#2283 - Billy Corgan

23:00Like what goes on outside the gates? People living in motels and kind of perpetual tourist economy. Kind of living hand -to -mouth and kind of using the turs, the white whale of tourism to just get enough money. Because there's always some turnover, you know, whether it's running scams and stuff. So he made a really beautiful movie about that as well. So I was in talks with him for a while about doing something and then it just didn't go anywhere. Like what kind of scams? I can't remember because it's been a few years since the beginning. It's just the idea that anywhere there's a tourist economy, there's money to be made.

23:29Right. You know, there's the guy standing on the corner selling brochures or hustling you into a van to see where the stars live. Oh, right, right, right. It's about a cast of characters living in the shadow of this idealistic place. Right. Just like those Hollywood tour people that you would get in LA. Yeah. Those were the weirdest fucking people. Well, I always get offended when I walk down Hollywood Boulevard and they think I want to go on it. I don't know what it is. I feel like I don't want to go on your tour. You look like a guy. Totally. Get on the tour. I'm not going on your tour. Just got off the boat.

24:02Yeah. Just came here from Nebraska. Totally. Like, gee, I wonder where the stars live. That's such a creepy thing to do. Just drive around and point. That's where Ben Affleck sleeps. Like they've been doing it since the 30s. Yeah, forever. Yeah. I mean, I have some of the old brochures, you know, see where Greta Garbo lives and all that stuff. It's just always weird. Well, back then it was even weirder because those were the first stars. Well, back then, I mean, they went way out of their way to turn them into gods. You know, they airbrushed the shit out of her. You photo and they cover up scandals.

24:36There's that one famous scandal where one of the top male stars, maybe it was Gary Cooper, Carrie Grant, ran somebody over in a car. Really? You know about that? No. You might want to look that one up. I know the fact that it was a top A level star. I think he was drunk, ran over somebody in a car and somebody from the studio went to jail for like seven years and took the rap. So that the star could stay out and the studio paid the guy like a stipend to go to jail. It's a very famous story. So some guy did seven years or something. That's crazy. You know, there's a similar story about that in China with the bodies exhibit.

25:13Oh, yeah, yeah. There was a woman who was married to a mayor of one of the cities in China. And this woman who was married to this mayor, the mayor was having an affair with a TV newscaster. And she got the TV, he got the TV newscaster pregnant. And apparently there was a confrontation between the woman and the wife and the lady winds up missing. She gets scrubbed from the internet. I mean, she scrubbed. There's only like a photo of her on the internet. And then all of a sudden in the body works exhibit, there's an eight month pregnant woman who they believe is this newscaster. Here's the other part.

25:55The woman who's the mayor's wife is also the manager of the local plastination factory where they take the bodies and they immerse them in these solvents and turn them into statues. This woman was the manager of the place that produced the woman with the eight month fetus in her body. And you can still see it, like it's on tour. You can go see this lady who was most likely murdered. So then she didn't just kill that lady. She poisoned some British businessman. So she poisons this guy and she has to go to trial. Well, she doesn't go to trial. Some other woman goes to trial who doesn't look anything like her.

26:42Raise the right hand. The whole thing goes to jail. So she probably paid some family off, some poor family. I'll give you a million dollars. Give up your daughter. She goes to jail. Everybody's written. It's not a bad jail. She's going to do yoga. Play checkers. Have you heard the ones where like, because there's so much plastic surgery in Asia where guys are suing their wives because they marry someone who they think is hot? And then the kid comes out and the kids not really good. Jaw lines totally different, different nose. Yeah, there's a lot of plastic surgery over there. In Korea, it's nuts.

27:12They do their eyes in this strange. Somebody told me as much as 75 % of the women in South Korea have surgery. Is it really? Somebody who's Korean told me that. Who's that, Jamie? We need to find this out. This is important information. Because last time I was in Korea, I was like, wow, these women here are really hot. Like this was like woman after woman after woman. And somebody pulled me a sight. Bro, that's like, that's just all plastic surgery. That's not real. Wow. As many as up to 50 % are higher, maybe some people have said a lot of liars. A lot of them ladies are lying about it. Up to 50 % or higher.

27:45Well, higher could be like 75%. I like this whole new business of plastic surgery tourism. Where it's like cheaper to get on a plane. Oh, like go to Turkey and get your friends. Yeah, somebody was recently trying to talk me to go to South Korea to get some work down on my face. It's like so like what? I guess the idea would be you could go and recover over there. Your neighbors don't have to see you with bandages over your head. No, I think it's the idea it's cheaper. It's cheaper. Yeah, cheaper and better because they can do stuff there that we can't do here yet. Oh, really? What can they do there that we can't do?

28:16Apparently they have some new thing that's unbelievable. What is it? Something, they tried to explain to me. It doesn't make any sense. Some kind of new facelift that's not a facelift or something. A facelift? Not like a non -invasive facelift. It's a relative of mind through marriage, Chinese relative. And he's in that business and knows the Koreans over there in LA and all of a sudden. He was saying in five years this will be the number one thing. So you might as well get to Korea now. This is the stuff I hear when I'm sitting around the hot pot dinner. Non -invasive facelift. Isn't that weird that one of our biggest fears is that your face sags?

28:59I don't know. I mean, I don't know how it would feel if I wasn't in the entertainment business, right? I mean, you're in a cosmetic business on some level. Some level. I know it's not to see your brain. It kind of helps you learn. You're a painer. I never thought of you as ugly. I'm not attracted to men per se. Thank you very much. But I never thought you were unattractive. Definitely less attractive than I used to be. That's just time and booze. I don't know. Successfully. Success creates a glow around a man. It does a little bit of a glow, right? Yeah, a little bit of a swagger. Well, just age beats us all.

29:31Nobody wins. Everybody looks worse at 80 than they do at 20. Yeah. Just how it goes. I'm 57, so you kind of look down. I'm 57, too. Oh, are you? Yeah. When's your birthday? August. I'll get older than you. I'm March. But you know, you look down that road and you're like, like, am I going to be all right when I get to 80? You know, very few people are. You know, there's a few people that you're calling. You're calling UFC like 972. Or like, you know, who I don't know what the number would be, but I'm worried about Bruce Buffer. Because Bruce Buffer, he puts out so much energy. Well, I was telling the guys the other day.

30:05One day, he's just going to be in the middle screaming someone's name. And he's just going to fucking check out. Like right in the middle. At... Time! Boom. His eyes roll back. But that's for any performer. That's the way you go out. You go out on your shield, right? That would be amazing. I don't want him to die. I love him. But if you did die that way, I'd be like, what a legend. What a legend. The Buffers, right? Both of them. Oh, yeah. Isn't it crazy that they didn't know each other until they were like 30? I only have you, no, we had a brother. I only have... UFC 313 is back in Vegas. It won't be paradise for one of the light heavyweights.

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31:57C -D -K -N -G dot -Co slash audio. I only have one Michael Buffer story if you want to hear it. Sure. So I went to see a Holyfield Lennox Lewis Madison Square guard. Oh wow. And I was hanging out with all the cool people at times. I'm in the fourth row and it was infamously a draw. It was almost all English tourists that had come in for the fight. They were booing the national anthem. I mean, it was a pretty riotous atmosphere. And, you know, I don't know anything about fights, but it was a pretty boring fight. And Lewis seemed to be a little bit more agile because of youth and all that. Anyway, so right when I, you know, they're, whatever they're doing, HBO, they're over there in the corner.

32:41They're doing their bit, you know what I mean? They're talking before they go to look scorecards. And a guy leans forward the, the ref to tell someone in the second row. Might have been Don King. And I heard him go, it's a draw. Right? So I knew it was a draw like 60 seconds before they announced it. And I was with a lot of well -known people. And I said, run. And they're like, what do you mean? And I said, we got to run. Like, and I started grabbing people and we ran out of Madison Square Garden. And we're almost totally out the building, you know, kind of we get to the concourse part and you hear the decision and it's like, and people start, like here comes the riot vibe.

33:22Really? So somehow we ended up because it got so - Was it because the decision was bad? Well, the English people didn't like that it was a draw. Oh. Because holy if it was on the older side and - Right. I don't know. It's not a well -renowned fight. I can't remember it. It was just a draw. It was a stone -cold boring fight. But because it was a draw on all these English people were mad and Don King was involved. So it was like all that typical bruhaha that was going on and boxing at the time. Anyway, so because of the suddenly the riotous or potentially riotous situation, the police started like making people go different ways, like funneling traffic or something.

33:56You know, it was almost like they got like code red or something because like suddenly got really weird. So then we couldn't get out of the building. So somebody was like somebody recognized somebody in our parties, follow me. And so then next thing we know, you know, we get we're in like in the VIP backstage part where it's safe. And there's, you know, Michael Buffer on a chair. And it wasn't talking to me but he's talking to somebody and I heard it was going, that's bullshit. Like in that voice, that's all I remember. That's bullshit. So was he talking about the decision? He thought the decision was bullshit.

34:28You know, a lot of men's cards was heavy for Louis. Wow, 117, 111, Harold Letterman who's always dead on the money. Harold Letterman was always right. Yeah, so they were saying, as it got called, like this is a travesty. Yeah, I mean, again, I'm not a, I mean, I'm not a fight officiant out of it. But I thought Louis was slightly better. Wow, I forgot about this fight. I completely forgot about this fight. There's so many fights from this era that were incredible. That was an amazing era for heavyweights. And this is when Don King was still running everything. Did they ever rematch? I don't, I honestly don't remember.

35:04You don't think so? No, I think so. I just happened to mention two missing. That's bullshit. There's a lot of that. With that great voice. He's still trucking. He's still trucking. He still announces huge. I went already, like, like, like, because you ever get that, like, like, like somebody wants you to do their bar mitzv or anything, you ever get those requests? No, those requests. Will you come do my bar mitzv? Who won this one? Is that the rematch? Had to be Louis, right? I would imagine. Oh, similar letterman card. Similar card. Let's see if they robbed and toyed. They gave it to him. Yeah.

35:42Well, they got their rematch. No, you get this thing like, hey, will you come do my, like, like, right, right? I wonder what Michael Buffer gets to show up somewhere. You know, it's probably like Saudi Arabia. They have him come over there and introduce someone's birthday. Like, is it half a million? Half a million, half a million thing? Probably more. Depends, you know, I mean, like, you know, in my face, we could become privates. Right. I saw Stone Temple pilots. They played Dana White's 40th birthday party. Yeah. And there was no one in the room other than UFC employees. And they put on a show like it was a fucking sold out arena.

36:19I mean, full blast went. Yeah, they didn't go through the motions at all. It was a phenomenal show. That means Dana paid him. Yeah. Yeah. Great band. I mean, toi, I love those guys. But they were so professional. It was like, it was so impressive. And because they were so, like, powerful on stage, everybody just started paying attention. Right. Because it kind of broke out in the middle of this party. Yeah. Where this birthday party will stand around tables, eating food, having fun. It's, I've done a few things, so it's always a bit awkward. Yeah. Which is weird, because they're all paid gigs.

36:48Right. But something about a paid paid gig feels different. Yeah. There's a lot of entitlement. It's attached to, like, someone's paying you to come perform. Well, then you see the guys wife going, who's this? Right. There's that, too, the people that aren't fans. You're like, oh, no. Yeah. Yeah, those are weird gigs. Because then you know, how much? I got to have a one shitty night for a million dollars.

37:18I mean, I'd like to tell you I haven't been there, but I've been there. Ron White did one last year in Vegas. And he was talking about, he's like, I don't, I didn't want to do it. I kept saying no, and they kept going higher and higher. I eventually got to a point where I was like, oh, fuck it, I'll do it. And he goes, it wasn't worth it. He goes, it was one of the worst fucking nights of my life. He goes, all the time I'm doing it. I'm thinking, I shouldn't have fucking done this. He said, they laugh, they barely paid attention. It's like, why am I here? But if like you're a giant fan, like say, if you're a giant Ron White fan and you hire Ron White, but you're like, office doesn't give a shit about comedy and they just want to like have fun and drink and eat hot dogs.

37:59Yeah, I went to a billionaire thing once with a guy at hired Diana Ross. Whoa. It had at least be a million dollar gig for her. Hmm. And maybe 700, 800 people? Wow. You know, and you're like, wow, I mean, basically a private concert with Diana Ross. I mean, that's pretty dope. If you were really into it and people paid attention, it would probably be fun. Small, intimate. I've done it where they're fun. Yeah. Yeah. What percentage? Less than 50. We don't get to be fair or not fair. We don't get asked to do it a lot. I don't think we're on most people's being go scarred for a private event. Yeah.

38:35I think my rep precedes me, you know. It's like a Beyonce thing. Oh, though. I mean, she does like, I've heard some of the numbers that some of those pop people get come out of Saudi Arabia. Yeah. 14 mil and for one show. Yeah, nobody calling us for that. You know what I mean? Yeah. I take that phone call. Well, that's one of those things. If like, who's that, um, the richest man in India, his son, a birthday, and it was like the most extravagant birthday of all time. He gave him 50, 50 mil on entertainment alone. Something crazy like that. Oh, God, it's so crazy. That's so much money. Yeah. I mean, I wish there was a perfect formula before it, but there is.

39:16Because that's what I mean. I mean, we play, every time we play, we basically get paid. I think it was a wedding, not a birthday party, right? It was a wedding. Yeah, you got like an endless form. An endless was the announcer. Yeah, it's just, that's the weird world of extravagant amounts. Like unbelievable amounts of money where you want to hire Kanye. There you come to your house. Where you're sitting was a hundred million. That's where Beyonce was. They were pretty spent over a hundred million for an aunt sister, Isha's wedding in 2018. The ceremony featured a performance by Beyonce. I mean, if I'm Beyonce's manager, she's not going over there for less than 2025.

39:53Yeah. Why not? They have so much money. They won't even notice it. They'll make it back tomorrow on the stock market. I don't know. I'm saying that. Okay, so when you get to that goofy hunt, that was a hundred and how many million? 190? How much does that count? No, I'm sorry. How much is it worth? Yeah, worth. How much does it work? 16 billion. 116. Yeah. You're making $20 million every day, probably. It's like rolling in constantly. I mean, you've met you. I mean, you just had a billionaire here in here a couple days ago. Yeah. I mean, you've met your share of billionaires. It's always an interesting thing how they spend or don't spend their money.

40:30There's no consistent guide for billionaires. No. I like the Jeff Bezos way. We're tight shirts. Get a yacht. Have a hot girlfriend. Let's fuck and go. That's what you're supposed to do when you've got $250 billion. You're not supposed to be a fucking weirdo and wear a sweater and go visit Haiti. No, you're supposed to be ballin'. Go to the Mediterranean. Poppin' corks with models. Let's go. Get a million dollar watch. I like to have a billion dollars to make that decision. Right. Not there yet. Well, the weirdest one is billionaires that compare themselves to super billionaires. And they feel poor.

41:07Like Brian Cowan was telling me about his buddy who's worth, I think, $3 billion. And he's like, I really need to fucking up my game. Because he's friends with a guy who's worth $80 billion. So he feels poor compared to his $80 billion friend. Boy, I like to be poor like that. The forest for the trees.

41:29Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, not this lifetime, I don't think. It doesn't seem like fun. It seems like the amount of stress and energy that must be required to acquire that much fucking money. Yeah, Jimmy Chamberlain of the Pumpkins, the drummer, is friends with Jimmy John, the sub -key. Oh, okay. So I know Jimmy John a little bit. And we were at dinner one night in Nashville. I had it at a place he owns, or with other people. And when my buddy started pitching, I'm on like some kind of money thing. And I just saw his face change because everybody in the world wants to pick, we're back to pitch and ideas, right?

42:07Of course. And Jimmy John knows this mutual friend. So it's not as rude as it might sound coming out of my mouth. But at some point, he looks at me, goes, Tommy, you know how I got that money? I made a lot of fucking sandwiches. That was the way he shut them down. Like, like, I know how I know what I had to go through to make that money. Like you just see me as a walk in ATM. Yeah, well, it just changes the dynamic of the friendship now too. Now he's not going to be able to trust your friend. Well, nobody trust, nobody trust Tommy. Tommy's a mess. Tommy's infamous, actually. In the mess. Yeah, everybody in the fadash mess.

42:51I've literally been walking down the street in foreign countries and strangers will come up to me and say, oh, you know Tommy? He's like, he's just a legendary character in the interjeion. What was he trying to pitch, Jimmy John on? Some kind of investment scheme or something because my friend Tommy collects billionaires. Oh boy. I call it, he plays billionaire Lotto. He's hoping that when one of them knocks over, they'll leave him, you know, a taste. Yeah, how bizarre. He's like a vampire familiar. Well, what's interesting about Tommy is his uncle was the founder of Hard Rock Cafe. So he grew up in a family with money.

43:30So instead of somebody who he figured was poor and aspirational and want to hang out with billionaires, he actually came from money. So he knows how to speak the language of wealthy people. And so he's kind of generally welcoming those circles where I, you know, I grew up in the suburbs. I don't know how to roll in that world. And so yeah. But yeah, Tommy, I think he's probably up to about seven or eight billionaires, the accounts his friends. And what does he do for a living? No one knows. No one knows. That's the legend of Tommy. Really? Yeah. And I fact, I pitched Tommy once I'm making a documentary called Who the Fuck Is Tommy Litnik.

44:02That's his name. Tommy Litnik. And he doesn't like the idea. Yeah, I wonder why. It just outed him. But I mean, we don't have time for it. But I can make you a list of 50 people that are super famous, like Bono on Down, who have pulled me aside and go, what's the deal with Tommy? Right? And just the fact that we're talking about Tommy will really please Tommy. But he'll take Umbridge. In fact, I have to tell you story by my father too, but he'll take Umbridge with the way I'm portraying him. I'm sure he will. The story I want to tell you about my father was when I was on your show, um, I told you a story about how I found a double -barreled, saw it off shotgun under my father's bed.

44:41It was in a guitar case. Right. Well, my father heard the show about a month after I told the story on your show. And so I get this text from my father's when he's still alive. Obviously, and he goes, yeah, I heard what you said on on Joe's show. And I'm like, you know, you're looking at your phone. Like here it comes, you know, because that thing's going to be pissed at me. He goes, there's one thing you left out of the story waiting text. The shotgun wasn't loaded. That's all he wanted me to know. Like somehow he made it better. How bizarre. Your father sounds like a fucking character. He was unbelievable.

45:14Unbelievable. What did he play? Guitar. Great, great, great musician. Really, truly great musician. He's the classic guy that should have made it. It didn't. So when I made it, it made the whole thing really weird. Oh. Because he looked at me and said, how did my shrubby kid make it? And I didn't. Wow. He must have gotten lucky. He must have done something. Because if it didn't work for me, how could it work for him? So that was a weird, a weird thing. But he was talented. I mean, he really was talented. That's great. Did he, did you get a, did you feel resentment? Did you get along with him after that?

45:50It was a weird thing. My father had a lot of issues with drugs. So it was always kind of like it can be with addicts. It was like depending on the day. One day he would tell me I was the greatest thing that ever happened to him. And I was the number one son and doubted on, and two weeks later he's telling me he wished I'd ever been more. And I should have been aborted. So it was a weird, it was weird. It was a weird thing. So that's why that's why that story's funny to me. Because he didn't mind that I told you about finding it sort of shotgun. He minded that I implied it was dangerous when he made sure that it wasn't loaded.

46:19So it was okay. That's where his brain worked. Do you believe in that it wasn't loaded? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. He was, he should have been an arch criminal or something, but he didn't have the nerve. So he just became a guitarist. No, he was a drug dealer and he used to run drugs and guns for the mob. Really? Oh, he would do stuff like Melrose Park is kind of an infamous city just outside the Chicago city limits where a lot of the mob wise guys lived. And he was friends with the kid of a wise guy. And the kid would dabble because he was protected because his father was a made man. So we go over that guy's house for hours and just hear these crazy stories about the mob and my dad would pick up something in a satchel and deliver it.

47:04You know, like it was, that's, that's, that's, that was eight years old going through. Oh, shit. Wow. What a crazy environment. Yeah. So you're eight years old. He's running drugs and guns. Oh, yeah. Wow. Yeah. Did you see like a lot of shit? I saw a lot of stuff, but it was like, you know, when adults are trying to hide stuff from you, but not really. Uh -huh. You know, so like, for example, they would stay in the basement all night party, whoever he was with, musicians, whatever. Right. So come down tonight and be coke everywhere and rolled up 20s on black sap with mirrors. I was like seven, ten.

47:38Oh, my God. So I had a feeling, call it intuition. I had a feeling that he wanted me to clean up, but not the mirrors. And he was, and I was like, what's on the mirror that, you know, that you left behind? He was like, oh, that's, uh, we have a cold or something, but yeah, this good you didn't get rid of it. And they're like, why do you need the rolled up 20? Oh, it's just easier to, you know, it was like, so it was, you knew it was bullshit, but you're, you're ten. You don't know what coke is. Right, right. You don't have any concept of what they're doing, but you know, something's going on. This was constant.

48:10Yeah, and my dad would do stuff like he'd take me to lunch with his mistresses and stuff and introduce him as his friends. Wow. So it was all kind of in plain sight, weirdness, but you know, you'd be driving on the street and suddenly you were in a drug deal and it was just, whoa. He told me, he told me he was shot at nine times and stabbed three times. Holy shit. Yeah, you want to hear, it was my favorite stories. Yeah. So the band had a van. He had a van and we bought it off and it was our band van for a while. And then after we were, we didn't need it anymore because we got too big. He wanted to buy it back so we sold it to him.

48:49So one day I went over to his house and if you know, this is the driver's thing, right behind the driver's where the driver's head would be, but in the middle of the car was in bullet hole. So I said, did somebody shoot at you? He goes, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. What happened? Exactly. He's like, yeah, I was stopped over there and arrogance it and some guy came up and I thought he needed something like a dollar or something. So I rolled down the window as soon as I did, he put a gun through the, put a gun through the window at my head and then, you know, I hit the gas and sped off. And so as I went to, he tried to shoot me, but then he missed and the bullet went in behind my head and I got away.

49:29That's the story he told me at the time. So years later, the story came back up somehow and he goes, oh, that wasn't the real story. Here's the real story. So same setup. He's sitting somewhere, but it was a drug deal. He rolls down the window and make the drug deal. The guy puts a gun at his head. He does hit the gas. The guy does try to shoot him. But because my father's mad now, he spins the van around and he tries to run the guy over and the guy's trucking down the street. And the guy ran into a gas station. So my dad came barreling at the gas station at full speed in this van and he was going to run the guy over.

50:03And he said he reached a point where the guy was going to, if the guy stopped, he would run him over, but the guy left defense. And the only way to kill the guy was to have to run the fence and ram into a house that was next to the gas station. So he hit the brakes and didn't run the guy over. So that was the real story. So back to the kid thing, excuse me, that's why it's so hard to pin this whole thing down because there's so much smoke. Right. Like he did tell me there was another kid named Bill. That's a real thing. And when he told me when I was 18, he lied and said he didn't know where the kid was.

50:39Well, when my stepmother brought up the whole billbirth thing later. And I asked him, he admitted that he didn't know where the kid was, but he didn't want to tell me. What did Bill think about this? Like the possibility that his mother had an affair with your dad? I don't think Bill gives it any credence. That's my sense of it. He just thinks it's bullshit. Honestly, I don't know what Bill thinks. Because I could see how you would think it'd be possible because your dad was insane. Your dad sounds like a fucking maniac. The only way to... Of course, Aisy Movie maniac. Well, it put his way, if a person doesn't believe that somebody is their father, not their real father, that they grew up with.

51:18And I do know people who've had that. They grew up with somebody and they, in fact, had just happened in my family. That a cousin of mine found out that her father was not her father and she's in her 60s because of a DNA test. Oh my God. So it is possible that people can find out later in life, oh by the way, that guy that you thought was your dad, he ain't your dad. Here's your real dad, right? So it does happen. But I don't get any sense from Bill that he believes that's possible. So the only way would be possible if Bill grew up in some kind of weird lie. You see what I'm saying? Right. And I don't believe that.

51:51Right, right. So I don't know how much he's talked about his family. But I guess you can't imagine a kid coming downstairs and seeing Coco over the mirrors and black Sabbath albums and people blacked out and... empty booze everywhere. Like, this is a normal thing on your house, telling these wild parties. Yeah. And to be fair, I think a lot of people grew up in that atmosphere. I think we just don't hear about it. Yeah, but not a lot of people grew up with a dad that's running guns and drugs for the mob. That's true. That is true. That is true. That's so insane. That's such a crazy way to grow up.

52:29Like we would have conversations, like we would have conversations, because you know, as you get older, you start to ask questions, right? Yeah. So I'd say, Dad, aren't you worried, like, if you get pulled over, you know, because he would carry like a lot of fucking weed in the car, just for his own personal use. He smoked constantly, like my whole childhood, like, I mean, I just remember, well, join after joint all day at the dinner table in the car. I'd contact high and that's like, so finally at some point I said, Daddy, aren't you worried about if you could pull over? And he, like, popped the engine, you know, old cars, you know, when you pop the trunk, what is it called?

53:03The hood. He had figured out some system where you, if you put, if you put weed in a, in a, in a thing full of whiskey, he said that the dogs couldn't pick up on the scent. So there was like a compartment in the engine compartment, like a thing that was full of whiskey, and then he would put a waterproof baggy with the weed in the whiskey, and so that the dog came around the car, it would never, never smell it. That's hilarious. So it was like life lessons, you know, from pop. How many, but dogs can only smell one thing. They're only looking for one thing. When you train a dog, you train a dog either for a bomb or you train them for heroin.

53:39You don't train a dog for everything. Like, what do you got? Three barks for Coke. The, the way they train dogs, it's one thing that they're trained to smell. All right, they have one. Yeah, they're looking for bombs. They're only looking for bombs. They're not going to stop you for weed. Yeah, I don't know. Which is like the dumbest thing to train a dog for, if you train a dog for weed. Well, now, yeah, now it's the dumbest, but they still do. They still have weed dogs. Yeah, yeah, if they smell weed, they'll call the weed dog. He's weed weed going Texas. It's not, it's weird. It's decriminalized.

54:10There was actually a lawsuit that Ken Paxen tried to stop Dallas from decriminalizing weed, and they just lost in court. So Dallas now marijuana is decriminalized for personal use. It's stupid. It should be the whole country. It should be legal. Just like whiskey is, don't do it if you don't want to do it. But, you know, you should probably know what the effects are, and we should probably study what the actual correct dose is per person. Like, we know it drinks. Like, one drink is one drink. Right? You know what it is. You go to the bar, you get a shot at the key. That's what it is. It's one shot of the key.

54:46Everybody's pretty much, it's standard. With weed, you don't know what the, you don't know what's the right amount. Like, should I take two hits or three hits? You can build a intolerance like your dad, your smoking weed. Like, if I smoked weed all day long, it'd be a fucking mess. I'd be paranoid and freaked out. If you're like, every one to get me. But he was. And he just kept doing it. That's even crazier. A weed back then was not weed today. It's, you probably could get some weed that's commensurate with weed today. Like, Acapoco gold or something wacky. But generally. They have all these crazy strains now, right?

55:22Isn't that the, now they have scientists. You the botanist got involved in the game. And they're making super weed. I noticed one thing because I was in LA for a couple months this winter. And when they first, whatever decriminalized in LA, it seemed like everywhere you went, everybody was smoking weed. It became like a thing. You couldn't go anywhere without smelling, you know, the telltale smoke. And now it seems to have calmed down. And I think it's almost like, now it's like Holland and back in the day. Yeah, normal. It's so normal. It's no longer a thing to like openly smoke weed. Yeah. So I think it's gone back to a, oh, it's not that big a deal, which I think is probably best.

55:56Because there was a year there where you would go there and everybody was stoned. You couldn't get service at a restaurant. Like, I mean, it was like people were staring off in a space. Edibles. Yeah. Well, for sure, you're going to have like a normalization period. After a while, or it's like weed's normal. It's just like everyone's not drunk all the time, even though you can get liquor everywhere. Yeah. You choose when to and buy and when not to or not to at all. That's just supposed to have choices. You're an adult. You're an adult human being. The analogy I always make is imagine it was a three of us in a room.

56:29Just us three. And we were the only people on earth. We lived on an island and Jamie just decided he doesn't want a smoking weed. And so Jamie passed the law and he wants to lock us up if we smoke weed. Oh, I see. That's just as ridiculous as 300 million people and one adult decides that the other 300 million people should be allowed to smoke weed. Like, do it if you want to do it. Don't do it if you don't want to do it. But you can't putting people in a fucking cage for doing something that they want to do that harms no one. But you don't want them to do is fucking insane. It's just insane. I grew up because of my father's life.

57:07I mean, I don't know what age I became conscious of my dad. My father doing drugs constantly, but let's say it was five years old. So that's 1972. So I've been in weed culture since 1972. Jesus. So I always thought it was Vietnam War days. Yeah. And I met all those guys too. You know, these guys with PTSD and all that stuff. Wow. So I guess what I'm after is I never understood what the big deal was. And the only thing that freaks me out are people that are really into weed. Like, you know what I mean? Like the 420 property. Yeah. Like that's their identity. That freaks me out. Yeah. It's a crutch for some.

57:43It's a tool for others. You know, it's a creativity tool for a lot of people. You know, Carl Sagan was one of them. Carl Sagan was a stoner. Oh, yeah. He's stoner. He's got one of the best quotes on states of consciousness that are available to people under cannabis that are not available any other time. See if you can find that quote. It's a brilliant quote. Yeah. Carl Sagan, I mean, he kind of had to keep it under wraps a little bit because marijuana was really illegal back then. But he still wanted to talk about it sometimes. It just depends on the person. It's like everything else. There's some people that should not drink.

58:23They drink and then their eyes turn to sharp eyes. They're gone. And they go away. That's it. The illegality of cannabis is outrageous and impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight sensitivity and fellowship. So desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world. That's not the quote. That's a quote. But the other one had to do with states of consciousness that were that you could achieve. It's a very stoner like thing to say. Yeah.

58:56Well, I'm sure you talked about it a bunch. But either way, he was a regular cannabis user. It's supposed to be like everything else. You can have wine in your house. It doesn't mean you're going to drink wine all day every day. You should not be high all the time. I just don't want the 4 -20 people here. Well, it's like those people like the mega people or like the fucking insane clown -possy people. It becomes their whole thing. That's something wrong with going to insane clown -possy show. But if you want to be a juggler, and that's your whole identity as being a juggler, Juggler is a whole, you know, we've done business because of the NWA.

59:35We've done business with the jugglers. They seem like fun guys. They're great. No problem with them. You know, violent J, as he's known. Well, I was in the NWA for a hot second. Oh, really? And he's kind of refired his promotion out, Juggel O. I guess JCW. Juggel O clown promotion or something. So a lot of my wrestlers wrestle for him too. Oh, okay. I didn't even know you had a wrestling promotion. They did back in the day. They used to wrestle. I know they wrestle for WCW and TNA. So they were wrestling at the highest level for a while when they were sort of in the 90s times. When they were in MTV and all that stuff.

1:00:12I just love that they have like a carnival of outcasts. You know, they like all the outcasts have a home in the Juggel O's. And they're all like they have these gatherings of the Juggel O's. They look like they're having the best fucking time. Like they're all like -minded people, all partying together. Yeah, but it's freaky when people admit secretly being Juggel O's have you ever had that experience? They pull you aside. A friend of mine, former porn star Sasha Gray. Like sent me a picture of her like 17 in the Juggel O makeup. Oh, wow. 17. And you're like, this is so out there. Juggel O makeup.

1:00:52Do they dress? Do they do that? Is it a very clown -possy? They do, they do a very specific makeup. Oh, the Juggels, do they have different makeup than the insane clown -possy? Or is it the same kind of makeup? It seems to me there's a kind of a particular way they do the Juggel O makeup. Jamie, can you please Google Juggel O makeup? Yeah, I think it's a black and white. I don't know if there's rules, but it's a clown makeup. Was it a click? Like that guy right there. Yeah, so that's finally J on the top there. Yeah, he's a bad clown. That's why they J there. But like they'll do the makeup kind of like how J is this.

1:01:22Okay, so some of the people in the audience choose to make their face up. I don't see anybody there with face makeup though in that picture. It's hot. Oh, yeah, there you go. He's sweating. When it washed off, sweating off his makeup. See like the girl there? That split tongue that dude in the middle. That's a fucking commitment. That's a commitment to never having a real job up top. That's a lot. You got to really hate your parents split your tongue like that. How about the guys who split their cock if you ever seen that? Yes. Who does that? Do you remember the early days of the internet? I don't know how much you were on the internet in the 90s.

1:02:01But there was a page called the Style Project. Do you remember that? Don't remember that. It was all like some of the most fucked up things that this dude could find on the internet. And he had a whole website and you go to the Style Project, you get like just insane fucked up stories about people. And one of them was body modification extreme. And I became friends with the guy who ran the site. Who's actually that arm wrestler, Devon Lauret. I think that was his brother or someone he's related to. Well, Shannon, Lauret, I became friends with him and he gave me access to his website. And it was like a member's only access where you could like...

1:02:46So you got the VIP tier of split cocks? Oh my God. It wasn't just split cocks. It was crazy stuff. Like some people they decided that they wanted to get their arm chopped off or their hand chopped off. So they devised a guillotine. It was body modification extreme. So it was all different people doing different things like putting horns in their head and splitting their cock and putting... And one of them was this horrible story about this guy who's boyfriend turned him into a eunuch, wanted him to cut his dick off for him and be a slave. And like, oh my God. It's like detailing how this guy cut his cock off.

1:03:27Yeah. Donnie Fargo, who is a famous wrestler, he was famous for him as a party trick he would put a nail through his cock. Ah! That's not nice. Yeah. I had David Blaynon and maybe stick an ice pick through his arm. Yeah, he's got this trick that he does. It's not a trick though. I really stuck an ice pick through his arm. It's like you can call it a trick, but a lot of things David does is just freaks you out because like you should... But you know, you can survive an ice pick through your arm, but I had to back it out because I hit a nerve and he maybe reinsert it. And so I reinserted it and then the original one just started bleeding and it got like a little bit of a hematoma and started swelling up.

1:04:13We had to get the medics and we had seals working for us. They checked it out. Because of all this body talk, my wife loves all sorts of weird body talk and she wanted me to send you a message because she's literally about to have a baby right now. Oh, congratulations. We were somewhat concerned coming in because it was possible I may not be able to come because of her about to have this baby. So when we were talking last night I said, please don't have the baby today. You know what I'm going to be doing? Joe Shoe and she said, you tell Joe that if I start to have the baby, I expect him to give you some of his net jet points so you can get home.

1:04:48It's a very, very rich person joke, but that's hilarious. What does that have to do with body modification? Nothing because she loves talking about this type of shit. Why is she like talking about that stuff? I don't know. It's like, but in my family we didn't talk about anything. Sex, you know, was all just kind of implied. Oh, I see. It's them saying, I grew up in a family where nobody hugged, nobody kissed, everyone hated each other and nobody talked about the secrets of life. You know, good or bad. It was all kind of in the shadows, you know what I mean? And she grew up in a family where it's like, because she has five brothers and a sister.

1:05:22So they talk about everything like to the point where just like at dinner, like you're talking about all this like weird body stuff. I don't want to be graphic because it turns me off, you know, but they seem to think it's funny. When did you learn to hug people and be like, outwardly nice? It's funny you asked me that. I didn't grow up with my mother. My mother went crazy when I was four and I never lived with her again. And we started to become close again when I was in my 20s. And I remember this one time where I walked through her door and it was that thing where I wanted to hug her because I never really hugged her my whole life.

1:05:56And I just made this decision at 24 like I was going to hug my mother and give her a kiss on the cheek. Yeah. And it was like that was the opening of this other life where people hugging kiss each other, you know what I mean? I mean, obviously I had fuller on with girls, but it was only within the context of being romantic. I had no physical affection in my life outside of that. Now my kids are all over me and you know, I got nine and six year olds. So it's like I'm used to kids like, you know, Rugrats, crime and all of you, but I didn't grow up in that at all. Like I had no, the idea of affection was was alien.

1:06:29In fact, when I first started chasing girls at 17, 18, you know, girls want to hold your hand or hug you or you know, in the car. And I was like, it's so freaky to me. When did you relax? I'm not sure I ever did. Well, I give you a hug when I saw you today. It seemed pretty normal. No, I'm actually very naturally affectionate person and it was nice to give you a hug and it's nice to see you and it's nice to love on people that you admire and are your friends and that's the great stuff of life. But I came very late to like, you can even see I'm just uncomfortable. Yeah. I mean, you know, I'm sure you know how he mandal, you must.

1:07:05I mean, how he would just, I made the mistake of hugging how he wants and I mean, I was like, kill this cat, you know, or how he'd execute him like it tased him. That poor bastard. It used to be he could touch knuckles with him. He'll touch knuckles. He will. I'm close to knuckles again. I'm close enough to how he'd touch knuckles. He stopped touching knuckles and then he would do elbows. You would touch elbows and then he got to air elbows. Who would just kind of like do that and then put it down. I'm a lead singer, so I do do some of these things. He's hanging out with us in the green room at the comedy mothership and then he's going on stage and there's people coming before him has the same microphone.

1:07:45They're spitting into it. He's holding onto it. See him. I'm, I think I'm secretly a germafold, but really? Yeah. I'm secretly. He just talked about it. You know, how he's like, how is another level? He talks about it though. He knows it's a problem. He just can't overcome it for whatever reason and he manages to sort of like have it and still work his way through life. Like he was fun to hang out with. It's not like he's freaking out about other stuff. Like he was cool hanging out with just talking. I had him on my podcast and we did talk about it. He has an air jet, but we talked about all his, I guess, woebias would be the world.

1:08:23Yeah. In conditions, I mean, there's all these letters, you know, ADHD, OCD, some of this and that. He's very open about it to his credit. Yeah. No, he is. Yeah, he talks about it and it's, you know, it's been a battle for him, but it's just like it's so odd because he's so personable. Like you expect that someone like that would be like a recluse, wouldn't like people, like get away from me, everybody, but he's not. He's like super friendly, super friendly. He said when he puts you in front of a professional comedian who's kind of irritated that you're there and claiming you're his half brother.

1:08:53Oh, yeah. Well, that was probably a bad pairing. I feel like both of you are kind of a lot in a good way. I would have one of you on by them. So I wouldn't want you and Burr together. Well, he's, he's such an alpha. I mean, he's, he's just one of those guys. He just can't help it. Yeah, we have to make fun of everything too. Many of what he said, oh, yeah, that's a fucking great idea. What about this? Right. He can't help himself. Yeah, one point he looked at me. I actually was wearing this coat. He goes, where'd you get that? Like a Moroccan bizarre. He's like, oh, this is a very expensive one.

1:09:23It's like a normal coat on our stands. That seems normal. Well, it's like a North Face or something. But I'm asking you this in an empathetic way. But because you're a professional comedian, so maybe it's different. But when a professional comedian puts their death ray on you and wants to make fun of you, it's a very particular feeling. It's like getting carved up by a chef. Right. You know what I mean? Because they, they're so good at zero, zero. You know, it's kind of cool. It's like, well, I'm being insulted by Bill Burr. You know what I mean? It's like, it's kind of an honor. Yeah. But at the same time, it's like, it's really fucked up because they're like, they know exactly where to poke you.

1:10:00Also, you can't fire back. You'll get killed. Right? If you fire back, that's what I'm saying. He's going to chew you apart. Yeah. What am I going to tell him? Like, make a little joke. Yeah, there's not much you can do other than laugh along with it. He's just have fun with it. Just let him make fun of you. No fun. Yeah. That's all you can do. But it feels like a death play. Yeah. It's like, yeah, especially the guy like Bill, who's a really good, like, who's like the meanest comedian you ever kind of locked horns on you. The meanest at that kind of stuff, but he's one of my best friends is Tony Hinchcliffe.

1:10:37He's the best at it. He's the fucking, but I just found out, I just found one the other day from quite a while ago. I'm going to send you this because this is like young, fresh face Tony Hinchcliffe. It's fucking hilarious. And it's just like off the cuff, they bring in these dudes and he starts roasting them. Just random dudes. Yeah, there's two guys and they're, they're, they team up and they start talking shit to him and he just eats them alive. Put your headphones on. This one's hilarious. All right, here we go. He's the best roaster on planet earth. Nobody's better than Tony Hinchcliffe. That's why I killed Tony so funny.

1:11:14Part of the reason he's so fast. Do you get it, Jamie? Yes, one second. Yes, one second. Okay. Rest, but what the fuck? You got all wrestling shoes, folks. You guys are mean. Jimmy Neutron, Granddaddy, right here. You guys look like a before and after for a product that doesn't work. But it's a DD stand for a dose of diabetes. Okay. Okay. I wasn't ready for any of this. Yeah. It's where sweatpants and sweat skin. If you guys just completely giving up on, see is that. You guys, baby, don't want, not me. I'm out here. No boy. Wait, what? His name is no boy. No boy. Yeah. I've got a DOBOY. Yeah, I had a feeling he'd miss it, fella.

1:11:51You guys are good at my favorites. Two chins and ASAP Rocky Road. Wow. Wow. Just off the cuff. I didn't know where. And he does that all day long. So he'll do that in the green room. He just turns on people in the green room. It's fucking amazing. We have, like, when we do these shows, like Tuesday at Wednesday night or whenever we're there, where everyone's in the, like Tuesday and Wednesday nights are a really good night of the club because all the comics that are traveling on the road on the weekend, they come into the club to hang out during the weekday. And so they'd be like eight or nine of us in the green room just talking shit about each other.

1:12:25And Tony's just cotton up left to right. This one, that one. It's so much fun. He's the best out of though. You do not want to fuck with. I don't want to be told to go for a low with Tony. I'm going to say right now. I don't think he's my brother. He's definitely not your brother. He's not going to anything like you. He's completely different gene line. Now he'll make fun of me for saying I'm not his brother. So did Bill know that you're going to be there with him or was it just like how he just decided to put you two of you together? I got the feeling that that Bill wasn't really given the heads up.

1:12:54Yeah, probably. It was a little bit irritating to him. Bill gets easily irritated. But that's also why he's so funny. Like he's, he gets mad. He gets mad at everything.

1:13:08You know, yes, and my mind doesn't work like that. So it's hard. Like I would have a better time understanding like a like a rocket scientist than a professional comedian, I think. Really? Because the professional comedians I've known personally a little bit like Bobcat Goldthwaite and Kara top, their minds are so different than the average human mind. I think the way they process information and they're looking for something that in almost like a meme, like coalesces as whole set of ideas. That's what makes it funny, right? It works on all these different levels at one time. The great comedians like dice to me is the greatest.

1:13:43And dice will tell a joke. It works on like eight different levels. You know, it's like the high low middle. Do you know what dice is best stuff is? You want it like people don't understand that dice is literally one of the best live performance artists. It's just random street artists. I watch it. You mean when he just goes up to people? Yeah, and pretends that these people wanted a photo with them and they don't know who he is. The face. You want the face? You want the picture? And he just goes, he's fucking, it's so uncomfortable to watch. You start pulling your fucking clothes off like no, don't do this.

1:14:20Like what are you doing? He's the best at the, and he does that for zero money. This is, he's, he's only doing that for fun. That's it. He's just being an artist. Like there's no money in it at all. And he spends all this time wandering around the streets, going to bars and restaurants and just bothering people, wandering people up to people on the street in New York City. They're waiting for the light to turn green. You want the picture? I just love that he'll just double and triple and quadruple down on the, on the, on the bit. Like he just won't give it up. He won't give it up. Zimoud is the same thing with the, with, you know, Tony Clifton.

1:14:59Yeah. Yeah. Just the like the discomfort of it all. Yeah. Well, Dice is the only guy ever in the peak of his fame to try to bomb on purpose and then release it as a two CD set. Is that the night comedy die? Yeah. Unbel, that, that is so, I love it. The day the laughter died. The day the laughter died. Rick Rubin produced it. Yeah, yeah. And Rick, who's a fucking maniac, loved the idea. He loved it. He's like, what a great idea. This is going to be amazing. Dice is selling out. Madison Square Garden, like more than anybody alive. Like he's just selling out everything. And the height of this, he decides to record on a night where no one knows he's going to be there and bomb.

1:15:38No material. There's talk off the top of his head. Sometimes don't even try to be funny. I've listened to it multiple times and it's one of the funniest things I've ever heard. It's performance art. It's like him on the street going, you want the picture? You know, and if, look, if he couldn't kill regular way, I wouldn't respect it. Because there's people that do comedy that pretend they're doing like anti -comedy because regular comedy is too easy. The problem is they're not good at regular comedy. If you're like hilarious at regular comedy and then he say, I'm going to freak these people out by hitting them with something.

1:16:12He would do this thing at the comedy store where he would go on stage and see how long he could not talk. Yeah. I saw him do it once. He'll go like five minutes. Five minutes. He's doing it. And no one knows what to do. And people are like nervously laughing. But he also could fucking kill. Like in the Roddy Dangerfield special, you know, when he did dice rules, I think he could destroy an arena filled with people. So it was a choice to do this weird favorite all -time comedian. I'm just curious. God, I don't think I have an all -time favorite. I think prior probably is the greatest of all -time, not living.

1:16:50We should pale being the greatest living. I think that you have to, you have to give credit to Lenny Bruce though. Because he really started the art form. Because before Lenny Bruce, comedy was just a series of jokes. It was just jokes. And Lenny Bruce came along and all of a sudden he had social commentary, cultural commentary that he turned to humor. The way he described relationships, the way he described marriage, the way he described, it was like completely different. It's like, what is this guy doing? And then I think prior took that and made it funnier. Prior took that and that honesty.

1:17:30I never connected that dot, but it makes sense when you say it. Yeah, because he was just funnier. Prior was just better at it. But the door was opened up by Lenny. It didn't exist before Lenny. So Lenny comes along in the 50s and he's getting arrested all the time in the 60s. He was getting arrested. Well, remember that whole thing where he would just go on and read his court transcripts? Yeah, that was the end. But that must have been really out there. I mean, I watched the videos of that. I watched the actual actual. Oh yeah, I bought it. I bought a VHS tape that was Lenny Bruce on stage. I forget what place it was.

1:18:05I think it was somewhere in San Francisco. And he was just talking, he was reading his court transcripts and talking about the case. And someone in the audience goes, we want dirty Lenny. And he's like, man, man, it's not about that, man. It's about, you got to stand with it. What they're doing here, man. Like, anybody could go into the court case, but it wasn't funny at all. It was just him on stage for a long time, just talking about his court cases. But you have to, the thing about comedy is a lot of comedy, like even from the 80s, it doesn't hold up. It doesn't mean that it wasn't funny at the time.

1:18:39It just means the concepts and the culture has shifted so much and they become so commonplace that it's not shocking or funny anymore. But it was maybe in the 70s or maybe in the 80s and much more so with Lenny Bruce. Because you go back and listen to his stuff and people are dying laughing and you don't even find it funny. Like it doesn't even make you chuck, it's hard to laugh at Lenny Bruce's stuff. But it's because we can't put ourselves in the context of being alive, watching this guy perform in 1962. He read Fox to me, still funny though. Still funny. But like his stuff holds this. Yes, his stuff holds.

1:19:15Moms maybe. Yep, some people still hold up. Robin Harris still holds up. There's some old school comedians from the 70s and the 80s that are just still, you could tell, Eddie Murphy, he was special. He was like a special talent. That still holds up today. But some of this stuff doesn't. And then I think the next big shift, the big change, was Kinesen. Kinesen was a giant change. Did you know Kinesen? No, I saw him live a few times. I was going to say I think H. Why is it probably this? Yeah, no, I was about 21 when I saw him live. I saw him live once when I was 19 when I was a security guard at Great Woods Center for the Performing Arts and Mansfield, Massachusetts.

1:20:01So I got to see him live there. And then I got to see him live at some, I think it was like some weird place in the middle of nowhere and it was like half empty. And it was this was like 88, 89. So by 89, he was kind of fallen off because he had just done so much drugs and partied so hard that he was fucking huge in like 86. And then by the time 88 came around, the material kind of dropped off and then by the time I saw him was like 89 or 90, it wasn't so good anymore. And then he died and like, did I like 92? I think he died in 92. Car crash. Yeah, drunk driver ironically because he had jokes about drunk driving.

1:20:47But he just, I was always hoping he was going to come out with a new album and he would be back. You know, he'd be back to the Guinness Inn of 86. But just the party and the coke and the women and the fucking no time to write. His brother wrote about it. There's a great book called Brother Sam. Oh, okay. His brother Bill, his bill wrote about the childhood, about him getting hit by a car and becoming this maniac. He's like the victim of a head injury. Oh, okay. And that's what turned him into that fucking maniac. The childhood preaching. Yes. Yes. Childhood preaching, tent revival preaching and he brought that kind of energy to comedy.

1:21:23You know, he was a different thing. I remember the first time I saw him like, oh, wow, that's comedy too. Like this is crazy. I remember like thinking like, well, this is a completely different thing. I never thought this was stand -up comedy. It's got to be. He felt he was like to me at the time. He was like, he was the rock and roll equivalent of somebody or something. Yes. And it didn't. Guns and roses take him on tour or something. There was some seem to remember like something like that to come on to. I think Bon Jovi too. I think he was hanging out with those guys too. He was just, I think Bon Jovi is one of, in one of his, because he had a music video called Wild Thing.

1:21:56I remember he was singing. Yeah. He was kind of trying to be a rock star for a while. But it's a quick fall from Grace, man, because in 86, he's one of the best comics that's ever walked the face of the earth. And by 89, he's like a caricature of the guy he was three years ago. And I think it's just, it's really hard to maintain, especially in the 80s when no one was famous. Like, how many famous comedians were there? They're like 5, 10 at the most. Now there's hundreds. But back then, like, nobody was famous. So it was all about getting on Carson. That was the thing, right? It was about getting HBO special.

1:22:32That was the big thing. Carson was big in the 80s, but for a guy like Kinesin, even though he got on Letterman, and he had one of the most brilliant sets ever on his Letterman sets. Fantastic. We played it on the show once. It's really good. But I think with Kinesin, it was really the HBO special. It was Rodney's, Rodney Dangerfield's young comedian special first, and people got to see him on that. And then he did his own hour special. You're right, because when Eddie Murphy did his HBO special, that was when he just like delirious. Yeah, we had that either suit. Yeah. I remember high school, everybody was like it was all like, I've been looking at you.

1:23:07And I know you've been looking at me. Yeah, he was, yeah, I mean, it's like there was only a few back then, though, you know, and then Dice came along and Dice had a completely different element to it because people wanted to repeat the lines. What's in the bowl, bitch? Oh, the whole crowd would go crazy. It was like they, it was rock and roll. Like they sang along, you know, shot through the heart. It was like, it was like rock and roll. Like everybody was singing along. You give love a bad name. They, the crowd wanted to say that and the crowd wanted to say, little boy, blue. Oh, he needed the money.

1:23:45Yeah. Oh, I tried to talk my wife in a sing if we could hire Dice to do our wedding. She wasn't having it. Who knows what he would have done. My, the vision I had, my wife wanted to do kind of an after party of the wedding. We had it at my house. So the idea was, you know, when, when half the crowd bangs off because it's been a long day, there still be a crowd that went and hang out and just party. And then Dice shows up and then Dice shows up and then takes them, goes, puts the death ray on me, right? And she just was not having it. We used to call it, we used to say Dice had two Dices, but my favorite Dice was mean Dice because mean Dice would like find a guy in the audience.

1:24:27He knew who could take it, who couldn't, who's smiling and laughing along. It'd be like, look at you and just start tearing this fucking poor fool apart. Uh, fun. In back then, the beautiful thing was the comedy store had no audience. So he could go on unannounced. He would show up at like, you know, midnight on a fucking Monday night or something like that and just torture people for fun. Just for fun. He was only fucking around. He was, I'm having Bill Burr PTSD because that feeling when they put the death ray on you, this is really bothered you. No, it didn't bother me. It's just, I, it's uncomfortable.

1:25:02Why I'm not, I'm not, what do they always say? Don't, uh, don't bring a knife to a gun fight. Right. What am I going to say? You don't mean? What was it? Why was he picking on you? I think because he was uncomfortable about the whole setup because at the end of the day, it's my fault. I'm the one who said something in public. Right. So at the end of the day, I do bear the responsibility for initiating this insanity. It's taken a life of its own because I, I mean, I walk through public now and people are like, Hey, it's Bill Burr's brother. So he's got to be getting it the other way. That's a rare.

1:25:34You're the brother of that, that, that, that we had off from the pumpkins, you know? Like, I got, I don't know. We were talking about the other night of the club in the green room. When we were convinced, it was a bit that you guys were doing together. We were convinced. Well, no one disagreed. Everyone, no one was like, I think it's real. Most people were like, I think they were fucking around. I think they, it seemed like they made an agreement. It's, it's, it's somewhere between a bit and reality. And I think that's where it gets confusing. That's why I would use the word meta. There's this moment.

1:26:05If you watch it back where how he splits and just leaves me and Bill alone and, and, and how he's, you know, how he has a band that plays when he does a show. So, so the, the gentleman runs the band starts playing a really sad piano. And Bill just starts riffing. It's just me and him in this room alone. I mean, I don't know Bill at all. And he's, and he starts talking about our shared dad and it gets really weird because on some level, it's like, it's possible, right? Even if it's 1%, it's not a zero. Right. So that's where it gets kind of, that's why I said meta. It's like you're, you're, you're, you're, you're looking down a hall of mirrors.

1:26:41And you start almost playing with your mind. You think like, well, I could, it could be possible. It's also the two of you guys doing this publicly is very pro wrestling, which is what you love. There's something about the, I, I, I, I brought a wrestler with me today and who runs the, uh, promotions for the NWA. Uh, but you know what I'm saying? It's like, there's something about it. It's like, is this K -fabe? You know, is this real? Is this a shoot or is this a work? Like what is this? Well, Tommy, you know, Tommy Dreamer, I know the name. Tommy Dreamer famous ECW wrestler went on to work for WWE and now works for TNA.

1:27:16Um, Tommy's the classic salty veteran, you know, seen it all done it all, you know, been split in half and the whole thing. So there's nothing Tommy hasn't seen. And, and, you know, Tommy will say something like, uh, it's all a work. It's all a work. Like, basically, it's the cynical view that everything you see in the world is, is fake. The president is fake. The, the, the news is fake. It's all the work. So once you go there cynically, it's hard to back out of that. Yeah. So I like the disc, the artist in me likes the discomfort. Yes. That's what I'm getting at. Yeah. Yeah. I really do like the discomfort.

1:27:58I remember watching Andy Kaufman on, Sarah Night Live, circa 78 or whatever. And it's that idea that you can, you can create a, a, a, a vibration in the room between what's expected and where you're willing to go. Yeah. Um, I have this one friend who was a performance artist and she would do stuff like when she was in college, she would just walk in the cafeteria and take all, all her clothes. And she would stick a camera in the corner and just film people's reaction. And it was interesting to watch because one guy would just keep eating his food and, and no sell it. Like I'm just going to eat my salad and just pretend this isn't happening.

1:28:36Like every human being goes in a different direction with the weirdness. Right. So, um, as an artist, you know, on a stage, you know, there is this kind of, uh, crazy power that you have because depending on what comes out of your mouth next or what you do can affect thousands of people. And then obviously through a digital medium even more. So there's something about flirting with the, the, um, the uncomfortable, but the, the, the, what makes it uncomfortable is there's always, it always has a foundation of truth. You know what I'm saying? Yes, I do know what you're saying. Yeah. If it didn't have a foundation of truth, it would just be silly.

1:29:13Right, right, right. The discomfort comes from like, oh, I wrecked, there's something you're doing that I recognize in myself or I know somebody that's like this. Well, it makes it much more interesting if it's, there's a 1 % chance that it's true. If I just think you guys are running a sketch, it's kind of funny. But if it might be true, then it gets to that weird place where it's like this is okay. So if I walked out of that room that day after, after meeting Bill for the first time and it was a 1 % chance, if now that I walk through life, we're up into like the 10 % tile in the public's mind.

1:29:42Yes. 10 % of the public is convinced for brothers. Even if I sat there and told him, no, it's not true. More now. That's okay, but that's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying after this show. But that's why it's like when you say it's a bit, yeah, it's a bit to the extent that you're playing with the idea. Yes. Do you know what I mean? It would be like if I sat down and say, you know, I'm sure you remember the last time it was on your show, but you know, I met you when I was 12. And I told you this whole story about how I met you. Like, Carrot Topp in his show tells us this whole story about meeting Gallagher when he's a kid.

1:30:15Have you ever heard that? No. Gallagher is the Carrot Topps hero. Sure. And he even does a thing at the end of his show, attribute to Gallagher. He kind of does a watermelon bit or something like that. But he tells this thing in the show about how meeting Gallagher when he was like 14 years old. And Gallagher actually gave him some advice that inspired him to be who he became. So, but I mean, for all I know, it's a bit. Right, right, right. But he says it was such earnestness and it does have some, it feels right. But for all I know, it's just another bit. Everything's a work. That's what I'm saying.

1:30:47So, if I came here, oh, Joe, I met you when I was 12. You were at an airport. You were so nice. You signed an autograph. You know, there's a party that would be like, well, it's like it's possible. I mean, you know what I mean? I got a pretty good memory. I'd be like, what happened? Where were we? I never, I never been there. Sorry. I have this plague that I can't get rid of. But if you have that Tommy's perception that everything's a work, the whole world gets really weird. Well, I think we're there. Yeah. We definitely are when it comes to politics and the news. I think our whole culture has been turned into like, where are we?

1:31:29Right. Like, you know, that's why I started calling it like five, seven years ago, a post -truth era. Right. I mean, we've all been in that situation where somebody in our inner circle will bring up something that we know from a factually presented basis isn't true. I heard so and so did so and so and you go, no, that's not true. Let me show you the YouTube clip. You know what I mean? This didn't happen or no. So and so made a left, not a right. But because of what they've heard, they believe it. And you can literally show them something saying, no, no, look, and they're like, well, that must be AI or edited.

1:32:08It's like once somebody becomes convinced of this culture, it's really hard to unconvince them. Right. And so from a performing point of view, and somebody who's now also in the podcasting sphere, it's like, it's like, is it better to play into what people want? Like, I really appreciate it in Bruce Springsteen's Broadway special when in the first five minutes, the thing he basically says, I'm not really Bruce Springsteen. Have you ever seen it? No. It's really worth watching. In the first five, it's when he did his long Broadway run. You know about that. He did this thing where it was like, he would talk and then play songs.

1:32:44No, I didn't even know it. Oh, yeah, it was huge. He was, he went on this massive Broadway run. And the HBO did it and put it on as a special. But he literally in the first five minutes of talking, and it's, you know, it's about 1200 people nights. So it's a live audience. And he says in the first five minutes, by the way, I'm not Bruce Springsteen. Like, I mean, that's my name. But the Bruce Springsteen, you think he's like, I don't know how to fix a car. I've never been a factory in my life. He's serious. Yeah. Now I knew that as a performer. I knew that what I was watching wasn't real. But people want him to play John Wayne so bad that he, he puts his finger in there and says, okay, you want me to be John Wayne?

1:33:23I'll be John Wayne. Right. Well, that's audience capture, right? Yes, but now we're in the business of it. I mean, there's obviously examples historical antecedents over the last hundred years of media where people would figure it out. Charlie Chaplin or something, you know what I mean? Like, they wanted him to be the tramp so he became the tramp. Right. He wasn't that guy at all. Right. He fed into it and obviously connected to something real in him, but he wasn't really a tramp. He was a complete, rich, lotharriale. Well, you really see it in the dictator, that movie the dictator? Yeah. Has that insane speech at the end of uniting the world?

1:33:58Yeah. Yeah. Oh, he was an out, now socialist, basically. And a brilliant guy. Oh, yeah. Which is really crazy when you think about how silly his character was. His character was this like bumbling, stumbling goof. So that's what I'm saying. What is more valuable? What the public wants from you or what is true? In the entertainment world, we're used to it, right? Yeah. Like, you could play Joe Rogan the comedian at the drop of a hat because you've done it. And Joe Rogan, the UFC announcer, you know, just, I'm not saying it's not who you are, but it's an extenduation. We say in wrestling, you turn the volume up to 11.

1:34:33Right. It's still Joe Rogan. I don't see you as being disingenuous. I can't even think of one time I've ever seen you in any media where I thought that he's not playing. He's not Joe Rogan, you know what I'm saying? Right. I've done it. I've played other people. So what I'm trying to say is, now we're in this thing where like everybody's doing it. I mean, everybody, we've all looked at some girl on the internet and said, that's not how she really looks. You got to go through the Instagram and like you find the real picture. Right. Like everybody's kind of become comfortable with like a filter over everything.

1:35:04So that's why I mean we're in a post -truth world where the impression is becoming more valuable than the reality. That's really, I think, unprecedented. Yeah, I think so too, but I also think that authenticity is more valuable now than ever before because it's hard to find. Well, that would be my argument for why my band has risen back up because we're one of the only bands left that sort of represents some ideal that's long abandoned. Right. Right. Right. You're not a corporate creation. No, we never were. Right. And we were. And there's so many of them now, you feel like, you know, like you ever seen a Kineshans bit about the monkeys?

1:35:42The band the monkeys? Yeah. I don't know. It's a bit about Manson. It was, and then, you know, he does this bit about the monkeys about they weren't a real fucking band. Like, because you know, they were pieced together by a corporation. The monkeys like one of the, which were great. The monkeys are great. I'm a believer. They have some great songs, but they were kind of one of the first corporate creations. But I actually on my podcast recently interviewed Mickey Dolans. Oh, wow. And we talk a lot about this very subject. Like, it hasn't arid yet, but, but, um, he was less interested in the discussion than I was.

1:36:16Because my argument would be, is that the monkeys are actually the template that came. Our whole lives, the monkeys were dismissed as an anachronistic thing that went against the integrity of the beetles. Right. But if you actually look now, beetles versus monkeys, the monkeys are more accurate of what came than the beetles. And what way? Because authenticity is less and less and less important. Uh, those who establish authenticity, and I would include myself amongst that, and I would include you in that. They're very valuable, but you also know because of your, your public things have gone on.

1:36:46You've had to stand there and take a lot of shit because just even speaking your own truth is inconvenient in a post -truth world. Yeah. Right. So, so it's actually more politically expedient to create a character that can navigate this new world. And by the way, change on a dime. Right. Does it make sense the way I'm positive? Yeah, no, it does make sense. So, so my argument would be from a rock and roll historical point of view is that the monkeys are actually more relevant now in a particular way. The beetles are the pre -immun band. That's not the argument I'm making. I'm saying is the model of the monkeys, which was always held up for a form of mockery.

1:37:22Right. See, this is what you get when you make plastic music. No, no, we live in the age of plastic music now. Right. The monkeys are the four, are the grandfather's of this thing. Right, it wouldn't even be shocking today if the corporation put together a band. No one would dismiss the band because a bunch of people, they cast it together with a bunch of good musicians and created a band. No, I mean, I, I, I, I, we used to want Arosmith. We used to want Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, young coming up together, playing music. That's what we used to want. Used to want the beetles. They all got together, they formed the band, they playing it in Hamburg until they tightened it up.

1:37:56I used to work with the musician and I was, I was in therapy at the time and I was having a lot of problems with the musician. And the musician was from a wealthy family, but he always, he didn't bathe and he wore junky clothes. He wanted people to believe he was somebody that he wasn't. Right. You know, I was actually from a porridge family. He was from a rich family pretending to be poor. Yeah. And my therapist had the great line about him. He said, he looks like a junkie, he smells like a junkie, but it doesn't have the guts to be a junkie. So if you can, if in this culture, you can pick up anything you want and adapt it without the downside.

1:38:31You can try to actually be coming it. Yeah. Well, you can see why so many people without courage or chops, it puts them in a game. It puts them in the social me, you that we all sort of have to navigate. So now we're into this place where we're talking to a lot of people who believe that they're, they're, they're a furry number 463, because that's all, that's all their status. Comes from their digital online group. Mm -hmm. Yeah. You know, I'm, I'm 57. I got two kids, another one on the way I, I work with animal charities and I have a T house and a wrestling company. And I'm still fighting at 57 with people who want me to be this guy that they believe I, I am from 30 years ago.

1:39:11Right. And no amount of empirical evidence will change their mind. Right, they're upset with you because you're connected to something that's different than what they want you to be connected to. Like they don't care what you really are. They don't want you to like pro wrestling. Sam, Kenis and second act should have been get sober, get straight and go on another delicious run. Yeah. Yeah, I suspect Sam was very mentally ill. I never met him, but I, but I think one of the reasons why I was self -medicating so hard was probably that head injury that he got when he was a young kid. Probably really fucked him up because I know quite a few people with some pretty significant head injuries.

1:39:46And they're wild and impulsive and aggressive and they do crazy things. Like some of them, like they just go off on benders and disappear for days. Like I think it's common with people with severe CT, CT. Well, it's because I'm on the board, I'm on an honorary on the board of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, which I'm sure has some tie to UFC 2 because, you know, Chris Newinsky who runs it as my friend. One of the main things that happens with people who start to get CTE early in life is lack of impulse control. Yeah. So suddenly you have a 40 year old retired professional athlete who's faster and stronger than 99 % of the population who can't control his temper.

1:40:28Right. Right. Right. That's what makes that situation so frightening for the families because they lose the ability to kind of keep it all rained in. Right. Right. That happens a lot with fighters, football players. I'm sure it happens with pro wrestlers. Probably happens with a lot of it. It's getting better, I think, with wrestling, the awareness is helping. In our organization, we forbid headshots. That's good. You know, the classic chair to the head does not have that good in my world. Good. You don't need it for what? Yeah, the pain of watching people deteriorate is so awful. The pain in their eyes where they just can't navigate life anymore.

1:41:04And they're every day they have a fucking headache and they just inhale and they just want to kill themselves. They just can't take it anymore. And it gets to certain point where it sort of accumulates over time where it doesn't get better, it gets worse. Well, I think also, and I'm not speaking from experiences, but I've heard the stories. You take people who are held up as almost like masculine ideals. That fall isn't just the fall physically. It's the fall of like, I'm not the person. I'm not the hero that you've made me out to be anymore. I'm broken. Right. And there's nothing I can do to put the pieces back together.

1:41:35That's a very hard journey for championship fighters. When they are the fucking man, they're on top of the world. And then they have to just integrate society and be one of us. When they used to be the dumb, and then they go to the fights, they sit there with a punch, you know, a little bit of a belly. Sit there and watch people doing what they used to do. And they don't know how to make a living outside of fighting. They don't know what to do. It's a very few of them figure out how to transition into some other stage of life. The thing about athletics is by the time you're 40, you're essentially done.

1:42:06Unless you're a rare Tom Brady type character or Randy Cotour, who can compete into their 40s. Yeah. Bernard Hopkins, great example. But at a certain point in time, it's over. And you have to know when it's over. And then what? You put all your eggs in this one basket. Where to be a championship fighter, like Alenix Lewis or Vand or Holyfield, you have to be all in. You can't have a side gig in a blues band. There's no room for you writing books. There's no room for you, you know, fucking selling things on Etsy. Well, that's, I know this is a leap of discussion, but that's one of the discussions that's going on internally in my band is I'm 57 and one guy's 56 and one guy's, I think 61.

1:42:49You know, it's like at what point do you start to dial the thing down? My brain is wired. I'm going to go into a run to a brick wall. Right. And they're more like, well, things are pretty good. You know, I mean, like, do we have to keep throwing ourselves into the mall of the public? Mm. You know, and my argument is, like, it'd be like going into a UFC fight and not fighting to win. Right, right. Fighting not to lose. Right. That seems to me far more dangerous. And that's kind of my argument is like, in order to be in the arts, you've got it. It's a pal mail, all in. All in or all out. That's the only gear I know.

1:43:24There's the thing that happens to bands when they get to a point where they never make any new music. Right. And they just tore on the old music. You're touching on the nerve of my life. Yeah. How do you navigate that? I just keep working. I refuse. That's it. In my case, back to my daddy for a second, I watched my dad play songs he didn't want to play. Mm. I watched him do and drug deals rather than make money from music. I watched him give up on his talent, his dream, all of it. I watched it destroy my father. And then, if you want to even go further in a kind of a mythical way, my success destroyed him again.

1:44:04Mm. So, if you've watched that, well, I then I was lucky enough to have kids late in life. My first kid came when I was 48 and we're about to have one again, 57. Once my kid came, I was like, this kid is not going to look at me how I looked at my father. Mm. Like, should a wood a cuda? Yeah. So, I had to get myself up off the couch and like get serious again. And again, that's that mentality, that killer mentality, like I can still go. I'm going to go. So, until somebody stops me, I'm going to go. Well, that's what got you to the dance, right? Well, even doing the podcast is, you know, it's just, it looks easy to just sit and talk, but it requires prep and mental focus.

1:44:48And it's a lot harder than I would have thought, you know. And, you know, I got money. I mean, I could sit home. I like being in the game. I like the hustle. I like having to learn things. I like having to. What do you enjoy about podcasting and why did you decide to get into it? A quick story was I did a podcast based on an album that we put out. There was 33 songs. And I did a fry heart radio. And they were fine and everything. But when it all finished, I started to kind of enjoy it a bit. And I poked around as you do to see if anybody was interested. And there was, it was like crickets. Nobody gave a shit about me being a podcaster, like at all.

1:45:24And if any kind of response came back and be like, well, if you want to tell stories about the 90s, and get other 90s artists on to talk about the 90s, we'd be cool with that. But other than that, we have no use for you. So I just thought, okay, not for me, not meant to be. And then I did Club Random with Bill Mar. And as soon as I was done with the episode and shaking everybody's hands, they said, Bill, starting a podcast at work, would you be interested in doing this? And I said, only if I could do whatever I want to do. And they said, tell us what it is. And I pitched them the idea that is the show called Magnificent Others Now.

1:45:55I said, I want to talk to whoever I want to talk to about whatever I want to talk about. But here's the reason. And the reason to the heart of your question is, I feel there's a lot of people in this culture that don't get celebrated in the way that I would celebrate them, because we've become so skewed with influencers and people who are famous that don't do shit. And I think there's a lot of value in American culture that can be celebrated. So you're talking about like a retired fighter or something. So a lot we can learn from a retired fighter. Yeah. You know, you have a show gun armor out here.

1:46:26You know what I mean? To me, a retired fighter is like, you think I don't want to sit down with a retired show gun? Right. And ask them about what it's like to be in their all -own. Right. Recently interviewed Steve Vi, great guitar player. And for some reason, I had this idea of the classic Sergio Leone, two guys at the end of the street with the gun. Yeah. So I said to Steve, Vi, who do you fear at the end of the, like, who's the faster gun? You know what I mean? That's his, not I'm projecting, but I'm saying we all have that moment, like, who do we not want to be in the octagon with? Is it Eddie Van Halen?

1:47:04Who was it? For me or for him. For Steve Vi. He didn't want to say. Really? Well, I think he's the top guy. Right, right, right. Why would you want to create heat where there's no need to create heat? And he's at a elite level. I'll tell you what, I wouldn't want to be at the end of the street with him. Steve Vi at the other end of the street. Green Bay. Yeah, right, right. Those guys are like, in say shredders. I mean, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm an amateur, you know, compared to those guys. So I wouldn't want the, there's something about that kind of shredding too. That's just like so stunning. Freakish.

1:47:35Yeah. I mean, you, you still train MMA or the guy, I still do martial arts. Okay. So I don't, it's bar though. I don't get hit in the head anymore. But, but there's got to be those times where you see a fighter that just, they just get it. Yeah. And it looks easy for them. And you're like, how is that autism? Okay, God bless. But I'm saying, that's the way it is for me with other musicians sometimes. Right. I look at a guy like Steve Vi or Netty Van Halen, Ring Van, like, how do you do that? Right. Like what it must have been like when Hendrix burst onto the scene. My dad had a story, actually.

1:48:06Yeah. He's, uh, he was playing a club in Wisconsin. He never heard of Jimmy Hendrix. And Jimmy Hendrix was playing the night before they were playing the same club. So one of his boys said, why don't we go up, watch the new guy, Jimmy Hendrix. We'll hang out, we'll play the gig the next night. We'll drive back to Chicago. So imagine my dad's in a club in Wisconsin with like a thousand people in 1966 or 67 and now walks Jimmy Hendrix. Whoa. My dad said he'd never even heard his music. So it split his mind. And he said it was so shocking the way he played and how masterful he was at it. He said when he got on stage the next night, he felt like he couldn't play the guitar at all.

1:48:43Wow. It was like, it was like an alien instrument. That's, and Clapton talks about it. Other, yeah. Like, Jimmy Hendrix blew Clapton's mind and whatever, when he, Roy Albert Hall, whatever it was, where he was like, oh my god, what the hell is happening? Yeah. I think it was bag of nails or something was going on. He was like, what am I doing? And this is when people were spray painting on the walls in London, Clapton is God. And here comes, here shows up this guy who was on the Chitlin circuit is what they used to call playing for little Richard and the Isley brothers. He was just in the backup band.

1:49:13Yeah. And he shows up in England, Chaz Chandler, the bassist from the animals goes, this guy could be a star. Get some a record deal. He shows up in England and next thing you know, he's like, hey Joe is a number one hit and he's on TV. And it's like, wow. I mean, imagine that. Wow. So, yeah, there are those people that's like, it's so shocking. Van Halen was the same way you, I got to interview him once and sit in his studio for four hours. He would just play the guitar and you'd just be like, I don't understand how this is possible. You're doing inhuman things and I know how to do what you do.

1:49:42Yeah. And I can't even come close to doing what you're doing. Shocking. It's always interesting too that people have a specific sound. Like you can hear them and you know who's playing the guitar. Like Steve Ray Vaughan had a sound. Like you can hear him. Like when he was doing Voodoo Child, you're like, oh, that's a Stevie version. Like he played music. No. So the one thing I'll tell you, guitar player to non -guitar players, the thing you learned about the great guitar players, it's all in their hands. Everybody focuses on what amp, what guitar, the gear. It's somehow it's the way they hit the strings.

1:50:21I couldn't even explain it to you. We call it a talk. I have no idea. Steve Ray Vaughan, for example, he played his strings purposely high. He made it harder to play the guitar. Really? And still played at that level. Now there's a belief with certain guitar players that the higher you put the strings, the more you have to dig out the notes and that's so it becomes more emotive. So imagine he's doing it at that level, even he's making it harder to do what he's doing and he's doing at that level. Wow. Unbelievable. Incredible talent. I mean, shocking. Again, shocking. It's like, where does that come from?

1:50:54Just has it. We have a photo of him in the tunnel leading up to the stage in my comedy club of him on stage at that club in 1980. Or the same place. I think it's 88 or 86. Somewhere in the 80s, he's on that. Maybe it's 83. But it's early in the, sometime in the 80s. Yeah. And it's like Steve Ray Vaughan on stage at that club. And it's wild. It's just wild to think that he was in this room. You know, he's often worries from. I think about this because he talked about it. There was a point in his life where he was dropping rocks, a Coke. I think it whiskey and drink in it and rotten his stomach out.

1:51:35And he got sober like in the last year. So his life, and he played even better. Right. If you listen to the recordings that he made live particularly in the last year. So his life, he's playing even better. So that's why I say about Sam Kinnis and imagine if he was able to make that left. Like I said though, I think Sam was dealing with something. I think his demons were internal. The Steve Ray Vaughan thing, what's fascinating to me is that, well, first of all, he's the only guy that can play Voodoo Child other than Hendrix. Like if you're like at some upstart and you want to release Voodoo Child today, like Jesus Christ, like what are you doing?

1:52:15You're trading on hollowed ground. Like maybe you can do all along the watchtower because that was actually a Dylan song. Right. Maybe. But you know why he, you know, this is my opinion, but you know why he plays Voodoo Child so well? Why? Because he had studied the same guys that Hendrix had studied. So he's not imitating Hendrix. He's coming from the same wellspring of information. Like who are the guys? Albert King, a BB King, Albert King. You know, it's muddy waters. It's understanding the way those guys played. So he's not imitating Jimmy Hendrix. He's playing from the same spot. Have you ever heard of Johnny Thunder?

1:52:57You mean talking about from the New York Dolls? No. Johnny Thunder was an artist in the 1960s. And he put out a song called Amalive. And I think it was 1969. And it was also covered by another band. But his version is fucking insane. It's so good. You can't believe he didn't make it. Can I play for you? Please, yeah. Right. That's right. His version is the cover. What was the other version of it? Tommy James and the Chondelles. Tommy James and the Chondelles. Their version. But Johnny Thunder put the heavily on. Oh, yeah. It's another new commercial I've heard recently. Yeah. Well, we started talking about it like a year or so ago.

1:53:39My friend Brian Simpson played it for me. And he goes, you're going to fucking love this. And he goes, this is a one hit wonder from 1969. Woo! Never heard of it. I'm usually know all this. Fucking fantastic, right? Yeah. I don't know. I don't even know where he's from. I can't even identify where he's from by the... The fucking song is fantastic. It's so good. It just, it stuns you because you hear something like that. And you go, how did he not make it? What hope is there? Imagine if you were around in 1969, and you see that guy up the whiskey to go -go. He gets on stage and plays that song.

1:54:18He's like, holy shit. But to be fair, I saw those people in the 80s and I saw those people in the 90s. And I couldn't imagine that they weren't going to make it and they didn't. Yeah. Isn't that weird? And that was part of the vibe that my father put on me, which was like, well, how the hell did you get out? Right, of course. Well, the fucking resentment must have been astounding. You know, when you're, you know, you try in and kind of half -assign it and your son comes along and also needs to do an arena, you're like, what the fuck? This interview from Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan, literally almost has what you guys just quoted.

1:54:52Like, never heard of it? I can't believe it. Right. We talked about this. Yeah. Bob, what year was this? 1969. Yeah, and that crazy. That's right. We talked about this. Bob Dylan. So he discovered it and was asking, when are a feed heard of it? That's so crazy that even Bob Dylan couldn't make it huge. So 1968. Yeah, Bob Dylan. Wow.

1:55:17And then disappeared. That's fucking incredible, man. Incredible. Because you feel like a guy who makes a song that's that good. Oh my God, all you need is good songwriters and that guy's going to be huge. There's a fucking billion dollars in there waiting for you. Dig it out. But that's kind of what I was saying before is like, it's a curious thing why certain people make it and certain people don't. My father, before he passed away, he told me, you had the one thing that I didn't have, which was the ambition. Like, he wanted it. He said, I didn't really want it. I just wanted it to come to me.

1:55:54Well, also, I think if you're involved in a life of crime like that, a lot of cocaine and fun. First of all, there's a lot of bad karma that you have. But also, it's like you're too distracted. Like you're too in that life. You're never going to really be able to go all in on music as an artist. So you're never going to really be able to reach your full potential, right? Yeah, that's kind of that's what he was saying. He was admitting to me that he had made some sort of internal decision that he didn't want to do whatever he had to do to do it. He made certain excuses involving the mob. He did say that back then, and it is a known thing in Chicago that in order to be successful in Chicago, you had to basically sign contracts with the mob.

1:56:34Right. There's always been rumors about the band Chicago that they were mob ties with their world. I'm sure there was a lot of that going on. Yeah, it wasn't that the whole Hendrix thing. You ever know that conspiracy? Well, yeah, I've read about that. That gets into other types of complications. And I'm not, I don't have an opinion on it. It's just, it's like saying, there's no way to separate the two things at the time. Like anybody back then, you know, any clubs at the time, particularly in Chicago, they were all mob connected. And Los Angeles as well. Sure. So if you were a comedian or, you know, I mean an MC or whatever you were doing, like here's a little of the answer, you know, there was a why guy standing there and everybody knew they were, because that's how they did their business.

1:57:23Because if you didn't like what Johnny Rocco was doing, you were going to get in trouble and you didn't want to get in trouble. And I went to school with a bunch of the mob wise guys' kids and grandkids. I worked at a mob club in Connecticut. I worked at, I did stand out and another one in Long Island. There was where the guys were connected by the mob. And in Boston as well. In Boston, Nick's comedy stop, they would offer to pay you in cocaine or money. We played a club on Long Island once where the crowd was mashing. And in the middle of the four song, the guy on the side of the stage that worked for me was waving like stop playing in the middle of the song.

1:58:01And I was like, fuck it, stop playing. I got a thousand people out in front of me. And he kind of did one of these and there were two wise guys with standing there with suits on. Kind of like you're going to get in trouble with these guys if you don't stop. And I said, fuck, and I kept going. So they waited one more song and then they came out between songs on stage with their backs to the audience and they pulled their coats open and showed me a gun. And said, you better calm the fuck down. Whoa. Because of the long eye. Yeah. Because it was one of, we used to call him brass and fern bars. You know, like the brass bar and the ferns.

1:58:34Right, right, right. You know that bar, right? Yeah, yeah. You've all been there. And we were playing one of those places for some reason. And the crowd was going, apeshit, they were bouncing off the wall. So they were blaming us for the reaction of the crowd. So they wanted us to bring the crowd down. But how do you bring the crowd down? So they literally showed me a gun and said, you better calm the fuck down. So what did you do? I just kept going. And we were going to kill me on stage. Jesus Christ, what happened when you got off stage? They worked on. Really. I mean, I may, there might have been a problem if somebody had done some real damage or something.

1:59:06But I, there was no problem. But they, they definitely threatened me on stage. How did they know about monsters? This is me, like, 180 pounds in like long hair and you know bad attitude. That's hilarious. No, I don't think they'd ever seen anything like mashing. You know, this is like 92. This is a very, very new phenomenon to the, to the outside world. But mashing was going on before that. Oh, yeah. But it's only in the underground clubs is what I'm saying. It's like, that's what I'm saying. You're in a, you're in a wise guy's club on Long Island with brass rails and ferns. And I dated a girl in the 80s who went to see the, the cramps and came home with a concussion.

1:59:42Yeah. Poisoned. I was in a mosh bit. I was in Ivy. She was the guitar player for the cramps. Oh, right. So great. Yeah. Bad music for bad people. Did you, did you ever kind of encounter the alternative scene when you were a kid? Not really. No. Just not, not for you, the freaks. Um, I didn't go to very many, I mean, I went to a few concerts when I was a kid. But not a, like, I went to J. Guiles band. I saw George Thurough good. Not exactly alternative there. Yeah. No, I never really saw a lot. And then once I started really getting into comedy, I didn't really go to see anybody perform. I was mostly just performing myself.

2:00:22Yeah. So I never got to see anybody. Yeah. And I didn't really become friends with band people until I moved to Hollywood and, you know, then like in the late 90s and 2000s, I met a bunch of band people. And it was always weird, you know, hanging out with them was always odd. And he's like, oh, that's that guy from that band. Yeah. It's a lot of, a lot of, um, like what do you call it? When the brain, when the brains don't, uh, connect the brain hemispheres bipolar, a lot of both bipolarity and music musicians. Oh, yeah. Particularly high levels. My theory is, is the reason they become musicians is they overdevelop one side of the brain.

2:01:02You know, this, you know, you probably get on somebody who knows what they're talking about. But the idea is that if people's, their brain hemispheres, and that's why a lot of musicians do coke is it helps the polarities work. It helps the brain communicate left to right. Really? Oh, yeah. It's a known thing that coke really helps that if you have that bipolarity. Huh. Do people, is that a medication for people that are bipolar, do they give them a lateral or anything like that? I don't know. I mean, I've worked with people are bipolar and they've talked about their medications and stuff, you know.

2:01:35Huh. And it's still kind of an inexact science by polarity. It's crazy to think that coke helps fix some things. I think it helps the, I think it helps the, what I've heard is it helps the brain communications. Anybody I've known that's bipolar as a musician that did coke told me they felt normal. It's the first time in their life they felt normal that their brain worked normally. What a terrible thing. Yeah, it doesn't work. Imagine if that's the thing that keeps you together, it's cocaine. I wonder if what coca leaves would do because there's a lot of people like the high altitude, hurting populations and, you know, like people in Peru, the chew coca leaves just for energy.

2:02:12And apparently it's a very different thing like the chewing of the coca leaves. We can get tea, coca tea. Yeah. I was just in South American. I've had that. I've had manteed to coca. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like get a little bit of a clarity. But the chewing of the leaves is like it's so normal for them and it's illegal over here. Yeah. But back to the theory, the idea is if you have one side of your brain overdeveloped, it makes you good. It's something that you would necessarily be good at. And then bad at life. Yeah, probably. Right. So you need a handler like else. So if you're meeting a successful musician, they're the graduating class of the bipolarity.

2:02:52Oh, okay. So there's some functional level of acumen. That makes sense. That makes sense. That's why, through the years as I've heard people give rumor to any number of famous rock stars, it's like I recognize all the behaviors. Most people treat it like, oh, can you believe so and so did this and made this a radic decision? It's like, no, that's a musician. That's how most of their brains work. Yeah. I don't know what it is. And maybe there's a comedic parallel, but it just strikes me that the reason there's such consistent, bad behavior with musicians is because their brains don't work. And I'm sure somebody's going to get mad at me for saying that, but I mean, it's a compliment.

2:03:26It makes them good at something that they maybe would necessarily be good at. And maybe I don't know. I've never been tested. I don't think I'm bipolar, but yeah, I probably, I would imagine that a lot of like motivational speakers would not be awesome band members. You know what I mean? Like people who are completely dialed in with their life Tony Robbins, my new bass player, you know. They get up in the morning and they do their exercise at yoga and they eat well. They stare at the sun as it rises and they get their fucking whole life dialed in. They probably wouldn't be the best band members.

2:03:57Well, especially like there's no good band members. That's the problem. How do you guys see how do you keep it together for all these years? Like what's the key to our money? That's the thing. I mean, we broke up in 2000 and then the German I brought the band back in 2007 and it only lasted two years. And then I soldiered on alone as the only original member from 2009 to 2015 and then the drummer came back and then the guitar player who I didn't talk to for 16, 17 years came back in 2018. So we've been in an intact three quarter unit since 2018. How could you guys didn't talk for so long? I just real heat.

2:04:32That's real heat. Yeah. That sucks. No, it's all resolved now. I mean, it's all good. I mean, I think if you don't talk to somebody for 16, 17 years, there's a beef there that, you know what I mean? It asks. A real one. But it's interesting to me how people can manage. Like it's always, like as comics, we always look at band members going to imagine if all of your fucking success depended on this guy showing up, that guy showing up, this guy's girlfriend not getting in the way, this guy's fucking uncle not trying to manage you guys. Like you have all these fucking people and you're trying to put together songs and you're trying to like get up, come on, we got a tour.

2:05:11I don't want a tour. My mom needs me to help her with the fucking business. What are you talking about, man? We're in a band. We have a record deal. Notting my head because this is every year. This is my life experience for 35 years. As comics, we always talk about it. Thank God we're like a one -man show. Thank God. All we need is other comics to work with us. The problem with the band is the band members have no idea why it works. We're clueless to the mystery of why people are attracted to us as a unit. We can certainly conceptualize. I write good songs and I play good guitar. But there's something about bands that creates a kind of a magical, P -Towns and refer to it as a gang.

2:05:51A gang that you want to be in. That's what makes bands attractive to people. That was his opinion. I don't disagree. There's something that goes on in those relationships that's kinetic enough that it sustains past whether or not you have a good song. Right. Or two. Yeah, it's all the pieces make the puzzle together. It's not one piece as an individual. It's all of them together. Make lead's up. Yes. So if you're lucky and in this new world, you know, you got the stones playing into their 80s. Yeah. So the economy of music has changed where it's like you're in an elongated state of success. It's just totally unprecedented, by the way.

2:06:31There's no part. There's no, what's going on with rock bands and their 50s and beyond is there's no prior parallel in 100 plus years of recorded music. There's even one instance you can point to and say it worked that way then. So we're all in uncharted territory. And there's nobody that can even really advise you. There's always the material thing of like, well, you're going to make a lot of money and you know, you got this IP and the band. But it's like the actual sort of the nuts and bolts of how to hang together. So for us, it's been really, it's the, I call it the family of the band. There's some sort of pride that's emerged with like, we've all survived.

2:07:05Our relationships are intact enough for us to get on a stage and somehow it benefits our families individually. So it has allowed us to sort of pride, you know, because it's less about our relationship and more about our relationship with our families. That's allowed us to have a sweetness between the three of us that we didn't have when we were young. Oh, that's cool. Well, also probably just growing up and being more mature and appreciative. You're really going on a limb there with the growing up. That's here a little bit of gratitude. Perpetual adolescence over here. Well, that is part of the fun though.

2:07:38I mean, you do wait. You actually have to really know. And you know, it's funny even when I say something like this, there's already some guy getting ready to go on Reddit. But there is a day you wake up and you look in the mirror like, I'm a rock star. This fucking cool. Yeah. And there's another day that you wake him and go, you know, I don't have to get off this rock star train if I don't want to. Well, look at the stones. I saw the stones at Coda, the circuit of the Americas here in Austin a couple years ago. It's fucking insane. It's insane. I was almost like having an out of body experience because you can't believe you're really seeing Mick Chagger.

2:08:07Like when he's out there dancing, I swear to God, I felt like I was on a drug. I was like, my friend Bobby and I were hanging. He's the one that he owns a place circuit of the Americas. And I was standing next to him like, I can't believe they're really here. Like there's certain people that you just get weirded out by being like Bill Murray was here the other day. Yeah. And I even told him I'm like, I'm weirded out. I'm weirded out that you're here. Like it's just, there's a lot of people that I don't freak. I mean, I've met a lot of people. I don't freak out about too many of them, but Bill Murray I freaked out about.

2:08:38But seeing Mick Chagger just, I don't even get to meet him. But seeing him on the stage, I'm like, this nuts. That's really Mick Chagger. Yeah. Well, the mythical part, see in his case, the mythical part of Mick Chagger and Keith Richards is integrated. They become the avatar. They are the living example of where it actually works. The argument is against those people where it doesn't work. You know, Larry Forfe 6 '5 on the internet. I think he's Lord of like, you know, D &D or something. I mean, that's where I get kind of like, what is that? I get the other thing, you know, because, you know, whether it's, you know.

2:09:17What do you mean by Larry Forfe? I'm not joking about the guy on the internet whose his entire status is based on being in a subculture and achieving some status within the subculture, which doesn't really apply into the outside world. Oh, like a Reddit forum or something. Yeah, whatever. Whatever it is. Mick Chagger walks into a stadium full of people. They're there to see Mick Chagger and Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood. Right. Even though they're 80 and you who's been around everybody goes, holy shit. There it is. Yeah, just the fact that he was alive. Okay, but it's the myth made real. Yes.

2:09:47Have you ever watched those YouTube videos like, what was Caesar really like? You know what I mean? Right. That type of stuff. Like, what was it like to live in those times? Because there's the myth and then there's the reality. Right. And then sometimes if you learn about the reality, you're like, wow, that guy was really a badass or she was really a badass because it's, the thing is real. The mythology is real. It's like, it has truth or resonance in it. It's all this other culture that's risen up where we're supposed to pay tribute. And that's goes back to the podcast. It's like, we're paying tribute to people who haven't done shit.

2:10:17Right. I want to pay tribute to people who've actually done something. Yes. Well, that's what you like about doing your podcast then. You just like finding people that resonate with you that really like strike a chord. I just, the other day, I interviewed Susan Olson who was Cindy Brady. Okay. The Brady bunch. Oh, wow. Okay. The Brady bunch is, you know, as far as the original show I think has been over for 50 years. Right. The thing is, so. Right. Yeah. Okay. Every interview you look up on YouTube on Susan Olson, it's like, it's just getting her to regurgitate the same stories. And she did the Brady bunch.

2:10:51When she was like seven to 12 years old or something. Wow. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. You're Gilligan for life. Okay. My thing is, no, you're not Gilligan for life. So that's, that's what, and then we had a great chat because I think there's a lot to learn from somebody who went through a zeitgeist moment at such a young age. Like, how do you navigate past that? What do you do with yourself? Like, how do you pick yourself up off the ground? Right. How do you deal with typecasting? How do you navigate the fact that as you walk through the airport, you're not Susan Olson. You're Cindy Brady.

2:11:22Do people still recognize her? Oh, yeah. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's Barbara Eden, I dream of Jeannie. That was another one. Yeah. People get locked in. Do they are Al Bundy? And I'm still the rat in the cage guy. Yeah. I do. I do with that too, you know. Yeah, but it's such a good jam. It's such a good jam. That's a fucking great song. Thank you. That's on the Green Room playlist. That fucking song rules, dude. That was a good one. Oh my god. All time. I didn't get it at that time. I actually had to be talked into it. Really? Yeah. We were putting out our double album and it was this big pressure moment, 95.

2:11:56And I wanted a different song to be the first song. And the guy from the record company called, who's now passed away, his name was Phil Cordray, a lovely guy. And he literally did the thing on the phone, kid. It's a smash. You got to trust me. And I trusted him. Wow. I thought he was crazy. Did you think that that's sometimes because you're too close to your own creations? Of course. Yeah. Like, you're never going to get to see how your songs impacted other people. The way it impacted them. You're not going to feel that the way they feel it. Like hearing that song for the first time completed.

2:12:26They've never seen you rehearse it. They don't know how you wrote it. They don't know how you guys practiced it. How you fucked around with the lyrics. You did it different way. They just get the first, they get the full version of it done. Like, holy shit. And it's kind of awful. You don't get to experience that like you created it. The only time I've been able to experience that is when I was really high. Oh, wow. I get so high that I could hear it for the first time. As if it was somebody else singing. What really tripped me out about doing a lot of drugs back in the day was I would hear messages in my music that I didn't even know I was putting in there.

2:13:03And at some point I became conscious of my unconscious ability to put messages inside. I'm sorry, you look at me like I'm crazy. No, no, no. It's fast enough. So imagine I'll try to reset up the scenario. Okay. You write a song you think it's about something. You're sure of it. In fact, you would tell people, sorry, this horrible plague I got. No worries. You're convinced that this song that you've written is about your ex -girlfriend. And then when you're super high, you listen and you can hear yourself actually singing about something else. So now you have a conscious understanding of something you're unconscious as implanted in the art.

2:13:42And once I became conscious of the process, I became more aware of how to consciously plant messages in my music. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You just operated on layers. You put stuff in there. Yes, but I didn't know that I was doing it until I did a lot of drugs. Ah! That there was this other voice at work, this subliminal voice. Like, can you give me an example?

2:14:08Um... The conscious mind wants to believe the song is about your ex -girlfriend. But what it's really about is about being abandoned by your mother. If you came up to me and said, what's that song about? And I trust you and I go, oh, it's just about my ex. I believed it. I would believe it. Like 100%. And then I listened to it high on drugs and I'm like, oh my god, I'm singing about my mother and I'm weeping. And I had no conscious mind when I wrote the song that was about my mother. Wow. And then once I have that kind of agape moment of like holy shit, then I go back and listen to the music sober and I can totally hear it.

2:14:41And then where it gets really weird is people would come up to me and say, that song, that reminded me of my relationship with my mother. Thank you. And then I went to that heel. Like people would come up and respond to me on the unconscious recognition, not what I thought I wrote the song about. That blew my mind. That there was this other person in there layer at work. And I gained a lot more respect for like I guess you would call it the shamanic aspects of art. I don't know if you know where it castinatus, but you know, do you read castinatus? Maybe I did in high school, I think. Yeah. It was kind of a thing for our generation, everybody kind of read castinatus.

2:15:19Yeah. And it's still to this day debated about whether castinatus, it was a real thing. It was a documentary. It was true stories are made up and did Don Juan, the shaman, was he a real person? Is there really a Don Juan? And it's like debate even I think it's even been New York Times articles written about it. Right. About whether castinatus this whole thing is a fraud and all this stuff. And I think castinatus may even still be alive. Really? That might be when to look up sometime. But anyway, I gained a lot more respect that artists have the ability to communicate at subconscious levels that they're not even aware of.

2:15:53I don't know if that resonates the way I'm explaining it, but that's that that it moves something to me allowed me to be a better artist. That's fascinating. And it also like you can never guess like what kind of an impact you're especially if you're too close to it. What kind of an impact your work is going to have on someone who's seeing it for the first time. And if there's like multiple layers that you're operating on that you're not even totally aware of. And then you put out this thing that has this like very complex layered message in it. And it just makes people go, oh my god. That's like one of the ultimate expressions of art, right?

2:16:31Like something that just, music does something very strange that no other art form does. It operates like a drug. Like music gives you more energy when you're on the treadmill. Like if a great song comes on you're working out. You're like, fuck yeah. Like you feel it, you know? Yeah. There's riffs. There's guitar riffs. I swear to god make you stronger. Like a tool, prison sex. Bonaum. Yeah, cool riddle. Bonaum. That song makes you just fucking raw. You know, there's like something to it. It gives you energy. Yeah. It's like a drug. It's an audio drug. It fires up your synapses in this very strange way.

2:17:12The best explanation I ever heard that resonated with me was, you know, the entire universe is constructed on waves. Light, everything has to do with waves. So music is the closest thing to the foundational aspects of the universe. That's okay. I know what you're saying. Yeah, well that makes sense. Because it penetrates the cellular. Right. Well, people that, you know, go on these shamanic journeys, the Iowaska journeys, they play these songs that accompany the Iowaska journey that are called Icaros. And when you... Are they traditional Iowaska songs? Yes. And they have like this weird beat to them.

2:17:55We listen to them by themselves. You're like, I don't get it. But if you listen to them under the influence, you... The psychedelic experience dances to those songs. And it gets guided by those songs. And it's really wild. Like really wild. And then you go, oh, this is like a technology to interface with the psychedelic experience. But you're hitting on exactly what I'm saying. I think artists... And I'll exclude myself from the discussion, so I don't make somebody mad. Artists have a way of knowing how to do that without anybody teaching them. Right. They just know what music beats, chords, melodies, lyrics to use, to penetrate.

2:18:36And the successful artist, think of it, they do it at scale. Yeah. Well, there's this thing that happens when someone's really in it. Where you feel it from them while they're performing. And you just, you just like get drawn into it. Like, wow. I remember the first time I saw Mr. Jones in me. First time I saw a county crows play that song. The way he was like dancing around in the lim... I'm like, that guy is so free. Like, I want to be free like that. You know, I really remember thinking that. Because he was so real. He was so in the moment while he was singing that song. And I had Adam in here and I asked him about it.

2:19:15Like, what is that? Like, you were fucking locked in, man. Like, I remember being a kid. I was probably like 23 or something like that when that song came out. And I was in my apartment in New York watching it going, fuck. Watching on MTV going, this guy is just so loose, man. He's so free. I remember thinking, I want to be able to perform like that. And whatever I do, I want to feel like, what's that zone that he's in? Well, part of that is, you know, a lot of shamanic work involves the breath. So think a singer is rhythmically breathing and rhythmically chanting. That's one thing that most people would not pick up on.

2:19:55There's a ton of exploration of breath. You know, like what's the Winhoth? Winhoth? You know, I do that for two hours. I mean, I'm totally asphyxiated the entire time. It's not natural to scream your head off for two hours. Do you have to get in shape to do it? Do you have to get your eyes in shape? I do. I do to a certain extent. Do you build up to like a concert performance? Like how do you do it? You have to to a certain extent. Yeah. I don't know how to explain it. Like if you, if I think I'm off cycle right now, so if you came to see me play an hour and a half show tomorrow, I could do it, but I probably couldn't talk the next day.

2:20:30But if I do a week of rehearsals and prep up, then I can do it. So it's like a muscle, like something. I don't understand. I don't understand it. It's almost like a trained fury. Like you learned to not go too far. You're going to say, because say blow your voice out. You have to really know where the line is. By the way, when you're dealing with a ton of adrenaline, like the thing with fighters comes to mind. Like they'll come in, they'll gas in a minute. Yes. Because they're so jacked. Right. Sometimes you see a guy getting in a rain, they're just like, like, yeah. And they gas in a minute. I know how to see that because of watching wrestlers gas.

2:21:08You know, you get you get you learn the body language of somebody getting gas. You know, they kind of start to lose their posture and go goosey right? They get loose. Okay, same thing for a first singer. I mean, you can gas in the first three minutes and you're dead and you're dead. Oh, no. What are you going to do? Yeah. So you have to almost like have a controlled fury. Like imagine screaming at the top of your lungs, but not totally at the top of your lungs. Right. 87%. Like there's the magical line. Well, that's what fighting is the same kind of thing. You don't go 100%. And the zen of that.

2:21:39Yeah. Some of the best fighters they'll punch like 50, 60%. And that way they could put volume on you. So I can't imagine being in there and somebody's in on the other side wanting to kill you and be able to be like, I'm going to just going to work my way through these. Well, you have to have serious experience to be able to manage the storm that way. Did you ever have to take vocal lessons to learn how to not blow your throat out? I did. Yeah. I work with the lady. I was a funny story. I work with the lady at one point. They hooked me up with somebody from the opera. Oh, perfect. And she came to my house and she said, oh, you sing totally wrong.

2:22:15But here's how to sing right and you won't blow your voice out. And it was all about the right posture and all this stuff. And the first time I tried to do it at a concert with 4 ,000 kids going nuts, I tried to do what she taught me. It didn't work because I just, I was in the deep end of the pool and I had to go back to all my old bad habits. So eventually I found a woman who was used to working with rock singers and she explained to me a bunch of theories about it. I think, I think, I think she said the human body has 11 folds at tissue and the throat. And if rock singers don't warm up all that tissue, that's how they damage their singing.

2:22:48And she'd also work with Stephen Tyler. And she said, the thing about rock singers is you guys sing wrong because that's the way you want to sound. It's part of your gimmick, you know. Right. I'm sure Stephen Tyler and myself we could sing choir voice if we wanted to, but that's not what attracts people to us. It's the razor's edge and the voice or something. So you have to learn how to warm up to sing like an idiot basically. And that's the sound that people attract to with rock singers and even the gentleman you play before. I mean, he's totally abusing his voice. That is not proper singing.

2:23:22Right, right, right, right. And there's physical techniques to create that sound. Like there's there's a axle rose for example like you know he sings a very particular way the way he uses his throat in a particular way that makes it you would say that's the axle sound or whatever but it's not natural but it's awesome when he does it it's kind of the thing yeah that has got to be really hard to maintain I saw them play in Athens, Greece and they did a three -hour show like two years ago yeah at like how old is he 60 60 something I think Axis about seven years older than me so yeah because I remember us welcome to the jungle was huge when I was in high school or just at high school 89 88 89 was it okay so I graduated 85 so it was like a couple years after high school welcome to the jungle I was like oh my god this song like I remember watching the the music video remember when he had the teased up hair back then yeah yeah the huge hair that was the poison hair era yeah yeah so singing like that is is it's it's it's it's wrong but that's what makes it right right but you can't say what's wrong or what's right it's just like what's a stain trust me no one can tell you you're surrounded by a lot of people with a lot of opinions I I was told that when I was very young that voice you sing with will never sell records ever and most people that don't like my music will often cite my voice is the reason they don't like my music but that's the way that my voice is the reason the people who do like my music like my music right it's a weird it's like I like what do you do with that well you can't do it for other people no no way I sing in this like it's like don't sing that way well I don't wait that's the whole idea of like you can't do it for other people you can't do it for them you can't do it the way they want it to no there's gonna be people like it the way you want you like it yeah you just have to find out what that thing is and you have to feel like you have to what whatever your internal compasses that guides you towards this particular style this particular way of expressing yourself it has to be authentic we're singing against a wall of guitars this is a particular skill set it's like singing against three airline jets at the same time right right right we have three guitars in our band playing at the same time so my voice has to cut like a razor through that all of them yeah voices are there some voices are so fucking compelling like you listen to them like Amy Winehouse perfect thing you hear her sing once and you just like whoa there's something about it okay so back to my argument about the unconscious thing certain voices convey an unconscious information yeah totally it registers registers in the public as a certain authority or wisdom or sorrow yeah like some based some voices have so much sorrow in them yeah like for our generation when Kurt would sing and I saw Kurt many times live it sounded like it was like the literal howl of our generation it had this great connectivity to what we were experiencing is Latchkey kids yes you know yeah I don't want to say tantrumish but it had a certain kind of anger anger but it was it was the anger of disaffection it wasn't the anger of a hardcore band like you know screw capitalism right right right right it had a sorrow somehow in it yeah yeah and authenticity like Kurt was the master of authenticity he was he changed he killed hair bands he really did he killed hair bands I remember when I was a kid never mind came out and I was with a couple of friends of mine and this guy goes have you seen this and he shows me this fucking cassette with a baby on the cover I go what is it he's like this is Nirvana yeah and he plays to me Nirvana for the first time over his house I was like holy shit like this is crazy yeah it was for for our generation it was that it was the door can kick open yes everything after just got easier but that's the thing these unique artists that come along and transform the medium you know like I said Lenny Bruce prior then Kinesen there's a few examples of that in music where someone comes along like Hendrix or Kurt or even Elvis someone comes along and everybody's like what the fuck is going on the Beatles yeah what is happening this is crazy what it strikes me and this is a business point but that's where all the money is and and and yet the music business is not to nurture those talents in fact the music business works against those talents it's almost like if they blow up their business model so it becomes inconvenient well what do you think the music business nurtures control they want control they want they want the the biggest problem I've seen in the music business is they don't understand why musicians can't be as supple in in the in the business part of the equation as as a guy makes cookies or something like this is what it costs here's your quality control the public wants more chocolate chips can't you just put more chocolate chips in there and that's and and none of that is what attracts the public to great artists right it's it's it's like complete counterintuitive so they sit there and they you just end up as a name on a piece of paper or an inconvenient problem I mean I've said this a few times publicly but it bears repeating here is I've been in meetings where they're complete they're complaining to me about me like how so like what do they say that basically the the person that I am in the world is inconvenient to their business the things I'm saying the things I'm doing the music I'm making is inconvenient to the business and could I temper those things more in the direction that they want like what particularly what they're talking about it doesn't you name it like in me one example it could be anything from you know you're too negative to your songs are too weird to your voices too weird to your guitars are too loud they just want to sell more yes so to them it's an intellectual thing oh wow be like Joe yeah if you could just make more jokes about the economy mm -hmm you'd sell two stadiums not just one this is what happened with Dave's lapel while he left the chipel show same exact kind of thing you know a different version of it yeah yeah so it's this weird thing where you're sitting there and then you're like and what I always try to tell them is I didn't get here with that type of thinking and I do think and I and I don't want to name names but you can I would say just to your great audience you can pretty much tell who got to the dance on their own and somewhere along the way between the second and the fourth album decided that the compromise had a bigger yield and off goes the organic switch and on goes the oh you want me to be the next door neighbor right or you know romantic movie ballads whatever yeah ours went through that for a while but to their credit I didn't understand at the time it was it was a brilliant move because they'd gone about as far as they could go and the one thing and they're super influential and including an alternative music and it ended up being a really smart watershed moment for them to do what they did at the time they were doing SNL skits you never add on sandler used to come out and he would do that he would do like I think it was Adam Sandler we could do like the seven aerospace ballads in a row and it was like I'm crying I'm really crying you know they were just playing he just sing all those songs like Stephen Tyler but I think looking back was really smart what they did well also maybe they're allowed to do whatever they want to do like artists change their whole thing like they went from mom akin to you know some of those ballads I'm I as far as I know in your your her stuute assistant over there probably check but I think Eros Smith is the biggest selling American rock band of all time whoa so if you're out Smith did they make a wrong turn I might argue would be no no it's not a wrong turn I mean obviously you're allowed to change what you're interested in too yeah you know like there's a lot of bands that sort of reinvent themselves with almost every album like my friend Sturgel Simpson he's sort of reinvent himself every album every album is different yeah they're like he just gets bored with stuff Eros Smith the best -selling American hard rock band of all time having sold more than 150 million records worldwide including over 85 million records in the United States who so yeah that's pretty good yeah so that's what I'm saying is only only the bands can really know what what the right direction to go in is because at some point you know what seems so obvious to the audience or some guy in an office isn't necessarily what drives the band forward well then there's weird cases like David Lee Roth leaves Van Halen Sammy Hagar takes over and it becomes bigger bigger in a totally different way but if you talk to the average Van Halen fan they wanted to hear the David Lee Roth Van Halen well especially if you grew up with that the thing is like what you started out with is always what you want to see right but I'm saying there's no there's no obvious argument of what which which is superior you know saying don't know so much records one one is sort of held more in people's hearts because of a particular generational thing which would be our generation but some people love the Sammy Hagar version better yeah that's okay you're allowed to like Taylor Swift smells sells a lot of fucking tickets like it doesn't if you're not into it there's nothing it doesn't mean it's wrong I mean everybody has a weird for the way they interface with the world and some things get in there and really lock on you and like wow is amazing and you could take the same concert and another person that you like goes to it they say this sucks and you're like this is a fucking amazing how can you say this sucks well I think you're about to see that nickel back in creator about to go on a huge run of business really oh yeah oh yeah nickel back took a lot of shit that's kind of a point is is they've survived it and now here comes the the inevitable moment of like oh yeah it was really good and they wrote a hot it they had some fucking great songs that rock star song that's a great song like I was but it was one of those weird things where they had become like a punchline and for whatever reason everybody thought that it was okay to shit on Nickelback and comics would shit on them and it was like a thing that people would mock the success of Nickelback me mother selling out of rena's every fucking night of the week so yeah I think history has a way of sorting out the bodies as the way I look at it yeah that's kind of how I feel I mean this is selfish for me to say this was a high kind of how I feel about my musical life I think time will tell my story much better than I did you will you see my piece with that I am I made my peace with it I mean it bothered me when it bothered me because it felt unfair or yeah I felt like I was being sort of made to pay for the sins of the people who are no longer here because in particularly in general we've had so many great talents die oh so you felt like you weren't getting the credit you deserve because you survived there was part of that that's the let's call it the the simpler version the more complicated version is is is generations move with a collective energy and by the mid 2000s the the collective energy of generation X had mostly dissipated in the musical thing there were bands out playing but a lot of the lead singers had died so it's hard to sort of stand and carry a flag for something that people feel very sentimental about if there isn't an army around you carrying the same flag so you start to you people start to put on you this like a set of cultural and generational expectations that you don't want you become you become the emblem of like the living version of what does it work but the other guys or girls aren't there to grow old with you and you know receive the same discernment or criticism like one time a guy tried to go me into an argument of comparing myself to one of the top people and musical people my generation I want to say who but you'll understand the flow on this so and they and they and they said can you compare you know like who do you think's better say it was like a real cheese set up and I said I said why I think they were more talented and they said but I said I feel I'm in that conversation and they said why are you in the conversation I said because I'm alive you know what I'm saying yeah I'm here well it's also like you can't deny that smashing pumpkins didn't have some fucking bangers like anybody who denies that well Joe that's a that's a whole other episode because the band is probably one of the most misunderstood I mean they're probably one we're probably one of the most misunderstood bands in the history of rock and roll I mean that sounds like a wrestling statement but it's it's fairly accurate what do you think that's from I think it has a lot to do with the issues of Gen X and it has a lot to do with a relationship that I set into motion with the media when I was a very young person playing kind of a funny game like doing my own my own version of Andy Kaufman or Bob Simuda you understand because I thought it was all shitty so I was just like I'm just gonna play with this like a toy because I think it's kind of funny I didn't realize that the coming culture was going to kind of almost be attracted to people who are willing to emulate themselves on the public stage does that make sense yeah most people who are attracted to fame they want to run towards the shiny part of it right I was attracted to the non shiny part which is okay I'll light myself on fireless he would happens or I'll light you on fire and let's see what happens so it kind of worked in the 90s when everybody was rolling and moving along well here comes Napster the music business craters then a bunch of people die and there you are standing you know now at 40 years old you're supposed to carry some flag for a generation that doesn't even know who it is anymore how do you navigate that like did does that did that trouble you at the time was it difficult to work as an artist yeah it's very difficult the simple version is and I had some of the top top people in the music business sit me down one on one in a room and say just give them what they want Jesus your life will be a lot better you'll make a lot more money and you could put your head on your pillow at night and I'd have to think about all these things and my response every time I said I don't give a fuck and I used to quote pop by I am what I am I'm here I'm here I'm here okay and I ain't changing for anything good for you and part of that goes back to my daddy okay I watched a man literally broken by the business so I'm the last person is gonna fucking bow down for that shit fuck off well the beautiful thing is to you always had an audience so you didn't have to well there is that but but but at the end of the day how can I explain it everybody in the music business will tell you your value is is exponentially related to your success so your your biggest song is here and your next biggest song is here and there's like a pyramid and as you go down you lose value your aging becomes part of that loss of value how do you maintain value relevancy you no longer have the record business that used to exist you no longer have the structure I mean the music business is basically a touring business first now and everything else is in support of the touring business we're lucky in that we continue to be a very large touring band so you're told over and over again almost in a in a propagandaistic way that your value is related to what's on a piece of paper and then somehow I woke up in the middle of it and I thought no no that's that's actually not my value and so the minute I started saying no I know what my real value is it's that I'm an independent artist who like a voice in the wilderness represents something and I know it's not for everybody trust me I've got begin that message since I was a little kid including for my own family but I know what I represent represents something that's valuable I can't quite put my finger on it but I see the consistency of the kind of let's call it the communication between myself and somebody who's interested in what I do and once I started doubling and tripling down the value my business started going back up wow and the way I would say it in a crossway is I reasserted my brand not the brand I was being handed in in 40 plus brand you know you're in all these bands you're an oldies artist you play these songs well you just kept and reinforced your true voice yeah but I had a legit what brought you to the dance in the first place it seems silly but that's what I had to figure out I had to figure that out on my own because there was nobody telling me that I mean you got to understand and and you're a man of the world so you know what I'm saying when you're in a room with somebody who runs the fucking world in my case runs the music business yeah the guy who can get shit done the guy who can get you canceled the guy who can fucking make stuff happen yeah and that guy tells you here's your value it's awfully hard to go back to Chicago and I can venture self that he's wrong right right there's nobody and who do you talk to about it especially if fame is fleeting it comes and goes album sales come and go and there's a new big thing right now there's the new thing you're not there's always the new thing yeah and then someone's coming along listen you've got to listen us we know how you can be back on top I don't read comments but I have a social media person who occasionally relays what she sees oh boy well we kind of keep it on the positive but my favorite comment of the last few years was she started poking around with young fans 16 18 year olds who were suddenly seeming to come out of the woodwork and liking the band and me almost like a cuddly bearer or something they suddenly were attracted to me in a way that the 16 18 year olds of the previous generation weren't so I asked her I said why don't you poke around with these people and ask them what's interesting and my favorite comment and it became kind of common amongst the feedback that she got was I like him because because other people told me not to like him but what what that says to me anybody can interpret the way they want the what it said to me is we need people in in the zeitgeist of the culture who don't represent the collective yes there's always room for somebody on the corner saying no right and that goes back to Lenny Bruce as crazy as all that was you still need that guy going no no no no no you know saying and you can call whatever disruptors or whatever authentic voices I that sounds nicer than disruptor I like disruptor because that's that's what I do well it does disrupt but it disrupt because it's an authentic voice and because it bucks the idea of creating some manufactured thing for the market I've told many people in the music business I know that you don't want me in this business but I'm here and I've made a lot of money and I've made a lot of people a lot of money like what's the problem oh you made great songs like but the idea that most people are in the business for the music but the idea that somebody wouldn't want you in the business when you've been very successful in the business is just insane it doesn't even make any sense doesn't make sense to me well that's the weird thing that you guys have to deal with you deal with like this whole layer of non -artistic people that have influence over art having heard you many times do commentary for UFC what I love about you as a commentator is you take me into the into the the passion of the moment the feeling of like two warriors are gonna enter this thing and only one can emerge there's a feeling there that's like and I've been to some of the events it's like it has that like it's a sort of a life affirming like here we are you know and you you know because you're behind the scenes the training that went in the injuries the guy had overcome or the girl or whatever or the crazy girlfriend and they got you know the training camp and all of it and there it is the clash it's no different for the musician it's like you know I sit in a room for a year and make songs with only three four people hearing them right I have to believe that I'm gonna be walk into that my version of that octagon and what I'm gonna offer is not gonna get me killed what is it like when you release an album what is that feeling like I just I just I want to curl up in a ball and just die because here it comes here it comes and sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised but I've had more negative experiences than positive ones but positive from the fans is it non fans that are the problem it's like the people on the outside peering in 20 years ago I would have given you a different answer now it's nobody's the problem it's ultimately the game is you versus yourself I don't know if there's any commonality in the fighting world but or the comedic world yes it's you versus yourself yeah not the audience as far it's not the guy at the radio station or the girl at the at the arena it's nothing to do with them because the one thing you do know is if you find that value that that makes a wheel turn the prince cash they don't care who you are they'll push you right back under the spotlight hmm so once you configure that game out that's the game the game is you versus you it's not you versus them in fact that's the that's the suckers game so it's you just trying to create the best version of what you have inside your head let's do a simple math and anybody wants to take a have a problem with it I don't care okay my band in in in over 30 years has been in the top point one percentile of touring artists in the world period you would think that if you were in that business and you were at that that elite level you would think the whole business would rally around you and try to get you to do more and make more not even close to that there is no system by which you get that kind of support you are completely on your own but is that universal with success I think I think I I hear different stories about the top pop artists but I think that's because they're making so much money it's like they're like a multinational corporation most bands are their experiences are similar to ours you kind of on your own you have your team of people and then you walk into the arena with what you got what you think is going to work but I hear about the modern pop stars I mean I hear stuff that sounds it sounds like they're running a fortune 500 company because they're they're they are literally printing cash also the percentage that the actual artists get versus what they should be getting it hurts it's crazy it hurts it's crazy because they do everything they create the music they perform the music and yet they're not making the money people are coming to see them perform the music yet they're not making the money there's some bizarre vampires that have attached themselves to the veins that's changing I think in the next 20 years you're gonna see a very music a very different music business in what way peer -to -peer ability to create commerce right and then also the fact that you could release things so like Oliver Anthony he put out that rich man north of Richmond and then it's fucking gigantic 100 million views on YouTube it's like it's crazy but like 20 years ago you're success and who you work with would have been unthinkable right right and you're an independent voice you've built it I mean it's yours right so that's what I'm saying that's coming from music this is coming for music yeah well that's good yes I think ultimately will benefit the fans of the artist and they'll get more of what they want and less of what they don't want here here all right grab it up thank you sir appreciate very much always fun to talk to you thank you tell everybody what your podcast call where they can get it the negative and others you can get it on with YouTube thank you sir appreciate check someone bye bye buddy