They become the avatar. They're the living example of where it actually works. My argument is against those people where it doesn't work. You know, Larry, four, six, five. On the Internet, he thinks he's lord of like you know, D D or something. I mean, that's where I get kind of like, what is that? I get the other thing, you know, because, you know, whether it's a.
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Unknown B
You Know. What do you mean by Larry?
-
Unknown A
I'm joking about the guy on the Internet who. His entire status is based on being in a subculture and achieving some status within the subculture, which doesn't really apply into the outside world.
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Unknown B
Like a Reddit form or something.
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Unknown A
Yeah, whatever. Walks into a stadium full of people, they're there to see Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood. Right. Even though they're 80. And you, who've been around, everybody goes, holy shit, there it is.
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Unknown B
Yeah. Just the fact that he was alive.
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Unknown A
It's the myth made real.
-
Unknown B
Yes.
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Unknown A
Have you ever watched those YouTube videos? Like, what was Caesar really like? You know what I mean? That type of stuff. Like, what was it like to live in those times? Because there's the myth and then there's the reality.
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Unknown B
Right.
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Unknown A
And then sometimes if you learn about the reality, like, wow, the guy was really a badass, or she was really a badass. Because it's. The thing is real. The mythology is real. It's like.
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Unknown B
Right.
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Unknown A
It has truth or resonance in it. It's all this other culture that's risen up where we're supposed to pay tribute. And that goes back to the podcast. It's like we're paying tribute to people who haven't done.
-
Unknown B
Right.
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Unknown A
I want to pay trick to people who've actually done something.
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Unknown B
Yes. Well, that's what you like about doing your podcast, then. You just, like finding people that resonate with you, that really, like, strike a chord.
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Unknown A
Just the other day, I interviewed Susan Olsen, who was Cindy Brady. Okay. The Brady Bunch. The Brady Bunch is, you know, as far as the original show, I think it's been over for 50 years, right? Yes. Right. Yeah. Okay. Every interview you look up on YouTube on Susan Olsen, it's like, it's just getting her to regurgitate the same stories. And she did the break when she. When she was like, 7 to 12 years old or something.
-
Unknown B
Wow.
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Unknown A
You know what I'm saying?
-
Unknown B
Yeah. You're Gilligan for life.
-
Unknown A
Okay. My thing is. No, you're not Gillian for life. So that's. That's what. And, like, we had a great chat because I. I think there's a lot to learn from somebody who went through a zeitgeist moment at such a young age. Like, how do you navigate past that? What do you do with yourself? Like, how do you pick yourself up off the ground? How do you deal with typecasting? How do you navigate the fact as you walk through the airport, you're not Susan Olsen, you're Cindy Brady?
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Unknown B
Do people still Recognize her?
-
Unknown A
Oh, yeah.
-
Unknown B
Wow. It was Barbara Eden. I Dream of Jeannie. That was another one.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
People get locked into who they are. Al Bundy.
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Unknown A
I'm still the rat in the cage guy. I deal with that, too, you know.
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Unknown B
It's such a good jam. It's such a good jam. That's a great song. That's on the green room playlist. That song rules, dude.
-
Unknown A
That's a good one.
-
Unknown B
Oh, my God. All time.
-
Unknown A
How do you get it? At the time, I actually had to be talked into it.
-
Unknown B
Really?
-
Unknown A
Yeah. We were putting out our double album. It was a big pressure moment. 95. And I wanted a different song to be the first song. And the guy from the record company called. Who's now passed away. His name is Coordinate. Lovely guy. He literally did the thing on the phone. Kid. It's a smash. You got to trust me. And I trusted him.
-
Unknown B
Wow.
-
Unknown A
I thought he was crazy.
-
Unknown B
Did you think that that's sometimes because you're too close to your own creation? Yeah. Like, you're never going to get to see how your songs impacted other people the way it impacted that. You know, you're going to feel that the way they feel it. Like hearing that song for the first time completed. They've never seen you rehearse it. They don't know how you wrote it. They don't know how you guys practiced it, how you around with the lyrics. You did different. They just get the first. They get the full version done. Like, holy. And it's kind of awful that you don't get to experience that. Like you created it.
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Unknown A
The only time I've been able to experience that is when I was really high.
-
Unknown B
Oh, wow.
-
Unknown A
Getting so high that I could hear it for the first time. It was somebody else singing. What really tripped me out about doing a lot of drugs back in the day was I would hear messages in my music that I didn't even know I was putting in there. And at some point, I became conscious of my unconscious ability to put messages inside. Sorry. You look at me like a crazy.
-
Unknown B
No, no, no.
-
Unknown A
Fast imagine. I'll try to reset up the scenario.
-
Unknown B
Okay.
-
Unknown A
You write a song, you think it's about something. You're sure of it. In fact, you would tell people, sorry, this horrible. Plague it out.
-
Unknown B
No worries.
-
Unknown A
You're convinced that the song that you've written is about your actual friend. And then when you're super high, you listen and you can. You can hear yourself actually singing about something else. So now you have. You have a conscious understanding of something. Your unconscious has Implanted in the art. And once I became conscious of the process, I became more aware how to consciously plant messages in my music. Does that make sense?
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Unknown B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You just operate on layers. You put stuff in there.
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Unknown A
Yes. But I didn't know that I was doing it until I did a lot of drugs. But there was this other voice at work, this subliminal voice.
-
Unknown B
Can you give me example?
-
Unknown A
The conscious mind wants to believe the songs about your ex girlfriend, but what it's really about is about being abandoned by your mother. If you. If you came up to me said, what's that song about? And I trust you, and go, oh, it's not my ex. I believed it. I would believe it like 100. And then I listen to it high on drugs, and I'm like, oh, my God. I'm singing about my mother and I'm weeping. And I had no conscious mind when I wrote the song. It was about my mother.
-
Unknown B
Wow.
-
Unknown A
And then once I have that kind of agape moment, like, holy. Then I go back and listen to music sober, and I can totally hear it. And then where it gets really weird is people would come up to me and say, that song that reminded me of my relationship with my mother. Thank you. That healed. Like, people would come up and respond to me on the unconscious recognition, not what I thought I wrote the song about. That blew my mind, that there was this other person in their layer at work. And I gained a lot more respect for, like, I guess we call it the shamanic aspects of art. I don't know if you ever read Castanedis, but you know, Jerry Castanedis, maybe.
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Unknown B
I did in high school.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. It was kind of a thing for our generation. Everybody kind of read Castanedas.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
And it's still to this day, debated about whether Castanedis, it was a real thing. It was a documentary. It was true. Stories were made up. And the Don Juan, the shaman, was he a real person? Is there really a Don Juan? There's a lot of debate. I think this is a New York Times article written about it.
-
Unknown B
Right.
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Unknown A
About whether Castanedis, this whole thing is a fraud and all this stuff. And I think Castanet might even still be alive. That might be one look up sometime. But anyway, I gained a lot more respect that artists have the ability to communicate at subconscious levels that they're not even aware of. I don't know if that resonates the way I'm explaining it, but that's. That. That it moves something to me. Allow me to be better artist that's fascinating.
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Unknown B
And also, like, you can never guess, like, what kind of an impact your. Especially if you're too close to it, what kind of an impact your work is going to have on someone who's seeing it for the first time. And if there's, like, multiple layers that you're operating on that you're not even totally aware of. And then you put out this thing that has this, like, very complex, layered message in it, and it just makes people go, oh, my God. That's like one of the ultimate expressions of art, right? Like, something that just. Music does something very strange that no other art form does. It operates like a drug. Like, music gives you more energy when you're on the treadmill. Like, if a great song comes on, you're working out, you're like, yeah, like, you feel it, you know?
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
There's riffs, there's guitar riffs. I swear to God. Make you stronger, like a tool. Prison sex. That song makes you just raw, you know? There's like, something too. It gives you energy. It's like a drug. There is an audio drug. It fires up your synapses in this very strange way.
-
Unknown A
The best explanation I ever heard that resonated with me was, you know, the entire universe is constructed on waves. Light, everything has to do with waves. So music is the closest thing to the foundational aspects of the universe.
-
Unknown B
That's okay. I know what you're saying.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, well, that makes sense because it penetrates the cellular.
-
Unknown B
Right. Well, people that, you know, go on these shamanic journeys, the. The ayahuasca journeys. They play these songs that accompany the ayahuasca journey. They're called ikaros. And when you.
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Unknown A
Are they traditional ayahuasca songs?
-
Unknown B
Yes. And they have, like, this weird beat to them. We listen to them by themselves. You're like, I don't get it. But if you listen to them under the influence, you. The. The psychedelic experience dances to those songs, and it gets guided by the songs. It's really wild. Like, really wild. Like. And then you go, oh, this is like a technology to interface with the psychedelic experience.
-
Unknown A
But you're getting exactly what I'm saying. I think artists, and I'll exclude myself from the discussion so I don't make somebody mad. Artists have a way of knowing how to do that without anybody teaching them.
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Unknown B
Right.
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Unknown A
They just know what music beats, chords, melodies, lyrics to use to penetrate. And the successful artists think of it, they do it at scale.
-
Unknown B
Yeah. Well, there's this thing that happens when someone's really in it, where you feel it from them while they're performing, and you just. Just, like, get drawn into it. Like, wow. I remember the first time I saw Mr. Jones and me. First time I saw Counting Crows play that song. The way he was, like, dancing around in the living. Like, that guy is so free. Like, I want to be free like that, you know, I really remember thinking that because it was so real. He was so in the moment while he's singing that song. And I had Adam in here and I asked him about, like, what is that? Like, you were locked in, man. Like, I remember being a kid, I was probably like 23 or something like that. When that song came out, I was in my apartment in New York watching it going.
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Unknown B
Watching on mtv going, this guy's just so loose, man. He's so free. I remember thinking, I want to be able to perform like that. Whenever I do, I want to feel like, how's that? What's that zone that he's in?
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Unknown A
Well, part of that is, you know. You know, a lot of shamanic work involves the breath. So think a singer is. Is rhythmically breathing and rhythmically chanting?
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
That's one thing that most people would not pick up on. There's a ton of expiration of breath, you know, like, what's the Wim hof? Wim hof?
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
I do that for two hours.
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
I mean, I'm totally asphyxiated the entire time.
-
Unknown B
Right. Natural.
-
Unknown A
It's screaming two hours. It just isn't.
-
Unknown B
Do you have to get in shape to do it?
-
Unknown A
I do. I do to a certain extent.
-
Unknown B
Do you build up to, like, a concert performance?
-
Unknown A
You have to do it To a certain extent, yeah. I don't know what. I don't know how to explain it. Like, I. If. If you. If, like, I'm off cycle right now, so if you came to see me play an hour and a half show tomorrow, I could do it, but I probably couldn't talk the next day. But if I do a week of rehearsals and prep up, then I can.
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Unknown B
So it's like a muscle, like something I don't understand.
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Unknown A
I don't understand it. It's almost like a trained fury. Like, you learn to not go too far, blow your voice out. You have to really know where the line is, by the way, when you're. When you're dealing with a ton of adrenaline. Like, the thing with fighters comes to mind. Like, they'll come in, they'll gas in a minute because they're so jacked.
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Unknown B
Right.
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Unknown A
Sometimes you see a guy can rain, they're just like, like in the gas in a minute. And I know how to see that because of watching wrestlers. Gas. You know, you get, you. You learn that. The body language of somebody getting gas. You know, they kind of start to lose the posture and. Yeah, boosty, right.
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Unknown B
They get loose for a singer.
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Unknown A
I mean, you can gas in the first three minutes and you're dead. And you're dead. Oh, no, what you going to do? So you have to almost like have a controlled fury. Like, imagine screaming at the top of your lungs, but not totally at the top of your lungs.
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
87. Like, there's the magical line.
-
Unknown B
Well, that's like fighting. It's the same kind of thing. You don't go 100 or zen of that. Yeah, some of the best fighters, they'll. They'll punch like 50, 60%. And that way they can put volume on you.
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Unknown A
I can't imagine being it in there. Somebody won't kill you. And people be like, I'm just going to work my way through these.
-
Unknown B
Well, you have to have serious experience to be able to manage the storm that way. Did you ever have to take vocal lessons to learn how to not blow your throat out?
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Unknown A
I did, yeah. I work with a lady. As a funny story, I work with a lady. At one point, they hooked me up with somebody from the opera. Well, no, it's actually, she was right, but she came to my house and she said, oh, you sing totally wrong. And. But here's how to sing right, and you won't blow your voice out. And it was all about the right posture and all this stuff. And the first time I tried to do a concert with 4, 000 kids going nuts, I tried to do what she taught me. It didn't work because I just. I was in the deep end of the pool and I. I had to go back to all my old bad habits. So eventually I found a woman who was used to working with rock singers, and she explained me a bunch of theories about, I think for memory.
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Unknown A
I think she said the human body has 11 folds of tissue in the throat, and if rock singers don't warm up all that tissue, that's how they damage their singing. And she'd also work with Steven Tyler. And she said, the thing about rock singers is you guys sing wrong because that's the way you want to sound. It's part of your gimmick, you know?
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Unknown B
Right, right.
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Unknown A
I'm sure Steven Tyler and myself, we could sing like choir boys if we wanted to, but that's not what attracts people to Us, it's the razor's edge in the voice or something. So you have to learn how to warm up to sing like an idiot, basically. And that's the sound that people are attracted to with rock singers. Even the gentleman you played before, and he's totally abusing his voice. That is not proper singing.
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Unknown B
Right, right, right, right, right.
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Unknown A
And there's, there's. There's physical techniques to create that sound. Like, there's. There's Axl Rose, for example. Like, you know, he sings a very particular way. The way he uses his throat in a particular way, you would say that's the actual sound or whatever. It's not natural, but it's awesome when he does it. That's kind of the thing.
-
Unknown B
Yeah. That has got to be really hard to maintain. I saw them play in Athens, Greece, and they did a three hour show like two years ago.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
At like, how old is it? 60. 60 something.
-
Unknown A
I think actually about seven years older than me. So.
-
Unknown B
Yeah. Because I remember welcome to the Jungle was huge when I was in high school or just out of high school.
-
Unknown A
89. Yeah, 88. 89 was it. Okay.
-
Unknown B
So I graduated 85. So it was like a couple years after high school. Welcome to the Jungle. I was like, oh, my God, the song. Like, I remember watching the music video. Remember when you had the teased up hair back? Yeah. The huge hair. That was the poison hair era.
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Unknown A
Yeah, yeah. So singing like that is. It's. It's wrong, but that's what makes it right.
-
Unknown B
Right. Well, you can't say what's wrong or what's right. It's just like what's sustained.
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Unknown A
Trust me, no one can tell you. Surrounded by a lot of people with a lot of opinions. I was told when I was very young that voice you sing with will never sell records ever. And most people that don't like my music will often cite my voice as the reason they don't like my music. But that's the way that my voice is the reason the people who do like my music like my music.
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
It's a weird. It's like a. Like, what do you do with that?
-
Unknown B
Well, you can't do it for other people.
-
Unknown A
No, it's the way I sing. And it's like, it's like, don't sing that way. Well, I don't.
-
Unknown B
That's the whole idea of, like, you can't do it for other people. You can't do it for them. You can't do it the way they want it to. No. There's going to be People who like it the way you want. You like it.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
-
Unknown B
You just have to find out what that thing is. And you have to fit, like, you have to. Whatever your internal compass is that guides you towards this particular style, this particular way of expressing yourself, it has to.
-
Unknown A
Be authentic against a wall of guitars. This is a particular skill set. It's like singing against three airline jets at the same time.
-
Unknown B
Right, right, right.
-
Unknown A
We have three guitars and a band playing at the same time. So my voice has to cut like a razor through that. All of them.
-
Unknown B
Yeah. Voices are. Some voices are so compelling. Like, you listen to them. Like Amy Winehouse, perfect example. You hear a sing once and you're just like, whoa. Like, well, there's something about it.
-
Unknown A
Okay, so back to Mario about the unconscious thing. Certain voices convey an unconscious information.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
Tonally, it registers in the public as a certain authority or wisdom or sorrow.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
Like, some days. Some voices have so much sorrow in them.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
Like for our generation, when Kurt would sing, and I saw Kurt many times live, it sounded like it was like the literal howl of our generation. It had this great connectivity to what we were experiencing as latchkey kids.
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Unknown B
Yes.
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Unknown A
You know. Yeah. I don't want to say tantrum ish, but it had a certain kind of anger. Anger. But it was. It was the anger of disaffection. It wasn't the anger of a hardcore band. Like, you know, screw capitalism.
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Unknown B
Right, right.
-
Unknown A
It had a sorrow somehow in it.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, yeah. And authenticity. Like, Kurt was the master of authenticity.
-
Unknown A
He changed.
-
Unknown B
He killed hair bands. He really did. He killed hair bands. I remember when I was a kid, Nevermind came out, and I was with a couple of friends of mine, and this guy goes, have you seen this? And he shows me this cassette with a baby on the COVID I go, what is it? He's like, this is Nirvana. And he plays me Nirvana for the first time over his house. I was like, holy shit. Like, this is crazy.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. It was for our generation. It was. It was the door getting kicked open.
-
Unknown B
Yes.
-
Unknown A
Everything after, it just got easier.
-
Unknown B
But that's the thing. These unique artists that come along and transform the medium, you know, like I said, Lenny Bruce prior, then Kinnison. There's a few examples of that in music where someone comes along, like Hendrix or Kurt or even Elvis. Someone comes along, everybody's like, what the fuck is going on? The Beatles. What is happening? This is crazy.
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Unknown A
What strikes me. And this is a business point, but that's where all the money is. And yet the music business is not to nurture those Talents. In fact, the music business works against those talents. It's almost like they blow up their business model so it becomes inconvenient.
-
Unknown B
Well, what do you think the music business nurtures?
-
Unknown A
Control. They want control. They want. They want. The biggest problem I've seen in the music business is they don't understand why musicians can't be as supple in the business. Part of the equation as a guy who makes cookies or something like this is what it costs. Here's your quality control. The public wants more chocolate chips. Can't you just put more chocolate chips in there? And that's. And none of that is what attracts the public to great artists. Right. It's, like, completely counterintuitive. So they sit there and you just end up as a name on a piece of paper or an inconvenient problem. I mean, I've said this a few times publicly, but it bears repeating. Here is. I've been in meetings where they're compl. They're complaining to me about me.
-
Unknown B
Like, how so? Like, what do they say?
-
Unknown A
That basically, the way the person that I am in the world is inconvenient to their business. The things I'm saying, the things I'm doing, the music I'm making is inconvenient to the business. And could I temper those things more in the direction that they want?
-
Unknown B
Like, what particularly were they talking about?
-
Unknown A
You name it.
-
Unknown B
Give me one example.
-
Unknown A
It could be anything from, you know, you're too negative to your songs are too weird to your voice is too weird to your guitars are too loud.
-
Unknown B
They just want to sell more.
-
Unknown A
Yes. So to them, it's an intellectual thing.
-
Unknown B
Oh, wow.
-
Unknown A
Be like Joe. If you could just make more jokes about the economy.
-
Unknown B
Mm.
-
Unknown A
You'd sell two stadiums, not just one.
-
Unknown B
This is what happened with Dave Chappelle while he left the chapel show. Same exact kind of thing, you know, a different version of it. But, yeah.
-
Unknown A
So it's this weird thing where you're sitting there and you're like. And what I always try to tell them is I didn't get here with that type of thinking. And I do think, and I. And I don't want to name names, but you can. I would say this to your great audience. You can pretty much tell who got to the dance on their own. And somewhere along the way, between the second and the fourth album, decided that the compromise had a bigger yield. And off goes the organic switch, and on goes the. Oh, you want me to be the next door neighbor.
-
Unknown B
Right.
-
Unknown A
Or, you know, romantic movie ballads, whatever.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, Aerosmith went through that for a.
-
Unknown A
While, but to their credit, and I didn't understand at the time, it was, it was a brilliant move because they'd gone about as far as they could go in the one thing, and they're super influential and including on alternative music. And it ended up being a really smart watershed moment for them to do what they did at the time they were doing SNL skits. Remember Adam Sadler used to come out and he would do that. He would do like. I think it was Adam Sandler. He'd do like the seven Aerosmith ballads in a row. It was like, I'm crying. I'm really crying. You know, they would just play and he'd just sing all the songs like Steven Tyler. But I think looking back was really smart, what they did.
-
Unknown B
Well, also, maybe they're allowed to do whatever they want to do. Like, artists changed their whole thing. Like they went from Mamakin to, you know, some of those ballads, as far as I know.
-
Unknown A
And your, your, your, her Stu assistant over there would probably check, but I think Aerosmith is the biggest selling American rock band of all time.
-
Unknown B
Whoa.
-
Unknown A
So if you're a Smith, did they make a wrong turn? My argument would be no, no, it's.
-
Unknown B
Not a wrong turn. I mean, obviously you're allowed to change what you're interested in too. You know, like, there's a lot of bands that sort of reinvent themselves with almost every album. Like my friend Sergio Simpson, he sort of reinvents himself with every album. Every album's different. Like, he just gets bored with stuff. Aerosmith, the best selling American hard rock band of all time, having sold more than 150 million records worldwide, including over 85 million records in the United States.
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Unknown A
So, yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah. So that's what I'm saying is only, only the bands can really know what, what the right direction to go in is. Because at some point, you know, what seems so obvious to the audience or some guy in office isn't necessarily what drives the band forward.
-
Unknown B
Well, then there's weird cases, like David Lee Roth leaves Van Halen, Sammy Hagar takes over, and it becomes bigger in a totally different way.
-
Unknown A
But if you talk to the average Van Halen fan, they wanted to hear the David Le Roth Van Halen.
-
Unknown B
Well, especially if you grew up with that. The thing is, like, what you started out with is always what you want to see. Right?
-
Unknown A
But I'm saying there's no, there's no obvious argument of which which is superior.
-
Unknown B
You know what I'm Saying one Solar.
-
Unknown A
Records one One is sort of held more in people's hearts because of a particular generational thing, which would be our generation.
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Unknown B
But some people love the Sammy Hagar version better. You know, it's okay. You're allowed to like Taylor Swift Smell sells a lot of tickets. Like, it doesn't. If you're not into it, there's nothing. It doesn't mean it's wrong. I mean, everybody has a weird. For the way they interface with the world, and some things get in there and really lock on you and like, wow, this is amazing. And you could take the same concert and another person that you like goes to it. They say, this sucks. You're like, this is a amazing. How can you say this sucks?
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Unknown A
Well, I think you're about to see that Nickelback and Creed are about to go on a huge run of business. Really? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
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Unknown B
Nickelback took a lot of.
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Unknown A
That's my point is they've survived it. And now here comes the. The inevitable moment of like, oh, yeah, it was really good. And they wrote a hotel.
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Unknown B
They had some great songs. That rock star song, that's a great song. Like I was. But it was one of those weird things where they had become like a punchline. And for whatever reason, everybody thought that it was okay to on Nickelback and comics would.
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Unknown A
On them.
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Unknown B
And it was like a thing that people would mock the success of Nickelback. You know, they're selling out arenas every night of the week.
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Unknown A
So, Yeah, I think history has a way of sorting out the bodies is the way I look at it. Yeah, that's kind of how I feel. I mean, this is selfish. How can I feel about my musical life? I think time will. Will tell my story much better than I did.
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Unknown B
You seem at peace with that.
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Unknown A
I am bother you at all. I made my peace with it. I mean, it bothered me when it bothered me because it felt unfair or. Yeah, I felt like I was being sort of made to pay for the sins of the people who are no longer here. Because in. Particularly in Gen X, we've had so many great talents die.
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Unknown B
Oh, so you felt like you weren't getting the credit because you survived.
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Unknown A
There was part of that. That's this. Let's call it the. The simpler version, the more complicated version is. Is. Is generations move with a collective energy. And by the mid-2000s, the. The. The collective energy of Generation X had mostly dissipated in the musical thing. There were bands out playing, but a lot of the lead singers had died. So it's hard to sort of Stand and carry a flag for something that people feel very sentimental about if there isn't an army around you carrying the same flag. So you start to see people start to put on you this, like a set of cultural and generational expectations that you don't want you become. You become the emblem of, like, the living version of what doesn't work. But the other guys or girls aren't there to grow old with you and, you know, receive the same discernment or criticism.
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Unknown B
Oh, wow.
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Unknown A
Like, one time a guy tried to go me into an argument of comparing myself to one of the top people of musical people in my generation. I don't say who, but you understand the flow on this. So. And. And they said, can you compare? You know, like, who do you think's better? So it was like a real cheese setup. And I said, I said, well, I think they were more talented. And they said, but I said, I feel I'm in a conversation. And they said, why are you in a conversation? I said, because I'm alive. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I'm here.
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Unknown B
Well, it's also like, you can't deny that Smashing Pumpkins didn't have some bangers. Like, anybody who denies that.
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Unknown A
Well, Joe, that's a whole other episode. Because the band is probably one of the most misunderstood. I mean, they're probably one of those misunderstands in the history of rock and roll. I mean, that sounds like a wrestling statement, but it's fairly accurate.
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Unknown B
What do you think that's from?
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Unknown A
I think it has a lot to do with the issues of Gen X, and it has a lot to do with a relationship that I set into motion with the media when I was a very young person playing kind of a funny game, like doing my own. My own version of Andy Kaufman or Bob Samuda, you understand, Because I thought it was all shitty. So I was just like, I'm just gonna play with this like a toy because I think it's kind of funny. I didn't realize that the coming culture was going to kind of almost be attracted to people who are willing to emulate themselves on the public stage. Does that make sense? Yeah, most people who are attracted to fame, they want to run towards the shiny part of it, right? I was attracted to the non shiny part, which is, okay, I'll light myself on fire, let's see what happens.
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Unknown A
Or I'll light you on fire and let's see what happens. So it kind of worked in the 90s when everybody was rolling and moving along. Well, here comes Napster, the music business craters, then a bunch of people die, and there you are standing. You know, now at 40 years old, you're supposed to carry some flag for a generation that doesn't even know who it is anymore.
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Unknown B
How do you navigate that? Like, does that. Did that trouble you at the time? Was it difficult as an artist?
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Unknown A
Yeah, it's very difficult. The simple version is. And I had some of the top, top people in the music business sit me down one on one in a room and say, just give me what they want.
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Unknown B
Jesus.
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Unknown A
Your life will be a lot better. You'll make a lot more money, and you can put your head on your pillow at night, not have to think about all these things. And my response every time I said, I don't give a fuck. And I used to quote Popeye, I am what I am. I'm here. I'm here because I'm a freak, okay? And I ain't changing for anything.
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Unknown B
Good for you.
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Unknown A
And part of that goes back to my daddy, okay? I watched a man literally broken by the business. So I'm the last person that's gonna bow down for that off.
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Unknown B
Well, the beautiful thing is, too, you always had an audience, so you didn't have to.
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Unknown A
Well, there is that, but. But at the end of the day, how can I explain it? Everybody in the music business will tell you your value is exponentially related to your success. So your biggest song is here, and your next biggest song is here. There's like a pyramid. As you go down, you lose value. Your aging becomes part of that loss of value. How do you maintain value relevancy? You no longer have the record business that used to exist. You no longer have the structure. I mean, the music business is basically a touring business first now, and everything else is in support of the touring business. We're lucky in that we continue to be a very large tutoring man. So you're told over and over again, almost in a propagandistic way, that your value is related to what's on a piece of paper. And then somehow I woke up in the middle of it.
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Unknown A
I thought, no, no, that's. That's actually not my value. And so the minute I started saying no, I know what my real value is. It's that I'm an independent artist who, like a voice in the wilderness, represents something. And I know it's not for everybody. Trust me, I got again that message since I was a little kid, including for my own family. But I know what I represent represents something that's valuable. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I see the consistency of like, let's call the communication between myself and somebody who's interested in what I do. And once I started doubling and trickling down the value, my business started going back up.
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Unknown B
Wow.
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Unknown A
The way I would say in a crass way is I reasserted my brand. Not the brand I was being handed in in 40 plus brand. You know, you're an oldies band, you're an oldies artist, you play these songs well.
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Unknown B
You just kept and reinforced your true voice. Yeah.
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Unknown A
I had a legit brought you to.
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Unknown B
The dance in the first place.
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Unknown A
It seems silly, but that's what I had to figure out. I had to figure that out on my own because there was nobody telling me that. I mean, you gotta understand and you're a man of the world, so you know what I'm saying? When you're in a room with somebody who runs the world, in my case, runs the music business.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
The guy who can get done. The guy who can get you canceled. The guy who can make stuff happen.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
And that guy tells you, here's your value. It's awfully hard to go back to Chicago and only convince yourself that he's wrong.
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Unknown B
Right?
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Unknown A
Right. There's nobody. And who do you talk to about?
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Unknown B
Especially if fame is fleeting, it comes and goes. Album sales come and go. And there's a new big thing right now. There's a new thing. You're not the new thing anymore. Yeah. And then someone's coming along. Listen, you've got to listen to us. We know how you can be back on top.
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Unknown A
I don't read comments, but I have a social media person occasionally relays what she sees.
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Unknown B
Oh boy.
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Unknown A
Well, we kind of keep it on the positive. But my favorite comment of the last few years was she started poking around with young fans, 16, 18 year olds who were suddenly seeming to come out of the woodwork and liking the band and me almost like a cuddly bear or something. They suddenly were attracted to me in a way that the 16, 18 year olds of the previous generation weren't. So I asked her, I said, why don't you poke around with these people and ask them what's interesting? And my favorite comment, and it became kind of common amongst the feedback that she got was I like him because. Because other people told me not to like him. But what that says to me, anybody can interpret the way they want. What it said to me is we need people in the zeitgeist of the culture who don't represent the Collective, Yes.
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Unknown A
There's always room for somebody on the corner saying no, right? And that goes back to Lenny Bruce. As crazy as all that was, you still need that guy going, no, no, no. You know what I'm saying? And you can call it a disruptors or whatever.
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Unknown B
Authentic voices.
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Unknown A
That sounds nicer than disruptor. I like disruptor because that's, that's what I do.
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Unknown B
Well, it does disrupt, but it disrupt because it's an authentic voice, because it bucks the idea of creating some manufactured thing for the market.
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Unknown A
I told many people in the music business, I know that you don't want me in this business, but I'm here and I made a lot of money and I've made a lot of people a lot of money. Like, what's the problem?
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Unknown B
Also you make great songs. Like, but the idea.
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Unknown A
But most people are in the business for the music, but the idea that.
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Unknown B
Somebody wouldn't want you in the business when you've been very successful in the business is just insane. It doesn't even make any sense.
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Unknown A
Doesn't make sense to me.
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Unknown B
Well, that's the weird thing that you guys have to deal with. You deal with like this whole layer of non artistic people that have influence over art.
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Unknown A
Having heard you many times do commentary for ufc, what I love about you as a commentator is you take me into the, into the passion of the moment. The feeling of like, two warriors are gonna enter this thing and only one can emerge. There's a feeling there that's like. And I've been to some of the events. It's like, it has that, like, it's sort of a life affirming, like, here we are. You know, you, you know, because you're behind the scenes. The training that went in, the injuries the guy had overcome, or the girl or whatever, or the crazy girlfriend, and they got, you know, the training camp and all of it, and there is the Clash. It's no different for the musician. It's like, you know, I sit in a room for a year and make songs with only three, four people hearing them.
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Unknown A
I have to believe that I'm going to walk into that, my version of that octagon. And what I'm going to offer is I can get you killed.
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Unknown B
What is it like when you release an album? What is that feeling like?
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Unknown A
I just, I just, I want to curl up in a ball and just die. Here it comes, Here it comes. And sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised. But I've had more negative experiences than positive ones.
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Unknown B
But positive from the fans. Is it non fans that are the problem. It's like the outside peering in.
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Unknown A
Twenty years ago, I would give you a different answer now. It's nobody's the problem. It's ultimately the game is you versus yourself. I don't know if there's any commonality in the fighting world or comedic world. Yes, it's you versus yourself. It's not the audience's fault. It's not the guy at the radio station or the girl at the arena. It's not nothing to do with them. Because the one thing you do know is if you find that value that, that makes a wheel turn, that prints cash, they don't care who you are, they'll push you right back under the spotlight. So once you can figure that game out, that's the game. The game is you versus you. It's not you versus them. In fact, that's the. That's the suckers game.
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Unknown B
So it's you just trying to create the best version of what you have inside your head.
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Unknown A
Let's do a simple math. And anybody wants to take up have a problem with it. I don't care. Okay. My band in. In over 30 years, has been in the top 0.1 percentile of touring artists in the world, period. You would think that if you were in that business and you were at that. That elite level, you would think the whole business would rally around you and try to get you to do more and make more. Not even close to that. There is no system by which you get that kind of support. You are completely on your own.
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Unknown B
But is that universal with successful artists?
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Unknown A
I think I. I hear different stories about the top, top artists, but I think that's because they're making so much money. It's like they're like a multinational corporation. Most bands are. Their experiences are similar to ours. You kind of on your own, you have your team of people, and then you walk into the arena with what you got, what you think is going to work. But I hear about the modern pop stars. I mean, I hear stuff that sounds. It sounds like they're running a Fortune 500 company because they're. They are literally printing cash.
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Unknown B
Also, the percentage that the actual artists get versus what they should be getting, it hurts. It's crazy.
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Unknown A
It hurts.
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Unknown B
It's crazy because they do everything. They create the music, they perform the music, and yet they're not making the money. People are coming to see them perform the music, yet they're not making the money. There's some bizarre vampires that have attached themselves to the veins.
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Unknown A
That's changing. I think in the next 20 years, you're gonna see a very music. A very different music business.
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Unknown B
In what way?
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Unknown A
Peer to peer, ability to create commerce. Right.
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Unknown B
And then also the fact that you could release things. So like Oliver Anthony, he put up that rich man north of Richmond, and then it's gigantic. 100 million views on YouTube. It's like. It's crazy.
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Unknown A
But, like, 20 years ago, your success and who you work with would have been unthinkable.
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Unknown B
Right, right.
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Unknown A
And you're an independent voice. You've built it. I mean, it's yours. Right? So that's what I'm saying. That's coming from music. This is coming from music, Right?
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Unknown B
Well, that's good.
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Unknown A
Yes. I think ultimately will benefit the fans of the artist, and they'll get more of what they want and less of what they don't want.
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Unknown B
Hear, hear. All right, wrap it up. Thanks, sir. Appreciate you very much. Always fun to talk to you. Tell everybody what your podcast called, where they get it.
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Unknown A
Others get it on YouTube. Appreciate.
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Unknown B
All right, bye, buddy.