Introducing So Many Steves, A New Audiobook from Steve Martin and Pushkin

0:05Pushkin. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human When it comes to the holidays, I believe you fall into one of two camps. Someone who loves holiday music, or someone who won't admit they love holiday music. There's something about a voice you love singing a familiar opening phrase, maybe it's Donny Hathaway, maybe it's Mariah Carey, that just flips a switch, and you instantly back into that warm and cozy headspace only the holidays can bring. For me, that feeling pairs perfectly with a cup of Starbucks Caramel Brulee Latte. That's their signature espresso with steamed milk and a rich caramel brulee flavor topped with whipped cream and a crunchy caramel brulee topping.

0:46It's like the sound of the season, but in drink form. And that's really what this season's about. Because this season and every season together is the best place to be. Come together over your favorite holiday favorites at Starbucks. If you've ever hired for your small business, you know how important it is to find the right person. That's why LinkedIn Jobs is stepping things up with their new AI assistant so you can feel confident you're finding top talent that you can't find anywhere else. The best part is those great candidates are already on LinkedIn. In fact, employees hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor.

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1:50Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash broken, then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI Assistant, making it easier and faster to find top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash broken to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Every December, we start singing at church, around the fire, in our cars, with the radio turned up. But have we ever stopped to ask, where did our favorite Christmas carols come from? And what makes them so magical? Join me in unwrapping the meaning and the magic behind these caroling classics. Listen to Hark, the stories behind our favorite Christmas carols.

2:29Available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at americamagazine.org.

2:59art. For decades now, Steve Martin's been a pure creative force. And now through Pushkin, Steve has his own original audiobook that I'm excited to share an excerpt of with you today. It's called So Many Steves, and it's an exploration of Steve Martin's many creative lives in conversation with his friend and New Yorker writer, Adam Gopnik. In this preview, you'll hear Steve Martin and Adam talk about Steve's music career. You'll even get to hear score their conversation on banjo. Check out the audiobook on Pushkin.fm for the complete conversations, and in the meantime, enjoy this excerpt of So Many Steves.

3:55Chapter 5 Music Man

4:01You did a whole record that had one whole musical side right in there. Yeah, but that's a long story. I didn't care to tell the inspector. That's because I was out of comedy material.

4:17Just really out of it. And I was at a roadblock of writing more at that time, the early 80s. And I had these songs that I'd recorded like eight years earlier. Oh, really? Yeah. And I thought, well, maybe this will work. The record Steve is referencing is called The Steve Martin Brothers. and it was released in 1981. Yeah, and, you know, it's not the smartest thing because if you're buying a comedy record, you don't want a music record, and if you're buying a music record, you don't want a comedy record. But anyway, so I didn't consider myself a music act. And, you know, while I was making movies, I just sort of kept the banjo enough.

4:56You kept it in the trailer with you. Yeah, I kept it in the trailer, and I didn't write any songs. Steve is a man of many ambitions, but of one electric current, or strand of DNA, depending on your pet metaphor, runs through it all, it's his love of music. In particular, his love of the kind of American music we more ignorant folks call bluegrass. I have already learned that the banjo, which I had foolishly imagined as a kind of deliberately camp instrument, was in fact a source of passion and satisfaction to Steve. He loved its tone, the American trail it left behind, its jangling sound and its Civil War campfire integrity.

5:37And yet, as you just heard, at the height of his conventional fame, he had stopped playing the banjo entirely. I want to know why he'd stopped and how this improbable instrument had made him begin again and drawn him back in, and then opened him to an even larger world of music and composition. So around 2000, Earl Scruggs was doing some kind of anniversary record. And he said, would you play... Earl Scruggs, master of the American country. Yeah, Earl Scruggs, a great master, changed the instrument. Absolutely changed the instrument. And he said, I'm doing a 75th anniversary album. Would you play Foggy Mountain Breakdown with me?

6:18You know, we're getting a lot of celebrities. I said, sure, you know, because I can play Foggy Mountain Breakdown. And remember, Steve had performed this very same song with Scruggs earlier in his career.

6:32So I go to this recording session and they put it on. They have the track I'm going to play along with. It was so fast. I couldn't believe it. Now, I could get it back up to speed, but it took some doing. And I thought, I'm rusty. And so I started getting back into the banjo. That began the second period of my musical life.

7:04And so I started writing these songs. But I didn't write songs with lyrics. Because I didn't know how. I thought, okay, I can write a banjo song with a melody. But I don't understand how the next melody lays on top of that. So if I'm playing in C, because I don't know music, I don't know what note, I don't know what fits. And then I was talking to Earl Scruggs. I heard him be interviewed one time. And he said, well, I just play the melody. And I thought, oh, my songs have melodies. Why don't I make that the melody? And just find lyrics that go along with that and then subordinate the chords. The top line, just pick out the top line.

7:47Yeah, pick out the top line. And then I was able to write songs. I don't think I wrote some pretty good ones for the genre. With that inspiration from Earl Scruggs, Steve felt newly empowered with the ability to write the top line for his songs. Soon, Steve's next record came out, his first in decades, and it was all music, no comedy at all. Released in 2009, it's called The Crow, new songs for the five-string banjo. I was very proud that they were new songs for the five-string banjo.

8:26so we recorded them and john mcughan produced it and then my agent a great agent mark geiger said you got to go on the road i said i can't go on the road and he said now look you got to go on the road so here's the options you're going to either hire a pickup band which means every time you go on the road you have to find five new players to learn all the songs etc which is possible because these players are great or you just team up with a existing band because they'll either be all available or not all available and i said well i only know one band uh because i had met the steep canyon rangers in north carolina at a party i thought wow they sound great so i asked if they wanted to team up i'm walking away my best friends all had worn i'm walking away Even your mom said you were nuts In my dreams You wear a red cape and a pitch I'm walking away Jubilation day And then I'm talking to this other friend, Pete Wernick, who is a banjo player, and he helped me quite a bit early on with negotiating the bluegrass world.

9:37And I said, I don't know what to do in the show. I guess we just play the songs. He says, no, no, no. He says, you've got to do comedy. I said, I don't have any. Well, if you don't do comedy, they're going to be disappointed. I said, why? I said, music show, why? He says, because they'll be disappointed. They're expecting you to do comedy. And I went, oh. I mean, like, I should have known that.

10:04But it worked out, because I loved, and eventually just loved, working out humor for that touring banjo show.

10:16This actually happened. I had a book called, it was an omnibus of bad poetry. It was a big, thick book. Yeah, it's called The Stuffed Owl. Yeah, it is. That's right. That's right. So I thought, just as a joke, I thought, I'm going to write some bad poetry. So I wrote some bad poetry about a kid and his dad played the banjo and blah, blah, blah. It goes on and on and on and on. And I looked at it, and I thought, you know, this is some pretty bad poetry, but it might make a good country song.

10:56It actually did. It was called Daddy Played the Banjo. Daddy played the banjo beneath the yellow tree. It rang across the backyard in old-time melody. Bad poetry often makes good lyrics. I don't mean that kind of sending it. Absolutely. Absolutely. Steve was about to meet someone who would become central to his work as a musician, and that was Edie Brackell. Edie Brackell, as you probably know, is a pop and country star, and latterly she had gotten married to Steve's friend, the great songwriter Paul Simon. One time I was at a dinner party, and Edie came up to me and she said, you know, I heard a song you wrote.

11:42I think it was Daddy Played the Banjo, I think. And she said, it's so kind of knocked me out. Would you ever like to write songs together? And I didn't know anything about writing songs together. And I said, well, sure, you know, sure. I think we met at Edie's house. And I didn't know anything about collaborating at all. And kind of got a few things but eventually it worked out that i would send the banjo line line the form and everything and then she would lyricize it and often change the lyrics so it'd have the two counter melodies you'd have the banjo counter melody and her melody on top of it and that's how we started writing them and she was the exclusive writer of the lyrics you know i thought we were going to collaborate on lyrics but she had an insight yeah she had insight into lyric writing you know So that's how that happened.

12:36She had a child by that man from the bank. He was married with a son. All of her family said, give that child away. Try to erase what you've done. We went on a tour with Edie and the Rangers and worked in comedy. It was a big show. And it did well. A traveling bluegrass show. Yeah, in a bus. And then one day we were just talking, and we said how much we both like musicals.

13:10Now, Steve loves musicals. We talk about them all the time. West Side Story, the Bernstein Sondheim classic.

13:22Maria, Maria. Gypsy, the Jolie Stein and Sondheim classic. Wherever we sleep, if prices are steeped. I wept through the whole thing, just from, oh, this song, oh, that song, oh, this song, you know, it's so sweet. And Meredith Wilson's one-of-a-kind 1957 show, The Music Man.

13:52Did you ever pursue the idea of playing Harold Hill? You know, it was always in the back of my mind, but I have a big problem. I can't sing There Were Bells on the Hill. I don't have that voice.

14:07Steve is a true connoisseur of classic musicals. And yet... I still don't really understand Oklahoma. In what sense? The story is so weird. It's insane.

14:22Oklahoma, I should say, was the first Rodgers and Hammerstein show. And it was based on a play called Green Grow the Lilacs. The spirit of Oklahoma is all very Americana, but the play itself has some very weird and strange turns within it. There's a whole sequence where the hero accidentally murders the very misunderstood villain. I mean, when I saw it recently, I really enjoyed it. And I still thought, so they kill him? I don't know. It takes such a bizarre turn into darkness and then sort of leaves unrecognized the turn that it's taken at the end. And then it ends with, O-K-L-A, O-M-A.

15:16But the songs are great. The songs are great. Oh, my God. You know the song Out of My Dreams? Yeah, gorgeous. Such a gorgeous band. Oh, my God. And into his arms you long to fly. The musical Steve went on to write with Edie Brackell is called Bright Star. It premiered on Broadway in 2016. Steve wrote what musical theater people call the book, in other words, the play. And he and Edie Brackell wrote the music, while Edie wrote all the lyrics to those songs. You know, the best part of any of these things is the rehearsal. and you're hearing your song sung by really good voices. I was never happier than when we were working on Bright Star.

16:05And I'd get on my bicycle in the summer and bike downtown to the rehearsal hall and get to see things brought to life. And that's the thing. You write a song, and you're just staring at it, and it's like a banjo melody in your stupid little voice. And then you hear somebody who can really do it, who can really play it, who can kill it. And you go, wow, I can't believe that happened. I mean, to our ears, you know, the writers were going, genius. You know.

16:42We actually based it on a story that Evie discovered, a true story, about a baby in a suitcase, thrown from a train in a suitcase. Right. And a couple heard the cries walking along the railroad track, found him, took him home, raised him, and he became the boy from the train. So we wrote a song about it. She wrote the lyrics, Sarah Jane and the Iron Mountain Baby. It's called the Iron Mountain Baby. Sarah Jane being the mother who finds her. The mother, yeah. Sarah Jane. Sarah Jane. Sarah Jane. Be a mama to the boy from the train. And that's our big closer. And eventually we cut that song. But that's the rule.

17:19Everything you write. Yeah. Well, the problem, of course, with the song is that it told the story that we just told. Bright Star had only a short run on Broadway, just about three months. But in the years that followed, a national tour gave it a second vibrant life. In 2016, it was nominated for multiple Tony Awards, including Best Musical. And those awards are in line with Steve's successful career as a musician. He really wasn't a comedian just dabbling with melodies and top lines. He won three Grammys, performed a duet with Paul Simon on SNL, and even wrote a song of his own for Vince Gill and Dolly Parton to sing.

18:00If I gave you pretty flowers, if I took you out to dinner, if we walked down by the river, la, la, la, la, la, la. Nevertheless, when it came to making Bright Star, I think Steve was, if not exactly repelled, then at least a little stunned by how much coordinated teamwork has to go into the creation of a musical. It's the exact opposite of, for instance, stand-up comedy, which is essentially you and at most a microphone and an audience. In a musical, every single time you make a change, 200 other things and 200 other people have to change with you. Because the second bassoon in the orchestra has to change its note, and the singer has to change her syllables, and on and on and on.

18:49A musical is a kind of great ocean liner of a work of art. And I think Steve was in some respects, if not short-tempered, then at least stubborn in the face of all of that composite resistance. As a comedian, you want everything to work, everything to work. And so, you know, you're patching holes and fixing this. And that's the way it's always been on everything, by the way. There's nothing made that wasn't fixed to some degree. But like you say, there's so many moving parts to it. If you want to change a line in a musical, the director will say legitimately, well, we'll get to it next week. And I say, no, it's just one line.

19:27It's just one line. No. Because their focus is somewhere else or it's authoritarian. And often it means, well, we have to change the music. We have to cut two bars. We have to think that the scene is longer. And it goes on and on and on. And, you know, if it was a gigantic, monstrous hit, by the way, it's still being done. It's done a lot, but I'm sure I'd think differently about it. But there's a struggle, a struggle, a struggle, you know, and then nine months later, you're closed. Yeah.

19:57I hate to say this, Steve, because you'll reject it, but it occurs to me, Three Amigos would make a very effective musical. They're on it. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, John Mulaney's been signed up to write it. Is that right? Three Amigos, of course, is a 1986 comedy directed by Jonathan Landis. Chevy Chase, Martin Short, and Steve star as actors mistaken for gunslinging heroes in Mexico. Oh, I had no idea that. But that was my instant response. I said, would you like to write it? I said, no way. Yeah. Because I know what that means. It's like three years every night down there with heartbreak.

20:39Steve is adamant that he does not want to do another musical. So why, I wonder, had Steve chosen to write a musical in the first place?

20:50Some of it, I suppose, was part of his usual search for the next thing, the new self. The musical comedy was a kind of great white whale of American entertainment. Everyone wants to write or perform in one sooner or later. But it also involved a kind of fascination with a particular line of Americana. That kind of music represents an authenticity that largely escapes us now. Bright Star, the musical that he and Edie Brackell would write together, represented an attempt to summon up some of that authentic American musical energy. And it was part, I felt, however subliminally, of Steve's place in what I always think of as the comedy of American resistance.

21:33You see, I have a unified theory of American comedy in the 20th century, which is doubtless as flawed, as all unified theories of anything always are. But it's one in which two kinds of comedy made themselves felt in the first half of the century and then on through the rest. One was the comedy of invasion and the other the comedy of resistance. There's the immigrant, and yes, mostly Jewish comedy, of energy, entrepreneurial mischief, anything goes, anarchy, a comedy of enterprise and noise. The Marx Brothers are obviously supreme here, but it's a vein that runs right up to Phil Silver's Sergeant Bilko, swindling the simpleton officers at the army base.

22:16And it's telling that Steve, trying to become Bilko, never really worked. But in response to that comedy of invasion comes the comedy of an older American resistance to all that immigrant energy and explosion, struggling to hold on to order and decency and gallantry. It's a comedy exemplified by W.C. Fields struggling to sleep on his sleeping porch in It's a Gift, while the neighborhood around him explodes, refuses to quiet down. The division extends even onto the written humor of the period, with James Thurber, the model of the uncomprehending and baffled Midwesterner, nostalgically watching Civil War values passing, and S.J.

23:00Perlman, the cynical navigator and, of necessity, commercial participant in the endless ocean of American vulgarity. Steve Martin has a place in this story, I think, as the model of the modern wasp resister. It's there everywhere. It's in the double takes he offers at the accented extravagances of the Martin Short wedding planner character in the Father of the Bride series. A cake, Frank, is made of flour and water. My first car didn't cost$1 ,200. Welcome to the 90s, Mr. Frank. It's there in the dumb doggedness of his character in L.A. Story, who accepts the absurdities of L.A. as a fact to be coped with not something to be polemical about.