The Bob Lefsetz PodcastYou'll love listening to Dwight's tales of growing up in Ohio and coming to Los Angeles to make it. Dwight is quite the raconteur, and this is the longest podcast I've ever done. It's like hanging with your best friend.
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast. My guest today is my friend Dwight. Yoakum, Dwight. Good to be talking to you.
Good to talk to you, buddy. I'm I'm always flattered you will consider me a friend and thank you. From the time we last sol and I think we were in the bottom of the it was pre COVID because we were in the building over at the at XM when we all were going up. You were passing me in the night on an elevator. You were coming from doing your show and I was just starting my you know, my nocturnal vampire kind of you know.
Okay, people can't see. This is audio only, but you're wearing a hat with STP.
Yeah, and I just don't have my foster grants on. You know, Richard Petty, you won't see remember, you won't see me driving without him.
Well, I just remember the sixties STP was such a big and people started talking what did it mean? And it was stop teenage pregnancy.
And no scientifically treated petroleum.
I do know that, but you know, in the pre internet era, it took years to figure to find that out.
When I walk around with this at tow. I always let a cool hat and I go not the Stone Temple pilots.
It's like, yeah, that's what it is. How many baseball style hats do you have?
Too many? You can't get the good ones anymore. The problem is they went to low Crown. Look, you and I we've never really gotten deep into what year are you born? You born? You older than me.
I'm three years older. I was born in fifty three year were born in fifty six?
Fifty six? Yes, but we're in a window. I've I came I think from a point of origin that left me with the uh, the cynical side of the sixties. You know, I kind of came out of it because I graduated high school in seventy four. You got out in seventy one or seventy seventy, seventy seventy. Yeah, would you graduate early?
I skipped a grade way back.
Whatever I was gonna see, I want you to show off.
You set that up for me pretty well.
You were scheduled. Yes, he's an advanced placement kid, this guy so so. I, on the other hand, should have been held back a year because my birthday's almost November is October twenty third, and now they wouldn't have let me go. I would have done better academically, as I looked back at it, because I was, you know, I used to we get in junior high. You had, you know, no singular class that you were stuck in and you could do whatever. And I had study hall periods and I skipped him, you know where I didn't go outside and you know, screw around and smoke with friends or anything, because I never smoked. But I was in the library. They had a library in the junior high and I would sit there and just read the encyclopedia. And when I thought back about it, after I did some college, you got went to Ohio State. My favorite courses were you know, lecture courses, you know, things where there was a full professor dealing in rhetoric, you know. And then these were because you went to a small school. Right now, my high.
School, well everything's relative. I grew up in the suburbs. High school had eighteen hundred people.
Well I had two thousand. We were in Columbus at that point, so I was a two thousand, you know person high school. It was a spread over of the three classes. It was a sophomore, junior, senior but meaning university though college you went to.
I went to a very small college in Vermont. It had eighteen hundred students. And that was in the dark era, pre internet, pre DVD, pre cable, like you had to entertain yourself.
Well, I was at Ohio State when it was sixty one thousand students on one campus. It was a small city in itself, but so I had So you had tas you know usually you know grad students that were you know for a freshman chorus or a sophomore course. You pick those up. But once a week you would end up in that in a grand lecture hall with the full professor you know who ran you know that it was, you know, sometimes head of a department or whatever. I found myself really fascinating with that when I and I what, we just went off and I took you down a rabbit hole here that you.
No, no, no, that digression is a spice of life. I got a lot of questions. Let's start at the end. So how hard How hard was it to drop out of college?
Not at all. I kind of did it by default. I was just kind of just quit going to classes and there was no formal kind of you know, removing them myself. I just uh, I left and and and I came. Well, I'd gone to Nashville first. And then a buddy of mine, a kid that was a year younger kid, uh, a guitar player named Bill Alves who was in stage band with me in high school, a year behind my class, and he was in this greaser band that we had had out of the theater department that you know, because Shananah and all that had blown up, you know, in the ensuing years after Woodstock, they kind of you know, that whole revival, the throwback stuff of the fifties. And at this this variety show that the theater department had at my high school, I front of this band. It became Dwight and the Greasers because they were all gassed back with duct tails and everything. And we actually opened in Columbus at the Loew's Theater the weekend they opened American Graffiti. They had us perform. Wow people did people well, no, but people didn't know what between the showing the screenings, and it was one of those old, you know, eight hundred seat modern but that big span of you know, not like the Cinerama dome, but but big and we were this tiny thing down there, jumping around between the screenings of the different you know of graffiti and doing that. It was kind of you know, it was kind of interesting and weird. But I so Bill Alves, the guitar player who was in that, and have been in Stage Man a couple of years after I was out of high school and was at Ohio State. You noticed my colloquialism there. My granny would always down in southeast Kentucky where I was born, would say, are you all doing well up in Ohio, Ohio? Very properly say? And I'd say, you know, we would, those of us from Columbus and south to the river. It was a Hia high It's like so Ohio State. And you know, I left, and my intention was I went back to La City. Out here, I actually had better professors. I had guys at La City College that were full PhD teaching. You know, where I was picking up, you know, sophomore year stuff. You know, I thought, well, I'll pick up you know where I left off there and do an AA and go to UCLA. I will transfer over. And that got interrupted by what I was doing, you know, finally in the clubs out here and then having a moment of you know, just seeing the reality of what I'd come to the you know, West Coast for. But Billy olves went back to the finished this said to me. In the winter of seventy seven, he said, Hey, you're gonna go with me. I'm going to my He and aunt and uncle lived out and here in Tustin, the you know, down in Orange County. He said, I'm going out there. You're going with me. He had its nineteen seventy Volkswagen bug and we loaded everything I owned, which wasn't much, but we had you know, Duffel bags on the roof and drove from Columbus on I seventy. You know, we took that highway away and he spent a couple three months and went home. By July fourth, he was out and U I stayed. I didn't even have a bicycle, you know. I rode the bus and we ended up in Long Beach, living on the beach, and I rode the bus to Bullock's Lakewood. Are you've been out here long enough to remember Bullocks? Right?
Oh? Yeah, absolutely, I've been out here longer than you.
Yeah. So it's a mid seventies, so seventy seven. I got here, arrived and I ended up working there, and I worked at moving furniture for a time and then I drove air freight. But anyway, so yeah, I ended up out here and stayed and planning. Let's go back a few seconds.
You brought up the fact that you were born in November in the fact that today, well, lamber hold on one second, since you were one of the youngest kids in the class, did that affect how people treated you in your personality?
Maybe maybe, I think back, I never got bullied. I was kind of the wallflower kid. That was what was weird when I got to I remember at the end of elementary, I was in a large old school, McGuffey Elementary, Junior High combined, and so they would have a talent show and I was up in there until fifth grade. And this is in Columbus. Like I said, we had made the move, you know, out of Appalachia at that point up and for anybody that wants me to say Appalachia, I ain't gonna do it. No. Somebody started chastising me on either how can you being from here? And I'd say Apple, I'd say, yeah, I've never heard it called Appalachia, except if you're in Florida, you know Apple, Apa Cola or whatever the swamps and the lakes are anyway, and Stuart Copelan would have said Appalachian Spring. Right. So in any event, this is a great book. By the way, have you read the United States Appalachian I haven't.
But if we're going to digress, I remember my roommate first year in college, his girlfriend went to Appalachian State, which was in western Pennsylvania.
The other one is in North Carolina, Appalachian State, right, Oh, that's what I meant. Yeah, North Carolina, boone, North Carolina.
I'm confusing two parts of my life, but you're right. I had friends went to Appalachian State.
Who I do that myself on more than one occasion. I confuse.
But also there's an ally I kind of ed what I would say to so many times. It's like a tongue twister. Appalachia Cola in Florida too.
That's what yeah, which to me, that's where I heard Appalachia, and it's Appalachia where I was, and I was born there anyway, So I mean, so whatever I ended up, Uh, well, you started to say something, how was affected by that. I didn't think about it at the time, because you know, I was gonna be five years old and he told, you know, nineteen whatever. That was sixty one. I guess. I went to kindergarten and I was the oldest kid in my family. They didn't have an older sibling, which had a lot to do with how I embraced music or didn't. In other words, the Beatles were a little beyond me. And I said to Mike ness With one time, you know, I was a huge Monkeys fan, and I probably got one of the best educations I could have ever had with those first two Monkeys albums. Now that I know what went on with that, right, that's the Wrecking Crew. I'm listening to Carol King, Neil Diamond, the writers, right, John Stewart people and Boyce and Hart, you know, do backwards inversions of Paperback Writer when they do you know, last prand to Clarksville's opening. And I was down in the basement with a half baked drum kit because I had a real snare drumm and then we had one of those sort of not real the rest of the kit. My parents couldn't afford, you know, to do that. But I had that, and my mother ranted. She was at that point working at a place called Columbus Autoparts, a factory that supplied stuff out of Detroit. Used to Joe and say that our family didn't make it to Detroit. We only got gas enough to get to Columbus, and had to make her stand there was actually that there were a family that was there, you know, on her side, out of Kentucky, that had moved up ahead. And you know, I don't know if you've read Hibiliology. I'm sure you have, and yeah, I have the book and I told Ron Howard. I did the reading with him, and he had asked me about doing a role, and I couldn't schedule wise do it. But the thing that I was remiss about was that they weren't doing it as a series. I thought as a series he would give the breath and width of that life and what he was, you know, the story he was telling that as opposed to a film, which we got four hours. Right, we can get into.
This with we go as long as you want.
Digress No, but your streaming observations are the greatest, because it's maddening to me that we have to wait like it's nineteen sixty six for the next episode or something. I want to strangle the TV when I look up on and Amazon used to not do it right going backwards. Now they're doing it. It's like what in the anyway? So I'm an oldest kid of three, so I'm kind of on my where were you in family line? Were you give an older son? No?
But since you're the oldest kids to three, how old are the other?
Next? It's three little Indians. It's like two years separate my brother and then three to my sister. You know, it's a three total, right, there's still that hierarchy because of school. I'm two grades ahead of him and three grades ahead of her, you know, but.
Usually the oldest, my younger sister's really into birth order. I'm the middle. Usually all the hopes and dreams in the family are in the oldest.
Yeah. No, it's a lot of weight. It's like, even if it's only two, they make that and uh, you're the middle. You went outside the home to seek attention. That's I'm still seeking attention. Well, there was there was, Well, there was a great book I think my sophomore year of college at Ohio State that that Uh, it was called firstborn second born. I've never been able to find it since I've looked on Amazon. Every firstborn second born sibling birth order traits and it broke down, you know, and in large families, it goes in subgroups. You know. They used the Kennedy family as an example of there's a second oldest, there's a My mom came from six my wife Emily, who actually shot photos of us and videoed us that night that we had you do the Beatles song with us. We She is the oldest daughter of twelve kids, so that's a whole another dynamic because she becomes the mother. Hint right, the last three could Yeah, yeah, they were. Well, there was an eleveniese Catholic family that on the one side, she Danish Irish on the other and uh but anyway, so yeah, I remember one time I went to camp and the councilors my brother hadn't been there the previous year I had gone. I was old, you know, going to a summer you know, uh, a youth camp, church, youth camp. So I went down there and this is I think back, because at the time, it's just the kind you know, it's your life. You don't know any different right, you don't know, there's no counterpoint to it. And uh, I went down there. It's in southern Ohio. It was an old it was an old. Uh. I think may had predated World War One, but it was an old. It was called Fort Hill in southeastern Ohio between Cincinnati and Portsmouth along you know, and you know, kind of north of the Ohio River. Beautiful down there in the hills. And they had these huge cabins that all the you know, the boys would stay in and the girls were on the other side of the camp, on the other And I had a ball the first year I was there. The next year that I went, my brother was of age that he could go, so he came with right the middle right, and they called my parents after about the third day and said, look, uh, they says there's something wrong because my brother had some issues when he was young. He had had some convulsions and he had some I don't know what meds. He probably on riddle and I don't know now what, you know what the fifties, sixties, you know, were giving kids whatever. He was. He was an ad D kid, you know, became actually later classically flew jets. You know, he was a charter jet pilot and you know, really smart guy, brilliant kid. He but but he had his struggles, you know, and he and he wasn't taking his medicine. He had something he had to take. I can't remember what it was, and it made me sick at my stuff. I could. They called my parents, They said, something wrong? Is something wrong wrong? And I said, no, no, it's it's the other it's your son, twit. You got to let him off the hook. He's miserable, he won't he's worried to death. The other kid running around having a ball, you know, and he's probably not taken whatever he's supposed to take. But so that's what was you know, that's what you're living with when you said that, the hero kid. And I read also that the firstborns will either stay very close to the family or they leave and never come back. And I fell in the latter category. Finally, I kind of left came to the West Coast. Now. I had a great relationship with my parents that till to my dad's death. My mother is still alive, thank goodness. She's eighty nine o ninety coming up and in this next spring. But she and I had as again perspective from me over the years and growing to know other people. And I was I was reading, you know, because I get your your your your online letter and the what is it the Guest? The new book you're reading sounds great, sounds fantastic, actually, because I'm a fan of, like, you know, Pete Dexter and the writings you ever read Spooner by Pete he wrote Paris Trout and Deadwood. He wrote the book in the early nineties.
I have not read it.
Yeah, Deadwood is great. It's one of the most brilliant Western descriptions of the Old West that I've ever come across. They attempted it twice. The first one was Walter Hill in the nineties with with Jeff Bridges, and they as soon as I heard the title, I think, okay, they missed the mark. They called it wild Bill and that's one foot in old school. And then the early two thousands they actually did the series. HBO did dead Wood and now they got close, but it's still not the same visceral kind of element that Pete Dexter captured in that. And so my parents were because you're talking about the Guests, and it was really interesting what you were saying about that kind of personality and especially if you don't grow up within that, you know, and I had. They were lacking my parents, but they were never for a moment ever, ever malicious to any one of the three of us. And we knew every day they loved us. And I think back about the lacking of whatever, you know, and maybe not being held back a year, you know, and I probably would have done, you know, I would have been grown a little more. You know. What. What's the is it in Outliers where he talks about or is it uh uh? The other one that he wrote before.
Well, Outliers is what he talks about with the best soccer.
Players, after the hockey players, the hockey players, right, yeah, the hockey that's Outliers, because Tipping Point was the earlier one that was about writ you know, yeah, you know, but which deals with the hushpuppy issue. Right remember the kids in South like in Lower East Side, the hipsters couldn't afford cool shoes, des are buying hushpuppies and blue hush puppies up.
But him talking about the Gladwell books in case people don't.
Yeah, Malcolm Gladwell, you know, brilliantly written stuff, and he uh uh, I just forgot my point. What was it? What was I referencing? I'm gladwell and outlined.
He was talking in Blink, which was the second book, that if you were born all the great hockey players right born in the first half of the year.
We take them because they're bigger, you know, at that age you're physically bigger. So I was there and I was just, you know, slight, skinny kid. I wasn't I wasn't small, but I wasn't you know, like a guy going to be six ' four, you know. I ended up being roughly right six feet tall. But it was like so with that age in answer to the question, not succinctly answering it, but with all the tangents I can muster. It was at the time I thought, Okay, this is what I'm supposed to do. You know, at four years and three quarters, I went into you know, the school and was always the youngest kid in the class, you or one of the youngest. There were probably kids born in November and December actually when I think back to that time, but not many. And it was later like in fifth grade there was this talent show that was I mentioned that, and uh, I was a hey crossing guard, a safety patrol kid, you know, like.
Oh yeah, that was a great honor.
Oh no, they let you do it right, and that was trying. I remember after that afternoon, because they held it in the afternoon, I went down and played a monkey. I played I'm not your stepping style, and my class voted me to go down to the to the to the variety show centre in the big auditorium combined on toury in the junior high and elementary and do it. And I remember the older kids, you know, kids that were you know, fourteen, coming across the crosswalk and look at me, kid, that wasn't bad in my little flag. So that was the first handhold right of actually thinking.
It's funny you mention this because I always had a history since I was a year younger than everybody. I would get along with the older people when I was in college whatever. It's sort of a similar thing. But well, let's go through a few other things. Okay, you said you can't get a good hat anymore. What's a good hat? And what can you get?
Well, a high crown, this hot the old classic seventies look you and I know the truck stop hat was twenty feet tall, right, the ball cap running rolled and you don't bend, you roll the brim if you if you're a real hot rod Gaylord Perry Pitcher, you roll that brim. And the same thing with you know guys the old Air Force caps, they had a different kind of crown on there. If the Marine Corps had the that you know, high peaked anyway, crazy, I'm into observing. Oh, I know.
Exactly what you're talking about with the crown, because that was a big thing in Little League. I mean, you wouldn't, like Babe Ruth the old schools how it is now if they're even smaller now where it goes straight to the head.
But what bothers me, which is horrible, it's not it's not aesthetically very flattering. No.
But the other thing is in the old days they were not adjustable. You got your own size and they really fit well.
You had to fight. Yeah, you had to know your hats and get the size because it was wool all the way around. The pro teams are still that, I mean you still buy them sized. But the adjustable this is dnhim. The one I got on it was a great store on Melrose that had stocks of these blank denim Classic trucker caps. They come and go every few years. Even still, I've tried with my merch people. I said, you know, I really want to get the Classic. I don't know how many answers I And we measured at one point with the height of the crown should be, you know, for the label to be sticked to whatever you know, patch you're putting on the front. Another when I've got to Union seventy six, big old Union seventy six badges, the last gas station job I had right after i'd quit going to you know, college in Ohio state, and right before in the months ensuing before I left and came to California. But I was Union seventy six. My dad owned a Texico for a time, so we'd as a kid, you know, growing up with with that.
Okay, but I'm gonna switch to another thing before we go forward. One of the other things you said earlier was being cynical, as they say in class. Amplify that well.
I remember, I had a great I had what I was I mentioned I touched on a second ago. When I went to La City College, I was fascinated because I had this professor O'Mara was his name, and I realized halfway through it was a Western CIVI class that the book on Egyptology we were using he had authored at the University of Chicago. I thought, whoa this guy? Because he could teach at La City, I think it was five years and they could pick up another state of California. At the time, this is in the early eighties, they could pick up a full retirement, a second full retirement, and so I had that. And I had a professor from USC, an English lit professor or creative writing professor who had been a publisher and again was retired out of USC as a full PhD and was picking up a second retirement, right, And so the you know, at close range, you know, with twenty kids in the class, and they said to me. The one said, well, you know, this philosophy professor I had it was also a full professor from USC that was doing double duty. He said, you know, the difference in a skeptic and a cynic is that the cynic has been a true believer that's become disillusioned. Right. I always held that I understood as soon as I said, yeah, that's one of the Yeah, you know, and so when I said cynical, I was watching the older part of that generation of boomers, you still probably believed. See I'm the kids sitting there watching you and the older parts of the boomers. Right, I'm the tail in the last years of the boomers, watching it go to shit, right, watching the Summer of Love become ultamont.
You know, you know, I understand your point. It's well taken, and there are certainly people older than me. The line of demarcation that's so important to me was I was fully conscious when the Beatles hit. But I always I always use the analogy. I have a beach analogy, okay, where the wave comes in, the wave goes out, and there are certain people from that era who are still on the beach. They don't go back out. So you know, in the fifties wave came in, we got Mayner, g Krebs, et cetera, et cetera, wave went out, people like Alan Ginsburg whatever, they were left on the beach. For those of us who lived had the sixties values, okay, and then Reagan legitimized greed. It's like our values don't square with everybody else. It's like the same thing. You know, even in music, you know, the first thing people want to know is how do they get paid and how do they extend it. Not that the people in the old ages weren't interested in getting paid, it just wasn't the first question. So I believe, you know, it's hard for me. This is going to be controversial.
You know.
Even in the Joni Mitchell album Blue California, she says she's going to kiss a sunset pig. Okay, pig is a cop. Subsequent to nine to eleven, the firemen and when the policemen they're venerated, whereas in the sixties you have to beware. And it's funny because a cop has never done anything good for me. Cop has done a lot of bad shit for me, but never anything good.
Really, that's fascinating. I mean, and I I've had Look, I've had experiences with cops that are not great. But I didn't What I was going to say was I I felt like, I guess the disillusionment by the early seventies, right when Vietnam finally.
But I have to tell you we all felt that.
Yeah, well that's what I understand.
The concept of being ripped off because they talked about that a lot with Generation X.
You got to do it.
And we're in the trails and we're picking up the the ship from the elephant.
In the circus, and it was one of the It was.
Very very strange to have Ken state in May and then everything switched. It was back to the land and all the protests they ended after that.
It was very weird. Well, Kent States were seventy yeah, so but by I remember I was sitting in I was a junior year because I had to go down and I had to go down and take the physical for the draft or anything. Even though they had stopped right the active draft by the time I, you know, got out when I turned eighteen, uh in late seventy four, I still had to get on that bus and drive down there, you know, ride a bus full of dudes down with an army sergeant hollering at you and getting the line. That's why I got up there and went now neck one yello him and he's calling out and I'm standing in my own word and he's measuring my Hair's a five ft eleven and three quarter inches. I said, you can't just give me to the other quarter inch get on.
Well. The great thing is you remember the movie stripes with barn Oates is Sergeant Holka. And what I loved about was, you know, they're sitting there and gon't think he's taking a little too seriously and that irreverence really is the sixties, That's what I love.
Yeah. And by the seventies, I mean they were letting guys. It was, it was. There was cynicism even in the military. You know, it was like, what with the hell was that ten years? And why you know what I mean if you talk to guys and I know you have that that came out of it, They're like, what a waste, you know? And how many young lives, how many young I used to look in Columbus there was a little newspaper, a local thing called the Londen News. At the height of that warrant. I remember the pictures of those kids, some of them with acne, acne still their photo from boot camp, right with their dressed uniform, and it would run and they weren't coming back. They would run them every week, the kids that were gone. And I really sad when I think back at those faces, those young kids.
You know, I remember being in high school remember being in high school and over the intercom for the first time they announced all the school that a student, you know, a previous student had died in Vietnam.
Yeah. Yeah, very sobering, and it's a an experience that, like you've said, watched you write, I mean, we're very nine on one to now is not the same because it's still an all volunteer force. It's not.
There's okay, but growing up forgetting that Vietnam, you know, bad war, et cetera, et cetera. But you're growing up and you say, shit, I can't see ever fighting for my country, And now I can see fighting against people who want to end democracy, of which there's a good number in America. I hear from them every day.
Yeah. Well, I mean there's an argument to me, mate. I was a few years ago Pire's Morgan's show on CNN. I did a thing about and he wanted to interview me and talk about the Second Amendment, and I said, look, it's not about hunting, it's not about you know, sporting rifle. There's a reason I believe that it was written in there that way, and it was to prevent tyranny, and it was to rise up against the tyranny of a government, the tyranny of someone taking over the government, you know, the military, you know, performing a coup whatever. So I didn't I was I guess I was hopeful, and hopefully I was more of a skeptic than a cynic, because a cynic it's hard to it's hard to go on, you know, cynicism, it's hard to kind of overcome it. But I remained skeptical and remain skeptical. You know of a lot of people power, right power, and those who get it and the wrong people getting it and who knows, you know, it's a coin toss.
Well, it's skeptical. You do you talk about that my father, you know, you'd hear the old what's the real story here? It's like when you see somebody driving down the street in the Bentley and they don't have a job, Well they either have a rich father or something. Especially in LA when somebody you can't accept it if face value, when it's incredibly go oh wait a second. There's a real story here. Part of being a skeptic, and.
A lot of them are leased in lamed.
As I say there, there are a lot of people live in that way. But there's all kinds of things. It's like, you know, HBO Max has now been turned into max Max and that makes no sense to me.
And then I can't remember who owns it, but.
Well, you know, it's more of discovery and it's run by this guy Zoslav. And I was listening to this guy, Scot Galloway, big business guy says, no brand person, no branding person in the world would say to change it. This guybo Yeah, that's a guy brand This guy changed it because if he wins, he wants all the credits credit. And then I was listening to this podcast with his economist from Columbia talking about what he said to the White House, et cetera. They won't listen. It's a dick thing. It's like I guess I was brought up my parents always telling me, you're not the guy. There's always somebody who knows better, who knows more. Find them, but you're not the guy.
And then you don't don't think you're the smartest guy in the room. I don't. Yeah, I go in, I think, look, i'm I'm I'm pretty good. I'm quick. I'm quick. I'm not fast, but i'm pretty quick. And uh that I want to have smarter people than me, you know, informing me. That's what I hope always, and somebody smartest me.
You know, as one gets older and time starts to run out of the hour glass, it's very weird because Okay, when you go back when you're still in school, there's a big organization. They're into what you're doing. Are you cutting class, you're getting good grades, whatever. Then you graduate, they don't give a fuck. Do whatever you want, you know, living, gutter whatever. And it's funny that there's that side. So you're ultimately forced to find your own way with no structure. And it's weird because you have you outgrow people, primarily because not that they're stupid, but the choices they made. They don't want to continue to go down the path. And it's very weird because then you're hanging with them. It's not as satisfying as it used to be, and you have to find new people.
Yeah. Well, I've over the year has been asked well how do I how do I do this? Or that? You know musicians that are talented maybe, and they go, well, yeah, I said, well, first of all, you got to get out of where you are. You know, it's like you're in You're you're in Indianapolis, or you're in Des Moines, you're in Omaha. Okay, cool, But you got to go to New York, go to La or at least Nashville so you can compete, you know, and put it in front of people, right, and and it surprises me, especially as a point of age. You know, you've you've written about this. I've read where you where there are those that do and those that don't and those that don't. You could tell over and over again. Are you when you're beach analogy? Are you saying you're one of those one of those persons left on the beach you feel beat? Right? Yeah? And you didn't go back out with the current or the wave, right, yeah, I probably went out with the wave. And maybe that's what you know it's like because I understand the analogy, I get it.
Okay, Okay, let's just say you bring up you know, you go on tour. A lot of places you tour are not the top line of the metropolis. All right, if you are just by being there the brief period of time, is it just another gig or do you learn something?
You learned something insight, you learn something every night. Everywhere you go, I think, I mean, I'm just curious enough that I look for what there is. I'm fascinated with people in places. The thing I never had to study, and I probably would have made it bout I was going to major in philosophy, but as I look back in history, history and geography, I never had to open a book. It seemed like it just was in me from some previous lifetime. I knew the globe, and that was what I was saying when I would cut class, I would, you know, actually cut classes. I could get away with it and sit in the library and read. Because my dad, God bless him, he tried to. I was raised very devoutly in Church of Christ, which they founded Pepperdine University out here. But the Church of Christ is a non denominational, you know, Christian church, and in Columbus, the fascinating thing for me, again in retrospect, was that it was this major university hub, right, so we had this influx of guys that were teaching my Sunday school classes that were doing I know it now because I remember doing their PhDs, one of them in high level mathematics at Ohio State. Another one we had a friend of our family, became very close to my dad because they both shared a love for cars, and he loved he had a little old Porsche Sea the C model looked like the bathtub, you know, because he was finishing his residency there in antestesiology. So I got exposed, you know, this cross polarization of culture. My dad was a ten year career Army sergeant. All I came, I was going to stay do the twenty you know, and because of me, he used to look at you, you know, boy, he lamented it until the end of his life. Almost I have been I'd have been retard. But now if I'd have stayed in but you don't because he couldn't. He was last posted in Korea posts the truth and people don't realize the Korean War, remember Korean conflict, John Prime, Hello in There is one of the great songs that deals with that. And you know the couple the old man on the bench and Hello in there and the Korean War. We don't know what for? You know, that lyric was so poignant and great. Anyway, it was post the war, the active war, and it's still to this day. I guess just a truce, you know, that's why it's such a you.
Know, well I read just to you know, put this in and you hear about how is it going to end between Ukraine and Russia and they say it might be like Korea and that there was never a treaty.
Is the truth.
They just kind of decided to stop fighting.
Stop and just became a truth. That that's what had DMZ is real. It's like right, it's like they're looking at each other still with loaded guns. So anyway, he was there and couldn't take us. He left. My mom was just pregnant with me, and he spent the time and he didn't meet me till I was nine months old, and that it was an interesting dynamic between the two. But he looked he said, you know, i'd have been retard. But I said, you'd have been in Vietnam. He said, well, you know maybe, but he ran a motor pool and he ran tank transporters, which you know, but those old sergeants did end up over there. And then I said, you know, the first thing I ever wrote, funny enough because I was watching all the news reel footage. I was eight years old and I had my first real guitar. Well, he had one he brought home. There's a shot of me in my box. Said that it's a k F hole, remember the old F hole guitars a k that he he couldn't play. He brought more instruments on the never could play a lick. He brought one from Westinghouse when he worked out there after he lost his gas station. That's another whole topic that they give these guys gas stations or great mechanics that have no business acumen whatsoever. And the oil companies know that, by the way, I've read analysis of that. They knew because they owned the real estate. So they would just flip every three or four years another, give another mechanic, you know, the station lab, try and run it. And but he brought a bass. He brought a bull horn Dan electro bass home. And so I bought this from this guy out at the plant. He said, he's young guy. He just needed money. He said, I figured you could play an electric guitar. I said, well, dad, that's not a guitar. I don't know how to play a bass a base. And when I thought about we in my it was black. It's a classic. It's probably worth multiple thousand dollars now. I think about that bullhorn, Dan electro bass and we painted at baby blue. For some reason, we sprayed my brother and I, you know neither. You know, I fooled around with it, but I couldn't play. But I had a real acoustic guitar. He had this k that I had when I was about two years old. Three there photos me with it, just bellering and trying to hold my granny hole in the top and the headstock, and I tripped and fell and crushed that. So then I had a couple of toy things that you know, between then and at eight years old. And this goes to who he was. And my parents saw the earth people that worked really hard, and he had a bit of walder Midie and he was always dreaming. And this was back to what I was talking about with the people that he knew, the cross pollinization of culture because they knew he was a great mechanic. And some of these guys like cars and they had that in common, but nothing else with him. And even him trying to learn to golf was hilarious. I caddied for him till the last time I laughing, so I collapsed onto the course. And anyway, but I wrote this song on that guitar because the newsreels were coming at dinner. You'd hear, you know, the Marines have gone into landed at Danang, Remember that they did. They did a landing craft landing if you remember, it was like a big staged you know, bit sort of all of World War two. And that must have prompted me because I was starting to see, you know, in that first couple of years of the active war. You know, it's would have been what eight, I was sixty four, eight years old, but.
Sixty four was really before that. I was just advisory.
Yeah, yeah, no, when went in when of the Marines? Actually sixty five. But anyway, I wrote this song called how Far Is Heaven? And my parents didn't quite they didn't know it was a hillbilly thing. It was half finished. That talks about it over the years a few times in interviews, but it went uh and it started with this hillbilly waltz ching ing, which is not all. I could plague two couple of chords. I don't play much more than that now, but I was getting interested. My daddy got killed over in Vietnam. Then there's just a few things that I don't understand boom boom boom. How far is heaven? When can I go? I love my daddy, Lord, I miss him. So so anyway, they heard me doing something they hadn't. I came downstairs, said what are you playing? And so I played it for him. My dad was flabbergast and almost offended. He said, whoa what in the world's he writing? Like I'm dead? My mother? He didn't like he's you know, poetic license. He didn't quite great, didn't grasp it. It's like you want me dead? You think he's looking at my mom. It's like he was hilarious. Actually a tough dude, tough guy, but a soft heart.
Okay, okay, A couple of things. So with your father, this was really you're a little young, as you said, but anti Vietnam and pro Vietnam was. I don't want to equate it with abortion because there are two different things, but the vociferousness that people held their positions. Was your father always pro Vietnam? Or did he ever start to crump?
I think he well, no, I think by the end he like a lot of xgis were like watching that from the distance and going, I don't know what in the hell there you know, yeah, he became disillusioned. But again, uh, there was. It's not as clear as black and white if your memory, if you really in line is the moments, Bob, there was, especially where we were, you know, the Ohio Valley. You've moved out into Greater Appalachian, right, you're out there in that region, and it's I mean I came from. He was in a union. He was a shop steward in the union. But he became disillusioned because you know, the power of unions becomes correct, they become corrupt, right, whether it's Hoffer or whatever. I forget what. He was a shop steward and one day he came home with his eye cut open because a guy on the line, because there was a guy that kept showing up drunk right to work at a plant, big factory, you know, and they're all on the line, and this guy was going to get somebody killed. He said, this guy's drunk and in not showing up, and it was his job to go defend him to the teeth, right, you know, and say he can be you know, he's absent now he you know, he's sick. He was sick. He was sick, and finally he said, and this is the old army sergeant. I can't do that anymore. You know, I can't cover for this clown, do you know what I mean? The Union was saying, hey, dude, you're covering for him. You're the shop steward. You're covering. And he said, not doing it. And the guy down the line let a flywheel part of a refrigerator like it was a it was a Westinghouse plant, right, They built refrigerators to let that go down the line the conveyor, but and it bounced, ricocheted and caught the guy next to him his hand and cut him and then hit my dad in the eye, you know, came up and cut him and it could have killed either of them. You know, it could have killed him. That was the warning shot right from you know, the Union. It's like, you know, so I saw that at close range. I watched him come home with stitches in that eye and what happened. And he said, well, this guy didn't like that. I I'm fed up. I'm not covering. You know, the Warren Oates moment. Remember the scene in the barracks where the guy jumps up and goes, it's his name, And they introduced themselves, and he says, I'm Francis, So any of you guys, he said the pejority of the interview mother, call me Francis. I'll kill you. He goes, and you touch my ship, I'll kill you. And he goes through a laundry list up. Anybody does this and that, I'll kill you. And Warren Oates is sitting there chewing on the cigar. He just sit down and stow it. Francis were the top thing on the list. Don't call me Francis. Sit down and stow it. Francis. Which is that's those guys right that run the army. They run the military. You know, anybody's smart, that's been the officers will tell you the thing that'll get you saved. Listen to your NCLs. Right. Let the old sergeant lead. And that's who he was. You know. He had have a career in and didn't want to get out. But he couldn't take us. His heart wouldn't let him go back. And his captain, I mean, he said, wow, my captain told me just go home. Spent a few months as you realist. I'll give you your full stripes back and put a stripe on it and come back to me, and he never did. But he never quit. And it wasn't about you know, the raw, raw end of it. It was about the function of the hierarchy of the military. I think you know what I mean, the organization. Do you know it made sense to him? Does that mean you know? And and great, great mechanical aptitude, So order probably made sense to him in that way. I was fascinated with it. I would say, I could tell you the crazy service in terms of rank and insignia is the Navy. The Navy's and I have a whole theory about the Navy that that the most uh suspect officer corps might be the Navy, because I my theory is, and this is my own barnyard theory is, you know, from teenage years on, was that there there will He didn't necessarily it can be compromised a little bit. There was ever a real coop in the United States. I think it might come from Naval intelligence rather than any of the branch because they're so removed when you think about their duty post from the country, especially in peacetime. Right they're on the high seas, They're all over the world, So there's a disconnect maybe possibly anyway, whatever, that's a whole like I said, no.
No, okay, but tell me about him owning the Texico station.
Well, he had that. He was great. And then his younger brother. He was one of three boys. He had an older brother and he was in the middle, and they had this younger brother and the two of them. He owned it and this brother, and it's just managing the money of it and all that stuff and trying to make it go. And that's back in the day when there were four corners. There were four stations, like there was a Saint Clair or Chevron, and my mom's cousins who had come out of Kentucky, the Christian Brothers, he owned a Sinclair I think. Then one night I remember all the stories, but he walked out and flicked a cigarette or a cigar. But as the tanker was loading, you know, fueled into the station and went it skipped across the lot and exploded. His whole station burned to the ground. That's the classic move. My dad didn't do anything that because again he was our army sergeant, kind of smart and and seizoned and he was like, what you what the hell are you thinking? There? Flicker a cigarette, a cigar butt across the lot. When that guy's out, the fumes are gonna And that's what happened. The fumes caught just one spark and it was like the whole corner went up. And they're lucky that the four could. I don't know, and and and uh because you were raised in Connecticut, right, yeah, yeah.
Oh I remember the four gas the four corners. Now it's like you have to think about buying gas. Oh yeah, we're the never mind the price wars and the glasses and all that.
And Sonoko he had a Texico and he had it for about three and a half years. He had a red pickup truck with that big star on the side, and it was fascinating. We got our first real dog from there. A guy didn't want to gave us his boy. He had a boxer that he ended up in that gas station. Uh, he had him there for a week or two, and he brought him home, Duke and that boxer that we ended up inheriting from from the gas station, and uh uh, you know, he he just it ended up financially failing. I was too young to know the machinations of it, you know, But he just couldn't make the business side of it go and makes sense. And they were being charged rent by Texico and sometimes the was set up on the margins when I look, you know, I know now that and they expected a certain amount of failure and they would just replace you with the next guy. They didn't. Texao didn't lose the corner. You know, they owned it and you were paying them.
You know, there's this there's the same scam now in lawn haul truck drivers that they basically leash you the car to own and the guys can't keep the payments and they just you know, they charged a lot to get in and they just pass it on to the.
Net next guy. And it's just a shame, but anybody. So that was that world. And then he went on, like I said, and always attempted to better himself. And you know, it was always looking to like he went to night school to try and you know, and just wasn't hadn't been prepared for that, you know, because he ended up dropping out of high school. He was sixteen when he enlisted. He was under age when he went in the army. It was post war, the Treatsy Forces. Because Colonel David Hackwort was a great book called About Face. He was a full bird colonel, highly decorated in Vietnam, and he went on what was you know, the Sunday morn warning should meet the press from Vietnam and railed against the conduct of the military and you know, the politicians running the war in I don't know what I think nineteen seventy or seventy one whatever, in saying, this is getting good kids killed for no reason. And he immediately was you know, I don't know if he quit the military at that point, but he was dumped. But I don't know why I was talking about hack course book, but about Face, and to you know, he was trying attempting to oh, I know what it was. He went in the army under age, like hack Corts had done post World War Two. He jumped in as a way out. You know. My granddad been a railroader, right, you know, and was with Penn Central at that point. My great grandfather had been a cabinet maker for the railroad. Came out of he was a baby and came out of the Shenandoah Valley and a constagle wagon across the Ohio, you know, and in the Ohio Valley and that's where they landed in southern Ohio across from Kentucky. And then my mom's side of the families steeped in southeasternmost Kentucky in deep western Virginia, you know, goes back. We don't know how many generations. I never really explored enough of it on that side, the Tibbs family, Ratlets, Gillhams, it's old mountain names. But so he had this railroad background, but he wanted to escape it, and I think I got a bit of his optimism, you know. He you know that he was always hoping for a better life, you know, and not always successful at trying to attempt the next move, you know. And ironically he ended up living the last thirty years of his life in Kentucky, in Louisville actually, but he became a state He worked for the State of Ohio at one point he became a construction inspector for the city and was really good at that. He had great, you know, mechanical aptitude. And then ended up working for the State of Kentucky his last you know, I don't know, fifteen years of his working life and retired from there. But I think back he and I were just so different, as you know, personalities. My brother and he were more in common with each other any think, and locked horns a lot more than men. I would look at my my younger brothers. You're the rebel without the cause, Bob and the middle kid. Right, yeah, absolutely, we'll get to that adventure.
But you know, we've talked about this before, but let's go back here where. Yes, you basically grew up in Ohio, but it's like Kentucky. It's the epicenter of the opioid culture and bad things. So for those of us who did not grow up there, you know, we hear about coal miner's daughter, we hear about the holler. You know, what exactly what was it like in your father's error?
What was it like for you?
What is it like?
Now? Well, there they were, you know, and my mother, who I regret for her that she didn't go on to college because she was an exceptional student and great with English grammar. She would correct us, you know, and a stickler for it. And my granny who barely you know, maybe had an I don't know, in eighth grade, the classic eighth grade education in the Mountain people, one of the ironic moments for me was sitting in that holler. It was dirt road. It was basically hollers. Rory Kennedy, huh. She's one of Bobby's daughters, all right, Bobby Kennedy junior domic Bobby Kennedy daughters is a documentary filmmaker. And she did a piece a few years ago. It was a great piece called American Hot. I only took exception with her calling it a hollow instead of because in the New England area where you would call it a hollow, right, sleepy hollow or well, that's what they are. It's a hollow. And it usually was a creek bed coming off the mountain top, you know, in southeast Kentucky in that case, or in West Virginia or wherever in the mountainous areas, and this it was a single car wide dirt road up that hollow to get to the top of them, you know, from down at the bottom, and a creek would run alongside of it out of there. So I was, and that was only it was ninety miles you know, to Kentucky from as we would go home, they call it going home. That was what I my mother would We're gonna go home this weekend and would take I used to say we're tail like babies, because you would see a line on Route twenty three out of Columbus. You would get back onto Route twenty three and beheaded south to Portsmouth, hind and go over to Ironan and cross into Ashland, which is where the Juds are from. And then Ricky Skaggs is another few miles in Louisa. Down that road, that same highway, Loretta Lynn, Crystal Gale or another county down. I'm on a sign that you get to Pike County and that's where I was born. Pipe Well, Patty Lovelas is a string of us that came off that highway and that one section of Kentucky, that state that went on. And then if you go just across from Pike County where it borders it borders Virginia, and you go across Ford Grundy and up and through there's Clinch Mountain, which is where Ralph and Carter Stanley came out up in the Carter family. Right ap card the beginning of modern country music. Really right, they go down and do the Bristol Sessions. Two acts came out of the Bristol Sessions. Jimmy Rogers, right, and which was it Ralph Pierre that went down with the recording. I can't remember who went down and did the Bristol sessions down anyway, And Jimmy Rodgers and the Carter family and those of the two that blew up and made country music in nineteen twenty seven commercial And so I'm born there, right, and the escape route across the river lands me, you know, up there in Columbus, And so my perspective was, and I would get so carsick when we'd drive down through therecause you follow Coultro as a two lane road, two lane highway it was. It was a US Route Route twenty three, and to this day it's widening and stuff, but there's no interstate running over there. They were supposed to put a new sixty six out of d C. It's never been finished. It was going to go through there. But and on one of the people that blocked you know, a US road going down through there was I believe Johnson post Lincoln, And it's weird. That's a weird presidency and of itself and his his you know, kind of hostility towards the South, you know at that point because he's from Tennessee the form and vice president, right, I mean Johnson who became the president and was impeached, you know, prior to Trump, the only I think sitting president impeached. Anyway, that culture was there up and down that highway, and I used to say that on Friday nights and tail a babies, you'd see all these license plates from Michigan and Ohio headed south. They were going home from Detroit, tons of these cars because they could make it. You know, at that point it was it was mostly you could do interstate coming down to Columbia. You could jump on that US route and take it across into Kentucky. But you could be down there from Columbus and you'd be at the river an hour and a half and then you'd start the hard part of it and there'd be another, you know, three hours to get you know, to the house in the holler. I wrote about it reading writing Route twenty three. You know about the grandparents staying up to see those grand babies. You know, they would bring us in and then I would spend time down there with them in the summers and you just stay there. My you know, mother would leave me and you know I'd be with them, and they were old mountain people. My granddad was born in nineteen oh one, and it's you know, it's you know, kind of the Sergeant York you know version of that stuff, you know. But I learned to shoot a shotgun with him. You know. It's all that was, you know, part and parcel of what I was living. And they'd had a tougher road to hoe, you know than me. I was lucky, you know. They they escaped me, you know, so I got to see the world and then have it come into the living room and color at some point, you know, and.
Have Okay, So with this late day, what is it that people in the blue areas in the metropolis don't get about people from that era area?
Well that there number one I think that I can talk about holler that they're suspicious. One of the things that stayed with me from Gladwell's book Outliers was his discussion about not being able to keep a circuit judge as late as the eighties, remember in Southeast Kentucky and Harlan and he was talking about Harlan County specifically. But if you remember that part of the book, he said they were going in people would walk in with a gun into court and threaten the judge. And they knew him minute. I had a great oral surgeon out here that had done his his his.
I think this is hillbilly elogy you're referring to.
Right, No, no, no, it's Gladwell's book Outliers. He talks about Harlan County, Kentucky, and how the feuding culture it crops up around the world in places that are not hospitable to agrarian culture, that are herd cultures, like if you remember the Highlands of Scotland, of the Mediterranean Crescent right the menu, where they don't operate as a collective force in it. They had to take any any suspicious person. A stranger shows up and if he bumps into you in a bar, you can't let it go because he may be testing you like a perimeter, you know, probe to see if he can come that if you're a weekly and he can come back that night and steal your herd of goats, steal your cattle. Because you can do that overnight. You can't take a thousand acres of wheat. You can't move that overnight. It takes a collective effort. Right to harvest it, put it on a truck, put it on you know whatever, and take it to market. But with herds, and it moved out across the country when you think about it, you know, with the last bashing being the cattle country in the west right where they fought the farmers coming in and putting up fences, et cetera. And they even got down to killing with regulators, you know, and things like that. So that culture's there. And what I would say is just know that they're suspect of everybody that doesn't, you know, come from their local area. Any outside that shows up, they're watching you. I was going to say, I had this this this oral surgeon out here who found out me. You got acquainted with me a little bit, and he went, wait a minute, you're from Kentucky's I want the University of Kentucky. He's wearing diners and know where you've ever heard of it either. I went to the University of Kentucky and did my They had a program there where you did. He had gotten his degree in dentistry and went back there to specialize in oral surgery. And while you're doing it, they became an MD, became a medical doctor. Along with you know, getting his specially in oral surgery, he said. But part of the deal was, I said, well, I'm from You probably never been where I'm born, Pipewell, Kentucky. We down it's last corner of the state. And he said, are you kidding? He said, our professor, the head of the department at University of Kentucky, had had dental offices in Pike County, in Floyd County, which is where I lived, he said, and we had to Part of the deal was we had to go work those on the weekends for him. He said, let me tell you something I learned a lot. He said. There was a guy had a dog near him. He was living and he had a little house that was owned by the by whoever. This doctor was at University of Kentucky. And he said, I was asleep the first couple of nights and there was a hound dog, like you know I was. It wasn't even it was a hunting dog, but he was. They were in this pen on an adjacent lot and they were barking all night, and he said, I had to get sleep, he said, so I went over and just lifted the thing. They weren't going to stop. They're hound dogs, you know, just in there, bellering and hollering. He said, I just lifted the latch and kind of let them go. He said. About two days later, he said, I gotta knock on my door in that little house, shotgun house, he said. He said. The guy came up and he said, uh, I said, hey, mister. He said, just two guys. He said. They were scary looking, haunted, gaunt faced, you know, coal miner looking guys, and they're hunting caps. And there to them, he said, said our dog got out. And he said, oh really, he said yeah, yeah, he said we got them back. He said, but you wouldn't know anything about that, would you let them getting out? And he said I was like, he said, I literally. But he talked about the culture. He told me. He said, you know, they would pay in cash and somebody said, I knew they couldn't afford any of it. And they would come in and have wads of cash to give him to fix their kid's tooth or fix and he said it was just it was heartbreaking at times. He said, and what was you know, part of that experience? And and but he said they looked at him and he said, you know, you don't let a man dog loose and he said, I took it. He said, I got the warning. He said. They were both standing. He said they were holding shotguns because there were hunters, you know, and hunter caps and he said staring at him. He said, because so his experience there, it was interesting, you know. He and I uh talked about it many times over the years. So that culture it's a lost part of America, you know, in a way it's it's it's and it's been forgotten a lot, you know, they've been left, you know, like you said, the opioid crisis that's gone on down there and throughout that area of the region, you know. And and he'll be theology. He touches on all that the aspects of it you get out and Gladwell discusses that aspect about in outliers about at the University of michigand a double blind study of kids that were removed from the South or just recently moved from them stuff, but even those that were two and three generations removed. And I believe they found in the nineties when they were unlocking the DNA code, right, they finally pre prior to twenty three and meterison all that stuff they discovered maybe a gene why people think they've had past lives. You know that you're carrying a sense memory gene. If you've read about the sense memories, you're carrying memories from all the relative your parents, grandparents, great grandparents, great great great as long as they lived through experiences long enough to you know, convey those thoughts and experiences through their DNA by pro creating forward right, so that if you had a great great grandfather that fought in something, you have this it's memory, Or you have apprehensions about height, or you have you know, you know what I mean. And they were talking. Gladwell discusses that these kids that were even a generation or two generations removed from the South still behaved with the umbrage of Southerners at the University of Michigan when they were presented with a circumstance that felt insulting to them, How they would react versus a kid from New York or you know, a kid from the Northeast who didn't react the same way, didn't take you know, as much umbrage was something you know, the you know the challenge of it. And I do believe that it has to do with with being a lost element. And I used to tell people, I said, look, Kentucky is a mountain state. There's parts of it that are that are dixiefied, you know, the central and western part, but eastern and southeastern Kentucky, eastern West Kentucky. It's mountain culture. Billy, Bob Thornton and I have talked about that because he's from arc which is a mountain state again, and it's different. The dialects are different. It's not Southern, it's not Southern colloquialism the same. It's not you know, Dixie Land kind of you know stuff. It's and it was a border state for that reason, I think, and that's why West Virginia broke away from Virginia, that section of the state, you know, within you know, within those states. There was this conflict going on. The Hatfields of McCoy's feuded in that county historically, that's where it happened, Pike County, Kentucky, and they believed that it was an outgrowth of the Civil War. I think the McCoys sided with the Union and the hat Fields were sympathizers to the Confederacy, and they had sons that were in the Southern Army and one of them came back and was hiding in a cave and the McCoy's allegedly gave him up to the Union troops that were there and pipe Bull and they went up and killed it. And they believe that's where the feud began with the Hatfields of McCoy's and it went on, you know that one, you know, for about forty five years. A sheriff finally arrested one of each part of each family, put them on a barge because they couldn't keep them. They would go break them out of the jail, you know, literally, and he put them on a logging barge at that time before the coal barges and sent him up river to Ashland and over to Louisville and they were held there and stood a trial and that tamped it down and they both went to prison and that stopped the feud. As you know what historically I've read anyway, that culture is different than the Deep South. It's it's the isolationists, you know, they really are. It's like the Scottish Highland culture. You know, the Scots they're not you know, they weren't like those from England, you know, going back as far as you know, Mary Queen of Scotts, all of it. You know, it's so I think that the Blue States don't understand that dynamic of American culture, the you know, the outlier culture that's part of that, right, those that are disenfranchised, no matter what race, you know, the disenfranchised that are part of that. You know.
Okay, your father was such an organization company man structure. You said he liked that. How'd you end up being so entrepreneurial? Me?
Yeah, me being I don't think I'm not that much.
Two things, it's you're inherently an entrepreneur if you're a musician making it's like he did a weekly he.
Would have never done that. He looked at me one time, he said, well, I'm just graduated high school. He said, son, boy, you got to know your station in life. And I thought I was sad for him when I looked at him across you know, I was. I guess I was eighteen or nineteen at that point, and I'm still living at home and going to school, you know, school at a high state. And I thought, wow, it kind of broke my heart for him. You know that he felt there was a point as much as that Walter Mitty was in him, he didn't fully believe he could really, you know, grab that ring, you know, and that brass ring was not okay?
Did you always know that you were gonna make it that you were going to grab the brass ring doing something?
For what I said fifth grade? Right that I even earlier, there was a craziness, you know. So I'm just egotistical enough, because enough of the narcissist maybe that I that I anyone that gave me encouragement again outside family, because they were and my parents were not. They didn't tamp me down, you know, they didn't criticize you know, you know what I mean. It's like I've been I've been witnessed now as an adult to some families. I'm stunned. I like, wow, That's why I said earlier. They weren't malicious ever, And I look at it now and I think you where you've got parents that are competing. I don't think what I've read from you that your parents competed with you.
They love not what I think my mother on a very subtle level, but the difference between my family and your family sounds like by today's standards, we were abused kids. My father used to hit us all the time.
Well we got spanked, oh and you didn't my dad, but my mother, my mother would make us go pick our own switch. That's a hillbalid deal. We would have to go pick our own switch. And it wasn't one you should bring back that would break. I remember testing the switch out on my bare legs and shorts, going back across the yard because she had this. We had this huge hedge that was we're on this house that we had and we have to pick a switch out of there. This is brutal, right, we have to go pick the element of your of your torture yourself. And so we got switched, but they didn't. Never got hit in the face, never got hit with you, you know what I mean. It was I was spanked, you know.
It was a little bit more vicious where I grew up. Really, my father was a little out of control. He'd had his father lost a hand in a railroad accident and had been married before. And when he lost die he left all whatever money he had to the first family. My father had a heart upbringing, and it wasn't until very you know, we were way out of the house where I remember there used to be this chairlifted Aspen Highlands. He was a shitty skier, but he was a terrible athlete. It's one thing he could do. And there was this chair that took a half an hour. And it would be difficult to talk to my father. You could listen to him, but it's hard to have a conversation. And he started pontificating about all these things that happened to him growing up. Never told any of those stories until he had made.
It right right. Wow, did you did you get hit like around the face and all that? I mean, oh, I mean.
You know that great line, I'm gonna hit you till you stop crying. Wow, that was all that, you know?
Yeah, that was me.
Usually it was the belt, sometimes the hair brush, They get the hair brush in the head. My father would slap you in the face.
Sure, and yeah we didn't. My father, he contains him. Not a guy.
My father was not the type of guy who was beefy and scary that way. But man, when he lost it, he was it was almost like this guy is losing control. It's like you felt sane.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I mean, well, they believed in corporal punishment, they were you know, they they spanked, but we again I didn't. I'm trying to think of my brother. My brother probably came to closest because he threatened my dad. And uh, one time I heard him. I was in college. My brother was in a bedroom next to me. But at that point we had a you know, a house you know, on the sub we'd gotten one car garage, but had had four bedrooms. My sister had a bedroom, brother and I and my parents. And he came upstairs and my brother was still in bed. He was supposed to be out and going to you know, high school, getting and I remember he was grown. He was probably in his senior year and I was in bed because I didn't have a class at at high State. I was and I heard my dad walk in and go, hey, get up, and my brother turned or no, he opened the door with me first is what was? He said, you're getting up? And I said yeah, I mean you know, and opened the door of my brother. My dad got up, even when he didn't. I never knew dated he and have another job. He would leave a job and go right to another job, you know, he did. He just had that ethic, you know, he would find work in early because the army. He was up even in his days off. He was up to six am with coffee, you know, down there, you know. And so he walked into my door first, and he closed and opened my brother's door, and my brother rolled over in the bed said I heard your mouth. Now what's the t ow He said that, and all I heard was my dad crossed the room in like three strides and he picked him up by the collar and the butt of the sheets grabbed his body, picked him up and threw him. And that was the barracks I'm sure that was a barracks moment. Across the room. He hit the wall. He goes, hey, boy, you could you call me my mouth again? Whatever it wasn't it stormed out and left, didn't it even face? And I got him. I remember, I walked down. I went, I leaned on the door John, I said, look at him, and he's on the floor, still in a pile of sheets. And I said, dude, what were you thinking? It's like, what are you thinking? And I and he threatened. I heard threats, like another great euphemism. He said. My brother had the refrigerator door. You know, this is when we're manchild's right. You know, I'm like seventeen, my brother's you know, fifteen. We're all standing and he's drinking out of the cart and you know, instead of pouring it into the glass, right, which which turned my stomach. I didn't do it because I don't want to see it done and I'm not doing But he was standing there and he did something like that, and he left the door just standing open and looked over at My dad was sitting at the other end of the kitchen table drinking coffee and read the newspaper. And he looked up and he said, hell you think you're doing He said what he goes, how would you like to have to drop up your parts to eat your next meal? And we both looked at each other, like, how would that happen? He let us. He let that sink in for a minute, and he said, because that's about how far down your throat your teeth are going to be if you keep this up. When I got that's the army sergeant going on. And like I said, he grew up. My granddad I barely remember. He died young. I mean it was early fifties. He had a heart attack. My grandmother at forty nine, so My dad's parents are both gone. My mom's parents the Kentucky side. My granddad, Luke, I knew till I was grown, and he was really a soft spoken mountain man, you know. He was just this humble coal miner. And I knew about all that from the mate Wan point of view, right. You know. He was there when the shootings happened, all of it. You know, they were back in the twenties and thirties. He was a minor, and when they unionized and the Pinkertons came in and killed people, you know, so I saw all of it, you know, I saw you know, the plus and minus of the unionists, you know, and what happened and how it happened, and watched in any event, my dad said, no, my brother came the closest because they would lock horns like that. Example. You know, it's like what he's the middle kid, Bob. You know, you can't help believe me.
My older sister used to test my father all the time, I remember, because we all ate dinner together.
Oh yeah, and we didn't take didn't take.
Much set my father off, and he would reach over and smack you. It was about how much could you tamp it down, and my sister would get in our One time she got in an argument with him and took his car. What just could not fucking believe it.
It's like, what were you thinking of it? Oh?
Broke?
No.
But the only thing is my mother. You know, when Reggie Jackson came to New York, he said, I'm the straw that stirs the drink. My mother socially was the straw that stirs the drink, right, But she was a hard ass. Where's my father? As crazy as he could be? If he sensed you were really in a bad spot, he says, yeah, it sounds like you're really a bad Send you twenty dollars, go out for a good deal, try to figure it out.
Yeah.
My mother would say, go get a job tomorrow.
Blah blah blah, blahlah blah.
You know, I don't want to hear it.
My mom was actually is a tender hearted person. My dad was actually underneath that facade. You know, he would he was you know, the thing that I regret that we're forgetting is forgiveness on our society and life. Do you know, Bob, forgiveness is a lost thought?
Well, hey, there's two types of forgiveness. I think, you know, they hold people to unreasonable standards. Now, we all make mistakes. If you make the mistake and you apologize, we can't hold it against it forever. But I must admit there are people who've done things in my life where I don't forgive them, and then people say, well if you give them, you know, forget that third party. You know, well, if you forgive them, you'll feel better. I don't think so as far as letting my father off the hook. He came from such a hard background whatever, sure.
Well yeah, that's but also I think my dad had the willingness to you know, and as guys you know, and my wife sometimes was like, look, yeah, guys fighting and you get over you like, you know, you wrestle around to one and then you guys now are friends. It's like, yeah, but that's the listen.
You know, that's one thing you learn growing up my mother. You know, people today they'll call up the school and say they have to stop bullying my kid. In my era, that would be like.
The curse of death.
If your parents stood up for you, these kids would beat the shit out of you. So, you know, my mother would never get involved, and she had the right lesson unless you stand up to them. Once you stand up to them, then they get over it. It's just amazing. They move on to the next.
Some of the culture that's going on now, to the whole thing with us. You were referring to that we're being so zealous in destroying people for a mistake.
Is I couldn't agree.
He was a bully. Called a bully culture to the victim can become the in fact, most of the time, you know. I talked with Billy Bob Thornton and I when he wrote gave me the script for Sling Blade. I said, this character is interesting because he's he's a bully, and bullies are usually those that are most afraid. And I said, he said, yeah, he said he. I said, you know the character that I was playing, And I said, he's the one that's the most afraid in the room and that's why he's or it's out of his control and he freaks and starts to But the bullying is usually born out of oftentimes being having been the bullied, right, the victim, Oh, yeah, the last person you want in charge of something. And that's what they do at prisons. They make you know, trustees out of other inmates, and they you know, put them in charge of the other and they're oftentimes the worst you know, uh, you know, the worst thing that could happen to the other prisoners is another prisoner being elevated being in charge of them. Anyway.
But well, no, it's the same type of thing, you know, talking about your forgiveness. There are all these people who can't change their mind. What kind of life is that, you know, like in politics, Okay, I believed one thing, I now know I'm nothing else.
Let's move on.
Yeah, but you can't do that. It's all a team sports.
To me, that shows a capacity of intelligence that you're able to evolve, right, and we can all evolve, you know, all of us and anyway, so yeah, but my mom also tamped that down. She wouldn't stand. She said, he shook me one time when he had just gotten back, you know, and just kind of knew me. And she was driving in the car and he was holding me and I started crying, screeching, like you know, the ten month old or whatever I was, and he kind of just said he shook me. And she took the car across the highway into the medium and back up the other side yelling at him into about he's all right, okay, don't kill him whatever. I'll never touch the kid. It's like. But she, very early on was our protector, and she wouldn't allow my granddad, who I was touched on a minute ago. My dad had a tough way, you know, like your dad, you know, he got knocked around. I mean, my granddad was a frustrated prize fighter. He had fought in clubs what they call a club fighter when he was underage, like at seventeen eighteen nineteen, and you had to be twenty one. And they went to his parents. There was a guy manager came through and saw him. He had a lot of fights and was evidently had a really vicious right hand, and they tried to get him turned pro and his parents. The old railroad or my great granddad, who I knew, actually I knew years beyond my grandfather because he outlived he lived into his nineties. Samuel Burt, who had come in the wagon, that covered wagon into the Ohio territory, come across. He he wouldn't sign. He said, nope, nope, Lawrence. That was LR Lawrence. He's gonna work on a railroad. And he said destroyed him. So he never could. And he drank, even though you know he was true to my grandmother, but he drank and fistfought. He became a yard boss from the Penn Centry and ran the yard railroad yards. But tough guy. And my brother, my my my dad and my uncle's you know, were uh, you know, treated pretty rough, you know by him. So my dad had an empathy for us. But my mom is who guided it. You know. I watched her at the dinner. He never hit one of us in the you know, like you were saying the never back. And he threatened, he threatened. I could see he was trying real hard not to With my brother especially. I used to say to him, said, dude, just say yes whatever, and when you get gone and do what you're gonna do, get out, you know, don't be the rebel that has no cause here. You know, you're not gonna win, right. Family dynamics. It's funny that you and then you're the youngest of your family.
Well what happens is my older sister would be out of control, then my younger sister would act.
Like the baby. Well they stay there. You know.
The key is just don't get caught in the crossfire. Yeah, there was so much. My father owned a liquor store. Oh, my sister started to have these parties on on the weekends where not only would they drink his booze, they would leave the boxes at the end of the street.
Oh.
My father would go bersirque, say you know, I'm gonna lose my liquor license. Forget. It's like you're there's gonna be no money. The other thing my father, my father would turn around in the station wagon and smack all of us in the back to eat, and we were less scared to get expacked.
The thing's got to drive the car right off the road was the bigger issue was dying at that point. The only time I've got my old man. We had a Buick Electra to twenty five convertibles. They inherited from my aunt and uncle had it for they sold it to my parents. My mom drove it. So we were going to Kentucky in that and we were taking this cat that we had a duce in a quarter, duce in a quarter. I heard it at the at the carboys the gap came up and said, where's y'all's car, And I said, it's over there. He goes that deduce in a quarter that. I was like, wow, that's cool. I heard more slang from my dad pre anybody in my junior high or high school saying it, because he was this old army guy, right, They had the slang, the stuff like he'd say, the dude thought he was bad. I said bad. My mother said, David, David, will you please just go easy on how you talk to these kids. He said, well, that's what he said. He thought he was bad. He thought he was a bad dude. I mean a decade before I heard anybody on the streets say that guy's bad, right, and it's like bad badly where Brown was late catching up to me, and my dad said it and all other kinds of slang. And he said, well meaning he thought he was tough, you know, he thought he was a real bad cat. And I used to say and it was a fascinating moment. I got to take he and his wife to Europe with me. He had not been back to Germany and he didn't want to leave. He was going to get married. I mean, thank god he didn't get I wouldn't exist. And the commanding general took over his division had been the colonel at bestone in the famous note where he wrote back to the Germans, nuts and the guy reads it and remember them. It's in the midde of the Battle of Ball. He was nuts Buss and he's like and so he spoke German at the dinner table to us because he was there six years. He would speak at go Ah, expl said Dodd shot because he dated this, and so that general took over and said, anybody'd been over here longer than eighteen months, they're gone. He'd been there six years, he loved it, and so he had never been back. So I think it was in nineteen I was playing the Monterey Jazz Festival Montro Jazz Festival, not Monterey, Montro Jazz Festival in Switzerland, and they did a bunch of things with this. I took them. We had several dates across around Europe, a whole run of stuff, and I took Key and his wife. And one of the great moments for my dad and I to have shared was I got to introduce him to Johnny Cash. You know, he was the songs that made him famous. Sun record I had because my dad had it. The albums that I got exposed to her because my dad, my dad was one of those what I used to call and Cash knew when I met the hillbilly cats that were the gis right, that were otherwise would have been locked. He What helped open my dad was the almost ten years in the army he went culture shopping. Right, they were exposed to the world in the way that his dad never was. Right. They were locked in the Ohio that didn't go outside, you know, from wherever he run from Pittsburgh to Evansville, Indiana, along that river and the railroad that was it. And my great my granddad and my mom's a man. He I remember my granny moved out to north of Dallas and Texas with her daughter, the youngest of my mom's family, my aunt Kay, and lived with them the last year of her life. And she used to look. She said, Luther would have never imagined this Texas. She said, he never thought there was any places flat, you know, because we were just because you could see the sunrise and the horizon sun set in the horizon, you know, for one hundred miles. So anyway, my dad in this really element in a weird way, you know. Hillbilly Katz they were the post World War two generation of GI's right that occupied remember Elvis's great song out of g I blues occupation GI blues right, meaning it was his occupation. But they were occupying those places that were conquered, right. So that's what my dad was. And Johnny Cash and he they turned out that they were standing there and I introduced it, Dad, this is mister Cash, and Johnny this is my dad, and I said, I think you guys might have been here, and they turned out they were in Germany, stationed forty miles apart, same years, and they hit it, you know, they were like, oh yeah, but Johnny was in the Air Force, Dad, My dad was in the Army, and so that was a great moment to share with him, to watch him somebody who he really you know, idolized and had those records, those early Cash records, that stuff, and that's who he was, you know, those guys Cash Dad, you know Cash out of Arkansas and it's you know, Johnny Cash. And reading his biography, you know he was a code breaker in the Air Force. He listened to Russian code and was a listener and that what is what is? But he wrote walked the line. They still had to pull sentry duty. He I don't know if you ever read this, but he wrote that song about pulling sentry duty on the flight line at the airbase in Germany, as I keep a close watch on this heart of mine, right, brilliant. Huh, how genius is that art? You're pulling guard duty. That's a difference in a guy who's a poet and the guy who just turned the wrench and going I just got to get out of here, you know. John Johnny writes that I walked the line out of pulling guard duty, but it was an interesting moment for that and then and so yeah, wow, we've talked so much. I've never talked this much about my dad with anybody.
You know, Bob, did you know from a young age you were somebody special and you were destined for a different outcome from than your dad and your relatives?
Well, like I said, there's probably enough narcissism in me, and it's just don't you come in with that. And maybe you know, but firstborn, you know, you're kind of treated like you're expected to be the shining star, but you're also treated differently. You know, I've got a little guy at this point, in my life. She know, I thought that train left the station a long time ago. It did not. We've got a little guy coming up on three years old. Dalton and I watched and there's a and I said, I said, he's kind of precocious. You know, there's something about because firstborn's talk to more, you know, and she and I and are you know, I mean, I'm, you know, a bit older than my wife, you know, and thank god that she's you know, still got her youth on her side with him. But the beauty of it is that we've never either of us. I think we just talked to him like he's an adult from the time he was born, just kind of expecting and and my mother expected a lot, you know. And I think I carry with my mom. I had to get rid of some of it because it's it's it's packweights. You can't carry up that mountain, you know, if you're going to climb, you have to be able to shed it at some point. And I know when had happened. It kind of happened in stages. But one of the moments was right before I left to come to California. You know, I just had a moment where we she and I had and my dad couldn't. He never got in between my mother and I, and I think it's because he felt we had a bond that was unique and different, because she spent almost her entire pregnancy alone with me, and we were down you know, my grand her parents, and then the first nine months of my life, he wasn't here right and he wasn't with us. So I think he always left the two of us, my brother, not his movies. He was, you know there, you know, handed my brother and my sister and my sister and dad had a very special relationship with it, you know, unique and and her you know, she was this little girl, you know, and you know, and uh uh, I think the connection to his own mother was was my sister, you know, and and who he dearly loved, you know. And he used to say that about his mom as much as his dad was rough on the three of them. He said, but we knew we were mom, mom, mother, your grandmother, Helen. She never let us go to bed, not thinking we were loved. And I said, well, good deal, good deal, you know, so I'm in the through line. Uh was that for us as kids? You know, we didn't have a lot you know, and they were struggling, you know, week to week paycheck people, and uh, you know, we had had a double aunt and uncle. My dad's older brother was married to my mom's older sister. That's how they met. Wow, they almost became surrogate parents, for they lived very close and they were both they never had kids, and so we were there with them, very close to them. My dad's brother was Larry, and my mom's sister was Margaret, and she was about eight years old my mom and uh, his brother Larry was six years old. I think that my dad are five maybe five, but enough that there was a gap and it was this you know, so that was interesting the perspective there and you know this is unique. And but this back to the car ride and the threat of death. You know, there was two times in that same buick that that that Electra two twenty five convertible and funny what year was it? As a sixty five? A cool look at me white, I'm white on white? Right? My aunt had to talk about something that would be worth a lot today. My oh yeah, my aunt had a black on black on black and and then my uncle got this white on white on white when they went this pair of these and then they graduated. As I wrote, that's why my you know, the guitars, Cadillac's reference the album title and my original that that second hit that I ever had about the culture, the Hillblo culture. You made it if you had a Cadillac, you know, and a lot of American culture. You had made it if you oh where I was absolutely with the Goombas and everybody. If you had a Cadillac, man that was you know, Rolls Royce. We don't know nothing about it, but if you had. So they graduated to the first Cadillact they ever bought was a sixty nine. That's when my mother inherited, you know, the the deuce in a quarter. So she was driving. We were in that and we had this cat that we had no business having cats anyway. We had the cat for about I don't know, nine months a year and they decided, okay, we're going to take it down and give it to you know, mother and daddy. They'll they'll, you know, they'll like this cat. We were taking it to Kentucky to the hills, right and my brother, my dad was put the cat. Well, they had it in a box they put so he would sleep you know, and he didn't put in a trunk with the whole air. You know. It was invented like a like a homemade kennel. And my brother insisted on Topper being in the car with him in the back seat with my sister brother in I right, And that thing was cool. It had stereo, but it didn't have air conditioning. Sixty file is still another. Yeah, it was a convertible, a luxury car, that particular one, the black one had air, but this one didn't have air. And my uncle actually had an after remember those aftermarket air conditionings. They would sit on the floor.
We had one in a sixty four olds will be on.
Yeah, they would put him in afterward. Right, the big bobsolutely look like a microwave ove and dinner with events, you know. And reverb units. My old man bought a JC Whitney catalog reverb unit. Of course under the dash. It's like it's just a reverb spring. Why would you have it on the radio. But it had this the front speaker and the one in the convertible the deck, you know, the back seat, right, and you could have those two because I remember listening to such great music in that car and all He had a sixty four Ford Galaxy convertible aqua blue with a white top with the first glass back window I ever saw in a convertible, And most of them were plastic up there, and it came glass and it would split when they would put the top down.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's sixty four Ford fair Lane five hundred. And then she had that Electra and and he was another thing. He was like, you know, Jack, these cars, all the hot riders had him raise right in the back with the big wide old tires, and he said, you ain't gonna raise nothing on the old NASCAR. And he's the boot layer, and he said, we would put weight that back end to keep it on, you know, in the trunk his cards. They were riding like this right on the angle I'm doing like we're on TV, but you and I are look but on that angle anyway, with fenderskirts and all that. So we got this cat topper. My brother argued wanted him in the back seat, so I watched. He said, he said, you can't open that box that cat, you know, leave leave them in there. Well we weren't. We were fifteen miles from the house doing a clover leave to get on the route twenty three and my brother reached down popped it open to check on him. You know, my brother was always also very mechanically inclined, had tools. They would drive my dad crazy with his tools stuff being missing, and my brother would be out there in the garage with him. I wasn't I was up in the room of the guitar and my brother had to look. And the cat came out of there straight up, hit the ceiling, ricocheted across. It was nuts, you know, was like wow, it went across the ceiling into the My dad tried to stop it and pin it. Now we're doing seventy miles an hour, you know, it's pre fifty five. You know, it's like, you know, the speed limits sixty five there, and people were driving seventy seventy five and eighty on the inn on the highway, and he's coming round that cliffer and the cat went crazy because we're doing a circle and that's the little cat, and he hit the front windshield and went across, hit my mom's side of the windshield, went back and hit past the three of us, and came back up and hit my dad and lent bit him in the neck. Scratched him across the face all the drum and I remember my dad, my dad. All he did was pin him with that big arm and he grabbed it and went bam on the dash, hit the windshield, pinned him. He goes, I'm good, My mother said, David. David slowed to kill us. He goes, I'm get in his car. Off the road, and he pulled over off. He got off the clover and got down to the and he grabbed that cat and had him by the and his cat flip, jumped out of the car, went back out, got the cat, threw him in the cat tails. There were cattails growing in the you know, against the side of the road, down the medium, and threw him into that and let the cat was out there by that point because he had strangled him out, you know, get him out of the car and he had a cut, I mean he was and so he put him back one after they both coughed it out for a minute or two, he put the cat and back in the box, said bring me in that box and put him in a trunk and we drove him on that and he lived with him for the next ten or twelve years. That cat was still down there. And how he made it he because he cause he stayed outside, but would come and sit in there kitchen window on an old tree, uh and stare in at him, and they'd go out and feed him. There was a topper anyway, you were talking about.
Your cat, my younger sisters. The cat went away for two and a half years and came back, really lived outside of him.
What was going on there? Because coyotes to get him out here. You aren't going to live beyond you know, cats are you know in jeopardy all.
Somebody else obviously adopted him and then didn't feed him, and then he came back to your house.
Cats and strange creatures. Kinky Friedman. I don't know if you've read any of his the kind of fictional little pulp fiction things that he wrote, kind of pretty funny, pretty funny stuff. And his whole cat routine is his affection to his cats. He still has a lot of cats in it. And uh, you know, I was never a cat guy. I you know, kind of a dog.
Bunch of an animal guy. But why are you Dwight?
My mother just loved the name people assumed, and I'm Dwight David, which was worse because everybody's like, oh, you named It was like, no, my dad's name's David. So she wanted to get you know, without making me a junior, which I appreciated that, but uh, Dwight. She just liked, you know, she just liked the name, and it was it'd been not commonplace at that point, you know, and Eisenhower was president. But but uh uh. And then my uncle, her brother, the only boy in the six of them, he was was he three years older than Yeah, I think he's three years older than my mother. They were very close. Guy Walton, my granddad always called him peanut. He's a you know, old peanut. He's a pankerdons man. He used to look at a peanut he goes. My mom said, that's guy old grandfather. Daddy just always calls him peanut. And they were both My granddad was about six one or so, like he just just looks like what those mountain men were. And uh and my uncle was about six two is calling him peanut. This was always beyond me, but you know, as a kid and uh uh, he would walk up. He was a good basketball player and he taught me how to balance it on the tip of my finger, you know, spin the basketball, and he he never would quit call me Ike. Ike had nothing to do with Dwight's first name, right Ike, And my mom said, yeah, he just like how you doing? And book. My middle name was David from my dad and uh, and we gave Dalton our little guy. One of my great regrets is that he didn't get to meet him. Uh. His middle name is Lauren and my dad's middle name was Lauren. And uh, you know, so there's a so what have you learned?
What have you learned from being a dad?
Uh? Hopefully and measured amounts some selflessness, uh, some willingness to impatience. And I'm still learning. So I'm learning every day. But uh, I've learned love in a whole new way.
You know.
That's the thing that I think. I really I shuddered to think that I could have gone on through finished life and not experienced it. Now that I have it, you know that that you know, it's a I wrote a song. It's going to be on this new album. That'll that won two things with him in mind. One, he came into me because he's fasting with the guitar. Gphty makes me pulled out and he's got a little finder makes a Yuku lele version of the telecaster, and he's had it since he's done. He's been on the side of the stage for like sixty shows over the last year and a half or two of mine. And it's been interesting to watch and his his kind of almost eerie understanding of the me of both of us, my wife Emily and his mom and me. And it's interesting because he's born to you know parents. I mean, she was thirty seven, I'm I'm so much older. And it's an interesting dynamic to watch him, you know. And and uh, but love, love is you know, the thing I've learned, you know, at a different level.
You know, what about if you want to do one thing and the kid wants attention, I need to.
Learn to give over. It's tough when you've been as solo as I've been for as long as as much as I love him, I have to remind myself, no, I owe him my attention. I owe him my attention because he needs it. You know, there's there's a need, you know. And anyway, yeah, so, but did you plan to have him or did you just well, we wanted, we wanted to and we didn't know we were, Yes, it was it was with you know, willingness that we did. You know that we uh, but enough, we didn't need help, just our own encouragement. And here he came.
And then what about a second you were mentioning, Oh, I don't.
Know, maybe I don't know, you know, but you know, I think I think it would stop there. I don't think I'll have a middle and they have the oldest and a younger.
You know, they need each other for when you're gone or when you're in your old Well.
I see that. I think so because I had and I see it. And of course my wife twelve, you know, she just doesn't know how you have only kids. Only kids I've known you know somew you know, uh and oldest kids and only kids get along.
You know.
Only kids tend to be very adult, you know, because they deal in an adult world in a different way than you know, those of us that had, you know, the siblings to fight and all with and you know, and engage in any kind of you know, endie or jealousy with you know all that.
But ah, it's just yeah, okay, let's go back.
Life's what goes on when you're making other plans.
Yeah, but now it's a little bit different when your time is totally your own.
You know, once you have a kid.
I don't have any kids, so they say that you're a kid yourself your whole life if you don't have any kids.
Well that's what it feels like now when I think back that I got away from being a kid. I pay.
But now the choices are different. I mean, if you have a kid, you can say, well, you know, we're just animals. We're here to reproduce. This is what it's all about. When you don't have a kid, your choices are more important, like, well, this has got to count. I mean, some people are drifting. I don't want to judge them, but myself it's like, well, you know, I didn't invest in kid, I didn't invest in family, so my career think it's got to work because I didn't sacrifice, you know.
Yeah, it's an interesting dynamic. And and uh, I love my wife even more than I loved her because she because of her, she gave me this. You know, it's just a very very unique gift that Emily brought to my life. Uh and uh, yeah, she never thought anything different than that. You know, we were we should have a child. And I was never opposed to having kids, and I always thought but again, my plan was, well, when I'm really feeling that I've got it, you know, handle and everything's in order, and you know, I've got this and that, and then you look around one day and you're like that ships sail, I guess I don't think that, you know, my life is good. And then it didn't, you know, you know, another another another horn was heard coming across the horizon of the of the you know, the ocean there and here he is. So it's it's but this is your this is your old married man. Right again, I didn't I didn't marry this one different.
I've been married once before. I've been living with my girlfriend now, I mean you and only been married once before?
Now, I just I just uh again, you know, had this. My parents divorced, but it was after we were all three grown. It is an interesting dynamic and they were together that long and and it was tough on them. I think it was tough with my aunt and uncle, you know, the older brother and said they never divorced, you know, and uh uh yeah, and so so I probably felt apprehensive about it, you know, and I just avoided. I just I also knew that I didn't want a marriage where I wouldn't be able to uphold the integrity of the of the promise, you know. You know, by the time I really started to have any success success, I was thirty. I was twenty nine when I signed with Warner and re released the EP that had been out about eighteen months or so. It was late twenties, and I thought, man, I've been broke and single all these this decade of my life. Maybe I should be not broken single for a while. And then, you know, life gets in your way, and you know, like I said, the John Lennon quote, you know, that's what happens while you're making other plans. And she and I met, we've been to we've been together actually for almost ten years before we got married. We've been engaged, and I know, I knew I wanted to marry her. And but again I was, you know, still trying to make things feel complete, you know, for lack of a better way to put it, you know, with my own just personal life. Believe me, I know that.
I know, when you get married the first time, it's like yeah, And then I was a year old enough and you're in a position where you realize you never feel that no.
You finally yeah, I tried to give over.
So how did you and Emily meet?
We met in Nashville. She was working two three different jobs she had left you know. Uh. She was raised in Omaha, and she came from one side of the family had cattle ranchers outside and well both sides of her parents, you know, the Joyce says her name is Emily Joyce as her maiden name, and she, uh, she grew up there and then went to creyton a on a full academic scholar She was a volleyball player and was going to own volleyball scholarship in her junior year. Right after the season she was a sectional player and there was a car accident. A drunk ran a light and hit she and a girlfriend. She was in the pastor's side, hit her in that side and destroyed a rotator cup. I mean, just so it ended the aspirations. She would have been a these five eleven. I mean, she was on her track to probably go to a Big ten school or whatever, and Creighton gave her a full ride to do pre med and so she graduated a year and she like you. She was a year ahead. She had done so much advanced placement and so forth, and she burned out finally because you know, she was there with family, you know, she was still being made to feel responsible, you know, for all those siblings under her, you know, the other ten beneath her. There was one older brother. They're twelve months apart, Irish twins that I think they're referred to as and that close. So her older brother and she and she left. She did one year pre med. Then she decided she could take getting close to patients. She was working in a hospital and and and studying, and then she did nursing for two more years. She had three years of you know, almost a nursing room. She left and went to Nashville, joined the circus and thought she'd go back to school there, didn't. And we met in a restaurant there, and she was working at one of the Cumulus stations there and radio like working with a radio group. And and we didn't meet in the station, and we kind of stayed in touch, you know, both of us were in all with different people. And then she traveled out here at one point, just on a brief vacation, and we saw each other out here and then we began she then she took a scholarship again at Mount Saint Mary's University, you know in Brentwood on top of the mountain there that'll run by the used to be an all girls. Uh, it's a Catholic university up there, but she did it. Some years later she picked up and then she had moved out here and was doing that and we began to date, you know that following in and and uh, uh that's how we you know, I met and just there was some soul connection, you know. At that point she's uh, you know, pretty, but it's beyond that. It's it's it was, there's beauty. Uh. And her best described by the third party. One night, we were coming out of a restaurant and and the actor Mira Sorvina's father wanted to forget his first name from Goodfellows to all and he just passed a year before last. Paul, you know, Paul Sorvino was there and he flagged me over and we were talking because he was doing a bit of opera here in town at the time. He's saying opera if you knew that, or the actor Pulserman and there was somebody else, a friend with us that was an actress, and she reached over for very you know, fused toward him and kind of telling him, you know, some things she was doing. And he looked across behind me at Emily and he said, you you're soulful. And I told her, I said, that's the best description I've ever heard of you. You know, there is a soulfulness. And so we met and you know, fell for each other and in that way, and and stayed with it. And I'm not easy, to say the least.
I'm okay, Well, why are you not easy?
Just who I am? You know, my nature and my my idiosyncratic nature.
You know, well tell us a little more.
I don't want to go into it, Bob, because that'd be given up too much. I can't tell you you already got somebody who was my idiosyncras. I mean, I just you know, look, I've lived alone the order of my how I'm a neat freak. You know. I keep things in, you know, like certain spots and places.
And and.
I'm not uh uh, I don't really have a d D. But I'm obsessive compulsive. Probably you know, I've got tend to Warren zvon. One night Billy Bob Thornton was talking about you know, uh O c D. And he said, yeah, I've got We were at a restaurant, remember Elsa Leigh on the Strip. Uh rest great great food and uh he was talking about it one night. Warrens zvone was a friend and and and he said, and did you ever meet Warren and all your I'm surprised because he charming guy and real rye wit obviously and were wolfs of London was the you know, the tip of it. But but you know Thompson, the headless gunner and all you know, you know, excitable boy, all the stuff that he wrote, Lawyers, guns and money. You know, We're sitting there and I used to say, I knew Warren post graduate. You know, he was settled down by the time I met him. He was not doing the you know, the Peruvian marching powder. That can't he talks about doing it anymore because I've heard the stories, he said. So we're sitting there and we're Billy's talking about obsessive compulsive you know stuff, and he's I got to do this, and he goes on and on about obsessive compulsive Billy Bob Thornton now disorder and he's very open about it, you know. He's like, and Warren's listening and just smiles. That cheshuire cat grinned as he's like, that's smiling is He said, have you ever had it with guns?
Like what have you ever had?
What have you ever had it with guns? And we both like right up, like no, I never had it was obsessive couples of Warrens like hmm. He just nodded at he would like since I know he was guilty of doing something up in Santa barber with guns anyway, Uh, the same deal when Billy was talking about that at the same restaurant and the guy that one of the owners, Paulo, who would sit and he was a little pit bowl from Tuscany and he but he was like sit there and he would smoke a cigarette holding it a lah you know MASTRIONI or somebody like, holding it like upside down with his index finger and thumb to smoke. He was sitting there sideways to Billy and I. He would just plots down in anybody's table if he knew if you were a regular at all, and he knew you and just insert himself in your dinner, you know. And so he goes, and Billy was saying, you know, well if I if I don't do this four times in a row, he'd chop at his thighs with his hands. He said. He looked at me and he said, you'll die in the way home. Then I said, I'll die if you don't do it. Why why die if you don't do the obsessive complete He goes, I don't know, but that's just how it works. And Pablo Hollow Paulo was sitting there with his back to us, half listening. He was not realizing Billy's talking about HIMSELFOD He goes, see, see he's stuck with a cigarette. See see is maniac? Who does this? Is maniac? Who was like, yeah, so I'm not you know, I'm not. I'm a little obsessive compulsive, I guess, And but I'm not really add because if you stay with me long enough, my tangent will come back around. I'll figure out Oh yeah, I got that. Yeah, yeah, which is that there's a difference some people assume if they're only with me for fifteen minutes and I'm add it's not that. No.
That was the shrink when I first started to see the shrink. I was in a bad space, and he thought that I couldn't track. That's like a big things. No, no, that I realized it always comes back to the beginning of the story.
Well, watching reading your writing, that's what was always That's where I'd stepped on your train years ago when I started, you know, reading the you know the stuff you would you know, your letter and uh and I was fascinated with and that must make it makes you a great writer, you know, the way you can take us on the journey and take the tangents and bring it back, you know. And so yeah, I'm a little untethered.
Okay, well let me ask you a different question. The limo's there to pick you up, take you to the airport, limo pulls away. Do you think you are you concerned whether you lock the door or not.
A little bit. I'm usually so compulsive enough that I've done and I have a routine like you know, touch three, you know, touch this, I don't do. I'm not I'm not quite as extreme. You know, Bill is extremely well, you know they can treat that now.
And I went to a special doctor for it because regular talk therapy doesn't work.
No, no, no, no, I didn't know.
No, you have to do exposures. I remember. It's like there are certain things to be able to let go.
You know.
Well, it's like, uh, if you know all the cans with poison on them, like don't do this, don't do that whatever, they'll scare me. So you work your way, you work your way up a ladder, just touching them at first. Then you get to the point where you use them. So it's it's an interesting thing. I mean, it never goes away, but you learn how to cope because otherwise it can torture.
Well with Billy Boba does. That's why I know I don't have it as severely because I've been like what you're describing, and I'll turn the cans facing away. But that's just kind of an aesthetic thing with me. I'm I'm really given to do whatever you want. Yeah that's no, okay, So I turned the cans. But it's not OCD. It's it's aesthetically. It's the aesthetics, but not all. But I don't freak out if they're although I will move something on the I and I like asymmetry. I you know, I like things to be slightly asymmetrical, you know, just in a room or you know, on the angle on the top of a desk, and and then I but I let go, you know, I tend to let go of stuff. I mean like, there's certain spots that are just a mess. They're going to be a mess until I can get around to do it. And I don't. I don't, you know, I won't. People often think it's like, are you a hoarder. It's like, no, I don't hoard, because then they're shocked when I walk in and I have the time. I desperately feel like I need the time to focus, you know, and and I'll go through and when I clean it out, it's gone. It's like, get rid of that now, I don't need I haven't used that in five years. That is that was a dream, you know, I was like I was. I thought it was being a boy scout, you know, my holding this and this and this and it. So I don't I have bits of it. I have bits of it.
Well, you know, not all the things. You know, you can have different characteristics. I do have the hoarding characteristic.
Progress is it hoarding or just preparing?
First and foremost? I know where everything is.
I used to you had to give that up with marriage and the child.
You know, certain things are really hard to throw out anyway. Okay, what books?
Well, books especially I don't want to Well, I mean, not only do I have the books that I have, I have the books that everybody sends me like, okay, yeah, you must get Okay, Rick Rubin, they did that special with him on HBO Showtime whatever, and he bought Shangri Lass Studios, you know, up in Malibu, and he's got a library with all these books. What you learn is an incredible percentage of the books I have will never be reprinted, and no one else has these.
So I'm saying, well, when I can reach that level, I'll have like the same thing drives my girlfriend nuts because in the garage, I got stacks and stacks of these books. And then as you get old, the older you get, everything becomes meaningless anyway. But it's like, well, all my vinyl records, I chose each and every one of those. I'm my partner with those. I say, when I die, do not throw those away. They're worth tens and tens and tens of thousands of dollars, you know, because they're meaningless to you know, like my girlfriend. But and you know she's like you in the house. It's like she likes order. But let me go one step further. Do you tend to ruminate on things?
No, I let go. I will let go. That's that's a difference. You know, Like you're getting ready to get this at the airport, It's like, uh, and I'll just make a plan to avoid it the next time. If I've left something, you know, I'll make a you know, I'll do something in order of getting out that.
I will tell you when they go for treatment, they get rid of all.
That which the order of getting out of the rituals.
You have to be able to lock the door and walk away. And the funny thing is you have to do everything three times you get to the point where you could do it. Because I used to be like you, I would hold okay, I'm gonna rush, I'm gonna hold the key, and I'm gonna think about it so I know that I can remember, well, you got it, do it just quickly. You know, this is a whole nother avenue to go down.
I don't have as much of the ritual That's what I mean about Billy Bob, and what you're describing. I never had the ritual stuff that I had to turn three like stand tap tap tap and and turn or something. Mine was more pragmatic based, I guess me the function actually to some degree.
Okay, let's go back to the essence. Here Emily comes into the house and she moves something.
Might bug me. She was great though. We had a housekeeper a few a couple of housekeepers back that came in over and she said, I watched you. We were walking her through and I was saying, okay, and this and then, but you don't need to move. You can dust around like there's a an athmost clock, one of those you know brass you know. And I said, but in there it's not an angle. It's not straight, okay, but for just the aesthetic, I just like it on an angle, not because I think I'm gonna if I don't do the angle, I'm gonna walk out. And I got it, I got it. It's literally what pleases me. The energy that almost almost the what's the Japanese the you know the way huh feng shui? Yeah, yeah, feng shui of that, so that it's almost that maybe of what and she watched her go over. I literally said, so, stuffs, didn't you just leave? I haven't placed very specifically, just because that's where I want it and how I like it. And she walked over two minutes after I had said that and turned that carck she goes and Emily was like, that's not going to go. Well, yes, we hired she worked for us for two years, I guess, but there were those moments just and because Emily's a shrewd observer of you know, she had to learn. You know, she had all these kids, she cut the um biblical court on, you know, her youngest brother in the hospital, you know, with her mom. I mean, she she was made a caretaker. So she's had to observe. So she's been an interesting, you know, observational you know, a person to have at close range of me.
You know, it's like, well, usually when there's that, when there's that many kids, they know how to compromise. Like on all the reality shows they say the Mormons, you're not supposed to use that word anymore. The Church of the Latter day Saints, they say they're really Mormon.
I didn't get the memo, man.
Well you're getting it now.
And why not. Why is Mormon?
You know, I'm tuned into this only because I lived in Utah for two years and that was an experience. It's much more cosmopolitan now. But uh, there's a reason and I forgot it.
WHOA, you can't leave me like that. Now, I'm gonna have to go look this up.
I could look it up.
All we're about Christ of the Latter Day saying LDS, right.
Right, You could say, hey, they're LDS.
But at the extremist version of no, no, oh, okay, I thought extremists.
I don't even think there's a specific for the extremists, okay, of which I remember when I lived in Utah, we would go buy somebody's house where there were six front doors. Said, that's where the polygamists lived.
Yeah. Wow, okay.
But since she's has to get along with so many people, does that make it easier for her to be with you.
Probably allowed her to put up with me. Yeah yeah, probably maybe.
So Okay, someone like you who's very determined in the mediate. Let's say you come home and you say, you know, I'm going out to dinner with this person. I'm going to to the studio tomorrow, and then I'm going on the road for a week. She's gonna say that's fine, or why didn't you tell no?
No, none, no, I mean she and she traveled a lot with me. She was shooting a lot of my live shows. She started shooting. She had great eyes photographer. She finished her undergrad degree. She completely chucked medicine anyway in science and ended up doing her undergrad when she finished her degree in history and English with a minor in English. And and but she had so many credits amassed from all of her you know, academic you know, uh years that she had to still put in on campus there at Mount Saint Mary's. And so she the last year studied film photography with a pretty talented you know, uh instructor, and she began to develop and you know, using film and then transcend transitioned into her digital camera. And uh, but you can't teach someone to have a good composition, law, you can't, you know what I mean, You know you can't teach it. You can't teach speed, as the old coach's you know somebody you can coach it, But you can't teach people to be fast, right, And have you watched that Reggie Jackson documentary by the way, I have.
Not watched it. I'm familiar with what you're telling.
Yeah, I really did. I was a bit. We were out on the road coming back and I but she traveled with me. It's it's it's a good watch. It's an interesting perspective on him. It's a whole different perspective than what you and I probably had because he was Reggie Jackson in capital letters right when we you know, from the Oakland A's to the But when you hear his whole when he tells it now and now, it's a little bit, it's just it's it's pretty touching you know him, you know, and where he is and and uh what he did and how he's anyway, because I was a Cincinnati Reds kid, you know, like I hated the Orioles, you know, and I didn't like the Dodgers. I still, you know, it's tough sometimes. I was at the game the other day.
I saw more people in the music business than I do at a concert. But I am not a Dodgers fan.
Well I was.
I'm an American League fan, that's just the way.
Well, I rooted for the Angels and then turned that Gene Autry owned him and he took me, you know, once my career had succeeded. He had me come down and sit in his box one night and he and they were playing the Rangers, and I said, you know, mister Roubrey, I said, I don't you know. Jean looked at me. He said, I said, I don't want to offend you, but I'm a huge Nolan Ryan fan. Time. I moved out here because I could root for you guys and hate the Dodgers. Still the Angels, right, and I loved that there were the California Angels, not anaheind angels. There were the Californians. So I went to He said, O, come on, Nolan loved to meet you. Come on, and he was on the bike. He wasn't pitching that day. He was down in the clubhouse and he was peddling watching the game. You know, Nolan just never get nobody will ever break that record, you know, of no hitters. But anyway, so I because being a Reds kid, you know, the Dodgers, it was always exotic though, because their games would come on out of WLW in Cincinnati at like eleven at night. You know, we were right and it was Dusty in the Palm trees and the Dodgers Stadium no place like it. It's one of the most beautiful settings ever you know up there. And that old Union seventy six gas station used to be in a parking lot right out there right.
Yeah, yeah, I remember that because we didn't have seventy six where I grew up, and you had to wait till you had to wait till the next morning to get the results.
Yeah, certainly from the West coast.
Wait, cross was it Crossley Field with the Cincinnati.
Reds then, Yeah, the Crawsley Field before they built Riverfront right by seventy when they became the big red machinery in the Riverfront, they were but Pete and Johnny Bench and all. And they came out of Crawsley Field because they were those guys that were coming up in the sixties and the Reds and brought to you a Burger beer down on the river anyway, So yeah, I why did I talk about the Dodgers and the Reds?
You well, I remember to have to do with your wife and the photography. But I want to go back and traveling with me. Okay, I get and we let's why did your parents get divorced?
I I think I think on some levels they were ill suited to each other. My mother was had hoped for I knew why she fell in love with it, you know, and he felt for her. He never quit, you know, he he was smitten when he met her, you know. But she wasn't prepared. She was a demure young girl from southeast you know, in the holler there, and just had not been prepared for his voisterous self, you know kind of and his nature. And I think the fears she lived with that, his Walter midyishness, you know, kind of the dreaming and the we're gonna you know it finally, you know, kind of got to her to the point that she couldn't. And I don't think she you know, he he was the one I think that suggested it. You know, Okay, well let's we should just we should split up. And my sister had gone to college and we were I was gone, my brother trying to think if he had anyway whatever, I don't think was at home, and uh, you know it was never. It wasn't a case of either of them, you know, one like one cheated and my dad never and uh, disillusionment, you know, truly, I think they just you know, and they had they had had to really just stay on top of it for so long to get us grown and you know out and I don't know, but I tried to understand, you know, for both of them. It was really My mother was really conflicted, you know, because she'd been raised to believe, you know, that you didn't divorce, and you know, her parents didn't divorce never, and my the the closest people to them, his brother, her sister, never divorced, you know, to the end of their you know, my aunt died preceded my uncle, and uh. And she always loved my dad, I mean, you know, to the end. You know. You say he was a good man, And I said, yeah, I said, you know, and we know the bond if you can you imagine your parents were together right absolutely.
You know, I don't come from divorce. If my ex wife didn't leave me, i'd still be married.
Weirdly, it doesn't feel like I came from divorce because I was two years out here, you know, I was gone, you know, and it happened.
I have a friend I went to college with went through the identical situation, and he still hasn't gotten over his parents before to cease now.
But my sister had the toughest time because she had literally just left him and felt somewhat betrayed that she went to college and they you know, came back home there like the first you know, Christmas break or whatever. The that was like, what do you mean you're broken up? You know it happened within that window and you know you're you're divorcing. So yeah, but I also saw, you know, I saw the things that made them different in the struggle that they had, the arguments. Again, I didn't come from Knockwood. My dad never struck my mother. You know. One time, one time he might have threatened to spank her. The kids, Well you're a kid, You're like, you're gonna spank her. I'm gonna turn you over my neighbors. That's like, it's like you and it's like but that was more just absurd than anything that's right. But see, my mother worked from the time I was She stopped working for about three years, uh, I think post my sister's birth, and then went back when I was in first grade, I think, to work and she ran a data center. She'd been a typist and she knew how to type. She started running and doing key punch operator, right, and she became uh uh, she was a very smart woman. She became a computer operator. That was when they were the big old Univac. You know they were four feet five four and a half feet high by eight feet long, you know, and you fed cards.
You know.
That was our scratch pads at home, the left of her punch card, right, you know, the key punch cards. And uh she worked then that job for twenty five years. And uh uh she drove her own car. From the time I was a baby, she drove you know, she had her own she had her own credit cards. She come home from work, she followed sales. She knew how to you know, she was a very thrifty woman. She knew how to manage money, you know, with my dad on the other end, you know, been the army. Army took care of if you ran out, you were still had a place to sleep and eat. And she she would take us to sales at the big department store. There was Lazarus. You know, you go down in the basement sale, you know, you know what I mean. And it's like she that was that and I I she she really did, you know, uh conduct herself on an equal left footing with my father. You know that way we you know, we knew Mom would was able to do things on her own, you know, from the time I was a kid. I it probably makes me expect more, you know, from women than what some are raised to be. You know, like I like assumed, well, yeah, you can do all your own things. You can take your drive, yourself, do this, and uh yeah, so I didn't you know, suffer the consequence of a broken family. You know, we were grown and it was over, and they remained civil with each other, and you know, we're able to be around one another.
You did either of them find someone new?
Yeah? They both remarried and and stayed with the person who were married to to the end. You know. My mom's husband passed just about three was it four years ago? And he was a bit older than her. He was probably eight or ten maybe ten years older my mom and and my dad remarried and he outlived his his spouse. And yeah, but you know, I mean I'm fortunate. It lets me as an artist, I think in writing, uh you know, that's maybe why I'm drawing the things that like in film. You know, you were mentioning and writing about the guests that book. That's not entertainment. I've never liked just entertainment. I like, like, I'd rather watch a Robert Oltman movie. Oh yeah. If you remember when he got the Lifetime Achievement Academy Award at the end of his life, he said, Now, I know some of you haven't liked all the movies that I've made, he said, but I just asked you to keep watching. It gets better, meaning it's all one movie. Right. It was a brilliant statement of it.
I just remember when h fuck, what was the name of the one with Warren Beatty shot in the Pacific Northwest with all the snow.
Missus Miller. Yeah, oh, that's one of the best. And I heard Warren Batty didn't, I said, yeah, because he did not doesn't act like a movie star in it. He's like a real person. I care. And the compression of time and that and now the charge me that for chippies. I'm not paying that for chippies. And you know, the hookers he's going And.
If a frog had wings, he wouldn't bump his asshole, and and the and the deal and because it goes from you know, it's not the first time compressed time is being used, but it's Altman's use of it in that film was amazing in that you see Warren Baby go in to get you know, the chippies, and it can it comes back up like it's now the spring coming out of the winter.
Seven months later and the place is built and he's gotten, it's working, and that always fascinated me. And even the scene with Keith Carrody. It's one of keys first on the bridge where and the guy says, oh, that's you got now it's a nice looking gun, and you're going, don't He goes, let me see that? Can you let me see it? Oh, you're going, don't you know? And because the women in the place are watching it and they like him, you know, he's just this young green cowboy that is you know, and you're going no. But his ability with stuff like that, you know, is always.
Oh no, i think I've seen every close to every one of them, and kind of like it's very rare that someone can peak later in their career. But like shortcuts, shortcuts was.
Great, Oh yeah, yeah again his telling of because his movies are about the interaction of people with each other, always it's not plot driven. There's a plot, and he'll get to it, but he's not in such a hurry, and he's not so overwhelming that that's the issue, because that's entertainment, right plot. You know, anybody can write plot, but not many people can write character and dial all the way. The other one is is even Peckingpad later in his life, right when he delivers the seminal Western is wild bunch because it takes you into and the way he was using slow motion, ptigraphy, the violence and all that. But that movie, i argue, always is much more with one foot still in the traditional Hollywood filmmaking because of the score Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is the first rock and roll Western because of the way he scored it. Right now, I'm not having to dore all this stuff, you know, just all the recurring, the way it was done, Pat Garrett, Billy the Kid. But bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia is the one with Warren Oates going crazy, what right the hook or that he's in love with right and trying to get that head. I mean to me that you know, that's fascinating, and it's maybe because I didn't suffer the same kind of angst. I never felt fearful in our house. I never felt fear from the outside world. As my old man was, I always felt it was a protector from the time I was a kid. For whatever his flaws were, nothing that you were. It was over that guy's dead body. You were gonna do anything to our family, do you know what I mean? I mean, there's a and I realized now and knowing friends and close people that are close to me that didn't grow up that way or suffered the under the threat of violence within the house outside you know, people coming into the house that were extended family that were violent towards you know, their you know them and their family. I've just experienced it with people and I'm like, wow, yeah, I'm lucky. And maybe that's what allows me to write about things that I you know, the sadness of some things and and uh, the willingness to you know, to watch it in film and observe it. And anyway, let's.
Stay with Peckapah for a minute. People say movies are too bloody, too gory. I've never had a problem without it all but the only movie that pushed me over the line. But I sat there in the theater straw Dogs. WHOA remember was Susan Joya? Yeah, pretty, he's seeing those guys. Wow it dustn't Hoffman?
Right? Yeah?
Is it Dustin Hoffman or that guy?
Is it? I have to look it up. Yeah it is. It's Dustin Hoffman. Is her husband? Right?
Yeah?
And they come in there and are they in Ironland or England? I can't remember where it takes place. It's either they're out of their cultural element and you know they are Americans that are there and living. Oh yeah, I haven't watched it in years, but it's very disturbing, very disturbing. More so Clwork or Clarkwork Orange has been a cartoon of that. This is so reality based that it it'll make you, you know, check, go get a gun exactly.
But there's one of the scariest movies I've ever seen, Angel Heart. Is that the name of the book or the name of the movie.
That's the movie both, I think with Mickey ro Hoffman.
Dustin Hoffman played Louis Seiffer ship. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, sat in New Orleans, et cetera. Wow. I even remember reading the book. Yeah, it was called Angel Heart. And I remember reading the book because I had it. Somebody sent it to me that even scared me.
Yeah, no, no, no, and well straw Dogs, like you said, is disturbing, and it's you know, I've thought about it. I thought, you know what, there is something and the safety of the life I was, you know, I lived, and not that we didn't have up down problems and you know, and my brother, you know, had his own issues and there was stuff, you know, even in his early adult life that bled over into the family of him. But I realize the the lack of being fearful in our own home that somebody else was going to come in, you know, and and do something to us, or be able to you know, have a free hand, you know, in coming over. And you know I didn't have to live with that kind of fear.
Well, we didn't have that at all. But I think, you know, you're talking about being the youngest. My father was a guy didn't fit in and he ultimately made his success individually and didn't have.
To fit in because he was the youngest of the family.
Was he in terms of the kids he was the oldest? Oh okay, I mean he had a rough family. One sister, one brother was run over and killed in the driveway. Another sister committed suicide. I mean, it wasn't just your everyday family. But he, you know, not by today's rich standards. He would support you. He would buy you the sporting equipment and do that as long as you were geting good grades in school. Didn't want to hear that you wanted to be a professional athlete. But as long as you were doing this, he would do it. To the degree. He wasn't trying to teach us a lesson. I remember talking about this the other day, but I was ten. My father bought me golf clubs. Almost no clubs in the There was a driver three five seven, three five seven and a putter. Everybody in the community went berserk. He's too young, I mean we just played the public course. He's the young to have alc golf clubs within a year. All their kids had much better golf sets than I did, you know, but he was one. He didn't give a shit what anybody else thought.
I mean, my father made a.
Living speaking his truth. And I guess, you know, you get old, you think you're so different from people, and you find out you're the same. I guess, you know, there's some lessons I got from him, same thing.
Yeah, speaking your truth. I don't think you'd be accused of not right.
But I really don't know any other way. I mean I tried to be the other way where you know, kissed but played politics. And you know, it's funny. I had a dream about this just the other night. You know, they said, how can you say this? You know, you gotta be ostracized. Most people learn to be a member of the group. That's not what my father taught me.
Yeah, he stay an outsider.
Yeah, so you were, you were successful. Classic thing is people buy their parents a house or something. To what degree did you buy your parents and your sister and brother on the payroll?
No, I didn't. I didn't do that. Didn't have to, Thank goodness, it didn't. I mean, you know, they both had their lives that were you know, okay. But I was able to retire my mom early, you know, let her after twenty five years instead of working another five or eight or you know whatever. And that much I was able to do was help her retire early, earlier, and you know, being able to give them things, you know, over the years, you know, gifts and stuff, but but never really And then I was able to help my dad and his wife, you know, a similar kind of thing, just you know, help help them, you know along. You know. So that was a benefit of the success, a great benefit of success. But as I always felt like I owed because that guitar he ended up for several years having to do piece meal when we go hunting, rabbit hunting or whatever. He always had kind of a bowl that he ended up with, not great shotguns. And uh, because I found out years later that that that guitar I wanted so desperately eight years old, I wanted a real guitar. He hocked a great shotgun that he had and actually just sold it to you know, have the money to buy that guitar that Christmas. So I owe them a debt of gratitude. But I felt like, look, you know, and I think that kids that are able to get back to their parents, it's a gift to the kid for me. Anything that I was able to do for them, I thought was a gift because, like I said, I was lucky. And I realized how lucky now when I meet some you know, friends and here of their life with parents that were less than mature about love, you know what I mean? Love, I believe me. We're talking about love. The sacrifice they'll make for love, you know, nothing else that they'll give up their own selfishness for love. And my mother had that and women, you know, the mothers do you know, for the most part. Obviously there are nominlies and exceptions to everything, the rules that that is. But guys, we have to learn what we tend to be selfish, you know, all right, you know, and and but selflessness is there when if you've got it in you, it comes out when they you know, they look up at you, and like you said, you learn a different love. And that's that's selfless love, you know, with a child. And that's what I felt. Look, I've read enough of you. With your mom, you would do small things, whether you didn't necessarily buy you didn't have to, you know, buy her house. I didn't have to with my mother and her husband were okay, you know, they were uh and and uh. She was always very cautious, you know, with with her money. I would you know, I had a little bit of it. I mean, you know, at least save some you know, had some you know, underneath the stereo or something in my room. I was getting paper route or whatever. And you know, yeah, I mean you've talked about even taking your mom to dinner right now, you know, and just things that you're able to do well.
My mother, I mean, I'm going to talk about my mother. My mother was the inspir Like if I wanted to go to a movie, or I wanted to go to a play, or I wanted to go to a concert, unlimited money for that. If you wanted to buy an item whatever, that was a whole different thing, okay.
But to engage in and art, art, watching art, you participating.
I mean my mother once I remember my mother tell me is hey, Country, Joe and the Fish are going to be a new haven. It's like, okay, you know, I'm gonna go whereas he said, you know, give me some money to go hang with my buds. No, but she would encourage you, and then if you got really into it, she would push back and.
You know, ha ha.
And I told some of these stories before, but my one of my favorite stories. In the earlier part of this century, basically everybody had a computer, even your parents, because if they are well whatever, So you send email to your parents and I forward, like, you know, sometime two thousand and four or three whatever. I forwarded an email from Quincy Jones and I never heard anything. So the next time I spoke with my mother, I said, you know, you know I sent you email.
Yeah, yeah, you know.
Did you read it?
Yeah?
I redreamail, you know the one, Yeah, Quincy Jones, Yeah, I read. Well, you weren't impressive with Quincy Jones whatever, blah blah blah. I said, Quincy Jones, you mean the artist I figured with somebody the same same name. How would you know Quincy Jones?
You mean the artist she figured?
You know, she would put you down?
Who are you?
How would you know that?
Would you? Bob? No, Quincy Jones. That's hilarious? Yeah, no, I you know. Yeah. The dynamic with with family is is interesting. I mean, fortunately they were they never traded on it, you know, when it, you know, the success happened. They they what's going on? Oh, somebody overheard as I heard somebody outside repeating what you said. They're they're hearing another speaker, and they were laughing about the fact that your mother was shocked, you know, Quinn. They yeah, so you know, knock Wood.
Sings. How'd your siblings cope with your level of success?
Really well, really well? Actually, I mean they they didn't again, didn't expect much. I mean I would. My brother had a bit of a struggle, you know, and life, and he helped my sister and I enormously. He went down and took care of my father when my father had dementia. He didn't have Alzheimer's thinking he had an arterial dementia. In the last couple of years with life and my brother, he had gone through a divorce and it was kind of in a different space. He moved there and stayed, you know, and stayed the course with him and and actually, you know, witnessed he was in an assisted you know, a place where my brother would go every day, you know, take him wherever he needed to go and do whatever. And for him, that was one of the greatest gifts he could give my sister and I. You know that he did that, that he did that for my dad. I loved him even deeper than I did, you know, my brother, I loved him, but but you know, it really played on him hard. He We think he casually of that first year of COVID he passed young. I think sixty two, wow, no, sixty what even was sixty one? And we think now that he may have had Louis body dimension, which is what Robin Williams was diagnosed with after the fact, because they don't know what and they start having And my brother had been at close range watching dementia take my dad and it was tough on him, and so I was, you know, but I was able to you know, help him by helping us and let him, you know, do that. And but no, they never expect that. They'd never tapped me, you know. I mean I've been able to do things with and for them and with them, but you know, uh, now, there was no no house buying or things like that. I was, you know, I've done some bit of lavish gift giving and over over time and and I did, you know, end up with a plane. One of the ways my brother built some multi time we have because I loved flying and I couldn't do it, and I bought a small twin engine jet, not jet, but a plane, and he flew and then he built his time and he on his own and he started doing you know, flying and jet flying and so forth, and doing it with first you know, carrying uh overnight banking, you know, back in the even the early night. They were still it was paper. They had to move it overnight. And that's one of the ways these guys will build enormous amounts of hours and flying is they'll they'll hire on to uh, you know, check flying. And he did that for you know, a couple of three years, you know, flew charter anyway. But yeah, so no, I mean, I mean, you know, not having to struggle with the function of life allowed me the luxury of being able to explore within myself whatever I needed to do, you know, I mean saying, it's like I'm not having to put myself back together, you know. And I didn't. I never never drank. I just I was raised, like I said, in a very absent environment, you know, until I was an adult. And by the time I got there, I almost kissed. Like I'm like, and I've watched it all you have, but at close range bars and I've seen professionals, I know, you know, and just it never because I had an event horizon that I kept staring at. I thought, I need to you know, I need to be awake and alert and sober, and I need to know what the hell I'm doing, you know, And I don't want they just never It's just not my nature to want to to come in. My old man smoked cigarettes and never never because of my throat. I didn't want to wreck you know. Weird early on, I knew from an early age I wanted to do this. I wanted to sing, and I thought I may I may be able to do this, you know. And and.
I just, uh, well, tell me about I know you didn't want to abuse yourself, But tell me about knowing that you wanted to do this.
Yeah, I just from my earliest memories. And it's strange. I see it in my little one. He it's almost a knowing about like he knows, you know. And it's my wife observes it in a different way because for me, it just reminds me of like, oh, yeah, I remember feeling, you know that I can do this, I could make people. Uh it's just yeah, I I And again, you can't teach it, and you have to have an experience along the way that lets you confirm if you've got any level of intelligence. I think you have to. You want to make sure you're not just delusional, right, So you've got to do it outside. Two things can happen at home. You need to be on the coffee table, and you're just, you know, the precocious little darling that you know they're going to dote over whether you're any good or not, or you can get the tall poppy cut down right. You know, I've seen both in families mine would you would it was not either, you know, they weren't just indulging me. But they knew when I came down with that concoction of a song about Vietnam, that there was something up. They didn't know what because they didn't know. You know, there are people they're so far removed from show business, you know, they don't know anybody that's even got a cousin that you know, did anything at the local radio or television station. So I was left to my own devices. And then by the time I got junior high, the first two years of my junior high was at a school. It wasn't middle schools junior high, but they the freshman class had been It was a new area that been built and we'd moved to this track home out there, and the high school had freshman through senior and so my junior high only had a seventh and eighth grade and in my freshman year, my ninth grade year was at that junior high and in that year, my former eighth grade history teacher, because they added the third class of students, he started a drama program. He started teaching you could take a drama class, and so he started putting up one act plays and I walked in and was able to be cast like I was good. I used to be doing the reading and he cast me, and I did a couple of these plays, and then I started doing it in high school. There was a great theater department there and a fellow named Chuck Lewis who was the theater teacher at that high school, who ran a summerstock company, weather Vane Playoffs is saying at Newark, Ohio. So he brought a certain level of professional expectation to how the stage was going to be around, how you were supposed to behave. So I got exposed to that in there, and I was always in band to march. I was trying to play football that was all of one hundred and thirty five pounds when I was a sophomore in high school and we had an all city team. I mean, it was like getting knocked around like a rag doll. And so by my sophomore year. I stopped after my sophomore year, I and it was became marched, one of the two based drums in marching band. My letter jacket is banned. That's funny enough, ironically. And we had a great marching band and had an instrumental drum band, you know, pro a stage band. I played drums, not well, but and the theater department and every other year they would do this combined variety show, you know, And I was back to what I was going to say. One day, the theater teacher in the junior high it was stubborn, gave me a ride home, give me a left home and from something we're doing. I don't know if it was a rehearsal or whatever. And he pulled on the driveway and he said, you know, I don't know what your parents do for a living or how they are. I said, but I don't know how to say. I think, if you want to, you could make a living doing this. And I was kind of like taking aback a little bit. I said, mean make a living doing what you meant, no performing, you know what you do in in what we're doing in plays, And so he said, I'm not sure how to tell you how to do it, you know, because it's a history teacher. But that moment, you know, there's a moment that someone gives you confirmation a third party who's not your parent, not your aunt, uncle, no relative. At that moment, I and again, I'm just obstinately, obstinately optimistic enough, maybe egotistical enough to use that as a handhold, you know. That was the next And then in that high school theater department, I started doing plays very immediately. And in my junior year, I haping to be walking down the hall and heard part of the stage band guys trying to do some in some fashion rockabilly and the drum major from the marching band and he was a trumpet player in stage man was attempting to be the singer and it was awful. I heard it outside the band and I walked in and said, well, you guys doing and they said, well, you know we're gonna do it for the show because I was gonna host it with this other guy. We were doing a Smothers Brothers stick, you know, and he had an upright bass and I was playing guitar. I remember I performed Loud and Wainwrights hit Dead Skunk, in the middle of the road during that, which was a brilliant song. Actually, so on crossing the highway late last night, he should have looked left and he should have looked right right, didn't see the station flagging, cars got squashed and there you are. You got a dead skunk in the middle again. You talking about post hippie them kind of weird, oh yeah, weird song world. You know, it was there by then, you know, nineteen seventy three, right right and h So I was doing that and they knew and they said, well, we're you know, doing this kind of like you know Seannan I kind of, I said, well, he said, but yeah, but he's not, you know, I said, you mean like that. I took the mind and they started playing whatever, and I started singing. And they didn't know I sang, because this was the stuff I did at home. You know, I wasn't in chorus or choir, I mean some perfunctory one course, you know, I whatever vocal music as an elective, but nobody knew I sang. And in fact, the theater folks for my sophomore year thought that I couldn't sing at all because I did a play Miracle Worker, right, you know, that was the kind of you know, and I was playing the younger brother and he had to sing Buffalo Gallantry. I never heard the song, so they and I couldn't. I was like in the theater and started directing. It was like he said, it's They hollered it out to me from the seats, you know, rehearsal one day and like hollering. I was like, okay, I don't know. I think so it was this you know, kind of weak performance of that that I did during the play. So they were stunned when they saw me come out with this band and take over that show and kind of have that moment and it's and it's it's that weird seminal kind of thing, and there were girls went crazy and we were you know, it was like this nutty moment and you kind of again a confirmation of something. And it probably did more to wreck any kind of academic pursuit that I would have ever had, you know, because because and now in the back of my head, and I had that band and we started playing at other schools you know that wanted to have throwback sock hops and you know that kind of stuff. And I mean I had like a Golden may suit done after that, and it was ridiculous, but.
It was this.
It was rockable because I was showing them. I so like, well, what about this the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly stuff which had more hellbilly to it. And I didn't really delve into that aspect of what I was going to do till I started writing right at my senior year of high school and writing stuff to sing. You know, I wrote something called Lovely Brown, and I wrote something else called Anyway. And after moving out here to the West Coast, because by then I knew because that was in those years where the transition was happening. You know, the whole thing with the Bakersfield be is I told you is about how the California sound springs forward from the Tom Jod wrote, you know, from the Great Sarathia, when Buck and Merle's family end up out here in labor camps, right and they bring that music from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, the dust Bowl to the West Coast. And then there are those that preceded the Maddox Brothers and Rose all that stuff, Woody Guthrie alllet But then by the fifties, late fifties, Buck starts to have the sixties in the sixties, Mrle and Chris Hillman and I have talked about it. He was this West Coast mandolin playing kid who loved bluegrass music right late fifties, early sixties and ends up by default the bass player for the Birds. Because I'm trying to remember the name of the guy that produced and put that together. But Tickner, I think was his last name. He knew Chris from the bluegrass band that he'd been in and had recorded him and said, hey, I think it was Jeane Clark first, and then Jim mgwin at the Troubadour put themselves together, right, And so all that was going on in my late adolescent early teens, and I started hearing it, and it was the hidden part of my culture right that I couldn't have much affinity with with those kids at that high school in Columbus, they didn't understand what I listened to at home. Like my best friend across the street in that track house world that we were. Now, his mother was from South Carolina, but he didn't grow up with that same kind of hillbil edge, but he watched me listen to Stonewall Jackson Records. I mean, you know, fourteen fifteen years old I've Got Life to Go, which is written by George Jones. That song is I've been in here eighteen years and still got life to go. He talks about his family left. Its brilliant, brilliant song. George Jones wrote it. Stonewall Jackson had a country hit with it. But my dad had bought that album as an apology to my mother. It's called Don't Be Angry with Me. It was the hit off of it, Don't Be Angry with Me, darling h I fail to understand all your little because they'd had an argument. That's his way of he brought this album home to her to apologize. So I was listening to all the other stuff on that record. Johnny Horton. My mother was in the Columbia Record Club. The only thing that she ever regretted being in there was when she ordered because she was a big fan of Herbalbert and Tijuana Brass, and got the Whipped Cream album and my brother and I got it first at like nine or ten years old. I think it was eleven, which was even more dangerous space. I always look at that album cover and she forever regretted that she ordered that album, although she loved the music on it. But so I was listening, but my dad had and like I said, the Johnny cashed up. But she had the Johnny Horton stuff that had whispering pines. You know, of course the hits Bismarck and all that north to Alaska. But the other one that I clung to. I was playing it in clubs after I was out here in southern California. I would do when it's springtime in Alaska, it's forty below, you know. Just I mean all that they didn't know about my peers, they wouldn't understand.
You know.
I had a cousin, Mike Christian. He played a bit of guitar, and he got it because his family were the same hillbilly transplants, but not many did. So it was a kind of a hidden part of me. But what country rock happening did. And I've said that the Brito Brothers were the most famous band that nobody ever heard, you know, their reputation preceded him and out out distanced there the reality right of their records, And Chris and I talked about that, and I knew of Graham Parsons out of that moment and him being these long haired kind of hippie cowboy, you know, guys doing this thing, and Mike Nessmuth from the Monkeys was doing it, you know. And then when he post Monkeys formed the first national band, right and did Joe Anne and standing in the lonely light of the silver move all that, you know, and I was like, you know what maybe country music and the thing Brian and Hearn did with Emmy Lou Harris, and she gives that credit to Brian that after Graham died, she went back into the folk scene, back to d C, you know, and kind of, you know, just in shock and and I think in a moment of depression back there, and I think it was I can't remember Mary Martin, that from the record label that showed Emmy and gave demos of Emmy's stuff to Brian, and Brian had a deal with Warner and he moved her out here and he put the band together, the first hot band, and more so than the Linda Ronstats because the first couple of Londa Ronstadt appems I was a huge fan of too. And then Peter Asher came aboard and they kind of moved it into the pop I can as you know, the iconography that became her sound, you know. And then of course the Begat and Begat was you know, you got the birds and all that stuff. The Sweetheart of the Rodeo album that happened. But I didn't have it because they am an older sibling to direct me there. You know. It wasn't the hits. I just had what I could find on my own. But I felt inside and creating scle Revival was, yeah, there were. John was a hero of mine just because of what he was doing musically, and as I grew to know what it was later he's writing the songs, playing the lead guitar, producing the records really you know, and control, you know. And then he did that Blue Ridge Ranger solo excursion they did after it, and he took again, and there became this pertinence of country music having its moment again. So I realized because I had an epiphany one day when I was the last trip I ever took with my aunt and my mother, when I was still just in to Kentucky. We sorry bumpedo that mike with the last trip I took with them, my aunt's Cadillac, my sister and I went. My brother didn't. He stayed on with my dad that weekend and we went down and I remember listening as we crossed the river from Ohio and to Kentucky, and these AM stations began. You would pick up i mean, religious programs even during the week and it was very rural radio. All of a sudden you were there and it was exposed and hardcore hillbilly stuff. And I remembered on that drive this is maybe at that point fifteen or sixteen. I wasn't driving it, so I was probably fifteen years old, sixteen, but old enough to feel the future, you know, the sense I wasn't going to be here. And I remember looking across at the hills when we were just north, just out of Ashley, Kentucky, and headed into Catholicsburg, where I would always hear about the car wreck where they went off and they flipped. They're lucky they lived, my mother and my aunt and uncle going back home and flipped a car. Because it was just a dangerous, dangerous road. And I remember we got past there, talked about that again. Every time we went through it. We had to hear about the wreck. And I remember looking out and thinking and not knowing anything about what that meant or why you have the thought other than you know, like unbridled ego. I don't. I thought, I'm supposed to. I'm going to sing about this, about these people in this world. I'm supposed to. I felt like that epiphanous moment was that in retrospect, I've thought about it several times over the years that ensued and once my career started, because you don't You can attempt to plan to have a journey, but you cannot be prepared for the topography of the journey. Right the landscape is going to be different than you imagined, and and you won't be prepared for it. I wasn't. I wasn't prepared for that, you know, for the for the the physical geography of you know, you can look at a map, but that's one dimensional. You can look on a map all day long and plan and think, but when you're really there, it's different. And I remember that, as I said, looking back over the years and thinking of that moment in that car with them, it was just a silent thought as that radio was playing all this various fading in and out am station stuff, and I'm supposed to this is what I'm supposed to talk about and do. And then after I was here for about a year and a half or so, I came across the very first John Prime album, that first Atlantic record that he did with the Memphis Boys. As you read the book, the Memphis Boys not great writing, but it's such a wonderful That's Chips Moments group that started out. The first record they ever had was I'm Your Puppet that he and Dan pencut and which became an East Lams like Sophie I'm Your Puppet. The Lowder going to just always imagine Art Bell not was it Art? I mean Art Lebaux Leau remember Art Lebau, I'm Your all those songs. Uh was it k R l A that Art lebaul was? Yeah, yeah, kr LA the amer I mean that was La. You know in the seventies, right, it was still there. You know, the you know, the culture, the car culture, you know hot Rod, those songs. But they did that and they made the spectrum on those guys, the Memphis Boys, like the Wrecking Crew, they did stuff that was I mean, Dan Penn produced the box tops, give Me a Dig Up One Air, Alex Chilton right of these teenagers, and he was so his voice sounded like that from what I've read, because he was so jacked up. See, he and his girlfriend were so excited he was going to go in and record. They stayed up for like two days straight before and they drank and he was all messed up when he walked in and sang that way. The cry like a baby's one of my favorite too, because Dan Penn wrote that, right, Yeah, the electric cetar. Right. But but those guys went from that's end of the spectrum. And they also did the gentries I keep on dancing, sades out and fades back in. Yeah, and and and they did that. They did Neil Diamond like a month before they cut the comeback record for Elvis, the Memphis record. That's the one they did. And I was reading in the in the book it was the guitar player for Oh, I just went completely blank on. Oh that's it's horrible. I can't even anyway. Uh, he was saying, you know, we were non plussed you and Elvis. He said, yeah, sure, Elvis wants to come and cut with us. He knows who we are. Now we've just cut Neil Diamond. Sweet Caroline we've done this and that. And he said, but the night of the session, because it was at night, because you know, started at like seven in the evening or hey, he said, the door opened. He said, we were all sitting there just going yeah, I guess again. And he said, we looked up and went, holy ship, that's Elvis. He said. There was nobody that ever came to that studio but that. But to finish that thought, they did that spectrum of music. I mean, they were doing all the Wilson picket stuff like Mustang staly and allying. They were doing some of it first in muscle shows until he built the studio American Recorders in Memphis, but Elvis that was in Memphis, Neil Diamond and then they did John Primece first time because Wexler right at Atlantic that he heard the I'm your puppy, He said, who did this? He said, I want to wreath it a cut with them, and that's the famous story of how they went. But and then she left the whole session, you know, and fame because of whatever was said to her. There was some you know, a horrible off color remark or whatever, and he said, she won't come back down there. He called Chip's moment, he said, but she liked you guys, and he said, she ain't coming back to Memphis or must shows, he said, but she wants you to do it, but I'll bring it to New York. So he brought those cats up there. And you know who's on on that chain of fools because Dan Penn had written do Right Woman for and and he was smart. You know what they did. They let her play piano, that's what Wexle was smart, but d the first time all of her career after that on Clembing, she'd not you know, been allowed to company herself and she played you and sang do it and it took off. But Chaine of Fools is Joe South doing that pop stables literally that guitar change, change chang. It's amazing they cut. Did you never see her? No? I never saw her. And I saw her an Award show. I saw her do one you know like that, but I didn't see her in colle She it was you.
Know, it was very interesting because she knew who she was. Yeah okay, and she sauntered out and she just delivered. It was it was kind of like the Elvis moment walking Oh, that's Elvis. Yeah, well that's a wreatha. She can do it effortlessly. She can blow your mind and walk off the stage knowing she's a wreatha. It's not like she's feeding off of you. It's like your stunt.
Just dropped the mic and say exactly.
It's like, yeah, I mean I can remember she said when you're a chain chain chain, oh, because that that was really the killer.
That opening guitar riff, and it's a it's like like Joe South. I found out later Joe South is who's playing that guitar with those guys, because he knew Chips and Chips was from Atlanta and that's where I mean Joe South. That's another story altogether of somebody.
Joe South.
He had the one hit. We had two. He had walked a mile of my shoes and in the games people play, Okay, I forgot the first one.
But could he survive? Is?
Could he?
Did he write anything else?
Oh? My god, Bob, he wrote He wrote Nana Hush hush, deep purple, I think out here name now hush hush. And he wrote one of my favorites. It wasn't a huge it, but it was he wrote down in the Boondocks down in There, down in It with Billy Joe Royal Billy. You remember the labor from down in the Boon.
Do you remember what label the Deep Purple record was on? No for Grammaton It was Bill Cosby's label. Okay, since yeah, since we're so deep into this, what did Billy Joe Shaver survive on?
Well? He wrote that whole Honkey Talks and Heroes first album for Whaling, right, and his son, Eddie Shaver. What a sweet soul, a kid that grew up right in the thick of it. I mean he was with Whaling and all of them, and Willie and I mean, you know, from the time he was a year old wandering around and Eddie had demons, but he was such a sweetheart and what a great guitar player. I saw him play with his dad at the club Lingerie when he was fifteen, maybe years old, in nineteen eighty three or four, because right as so I was putting out my EP now it was eighty four. And then in eighty seven Pete Anderson, who had been playing lead guitar with me and going out, couldn't do it. He had fourteen offers to produce. He said, I got to do this. I got to stay here. We have to find a guy. I said, I know who to call, and I called Eddie Shaver and he can't do it. Yeah, Eddie Shaver played with me that year, and he did it again in eighty nine when Pete couldn't go out for you know, producing, and Eddie twured in eighty nine again into ninety and just I mean a whole different style playing. He's a Texas big hand, you know, lead player. But Billy Joe, I mean, he's written some great stuff. I'm just an old chunk of coal. John Anderson had a huge hit. But you know I'm going to be a diamond someday. That rye tongue in cheek. But but what was I talking about with the chain of old Joe South? The other one, the other one that he wrote because he owes songs. He was on a plane to la to meet with his publisher to get a new check. You know, he's living on the you know advances, and he and he hadn't delivered two or three songs, right And on the plane ride from Atlanta out here, he wrote, I beg your pardon. I never promised you. Rose Garden along with the sunshine. He's got to come a little rain some time. So, I mean he wrote some great stuff for other people. The one that I love is don't it make you want to go Home? Which I think bj Thomas had a don't make you want to go home? Children? Don't make you want to go home? All guy's chilling, get weary when they roam. Don't make you want to go home? Anyway.
Well, you know I grew up you know where we only heard those songs when they crossed over. Yeah, it's like Tom Petty. One of the last times I saw he played some country song and he called you know, today's modern country music is the rock of the seventies. If you grew up in the Northeast and you hit the country station, you saw the shit kickers. It's not like today. So there's a lot of history we don't know. Conversely, I have to ask you to what degree were you into the Beatles?
In the rock seat? Oh? I was. You couldn't escape the Beatles because am rady right? You know the buttons And my mom listened to every station she loved. The Big Top forty station was on her car radio. My dad was the Hillbalay station, you know WMN I was the hillbalay station you didn't get in his car, and it wasn't on anything else. It was on that I was hearing. The one that crossed over a little bit was Hintson Cargil with the skip Rope. The Doom Doom skipp borro ain't a kind of fun and what to children say, skippero. It was about a divorce and a couple, And it was like there was that kind of stuff going on at that time, late sixties, the psychobilly era had kind of taken hold in Nashville and there were crossover hits. Harper Valley Pta that was a huge top hit, and that was a straight up hillbilly record to begin with. It was out of you know, kind of the country polatant moment. But so all that was going on, I mean, you know, and then by the early seventies you got Jerry Reid breaking out of the Nashville scene doing Amos Moses and all that stuff. You had Tony Joe White doing Poke Salad Anning which almost first covered and so there was this that was the beauty of Top forty radio. Really was that right in that moment?
Well, I remember the last crossover record was Charlie Rich Beautiful Girl in the World. After that, everybody had an FM radio. Yeah, they didn't have to listen to the top four, right. It became segregary when you come like you know, Polk Salad anyhow. I just know those listening to.
The top forty. Yeah, no, it was and I didn't. Uh. And Charlie Rich, yes, along with the other guy that Freddie Hart had Easy Lovin that crossed over, which was this West Coast thing and you know he did, uh, Charlie Rich with the most Beautiful Girl. Yeah, and Behind Closed Doors that thing right, yeah, yeah, Behind Closed Doors was you know. The funny thing about Charlie Rich was he was out of Arkansas and he was studying. He was a very literate cat he was, I mean really musically. Yeah, he was a jazz piano player, right, and studying I think at Arkansas State. And he went to Memphis and had an audition with with Jack Clements, right, you know who produced Charlie Lee and everybody, and and worked with Sam Phillips, you know, after Elvis left, Jack was and Johnny Cash all that you know, Home of the Blues and all that stuff, you know, was with Jack Clements and he wrote, what was it? He wrote, I guess things happened that way. I think was him. I don't like it, but I guess things happened anyway. Jack. He auditions Charlie Rich and he said, not bad kid. He said, you're really good. You're very sophisticated, accomplished musician, aren't you. And he said, well, I've studied.
This, sir.
And he said he dropped the needle on one of Jerry Lee's before he they had just done, hadn't released. He started playing Jerry Lewis. He said, you know, Son, He said, when you can play that bad, won't you come back and see me? But you can play that poorly, come back and see you. Right, that was And then Charlie wrote he did sign with Son and he put out Lonely Weekends. That was when his Sun record. It was like Orbison. They didn't have they didn't blow up on Son. You know, Roy had this day.
People don't realize how different Nashville and Memphis are.
Oh, you're a student of the game.
They hear that Memphis is like Mississippi. Oh yeah, Doc, it's like a whole different thing.
Yeah, it's another world. And and uh, and even Elvis. There was a story that I hold heard George Klein tell in the Elvis channel one time about when Sam Phillips sold Elvis to sold the contract to our ce. He warned, oh, he said, Now, Elvis, he said, you're going to be around those guys and they're gonna, you know, start cuting. He said, they're going to try and change you because they're not they don't understand you said, I guarantee you they will not understand what you've done and what we've done. He said, And you're a really good singer, Sam Phillips, this is what he told Elvis, he said. And don't let them change you, he said, And don't let them change your band, because you've put your sound together. You know, Elvis in DJ, the drummer Fontaine, you know who come on board with him the last year and a half before he signed with the RCA, because they were a trio first Scottie and Bill Black and you know upright bass and he said, man, he said, well, people don't realize that's Elvis playing that rhythm guitar and all those Sun records that slapped them backed because they're no drums, he said. And I never played with a guy that had as good a right hand on the guitar as Elvis, he said, or that sang with the sense of time. That's what people don't get about Elvis Presley, you know, is how good a singer he was in terms of that's why rock and roll became rock and roll. In Capitol Letters and Little Richard, which there's a new documentary on him, I have everything, which is I liked watching Richard met Little Richard. Huh Old. Yeah.
The funniest thing about Richard is he was the same guy.
Yep, yep, he was. Little Richard was like he would come and he would see me and he did gravity, Oh baby, come here, and and everybody had to pray with him, you know, you had to pray prayer circle. Marty Stewart had me they were cutting over I don't know. It was a I don't know what it was a don Imus record that we were all anyway, he and he said you got to come over here me. He said, I got Richard of the Village recorders, and I went over that night and I hung out and he spotted me. He was living at the top of the old you know, the rock and roll Hiatt on. So I said, you know, he was living there for a year or so and I was doing a video on the roof and he caught me then and he was just always really really kind to me, and the few interactions I had with him, he was just a you know, a sweet guy. Uh and you got to feel, well, you watch this, you feel what a what a shattered kind of torn soul? You know. He boy the original version of Tooty Fruity. I'd never heard the original lyrics till that documentary Tooty Fruity, Good Booty. It was like wow, and uh, but anyway, so he pre sees he's Elvis, and of course the Pat Boone stuff of you know, is something it's like, you know, like wow, it's sacrilegious. But Elvis and I understood when DJ talked about he said, yeah, but you got to understand, man, when he and he actually was ahead of Richard regionally. You know, he was out in fifty three, fifty four or five, you know, those three years, and Richard doesn't hit till that day in New Orleans with the Old Session. Durm Earl Palmer talked about it. He's like, man, we all went to lunch Richard said, And they didn't know I played piano. They had him standard doing arms, like thinking he'll just be this guy standards sing sing blues, R and B. He said, I didn't want to do that. They didn't understand, he said. At lunch they all went over to this little dive that nearby and had a piano in her, he said, and Richard got up and started playing her, like what the and he started tooty fruity and said, we've never seen anything like that or heard anything that was like to be pretty good booty. And so they went back and the guy that was the A and R guy can't remember his name now this is in the documentary, but he goes back over and says to the owner of whoever's studio they had him in there, not carusive, but uh anyway that because that label, which is LA based, I think that that he was on right that decided to go with it. When he went in and said that the an R cat he said, hey, he just did something over there. We got to now we got to clean the lyrics up. And there was a staff woman who and she's interviewed and now she said it was nasty, nasty, nasty, Richard got him and he said, oh, that wasn't that was just her mind. You know, you're literally saying it, Richard. But so you between the two, rich has that hit. But again it was ostracized to race stations, right, black radio, and it had to find the white audience and Elvis you know, doing that, you know, it was just and so I'm a kid that the meant the Sun stuff was with me from the time I was a baby. I was an Elvis free but mystery trained, you know. And and then by the time I got in high school, that album they re released, you know, the Sun album, the Sun Records as a collection, and I had them and I had them and I knew that's when I knew. I said, but this is and I was listening simultaneously at the same time, same window credence, you know. One of the first albums, well, the first record ever bought by myself was that this this shopping center and it was an old you know, apothecary drug store was record racks, you know, and stuff.
Yeah, my mom.
I had money in my own from whatever allowance I got from working George stuff around the house, and and I had you know, a few dollars and I bought Roy orbitson. They did a re release of pretty Woman, but the song that I found on the backside it was a double single because it was they were both singles, but it was re released uh as a spotlight series. It was Candy Man and Candy Man was cut monument in Nashville, you know, post the Memphis stuff with the first ever uh, playing on record of harmonica by Charlie McCoy who goes on to become a great harmonica session player. But it opens wet bone, Bone Bone. I'm That song fascinated me to this day. Come on Baby, And that was the extension of the Elvis thing. You because the other stuff with Roy I loved Woman, I love all, but it's a little more operatic. And Candy Man was swinging man. It was in that groove at shovel and and Elvis, especially the sun stuff, and I found it. That was the first single I bought. Album album was probably Cosmos Factory because I was on my bikes. I rode from this this uh, you know box store that had started, you know, sprung up by the early seventies. There were these things and it had racks of music and I was looking through it, and I found the Cosmos Factory because I wanted tracks off of that. And then I bought Green River. I bought the preceding things that I heard single.
Green River was the first one I bought. Yeah, I was Born on the bay unbelievable.
Oh how how great? Huh? I mean born on the Bayou, right, because I mean all of it. But anyway, so I'm listening to that and this re release, this stuff they were rediscovering, you know, of the sun stuff of Elvis, you know, because the Brits all knew that. And yes, I was listening to the Beatles because of my mom with that AM radio, and I was hearing those hits and I really got And when you see the get back down here and you see the two of them looking up each other at one point point later in the in the movie, you know, after George leaves and then comes back and they're staring and John and George just like just by Osmosa begins singing bye Bye Love identically to the Everlas. Right, you realize they loved it. They loved that music, they loved that stuff, and uh so I could hear that in there. I could find it in the Beatles. I understood it, you know, Yeah, I was listening to the Beatles, and I've done homages to them, you know, you and I we did. You know, I've just seen a face. Right.
But when when you come to LA this is not the music that's being signed and on the road.
But but I get here in seventy seven and seventy eight, I'm up on the strip one night. One day in the afternoon, I'm roaming around and looking at tower because I'm living in Long Beach and I hadn't moved yet up here. I was driving. Okay, Joe, why Long Beach because that's the cheapest beach on the buddy of mine. And I came out. I said, dude, we can't live down in landlocked Orange count We've come this far, that's come this fighting. No, you either got to be in Hollywood. We should be right in Hollywood or early Ocean, all right. So we started in Santama. He goes, Okay, okay, we started in Santa Monica because we were staying with his relatives in Tustin, right, and so we drove up, spent a whole day. Dress we start in Santa Monica and we can't afford any of that, right, Santa Monica, Venice. We just go down down Route one. We're down Pacific Goes Highway, going all the way into the Then we get to Manhattan Beach and we can't or that and we get over it and we come up. I said, what what this thing? I'm looking at, Madie, there's somebody, come on, get back on the freeway. And we crossed, you know, over the San Pedro and roll into Long Beach and we go down there and the old pike was there, the Remuvement Park. It was still a run down ocean town, you know, Harbortown, Long Beach, and the apartments were literally on ninth Place, right dead end of the beach for nothing. And we got this little single you know, with a bat, you know, a little tiny kitchen. And he only stayed about three months. He left by the last week of June, and I was there, Okay, Well, why did he leave?
How much of it?
He just didn't? He never, I think I looking back. He wanted to visit his aunt and uncle and was held bent on delivering me to La. He knew I had already been to Nashville a couple of times, and in seventy six, seventy two. It was if you did. I didn't know. I've said this to Steve Earl. I said, I didn't realize that those houses were the business, the publishing houses, right, music Row, it's quiet. There was no there was Lower there was Lower Broad, but it was just a few drunk bars. And there's Printer's Alley which Boots Randolph had a club and it was you know, it's a nightclub thing, but there was no live music, not like La or New York or you know, and it was it was the quiet. They got up nine am, they had coffee and we're writing solid right, and they're cutting them with the I didn't know that that that's how you did it there. And I went there a couple of times. I auditioned for the Grandel Opry Park, the Opry Land, and I got a slot in January as as an alternate. And they said, well, you come back to summer and if somebody gets sick or they will pull you in. And he said to me, do you really want to do that? I said no, I said, I guess. He said, man, you're coming with me, and he said and he paid for the gas, and I didn't have, you know, couple hundred bucks. We packed everything on which was nothing. My guitar and I had a k at that point, big open sound, okay, And he deposited me on the West coast, and then by his plan was all he wasn't staying.
Well, how did you feel when he abandoned you?
Not not crushed, because I kind of preferred to be alone, you know, scale I was like, you know, I wanted my own room. I never had a room, and I stayed in the smallest little apartments on the face of the earth, just a lit alone. I never shared the space because it would interrupt my I knew what it was. It would interrupt my thoughts and what I needed to do, and you know, write and to try and create songs. I knew then you had to write, you know, you had to create your material. And so no, what was going on out here then? I mean, you had you had the burgeoning La punk thing, but I don't even think Los Angeles had come out yet with the X hadn't happened. But you still had Fleetwood, Matt, you had all the that stuff. You know. The other end of the spectrum of country rock had become the new pop, right the Eagles had now become the pop rock act. Fleetwood Mac was everything, and you know, and and then you started hearing in the summer seventy seven. I remember, I think watching the Detectives Elvis in the attract. The English new waves started coming, right, So seventy eight, I'm up at Tower Records and one afternoon and stumbling around. We're looking through it and there's free tickets like you highlight tickets to the Whiskey. You go. There's a show that night and it's Robert Gordon with Link Ray and Yeah. And Robert Gordon at the time had had on FM. I would hear on the wirl if it was k R o Q or whatever. But he had a revival rockabillity thing of UH. I forget who the band was it did Lex Lex Lexlex remember that? And Robert Gordon was out of d c any he had well the first the opening act that night was UH was Billy Zoom pre X. Billy Zoom, the guitar player for X had a rockabilly band and he and he had that duo jets and he was out there slamming it and he was out and it was one of the last gigs he ever did, because he told Pete Anderson at the time told me. Larry said, yeah, he told me. He said, I you are gonna believe this. He said, I've been trying to do what I do great for years. I've just put this band together just doing We're doing trash punkins and we're signed. We're doing it. It was x he said. They got out and then did John Doe and Exen. They did Los Angeles and it was the cultural explosion of that. But I go in there and see Robert Gordon with link Ray. That was one of the loudest things I've ever heard to this day, nothing louder than link Ray because he would open do a couple did rumble of course, you know, brown, brown brown. I mean, it was a sight to see. And the Blasters were somehow connected because Ronnie Weisner or whatever, this guy this he was either Czechoslovaki or Hungarian. He was a little guy, was out of his mind. He saw me leaning on a pole because I you know, you're you just want to drink in every single second of any of it. So I stayed that the show's over and they've all but turned the ugly lights on and their tearings. You know, they don't run you out of the whiskeys. You just stand there if you want to buy a drink. And I'm leaning against the pole, just watching, just to watch it, you know, watch them tear down the gear, watch them carry it to the curb, watching everybody. And I'm alone, and I'm and this guy comes to running Weisner. Wisner. Yeah. Anyway, He goes, what you do? What are you doing? The broken English Eastern European accident? Well do you know I think? I said, well I do, I said. He said, you're a musician, because he's just looking at me, and I'm leaning on you know, at that point, I'm more a David Essex. Looked at anything. I've got boots on, but I got you know, bells, it's bell bottom blues. Right at that point in La leaning against the wall, and he goes, look at of music. I said, well, you know, kind of country rock. For lack of a better discrete. You know, I'm letting them know that we're He goes, ah full you you know what you need to rockabilly? Rockabilly, rockabilly, that's what's bigger. Rockabilly. I'm like, dude, I know rockabilly from the inside out of me. I was born to rockabilly, and that was my first experience when you said, what was going on here? Was that moment? Think about seventy eight. You're already here. You're in the business. Right, it's the chains shift. Right. Petty comes out looking like a seventies rocker but playing like new wave. Right, you know, you know what I mean. That's the economy of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
I saw them all at the whiskey, Tom Petty, Elvis Costello.
In even the band, Joe Jackson, Yeah right, you know, and even the band was Joe Jackson watching the detectives.
No, that was Elvis.
That's Elvis. But what Joe Jackson was, uh usually really going out with him.
One more time goes on. But they saw the papers.
Anyway, and Joe Jackson was the sharp you know the two tone shoes, you know, man, so so sharp? Yeah, really sure sharp? You know the Teddy Boys shoes right at the needle point. But but uh, that's the moment, and I'm thinking, man, you know, when the tide comes in and goes out, you know, when you can beach combe, you can go up and down and find the leftover if you see what's going to happen. And I just had a sense that there was going to be this moment, and because I had known about the whole buck Merle, the whole traditional country that was out here, Appitol Tower, the Capitol Records sound, the Bakersfield sound, and it led to and I knew it begat Chris Hillman, the Birds Sweetheart, at which begat Burritos, which gives Lynda Ronstat the footing. You know, they all that m com mingling. And then by Eagles and Emmy Lou and those records with Brian hern were a beacon that drew me. I thought, that's what I am, that's me, you know, with the purtiness of that. The John Prime thing, I didn't finish. They cut that album on him in Memphis. That first album was again one of the similar moments in the revelatory moments of my life in terms of in terms of my own family's experiences. I remember, I said, the epiphanius moment that I fell, I had, you know, at fifteen or six, riding in the back of that car down Route twenty three of my mom and my aunt and I thought John Prime and the song paradise about his own family moving from western Kentucky up into Illinois and Chicago, and he articulately and I thought, that's what it is. And it's almost like having to be moved so far away from it, so far removed that I wrote reading writing Route twenty three about those tailight baby years, you know, when we would leave on a Friday evening after they got off work. You have you ever seen folks pull up in a hollow after work on Friday night, you know, Prestonsburg can all that stuff. It was I realized it's pertinent. It's pertinent because it's me. It's pertinent to my you know, my expression musically in my life. But John Primes who inspired me to self examine and think. And it's like, what was it that I read that Dickens wrote all the great stories about London and the winter right Christmas Carol living on the Tuscany coast in Italy when he had moved far removed, you know, on the Mediterranean coast in Italy, you know, living expatriate, as you know, as a lender out of it. And he wrote from the vantage point because you're able to see, I think you pull focus when you write about the elements of your own life. When I read you from your distance, right, you're able to see from the distance with a greater degree of clarity what it was you came from Connecticut, the whole scene when you talk about your dad in the liquor store, and you know all of it, the ice cream, the ice cream, you know. I mean, it's visceral when you write, it's visceral, and that's what people love to read. That's why they read, you know. I mean you haven't have you excuse me if I'm insulting you by not knowing that you You haven't published in book form, have you? No? I mean I have got to, Bob.
Well, I mean just taking a detour here. If you talk to the major people, they only want fiction. Because I said I would do this, then I had publishers who would do it. But the advances were like ten to twenty grand.
You can't afford to do it, you can't take the time.
No, no, but yeah no, When I hit send, I reach more people than all these people who read their back their books.
But I think a collection of all of it, Bob, has to happen, and somebody's going.
To do it.
I was thinking, right. But the other thing about it is nothing sells itself these days, not only making it is not the hard part. Then you got to go out and flog it.
Yeah, And.
That's both time and not quite my personality.
But I hear you not your nature. No, But I'm telling you there are enough people that know that would love to have it all in one space and in a hardbacked version. I think people would love reading, and especially I mean, you've got va you could do more than one book. It's like you could just do just the things you've written about your family would be you know, it would be its own, you know, tome of four hundred pages. You know you would have. But so the visceral nature. What the John Pride album, that first one where he's on the Bailahet which has Sam Stone uh has has uh uh? Your flag decal won't get you to have anymore? I mean all that but Paradise Spanish pipe Dream. I used to play that in nightclubs out in the Corral in the lake View Terra Foothill in Osborne. There was a cowboy bar that was hardcore. They would ride down from up there in Tonga, and that ain't to Panga. People that someone to Honga ain't to Panga. Don't confuse it too, because the hippies are in Topanga, the bikers that sell meth or in Tonga. It's like exactly. But I played for a year straight the off nights the year Johnt John Lennon was killed on the night that I drove into work and got in there and we heard and Delaney Bramlet lived down the road and came in. He was torn up and got up and played with us, just to just to give Trivty a couple a couple of John's songs. And so my experience this is like nineteen what was eighty because he died in December of eighty, But I had been in there playing Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Because I wasn't good enough to play the weekends. They were fearful I wasn't because I wasn't. I wasn't doing I just wouldn't, you know. I was doing Bill and Row and doing some merle I was doing. You know, it was it was hardcore, you know, hillbilly stuff. Because to that point, once I got here and found just my headspace around it, I realized, but the vantage point I had, dude. That's what the car ride was about who I and my who I was by the birthright of my family, you know, and where I was born, and I need to take this and I need to, you know, pay tribute to that and those people that gave me a chance, you know, to get away from mining coal as a way to make a living.
Okay, you're out, you know, the hungun you're playing the week nights. Okay, the nature of being in your twenties and the nature of someone who actually made it. On some level, you're happy. On some level, you're incredibly frustrated. I'm out of the far end of the valley singing Bill Monroe and the billboards are on sunset and everybody's touring. How am I going to get from A to B?
Well, that happens because as fate what have Like I said, you sensed the tide, you know, the changing of the tide, right, you know, seventy eight, seventy nine, so eighty that entire year. I'm out there, you know, and it's still a life altering experience. I mean, I'm learning. You're from the bandstand. You see life go by every number, you see them dance pass on that dance floor and you're watching from the fist fights to the the to the heartache to the screaming matches. You you're in there long, five sets a night. You get an education. And I'm writing, I'm writing songs. I'm driving air freight during the day, Airborne getting off work, rolling out there and in between and on the weekend, I'm writing, it won't hurt about those people when I fall down from this barstool. There was I mean, it was a woman. I won't give your name, and it's just a different but she was.
I think it's hilarious. You drove Airborne. I used to use Airborne all the time.
Instead, Airborne was a competitive fed X. Right, there were three Emory right was the purple, the band, and Airborne was the red and black, you know, and then FedEx was the purple.
There were I just have that like silver, red and black.
Yeah, it would over. Red and black was a who had a red shirt and a crack of dam. And so I'm driving Airborne air freight and and look at this bar. There was a woman that wo come in came in there almost every night and I won't give her name, and they called her Lady something, and it wasn't ladylike behavior. She was the screaming us. She'd be down at the end of the bar, and about the third set she would go off and start because somebody would be looking at her, she thought from down the others. It was an L shaped bar, and this place probably held two hundred people. I mean it was a good sized bar, I mean know. And it had an L shaped building that in the front. This is how rough, this was how hardcore. Their banner across the crowd and the outside of it said cock open for cocktail six am. Because they had they had a breakfast counter. Okay, they were close from two to set and they served breaktae. I was asleep on the stage one day. And because my drummer guy named stup Perry, who lived into Hungo, That's how I got to know to Hunga well. He had pit bulls in it. I remember, never forget. Stu was so upset one night when I'd give him a lift from there to get into He was a great drummer. He'd been on the Dick Clark tours. And remember there was a guy around town named Jimmy Rabbit. He was a radio person. Now I had a Jimmy Rabbit, right, not not related to Eddie Rabbit. And he was a you know, a bar band guy, but had local fame because of radio. You know, he was a radio now the DJ, I guess. And so Stu played with him, but he played with everybody. I mean he knew you know, Delayning Bramlet, and he had played over the years because stupid. So Stu was playing drums for me because this guy from Oklahoma who had helped me get my first demos done through a guy at Western Recorder, United Western at that time, those were where I made my first demo.
And wait, wait, wait wait this guy who helped you, who paid for that out of the Western's a real studio.
Yeah no, No, what happened was this drummer I had, Stuart h Stuart Perry replaced him because Richard Coffee, the guy that I met through another guy from Tulsa. There's this whole weird you know, Tulsa is a weird music scene. They don't know, they don't know if they're over under sideways down right there. Because the culture the continent meets, it's the South meeting the northeast, Midwest. It's oil money, it's big oil money. You know, the Phillips petroleum fortunes there, Phillips sixty six men. They've got one of the great museums of art there. But they are Oakie's you know. On top of it. Leon Russell is the example, right, he comes out of oak you know. So the drummer Richard Coffee who's from Tulsa, who I've met through another Tulsa character. They are characters, the guys that come up. Even Tom Petty has a Tulsa connection. Mudd Coach went through their right and Tom Petty. If I'm not mistaken what I've Yeah, he played bass on a Tulsa record by Dwight Twilley I'm on Fire, remember that, which had Phil of course, I'm on fire. You record in l A. Oh you don't, you don't, you don't, God.
No, no, Phil Seymour was really and then he put out a solo album. Then he died very quickly.
Yeah, very he had cancer, I guess. And but but he was the drummer for Dwight Twilley and and right, but he also.
He also sang in a lot. I would see Dwight Twilly at Madam Wong remember, Oh my.
God, And and well, Phil then had the plym Souls. That was his band, right, Well, the Phillip.
Soles was the guy who went Folky and went on Geffen. Oh God, what it was married to the woman? Uh not lud Williams, l.
Williams somebody, somebody Williams, Williams, Lucinda.
No, it wasn't Lucinda. The name was Williams. How come I can't remember the name. I'll look this up in a minute. Because the guy from the Plimso has been in La forever and he changed from being a rocker to be a country Uh, Peter Case.
Peter Case, that was his band. You're right, the Plymsols Phil Seymour, and I've misstated that a few times over the years. If Phil just went on to Geffen and had a solo thing, right Phil Seymour, I think it was. I owned the album on Arista for some reason, but it was all about Denny Cordell's stuff at that point, which was Leon's label. Right. They shared Shelter Records, right, and Denny Cordell, who is famous for Flippers the roller rink right at the corner of Losienega and Santa Monica, believe me, where they would have everybody. The King Be's played in the middle because I knew those guys and I would go watch him try and get out there with their gear in the middle of the roller rink. It was in the whole rage of you know, chaer was in their roller skating and yeah, it's crazy.
Okay, anyway, so wait, wait, wait, King Be's Jamie Paul Warren. They used to play everywhere all the time. As far as Flipper's Roller Disco, I certainly went there and roller skated. But you remember when Reagan was shot and they delayed the oscars by one day, and that second day second day was Prince at Flippers.
At Flippers, it was on the Dirty Mind album. My God, I went there.
Maybe there were thirty people in the audience, and he did.
The whole act.
He was jumping on the bed and everything unbelievable.
In the middle of the roller rink. Well, that's la and that's where we were, you know. It's nineteen eighty eighty one, so eighty and then leads into yeah, eighty to eighty one. Because I'd switched from playing driving air freight, I took a job with United Couriers uci there were that red dot I drilled bank checks right in the Armored Car Company, you know. Anyway, because i'd started, I had gone back to La City College, like I mentioned to earlier, and was fooling around with that, and uh, you know, thinking, well, I guess, you know, if it doesn't happen by the time I'm thirty or thirty one, I'm probably twenty seven. At that point, I'm thinking I better at least re you know, recalibrate or something. And so I am doing that at daytime. And Richard Coffee leaves me with stupe Perry as a drummer, but he also introduces me to a house engineer at United Western. His name's Gordon Shryock, and he was this real tall, lanky, like six to two, with a redheaded guy that had curved red hair like a you know, a natural and he had a band called the Mundane Willis World Review. That's a very tulsa kind of take on life, The Mundane Willis World Review. But he was a staff engineer and he did Andre Crouch, he did Natalie Cole, you know at United Western Engineering, right, I mean everybody. He knew Leon really well, you know, and he heard me sing and I played these songs. He said, now dig and he said, that's good stuff. So he decided, he said, but they're going to call this rock and roll because it's so you know, hillbilly and we cut and they're on my thirtieth anniversary re released The Guitarist Cadillacts and on the box set in two thousand and two. I think we put that out, a three or four CD box set Reprise Please Baby. But they're on the re release of The Guitars Cadillacts, the thirtieth anniversary Deluxe dish of that, those demos and it's interesting to hear because Gordon put together Glendy Harden on piano. And I'm getting off driving I was still driving Airborne at that point. Actually I was getting off to Airborne and going to the United Western because he had SPEC time so there's no charge. And he was he said, okay, well, if we make this go, if I get you signed, if I do, I'll I'll take half the publishing. You know, he was going to own part of the public. That's why we do it on the on the spec right, And I said, oh, you know, okay, look back now, so I don't know it. You know, I didn't didn't give it away. And but but we cut I think we cut eight or nine tracks in there, and and he had some connections in Nashville, and I went down there and pitched around and they just looked at me. But I did. Glendie Harden on piano, David Mansfield played fiddle and mandolin. Yeah, I mean, coming right off of Days of Heaven, you know the film the Michael Chimino, right, and he come out of David rolling thunder renew right, He's I mean it was the Prodigy, but so David's playing the mandolin fiddle on those demos, Glendy Harden on piano, Jerry McGee on guitar, you know Jerry McGee from The Ventures and Monkeys, and again a Wrecking Crew guy peripherally, uh, and Robert Wilson, this young bass player out of New Orleans. So that's what And then we had I'm trying to remember the steel players that did it. So that's what I'm doing. It didn't cost me anything. I showed up, you know, after work night, and we cut in the smallest room over there where we tracked at a parquet floor. It's now Studio D because they have no it's now Studio four, but it was, uh one is the big room over there, Studio one, two, and then three Rick Rubin Love's Studio two over there a lot that's a I mean those studios and I would be standing and I cut vocals then out in the big room which Sinatra built. I learned a lot of this later. I'm like, what an auspicious start to that I'm cutting for a first time in a real studio in LA and it's with this guy, Gordon SHROI all this Tulsa connection. And so I did that, and they had those demos, you know, in hand, and it kind of gone Nashville for a brief time to visit. My dad was in Louisville. I took his truck, got the Louisville and drove down and drove to Nashville and spent days down there trying to get somebody to listen and look at this stuff. And it was the songs that made up parts of the first three albums, you know. Eventually and a couple of them we became big hits. And they just kind of looked at it and blinked and didn't quite know what to make of me or what to do with it and that's when things changed and we can pick it up on the next one.
Yes, Dwight, I think we've come to the end of the feeling we've known. There's a whole nother story when you emerge on the national stage. We'll get back to that.
We want to thank you. The other side of the hills, on the Hollywood side of the hills.
Well, you know, then there's there's that, and then there's the twenty first century, which we're still figuring out on.
So many levels.
From one, I mean, you had, you had a kid, so it makes sense the rest of us are still wandering through the universe trying to figure out what's going on.
I don't know, but the kid just looks at me. He was on the phone with them, Okay, daddy, hang up, daddy.
Oh little kids, right right right then I hung.
Up on me, and then she mayn't call back. I'm sorry. You don't ever have to apologize to me, just anyone.
Well, I'll let you get back home to him.
Well, I'm actually head of the studio. I'm gonna stop there and go I'm trying to finish his record. So but you know, Bob, thank you for having me and it's it's.
Well, it's great talking to you because it makes all that stuff that I have in my brain important than my parents. You know, what, are you going to stop buying records for this girl I lived with? I didn't think I was moving in with your records and you know all these cultural references that means so much to us.
We got to talk about that, and we've got to talk about free and how good all right now? Is? I mean the stuff that we That's the best song ever played on a state fair, County fair in Midway because you know who play the guy doing the Himalayan ride? Remember that ride? The Hemmel was the sled Because I was not a ride freak. I'd get motion sick real quick. But that ride with the mirror balloman and the guy was up there ex connor and escape the microphone around his neck, going you want to go faster? That's all I would yell, and it would be all right.
Now, Well the other thing do you have? It was a double CD. Now there are no CDs. There's a free anthology called Molten Gold. I was a free fan. I bought that album Fire and Water. There is shiit on that album. You know there's I'll be Creeping.
All I knew was all right now.
Okay, and they have the Steeler. Do you know the Steeler?
I've heard the Steeler because.
Even Bob, you know, Bob Secret had all those Bob Segart was on Capitol, went to Warner Brothers, then back to Capitol when he went back to the Capitol, right yeah, okay, well the Silver Bullet Man was on Capitol, right.
Yes, that was.
He came back with the Beautiful Loser album in nineteen seventy five, right, But all the albums that he made on Warner others he refuses to release really, which is just pause.
You and I have to talk about the insanity of fighting streaming. Come on, you know it's not that horse is at the barn. You're not going to bring it back, you know what I mean.
And it's like the song believe I know I mean, but people don't know. I'm back in seventy two, which is a great album.
Was that on.
The Katmandu was on Beautiful Loser and then on Live Bullet in seventy five six? Okay, but the original version of Turned the Page, which is now seen as a Metallica song, do you know that song.
Yeah, ohly, I know Bob Seger's good loop Segret. It's it's haunting, it's unbelievable to turn the page, Seeger. And that's that Detroit stuff, because you know, Seeger was working with Mitch Ryder when he was and Mit Mitch oh Man and Pete told me a story when he said want and saw the writer ramp through the Peppermint Lounge and then just released Jenny Jenny, and you know, right right right, he said. And they came on stage, he said, the Fox, we're all down there in Detroit, and he said, we're all jit he said. And they come on stage and they stand with their backs to the audience and start playing with their backs to the audience. He said. They do one whole song, they do another song there in the third song, and they won't turn around. Now, he said, Detroit people are throwing shoes and throwing shit, and he said, and all Seger did was hold his middle finger up over his shoulder and keep singing with his back to the ground, he said. And then when they turned around on the next song, he said, the place came apart. And I said, well, that's theater, right, that's theater.
Well, Okay, I got to tell you one more story. My friend Richard Griffiths, who ran Virgin Publishing and Epic and as a maniter in one direction a million other ates at this point, started out as an agent and he was the agent for Backstreet Crawler, which was Paul cass Off, a Freeze group after free broke up. Now Paul was he not the bass player, the kid, no please, the guitar player.
Okay, but the kid bass player you know, wrote that in the dressing room. They came right right, right right, said we got to have something up to go off. Well, we can't just keep going off with blues. It's down man, And he's walking around banging and.
Listen Chris Blackwell, who they were on island, He says they were the best act. That was the best act he had. They were just too young free well.
But in any event, never not had a hit with anything he's ever done, any band. It was the next one's bad company. Well.
The other thing about Paul Rodgers is he can still sing. Oh man, I mean most of those guys cannot, but he can.
Still deliver about Paul Rogers was sitting somewhere with me just it's weird. Because they'd asked me to do this duet thing he's doing and we're trying to schedule and them coming in and out. I think he might have had a little bit of help. Stuff go on. There's a Paul Rodgers album on foot that he's going to do what And I said, man, I'm are you kidding? Just a school boy when I heard his very beetlestall love him?
Oh think it wasn't from there.
It didn't take him long, don't you know?
Don't you know?
Don't you know shooting that? You are shooting stuff, don't you know?
Ye Oh God? In the second side, good loving, gone bad, all of it. And on the first album s the Firm What chi mean, Paige?
Right?
Absolutely they had a hit.
Then he did in the nineties Bobby did the Law and they had a hit laying.
Down the law. Yeah, I know because the same manager is the manager of Ceezy top All was the one send me the record.
I still have the record.
You can't even find that. But in any event, so he's the manager for he's the agent. Paul Kasof is the act. Paul Kassoff dies on the plane from New York to London. The opening act is ac DC, but the headliner is gone. A CDC says, we're going on anyway in this club, okay, there are five people there. You walk down the stairs and to this club in England. Okay, they do the whole fucking act. They carry uh what's his name around on the shoulders. You know, they're playing blah blah blah. As soon as yeah, as soon as the act is over, angus young. So as soon as it's over, the five people, the five people run out of the building and my friend is freaking out, not home. Did the guy died? Five people came and they immediately left.
What they didn't know was.
They were so blown away that all those five people ran out to the phone booth. They called me and said, you're not going to believe this. You have to come back for the second show completely full. But he got fired as the agent anyway.
Yeah, oh.
Yeah, yeah, but you talk about theater, it used to be you had to go see the act, Yeah, because they would never play certain songs from the album again, and you would come home and tell people say you're not going to believe it. Yeah, it's like I remember seeing Ziggy stardust Rales Cooper Killer.
So you're not going to believe it.
You have to come with me the next time. Now, there's none of that because everybody sees everything.
Yeah, yeah, they think they did, but there's still nothing like it live. You see it live. I saw Steely Dan in Ohio State. They came out with that second A in their debut. They said, here's something new. We're just cutting it with Ricky, don't lose that number. And I was up in the upper deck of that arena was an old where the old basketball arena, and it was up there in the nose but in Washington, And as soon as you heard, We're like, Wow, that's a hit, It's like, Ricky, don't lose.
Okay, one final question, We're gonna go, who have you not met that you'd like to meet?
Alive? Wow? Alive? That's the trick because there are people that I've not had the chance to meet that died that I would have maybe had a chance to meet. I'm trying to think of it as anybody that I've actually I've met, Robert plant Uh and you know Fan Up, you know guys somebody that used that he's deceased. God, I would have loved to met Sam Cook. You know, I'm i'm, I'm bending the margins here for your parameters. But but I just think that's one of the tragedies of early death ever. And what a pinky weird deal that was, you know. And and it's still this dad thing somewhat dubious as to how he got set up, you know, that night with it. I mean, when you think about what he did, what he was doing the father of so really Sam Cook, you know, in terms of taking gospel style stuff and bringing I mean, what he was doing the songs he wrote. Bob, I mean, anyway, so you you limited me to somebody alive, you know what I'll know the next time we talk.
Okay, we'll leave it here, otherwise we'll be talking into the next century. In any event, I want to thank.
You, Dwight.
Till next time. This is Bob left Sex
