Questlove Supreme: Todd Rundgren

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Quest Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
Ladies and gentlemen. Uh, it's another beautiful week upon us.
My name is Quest Love and this is Music We Paradise,
otherwise known as Quest Love Supreme.

Speaker 1 (00:18):
I'm joined here by Fon Tikolo. What's up? Man? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (00:21):
What's going on?

Speaker 1 (00:22):
Man?

Speaker 4 (00:23):
I never thought we would get this interview and being real,
I know this is real.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
This is a major league shit. I know this as well.

Speaker 5 (00:31):
Just get giddy, when get giddy and Steve, get giddy, Steve.

Speaker 1 (00:35):
We did it. We did it, Ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
Nothing excites me more than when I get to pick
the brains of.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
A fellow Philadelphia.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
Yehe like, what what can I say about our yesterday?
He's an absolutely he He's an unsung creative maniac.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
That's what I'll say.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
He's an unsung creative maniac, excelling and songwriting and production
and engineering and especially engineering with techniques and ideas that
were planet seated and plant over fifty years ago that
we're just starting to referral even to this day.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
I mean, I don't think it's it's a hyperbolic for
me to say that.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
You know, Todd probably crawled so that artists like Radiohead
and Prints and thunder Cat and all stops in between
can fly. He pushes the artistic envelope that, to me
is a major understatement. His achievements are it's just beyond description.
Ladies and gentlemen, stop laughing at me, Steve, I'm very

(01:45):
excited for this episode. Please welcome the endless flow of
creation and human form known to us mere mortals as
Todd run Grit, Shut up, Steve.

Speaker 1 (01:57):
All right, yes, all right.

Speaker 6 (02:00):
To say it.

Speaker 3 (02:01):
Leave now, you know, Steve, It's it's all downhill from here.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
You know, let me tell you something about sugar Steve.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
He will remain silent on everything except for the proper
mispronunciation of your name.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
He will Yeah, there there, there are.

Speaker 2 (02:23):
Receipts from giving tickets to anyone that's ever butchered your name.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
No, that's run grit like he's leg still not right,
not right, he got.

Speaker 7 (02:33):
It, He got it right on time.

Speaker 3 (02:34):
There, No, Steve corrected me.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
Like ten years ago, I used to say run run grin,
like do run run grid.

Speaker 8 (02:43):
No, it's run grin. And there was a period where
I say run grinnen, but it's run grin.

Speaker 9 (02:48):
So there was a period. Yeah, let it, let us
have Steve all right? Yeah, Uh, how how are you?
And uh where where are you right now?

Speaker 1 (03:01):
Sir?

Speaker 3 (03:02):
I'm at home in Kawhi and I'm doing quite well.
We haven't had a case here in like six eight
weeks of the deadly grown virus, so we're just waiting
for the rest of the world to clean up. And
I'm back on the road again.

Speaker 1 (03:18):
I see, so you're kind of enjoying your.

Speaker 3 (03:22):
Well, I don't get on. I never get this kind
of time at home, and so I'm feeling a little
bit guilty about having all the time. But then again,
so much stuff has piled up in my life that
I don't get to properly address that. I'm actually enjoying
this freedom for the time being.

Speaker 4 (03:40):
As most of your time spent is it in on
the road or like how much of your time is
spent between like traveling and studio recording.

Speaker 3 (03:49):
Well, a while ago, I would say within the last
five years, I would be out as much as ten
months on the road because I'd be doing my thing.
I would be playing Ringo Star and then there's all
the other little odd things that get thrown there, and
you know, sometimes I'll go out on a tour to
tribute an artist, like I've been out on tours a

(04:11):
tribute David Bowie, and I'll be doing that again, I
think in November. If everything goes well with the various
things that I do, I would get maybe ten days
at home at a time and then be gone for
a month and a half another ten days at home then,
so yeah, I'm settling in.

Speaker 2 (04:34):
Can I assume that, okay, that this is probably the
longest extended time that you've taken off from working, and
if so, are you sort of recharging your creative juices?
Because I'm often curious as to how, like serious creatives
that I know, how are they using this time off,

(04:56):
Like are they using this time to absolutely do nothing?

Speaker 1 (04:59):
Are they? And there's time so.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
That they can get more inspiration to create things, because
oftentimes it's like once you put out your first record,
then you're in a cyclone of you got to promote
the tour it and whatever free time you have, that's
where you document the new ideas, and then you make
your second record, repeat rents, repeat rents, repeat rents, and
then once you have eight albums under your belt, then

(05:22):
you're just in a constant touring swoop, so there's really
not time to just sit in silence and create. Like,
how are you getting your creative creative juices off?

Speaker 3 (05:34):
Well, I have an unusual creative process in that I
don't do what looks externally like a whole lot of work.
Most of the work that I do is internally, just
you know, hashing through little musical ideas in the midst
of doing another collaboration record. As a matter of fact,

(05:54):
there's going to be a song with the Roots on it.
Oh yeah, I actually premiered it already. I did a
radio show for somebody and I played Godiva Girl. But
I'm doing collaborations and I was you know, I was
supposed to sort of deliver earlier in the year, but
the problem is that everyone's kind of stuck at home,

(06:16):
so nobody can get in the studio to finish up
a lot of the stuff that I've been working on
so lately, you know, from a creative standpoint, I've been
doing these collaborations, which allow me to work more with
other people's ideas than just always coming up with something myself.
It doesn't mean I won't go back to that, but

(06:37):
this kind of solitude and silence is like what I
need to be able to write because of the fact
that it's such an insular and mental process for me.
It's like I'll be thinking about what I'm going to do,
and then when I finally get down to finishing a song,
I'll come up with like the melody and lyrics in
twenty minutes, almost like automatic writing, Like my handle just

(07:00):
start writing out lyrics and I won't even have to
hardly think about it. So yeah, it's just kind of
I've let my subconscioence take over a lot of the work,
and then when it's time to actually create, it just
kind of spills out.

Speaker 4 (07:15):
What would you say is your primary instrument? Because I
know you pretty much play everything, but what's your primary
instrument did you use to compose on when you get
those ideas?

Speaker 3 (07:24):
Well? Keyboard is it is the principal I guess idea
musical idea creation tool because you've got like all the
notes laid out linearly in front of you. But that
doesn't mean that you know the limitations of like the
guitar aren't also something that's sort of inspirational. There are
sounds and sort of tonalities that the guitar creates that

(07:49):
you know, work with certain sort of vocal themes and
stuff like that. And of course, you know, Norwegian death
metal would be nothing if it had to play nothing
but piano on it. So, but from a compositional standpoint,
I actually sort of I have always considered the studio
itself sort of a composition tool, because I very early

(08:13):
on built one for myself in the belief that the
ideas could happen anytime, and you don't want to, you know,
have to wait to get into the studio. And conversely,
if you're in the studio and you're making good progress,
you don't want to have to get out and make
room for somebody else. So the studio itself sort of

(08:33):
became the creative tool because you lay down something, you
get to hear it back right away and decide whether
it works or not.

Speaker 7 (08:40):
And what's the don't skip over the most important thing
that he basically just said, engineers make the best artists.

Speaker 1 (08:51):
Studio. You know what I'm saying, Yes.

Speaker 3 (08:53):
I know what is the That's why I kicked out
the engineer that I had when I first got into
the studio. Did my first production exactly never mind never mind,
I think it was well, it was The first time
I engineered was a band from Philadelphia called the American Dream.
It was a brand new record plant studio and they

(09:14):
had a custom board and nobody in the studio actually
knew how to use it. So I just got frustrated
watching one of the engineers fumble around on it. I said, well,
I don't want to just watch him learn how to
do it. I'll just learn how to do it myself.
And subsequently it changed the way the whole way that
I approached production because I could assume that the sound

(09:39):
was there because I knew enough about the engineering that
I you know, if you put the MIC's in the
right place and that sort of thing, you don't have
to do a whole lot of messing around, and then
you can assume the sound is there and then focus
on the musical part of it, on the performance and whatever,
you know, kind of details that you want to put
into the music. So it made the ex sperience, you know,

(10:01):
for the most part of working with a band a
lot different, because, you know, productions in the old days,
you get in the studio and you spend the first
entire day just getting drum sounds, you know, or something
like that. You know, and then the next day guitar sounds.

Speaker 1 (10:17):
You know, what's the percentage of.

Speaker 2 (10:20):
Or at least like from from from zero to one
hundred of the idea that's inside of your head being
perfectly executed once you put it on tape.

Speaker 3 (10:34):
Very rarely, But that's because I don't often have that intention.
I don't have the intention necessarily to completely craft something
in my head and then try and imprint it onto
the tape. I'm really, as I say, I'm exploring in
a way, I'm fumbling around. I often when I'm starting

(10:55):
a new record, I'll go out and do a lot
of musical research, like I'll ask my kids, you know,
what are you listening to? Or what do you think
I should listen to? Then go on YouTube and start
poking around, and then there's the sidebar. You start out
one place and before you know it, you're in a
whole other place.

Speaker 1 (11:12):
You rabbit hole yourself.

Speaker 3 (11:13):
Okay, yeah, but that's you know. I mean that. I
really enjoy that because you discover things that aren't in
the mainstream, which to me is the whole point of
the Internet, is that everyone gets a platform. Of course,
not everyone deserves it. Not everyone deserves it. You know,
and you know, some people are easier to find, but

(11:34):
it essentially took the music business and flattened it, you know.
In other words, there's no or very little price of
admission to participate anymore. All you got to do is
get yourself a laptop, you know, at a website.

Speaker 1 (11:47):
In the world's your oyster? What part of Upper Derby
did you grow up in?

Speaker 3 (11:55):
I grew up in the very western part of Upper
Derby and a brand new post war row housing development,
a familiar kind of housing in the Philadelphia area and
Delaware and stuff like that Row Houses, which is essentially
like an apartment building that fell down. Every house looked
exactly the same. It was like one of these Levittown situations.

(12:16):
But it was very lower middle class, so you know,
I had to share for my entire life that I
lived at home a bedroom with my brother and my
two sisters shared a bedroom.

Speaker 1 (12:27):
Okay, how many? How many siblings?

Speaker 3 (12:29):
Again, I have a brother and two sisters.

Speaker 1 (12:33):
Did they have musical interest in what as well? Or
was it just you?

Speaker 3 (12:37):
Not? Really?

Speaker 6 (12:38):
No.

Speaker 3 (12:39):
When I was in elementary school, we used to have
a program where you could rent an instrument, and every
week or so, somebody would come and give you a
lesson that wasn't like a band or anything. But I,
for some reason, thought I wanted to play the flute
when I was like wow, when I was like eight
or nine something like that. You know, I just liked

(13:01):
the sound of it. But when I actually got it,
I didn't realize what a nonlinear instrument it was. You know,
it's very difficult to learn, and plus when you're young,
it's difficult to get your mouth to the umbusure, to
get your mouth to do the right thing. So my
sister she got a clarinet, and I actually learned to

(13:22):
play that way better than I learned to play the flute,
and she never learned to play it at all. So,
you know, I learned how to play Too Strange on
the Shore by mister Ackerbilk, and that thrilled my dad,
you know, because he was into that kind of easy
listening stuff. But when I first heard I think it
was walk Don't Run by the Ventures. That's when I

(13:44):
knew guitar was what I wanted to play.

Speaker 2 (13:48):
Was that the first album that you purchased or like,
do you remember the first album you ever had?

Speaker 3 (13:52):
Yeah? The first album that well, the first album that
I ever purchased was like a cut out of a
cutout bin and it was I'll be like sixty nine
cents and it was called Boppin' and a bunch of
artists that you've never heard of. Actually, years later I
did find run across a few of the artists, Like

(14:14):
if you go on YouTube, you can actually find performances
by Dike Watson and the Brown Dots. It was just
an odd collection of weird fifties rock and roll, proto
rock and roll, a lot of it. And it was
still before the Beatles, so I didn't have a whole
lot of discrimination. I just knew that I was not

(14:36):
into Elvis Presley because he was a greaser and the
greasers like to beat me up. So I had no
interest in Elvis Presley whatever.

Speaker 1 (14:44):
So you weren't the cool kids.

Speaker 3 (14:45):
You like the loaner, Oh, the trouble loaner. Definitely, the
troubled loaner. Yeah, it was one of those things. I
had terrible add or whatever it is. They didn't know
what that was in those days. It was just an
unruly child. And you know, no matter what where I
started out in the classroom in the beginning of the year,
by you know, the end of the first semester, I'm
in the very back row because I'm creating distraction and

(15:10):
stuff like that, and I just was I was never
meant for that kind of that kind of discipline that
school required. So everything I ever learned, I learned after
I left school.

Speaker 2 (15:23):
So what was the what was the moment where you
decided that this is this is my destiny, this is
my my my moment in.

Speaker 3 (15:33):
Music, Well, I had a high school band, and as
previously cited, I did so terribly in high school that
there was no possibility of me going to college. It
would only have been possible if I had landed some
kind of scholarship anyway, because my dad didn't make that
much money. And so after high school graduation, which was

(15:56):
just around my eighteenth birthday. On my eighteenth birthday, I
packed all my worldly goods into a typewriter case. At
that point, I didn't even have a guitar anymore, and
I left home and went to meet a friend of
mine who was a drummer and we were going to
start a band, and he was supposedly in Ocean City,
So I got on a bus. It was my eighteenth birthday,

(16:18):
so the first thing I did is I went to
sixty ninth Street, right across from the sixty nine Street
station and registered for the draft. Wow and yikes, yeah, yikes.
And then I got on a bus to Ocean City
and met up with this guy. Well, I didn't meet
up with him right away because apparently he and he
was hanging out with some guys who were stealing park

(16:39):
benches and hiding them in their garage in Ocean City,
And so I had to find a place to stay
overnight till he had his court date the next day.

Speaker 1 (16:50):
And then wait, why would they steal park benches.

Speaker 3 (16:54):
In Ocean City. This is in nineteen sixty six.

Speaker 1 (16:57):
You just did anything, okay, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (17:00):
And so you know, I went to his house with
him and his parents. A couple of days later, we
went to see The Birds and the Shadows of Night
at a summerstock tent little concert thing. So it was
the Birds. They were big on radio, The Shadows of
Night they had a hit, and a local band called
Woody's Truck Stop. Okay, we were kind of excited to

(17:24):
see them because I knew about them through seeing a
picture one of the guitar player. One of the guitar
players in. It might have been Time magazine or something,
because he grew his hair long and beat the system
because I was having trouble all the time. I was
always growing my hair, and they're always sending me home
and my dad would send me to the barber. And

(17:44):
this was just an endless cycle. And he essentially beat
the system. He was a straight a student, and so
a judge said, you can't not educate him, so they
made him. They made the school provide him with private
telephone line. And there was a picture of him at
a desk with his long hair and a little speaker phone,

(18:05):
and I thought, man, he beat the systems, you know.
And the way he beat it was he said, I'm
in a band, you know, I have to have my
hair long. I'm in a band, and so and so
I you know. I was excited to see them, although
I had never heard them. I had no idea what
kind of music they did, but they really like they
kind of like kicked everybody's ass. They had so much

(18:27):
energy and they were basically a blues band, blues and
R and B. They did like I think they did
a Sam and Dave song, and they did a couple
of blue songs. And so god, that's that's great. Let's
go see them when they play at the Artist Hut
in Philadelphia, which is no longer there. It's a little
it was a little basement club on Walnut Street, just

(18:52):
a block past Rittenhouse Square and held maybe eighty people
something like that, maybe one hundred people if you cram
him in there. And we went to see the band. Then,
as it turned out, their drummer was just a stand in,
you know, they could not seem to find a drummer
they could keep. As a matter of fact, the drummer
on the gig was Tim if I could don't remember

(19:14):
her name. He was became a famous songwriter and he
wrote Seventh Avenue I think was a hit song for
art Guardfuncle. But anyway, he you know, they were looking
for a drummer, and Joe, the guy that I was with,
he was just, you know, amazing trained drummer, you know.
So he just sat down on the drum started doing

(19:34):
all his Buddy Rich stuff, and they said, okay, join
our band, and he was loyal enough to me for
some dumb reason. Then he said, okay, but you got
to hire my friend here, the guitar player as well,
and they decided, okay, well we can go for that
because that allowed the so called rhythm guitar player. They
come up front and play harp, and then the band

(19:55):
looked exactly like the Butterfield band. And so that was
my first real gig, first time I ever got paid
real money. And it lasted for he maybe six months,
eight months something like that.

Speaker 1 (20:09):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (20:09):
And then I then I formed an ass you.

Speaker 2 (20:12):
You mentioned Upper Darby, I have to ask you, uh,
if you've spent any time in Val Shieveley's record store,
which is still open and.

Speaker 1 (20:23):
Up and running to this day.

Speaker 3 (20:25):
Now, where was that.

Speaker 2 (20:28):
Just in relationship to where you catch the l I
would say it's like two or three blocks away.

Speaker 3 (20:32):
I mean technically that's around the sixth ninth Street area.

Speaker 1 (20:36):
Yeah, around the sixty nine Street area.

Speaker 2 (20:37):
I mean technically, I would say that he's the number
one forty five distributor end well, at least the SCIgen
says in the East Coast.

Speaker 1 (20:48):
I'm certain that now in.

Speaker 3 (20:49):
The whole of the East Coast.

Speaker 2 (20:52):
Yeah, you go there and his whe would you say,
Steve that he has at least like six hundred thousand Yeah.

Speaker 3 (21:01):
He's there, it's still there.

Speaker 2 (21:03):
I'm still open so once a year I'll take a
maybe a two day trek and get lost in and his.

Speaker 3 (21:10):
Uh, where's that in relationship to the tower theater.

Speaker 2 (21:14):
Across around the corner if you go to if you
go to a tower theater, I would say it's just
slightly slightly around the corner.

Speaker 1 (21:23):
It's like walking distance.

Speaker 3 (21:25):
I remember there used to be a place downtown on
Chestnut Street that was one of those you know, one
of those places that had like every single, every obscure
single that you're looking for that.

Speaker 2 (21:37):
Care right now, he's managed to just stay open and
and you know pretty much people just take pilgrimages there
and do like.

Speaker 3 (21:45):
Week week long great diggers.

Speaker 6 (21:48):
Yes, exactly, he's okay post Rona.

Speaker 2 (21:53):
Yeah, now he's by he lives aloner.

Speaker 1 (21:57):
You know nine hundred that records.

Speaker 3 (22:02):
He's like Harvey Peacar, Did you know who he is?

Speaker 1 (22:05):
Harvey Peacard now Harvey Pea Carr.

Speaker 3 (22:07):
He used to he would be on the David Lemerman
show every once in a while. He guy from Cleveland, Ohio,
like very angry, but his life's work was essentially collecting vinyl.
And I went to his house once and for an
individual person, I don't know how he found the time,
you know, to collect the catalog so much stuff. But

(22:31):
I guess it's because he had you know, he worked
at the post office. Okay, so yeah, yeah, you never know.

Speaker 2 (22:40):
So with the net with the NAZ that was your
when did you guys? You guys got signed in what
sixty eight?

Speaker 3 (22:46):
I think it was around and the band sort of
formed the band in the summer of sixty seven, and
it wasn't too long before we got kind of discovered
and whisked off to to New York not New York City,
actually Great Neck Long Island. The guy who took over
managing us, he he lived in a really nice neighborhood.

(23:13):
His name was John Curland and he actually lived next
door to Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary.

Speaker 1 (23:19):
And he was and he.

Speaker 3 (23:20):
Was a publicist. And one of the great things about
that was and when I would go to his office,
he was still all of the latest releases, you know,
like who is this iron Butterfly? And what the hell
is a Buffalo Springfield? And you know that sort of thing.
You know, he get wed you know, we'd get the

(23:41):
records before they ever got into the stores because they
were promos and in that sense, you know, we were
always like slightly ahead of whatever was was going on
in the public musically, but he really didn't know anything
about managing a band, you know, and he kind of
stuck us all together in a house in Great Neck

(24:01):
where and said, I don't want you guys to play
until you get a record deal because I want to
be able to set you know, like a high ticket
price or something like that. And ultimately, you know, that
philosophy killed the band because you know, the only thing worse,
you know than being in a band and fighting on
the road, you know, is being in a band and

(24:24):
stuck in a house somewhere and fighting all the time,
you know, because you don't get to break it up
with any playing. So that to me was a big,
a big disappointment. And as a matter of fact that
my time in the NAS only lasted about eighteen months,
but we managed to get two records out.

Speaker 1 (24:44):
Was there any I was excious to know?

Speaker 4 (24:46):
Was there any crossover overlap between NAZ and Utopia, another
band you produced. Were there any guys that were in
NAS that went onto that band.

Speaker 3 (24:55):
Or No, there weren't, But ironically enough, Rick Nielsen and
Robin Xander of Cheap Trick. Eventually they became members of
n NAZ for a brief period of time until the
band changed its name to the Sick Men of Europe.
Then eventually they left that and and started Cheap Trick.

(25:16):
And then I did, years later produce a Cheap.

Speaker 1 (25:19):
Trick record, Which one did you produce?

Speaker 3 (25:23):
Next position? Please? Didn't have any big hit singles on it,
but they didn't have any big hit singles after that
much anyway, So.

Speaker 4 (25:33):
Right, yeah, my band we h we actually sampled a
song you produced off Utopia, legally sampled. We sampled Eternal Love,
off the Good Morning Sunshine, off the.

Speaker 3 (25:51):
Cool Sample Away. I've never that never bothered me, you know,
people sampling stuff. I always thought it was sort of flattering,
you know, when someone would excerpt your music.

Speaker 1 (26:02):
Keep that in mind.

Speaker 2 (26:03):
Well it should be it should be noted that, you know,
many people think that Hello to Me made its debut
on something anything when the actuality it appeared on the
NAS record. However, for a lot of black people, hell hell.

Speaker 3 (26:22):
Yeah one of them, but Hello Hello, Hello, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (26:29):
Okay, I'm really showed my age autisty drew. My first
hearing of that version, it was groove theory liked, not
like groove theory. They because they covered it in like
ninety five. I want to say that.

Speaker 1 (26:44):
That was the first time.

Speaker 2 (26:47):
You're telling me that you never had a mom hunt
or grandma that cleaned the house on the weekend.

Speaker 1 (26:52):
Not to that song. Now, I mean we have lived up.

Speaker 6 (26:57):
Right, It's like top five.

Speaker 1 (26:59):
That was my first time.

Speaker 4 (27:00):
My asley's was like because my mother was younger, so
Ale was like between between the ces, you know, I
mean it was I'll give you that. Yeah, it was
all so yeah. When I heard, I was like, oh
this is damn did this? Yeah, that was my first
time heard it.

Speaker 5 (27:17):
Was me feel better I do.

Speaker 2 (27:23):
A fellow Philadelphian, so it's even more full full circle.

Speaker 1 (27:27):
That is hilarious. Wow, that's amazing.

Speaker 7 (27:31):
Some one who got introduced to the song by the
actual song. Well, like you pointed out, though not the original,
the original was was on a NAS record, right.

Speaker 3 (27:41):
That's correct, And the original was like you likely wouldn't
recognize it because it was like a really dirgy tempo,
really slow and sappy.

Speaker 1 (27:51):
And I prefer that version of the NAS then even.

Speaker 3 (27:55):
And I didn't play guitar on I played vibes. Yeah, no, guitar,
the version.

Speaker 2 (28:01):
I guess you're the first person that we interviewed that
even put their footprints into psych rock or what they
call uh progressive, I mean progressive at least under that
Under that umbrella was was the basic mind state to
rebel against whatever the status quo was. Like, what was

(28:24):
your thoughts on uh, I'm trying to think of like
commercial albums that push the envelope, like say, uh uh couple.

Speaker 3 (28:32):
Of Old Is Love or the first couple of Yes records,
you know, with the first couple of Genesis records. We'll
see there was a whole there was a difference between
like a so called American prague and English prog rock,
because English prog rock was inspired by classical music and

(28:53):
you know, and more classical forms and old maybe something
to some extent folk music, English type type folk music,
whereas American prog rock was more informed by jazz and
acts like Return to Forever and Weather Report, and so
what we were doing by that time, you know, was

(29:13):
some weird combination of all of those influences, whether Report,
my Vision, New Orchestra. Yes, you know, jeneis gentle giant,
you know, all of those. The English prog rock, which
was more you know, classically inspired and had classical themes,
and the American prog rock, which had more jazz it

(29:35):
was jazz inspired and jazzier themes. So somewhere in the
middle it met because we had the way that we
would write with. We would all just sit around in
the studio and we would just throw ideas out and
we'd figure out how to glue them together. And everybody had,
you know, different things that they were listening to at
the time. John Siegler bass player, he'd probably be listening

(29:58):
to a lot of return for and but we would
you know, work other stuff in, like American classics like
Aaron Copeland.

Speaker 1 (30:07):
Oh wow. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:09):
So around that time, like what were what were the
artists or the albums that were blowing your mind? Like,
were you anti Sergeant Pepper's.

Speaker 3 (30:20):
Or anti Sergeant Pepper? Well? I was. I had an
interesting reaction to Sergeant Pepper because I was a teetotaler
until I was twenty one. I had no drugs, that
never drank alcohol, had no idea what people were talking
about when they were high. And when Sergeant Pepper came out,

(30:40):
I was kind of disappointed in it because the album before,
which was Revolver. I thought was an incredible record, just
from the standpoint of the songwriting and the and the
production innovations that went into it, and it seemed like,
you know, they were just reinventing music all the time,
and Sergeant Pepper was just very imitative of English music

(31:05):
hall kind of yeah, that sort of stuff. Well, you know,
it's where it was, you know, circus music, that sort
of thing. Yeah, yeah, and uh. And people will say, like,
you know, it's a completely different album when you're on acid,
you know, And I said, well, I don't take acid,
you know. So it kind of like I thought I

(31:27):
must be missing something here. And so it never affected
me the way that it did everyone else. But years
later I kind of, you know, I got a little
more into it, and mostly because of the quality of
the sound. There's a certain there's a space that they
created in there that I don't think existed on a
lot of records previous to that, an atmosphere or a

(31:50):
sonic space. And I grew to appreciate that, and I
grew to be less offended by things like within You
and Without You.

Speaker 1 (32:01):
So what led to.

Speaker 2 (32:03):
You leaving NAS and starting your own What was the
process in starting your own solo work.

Speaker 3 (32:10):
Part of it was, I guess, the inevitability of me absorbing,
absorbing broader influences than the ones that originally went into
the NAS. We characterized the NAS as a combination of
The Who and the Beach Boys. In other words, we
wanted to do that. We wanted to perform like The

(32:30):
Who at the dis Yeah and this or everything, but
be able to do harmonies like the Beach Boys. And
it's not that much of a stretch because the Beach
Boys was Keith Moon's favorite band, and that's why Who
did a cover version of Barbaring. They would let him
sing that every night on stage. I got completely enthralled

(32:53):
with Laura Nero and Eli in the Thirteenth Confession when
that album came out. That just been up the skies
for me, and I had never heard anyone sort of
like be so revelatory in their performance, really interesting and
intricate in the songwriting, and very sophisticated in the harmonics.

(33:15):
And of course she sang great, and I was so
kind of like taken with her that I asked my manager,
John Curland at the time if he could somehow get
me an audience with her. And so he called up
David Geffen, who was an accountant at Columbia Records at
the time, Wow, but was kind of like the contact

(33:38):
guy to Laura Neiro and managed to She allowed me
to come up to her apartment in the Dakota and
she made tuna fish casserole, which is the only thing
she knew how to make, and that's why her publishing
company was called Tuna Fish Music. And she played the
piano and sang, you know, sang all these and played

(34:01):
the piano and wanted me to sing along, but I
was just too petrified. But the thing I remember from
is she let her fingernails grow so long that they
curled over, you know, Like her fingernails were like at
least three inches long, and so and so when she
was playing the piano, it would be this clattering noise,
you know. And I don't remember hearing that on the record,
you know. But she called me back like two weeks

(34:23):
later and went up to visit her again, and she
asked if I would be her band leader, and I,
you know, so I have to think about it, but
I knew that I couldn't because the NASA had just
signed a record contract and her first album was about
to come out, but between the first and second albums,
I started writing like Laura Niro and none of that
fit and it caused a big debacle. During the recording

(34:48):
of the second album, which was originally a double album,
about half of it I was singing and it was
all Laura Nero songs, and so essentially they cut the
album in half. And when they did that, I quit
the band and lived on the street for a while
until the partner of the guy who was managing the
NAZ looked me up. He had gone to work for

(35:10):
Albert Grossman, and Albert said, you know, I want you
to go out and find some young talent, because everybody
I got ye is old, you know. He you know,
he had Bob Dylan, and he had Peter Palm Mary
and then then he was getting into some more contemporary
X but the only one that he ever actually signed
was Jennis Joplin, and within a year she was gone.

Speaker 1 (35:33):
You're supposed to producer, correct, I.

Speaker 3 (35:37):
Was supposed to producer, but you know, all these things
don't always work out, you know. Some in retrospect, I
deduced that the problem was that she didn't really like
making records. She liked performing in front of an audience
and records, you know, there was no audience there, and
so it was just like she was lost in the studio.

(35:58):
It wasn't for her. She needed the response of an
audience and I'm you know, I'm in the studio. I'm
just thinking about musical concerns and stuff like that. So
eventually she got Paul Rothschild to finish the record. And
Paul Rothschild is one of these producers who knows almost
nothing about music, you know, but knows how to knows

(36:18):
how to pump an artist up. You know, It's like
that was great, you know that was It doesn't matter
how terrible it was.

Speaker 1 (36:24):
That was just great.

Speaker 3 (36:25):
Can you do another one?

Speaker 1 (36:26):
You know?

Speaker 3 (36:27):
Like that? And they'll eventually accidentally you get the performance
that you keep. But the whole thing, you know, was
more psychology than you know, actual musicology. And at that
time that was my extremely weak suit. I was only
in my very early twenties.

Speaker 6 (36:44):
And Hey tied you briefly.

Speaker 5 (36:46):
You briefly went over to Struggle, but we do that
kind of fast. Sometimes you said you were homeless.

Speaker 3 (36:52):
I was, well, I wasn't literally homeless, because I was
still signed to screen Gems as writer through the contract,
through the Nazath contract, they had apartments, you know, in
various major cities in LA and in New York where
they would just put songwriters up for you know, I

(37:14):
don't know, songwriting sessions or whatever. They just happened to
have these places. So I was staying in one, but
you know, I didn't have a lease or anything like that.
And at that point I was spending most of my
time with clothing designers in the West Village. I was
designing and installing lights in a dance club. I wasn't

(37:34):
doing no music whatever, stuff like that. When this guy
discovered me and brought me into the Grossman organization and
started pairing me up with everybody that was on the
roster because a lot of the artists were not making
the transition into the seventies. Some of them hadn't fully

(37:55):
made the transition into the sixties. But I started doing
like Ian and Silvia and James Cotton and ultimately the
Butterfield Band. And the mandate most of the time was
make the record sound more modern, you know, make the
record sound contemporary somehow. So I strove to do that,
and they appreciated that, and then my big biggest break

(38:18):
probably came when I did well stage Fright with the band,
because the band was like the biggest band in the
world at that moment, and so getting my name on
stage Fright kind of got a whole bunch of other
stuff right after that. Hall and Oates was among them,
Graham Funk, Railroad Finger, you know, and et cetera.

Speaker 2 (38:45):
Only because of my affinity for collecting like weird rock
proc rock stuff for sampling purposes or whatever. So there's
a there's a group called Paris that that's been stampled
a lot and in the hip hop community with the
drummer uh named Hunt Sales.

Speaker 1 (39:04):
Oh yeah, the comedian Super Sales.

Speaker 2 (39:07):
Is it true he's on Runt And if he's that's
the case, he's he was a.

Speaker 3 (39:14):
Kid, Yes, he was a kid. I first met.

Speaker 1 (39:17):
Drumming on your album as what like fifteen something.

Speaker 3 (39:21):
Around that's fifteen sixteen something like that.

Speaker 2 (39:24):
He was in his thirties when Bowie put uh tim machine.

Speaker 3 (39:29):
Yeah, that's yeah, it's so he.

Speaker 1 (39:32):
Was that dope at the age of fourteen fifteen, he was.

Speaker 3 (39:35):
He was getting drum lessons from well, people don't know
this probably if you know who Soupy Sales is because
people probably don't know who super.

Speaker 2 (39:43):
Sales be on Motown, which people don't know that I have.

Speaker 3 (39:48):
To you can do it in your house.

Speaker 4 (39:51):
Yeah yeah, do you guys know he was a comedian, right,
he was like he.

Speaker 3 (40:00):
It was a Saturday morning. He was like Saturday morning,
Saturday afternoon kids show hosts. That's how he got famous
because his show went coast to coast when he became
the Soupy Sales Show, right, But previous to that, he
was a local late night host in Cleveland, and he
would have you know, he was like Johnny Carson, and

(40:22):
he would have all the great all the jazz greats
come in and play on his show and talk on
his talk show. And so he knew everybody. I remember
going with him and hunting Tony to see like an
eighty five year old Gene Krupa play at the jazz
club that was in the in the Plaza Hotel, in

(40:44):
the basement of the Plaza Hotel, and it was so funny.
Jean group of grinning like he always did, but could
barely lift the sticks off the drum. But you know,
he knew everybody in jazz, and Hunt got lessons from
Louis Belson, you know, one of the great technique drummers
you know of all time, right and one of the
and the first guy I think to do double bass drums.

(41:07):
I met them at a place called Steve Paul's. The scene.
There used to be UH in New York City, and
in a lot of cities there used to be a
lot of music clubs where they serve no liquor. For instance,
the UH the Cafe a Go Go in New York City,
which was a basement club, very weird configuration. But I
saw Cream's first gigs in the US. There saw a

(41:30):
Butterfield band probably four times. There saw John Mayol and
you know, all of these and and Richie Havens before
would stuck, you know, you know, all of these greats
would play in this tiny little club. But the but
you know, I mean the admission was probably ten bucks

(41:50):
and the one drink minimum was like a flower vase
full of ice cream, you know, like a giant milkshake,
because you know it, these places were all open to
underage kids. And Steve Paul's aceame was the same way
was you know, all ages if your mom would let you.
Because they served no liquor. And it was the same

(42:11):
kind of place you saw the very first gigs of
seann Onna, for instance, the very the very with some
of the very first gigs of just some of the
strangest acts, like well the Nice, remember The Nice.

Speaker 1 (42:24):
That was.

Speaker 3 (42:26):
Keith Emerson's band before ELP. I saw David Clayton Thomas
in a Canadian band called Raven before he joined Blood,
Sweat and Tears.

Speaker 1 (42:39):
You know.

Speaker 3 (42:40):
The house band was the McCoy's hang on Sloopy.

Speaker 1 (42:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:45):
Rick Deringer and his little brother Randy, they were the
house band. And since it was all ages and since
you never knew it was going to play there, especially
the jam sessions which would happen after the build acts
came on, they were amazing. You know. I was standing
on stage on time with I'm trying to remember, but
it was like Dwayne Almon and you know, the drummer

(43:09):
from Led Zeppelin and the bass player from another band.
You know, just the jam sessions were amazing. I never
got the jam with Jimmy Hendrix because I walked right
by him as he was coming into the club because
I thought he was taller than he was, you know,
but his afron only came up to my nose, so
I thought, now they can't. Yeah, he's actually kind of

(43:30):
a short guy, so, uh so I walked right past him.
I never even got to watch him jam So but anyway,
that's me.

Speaker 2 (43:37):
You're you're actually confirming the rumor that Hendricks was supposed
to be n E. L. P.

Speaker 3 (43:46):
I didn't hear that, but that's an interesting it was.

Speaker 2 (43:48):
Yeah, there is a rumor that the name of the
group was supposed to be called Help Hendry DRIs.

Speaker 1 (43:54):
Emerson Powell and it was Lake Palmer. It was Lake
Palmer Pow.

Speaker 8 (44:00):
I'm some thing of Cole and Powell right now, I'm sorry, Yeah, no, right.

Speaker 3 (44:10):
He was the original drummer in Journey Trivia. Oh we
love our trivia.

Speaker 2 (44:17):
So anyway, the place for it, you should be all right,
I'd say we grabbed Todd to be our seventh member,
of course of coust Love Supreme. So I'm skipping over
to something anything which, first of all, I know, I
know back then, at least for for a double album

(44:39):
to get released was a big deal.

Speaker 1 (44:42):
I mean now it's nothing, but.

Speaker 2 (44:46):
And normally I would think that double albums were a
thing for uh, I mean proven acts that are you know,
multi platinum and all those things. But I mean seventy
two was just the level the level plane field was
clear and things were being defined. But the risks that

(45:07):
the artistic risks that you took on that record, Like
what was your mind stake during that period?

Speaker 3 (45:12):
I was in kind of a great position, and it's
affected the way I'd think about making records ever since,
because I was producing records for the Grossman organization, but
I was still writing songs and I have musical ideas,
but I had no inclination at all in becoming like

(45:33):
an actual, you know, bankable artists that had to go
out on the road and play and stuff like that.
I enjoyed being in the studio too much, so I
wanted to get these ideas out of my system. And
I asked Albert who or whoever I was dealing with.
I said, can you give me a budget to make
a record of my own? And they said, well, you've

(45:55):
been doing all this work for us, Sure we'll give
you a budget. And then I recorded Runt and they
were kind of surprised at the result, you know, they
thought it was going to be a piece of crap,
and as it turned out, there was a minor hit
single on it, so that kind of sealed my fate.
I had to continue making records because I had had
a single then the next and the first record was

(46:18):
just a scatter brained effort because I had never made
an album of my own and I just wanted to
capture all of these various musical ideas and to work
with musicians that I really wanted to work with. Then
I got to my second album. Between the first and
second album, I discovered marijuana.

Speaker 1 (46:39):
And.

Speaker 3 (46:41):
An ironic thing is it gave me a much more
ordered approach to songwriting, you know, in other words, yeah,
I was. It made me less scatterbrained when it came
to songwriting. So the next record that I made, which
was called The Ballad, and that one really fell through
the cracks because Bearsville changed their distribution from Ampex, which

(47:03):
was a tape company, to Warner Brothers right in the
middle of when that album got released.

Speaker 4 (47:08):
So it just kind of so Bearsville was not your label.
I always always thought that was your indie label.

Speaker 1 (47:15):
Whatever.

Speaker 3 (47:15):
No, that's Albert Grossman's, yeah, you know, since I was
working for him, I was on it, and so that
was surprising. And then the second record was just much
more coherent and much more songwriterly record. And then when
I got to something anything, I moved to LA for
a year, got a house so that I would be,

(47:36):
you know, have nothing to do but make music, and
I would record in this little studio called ID Sound
where we did the NASA records during the day. Then
I go home at night and write and do some
other recording. I rented an eight track machine and recorded
some of the more bizarre things from the record, like

(47:57):
went to the mirror, it sounds sounds of the studio
and that sort of thing.

Speaker 1 (48:03):
Why and how did you create intro.

Speaker 3 (48:06):
Intro meeting the sounds of the studio? Is that it?

Speaker 1 (48:10):
Yes?

Speaker 3 (48:10):
Or the one on the very last side, which is
found tapes for my high school band and stuff.

Speaker 2 (48:17):
Well, the one on the last side where you introduced
hissing reverb and.

Speaker 3 (48:21):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's that it sounds of the studio.
Well it was course, you know the analog days, you know,
and analog had its own sort of issues and responsibilities
and stuff like that, you know, which nobody nowadays much recalls.
But before you could do a session, someone would have

(48:42):
to come in. They would have to clean the heads
on the machine, they take a swab and swab down
all of the heads and rollers and stuff on the machine.
They would lay tone down on the tape reference tone.
It's kind of like a and for tape ops, you know,
because which is a lost art. But in the analog days,

(49:04):
you had to do all of these little rituals like
cleaning the heads and the pintrollers and laying tone down
on the tape and being the guy who gets yelled
at when you accidentally punch in in the wrong place,
or or the guy who gets yelled at because the

(49:25):
tape broke or something like that. So, you know, analog
recording there was this whole other range of issues you
had to be conscious of that. Of course the music
consumer never really considers. But since it was analog, you know,
in all the records I've make, at at least somewhere
there's an analog glitch in it, you know, something where

(49:49):
accidentally the tape got pinched or creased, but it's in
the middle of a performance and you can't do anything
about it, you know. And it's before digital where you
could drop in something from another place, you know, and
so it just goes on to the record, you know,
and most people. It goes by. Most people don't even
notice it.

Speaker 2 (50:08):
So, knowing what you know now, having dabbled in both,
you know the world of analog and digital, what is
your what is your preference? Do you prefer the beautiful
imperfection of the analog world or are you consistently still

(50:29):
working for looking for the best experience of sound that
you can get in the digital world.

Speaker 3 (50:36):
Well, I think a lot of people forget that, you know,
the analog world was an entire mailieu. It wasn't simply
the fact that records were on vinyl. It was a
fact that portable music systems had not been invented yet,
and so if you wanted a personal listening experience, you
had to go to your own home and sit in

(50:57):
the sweet spot in your own system and listen to
the record. Ideally, nothing goes wrong in that situation. The
record does not skip where nobody dances across the room
and makes the tone arm hop around, or you know,
or the base on the record does not interfere and
start to cause a rumble, and other sorts of you

(51:21):
know artifacts, or the fact that the plain fact that
the sound on a vinyl LP is worse in the
center than it is at the outside of the record
because you're trying to put the equal amount of sound
in smaller and smaller real estate, you know, as the
record proceeds. So people tend to forget about all this.

Speaker 5 (51:41):
I'm sorry, I know that to most people that to
most of you guys, that just sounded like one plus
two equals three.

Speaker 6 (51:47):
But to me it just went, well.

Speaker 1 (51:48):
Okay, here's the deal, so die in the vinyl world.

Speaker 2 (51:54):
In vinyl world, it's probably to your best interest to
keep your your time under sixteen minutes.

Speaker 4 (52:03):
Yeah, because that way the maximize on you get the
best sound.

Speaker 2 (52:08):
So the reason why they make twelve in singles, the
reason why they make twelve singles is so that you
can have one song on that record.

Speaker 1 (52:17):
So it's it's louder when it's just when it's a.

Speaker 3 (52:22):
Maximum maximum volume. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:24):
Now, for instance, Side too of Michael Jackson's Off the
Wall record has six songs on it, So the records
are the gruves are really smaller as opposed to Side one,
which is four songs and louder. So if I were
to play the title, if I would play Off the
Wall in the club from that album.

Speaker 1 (52:44):
The volume would be very low.

Speaker 2 (52:46):
So that I would have to do, yeah, as opposed
to so yeah back in the day. I mean the
reason why we use computer technology now to DJ is
so that now I can make it loud as shit. Wow,
it used to be problematic, like if you turn the
volume up, you would hear.

Speaker 1 (53:05):
Like he lowen feedback and all those things. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (53:09):
How many people y'all just sent back to listen to
like their old vinyl Like that's that's what okay?

Speaker 1 (53:14):
Yeah, the more the more it's it's problematic.

Speaker 2 (53:17):
Like probably one of the worst records I know that
has this system times no god, the worst mastered albums ever.
I was gonna say, uh uh the Deaf Jams initial
release of Public Enemy Spear of a Black Planet, where
they actually try to cramp ten songs on one side,

(53:39):
like they didn't make it a double album. They're just like,
fuck it, ten songs on one side, ten songs on
the other side, and thus all this. Yeah, the more
music you squeeze on a record, the softer it gets.

Speaker 3 (53:54):
Well, it's funny. I didn't discover that record until I
got it on a on a CD.

Speaker 1 (54:01):
Yeah, I mean it was me.

Speaker 10 (54:02):
I mean's amazing technology.

Speaker 3 (54:05):
That's an amazing record. Though, that's the that's the Sergeant
Pepper of hip hop. That record. Wow, yeah, that record,
you know, influenced a white guy like me. You know,
it's really you know, I thought that, can you do that?
Can you actually do that?

Speaker 1 (54:23):
Not legally?

Speaker 3 (54:25):
Yeah, well we're doing it. We're not doing it, so.

Speaker 1 (54:29):
You just do it you get caught.

Speaker 3 (54:30):
Yeah, you just know. I just you know, I love
that record. I go back to it with regularity.

Speaker 1 (54:36):
All right, Wait now you see damn see I don't
even want to.

Speaker 5 (54:39):
Go to ask them what.

Speaker 2 (54:42):
Well, no, I was gonna leap right to Hermit of Mink,
but I don't. I don't want to lose faithful and
all the other stuff. But all right, I know I
booked you the last time when I asked you about
But that's just not normal. It's not normal.

Speaker 1 (54:59):
Not normal.

Speaker 2 (55:00):
It's not normal to be making shit like that. Uh yeah,
long did it take you to make that song? And
where did you did you just have a sound effects
record and be like, Okay, I'm going to figure out
the song.

Speaker 3 (55:14):
Some of them sound effects, some of it as sound effracts,
and then that's you know, a lot of it's just
me making noises with my mouth all.

Speaker 2 (55:20):
Right, and itever even bothered me that you would actually
make the sounds by yourself. I thought, yeah, I thought
you were just like one by one, like cutting pasting.

Speaker 3 (55:30):
Well, obviously some of the sounds are not human derived,
so they would have to be sample from something, probably
from a sound effects record or even me like making
some foldy for it.

Speaker 2 (55:41):
But well, yeah, what I'm trying to lead to is that,
I mean, between you and Miles Davis, Well, well, you
know what with TiO Marcia, uh Marcia's name see Mao,
with how they craft a bit just brew. I mean,
these albums that you're making are just they're they're redefining

(56:04):
what you can do and can't do with technology. So
was it the fact that you just felt like, I mean,
were you ever just unsatisfied with the studio? Like what
studios were you looking for to give you maximum creation?

Speaker 1 (56:21):
And did you everything of a.

Speaker 2 (56:23):
Day would come that something like pro tools would come along,
like that would make your life easier.

Speaker 3 (56:31):
Well, I got into the idea of having a studio
of my own on Wizard or True Star because I thought,
if you're going to go musical exploring, you know, if
you're going to go musical big game hunting or whatever. No,
that's that's Paul Simon. If you're going to go musically exploring,
you need to be able to do things sometimes that

(56:53):
they won't allow you to do in a regular studio.
I say, if we own it's a regular studio, let's say,
but it don't turn that knob past there, you know.
But if I have my own studio, well that's it's
because they have to, you know, turn the studio over
to somebody else when you're equipment. Yeah, it's like, you know,

(57:16):
it's not just yours to do anything you want with.
But when you have your own studio, that's exactly what
it is. So we would put the knobs wherever we
want it, you know. In other words, we wouldn't even
look at the meters. We would just listen, you know,
and turn a knob until it sounded right, you know.
And sometimes you know, the meters are just pinned in
the red. But that's how you get that sound. And

(57:38):
ever since.

Speaker 4 (57:39):
National Feel off that album, it sounds like I love
that song man.

Speaker 3 (57:42):
Oh yeah. A lot of it is you know, just us,
you know, not not being not being like you would
be in a normal studio, like in a normal studio.
You would have somebody make sure that the noise reduction
was in the right the switches on the noise reduction

(58:04):
we're in the right locations, depending on whether you were
recording or playing back, and we would find ourselves doing
things like putting noise reduction on something and then bouncing
it to another track forgetting to put the noise reduction
into the decode board of it. So essentially it would

(58:25):
be like the most squishy limitter that you ever heard,
and the highs would just be the highest highs because
we were using DBX discolinear compression and I won't explain
what that is now, but essentially accidents. You know, half
of what happened on that record was accidents. I was wiring.

(58:45):
I was on my back underneath the console wiring it
while the musicians are coming in for the first session,
you know, and we're just finding channels that work. You know,
mark that one. I'll fix that later. But we just
we get enough channels to record everybody. Okay. It was
like that all the time. It was just gorilla recording

(59:07):
because you know, we had no studio manager. Nobody ever
paid anything to use the studio. It was just we
would contribute to each other's projects and stuff. It was
a little musical collective. It was great.

Speaker 4 (59:22):
And your your label, your label like Bearsville, How were
they were they supported because, I mean, cause a lot
of stuff you were doing, I mean it was really unorthodox.
And you know, a song like I Saw the Light
or you know, Cold Morning, like you know just, which
is some of my favorite songs by you, but like
those are kind of just, you know, kind of easier
to digest. But then on a Wizard of a True

(59:43):
Star you went really kind of heavy.

Speaker 2 (59:47):
But have you ever got John Lennon's reaction to rock
and roll pussy and.

Speaker 3 (59:55):
No, not that particular thing. Uh, And that was about
It wasn't particularly about I don't think it was about
John Lennon, although I can't remember exactly when that press
manufactured feud was, but yeah, they uh uh, some people
at the label really freaked out. My friend Paul Fishkin,

(01:00:15):
who later went on to found Modern Records, he was
running the label at the time, and after something anything
that had like three hit singles on it, I give
him always a True Star, which doesn't which doesn't even
have spaces between the songs.

Speaker 4 (01:00:31):
You know, you know, when that record though I love
this shit man, Oh no.

Speaker 3 (01:00:36):
But then you know he is freaking out. You know,
he's saying, how do I how do I sell this?
You know, this is the lost album. Now. Meanwhile, Albert
Grossman is just tickled pink about the whole thing. You know,
he says, Oh, yet, let's drop the bomb on this one.
We're gonna we're gonna make this a double gatefold die
cut album cover. You know, we're gonna do records in

(01:00:58):
colored vine Well, we did limited run a colored vinyl
is something anything, but we're going to do some colored
vinyl in there. We're going to get Patty Smith to
do a you know, a little poem on a piece
of paper and shove it in there. And a postcard
so we can solicit addresses from people and put their
names in the next package. These were all his ideas.

(01:01:20):
You know, I never had the guts to say, give
me a double you know, give me a gatefold die
cut record, you know, to hold only one record. You know,
it wasn't a double album, but that record also was
the epitome of that problem with too much program on
your vinyl. And I think it's either on that record
or another record. I put something on it, and the

(01:01:43):
company let it pass. But it was really sort of
in violation of general policy. I said, this record, you know,
there's a lot of music on here. I advised that
the very first time you play you record it to
tape and then listen to it from tape after that,
because you'll be lucky if you get through once on

(01:02:04):
the on the turntable.

Speaker 2 (01:02:07):
So with your your album afterwards, just based on the
lyrical content and whatnot. What was I mean by this
point you were an established you know, and an established start. Like,
how how was it handling the success that you were gaining?
Because I guess, you know, you said at the top

(01:02:27):
of the show that you really didn't have any expectations
to become, like, you know, a big star or those things,
and now you're dealing with it, Like what was it
like to deal with it and too do these songs
in concert? And well, even with that, like you're such
a studio wizard, how were you able to kind of

(01:02:49):
execute these ideas on stage by this point?

Speaker 3 (01:02:52):
Well, I had to learn how to sing in front
of an audience. I didn't. I was never a singer.
I always delegated the singing to somebody else. The first
time that I went out on the road was probably
after after Run, after we Got to Get You a Woman,
and I put a band together mostly of musicians called
the Hello People, who were a group of rock and

(01:03:15):
roll mimes. And I couldn't make it twenty minutes into
a set, and in those days a set was like
thirty minutes. You know, I couldn't make it. I couldn't
sing for you know, more than fifteen twenty minutes at
a time. And it took me literally years to develop
my voice to the point that I could sing a

(01:03:36):
whole show. The irony being now that I can sing
all night, it doesn't seem to affect me.

Speaker 5 (01:03:43):
Were there any of your peers that you look to
to kind of did you do it in.

Speaker 6 (01:03:47):
A way like anybody else? Any other artists that you
looked at and like, okay, what peers?

Speaker 3 (01:03:50):
I mean the ones that are still alive. No, at the.

Speaker 6 (01:03:53):
Time when you how to do it his live thing?
What fifteen minutes? That's what I meant, Like.

Speaker 3 (01:03:59):
Oh yeah, well, you know, it's not an uncommon thing.
And what happens is most people see I always had,
I guess I would write aspirationally, I would write to
the very ends of my range when I was in
the studio, because all I have to do is like
hit the note once and then we'll punch it to that,
you know, just punch in every freaking note, you know.

(01:04:20):
But then you have to go out on the road
and sing all those notes in a row. And you know,
I was just wasn't prepared for that. But what a
lot of people will do, They'll just simply they'll compensate,
you know, they'll say, Okay, I'll just lower the key,
or I won't write into that range. You know, I'll
I won't, I won't strange. I won't strain myself that way. Yeah,

(01:04:45):
But I was still always aspirational. I just you know,
there were singers that I admired that I wanted to
sound like, and so I just kept trying to do that.
You know, I was a giant Stevie Wonder fan. You know,
I was always trying to sing like Stevie Wonder, which
is an impossible thing to try and attempt in the
first place. But I got just so much inspiration from

(01:05:07):
his singing. And more importantly, you know, it was a
weird artifact of the way they recorded at Motown and
particularly the way that he is. His voice got recorded,
they put so much compression on his voice because probably
because he's so loud, you know that you could hear
every breath he took. You could hear every breath he
was taking in between the notes. And it taught me

(01:05:31):
how to breathe when you sing. It's more about having
wind than it is about, you know, your throat and
trying to stretch it hard enough to get to those
high notes, you know. So I just I learned a
lot from listening to other people' sing. But that was,
you know, a revelatory moment when I suddenly realized I

(01:05:51):
should just go and go in my car, drive around
for hours, screaming my head off, just drive around screaming
your head off. And after enough of that, I started
to gain the stamina, you know, to be able to
actually hit those notes.

Speaker 1 (01:06:06):
Is it possible for you to listen.

Speaker 2 (01:06:10):
To music by other artists and not get in sort
of the analytical mode of I wonder what mike they used,
or what tubing or what the engineering was, and there's
too much compression, and I would have changed this, And like,
can you just are you able to listen to music

(01:06:30):
without dissecting it as you hear it as an engineer
or as a producer.

Speaker 3 (01:06:35):
Well, like all things, you know, it really depends on
the strength of the performance and the music. And this
is in line with my philosophy as a producer. The
audience at large doesn't give a damn about so called
sound quality. They think when they hear it the first time,

(01:06:56):
they think that's how it's supposed to sound. They never think, oh,
was too much reverb on this, or you know, that's
you know, I can't hear this quite. They may have
some they may have some subjective opinion about it overall,
but they don't know enough about the process to be
able to pinpoint what it is. So for the most part,
if it's a great song, and if it's you know,

(01:07:18):
a vivacious performance, you know, if it's a great performance
of that song, people don't care at all what it
sounds like, you know, which is why I could just
can never get into these high fidelity arguments, you know,
with Neil Young or whoever. You know that you need,
you know, two hundred and fifty six thousand bits of second,
you know, properly hear the sounds. Yeah, use it much,

(01:07:46):
you know, there weren't. I don't know. The most hysterical,
most hysterical part about it is that it's coming from
Neil Young, you know, who did an album of him
standing in front of a stack of marshals making feedback.

Speaker 1 (01:08:01):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:08:03):
So he's talking about, you know, the finer points, the
audio fidelity. But you know, I've always always maintained that
that is better to you know, if an act comes in,
which is one of the reasons why I learned engineering,
because you don't want to waste a lot of time
on that. If an act is ready to make the music.

(01:08:25):
That's my you know, my number one priority before I
go into the studio with someone, I want to hear
the material. I want to know that we're not in
there like pulling our PUDs, you know, over something, or
that we suddenly got to call a halt to the
session because we have to write a bridge, you know.
So I always want to hear the material before we
go into the studio to have the confidence that we're

(01:08:47):
going to be making music in there and not talking
about non musical issues. That's the most important thing. Second
most important thing is, you know, is to get the
artist in a mood to deliver that song you know
to actually, you know, which is another reason why I
like them to have written and ideally have performed the
material before you get into the studio to record it.

(01:09:10):
It makes such a difference because if somebody's reading the
lyrics off of a piece of paper while they're doing it,
they're not really thinking about what it means. They're just
trying to get the words right, you know. And what
you really want to do is convey the meaning of
the words with your singing. So number one, yeah, getting

(01:09:31):
good singing and good songs that really inspire the performers
get the performers to be inspired. Nobody really cares that
much about the sound of it unless you've made it
incredibly terrible.

Speaker 4 (01:09:44):
I had a question about about can we Still be friends?

Speaker 1 (01:09:48):
A lyric? Your lyric?

Speaker 4 (01:09:50):
I don't know if it was a lyrical as an
ad lib. Can we still get together? Sometimes? That's like
one of my favorite part in songing heard like can.

Speaker 1 (01:09:58):
We are we gounk?

Speaker 3 (01:09:59):
And this? Can we do it?

Speaker 1 (01:10:01):
Can we do it? Is it just can we hook
up and we get some coffee? Some shit? I how
did you mean that?

Speaker 3 (01:10:10):
Well? You know, it's it's kind of an open question, Uh, Okay,
you know, it's just you know, the whole whole tenor
of the song is you know, a lot of people
assume it's it's a romantic song. But I made a
decision at a certain point that most people when they
use the word love in a song context, they're more
often talking about either sex or ownership. And I at

(01:10:34):
a certain point decided I wasn't going to use the
word at all. So for many albums, the word love
does not appear.

Speaker 1 (01:10:41):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:10:41):
Then I decided that it's okay to use the word love,
but try and do it in a way that isn't
doesn't make things so specific that people always think it's romantic,
that everything is always about a boy and a girl.
And that's the same way about like can we still
be friends? It's assumed that it's a guy in a
girl breaking up, or a guy and a guy or

(01:11:02):
girl girl whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:11:03):
But.

Speaker 3 (01:11:05):
It isn't necessarily about that. It's like, let's say you
and a friend of yours worked really hard, you know,
to build a company up, and then you realize you
got to leave the company. You know, I can't do
this anymore. I got to move on to something else.
That's you know, it could be that, you know, right right.

Speaker 2 (01:11:26):
No, Yeah, I always uh saw from the standpoint of
maybe you know, a plea for kind of like a
post amicable divorce situation or you know, kind of after
the fire has burnt out.

Speaker 3 (01:11:46):
Yeah, but it is a very it is. Yeah, can
we be civil? It's more like that, you know, it's
like more like the overriding messages, you know, can can
we go on? Because there are because there are situations
that are exactly not the opposite, you know. It's like
there are people that you know you never want to
encounter again ever, you know. So, and I have the

(01:12:09):
I don't know that I've written that song, but I
do have, you know, a philosophical thing about it, you know,
which is, you know, certain people. It's if you'll excuse
the expression, I call it the tar baby syndrome. If
you recall from the Song of the South. Yeah, Thorimus saying,
you know, it's all about Breer Rabbit and brer Fox

(01:12:31):
and beer Bear, and these are you know, antagonists. They're
always at each other, you know, messing with each other
all the time. And so Bret Rabbit finds this big
ball a tar and he says, I'm going to play
a trick on bear Fox and bereer Bear, you know,
because I know that they were going to they mess
with strangers and stuff. So dresses it up and close
and sticks it on a log, and sure enough brea

(01:12:53):
Fox and bereer Bear come around start messing with it.
And what happens is that, you know, all has to
happen is you stick a finger in there and suddenly
you got it on you and you can't get it off.
And then it's suddenly and the next thing you know,
they're trying to get it off and they're just getting
more and more of it more on them. And to
you know, the lesson to me was, you know, there

(01:13:14):
are certain situations and certain people you should know beforehand.
Don't even touch it, you know, don't put a finger
on it, you know, because you will be paying for
it for a long time after that. And so there
have been people in my life which you know, they
fall under that category. I say, don't even you know,
you can imagine, oh, everything is gonna be fine, it

(01:13:35):
won't be like it was before, and then the next
thing you know, it's exactly like it was before because
you changed what they didn't.

Speaker 6 (01:13:43):
They didn't Oh my goodness, Yes, that is universal.

Speaker 1 (01:13:45):
That's a word. That's a word, or at least today.

Speaker 2 (01:13:48):
When when the cover album is made, usually it's a
period where like maybe people will run out of ideas
and you run all the way up until uh to Faithful.
And not to say that you weren't still pushing the
boundaries because we didn't even get started on the Acapella
record yet.

Speaker 1 (01:14:07):
But with Faithful, what was the idea.

Speaker 2 (01:14:12):
Behind covering those to do those covers, because I mean
the idea of doing a cover album or conceptual cover
half album wasn't even practically a thing yet. I mean,
I know that in the sixties to make records, people would,
you know, cover whatever, like a Beatles song or that
sort of thing. But what was your whole ideology behind

(01:14:37):
making that record?

Speaker 3 (01:14:38):
It was actually to demonstrate how much radio had changed
in ten years of Faithful came out in nineteen seventy six,
and every song, pretty much every song that I did
on the cover side of Faithful was on the radio
in nineteen sixty six, okay, And what I wanted to

(01:15:00):
try and do is recreate what it was like to
listen to radio then where you would go from like
the Beatles to Bob Dylan to you know, I didn't
even cover the range of what was happening. But growing
up in Philadelphia, you know, the DJ's highlight, and there
was another DJ. I can't remember who he was, but

(01:15:23):
I mean, the sixties liberated them and they would play
you know, Judy Collins, and then they'd play the Beatles,
and then they played Bill Evans or some other jazz.
And the radio was just really interesting in those days
and enabled you to discover a lot more music than
the kind of formatted radio that eventually happened, Like by

(01:15:47):
nineteen seventy six, everything is syndicated radio. Everything's everybody's playing
the same playlist. So I just wanted to demonstrate, you
know what, how eclectic music could be on the radio.
The other side was just a handful of songs. But
it's funny, a lot of those songs on the original

(01:16:10):
side turned out to be standards that I do all
the time, even to this day.

Speaker 2 (01:16:16):
So my personal favorite album of your canon is The Hermit,
A Big Hollow, of which I well, I know that
you literally did everything by yourself with correct how nerve

(01:16:37):
wracking is that process when you are your own engineer
and your own like, did you have a remote device
for the tape or did you like did you?

Speaker 3 (01:16:50):
Well, the thing is, how did you I did not, unfortunately,
did not have a remote device or the tape. And
my studio. I was using my my personal studio, which
was up in Lake Hill, a little bit past Bearsville.
I had a house, and then I had there was
a little barn on the property, and the barn had

(01:17:12):
a loft in it, and so I enclosed the loft
and made that the control room. But that meant that,
you know, every all the instruments of any size, drums
and such, would have to be downstairs. And so the
most nerve wracking part, of course is recording the drums,
because I would get, you know, like into it a

(01:17:33):
little ways and then screw up and I have to
run up the stairs. I was always very stingy with tape.
You know, you were record over No, no, no, I would.
I would just you know, if I would mess up
a take, I would just go back. And a lot
of people they would buy many reels of tape and

(01:17:54):
they would go through make many takes of everything and
then eventually maybe make a master reel or something. But
I was always making a master reel. I was always
like going for the one take, then I would put
a paper leader in and start recording the rest of
the reel, you know. And so I was just very
stingy with tape and don't really never really made a

(01:18:15):
lot of outtakes. I mean, well, I either got the
drums right or I didn't. You know, It's like it
wasn't the kind of thing eventually, you know, if I
got three quarters of the way through a take, then
I would might stop and pick it up from there
and then do a splice and the tape. But I
always felt that I had to get as lead ast
halfway through it before I would consider a splice. Otherwise,

(01:18:39):
you know, I would just stop rown stairs, rewind the tape,
start put it in and record again, run downstairs and
count it in, start playing again.

Speaker 1 (01:18:49):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:18:49):
It's one of those things like I learned during something anything,
the first time I played the drums, the drums have
to be first, you know. I started out thinking I
could play the piano part and that would give me
some guidance about where I was in the song. But
I could never lock into the piano because the piano
wasn't actually you know, in any particular strict tempo. So

(01:19:12):
I had to teach myself the song in my head
and sing it in my head, the whole song while
I'm playing the drums and click tracks. And because I
couldn't play that, I couldn't play the click track either.
You know, I couldn't lock to a click track. It
would just you know, it would be so obvious when
I was trying to catch up to it, you know.

(01:19:34):
But it also gives it more of a sort of natural,
natural feel. You know, it's amazing. You know, a drummer
can sound like he's totally locked in time, but then
you put a click track, and then you find out
that it's kind of all over the place. You know,
it's feel you don't notice so much, you know, the
exact timing of of what the drums is doing. It's

(01:19:57):
more about the field. It's a little push and pull
happening all the time.

Speaker 2 (01:20:01):
Yeah, I you know, I use a click track, but
oftentimes I have to force myself to figure out how
to purposely sound like I'm not playing to a click trek.

Speaker 3 (01:20:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:20:13):
So you know, even though I consistently hear that pulse
in my head, I have to now program myself to
go behind it, go a little bit ahead of it,
go behind it, go look, you know, just so that
there's there's a human flow. Yeah, yeah, there's a flow
to it. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:20:28):
I discovered that when I try to make a temple
map to go Diving girl. Really, yeah, I discover when
I you know, when you actually try and you know,
the tempo map essentially is you change the actual speed
of the recording as it goes along to match up

(01:20:48):
to some something that may not be an e you
know that might not be following a click track, even
though the song is mostly all the same tempo. It
it moves in and out and subtle little ways which
you don't discover until you try and lock to.

Speaker 2 (01:21:03):
It, right right, So okay, not knowing the history of
it because you know, well there's no excuse to say
I was eleven when it came out, but I purchased
this record, you know, in the last ten to fifteen years.

(01:21:25):
But assuming that the popular tortured ever popular tortured artist effect,
can I assume that your relationship with the label sort
of went sour by that point because usually with the

(01:21:46):
album titles like that, those things happened. But what also
happens is. I would assume that that is your mind
whatever project, and then you mess around and actually have
because I know, being on the drum is uh being

(01:22:08):
the drum all day is on that record.

Speaker 1 (01:22:11):
And so since that's your last record, am I am?

Speaker 2 (01:22:14):
I correct in saying that the relationship soured with Bearsville.

Speaker 3 (01:22:17):
By that point, things were not great with with Bearsville Records.

Speaker 1 (01:22:23):
It just.

Speaker 3 (01:22:25):
Albert Grossman was a peculiar personality and tended to go
hot and cold in some things. And even though he
had a label called Bearsville, he never really promoted anything
on it. He expected Warner Brothers, a distributor, to do everything,

(01:22:49):
so he would be constantly making deals for foreign distribution
and then take all the money and instead of promoting
the records or anything he would build. He would build
a rest or something with it, you know. So he
was very much into land ownership. So almost anything that
you know that brought an income, he would buy something

(01:23:11):
and build something on it. I felt that, you know,
they first of all, weren't taking the whole idea of
records seriously, but also certainly not my records. It's not
as if I thought that, you know, there were a
whole bunch of great hits on my records. You know,
I've never never striven to do that, so I don't

(01:23:34):
force the label, you know, to say to give me
hits or anything like that. But at the same time,
I did expect that they would take the record seriously
because I did have an audience. And in the end,
you know, it was not as if I was doing
a spoof of a record. It was just that I

(01:23:54):
didn't bother to develop any concept behind it. You know,
most of the records that I do have got to
some overarching thing that helps me figure out what fits
in the overall picture.

Speaker 2 (01:24:06):
But history will show that artists that you know, and
this is the case with Shout by the Aisley Brothers,
is the case with Tequila, is the case for even
La Bamba, Like sometimes artists will Well, what I'm trying
to lead to is that were you shacked at all?

Speaker 1 (01:24:24):
At how it became the sports world took to the
Benga the trum all day.

Speaker 3 (01:24:29):
And it was a funny, weird kind of thing that
happened with that. I think it started with the sports,
but I'm not exactly sure, and I believe it was
first like hockey games that they started playing it. Then
two football teams, the Packers and what was then the

(01:24:51):
Saint Louis Rams, started using it as their score celebration
song because everybody seemed to know it for some reason.
But it was never a hit single. In fact, it
was never released as a single. It was a B
side I Think of Something, and it was never in
a technical sense written by me. It was a song

(01:25:14):
that I dreamed. I was like asleep, I was totally asleep,
and this song is, you know, playing in my sleep.
I have no idea what it means or why I
should care, but I just immediately went down to the
studio and recorded everything that I remembered from it and
added words. But you know, the bang, the drump thing

(01:25:35):
was all there. It was all complete, you know. You know,
all I had to do was write it down. Sometimes
it's not the first time that's happened. I've had other
songs that have just come to me when I'm asleep,
completely formed, and then I have to go figure out
how to remember and capture that. But it was like

(01:25:56):
some mystical being wrote that for me and said, you're
not going to understand now why you're doing this, but
years and years from now, it's going to make a
whole lot more sense, right, And then and then it
actually happened. I mean, people started, aside from you know,

(01:26:18):
the public usage of the song, they started people started thinking, oh,
this is a great party theme to use for our
movie trailer or party theme to use for our you know,
advertising something. And they eventually peaked with carnival cruise lines.
I'm getting six figures, big six figures a year just

(01:26:40):
for them to use that song, right, and I would
still be getting it except they started sinking all those
boats decided to change their edge.

Speaker 1 (01:26:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:26:52):
I was going to say that that song is the
sound of a kid, a kid's brain and he gets
extra chicken fingers on his.

Speaker 3 (01:27:01):
Plate, extra chicken fingers.

Speaker 2 (01:27:08):
Yeah, that's the sound of a ten year old just
in this happy place.

Speaker 4 (01:27:12):
You made a record called Arena and it has the
song on it called Courage that I just really love.
I just think it just beautiful changes, just a just
a really great song. I was curious to know was
Arena Was that you kind of mocking the arena rock
kind of thing. Was it like a parody or was

(01:27:34):
it a sincere tent? Because I just I mean, I
love the record, but I know, just from listening to
your music, kind of your sense of humor stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:27:41):
So I was like, is this him kind.

Speaker 3 (01:27:43):
Of No, it was, you know, I was pretty serious
about it. It was the record was essentially me reacting
to the fact that I had not played enough guitar
the last time, you know, the first time I had
that's to reaction was when I was sometime around something anything,

(01:28:04):
and I'm starting to write all my songs on the piano,
less and less on the guitar, and I'm playing less
and less guitar, and so I said, well, how can
I compensate for this? So I started Utopia specifically as
a project for me to play guitar. So I don't
play any keyboards and any Utopia records, I play only
guitar on Utopia records. Essentially, around the period of Arena,

(01:28:29):
I started to get the same feeling. You know, I
spent a lot of my youth trying to learn how
to play this thing, you know, and now I'm just
kind of I hardly pick it up anymore. So I
decided to decided to do something that would basically be
all guitar written, you know, everything would be written on
guitars and it would be basically mostly guitars, occasional keyboards

(01:28:53):
and other sounds, and to really explore, you know, what
contemporary heavy guitar music could be like. And when we
found a distributor for it, they said, okay, well you're
so into playing the guitar, We just acquired the Robert
Johnson's publishing catalog and we want you to do a
cover record of Robert Johnson's song. So I got like

(01:29:16):
a double dose of guitar there. I did a record
called Todd Rungrens, Johnson and Uh and did nothing but
Robert Johnson songs on it in the sort of sixties
white English band style, you know, where you wouldn't recognize
it as a Robert Johnson song, you know, because it's

(01:29:37):
really just there to play guitar solos on.

Speaker 7 (01:29:41):
That's that's when he first came on the show, played
with the roots for that to promote that record, Johnson
the Johnson.

Speaker 2 (01:29:47):
Yeah, like literally I got to ask about a cappella
because that's your thing, is your I mean, there's a
bunch of creative zenas, but of of a career of
creative zeneans, you leave the label, you make this album
in eighty five, and you're basically using the tools that

(01:30:11):
rappers will use.

Speaker 1 (01:30:12):
I mean, were you one of the first people to
use an.

Speaker 3 (01:30:16):
EMU emulator Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:30:18):
Yeah, yeah, later and an EMU uh synthesizer and all
these things.

Speaker 2 (01:30:23):
First of all, going into the eighties, what was your
thought process. Did you feel as though, like, Wow, the
world's my oyster now or were you worried.

Speaker 3 (01:30:33):
Or things were still pretty good for me? Utopia was
still by nineteen eighty we were still playing you know, arenas,
and mostly on the strength of our shows and word
of mouth, not on kind of like huge record sales.
But we would do spectacular things, you know, flamethrowers and

(01:30:54):
falling off the pyramids and that sort of thing. So
so Utopia was still pretty successful and I was doing okay,
and there were still productions to be done. So you know,
it wasn't like what happened at the end of the
nineties and what has happened ever since in that first
of all the majors have you know, kind of fallen apart.

(01:31:16):
So the kind of funding structure for records changed a
lot because I was making my living principally on advances
for producing other people's records and so that as yeah,
that all started to like fall apart throughout the nineties
and then in the two thousands, you know, everything got different.

(01:31:37):
You know, everything got bifurcated. You either produce your own
records in your bedroom, or you have five producers on
one song, like Katy Berry or something like that. You know,
six songwriters and four producers, you know, because you want
it to be perfect, I guess. But so you know,

(01:31:58):
nowadays I do hardly any production at all. There's no
demand for it. But yeah, the uh, the guitar, I
miss it. So but anyway, back to back to acappella.
I had these I had these concepts that I carry
around sometimes, you know, every once in a while to

(01:32:20):
get to one and follow up on it. And the
idea of doing an a cappella record or a record
where all the sound sources were from the voice or
the body. What's a concept that I had had for
a while. It has certainly has its challenges, but there was,
as you mentioned, some new tools like samplers and things,

(01:32:40):
so I could do that beatbox stuff that eventually became
so popular, you know, in other words, overblowing a microphone,
you know, to make a snare, drum or a bass
drum or something like that. I would do the noise
into a sampler and then have there was no MIDI
yet tying everything together, so I'd have to sort of
like manually play the drum part, you know, on the

(01:33:00):
keys all the way through the song. And that's why
the time is kind of like a little funny in
some places, because I'm really just playing the keyboard. There's
no sequence or anything, right. And then you know that
with that sampling capability, I could do, you know, things like,
you know, make an instrument out of my voice and
play chords with it, something that you couldn't do before.

(01:33:24):
Uh So the technology was an enabler. The technology evolved
to the point that I could do more than just
simply singing with myself. I could create a broader palalette
of sounds and make the whole thing more interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:33:38):
Man, we got to talk about that.

Speaker 4 (01:33:39):
Out of Hell meant I totally forgot about that, right,
one of the biggest selling albums, Like, ever, how did
you meet?

Speaker 1 (01:33:48):
How did y'all hook up?

Speaker 3 (01:33:50):
Well, there there are two people involved in meat Loaf,
or there were two people involved in that was Jim Steinman,
who essentially wrote all the material and meet Loaf, who
was the performer. And when they approached me, they had
auditioned for like every producer in the business, and every
producer in the business. I told them I don't hear

(01:34:11):
it or whatever, which is you know, not that strange
because the songs were all really long. You know, they
didn't have traditional forms. You know, Steime intended to write
backwards sometimes from certain things, like he would leave big
parts of the songs unfinished, but say to me, okay,

(01:34:35):
I would like a giant choir to sing for the
next thirty six bars, and then I'd have to come
up with something for it. You know, he wouldn't write anything.
I just have to come up with some thing that
played off the themes that he had already done. So
I go down to a rehearsal studio in New York
City to see them. I knew who Meatloaf was, I

(01:34:55):
didn't know who Steiman was. I'd seen Meatloaf Rocky horror
Show on Broadway, so I was aware of the fact that, well,
I wasn't going to be surprised about how fat he was.
Put it that way, and they essentially performed for me
meat Loaf, Stimon on the piano and two background singers,

(01:35:15):
Rory Dodd and Ellen Foley, and they performed essentially all
about Out of Hell with just the four of.

Speaker 1 (01:35:21):
Them the entire album in front of you.

Speaker 3 (01:35:24):
Well, not everything on the album, but you know, like
good percentage of the album.

Speaker 1 (01:35:27):
You know. He's like a moment with Kanye West.

Speaker 10 (01:35:30):
And.

Speaker 3 (01:35:34):
I'm listening to this and saying, I want to do
this record, and the reason why I want to do
it is because it's a spoof of Bruce Springsteen. Bruce
Springsteen was like the biggest thing. He was on the
cover of Time magazine, the Savior of rock and roll,
you know, And to me, it's just retro music. He's
you know, it's music out of the fifties. He's singing
about motorcycles and leather jackets and that's what it junk,

(01:35:57):
you know, And that's exactly what Meatloaf is singing about,
you know. So I thought, this is great. I'm going
to do a spoof of Bruce Springsteen and this is
going to be it. And I never told them that
that's what I was thinking. So they took it. They
took it totally seriously the whole time, you know, And
and I was like, yes, yes, this is so Springsteen.

Speaker 1 (01:36:23):
Old.

Speaker 7 (01:36:23):
I got to stop right here. So there's actually members
of the EA Street Band on that record.

Speaker 1 (01:36:29):
So were they.

Speaker 3 (01:36:30):
Yes, there are you know were they were.

Speaker 1 (01:36:31):
They in on the joker? You just called them up.

Speaker 3 (01:36:34):
Like, no, they were not in on the joke. And
Stein in the whole time would claim that Bruce Springsteen
had no influence on him at all, even though he
wanted he wanted Max and he wanted Roy from the
East Street Band to play on the record, but otherwise,
no influence whatever. And so you know that's why it

(01:36:54):
has all of that. You know, it's got Springsteen's drummer in,
Springsteen's piano player on it, so it sounds like Springsteen.
And after the record was finished, well, the first thing
that happened was when I agreed to do it, he
had a label obviously, because I'm not gonna go into
the studio with somebody who can't pay for the studio

(01:37:14):
I we're about to go into. It's like the day
before we're about to go in, we've been rehearsing up
in Bearsville. So because we want to do the album live,
and most everything on the album is live, not the vocals,
but all of the playing and meet Love comes up
to me and he says, I want to get off
my label. I don't think they understand me and whatever.
I said, Well, I'm not your manager. I can't tell

(01:37:36):
you what to do. But you know that's going to
that's kind of a sticky situation. We're going into the
studio tomorrow. So essentially, I go to Bearsvielle and say, well,
you know, if you will underwrite the cost of making
this record and put it on my tab, you'll have
write a first refusal when it's done. So we finished
the record and Bearsville doesn't want it, and neither does

(01:37:56):
Warner Brothers, who's distributing Bearsville, and they spend the next
maybe four to six months looking for somebody to release
the record. Nobody wants this freaking record, and they find
a guy, a guy who runs like a label all
by himself. It's called Cleveland International, subsidiary of like Epic Records.

(01:38:17):
His name was Steve Popovich. He had one other artist
for some reason he believed in the record, and so
took the record on. They put out a single, Nothing Happened,
put out another single, Nothing Happened, put out third single,
and finally something started to happen, and that was because
MTV came out the same time. Paradise by the Dashboard

(01:38:38):
Light got played like once an hour because they didn't
have enough music videos to fill up, you know, all
the time on MTV, So they're playing Paradise by the
Dashboard Light once an hour, just like a regular DJ
would do, like put on Dark Side of the Moon
and go up to the roof and get high. But
you know, it's like seven and a half minutes long,

(01:39:01):
and he's touring relentlessly. Meet Love was just touring his
ass off, and the fact that Steve Popovich just believed
so much in the record, you know, and wouldn't give
up on it like a typical record executive, that it
finally broke, and once it broke, it you know, went
nuclear out of here, like a bad at of hand.

Speaker 1 (01:39:25):
What was it? What was it like to record Phil Rizzuto?

Speaker 3 (01:39:30):
I didn't you know, I didn't know much about Phil
Rizzuto except for the Money Store, But you know, I
was not a baseball fan at that point and had
no idea of his career accomplishments.

Speaker 7 (01:39:40):
That he's the guy who's sitting on the unpires by
the dashboard light, who's doing the baseball call?

Speaker 3 (01:39:45):
Well, he would essentially be the Yankees color commentator or
something like that. You know, so people who were in
the New York area and listen to, you know, Yankees
games would be familiar with him.

Speaker 1 (01:39:56):
But I was not.

Speaker 3 (01:39:58):
But Steinman said, oh, hey, you know, we're going to
get this guy to just read this thing, and we're
gonna give him five thousand dollars. And I'm like, what
can't anybody read it? Could when somebody else read it,
you know, for like five hundred dollars whatever.

Speaker 7 (01:40:13):
So he was from New York, Like, how did Jim Stee.

Speaker 3 (01:40:15):
Was from New York? He had no idea what this
was about. You know, he just read but he read it,
read it into a microphone, and took his money and left.
And I think years later he found out the context
of it and was very upset from what I heard.

Speaker 2 (01:40:28):
Yeah, I was gonna say, what happens when the cat
was out the bag?

Speaker 1 (01:40:32):
And like, at what point did they realize, Oh, we've
been had or what about I've gotten mad?

Speaker 2 (01:40:39):
Because it's also one of the it's the one of
the it's the third biggest selling album of all time.

Speaker 3 (01:40:43):
So yeah, it's yeah, it's up to here, around forty
million copies or something like that, and it's you know,
what do they care? It worked right? If I hadn't
thought that they would have no producer at all?

Speaker 1 (01:41:00):
How how long was it until they caught on that?

Speaker 3 (01:41:04):
Wait a minute, Well, I probably said it sometime, if
you know, once somebody interviewed me about it, I probably
mentioned it.

Speaker 1 (01:41:13):
You know, were you approached about producing that? Ada held too?

Speaker 3 (01:41:17):
I did produce bad out of hell?

Speaker 1 (01:41:18):
Oh shit, I didn't realize that.

Speaker 3 (01:41:20):
Yes we did. We made the whole recording, and then
we went in to get his vocals down, and meet
Love suddenly went and said, there's something wrong with my voice.
I can't say. He'd been like singing too hard and
taking too much cocaine or whatever or something like that
and permanently screwed his voice up, which you know, lopped
a couple of notes off the top of his registered

(01:41:42):
and made them sound really weird. And the way that
Steinman would write was, at least the way he wrote
the first record was what's the highest note you can hit?
Meat Love? Okay, all write everything from there down, you know,
In other words, hit that note. You're going to hit
it a long time. I bout it, you know, and

(01:42:03):
so he wrote. When he got to the second album,
he did the same thing. He assumed Meet Looaf could
hit all those notes, and he wrote all those notes
into it, and then we get in to get Meatloaf
to sing it, and he can't hit those notes. And
meet Loaf is like, so he's nearly suicidal at this
point and said, I can't finish this record, you know,
I don't care what you do with it. And so
Steinman sang the record and it became Jim Steinman's album.

(01:42:25):
It was called Bad for Good and it was it's
got Jim Steinman with I don't know if you know
who Corbin is, but he was a comic book illustrator,
airbrush artist, you know. And he did the first cover,
which was, you know, the demon flying out of Hell
on a motorcycle. He also did the second cover, which

(01:42:47):
was Jim Steinman's head on top of what looks like
Arnold Schwarzenegger's body with the semi naked girl like hanging
onto his legs.

Speaker 1 (01:42:59):
He's googling.

Speaker 3 (01:43:01):
The hell yeah yeah, And that album went exactly no place,
even though it was even though it was all kind
of like the same stuff, you know.

Speaker 4 (01:43:12):
Wow, But I was always curious to know how you
and Dame Funk got together. Dang Funk is as buddy
of mine, and uh he just always had nothing but
great things to say about working with you.

Speaker 1 (01:43:25):
How did y'all hook up?

Speaker 3 (01:43:27):
I can't remember how I exactly found out that he
was a fan. It was when I was doing my
first collab, you know, and I thought, yeah, let's get
some funkiness thing, and uh so I contacted him and
we just kind of, you know, struck up a relationship.
And uh whenever I'm in LA I try and get
out to his DJ gigs and uh.

Speaker 1 (01:43:50):
Yeah, next one of my favorite joints. I love that.

Speaker 3 (01:43:53):
Yeah, that was you know, it was a fun song.
He just you know, he sent me what essentially is
the chord changes and stuff like that and built a
song around it. It was easy. You know, a lot
of these things can be really challenging, you know, to
figure out, you know, what'll work for two artists who
are just coming together cold. But it it was pretty easy.

Speaker 4 (01:44:17):
I was gonna say, was that with your collapsed? Was
that kind of the same thing with you and Trent?

Speaker 1 (01:44:23):
Trent Resident. How did that?

Speaker 3 (01:44:24):
Well, I had actually done a remix for Trent a
couple of years ago, so I had worked with Trent
before that, and and so I thought, this is, you know,
a big, great way to sort of balance things out,
to get him to contribute to my record. And it's amazing.
He you know, he and his partner Atticus Ross, they
do a lot of film and TV work, and so

(01:44:47):
he they'll just go into the studio and catalog a
bunch of ideas. So he sent me like, you know,
like twenty two like musical ideas, you know, to pick one,
you know, and it was that was the biggest challenge,
you know, which one could I focus on? You know?
I actually was sort of for a while. I was
working on two of them at once, and decided I

(01:45:08):
should probably just focus on on the one that we finished.

Speaker 2 (01:45:12):
And not much as is said about your work also
in like music video production, like what made you even
want to get involved in like forms of media outside
of recording music.

Speaker 3 (01:45:26):
Well, when I was living alone in New York City
in the early seventies, one of my principal forms of
one of my favorite shows that I watched TV because
I didn't watch a lot of TV. I would, you know,
make music or I would go out. But you know
that's in the old days when there was still principally
just three or four TV stations, and you know, a

(01:45:48):
lot of it is just too vanilla, you know. So,
But there was some couple of shows on public television.
One of them was called Live from the and the
Egg Factory, and another one was a VT Videotape Review,
and there was a movement to use video in more

(01:46:10):
artistic ways at the time. It was started by a
guy named Nam June Pike, Korean guy, and he would
do things like hold magnets up to the TV and
warp the picture and things like that, and eventually they
would develop devices that would do that for shows like
Electric Company in Sesame Street. But there were a lot

(01:46:33):
of experimentalists and video people doing experimental video, and I
was very much into that. I wanted to do that,
so I started buying video synthesizers and built myself a
little video studio and started taking music that I liked
and putting visualizations to it. And it wasn't pop songs.
It was like to Meeta's songs from like to Meeta's

(01:46:55):
snowflakes are dancing, you know, or you know, classical music,
you know, reveil a song about a clown. I can't
remember the Spanish title of it, but classical music and
stuff like that, and just do weird visualizations to it.
And I thought this could be you know, legitimate art
form and maybe someday, you know, be a real format entertainment.

(01:47:19):
And so through the years, I just kept accumulating video
equipment until like I got my check first check from
meat Loaf, after you know, like almost a year of
them wrangling trying to get a label, finally getting a
label and then negotiating you know, my participation and stuff.
I remember being in the office and getting handed a

(01:47:42):
check for seven hundred and thirty thousand dollars. Was the
first check I got for meat Loaf for Royal Teeth.
You know, this was a project that I thought was
just going to be a laugh, you know, and you
know maybe yeah, and when I you know, and I
didn't get my advance when I had to get Bearsville
to finance the record like I usually would have done,

(01:48:03):
so I did the record almost for nothing, and suddenly,
you know, it's the biggest paycheck I ever got. Probably
the biggest paycheck I ever got since because it had
accumulated so much royalties without being disbursed. So I took
that check and I bought video equipment with it and
built a real video studio, and we started doing what

(01:48:24):
it would be more recognizable as music videos, you know,
videos to pop songs and stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:48:32):
There's one thing I forgot to ask, and we're going
to wrack this up, but could you please explain how
you got involved in producing the New York Dolls debut album.

Speaker 3 (01:48:44):
It was an interesting time in New York. New York
was never known to have a sound. New York City
didn't have a sound. There was the Long Island sound,
which was very R and B influenced, but New York
City wasn't to have a sound. And suddenly all of
these bands started forming, mostly of people who didn't know

(01:49:08):
how to play that well. So it was kind of
almost like a Warhol Andy Warhol inspired, you know, gorilla
art movement, and a lot of it was some of
it was good and tergening, a lot of it was
just crap, you know. But I was about to leave
New York City and move upstate permanently. I still kept

(01:49:32):
a place in the city. But I knew that I
was leaving, and I thought, before I leave, maybe I'll
pick one of these bands from this new scene and
produce a record for them, you know, produce the New
York sound, and the band that seemed to have the
biggest following and have it the most together, I guess,

(01:49:54):
in a euphemistic way of speaking, was the New York Dolls.
So it was pretty easy for me to just approach
them and say, you want me to make a record
with you. And they had by then gotten a record
deal with Mercury, and I was probably as hot as
I've ever been as a producer, so they figured, yeah,

(01:50:14):
you guys better do this. It was like managing a carnival,
you know. The band had so many, so many hanger ons,
and you know, groupies and press guys. The press loved
the band because they played a level of music that
rock writers could imagine playing themselves, you know, because it required.

Speaker 1 (01:50:37):
Yeah that's a quote for you, ass man.

Speaker 3 (01:50:40):
Yeah, because it was so unchallenged. They could understand it
really well. So you know that. Then rock critics started
forming their own bands after that. But yeah, we somehow
managed to get through the record without anybody dying because
soon after we finished the record, they started dying. And yeah,

(01:51:02):
it didn't really do anything when they released it. I
don't think there was any precedent for, you know, how
to sell this kind of sloppy and what was mostly
Rolling Stones inspired early Rolling Stones inspired. Most people say, oh,
they're a punk rock band, but they were really emulating
The Stones during their drag period, you know, Mother's Little

(01:51:25):
Helper and that sort of thing. That's why they all
dressed up and kind of like semi drag. The lead singer,
David thought he was Yeah, David Johansson kind of thought
he was Mick Jagger, you know, even though he sounded
like an angry Louis Prima.

Speaker 2 (01:51:40):
One of the weirdest moments in my career was we
opened for Reunited New York Dolls at like a one
of those music festivals.

Speaker 1 (01:51:50):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:51:52):
Here's the thing though, when I saw David backstage, I
was like, oh shit, it's Buster Point Dexter exactly. I
had no clue, had no clue that Buster Point Dexter
was in the New York Dolls. And then they opened

(01:52:12):
up the show with you know, like I'm one of
the biggest kids in the hall, fans of All Time.
So they opened up with that. So I was like, wait,
like my whole mind was I had no clue.

Speaker 5 (01:52:26):
You just enlightened, dummy, that the New York Dolls sang
the same song for Kids in the Hall that you
just enlightened.

Speaker 1 (01:52:31):
Okay, thank you, Yes, exactly. Wow, I just learned that myself.
I didn't know.

Speaker 2 (01:52:35):
Yeah, the theme the Kids in the Hall is New
York Dolls. But you know the thing is that I
mostly knew of New York Dolls via all the critical
claim they were getting. You know, Robert Christa, Gals, you know,
year enlisted all that stuff and Rolling Stones five hundred
of all Time, you know, And I know that people
cite them for like at least uh them as a

(01:52:57):
group and how groundbreaking they were. I just never heard
them or anything or just knew the members or any
of that stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:53:04):
And so well, essentially they were the they were the
inspiration for the sex Pistols, and that's why people referred
to them as a punk band, even though nobody used
that term in the era. When you know, when we
did the The New York Dolls record, it was, you know,
if it was anything, it was the New York sound.
But when John Lydon heard the record, the accessibility of it,

(01:53:28):
I guess inspired him and the nasty attitude and everything
about it, and it was you know, it was the
inspiration for the Sex Pistols essentially, and that's how they
got rolled into the whole punk rock thing kind of
by backwards inclusion into those.

Speaker 1 (01:53:44):
Malcolm McLaurin ever reached out to you to ask you
for tips.

Speaker 3 (01:53:47):
Or I don't know that. I I may have run
into him in London at one point in like the
in the earlier mid seventies, but I not really had
much content tech with him. Uh, you know, his his
attitude about this is kind of you know, it is
that punk rock thing. You know, it's like, let's do

(01:54:09):
some care'll that'll just get people all wound up, you
know the thing. And you know, as a record producer,
I had longer goals than that.

Speaker 7 (01:54:19):
Okay, I see, So of all of all your outside productions,
not including your records or Utopia's records, but records that
you produced, like some We've mentioned some We have an XTC, Badfinger,
Holland Oates, Jule Shecher, Patti Smith, just to name a few.
Which of which of the outside production projects do you

(01:54:39):
think was the most rewarding in the sense that you
learn the most on that project, whether it was technicals,
something you learned technically, or something about how to be
a great producer or an effective producer.

Speaker 3 (01:54:51):
Well, I, you know, I tend to cite skylarking as
as something. You know, I'm not a person that feels
like a lot of pride, because that's you know, there's
not much to be gained out of it. You know,
I try and be sanguine about the things in the
past and concentrate on the future, and so I don't

(01:55:12):
think of things with pride except for my kids. It
was an incredible slog to finish the record because I
was getting so much resistance from certain band members. But
I also can say that, you know, they never appreciated
what was going on because Andy went home and before

(01:55:36):
I'd even delivered the record, he was telling people in
the press, who was the worst record they ever made?
Because he was imprinting his feelings about the experience, and
the reason why the experience was not pleasant for him
was because I took it over. You know, I was
a fan of the band. I was a big fan,

(01:55:57):
and so I knew about their records. I knew about
the evolution their records, and I knew about what was
happening in terms of the making of the records. And
when the label approached me, you know that they had
no the band was lost, and the label said, you
have to have a real producer. Now, you know, we
can't let Andy take over this project and turn it

(01:56:18):
into an Andy Vanity project again because the records aren't
selling like they used to. And so I guess the
one of the A and our guys said, you know, no,
go with to run and he's notorious for taking control
of these things, you know, and so so they acquiesced,
you know, to that, and they came to record up

(01:56:41):
in Lake Hill where I was in my studio, as
they had never recorded outside of a British studio before,
and we did, you know, like the basics in UH
up in Lake Hill, and then we went to San Francisco,
UH laid on drums and other instruments and things like that,
then finished up the vocals back in in lake Hill.

(01:57:03):
During the course of the record, the bass player quit
the band UH and Andy threatened to cleave my head
into with an axe.

Speaker 1 (01:57:12):
UH.

Speaker 3 (01:57:13):
But so after after old experience, right, Yeah, that's experience.
But the reason why I look at it, as you know,
as being maybe more rewarding than other records is that
record saved their career, that they got a hit record
off of it, and they continue to record, you know,

(01:57:34):
album after album with no hit records after that because.

Speaker 1 (01:57:37):
The acknowledged that.

Speaker 3 (01:57:38):
Now they ultimately acknowledged it.

Speaker 2 (01:57:41):
Yes, I want to let you in on something that
that record also saved someone else's career.

Speaker 3 (01:57:50):
H Whose is that?

Speaker 1 (01:57:52):
All right?

Speaker 2 (01:57:53):
This is the this is the weirdest is the weirdest
twist to this story right here? Skylarking, Sonic Sunspot and
Oranges and Lemons.

Speaker 3 (01:58:06):
Oranges and Lemons.

Speaker 1 (01:58:07):
Yeah, the three albums.

Speaker 2 (01:58:09):
Now, you know, we at the Roots had a hustle
because we were on Geffen Records as well, and we
were absolutely starving between nineteen ninety three and nineteen ninety six,
and an instant hustle would be to go visit Geffen

(01:58:30):
Records on a Thursday. Somehow created diversion or you know,
you would ask the receptionist to go, like, oh, can
we get orange juice, apple juice or water? And in
those twenty seconds that she walks away from her desk
to go to.

Speaker 1 (01:58:48):
The kitchen. Three roots would then ran sat the.

Speaker 3 (01:58:52):
Entire record library.

Speaker 1 (01:58:55):
Yeah, there was a.

Speaker 2 (01:58:56):
CD closet right behind her, of which we learned early
that the only product that used record stores were interested
in buying these records from from us was the Ecstasy records.
You know, at first we were like, all right, all
these guns and Roses records, all these Nirvana records or whatever,
and we couldn't give them away. But somehow every cool

(01:59:19):
used record store in the village only took the Ecstasy records.

Speaker 1 (01:59:25):
So it just it came weekly said like, to make.

Speaker 10 (01:59:28):
It, yeah, no, but to make a quick two hundred bucks,
you take all the skylarkings, all the suns on spots,
and all the oranges and lemons and just go to every.

Speaker 3 (01:59:41):
Records store in the stratosphere too, right.

Speaker 1 (01:59:45):
Yes, and then that's how I'd have money for the week.

Speaker 3 (01:59:48):
So thank you. Hi.

Speaker 5 (01:59:51):
Can I ask before because I know we're about to
wrap up, but can you please tell us about what
a virtual talk show is?

Speaker 6 (01:59:57):
And Todd's honest truth, like, what is a what are
you doing over here in Hawaii?

Speaker 3 (02:00:02):
There's been a lot of talk you know, people doing
you know, virtual things of virtual tours and stuff like that,
and I would have I would be on a virtual
tour now if if our promoters had led me, I
was totally prepared to. You know, my tour was supposed
to start May first and run to the middle of
this month. Fact, it would be virtual store. Yeah. In

(02:00:23):
other words, we would rehearse the band and do the
show production and everything like we would normally do, but
then find a venue in San Francisco where we'd be
rehearsing and do a live broadcast to every city on
the night that we would have been there. So, in
other words, I would have done twenty eight shows, but

(02:00:44):
all from the same venue, going to you know, narrow
cast to all the people who had bought tickets to
the show.

Speaker 6 (02:00:50):
Well, each show still be different too.

Speaker 3 (02:00:52):
Well, it would be different because it'd be a different show,
you know, I mean the show is the same show
in that well, they are different because on alternating nights
we would do either Side Ay or Side be Able
Wizard a True Star as well as the rest of
the show. You know, I've been wondering what else I
can do besides podcasts and things like that, and our

(02:01:14):
merch company has since they can't go out on the
road and sell merch. Anymore, set up this whole sort
of video broadcasting paradigm thing, pay per view thing, so
that fans can participate in live events, video events with
various people. I think Melissa Etherrich has done one. Most

(02:01:35):
of the other ones I don't recognize the names. There's
a Fab four thing, not the Fab Foe, of course,
but a Fab four Beatle tribute thing. And they said,
those things sell like people are really, you know, tired
of being at home, so they want some kind of entertainment.
So I had an idea for something where I would
just spiel, you know, I would just get in front

(02:01:57):
of a camera and start talking about something really commonplace
but easily misunderstood, like money or something like that. But
money is liquefied labor. That's the that's the bottom line.
But in any case, we pitched that idea and they said, okay, well,

(02:02:18):
let's do something a little bit more than that. So
the show is going to be me hosting live but
most of the show will be things that I recorded
already so that they can be so that I can
make sure that they're like high quality, because a lot
of the live events, you know, they're you know, they
lack scripting. They just they don't have energy to them,
you know, because you're not getting immediate feedback from the

(02:02:41):
audience like you usually do. So it's, you know, a
fine line whether it's actually qualifies as entertainment. And so
I want to you know, hedge my bets and do
a lot of different sort of video productions that I
will then host and do Q and as in between
and not you know, him to play an hour's worth

(02:03:02):
of acoustic material from my couch. You know it's too
much of that.

Speaker 2 (02:03:08):
Yeah, I'm taking notes. I am taking notes. Okay, Todd,
We thank you nice. We did it today.

Speaker 1 (02:03:21):
We thank you so much for.

Speaker 3 (02:03:24):
It was a major motion picture.

Speaker 2 (02:03:27):
No, we thank you for seeing your story with us.
And you know we're we're all massive fans and you know.

Speaker 3 (02:03:32):
We've been I kind of miss you, guys. I would
have been in New York and well weeks ago for
right for all for for about a week, so you
know it could have stopped.

Speaker 1 (02:03:43):
By and well this will this mess will be over
for you will, all right.

Speaker 2 (02:03:55):
We thank you for sharing your story with us and
we appreciate it. On behalf of Layah and Sugar Steve
and font Ticolo and the Great Todd run Grin, Relax, Relax,
A lot of question anyway, YO, this Quest Love and
we thank you guys, and we'll see you in the
next go round of Quest Love Supreme.

Speaker 1 (02:04:17):
Thank you, m.

Speaker 4 (02:04:28):
M.

Speaker 1 (02:04:30):
Quest Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (02:04:36):
For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Laiya St. Clair

Questlove

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Questlove Supreme: Todd Rundgren