September 9, 2025 • 62 mins
Our episode title is a lyric by Scott McCaughey, the beloved singer-songwriter behind bands like Young Fresh Fellows and The Minus 5. McCaughey was also a member of R.E.M.’s touring band and contributed to their albums. He had spent his life living and breathing music—until a massive stroke in 2017 shattered his ability to speak, play, and understand the world around him. He describes the early aftermath as “a bizarre netherworld,” where reality blurred and even the simplest words failed him.
In this deeply human episode of Alive Again, Scott opens up about the long road of recovery—his first terrifying moments in the ER, the confusion of aphasia, and the odd beauty of watching The Wizard of Oz while relearning language. His story isn’t just about survival, but transformation.
With honesty, humor, and an artist’s insight, Scott explores what it means to lose the thing that once defined you—and how love, creativity, and community helped him find something even more profound in its place.
Scott McCaughey has led The Young Fresh Fellows since 1981. In 1993, he and Peter Buck founded The Minus 5 as a side project along with The Posies’ Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow. The group’s lineup has featured a rotating cast of musicians over the years. From 1994 to 2011, McCaughey was a member of R.E.M.’s touring band and also contributed to that group’s albums. In 2008, McCaughey formed The Baseball Project with Buck, Pitmon, and Linda’s husband, Dream Syndicate frontman Steve Wynn. The group, which now also features R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills, plays original baseball-themed indie-rock tunes.
Scott will be on tour with Minus 5 and The Baseball Project this September (2025). For more info and tour dates, go here:
The Minus 5 / Baseball Project – September, 2025 Tour
Scott graciously shared tracks from his incredible body of work, including:
- “Johnny Volume,” “Heartbeat Smile” - Alejandro Escovedo
- “Young Fresh Fellows Theme,” “Power Mowers Theme” - The Young Fresh Fellows
- “Hey Lacey (Live)” - Filthy Friends
- “All The Time,” “Emperor Of The Bathroom,” “Placent Folk,” “Scar Crow,” “MRI,” “Let the Rope Hold, Cassie Lee,” “House Of Four Doors (End Theme),” “Words & Birds” - The Minus 5
- “Sun Station Vadsø” - The No Ones
Story Producer: Brent Dey
* If you have a transformative near-death experience to share, we’d love to hear your story. Please email us at aliveagainproject@gmail.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to a Live Again, a production of Psychopia
Pictures and iHeart Podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
My name is Scott.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
I'm a musician and I've toured the world with artists
like rim M Ward and Robin Hitchcock. I've also started
bands as a songwriter and singer, like The Minus Five,
The Baseball Project, and The Young Fresh Fellows. On November fifteenth,
twenty seventeen, while on tour, I collapsed on a San
(00:44):
Francisco sidewalk, paralyzed by a stroke. People were just stepping
over me. I really didn't know if I was going
to live or die. What followed was one of the
most surreal experiences of my life, and the songs I
(01:04):
wrote during my recovery feel like postcards from another dimension,
messages from a version of myself that I barely recognize.
Speaker 4 (01:13):
Now, Welcome to a Live Again, A podcast that showcases
miraculous accounts of human fragility and resilience from people whose
lives were forever altered after having almost died. These are
(01:35):
first hand accounts of near death experiences and, more broadly,
brushes with death. Our mission is simple, find, explore, and
share these stories to remind us all of our shared
human condition. Please keep in mind these stories are true
and maybe triggering for some listener, and discretion is advised.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
I played guitar with Ram for many years, and I
was playing with him when Bill Barry the drummer, had
aneurysm when we were on tour in nineteen ninety five
in Lauson, Switzerland. It was a regular night, you know,
we were having a great time, playing an awesome show.
I didn't really notice any indication that there was something
(02:21):
wrong with Bill. He was playing fine as far as
I could tell. When I first noticed was when he
got down off the drums to play bass on Half
a World Away. He played bass on a few songs
in the set, and he just he couldn't play, and
he kind of like fell back and sat down back
(02:43):
against the bassamp as I recall, and everybody's like, what
the hell is going on? And then we just kind
of lifted it up and walked him off stage and
he was, you know, apologizing. We went out and did
some more songs, giving the fans the rest of a show,
(03:06):
and then afterwards we just went and we saw Bill
was being taken off into a into an ambulance. Once
they realized it was an aneurysm. They had to operate
immediately and.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
We were all sent home.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Arim was a hugely popular band at that point. That
was probably the peak of their popularity. They made two
records that sold like ten or fifteen million each, and
then they made this big kind of glam rock record
called Monster, and I was one of the people they
asked to come along and help augment the sound on stage.
(03:49):
My first show with Arim was Saturday Night Live, so
that was really harrowing, but it was also really fun.
Then we started a tour in Australia and we're playing
these arenas and huge shows.
Speaker 5 (04:06):
Hey, what's your hurry?
Speaker 4 (04:08):
I see you've listened to the sounds of the Pacific
Northwest and now you just can't wait to go.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Look fine, but we had one more important sound.
Speaker 5 (04:17):
We wanted you to hear.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Whatever walking down the street.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
I've never seen a couple Young Fresh Fellows before.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
My experience before Arim was playing with the Young Fresh Fellows,
which was a band I formed in Seattle with a
friend from high school and his cousin. We're playing clubs,
you know, in front of five people to maybe five
hundred people, or maybe a thousand if we're opening for
(04:49):
the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Suddenly with ri Em, I
was playing in front of fifteen twenty thousand people, maybe
one hundred and ninety thousand rock and rio in Brazil.
But once once I started playing, it didn't feel that different.
Even though there were tens of thousands of people cheering
(05:10):
us on, it still felt like playing a rock show.
It was still fun and it was still like playing
with buddies on stage. Now we're together all the time.
We're just a couple of the young fresh fellows, you see,
and so it quickly became less daunting to me than
(05:33):
I thought it was going to be. So yeah, that
was that was how I got into being an rim
and it was. It was basically because Peter Buck, the
guitar player, had moved to Seattle and I was his
friend there. He'd met me over the years with the
young fresh fellows coming to shows and stuff like that.
(05:55):
So we just started playing together immediately, just strumming guitars
together a lot and kind of hit it off. Before
the RAM tour, we were recording a lot of songs
together that I had written that turned into the first
Minus five record.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
I grew up in.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Sarato, California, which is a small little suburb of San
Jose in Santa Clair Valley. It wasn't a happening place.
What's happening when you're nine years old, you know. I
played baseball and football, and then the Beatles happened. My
dad worked at Sears and they had a little record
(06:42):
department there, and he brought home a copy of I
Want to Hold Your Hand, and the music was and
is absolutely fucking magical. I had an older sister, I
had a younger sister too, and all three of us
were suddenly standing in front of the giant console stereo
in the living room, playing tennis rackets, you know, and
(07:04):
pretending we're the Beatles. I mean, there's no other records
that sound like those records. Still to this day, my
dad probably regretted that he ever brought home that forty
five though, And so I became totally obsessed with rock
and roll. When I was in my teens, I'd get
(07:26):
my parents to take my friends and me to San
Francisco to catch shows like almost every weekend.
Speaker 5 (07:34):
This was the Bay Area.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
So I saw local bands like Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Day, a,
Quicksilver Investitors, service, and then bands like The Who, the Kinks,
and Neil Young whenever they came to town. First time
I ever heard Saraway to Heaven was the fifth row
at Berkeley Community Theater watching led Zeppelin because they played
(07:57):
the song before before the record even came out, you know,
and I was just there for when when it was
all new. I mean, you never knew what was going
to hit you, and it was just like so magical
and so insanely innovative, and there were people like that
who were just trying to blow your mind and succeeding.
(08:21):
All my early bands were all just my group of friends,
and that's what we like to do, is make music
or listen to music together, and that's just such a
joyous thing. We never even cared if we were really
good or not. We'd play a party with six drunk
people there, you know whatever. If I ever could even
(08:42):
play a song in front of anyone. It still is now,
it still is. There really wasn't a music scene in
Seattle when I first moved there. I realized that the
(09:06):
way to do things in music is to just do
what you want to do and do it yourself. If
you're planning on getting a deal on a major label
or something.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
It's just dumb, you know.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
I Mean, it worked for some people, but I never
had any dream of that happening, you know. I never
even had a dream that I could make an indie
record either by myself. But we discovered people were doing it,
and we just figured out how to do it. So
I was probably twenty seven when I first held a
piece of vinyl that that I'd worked on, and it
(09:44):
was just the culmination of all the fun that I'd
had with my friends growing up, just listening to music
and playing music together. Young frishpelle Is first I heard,
came out in nineteen eighty four. A few years after that,
(10:04):
a record label called Subpop started putting out great local
bands like Mud Honey, Nirvana, Sound Garden. Some of those
bands became really, really huge. The Seattle sound back then
became known as the grunge thing. We didn't really fit
(10:25):
into that because Young Fishellows were a pop band that
those sub Pop bands were always really good about giving
us credit for being one of the first bands from
the Pacific Northwest that actually got national coverage and went
on national tours and wherever we played, ten or fifty
(10:48):
people remembered us because we were really really good.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
There was a celebration of Rickey's mouth disease.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
We were really really fun to see. If it's a
wedding our high school dance, Well, do you that you're
not the yence power cut it?
Speaker 2 (11:03):
You know?
Speaker 3 (11:04):
Right with the Fellows we scraped by, you know, we
we make our tours so that they would make enough
money or we wouldn't lose money or whatever. But suddenly
with Rim, I was actually getting paid and it was like, Wow,
this is this is amazing. So I guess that's how
(11:27):
it became a career. I don't think it ever would
have if it hadn't been for Rim. The Minus Fine
was just it wasn't supposed to be a band. It
was just supposed to be a recording project. Psychedelic folk
(11:48):
sort of thing was what Peter and I were calling it. Yes,
then somehow it became a band, you know, and we
started playing rock and roll songs, because when you play live,
(12:10):
it's more fun to play rock and roll than to
play downer solo songs. We also started playing with Alejandro Escovedo.
Alejandro is one of the bright shining lights of Americana music.
(12:35):
He does records in Spanish sometimes, but deep down he's
the rocker. We did a record with him I made
in twenty seventeen called burn Something Beautiful, which we're very
proud of. We were having so much fun on that tour.
I mean, the Seattle show was just completely off the hook,
(12:56):
and Portland What show was too. And then we came
to the Phoenix Hotel in San Francisco, which is a
classic old dive in the heart of the Tenderloin. It's
become like a place for bands to stay. We got
there at three o'clock when we could check in. I
went in, threw my stuff in the room, and I booked.
I just turned around and headed for Cafe Triste to
(13:20):
get a coffee. Cafe Trieste is an authentic little Italian
coffee shop in the heart of North Beach in San Francisco.
It's where Francis port Coppola wrote the screenplay for The Godfather,
and you know, it was a major hangout for writers
like Jack Carrouac and the.
Speaker 5 (13:39):
Beat Nicked Poets.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
I just really liked the vibe of that place. A
cappuccino that were so beautiful. The people there were just artists,
and I would always go there to sit and write,
you know, and just spend an afternoon there, you know,
whenever I had time. And it was a beautiful day.
I was heading to Cafe Triss, but I didn't make it.
(14:10):
I was walking down.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Kearnie and.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Suddenly I just felt like I was slowing down and
I couldn't control my movements. I couldn't put my foot
in front of in front of the other one.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
It didn't hurt, there was no pain.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
So it's like, I don't I was mystified. I don't
know what's happening here. There was some scaffolding on the street,
and I grabbed onto the scaffolding and I said, I'm
just gonna hang on here for a second. I'm sure
i'll feel better in a minute. Something could have passed
(14:53):
you all. And I was like, it was like thirty
feet from the corner, and I thought, I'll wait for
a few minutes.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Then if I can and walked to the corner.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Everything will be fine. But I just gradually couldn't even
hold myself up anymore, and I just kind of slid
down the scaffolding and just kind of crumpled spread out,
half on the curb and half in the street. I
(15:23):
wasn't really afraid. I don't know why I should have been.
I should have been terrified, but.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
I wasn't. I think. I just remember going, well, this
is happening. I don't know what it is, but I'm
just gonna going to roll with it. You know.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
I was conscious people were stepping over me and stuff,
because you know, they're they're like, hey, there's another drunk
guy on the street in San Francisco or whatever, you know, so.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
They were stepping over me. I couldn't really get angry.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
At them, but but I I couldn't really signaled anybody.
I couldn't move or anything. I couldn't talk. I discovered
that pretty quickly. Eventually somebody stopped and looked at me,
and they called nine on one or whatever, and uh,
(16:18):
pretty soon some medics came and it took me away
in an ambulance. I actually remember being in the back
of the ambulance and we were driving up a really
steep hill. I could look out the back window and
just saw a beautiful, beautiful San Francisco panorama and I
(16:39):
was just every thinking, God's so so beautiful out you know,
It's like it's it's true. I was just it was
just like it was like so lovely. I guess I
was accepting what was happening somehow. Once I got the hospital,
(17:06):
everything went south. I lost in and out of consciousness
and was a total wreck for the next twenty four hours.
I definitely panicked a lot of the time. I didn't
know what was happening, So there's only very brief moments
of where I can remember anything happening in that period.
(17:29):
They couldn't figure out how to get in touch with anybody.
Eventually they called the last number that I dialed on
my phone, and that was Linda Pittman, who's the drummer
in the Minus five in Alejandro's band. She had this
funny name that I called her, Miss Georgia Polycarp, and
(17:50):
so she thought it was a prank call by me
because somebody called it is this Miss Georgett Polycarp And
she was like, oh, yeah, what's happening. The McCoy's. McCoy's
pulling a fast one. But uh yeah, they got the
word to her that I was in the hospital, and
so she got Peter Buck and they came down and uh.
(18:13):
From then on, I like I really was out of touch.
I didn't really know what was happening. After I'd been
there for twenty four hours, they finally got the doctor
to give me a MRI because he wouldn't. He wouldn't
(18:37):
give me one because he said, it's not a stroke.
He said, he's a drunk. So you need an MRI
to determine if you had a stroke and if so,
where the blood claw is so it could be treated.
The quicker the better, because if you've had a stroke,
each moment she delay creates the potential for more damage
(18:58):
and more bitter of your brain dying. You got to
give this guy m he's had a stroke, But this
(19:19):
doctor just wouldn't believe it. I think they assumed I
was a burnout drug addict because of it being San
Francisco and being of the area it was, even though
I wasn't actually in the Tenderloin at that point. I
(19:39):
just walked right through it, and you know, I was
very very close, very very close, so I wouldn't have
been shocked to see somebody lying on the sidewalk in
a puddle of piss on Kearney Street. You know I
wasn't in a puddle of piss, by the way. He
must have had so many people come in that he
was just so blase and and so burned out on
(20:01):
it or something like that, but I don't think that's
an excuse for him.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
I mean, I didn't look terrible. I was wearing my
rock and roll clothes.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
I was wearing a Rocket from the Crypt bowling shirt
and black jeans, and I was carrying my little notebook
with my lyrics song lyrics I was writing in and
that was it when Peter showed up. And I don't
know if he told him that he was a world
famous musician in RAM, he wouldn't have been afraid to
(20:32):
throw his weight around if he needed to do, which
he obviously.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
Did need to.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
My wife told me that he said, look, whatever this costs,
I've got it.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Don't worry.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
There wasn't any reason for them to not do an MRI.
I don't know why that mattered, or why he wouldn't
have just immediately regardless of who I was, or who
my friends were, or what kind of condition I was in.
I don't know why he wouldn't have said, this guy's
had a stroke, let's take care of him. It was
(21:14):
really important to have my wife Mary there and Peter
and Linda our drummer. We're all there, really staying close
and making sure that things were going the way they
should go. It was probably hard for Peter because he'd
been through it before with Bill Barry having an aneurysm,
(21:34):
and it was the same thing with me. And aneurism
is where you get a blockage in your blood vessel.
A stroke comes from elsewhere, A clot is formed somewhere
in your body and it goes up to your brain
and it blocks the blood flow to your brain. So
at some point they transferred me to a stroke center
(21:56):
at a better.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Hospital across town.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
And weirdly, I also remember looking out the window of
that ambulance too, and by then I was a total wrack.
I was paralyzed on the right side totally. And yeah,
and so they put me in the ICU for ten
(22:23):
days or something, and they had to raise my blood
pressure to one ninety for a while to try to
flush the rest of the clots out in my brain.
I remember some really bad times in that hospital. I
didn't know what was happening, and I was trying to
move and stuff like that but not being able to.
(22:44):
And I couldn't understand what anybody was saying because their
words were garbled to me, and everything I said was
a real words didn't make any sense. So I was
living in this weird world where I just didn't know
what was happening. At one point, they started writing stuff out.
They said, this is what you just said, and I
(23:06):
was like, no, that's not what I said, because I
was I was speaking another language or whatever, you know,
because the speech part of my brain was the part
that had gotten killed, you know, it.
Speaker 5 (23:21):
Had died.
Speaker 3 (23:22):
Basically. It probably was only a couple of days before
I started being able to understand what people were saying
to me a little bit and where I started being
able to say words that made a little bit of sense.
But it was it was really scary.
Speaker 5 (23:40):
At that point.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
It wasn't fun.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
I didn't start realizing, probably till you know, after a
week or two, that I had really lost the ability
to recall words. I didn't realize that was going to
(24:07):
be a permanent thing. And you know, to a to
a degree, it hasn't been. It hasn't been permanent, but
it kind of has. I mean, obviously I can talk
(24:29):
now and I couldn't at first, but I can't really
remember words to songs anymore, or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
I mean that.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
It's it's come back in some ways, but it's still
it's always a constant, a constant battle. When i'd been
in there, I see you for a couple of days,
and I was kind of starting to be a little
bit more functional.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Peter handed me a.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
Guitar because he wanted to see if I would re
remember anything about how to play guitar. And I immediately
put my fingers on the net in a shape of
an a minor chord, and we both realized, I can
remember that. I haven't lost that. I haven't lost the
ability to remember how to play guitar. I'm not saying
(25:20):
I could play it, but I remembered. It was like
the first like real glimmer of hope for me because
I was like, well, I'm not going to have to
completely learn guitar from scratch again. Really early on in ICU,
i'd been there for a couple of days, Peter brought
(25:42):
an iPod with it just made a Beatles playlist, so
it was like two hundred Beatles song, let's just put
it on on a repeat. So I was just listening
to that for days, and and I was it was
it was really weird because I would I couldn't really
understand what they were seeing, but it was it was
(26:04):
familiar to me, of course, but I couldn't I couldn't
name the songs. And then after a couple of days
of it, I said, let's let's make a list of
Beatles songs and I and I will try to think
of any Beatle songs you can think of a title for.
And I made this list of them and like twenty
songs or something, and a couple of them were right,
(26:27):
and some of them were just we're just we're close,
but no, cigar, it was just the beginning of trying
to find my way back to language, you know. Really quickly,
I started writing in my notebook, writing songs or lyrics
or whatever was in my head. And those are those
(26:49):
are really strange one too, And those are the lyrics
I ended up using when I made the Nice five
album called Stroked Manner All the wa WA sponsored Root
Talk Back.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
On Top.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
Because I just wanted to pay tribute to that moment,
that weird state of mind, because I was I was
just really I was proud that I was trying. I
was trying to to to do something to write when
(27:27):
I couldn't really Sunset kicks on Selman.
Speaker 6 (27:35):
Cherian.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
Some of the words are aren't even real, Like the
one of the songs was called placent folk, and I
don't know where that word came from. I think maybe
it was like a weird blending of plangent and nascent.
Teach the Times.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
Can't shoot.
Speaker 5 (28:04):
In common.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
Senties place, so I really don't know what I was
trying to say. White Monterade, it sparkles Ingridtuage his columns.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
The Wizard of Oz came on the TV.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
And it was like a really shitty little TV, like
you know, classic hospital, upperly High and far away and
had commercials.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
And everything like that.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
But I remember with Peter watching Wizard of Oz and
I was just kind of freaking out, like I'd never
seen it before, and it was like it was like
a total acid trip for sure.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
Peters said.
Speaker 3 (29:02):
I just kept saying, it's so weird, it's so weird.
And one of the songs I obviously wrote about I
watched it. It's called Scarcrow and it's it's all images
that I think was me trying to to describe what
was happening in the movie. The dug Clown was real.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
And baking and we gay and.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
I was writing these songs in the ICU, writing in
my little notebook. I didn't really remember writing them. The
ambro deal wasn't playing No Break Awake. At the first
hospital when I came out of being unconscious, I remember
asking somebody about my notebook, and one of the guys
(29:59):
who came in picked me up and throw me in
the ambulance said, yeah, here's your notebook. I've got it,
and I remember him saying, I really liked that song
you wrote about Facebook. So he had not only grabbed it,
(30:20):
but he was he was reading it, and there was
a song I wrote about how much I hate Facebook
in this in there, and.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
He really liked that.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
So I never never really put that into a into
a song yet, but but I.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Do remember that I loved him.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
I loved him because he had the book and I
thought it was really cool that he that he read
a song and liked it in there. So after the stroke,
I started looking at the lyrics I'd written in the
notebook there, and I started designing to try to make
songs out of. Then I started trying to record them
(31:03):
to see if I could do it, and I discovered
really quickly that I could still play, and I was
coming up with weird things that I might not have beforehand,
and I was singing in weird voices that I didn't
do before, and that became the album stroke manner.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
When I got out of the.
Speaker 3 (31:31):
Hospital a month later, I had to drive back to
Portland because I couldn't fly. Pressure would be weird to
my brain or something like that. It would be dangerous,
so I had to drive back. So the first thing
when we left the hospital after a month there, we
drove straight to Cafe trist and I got a cappuccino there.
(31:55):
The first thing, Mary, I said, you're going to Cafe Trists.
You're gonna make it. It just took a month. One
of the first things I said when I could actually
communicate in the hospital is I said to Mary, don't
do any benefit concerts or GoFundMe or anything like that,
because I just I don't like.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
That kind of attention. But you know, she said, it's
already too late.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
They ended up having these two big concerts in Portland
in early January. It was like only six weeks after
the stroke or something, and you know, they raised a
lot of money, which was really really nice. And just
above and beyond everybody came and just we're just giving.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
You know.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
I did actually play a couple of songs. I played
based on a couple of songs with filthy friends, just
to see.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
If I could do it.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
But it was really hard because everything seemed really loud
to me, and and I was I wasn't in really
good shape, but.
Speaker 5 (33:24):
But it was.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
It was amazing.
Speaker 3 (33:26):
Some of the music that was played was just so
incredible and and it was It really meant a lot
to me. I mean, like I said, I didn't want
it to happen, but but when it did, I was
very very thankful.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
The future.
Speaker 3 (34:09):
Well, and that's my whole life is just based on
music and other people who I love who love music.
But you know, the whole thing is the benefits shouldn't
have had to happen because it should be taken care of.
Your health care should be taken care of. And with
(34:30):
my situation, and this is an important point I should make,
it could have been prevented because I knew there was
something going on with me. I mean I'd gone to
see a doctor like a year before to have him
look at my heart and a said, well, we're not
finding anything now, but I should have you wear a
(34:53):
monitor for a month and we'll see how your heart's doing.
I realized I was getting out out of breath really easily.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
It wasn't pausing me.
Speaker 5 (35:04):
Die or worry.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
But I never went back.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
And what I found out later is that's why I
had a stroke, because my heart runs really irregular, and
so that's why I got clots. I'm niloquist now. Yeah,
it's a blood dinner. It seems to be help. I'll
be on it for the rest of my life. Probably
(35:32):
I would just say I had a stroke, and all
the things that are bad for you, they they raise
your they raise your your chance of having a stroke.
And the other thing is, I say, once you have
a stroke, you're probably gonna have another one, you know.
So so that's not that's not a comforting thought. But
(35:52):
I feel so lucky that I function as well as
I can right now. I think what it has done
for me is it's made me just more desperate to.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
Keep creating art and to keep putting things out there.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
When you're creating art or making a record, you are
committing something to eternity. I don't know who we're committing
it for or how long it's actually going to last.
But it's important to me to get those things out
and get them into the existence.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
For some reason.
Speaker 3 (36:40):
I know, I only write songs for myself, really, but
there's a reason that I must feel like I have
to record them and release them. You know, I'm seventy
years old now, and that's just shocking to me. It's
shocking to me, and I feel like I don't have
that much time left. What's important to me now is
my little family, my wife and my dog, us spending
(37:01):
time with them and with all my friends that I
make music with. But the biggest driving force in me
is just to keep making music. There's a whole new
Menusfib record out called War on Penelope. I don't even
know what makes it different from the rest of the
(37:21):
records I've done, but to me, it feels like a
really positive record. You know, some of my records are
real downers and and this just feels really positive. Like
the lyrics to Words and Birds, which is the first single,
let me see if I can remember them that. Sometimes
(37:43):
words can be a challenge after after a stroke.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
Tries.
Speaker 5 (37:48):
What's the first part?
Speaker 3 (37:49):
Time Time is time hangs time hangs hard. On our hands.
A bird makes no demands, try to survive. Only the
word gets out alive.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
That's that right. I did it. I did it.
Speaker 4 (38:32):
I went and told him I was new Downtown and
I did not know the promise.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
I said, hang around world.
Speaker 5 (38:39):
They were ubbly cool, those guys, answering me true, I said,
(39:08):
welcome back.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
This is a Live Again joining me for a conversation
about today's story or my other Alive again story. Producers
Lauren Vogelbaum, Nicholas Dakowski, and Brent Die and I'm your host,
Dan Bush.
Speaker 5 (39:21):
Brent, how did you find this story?
Speaker 6 (39:23):
A good friend of mine had a stroke in January,
and a young guy soccer player, and it just kind
of came up on him. So I was doing research
to try to figure out how to help my friend
who had just had a stroke. We all were, and
I came across this story, and I thought there was
a lot to it, you know, in terms of the
failings of our healthcare system, in terms of how does
(39:48):
a stroke effect somebody whose career is related so much
in words and language, which are affect everybody who has
a stroke. Usually that's one of the first things that
it really hits them. And yeah, I mean, and I
loved his music. I was familiar with The Baseball Project
minus five ram, so I just was like, Wow, this
is just a really interesting Can I just say.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
That the moment when he's in the hospital room watching
The Wizard of Oz but the scarcrow is that what
he called it, scarcrow. But here's a man who's lost
his grip on reality. He's watching one of the most
archetypal stories about alternate reality ever made on a fuzzy
hospital TV. And he kept saying, you know, it's so weird,
(40:32):
it's so weird. And here he is, having had a stroke,
trying to make sense of what he's looking at. I mean,
for me, that moment was like just chef's kiss of
like what how absurd life can.
Speaker 6 (40:47):
Be, particularly when this is something that we've all seen
a million times seeing it with new eyes.
Speaker 7 (40:53):
Yeah, because if you hadn't grown up with that movie, right,
I was thinking, like, if I had not grown up
seeing that movie you know once a week, Yeah, what
would you think of that? As an adult? Just dropped
into all sorts of brain saving medication.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
But it's it's like I found that really poetic that
this this broken brain is trying to rebuild itself while
watching Dorothy try to go home. Isn't that just like
the most poetic thing in the world.
Speaker 6 (41:22):
And he writes a song about a character who said,
if I only had a brain.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
I mean, he wasn't horrified. He was sort of oddly
passive during this experience. He wasn't freaking out inside of
his own brain. And you know, if you're paralyzed, you
can't talk, you can't really control your muscles, and all
you can. All he could do was sort of slide
down the scaffolding and collapse onto the sidewalk there in
San Francisco. That one that's hard to imagine, being sort
(41:46):
of in prison in your own body. But secondly, he
wasn't scared. He just sort of like, oh, okay, this
is happening. Yeah, and then people are stepping over him thinking, oh,
he's probably just a burnout, just a drunk, right.
Speaker 7 (41:56):
That callousness, that learned callousness of living in a city.
Speaker 3 (41:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (41:59):
I wish he would have spent more time on that,
because just the idea of being trapped in your body
has always kind of been a fascinating thing to me.
Speaker 5 (42:07):
You know, Like the.
Speaker 6 (42:08):
Story we did on Drew Cybert, who broke his back.
I remember seeing him in the hospital that night, thinking
he can't move, you know, like, and yet there's this
resonance and calm that he had the way Scott is describing,
He's lying on the street and he can't even get
angry at these people that are stepping over him. He
understands why they're stepping over him. And I just I guess,
because I'm claustrophobic, I think I would be losing my mind.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
Does anybody notice that, because I've heard that from multiple
stroke stories of people having the sense of, oh, this
is happening and it's not necessarily and you've you've like,
it's not necessarily tell another story about his life, it's
not necessarily scary.
Speaker 5 (42:42):
Well, you've had a no.
Speaker 8 (42:43):
I literally I was I was working on something. I
started having a hard time focusing on the screen and
I was getting a little bit of a headache, and
I was like, I'm just gonna get up, move around
the house, go to the bathroom. Went to the bathroom
and as I'm washing my hands, I look at my
face and it's not right, like it's it's I can't
(43:04):
understand what I'm looking at. I know it's my face,
but nothing makes sense i'd face blindness. It's just like
it just looked like a weird blur of things. And
so I was like, oh, I've heard about this before.
I'd read about it, and I've always been so fascinated
by that.
Speaker 5 (43:19):
Were you scared in that moment? Were you not in
that moment?
Speaker 8 (43:22):
What scared me was when I opened up my phone
to look up what causes face blindness? And I couldn't
understand the words. I remember staring. I remember the word
that I was staring at where I was like, I
know this word, why can't?
Speaker 5 (43:36):
Why don't?
Speaker 8 (43:36):
But I now remember the word. It was the word
through weirdly enough, But I'm staring at this word and going, okay,
I know what this is. This is this is a
form of a phasia. If if I'm having a hard
time reading this, do I have a hard time speaking?
So I just tried to say my name is Nicholas
Takowski and it came out just wrong, not slurred, just
(44:01):
I was using different guy, I was different, so weird.
And it was at that point that I was like,
I might be fucked. Yeah, So I yeah, I basically
called my little sister after after a few minutes, because
I kept trying to talk and the words started coming properly,
they were I was transposing words. I was saying things
(44:23):
in the wrong order. I have a video of myself
like because my partner Aims was coming home to take
me to the hospital because we were broken. I didn't
want to call Nambula.
Speaker 7 (44:36):
Uh huh, but America.
Speaker 8 (44:39):
I'd managed to make a video where I'm just saying
my name is Nicholas Kakowski. I just want if these
are the last words that I'm able to speak, then
I just wanted to tell my family I love them
very much. But I'm I'm transposing words here and there,
so you can if this video you can just hear
I'm talking very slowly and I don't do that naturally.
(45:00):
I'm just struggling, but I'm there's words like in the
wrong places, and it was I was terrified for my
entire life.
Speaker 6 (45:09):
Yeah, I mean the for an artist who's entire existence
is about self expression, and suddenly your tongue is clapped
and you can't speak, and you can't you can make
sense of what people are saying to you, but when
you try to express yourself back jarbled garbage comes out, Yeah,
(45:32):
things that you're very familiar with. The Wizard of Oz
beatles songs. When you tried to express what you've just experienced,
it comes out as gibberish.
Speaker 1 (45:39):
Would be frightening, And Peter Buck gave him a guitar
and he instantly reactively.
Speaker 5 (45:46):
Went to a decord or something.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
Right. So music is funny because music's like, the brain
is one of the most complex objects in the universe.
Speaker 5 (45:55):
Literally, it really is.
Speaker 1 (45:56):
I mean the number of the myriad of connection is
acheing just stars in a galaxy.
Speaker 7 (46:02):
Right, we don't understand a lot about it.
Speaker 8 (46:05):
Oh, it's wild and just like the weird like workarounds
that we get the king's speech, right, this idea that
he has a stutter that he can't get past, but
if he starts singing what he's trying to say.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
So music again, it's like the music is for a
lot and for Alzheimer's patients as well. Music is something
that can trigger memories or bring people back to luton
flucidity briefly. And here's a musician who has had a stroke.
So like, what part of the human brain is always
going to be turned on by music? Are always going
to be you know, how much of us is musical
and how much is the rest of it just an
(46:39):
abstraction somehow?
Speaker 5 (46:41):
You know.
Speaker 6 (46:41):
Yeah, I think it's just because of the part of
his brain that was affected. Though, because like Dave Davies
of The Kinks had a stroke as well and had
to relearn guitar. Several people have had to relearn guitar.
Oh okay, But I do think maybe there is a
certain amount of muscle memory. Like I remember seeing Sonny
Rawlins the Saxophone Jazz Art and they had to at
the Variety Playhouse and they had to escort him out
(47:04):
on stage. He could barely move. And as soon as
he started. Same thing with John Lee Hooker when I
saw John Lee Hooker, when as soon as they started
playing it just as if they're in a twenty five
year old body, like all this muscle memory comes back
and they're moving about the stage and then they finished
the song and they need help being set down in
their chair.
Speaker 8 (47:22):
It was oh yeah, like dementia patients or Alzheimer's patients
who are very like in nursing homes, who are nonverbal,
if they play music that they liked when they were
a kid, they'll wake up and start singing along, and
even after the music is done, they're there for a
few more minutes. Yeah, you know, they might not be
(47:42):
fully but they but people who are just non verbal
suddenly are able to engage the people around them after
not having done it for months at a time.
Speaker 7 (47:50):
Yeah, my dad did that. He had a Cretsfield jacob
which is a type of neurodegenerative disease that acts like
Alzheimer's in a very short period of time, and he
would he would sing. He would sing kind of random songs.
He was basically nonverbal, but he would sing frequently. It
was weird that like TV show Themes, I was like, Okay, yes,
(48:13):
this is what we're doing today.
Speaker 6 (48:14):
That's great.
Speaker 7 (48:15):
I think that in the moment of having this stroke,
Scott was very calm, but he described the developing terror
of realizing that this was real, that this was ongoing,
that it was not a thing that was about to stop,
and that furthermore, he wasn't being believed by the healthcare
workers right who were ostensibly supposed to be there to
(48:39):
save his life.
Speaker 1 (48:40):
Everything that he was having to go through was sort
of prolonged by his and deepened by this weird neglect.
And this doctor who refuses to give him an MRI
because he assumes that Scott's a drunk and a burnout.
Speaker 5 (48:52):
He doesn't. So the doctor didn't see a human being,
he saw a type, you know. And it's this.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
Question of like who decides who's worthy of medical attention,
right the Trump administration?
Speaker 8 (49:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (49:08):
Well, and like when my friend had his stroke, they
said that the thing the doctors told him was like
every second we do not get an MRI on you,
and we don't figure out what is happening to you.
Your brain is getting killed. Parts of your brain are
trying and not to come back necessarily. So to be
in this diar of a situation and be denied care
(49:31):
just because they assume he's a drunk, And like Scott said,
you know, maybe they have drunk homeless people come in
all the time and they give them in our eyes
and they're just drunk. Maybe maybe that's the case, but
certainly we can do better than this.
Speaker 8 (49:45):
That's like the understatement.
Speaker 6 (49:46):
Yeah, I mean, why isn't it just part of our system?
Speaker 2 (49:50):
You know?
Speaker 6 (49:50):
Why when somebody's bought into emergency room, I give them
what they need because that's what I thought the juxtaposition
of here's a guy that instantly nobody knows, I think
he's a drunk line on the street, and then Peter
Buck walks in a lot of people know who that is,
and it's like, what difference does it make who your
friend is or who how much money you have access
(50:12):
to or what you.
Speaker 7 (50:13):
Know, Like, it shouldn't take a literal rock star walking
into your room to get something done.
Speaker 8 (50:19):
That's very rare, very expensive insurance. I got a Buck policy,
you know, it has stipe policy, but it was just
kind of squirrelly.
Speaker 6 (50:30):
But yeah, I think it highlights the whole whole gap
in our health system. You know, if you're a wealthy,
recognized figure, here's the door, come on in. Yeah, But
if you're just average Joe.
Speaker 8 (50:43):
I feel like a running theme in this show is
that the healthcare system is fucked beyond belief and just
getting worse, driven by profit.
Speaker 3 (50:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (50:55):
Yeah, And it's not even that one doctor's fault. I mean,
it is his fault.
Speaker 8 (51:01):
Screwed that guy, and it is both the faults of
the system and the But.
Speaker 7 (51:05):
We're right and at the same time, you know, like
you have to you have to empathize a little bit
this with this dude who you know is probably working twelves.
You know, he's probably working twelve hours a day. He's
seeing humanity when they are not at their best. People
walk into an er, are not having a good day,
they're not treating you well. It's difficult to remain to
remain empathetic for humanity when that is what you are seeing.
Speaker 6 (51:30):
He's probably dealing with a certain amount of resource management
as well.
Speaker 7 (51:32):
Oh of course, yeah, that's.
Speaker 5 (51:34):
That's all true. But there is still this underlying.
Speaker 1 (51:38):
Arrogance that goes with the white coat that is just
overwhelming at times. I mean, it's it's sort of built
into In other words, that's sure, he had all these obstacles,
but he wasn't able to see correctly because he was
stuck in his own arrogance, which was something that I
think was probably a learned behavior.
Speaker 5 (51:54):
Honestly.
Speaker 8 (51:55):
I also frequently think that that also depends on the
doctor's back, like deep background, like where did they come from?
Speaker 1 (52:02):
I think true, But I think that arrogance is also
systemic in medical school. I think you're taught to have
that sort of and it maybe has to do with
the place Ebo effect, like you put somebody puts on
a white coat and it's like, oh, we believe them.
We lose our autonomy as over our own bodies because
we trust this guy who just walked in the door.
And I think there's something about that that is trained.
(52:24):
I think that arrogance is trained. In some cases, maybe
it's helpful because you can command a situation or you
can make determinations quickly.
Speaker 5 (52:31):
But in a lot of situations.
Speaker 1 (52:33):
It is the most unhelpful thing in the world because
it bars the it blinds the doctor, and it bars
them from being able to actually question their own you know,
to think twice about something like just because you've made
a decision about this guy being a drunk, you know,
that doesn't give you, Like Brent said, he lost you know,
critical moments where where they could have saved parts of
(52:56):
this of potentially saved parts of Scott's brain. And what
got in the way of that was mostly I think
in arrogance.
Speaker 6 (53:04):
Yeah, I will say it's remarkable what he's done since
the stroke. I mean, like he's put out I don't
know if the Baseball Project has put out another album,
but he just put out an album with Minus five
and they're on two he's on a crazy tour this summer.
Speaker 5 (53:18):
Like it's a great album.
Speaker 6 (53:19):
The guy's seventy years old, and he's he's playing all
over the world this summer. They're they're going to be
in Athens in Atlanta in September. But but yeah, like,
and he says that he keeps a music stand on
stage with him so he can because the words don't
come easily to him, these words that he's written himself,
that he's gone over a million times as he's cut
(53:41):
the albums in the studio. But to be able to
do it, you know, to be able to get out
there and keep doing it. And one thing about these stories,
so many of them are about redirecting. You have this
near death experience and it redirects your life. A light
bulb goes on on you. You see the path you
should have been on. And I think what's remarkable about
Scott's story is he was on that path already, like
(54:03):
from a young age. He discovered his love of music
and the community that that has built for him. And
all he got out of this experience was I don't
have much more time left to do this thing that
I love to do, and to create this thing I'm
compelled to create and to throw it out there in
the universe. God knows why. I'm being told almost that
I have to create. So many of us feel that impulse.
(54:25):
And he's lucky enough to be in a position where
he can act on it. Yeah, and he's not going
to give it up, you know. I think that's that's
a really cool part of his story. I love too,
when he's dying in the ambulance and he just looks
out and sees the beautiful panorama of San Francisco.
Speaker 7 (54:41):
It's like, oh, what a nice day.
Speaker 5 (54:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (54:43):
Yeah, It's funny how many of these stories people are like, oh, this,
this would be a good moment.
Speaker 1 (54:47):
Yeah, check out right. Yeah.
Speaker 7 (54:49):
I think I cried a little bit when the nurse
or hospital attendant there, whoever it was, gave him back
the notebook, because yeah, I've lost notebooks before, and it's
I mean, you know, stroke bigger issue losing a notebook,
crushing completely.
Speaker 8 (55:07):
Losing a notebook is it makes me very upset.
Speaker 5 (55:11):
I like that he didn't just give the notebook back.
He had some commentary.
Speaker 7 (55:15):
Well, I've added some notes.
Speaker 8 (55:18):
It's like spellchecked.
Speaker 1 (55:20):
So sweet.
Speaker 7 (55:21):
And I also do want to put in here that
his philosophy of like, don't if you're an artist, do
it to art. Don't do it because you want to
get signed on a big label. Don't do it because
you want to go big, because that's not why you art.
And it's I know it's easy to say that from
a position of being a world touring artist, but at
the same time, yeah, like you can't believe me. I
(55:45):
say this as a human who works for her day
job in podcasting. You cannot make something go viral, that's
not what happens. But you can make beautiful, weird art.
Speaker 1 (55:58):
Yeah, And chances of it going viral have nothing to
do with you wanting that result. They have everything to
do with you actually being authentic.
Speaker 4 (56:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (56:06):
Well, and also well placed marketing and advertising.
Speaker 6 (56:09):
But well, I think kind of back to what you
were saying, you know, his authenticity is what created that
opportunity to play with Ram. You know, like the young
Fresh Fellows. I knew them from when I was in
high school. They would play them on the progressive station
and I love their music and they kind of were
coming up at the same time as like the Replacements
and huscared Do and Ram and what the indie music
(56:33):
scene represented to me at the time, was people doing
what you're talking about, just making art to make art,
not trying to follow a trend. And the community that
he built through that. I mean, Scott not only is
in Minus five, he's in the Baseball Project. He plays
for Alejandro Escovito, he plays for m Ward, he plays
for all these different artists because he's going to support them.
(56:56):
He's going to become part of the team and play
play at his ideas and played.
Speaker 5 (57:00):
The music that he wants to play.
Speaker 6 (57:02):
And out of that came this whole benefit concerts, series
of benefit concerts that were done for him. The community
that he developed he was able to fall back on
when he went through this moment. I mean, he plays
in a lot of bands. He's not a wealthy guy
by any stretch of imagination, so he needed this. And
but as he said, you shouldn't have to depend on
a go fundme or a benefit concert to have your
(57:24):
healthcare addressed anyway. Well, doing the story it's been, I
mean I was not extremely familiar with the Baseball Project.
I kind of just got to give them a plug
because it's this band. I'm not a baseball fan, but
it's this band that tells all these stories. All the
songs are stories that have really happened in baseball, and
it's been such a bleak period in this period of
(57:47):
that we're living through right now in baseball history. In baseball,
I haven't I haven't followed baseball since the strikes of
the early nineties. I'm like a but yeah, our audio
tech is wearing Atlanta Braves sweater. So she would join
(58:08):
Mike Mills of The Baseball Project, who was a big
Atlanta Braves fan. But it has been such a dark time,
like world history wise, and then researching the story, going
to the gym, listening to his music to just kind
of get a background on him. It's been a delight
to listen to these records by the Baseball Project. So
(58:28):
if you're in a dark space and you want some
good music, may I recommend the album's three in Grand
Salami Time by The Baseball Project. There are a lot
of fun and I think there's a lot of you know,
as artists, you just create things on impulse, and I
think on his new album, there's a song called Words
and Birds, which I had him. I was just gonna
have him to recite the lyric and he was having
a hard time recalling it, and I found that really
(58:50):
touching that he didn't want to give up. He was
pushing through to do it. But the song, to me
encapsulate his entire experience. I don't know that he would
say that he was writing about that, but he says,
you know, you might die for kicks, but the high
won't stick. It's all too beautiful man, too beautiful to land.
Try to survive and only the word gets out alive,
(59:12):
Like that's his mission. Try to survive, and only the
art you create is the thing that you leave behind.
Speaker 3 (59:17):
You know.
Speaker 5 (59:19):
That was a great story.
Speaker 1 (59:23):
Next week on the Live Again, we meet Matthew Fortune,
who lived twenty five years on the street before a
fentanyl overdose stopped his heart.
Speaker 8 (59:30):
Your feet have been wet for three days. You're in
wet clothes when it's freezing cold, and you don't.
Speaker 1 (59:37):
Have a blanket.
Speaker 5 (59:37):
You're in a T shirt. If somebody hang you a pike,
but you can hit it once and feel better.
Speaker 8 (59:43):
If you're gonna hit it once and mil better. My
heart started beating and then stopped and then started, and
so they kept going, and so they did it for
about forty five minutes.
Speaker 5 (59:52):
It's a miracle.
Speaker 1 (59:53):
I was brought back because if you know anything about CPR,
they do not typically go that long. He shares a
brutal and honest account of addiction, homelessness, and what it
takes to rebuild a life when there's nowhere left to fall.
Speaker 3 (01:00:16):
Vic Fly is shrewe That's not all they can tell.
Speaker 1 (01:00:23):
Heartfelt thank you to Scott McCoy for generously sharing his
story and his music. This episode features songs from Scott's
incredible body of work, including tracks from The Young Fresh Fellows,
The Baseball Project, The Minus Five, and Alejandro Escaveto. For
a full list of songs featured in this episode, please
visit our show notes, or you can check out our
website Alive Again Project dot com. Our story producers are
(01:00:55):
Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent die, Nicholas Dakowski, and Lauren Vogelbaum.
Music by Ben Lovett, additional music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our
executive producers are Matthew Frederick and Trevor Young. Special thanks
to Alexander Williams for additional production support. Our studio engineers
are Rima L. K Ali and Noames Griffin. Our editors
(01:01:16):
are Dan Bush, Gerhartslavichca, Brent Die and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing
by Ben Lovett and Alexander Rodriguez. I'm your host, Dan Bush.
Alive Again is a production of i Art Radio and
Psychopia Pictures. If you have a transformative near death experience
to share, we'd love to hear your story. Please email
us at Alive Again Project at gmail dot com. That's
(01:01:40):
a l I v E A g A I N
P R O j E C T at gmail dot com.
Speaker 4 (01:02:00):
Get the word we all go wrong Wrong
You're listening to a Live Again, a production of Psychopia
Pictures and iHeart Podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
My name is Scott.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
I'm a musician and I've toured the world with artists
like rim M Ward and Robin Hitchcock. I've also started
bands as a songwriter and singer, like The Minus Five,
The Baseball Project, and The Young Fresh Fellows. On November fifteenth,
twenty seventeen, while on tour, I collapsed on a San
(00:44):
Francisco sidewalk, paralyzed by a stroke. People were just stepping
over me. I really didn't know if I was going
to live or die. What followed was one of the
most surreal experiences of my life, and the songs I
(01:04):
wrote during my recovery feel like postcards from another dimension,
messages from a version of myself that I barely recognize.
Speaker 4 (01:13):
Now, Welcome to a Live Again, A podcast that showcases
miraculous accounts of human fragility and resilience from people whose
lives were forever altered after having almost died. These are
(01:35):
first hand accounts of near death experiences and, more broadly,
brushes with death. Our mission is simple, find, explore, and
share these stories to remind us all of our shared
human condition. Please keep in mind these stories are true
and maybe triggering for some listener, and discretion is advised.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
I played guitar with Ram for many years, and I
was playing with him when Bill Barry the drummer, had
aneurysm when we were on tour in nineteen ninety five
in Lauson, Switzerland. It was a regular night, you know,
we were having a great time, playing an awesome show.
I didn't really notice any indication that there was something
(02:21):
wrong with Bill. He was playing fine as far as
I could tell. When I first noticed was when he
got down off the drums to play bass on Half
a World Away. He played bass on a few songs
in the set, and he just he couldn't play, and
he kind of like fell back and sat down back
(02:43):
against the bassamp as I recall, and everybody's like, what
the hell is going on? And then we just kind
of lifted it up and walked him off stage and
he was, you know, apologizing. We went out and did
some more songs, giving the fans the rest of a show,
(03:06):
and then afterwards we just went and we saw Bill
was being taken off into a into an ambulance. Once
they realized it was an aneurysm. They had to operate
immediately and.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
We were all sent home.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Arim was a hugely popular band at that point. That
was probably the peak of their popularity. They made two
records that sold like ten or fifteen million each, and
then they made this big kind of glam rock record
called Monster, and I was one of the people they
asked to come along and help augment the sound on stage.
(03:49):
My first show with Arim was Saturday Night Live, so
that was really harrowing, but it was also really fun.
Then we started a tour in Australia and we're playing
these arenas and huge shows.
Speaker 5 (04:06):
Hey, what's your hurry?
Speaker 4 (04:08):
I see you've listened to the sounds of the Pacific
Northwest and now you just can't wait to go.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Look fine, but we had one more important sound.
Speaker 5 (04:17):
We wanted you to hear.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Whatever walking down the street.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
I've never seen a couple Young Fresh Fellows before.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
My experience before Arim was playing with the Young Fresh Fellows,
which was a band I formed in Seattle with a
friend from high school and his cousin. We're playing clubs,
you know, in front of five people to maybe five
hundred people, or maybe a thousand if we're opening for
(04:49):
the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Suddenly with ri Em, I
was playing in front of fifteen twenty thousand people, maybe
one hundred and ninety thousand rock and rio in Brazil.
But once once I started playing, it didn't feel that different.
Even though there were tens of thousands of people cheering
(05:10):
us on, it still felt like playing a rock show.
It was still fun and it was still like playing
with buddies on stage. Now we're together all the time.
We're just a couple of the young fresh fellows, you see,
and so it quickly became less daunting to me than
(05:33):
I thought it was going to be. So yeah, that
was that was how I got into being an rim
and it was. It was basically because Peter Buck, the
guitar player, had moved to Seattle and I was his
friend there. He'd met me over the years with the
young fresh fellows coming to shows and stuff like that.
(05:55):
So we just started playing together immediately, just strumming guitars
together a lot and kind of hit it off. Before
the RAM tour, we were recording a lot of songs
together that I had written that turned into the first
Minus five record.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
I grew up in.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Sarato, California, which is a small little suburb of San
Jose in Santa Clair Valley. It wasn't a happening place.
What's happening when you're nine years old, you know. I
played baseball and football, and then the Beatles happened. My
dad worked at Sears and they had a little record
(06:42):
department there, and he brought home a copy of I
Want to Hold Your Hand, and the music was and
is absolutely fucking magical. I had an older sister, I
had a younger sister too, and all three of us
were suddenly standing in front of the giant console stereo
in the living room, playing tennis rackets, you know, and
(07:04):
pretending we're the Beatles. I mean, there's no other records
that sound like those records. Still to this day, my
dad probably regretted that he ever brought home that forty
five though, And so I became totally obsessed with rock
and roll. When I was in my teens, I'd get
(07:26):
my parents to take my friends and me to San
Francisco to catch shows like almost every weekend.
Speaker 5 (07:34):
This was the Bay Area.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
So I saw local bands like Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Day, a,
Quicksilver Investitors, service, and then bands like The Who, the Kinks,
and Neil Young whenever they came to town. First time
I ever heard Saraway to Heaven was the fifth row
at Berkeley Community Theater watching led Zeppelin because they played
(07:57):
the song before before the record even came out, you know,
and I was just there for when when it was
all new. I mean, you never knew what was going
to hit you, and it was just like so magical
and so insanely innovative, and there were people like that
who were just trying to blow your mind and succeeding.
(08:21):
All my early bands were all just my group of friends,
and that's what we like to do, is make music
or listen to music together, and that's just such a
joyous thing. We never even cared if we were really
good or not. We'd play a party with six drunk
people there, you know whatever. If I ever could even
(08:42):
play a song in front of anyone. It still is now,
it still is. There really wasn't a music scene in
Seattle when I first moved there. I realized that the
(09:06):
way to do things in music is to just do
what you want to do and do it yourself. If
you're planning on getting a deal on a major label
or something.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
It's just dumb, you know.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
I Mean, it worked for some people, but I never
had any dream of that happening, you know. I never
even had a dream that I could make an indie
record either by myself. But we discovered people were doing it,
and we just figured out how to do it. So
I was probably twenty seven when I first held a
piece of vinyl that that I'd worked on, and it
(09:44):
was just the culmination of all the fun that I'd
had with my friends growing up, just listening to music
and playing music together. Young frishpelle Is first I heard,
came out in nineteen eighty four. A few years after that,
(10:04):
a record label called Subpop started putting out great local
bands like Mud Honey, Nirvana, Sound Garden. Some of those
bands became really, really huge. The Seattle sound back then
became known as the grunge thing. We didn't really fit
(10:25):
into that because Young Fishellows were a pop band that
those sub Pop bands were always really good about giving
us credit for being one of the first bands from
the Pacific Northwest that actually got national coverage and went
on national tours and wherever we played, ten or fifty
(10:48):
people remembered us because we were really really good.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
There was a celebration of Rickey's mouth disease.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
We were really really fun to see. If it's a
wedding our high school dance, Well, do you that you're
not the yence power cut it?
Speaker 2 (11:03):
You know?
Speaker 3 (11:04):
Right with the Fellows we scraped by, you know, we
we make our tours so that they would make enough
money or we wouldn't lose money or whatever. But suddenly
with Rim, I was actually getting paid and it was like, Wow,
this is this is amazing. So I guess that's how
(11:27):
it became a career. I don't think it ever would
have if it hadn't been for Rim. The Minus Fine
was just it wasn't supposed to be a band. It
was just supposed to be a recording project. Psychedelic folk
(11:48):
sort of thing was what Peter and I were calling it. Yes,
then somehow it became a band, you know, and we
started playing rock and roll songs, because when you play live,
(12:10):
it's more fun to play rock and roll than to
play downer solo songs. We also started playing with Alejandro Escovedo.
Alejandro is one of the bright shining lights of Americana music.
(12:35):
He does records in Spanish sometimes, but deep down he's
the rocker. We did a record with him I made
in twenty seventeen called burn Something Beautiful, which we're very
proud of. We were having so much fun on that tour.
I mean, the Seattle show was just completely off the hook,
(12:56):
and Portland What show was too. And then we came
to the Phoenix Hotel in San Francisco, which is a
classic old dive in the heart of the Tenderloin. It's
become like a place for bands to stay. We got
there at three o'clock when we could check in. I
went in, threw my stuff in the room, and I booked.
I just turned around and headed for Cafe Triste to
(13:20):
get a coffee. Cafe Trieste is an authentic little Italian
coffee shop in the heart of North Beach in San Francisco.
It's where Francis port Coppola wrote the screenplay for The Godfather,
and you know, it was a major hangout for writers
like Jack Carrouac and the.
Speaker 5 (13:39):
Beat Nicked Poets.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
I just really liked the vibe of that place. A
cappuccino that were so beautiful. The people there were just artists,
and I would always go there to sit and write,
you know, and just spend an afternoon there, you know,
whenever I had time. And it was a beautiful day.
I was heading to Cafe Triss, but I didn't make it.
(14:10):
I was walking down.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Kearnie and.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Suddenly I just felt like I was slowing down and
I couldn't control my movements. I couldn't put my foot
in front of in front of the other one.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
It didn't hurt, there was no pain.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
So it's like, I don't I was mystified. I don't
know what's happening here. There was some scaffolding on the street,
and I grabbed onto the scaffolding and I said, I'm
just gonna hang on here for a second. I'm sure
i'll feel better in a minute. Something could have passed
(14:53):
you all. And I was like, it was like thirty
feet from the corner, and I thought, I'll wait for
a few minutes.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Then if I can and walked to the corner.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Everything will be fine. But I just gradually couldn't even
hold myself up anymore, and I just kind of slid
down the scaffolding and just kind of crumpled spread out,
half on the curb and half in the street. I
(15:23):
wasn't really afraid. I don't know why I should have been.
I should have been terrified, but.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
I wasn't. I think. I just remember going, well, this
is happening. I don't know what it is, but I'm
just gonna going to roll with it. You know.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
I was conscious people were stepping over me and stuff,
because you know, they're they're like, hey, there's another drunk
guy on the street in San Francisco or whatever, you know, so.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
They were stepping over me. I couldn't really get angry.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
At them, but but I I couldn't really signaled anybody.
I couldn't move or anything. I couldn't talk. I discovered
that pretty quickly. Eventually somebody stopped and looked at me,
and they called nine on one or whatever, and uh,
(16:18):
pretty soon some medics came and it took me away
in an ambulance. I actually remember being in the back
of the ambulance and we were driving up a really
steep hill. I could look out the back window and
just saw a beautiful, beautiful San Francisco panorama and I
(16:39):
was just every thinking, God's so so beautiful out you know,
It's like it's it's true. I was just it was
just like it was like so lovely. I guess I
was accepting what was happening somehow. Once I got the hospital,
(17:06):
everything went south. I lost in and out of consciousness
and was a total wreck for the next twenty four hours.
I definitely panicked a lot of the time. I didn't
know what was happening, So there's only very brief moments
of where I can remember anything happening in that period.
(17:29):
They couldn't figure out how to get in touch with anybody.
Eventually they called the last number that I dialed on
my phone, and that was Linda Pittman, who's the drummer
in the Minus five in Alejandro's band. She had this
funny name that I called her, Miss Georgia Polycarp, and
(17:50):
so she thought it was a prank call by me
because somebody called it is this Miss Georgett Polycarp And
she was like, oh, yeah, what's happening. The McCoy's. McCoy's
pulling a fast one. But uh yeah, they got the
word to her that I was in the hospital, and
so she got Peter Buck and they came down and uh.
(18:13):
From then on, I like I really was out of touch.
I didn't really know what was happening. After I'd been
there for twenty four hours, they finally got the doctor
to give me a MRI because he wouldn't. He wouldn't
(18:37):
give me one because he said, it's not a stroke.
He said, he's a drunk. So you need an MRI
to determine if you had a stroke and if so,
where the blood claw is so it could be treated.
The quicker the better, because if you've had a stroke,
each moment she delay creates the potential for more damage
(18:58):
and more bitter of your brain dying. You got to
give this guy m he's had a stroke, But this
(19:19):
doctor just wouldn't believe it. I think they assumed I
was a burnout drug addict because of it being San
Francisco and being of the area it was, even though
I wasn't actually in the Tenderloin at that point. I
(19:39):
just walked right through it, and you know, I was
very very close, very very close, so I wouldn't have
been shocked to see somebody lying on the sidewalk in
a puddle of piss on Kearney Street. You know I
wasn't in a puddle of piss, by the way. He
must have had so many people come in that he
was just so blase and and so burned out on
(20:01):
it or something like that, but I don't think that's
an excuse for him.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
I mean, I didn't look terrible. I was wearing my
rock and roll clothes.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
I was wearing a Rocket from the Crypt bowling shirt
and black jeans, and I was carrying my little notebook
with my lyrics song lyrics I was writing in and
that was it when Peter showed up. And I don't
know if he told him that he was a world
famous musician in RAM, he wouldn't have been afraid to
(20:32):
throw his weight around if he needed to do, which
he obviously.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
Did need to.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
My wife told me that he said, look, whatever this costs,
I've got it.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Don't worry.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
There wasn't any reason for them to not do an MRI.
I don't know why that mattered, or why he wouldn't
have just immediately regardless of who I was, or who
my friends were, or what kind of condition I was in.
I don't know why he wouldn't have said, this guy's
had a stroke, let's take care of him. It was
(21:14):
really important to have my wife Mary there and Peter
and Linda our drummer. We're all there, really staying close
and making sure that things were going the way they
should go. It was probably hard for Peter because he'd
been through it before with Bill Barry having an aneurysm,
(21:34):
and it was the same thing with me. And aneurism
is where you get a blockage in your blood vessel.
A stroke comes from elsewhere, A clot is formed somewhere
in your body and it goes up to your brain
and it blocks the blood flow to your brain. So
at some point they transferred me to a stroke center
(21:56):
at a better.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Hospital across town.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
And weirdly, I also remember looking out the window of
that ambulance too, and by then I was a total wrack.
I was paralyzed on the right side totally. And yeah,
and so they put me in the ICU for ten
(22:23):
days or something, and they had to raise my blood
pressure to one ninety for a while to try to
flush the rest of the clots out in my brain.
I remember some really bad times in that hospital. I
didn't know what was happening, and I was trying to
move and stuff like that but not being able to.
(22:44):
And I couldn't understand what anybody was saying because their
words were garbled to me, and everything I said was
a real words didn't make any sense. So I was
living in this weird world where I just didn't know
what was happening. At one point, they started writing stuff out.
They said, this is what you just said, and I
(23:06):
was like, no, that's not what I said, because I
was I was speaking another language or whatever, you know,
because the speech part of my brain was the part
that had gotten killed, you know, it.
Speaker 5 (23:21):
Had died.
Speaker 3 (23:22):
Basically. It probably was only a couple of days before
I started being able to understand what people were saying
to me a little bit and where I started being
able to say words that made a little bit of sense.
But it was it was really scary.
Speaker 5 (23:40):
At that point.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
It wasn't fun.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
I didn't start realizing, probably till you know, after a
week or two, that I had really lost the ability
to recall words. I didn't realize that was going to
(24:07):
be a permanent thing. And you know, to a to
a degree, it hasn't been. It hasn't been permanent, but
it kind of has. I mean, obviously I can talk
(24:29):
now and I couldn't at first, but I can't really
remember words to songs anymore, or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
I mean that.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
It's it's come back in some ways, but it's still
it's always a constant, a constant battle. When i'd been
in there, I see you for a couple of days,
and I was kind of starting to be a little
bit more functional.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Peter handed me a.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
Guitar because he wanted to see if I would re
remember anything about how to play guitar. And I immediately
put my fingers on the net in a shape of
an a minor chord, and we both realized, I can
remember that. I haven't lost that. I haven't lost the
ability to remember how to play guitar. I'm not saying
(25:20):
I could play it, but I remembered. It was like
the first like real glimmer of hope for me because
I was like, well, I'm not going to have to
completely learn guitar from scratch again. Really early on in ICU,
i'd been there for a couple of days, Peter brought
(25:42):
an iPod with it just made a Beatles playlist, so
it was like two hundred Beatles song, let's just put
it on on a repeat. So I was just listening
to that for days, and and I was it was
it was really weird because I would I couldn't really
understand what they were seeing, but it was it was
(26:04):
familiar to me, of course, but I couldn't I couldn't
name the songs. And then after a couple of days
of it, I said, let's let's make a list of
Beatles songs and I and I will try to think
of any Beatle songs you can think of a title for.
And I made this list of them and like twenty
songs or something, and a couple of them were right,
(26:27):
and some of them were just we're just we're close,
but no, cigar, it was just the beginning of trying
to find my way back to language, you know. Really quickly,
I started writing in my notebook, writing songs or lyrics
or whatever was in my head. And those are those
(26:49):
are really strange one too, And those are the lyrics
I ended up using when I made the Nice five
album called Stroked Manner All the wa WA sponsored Root
Talk Back.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
On Top.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
Because I just wanted to pay tribute to that moment,
that weird state of mind, because I was I was
just really I was proud that I was trying. I
was trying to to to do something to write when
(27:27):
I couldn't really Sunset kicks on Selman.
Speaker 6 (27:35):
Cherian.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
Some of the words are aren't even real, Like the
one of the songs was called placent folk, and I
don't know where that word came from. I think maybe
it was like a weird blending of plangent and nascent.
Teach the Times.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
Can't shoot.
Speaker 5 (28:04):
In common.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
Senties place, so I really don't know what I was
trying to say. White Monterade, it sparkles Ingridtuage his columns.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
The Wizard of Oz came on the TV.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
And it was like a really shitty little TV, like
you know, classic hospital, upperly High and far away and
had commercials.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
And everything like that.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
But I remember with Peter watching Wizard of Oz and
I was just kind of freaking out, like I'd never
seen it before, and it was like it was like
a total acid trip for sure.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
Peters said.
Speaker 3 (29:02):
I just kept saying, it's so weird, it's so weird.
And one of the songs I obviously wrote about I
watched it. It's called Scarcrow and it's it's all images
that I think was me trying to to describe what
was happening in the movie. The dug Clown was real.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
And baking and we gay and.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
I was writing these songs in the ICU, writing in
my little notebook. I didn't really remember writing them. The
ambro deal wasn't playing No Break Awake. At the first
hospital when I came out of being unconscious, I remember
asking somebody about my notebook, and one of the guys
(29:59):
who came in picked me up and throw me in
the ambulance said, yeah, here's your notebook. I've got it,
and I remember him saying, I really liked that song
you wrote about Facebook. So he had not only grabbed it,
(30:20):
but he was he was reading it, and there was
a song I wrote about how much I hate Facebook
in this in there, and.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
He really liked that.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
So I never never really put that into a into
a song yet, but but I.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Do remember that I loved him.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
I loved him because he had the book and I
thought it was really cool that he that he read
a song and liked it in there. So after the stroke,
I started looking at the lyrics I'd written in the
notebook there, and I started designing to try to make
songs out of. Then I started trying to record them
(31:03):
to see if I could do it, and I discovered
really quickly that I could still play, and I was
coming up with weird things that I might not have beforehand,
and I was singing in weird voices that I didn't
do before, and that became the album stroke manner.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
When I got out of the.
Speaker 3 (31:31):
Hospital a month later, I had to drive back to
Portland because I couldn't fly. Pressure would be weird to
my brain or something like that. It would be dangerous,
so I had to drive back. So the first thing
when we left the hospital after a month there, we
drove straight to Cafe trist and I got a cappuccino there.
(31:55):
The first thing, Mary, I said, you're going to Cafe Trists.
You're gonna make it. It just took a month. One
of the first things I said when I could actually
communicate in the hospital is I said to Mary, don't
do any benefit concerts or GoFundMe or anything like that,
because I just I don't like.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
That kind of attention. But you know, she said, it's
already too late.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
They ended up having these two big concerts in Portland
in early January. It was like only six weeks after
the stroke or something, and you know, they raised a
lot of money, which was really really nice. And just
above and beyond everybody came and just we're just giving.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
You know.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
I did actually play a couple of songs. I played
based on a couple of songs with filthy friends, just
to see.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
If I could do it.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
But it was really hard because everything seemed really loud
to me, and and I was I wasn't in really
good shape, but.
Speaker 5 (33:24):
But it was.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
It was amazing.
Speaker 3 (33:26):
Some of the music that was played was just so
incredible and and it was It really meant a lot
to me. I mean, like I said, I didn't want
it to happen, but but when it did, I was
very very thankful.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
The future.
Speaker 3 (34:09):
Well, and that's my whole life is just based on
music and other people who I love who love music.
But you know, the whole thing is the benefits shouldn't
have had to happen because it should be taken care of.
Your health care should be taken care of. And with
(34:30):
my situation, and this is an important point I should make,
it could have been prevented because I knew there was
something going on with me. I mean I'd gone to
see a doctor like a year before to have him
look at my heart and a said, well, we're not
finding anything now, but I should have you wear a
(34:53):
monitor for a month and we'll see how your heart's doing.
I realized I was getting out out of breath really easily.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
It wasn't pausing me.
Speaker 5 (35:04):
Die or worry.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
But I never went back.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
And what I found out later is that's why I
had a stroke, because my heart runs really irregular, and
so that's why I got clots. I'm niloquist now. Yeah,
it's a blood dinner. It seems to be help. I'll
be on it for the rest of my life. Probably
(35:32):
I would just say I had a stroke, and all
the things that are bad for you, they they raise
your they raise your your chance of having a stroke.
And the other thing is, I say, once you have
a stroke, you're probably gonna have another one, you know.
So so that's not that's not a comforting thought. But
(35:52):
I feel so lucky that I function as well as
I can right now. I think what it has done
for me is it's made me just more desperate to.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
Keep creating art and to keep putting things out there.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
When you're creating art or making a record, you are
committing something to eternity. I don't know who we're committing
it for or how long it's actually going to last.
But it's important to me to get those things out
and get them into the existence.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
For some reason.
Speaker 3 (36:40):
I know, I only write songs for myself, really, but
there's a reason that I must feel like I have
to record them and release them. You know, I'm seventy
years old now, and that's just shocking to me. It's
shocking to me, and I feel like I don't have
that much time left. What's important to me now is
my little family, my wife and my dog, us spending
(37:01):
time with them and with all my friends that I
make music with. But the biggest driving force in me
is just to keep making music. There's a whole new
Menusfib record out called War on Penelope. I don't even
know what makes it different from the rest of the
(37:21):
records I've done, but to me, it feels like a
really positive record. You know, some of my records are
real downers and and this just feels really positive. Like
the lyrics to Words and Birds, which is the first single,
let me see if I can remember them that. Sometimes
(37:43):
words can be a challenge after after a stroke.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
Tries.
Speaker 5 (37:48):
What's the first part?
Speaker 3 (37:49):
Time Time is time hangs time hangs hard. On our hands.
A bird makes no demands, try to survive. Only the
word gets out alive.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
That's that right. I did it. I did it.
Speaker 4 (38:32):
I went and told him I was new Downtown and
I did not know the promise.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
I said, hang around world.
Speaker 5 (38:39):
They were ubbly cool, those guys, answering me true, I said,
(39:08):
welcome back.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
This is a Live Again joining me for a conversation
about today's story or my other Alive again story. Producers
Lauren Vogelbaum, Nicholas Dakowski, and Brent Die and I'm your host,
Dan Bush.
Speaker 5 (39:21):
Brent, how did you find this story?
Speaker 6 (39:23):
A good friend of mine had a stroke in January,
and a young guy soccer player, and it just kind
of came up on him. So I was doing research
to try to figure out how to help my friend
who had just had a stroke. We all were, and
I came across this story, and I thought there was
a lot to it, you know, in terms of the
failings of our healthcare system, in terms of how does
(39:48):
a stroke effect somebody whose career is related so much
in words and language, which are affect everybody who has
a stroke. Usually that's one of the first things that
it really hits them. And yeah, I mean, and I
loved his music. I was familiar with The Baseball Project
minus five ram, so I just was like, Wow, this
is just a really interesting Can I just say.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
That the moment when he's in the hospital room watching
The Wizard of Oz but the scarcrow is that what
he called it, scarcrow. But here's a man who's lost
his grip on reality. He's watching one of the most
archetypal stories about alternate reality ever made on a fuzzy
hospital TV. And he kept saying, you know, it's so weird,
(40:32):
it's so weird. And here he is, having had a stroke,
trying to make sense of what he's looking at. I mean,
for me, that moment was like just chef's kiss of
like what how absurd life can.
Speaker 6 (40:47):
Be, particularly when this is something that we've all seen
a million times seeing it with new eyes.
Speaker 7 (40:53):
Yeah, because if you hadn't grown up with that movie, right,
I was thinking, like, if I had not grown up
seeing that movie you know once a week, Yeah, what
would you think of that? As an adult? Just dropped
into all sorts of brain saving medication.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
But it's it's like I found that really poetic that
this this broken brain is trying to rebuild itself while
watching Dorothy try to go home. Isn't that just like
the most poetic thing in the world.
Speaker 6 (41:22):
And he writes a song about a character who said,
if I only had a brain.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
I mean, he wasn't horrified. He was sort of oddly
passive during this experience. He wasn't freaking out inside of
his own brain. And you know, if you're paralyzed, you
can't talk, you can't really control your muscles, and all
you can. All he could do was sort of slide
down the scaffolding and collapse onto the sidewalk there in
San Francisco. That one that's hard to imagine, being sort
(41:46):
of in prison in your own body. But secondly, he
wasn't scared. He just sort of like, oh, okay, this
is happening. Yeah, and then people are stepping over him thinking, oh,
he's probably just a burnout, just a drunk, right.
Speaker 7 (41:56):
That callousness, that learned callousness of living in a city.
Speaker 3 (41:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (41:59):
I wish he would have spent more time on that,
because just the idea of being trapped in your body
has always kind of been a fascinating thing to me.
Speaker 5 (42:07):
You know, Like the.
Speaker 6 (42:08):
Story we did on Drew Cybert, who broke his back.
I remember seeing him in the hospital that night, thinking
he can't move, you know, like, and yet there's this
resonance and calm that he had the way Scott is describing,
He's lying on the street and he can't even get
angry at these people that are stepping over him. He
understands why they're stepping over him. And I just I guess,
because I'm claustrophobic, I think I would be losing my mind.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
Does anybody notice that, because I've heard that from multiple
stroke stories of people having the sense of, oh, this
is happening and it's not necessarily and you've you've like,
it's not necessarily tell another story about his life, it's
not necessarily scary.
Speaker 5 (42:42):
Well, you've had a no.
Speaker 8 (42:43):
I literally I was I was working on something. I
started having a hard time focusing on the screen and
I was getting a little bit of a headache, and
I was like, I'm just gonna get up, move around
the house, go to the bathroom. Went to the bathroom
and as I'm washing my hands, I look at my
face and it's not right, like it's it's I can't
(43:04):
understand what I'm looking at. I know it's my face,
but nothing makes sense i'd face blindness. It's just like
it just looked like a weird blur of things. And
so I was like, oh, I've heard about this before.
I'd read about it, and I've always been so fascinated
by that.
Speaker 5 (43:19):
Were you scared in that moment? Were you not in
that moment?
Speaker 8 (43:22):
What scared me was when I opened up my phone
to look up what causes face blindness? And I couldn't
understand the words. I remember staring. I remember the word
that I was staring at where I was like, I
know this word, why can't?
Speaker 5 (43:36):
Why don't?
Speaker 8 (43:36):
But I now remember the word. It was the word
through weirdly enough, But I'm staring at this word and going, okay,
I know what this is. This is this is a
form of a phasia. If if I'm having a hard
time reading this, do I have a hard time speaking?
So I just tried to say my name is Nicholas
Takowski and it came out just wrong, not slurred, just
(44:01):
I was using different guy, I was different, so weird.
And it was at that point that I was like,
I might be fucked. Yeah, So I yeah, I basically
called my little sister after after a few minutes, because
I kept trying to talk and the words started coming properly,
they were I was transposing words. I was saying things
(44:23):
in the wrong order. I have a video of myself
like because my partner Aims was coming home to take
me to the hospital because we were broken. I didn't
want to call Nambula.
Speaker 7 (44:36):
Uh huh, but America.
Speaker 8 (44:39):
I'd managed to make a video where I'm just saying
my name is Nicholas Kakowski. I just want if these
are the last words that I'm able to speak, then
I just wanted to tell my family I love them
very much. But I'm I'm transposing words here and there,
so you can if this video you can just hear
I'm talking very slowly and I don't do that naturally.
(45:00):
I'm just struggling, but I'm there's words like in the
wrong places, and it was I was terrified for my
entire life.
Speaker 6 (45:09):
Yeah, I mean the for an artist who's entire existence
is about self expression, and suddenly your tongue is clapped
and you can't speak, and you can't you can make
sense of what people are saying to you, but when
you try to express yourself back jarbled garbage comes out, Yeah,
(45:32):
things that you're very familiar with. The Wizard of Oz
beatles songs. When you tried to express what you've just experienced,
it comes out as gibberish.
Speaker 1 (45:39):
Would be frightening, And Peter Buck gave him a guitar
and he instantly reactively.
Speaker 5 (45:46):
Went to a decord or something.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
Right. So music is funny because music's like, the brain
is one of the most complex objects in the universe.
Speaker 5 (45:55):
Literally, it really is.
Speaker 1 (45:56):
I mean the number of the myriad of connection is
acheing just stars in a galaxy.
Speaker 7 (46:02):
Right, we don't understand a lot about it.
Speaker 8 (46:05):
Oh, it's wild and just like the weird like workarounds
that we get the king's speech, right, this idea that
he has a stutter that he can't get past, but
if he starts singing what he's trying to say.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
So music again, it's like the music is for a
lot and for Alzheimer's patients as well. Music is something
that can trigger memories or bring people back to luton
flucidity briefly. And here's a musician who has had a stroke.
So like, what part of the human brain is always
going to be turned on by music? Are always going
to be you know, how much of us is musical
and how much is the rest of it just an
(46:39):
abstraction somehow?
Speaker 5 (46:41):
You know.
Speaker 6 (46:41):
Yeah, I think it's just because of the part of
his brain that was affected. Though, because like Dave Davies
of The Kinks had a stroke as well and had
to relearn guitar. Several people have had to relearn guitar.
Oh okay, But I do think maybe there is a
certain amount of muscle memory. Like I remember seeing Sonny
Rawlins the Saxophone Jazz Art and they had to at
the Variety Playhouse and they had to escort him out
(47:04):
on stage. He could barely move. And as soon as
he started. Same thing with John Lee Hooker when I
saw John Lee Hooker, when as soon as they started
playing it just as if they're in a twenty five
year old body, like all this muscle memory comes back
and they're moving about the stage and then they finished
the song and they need help being set down in
their chair.
Speaker 8 (47:22):
It was oh yeah, like dementia patients or Alzheimer's patients
who are very like in nursing homes, who are nonverbal,
if they play music that they liked when they were
a kid, they'll wake up and start singing along, and
even after the music is done, they're there for a
few more minutes. Yeah, you know, they might not be
(47:42):
fully but they but people who are just non verbal
suddenly are able to engage the people around them after
not having done it for months at a time.
Speaker 7 (47:50):
Yeah, my dad did that. He had a Cretsfield jacob
which is a type of neurodegenerative disease that acts like
Alzheimer's in a very short period of time, and he
would he would sing. He would sing kind of random songs.
He was basically nonverbal, but he would sing frequently. It
was weird that like TV show Themes, I was like, Okay, yes,
(48:13):
this is what we're doing today.
Speaker 6 (48:14):
That's great.
Speaker 7 (48:15):
I think that in the moment of having this stroke,
Scott was very calm, but he described the developing terror
of realizing that this was real, that this was ongoing,
that it was not a thing that was about to stop,
and that furthermore, he wasn't being believed by the healthcare
workers right who were ostensibly supposed to be there to
(48:39):
save his life.
Speaker 1 (48:40):
Everything that he was having to go through was sort
of prolonged by his and deepened by this weird neglect.
And this doctor who refuses to give him an MRI
because he assumes that Scott's a drunk and a burnout.
Speaker 5 (48:52):
He doesn't. So the doctor didn't see a human being,
he saw a type, you know. And it's this.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
Question of like who decides who's worthy of medical attention,
right the Trump administration?
Speaker 8 (49:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (49:08):
Well, and like when my friend had his stroke, they
said that the thing the doctors told him was like
every second we do not get an MRI on you,
and we don't figure out what is happening to you.
Your brain is getting killed. Parts of your brain are
trying and not to come back necessarily. So to be
in this diar of a situation and be denied care
(49:31):
just because they assume he's a drunk, And like Scott said,
you know, maybe they have drunk homeless people come in
all the time and they give them in our eyes
and they're just drunk. Maybe maybe that's the case, but
certainly we can do better than this.
Speaker 8 (49:45):
That's like the understatement.
Speaker 6 (49:46):
Yeah, I mean, why isn't it just part of our system?
Speaker 2 (49:50):
You know?
Speaker 6 (49:50):
Why when somebody's bought into emergency room, I give them
what they need because that's what I thought the juxtaposition
of here's a guy that instantly nobody knows, I think
he's a drunk line on the street, and then Peter
Buck walks in a lot of people know who that is,
and it's like, what difference does it make who your
friend is or who how much money you have access
(50:12):
to or what you.
Speaker 7 (50:13):
Know, Like, it shouldn't take a literal rock star walking
into your room to get something done.
Speaker 8 (50:19):
That's very rare, very expensive insurance. I got a Buck policy,
you know, it has stipe policy, but it was just
kind of squirrelly.
Speaker 6 (50:30):
But yeah, I think it highlights the whole whole gap
in our health system. You know, if you're a wealthy,
recognized figure, here's the door, come on in. Yeah, But
if you're just average Joe.
Speaker 8 (50:43):
I feel like a running theme in this show is
that the healthcare system is fucked beyond belief and just
getting worse, driven by profit.
Speaker 3 (50:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (50:55):
Yeah, And it's not even that one doctor's fault. I mean,
it is his fault.
Speaker 8 (51:01):
Screwed that guy, and it is both the faults of
the system and the But.
Speaker 7 (51:05):
We're right and at the same time, you know, like
you have to you have to empathize a little bit
this with this dude who you know is probably working twelves.
You know, he's probably working twelve hours a day. He's
seeing humanity when they are not at their best. People
walk into an er, are not having a good day,
they're not treating you well. It's difficult to remain to
remain empathetic for humanity when that is what you are seeing.
Speaker 6 (51:30):
He's probably dealing with a certain amount of resource management
as well.
Speaker 7 (51:32):
Oh of course, yeah, that's.
Speaker 5 (51:34):
That's all true. But there is still this underlying.
Speaker 1 (51:38):
Arrogance that goes with the white coat that is just
overwhelming at times. I mean, it's it's sort of built
into In other words, that's sure, he had all these obstacles,
but he wasn't able to see correctly because he was
stuck in his own arrogance, which was something that I
think was probably a learned behavior.
Speaker 5 (51:54):
Honestly.
Speaker 8 (51:55):
I also frequently think that that also depends on the
doctor's back, like deep background, like where did they come from?
Speaker 1 (52:02):
I think true, But I think that arrogance is also
systemic in medical school. I think you're taught to have
that sort of and it maybe has to do with
the place Ebo effect, like you put somebody puts on
a white coat and it's like, oh, we believe them.
We lose our autonomy as over our own bodies because
we trust this guy who just walked in the door.
And I think there's something about that that is trained.
(52:24):
I think that arrogance is trained. In some cases, maybe
it's helpful because you can command a situation or you
can make determinations quickly.
Speaker 5 (52:31):
But in a lot of situations.
Speaker 1 (52:33):
It is the most unhelpful thing in the world because
it bars the it blinds the doctor, and it bars
them from being able to actually question their own you know,
to think twice about something like just because you've made
a decision about this guy being a drunk, you know,
that doesn't give you, Like Brent said, he lost you know,
critical moments where where they could have saved parts of
(52:56):
this of potentially saved parts of Scott's brain. And what
got in the way of that was mostly I think
in arrogance.
Speaker 6 (53:04):
Yeah, I will say it's remarkable what he's done since
the stroke. I mean, like he's put out I don't
know if the Baseball Project has put out another album,
but he just put out an album with Minus five
and they're on two he's on a crazy tour this summer.
Speaker 5 (53:18):
Like it's a great album.
Speaker 6 (53:19):
The guy's seventy years old, and he's he's playing all
over the world this summer. They're they're going to be
in Athens in Atlanta in September. But but yeah, like,
and he says that he keeps a music stand on
stage with him so he can because the words don't
come easily to him, these words that he's written himself,
that he's gone over a million times as he's cut
(53:41):
the albums in the studio. But to be able to
do it, you know, to be able to get out
there and keep doing it. And one thing about these stories,
so many of them are about redirecting. You have this
near death experience and it redirects your life. A light
bulb goes on on you. You see the path you
should have been on. And I think what's remarkable about
Scott's story is he was on that path already, like
(54:03):
from a young age. He discovered his love of music
and the community that that has built for him. And
all he got out of this experience was I don't
have much more time left to do this thing that
I love to do, and to create this thing I'm
compelled to create and to throw it out there in
the universe. God knows why. I'm being told almost that
I have to create. So many of us feel that impulse.
(54:25):
And he's lucky enough to be in a position where
he can act on it. Yeah, and he's not going
to give it up, you know. I think that's that's
a really cool part of his story. I love too,
when he's dying in the ambulance and he just looks
out and sees the beautiful panorama of San Francisco.
Speaker 7 (54:41):
It's like, oh, what a nice day.
Speaker 5 (54:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (54:43):
Yeah, It's funny how many of these stories people are like, oh, this,
this would be a good moment.
Speaker 1 (54:47):
Yeah, check out right. Yeah.
Speaker 7 (54:49):
I think I cried a little bit when the nurse
or hospital attendant there, whoever it was, gave him back
the notebook, because yeah, I've lost notebooks before, and it's
I mean, you know, stroke bigger issue losing a notebook,
crushing completely.
Speaker 8 (55:07):
Losing a notebook is it makes me very upset.
Speaker 5 (55:11):
I like that he didn't just give the notebook back.
He had some commentary.
Speaker 7 (55:15):
Well, I've added some notes.
Speaker 8 (55:18):
It's like spellchecked.
Speaker 1 (55:20):
So sweet.
Speaker 7 (55:21):
And I also do want to put in here that
his philosophy of like, don't if you're an artist, do
it to art. Don't do it because you want to
get signed on a big label. Don't do it because
you want to go big, because that's not why you art.
And it's I know it's easy to say that from
a position of being a world touring artist, but at
the same time, yeah, like you can't believe me. I
(55:45):
say this as a human who works for her day
job in podcasting. You cannot make something go viral, that's
not what happens. But you can make beautiful, weird art.
Speaker 1 (55:58):
Yeah, And chances of it going viral have nothing to
do with you wanting that result. They have everything to
do with you actually being authentic.
Speaker 4 (56:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (56:06):
Well, and also well placed marketing and advertising.
Speaker 6 (56:09):
But well, I think kind of back to what you
were saying, you know, his authenticity is what created that
opportunity to play with Ram. You know, like the young
Fresh Fellows. I knew them from when I was in
high school. They would play them on the progressive station
and I love their music and they kind of were
coming up at the same time as like the Replacements
and huscared Do and Ram and what the indie music
(56:33):
scene represented to me at the time, was people doing
what you're talking about, just making art to make art,
not trying to follow a trend. And the community that
he built through that. I mean, Scott not only is
in Minus five, he's in the Baseball Project. He plays
for Alejandro Escovito, he plays for m Ward, he plays
for all these different artists because he's going to support them.
(56:56):
He's going to become part of the team and play
play at his ideas and played.
Speaker 5 (57:00):
The music that he wants to play.
Speaker 6 (57:02):
And out of that came this whole benefit concerts, series
of benefit concerts that were done for him. The community
that he developed he was able to fall back on
when he went through this moment. I mean, he plays
in a lot of bands. He's not a wealthy guy
by any stretch of imagination, so he needed this. And
but as he said, you shouldn't have to depend on
a go fundme or a benefit concert to have your
(57:24):
healthcare addressed anyway. Well, doing the story it's been, I
mean I was not extremely familiar with the Baseball Project.
I kind of just got to give them a plug
because it's this band. I'm not a baseball fan, but
it's this band that tells all these stories. All the
songs are stories that have really happened in baseball, and
it's been such a bleak period in this period of
(57:47):
that we're living through right now in baseball history. In baseball,
I haven't I haven't followed baseball since the strikes of
the early nineties. I'm like a but yeah, our audio
tech is wearing Atlanta Braves sweater. So she would join
(58:08):
Mike Mills of The Baseball Project, who was a big
Atlanta Braves fan. But it has been such a dark time,
like world history wise, and then researching the story, going
to the gym, listening to his music to just kind
of get a background on him. It's been a delight
to listen to these records by the Baseball Project. So
(58:28):
if you're in a dark space and you want some
good music, may I recommend the album's three in Grand
Salami Time by The Baseball Project. There are a lot
of fun and I think there's a lot of you know,
as artists, you just create things on impulse, and I
think on his new album, there's a song called Words
and Birds, which I had him. I was just gonna
have him to recite the lyric and he was having
a hard time recalling it, and I found that really
(58:50):
touching that he didn't want to give up. He was
pushing through to do it. But the song, to me
encapsulate his entire experience. I don't know that he would
say that he was writing about that, but he says,
you know, you might die for kicks, but the high
won't stick. It's all too beautiful man, too beautiful to land.
Try to survive and only the word gets out alive,
(59:12):
Like that's his mission. Try to survive, and only the
art you create is the thing that you leave behind.
Speaker 3 (59:17):
You know.
Speaker 5 (59:19):
That was a great story.
Speaker 1 (59:23):
Next week on the Live Again, we meet Matthew Fortune,
who lived twenty five years on the street before a
fentanyl overdose stopped his heart.
Speaker 8 (59:30):
Your feet have been wet for three days. You're in
wet clothes when it's freezing cold, and you don't.
Speaker 1 (59:37):
Have a blanket.
Speaker 5 (59:37):
You're in a T shirt. If somebody hang you a pike,
but you can hit it once and feel better.
Speaker 8 (59:43):
If you're gonna hit it once and mil better. My
heart started beating and then stopped and then started, and
so they kept going, and so they did it for
about forty five minutes.
Speaker 5 (59:52):
It's a miracle.
Speaker 1 (59:53):
I was brought back because if you know anything about CPR,
they do not typically go that long. He shares a
brutal and honest account of addiction, homelessness, and what it
takes to rebuild a life when there's nowhere left to fall.
Speaker 3 (01:00:16):
Vic Fly is shrewe That's not all they can tell.
Speaker 1 (01:00:23):
Heartfelt thank you to Scott McCoy for generously sharing his
story and his music. This episode features songs from Scott's
incredible body of work, including tracks from The Young Fresh Fellows,
The Baseball Project, The Minus Five, and Alejandro Escaveto. For
a full list of songs featured in this episode, please
visit our show notes, or you can check out our
website Alive Again Project dot com. Our story producers are
(01:00:55):
Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent die, Nicholas Dakowski, and Lauren Vogelbaum.
Music by Ben Lovett, additional music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our
executive producers are Matthew Frederick and Trevor Young. Special thanks
to Alexander Williams for additional production support. Our studio engineers
are Rima L. K Ali and Noames Griffin. Our editors
(01:01:16):
are Dan Bush, Gerhartslavichca, Brent Die and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing
by Ben Lovett and Alexander Rodriguez. I'm your host, Dan Bush.
Alive Again is a production of i Art Radio and
Psychopia Pictures. If you have a transformative near death experience
to share, we'd love to hear your story. Please email
us at Alive Again Project at gmail dot com. That's
(01:01:40):
a l I v E A g A I N
P R O j E C T at gmail dot com.
Speaker 4 (01:02:00):
Get the word we all go wrong Wrong
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Herd with Colin Cowherd
The Herd with Colin Cowherd is a thought-provoking, opinionated, and topic-driven journey through the top sports stories of the day.