Dave Dederer

Dave Dederer was the guitarist in the Presidents of the United States of America. It's the thirtieth anniversary of their major label debut. Hear the story of how an indie band made its own record, got signed by a major, had huge hits and then broke up.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Such Podcast.
My guest today is Dave dieterwer of the President of
the United States of America. Dave, it's a thirty at
the anniversary of your debut album. What do you have planned?

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Not as much as I'd like. We don't play live anymore,
and we have some nice offers and such, but I
don't know how much we'll get up to, and we've
always been I guess you'd have to say laissez faire,
or you could call it punk rock or you know,
pickywords wisely, but we just let the music speak for
itself and hope people respond well. So we don't have

(00:49):
any kind of blitz scheduled, just try to try to
do a few things here and there like this. This
seemed like a good excuse to talk to you if
nothing else.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
Okay, there are two other members in the original band.
How do all of you get along?

Speaker 2 (01:04):
We get along unbelievably well. Actually, So there's my bandmates
are Chris Blue, who's the bald guy and the singer,
a primary singer, and then Jason Finn, the drummer. Chris
and I have known each other since middle school. And
Jason and I have known each other since we met
at a urinal at a gig at Seattle University in

(01:25):
about nineteen eighty four and I asked him to be
in another band I had at the time, and somehow,
over the course of thirty plus years of playing together,
we've gotten along famously. We don't really hang out with
each other a lot outside of playing music, but we
have this symbiosis whatever when we get together in a

(01:48):
room with instruments, and then we'll get into it, I'm sure,
but we have these incredibly lucky to have sort of
complimentary musical talents and also complimentary, for lack of a
better way to say it, business or professional skills and
interests that allowed the thing to work really well and

(02:08):
still work well thirty years later.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yeah, but didn't you stop playing with the band a
little over a decade ago?

Speaker 2 (02:14):
I stopped our heyday was really ninety three to about
ninety eight, and then Chris quit as he was starting
his young family, and then at my instigation really around
three we started up again. That was when we got
the rights back to all the rights back to the
masters to our debut record, our hit record, and it

(02:36):
was a good impetus to get going again. And for
a few years at that time, I'd gone back into
proper white collar work as a public affairs account executive,
and I had two young daughters and you know, wife
and a big house, and I was trying to do
all of it. For about two years, I was working

(02:58):
full time, being a dad, being a husband, and then
trying to fly out two to four weekends a month
to play, you know, one to three gigs a weekend.
And after about two years of the band being back together,
maybe in six I just said I never actually quit.
Actually I said I needed to take a break for
six months. And a mutual friend of ours, Andrew mckaig,

(03:18):
lovely guy and great musician, he filled in. And then
they kept going for a number of years, touring without me.
But yet we all the three of us, kept running
the business and managing our managing the records we own,
and you know, so the whole thing kept rolling. I
just couldn't do it.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
Okay, when you reform the group and you're flying out
two or three weekends, is that more of the vanity
project or you're making any money?

Speaker 2 (03:46):
We were making money, and the challenge is, as you know,
as a as a musical artist unless you're you know,
Trans Siberian Orchestra or somebody in the Wiggles or somebody
who figures out how to clone yourself. Well, there's only
one of you, and you can only be in one
place at a time. So the challenge was, is this

(04:08):
what I want to hang my hat on for the
rest of my working life? Is you know, maybe playing
sixty to eighty shows a year and being gone two
hundred days a year with kids, And I didn't want
to do that. So it was it wasn't a vanity thing.
We were making money and could have made a great
living at it.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
So okay, a band that is you know, ten plus
years pass its heyday or around that ballpark, you leave,
you fly out, you come home. How much can you net?

Speaker 2 (04:39):
We sort of put a floor on what we would do.
You know, I don't think we would take any gig
for sort of less than ten k after expenses. So
if we felt like we were each netting before taxes
three to four grand a gig, or grossing before taxes
three to four grand a gig, that it was worth doing.

(05:00):
And then as it evolved, you know, I bailed out
at a certain point. But as it evolved, you take,
as you know, in this industry, you get, you know,
if you want to route a tour all the way
down the West coast. For us at that point, it
didn't work very well because some places you get a
twenty five hundred dollars guarantee, but then you might also
get the gig at the Rodeo in Houston that's thirty

(05:22):
five grand. Right, So the things sort of start to
average out a little bit and you have to put
some floor on it to be able to make it work.

Speaker 1 (05:30):
Okay, you've always emailed me about your income. Let's start
with the basics. Was the original deal with Columbia that
you get the record back or is that a result
of some kind of lawsuit or something.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
No, we owned the record. So we made the record
with our friend Conrad Huno, who had what was locally
a legendary studio, Egg Studio in Seattle for years, and
he recorded the young fresh Fellows who were sort of
an you know, Seattle indie icons. Mud Honey records lots
of other artists, and he had a label called pop Lama,

(06:07):
and we just did a handshake deal with him in
sometime in ninety four, as you know, it all happened
really fast, Bob. We started. Chris and I had had
bands for ten years, starting in maybe nineteen eighty two
or eighty three. We were both from Seattle. We started
playing Me's. We went to high school together. We weren't

(06:28):
really friends. Right after high school, I was a year
ahead of him. The year after he graduated, we started
playing together, making recordings, and we always had this chemistry.
It was like it was just on from the first
time we ever sat down together. We played Deer Prudence.
He was playing keyboards and I was playing guitar, and
it was like, this is obviously like magic. So over
of course of ten years, we had all these bands.

(06:50):
I was going to school, he was going to college,
and then he was moving back and forth from Denver.
I was in Denver, excuse me. He was in New
York and Boston. We'd both come back to Seattle at times,
and we always had bands. So what happens fallow ninety three,
he moves back to Seattle for good. We do what
we always did. I had a rehearsal studio at the
time with I Think the Posy's, a great band called

(07:11):
Flop another band seven year bitch I shared with them,
and I'm like, okay, we got songs, I got a
rehearsal studio, let's just start playing. And we started playing
as a duo, and he has really bad tonight us
and at the time he's like, I don't even want
to have a drummer. Let's just play as a duo.
We started playing shows under these other names. We were
the Lofies, we were Pure Frosting, we were I can't

(07:33):
remember what else we called ourselves, and pretty quickly, you know,
this is we got a following, even before we added drums.
This is in the fall of nineteen ninety three, and
people dug us. You got to remember, Seattle nineteen ninety
three is like people move in here from Phoenix, you know,
and buying flannel and Doc Martin's and every show is

(07:54):
like a wall of Marshall stacks and long hair and
super loud and anks, dridden nonsense. And we get up
on stage and I'm like dorky, preppy guy in a
you know, a button down shirt and a grow grain
belt and saddle shoes, and Chris is this spaz bald
spas with spray painted gold boots. And so the two

(08:16):
of us plugged into this one, you know, like ninety
dollars amplifier with our twenty dollars guitars coming out playing,
you know, iggying the Stooge's tv I with no drummer.
So I think we stood out right away. And at
that point we'd been doing it for a long time,
and I think we kind of knew what we were doing,
so boom, it just all of a sudden we had attention.

(08:37):
And then Jason, who was kind of at the time
known as the popa Pike Street, Seattle's hipster neighborhood. He's
kind of like the coolest guy in town. He was
in another band, Love Battery, who were on Subpop and
at the time had just been signed to A and M.
And he'd seen an earlier band Chris and I had
called go and had the joke was the super cool

(08:58):
rock guy had begged us for three years like next band,
you're in, next band, you guys have I'm going to
be the drummer. I'm going to be the drummer. So
he's begging us, you know, come on, I got to
join the band, and Chris and I had these big
heartfelt do we want a drummer Jason joins us, and
it's even more magical. It's like the thing Chris and
I had and then just I'll never forget. The first
rehearsal was like, Okay, this is a thing, and boom

(09:20):
it takes off. So early ninety four, all of a sudden,
like we're packing places within a few months, and we
went in to I don't think you've had him on
your podcast, you should. Barrett Jones, who was Dave Grohl's
good buddy from back East and then his drum tech
for years. He had a little studio and it's a

(09:40):
long story, but somebody who liked the band gave us
three hundred and fifty dollars to make a recording. We
went in and made a ten song cassette and Jason
was at the time bartender at the Comet Tavern, which
is kind of the ground zero for hipsters in Seattle
than in Now. He started selling it from behind the bar.
Chris takes off meanwhile, to go play bass in Beck's

(10:02):
band on the Mellow Gold tour for six months, and
Jason's selling these tapes from behind the bar just like
he's selling hundreds.

Speaker 1 (10:09):
Wait wait, wait, just how does he even know Beck?

Speaker 2 (10:13):
He knows Beck. That's a long story. I think they
may have met because they were mutually acquainted with the
female singer songwriter Mary Lou Lord with him. That's fascinating, Okay, Yeah,
So anyway, Yeah, Beck came up to Seattle once, did
a gig. Chris jumped on stage as he will with
anybody anytime, for any reason, and played a harmonica solo,

(10:34):
and then I think in the next few days after that,
Chris went down to Olympia and played some slide guitar
on what became One Foot in the Grave, and then
Beck had this weird hit out of nowhere as you know, Loser,
which broke. You know, Beck was in Seattle because Seattle's
one of the main places where it broke with Marco O'Collins,
DJ at K and d D and Yeah, Chris moved

(10:57):
down to la for a few weeks and hears and
then went on tour with Beck on the Mellow Gold Tour.
So at a certain point, Jason and I are calling
Chris like, we're getting these gig offers, you got to
come back. We're selling these tapes from behind the counter
at the Commet and it's just kind of going.

Speaker 1 (11:14):
On, Wait, wait, wait, selling the tapes behind the counter.
Everybody lies if they say they sell one hundred thousand,
they sold a thousand. But since you ended up having success,
you can be honest. How many cassettes did you actually sell?

Speaker 2 (11:30):
Hundreds? Somewhere between five hundred and a thousand.

Speaker 1 (11:33):
That's a lot.

Speaker 2 (11:34):
Having anything going on other than Jason b and you know,
playing it at the bar and people starting to get
a buzz around it. So so meanwhile Chris is on
tour and we're calling him and saying, we're getting all
these gig offers, when are you coming back? And then eventually,
this is a good industry story, John Silva, Beck's manager
fires Chris. I mean I think Beck fired him, but

(11:56):
because this is when Beck was still super kind a
dour and super serious and basically wanted to be thirston more.
It was before he got kind of was doing the
robot in a captain's outfit and stuff, which he eventually did,
and being fun. But Chris got kicked out of Beck's
band for you know, being having too much fun, like
smiling and jumping around on stage. It didn't fit the

(12:19):
mo that they wanted to portray. So that was in
you know, like I don't know. June nineteen ninety four,
Chris came back and boom, all of a sudden. I mean,
we are packing clubs and immediately like we are selling
out the Crocodile Cafe mos which is now new. Most
these are all like four hundred to seven hundred seat
rooms where within a month or two they're sold out

(12:42):
and they are like eight hundred people outside trying to
get in. And this is not hyperbolic, this is it
was insane. It was just it just happened. And it
was not like the hipsters in Seattle didn't think much
of us, except for a few people like Kim Thale
always loved us. Everybody was telling you Jet that same
summer of ninety four, Jason was making Love Battery's major

(13:02):
label debut for A and M, and everybody's telling him, man,
you got to just stick with Love Battery. You guys
are going to do it. Meanwhile, this freight train was
just gathering steam, and by the end of that summer
we played an as gap. So this is August ninety four.
We played an ASCAP showcase the weekend of Bumbershoot in
Seattle and it was packed and Tim Summers, who was

(13:26):
an A and R guy at the time for Atlantic
who signed Hoody and the Blowfish and who weirdly Chris
knew because they had played a gig together with Chris's
band and Tim's band, Hugo Largo I think at CBGB's
years before. Tim accosted us that night and took us
out for coffee the next morning and on there sitting

(13:46):
there at Cafe Vita, I think on Pike Street. He
really was excited about us. He was the first day
and our guy to be excited and I'll never forget.
He said, you guys are going to be the police
of the ninety and Chris just looked at him and said,
maybe the minute work of the nineties. So from there on,

(14:08):
all of a sudden, like a week later or two
weeks later, we were in Hits magazine constantly. There was
just this industry buzz. We didn't even have a manager
at the time. We eventually grabbed a friend who was
managing seven year bitch, Stacy Slater, and asked her to
manage us. And all of a sudden, We're going to
do showcases, you know, in LA and New York, like

(14:29):
every four to six weeks. Every label at that time,
there were seven or eight majors. Every major but Interscope
tried to sign us. It was nuts. I was in
grad school. I was my second year of grad school
at the time, and I was, you know, managing all
that and then taken off to New York or LA
every few weeks to do these you know, play at
the Viper Room or whatever. It was bizarre, and it

(14:52):
just kept gathering steam, you know. There was just this
momentum and Jason eventually he didn't At that time, We're
getting back to how we own our first record that
fall of nineteen ninety four, We're like, we didn't even
know if we're a band like Jason's in this other band.
They've got a you know, major label deal. Can we
even make a record together? So we uh made a

(15:13):
handshake deal with Uno and went into the little pop
Lama studios in his basement of.

Speaker 1 (15:18):
His Wait wait, wait, wait, wait a little bit slower. Sure, Yeah,
the three hundred and fifty dollars cassette tape.

Speaker 2 (15:24):
That you're selling Froggy Style.

Speaker 1 (15:26):
Subsequent to that, there's all this major label action, but
you decide to cut an independent record instead of making
a major label deal.

Speaker 2 (15:38):
I think at the time, it was all happening so fast,
we thought, let's just go ahead and make a record.
And the other thing is we were getting indie. There
were some other indie labels that were interested in us
that and we started to get really crappy publishing offers,
kind of from all corners. And I remember vividly that
summer Chris and I sat down and had a long conversation.

(15:59):
We're like, let's either just do the simplest thing with
people we like, or let's grab for the brass ring.
If it starts gets to the point where we really
feel like we have the opportunity to take this to
as many people as possible, let's do it. But otherwise,
let's just do what we want to do. We don't
ever want to you know, we're I was thirty when
we signed a record deal. We weren't kids, you know.

(16:20):
We we knew how we wanted to live our lives,
and that we weren't you know, we were fully committed
to what we were doing, but we weren't gonna cowtow
to anybody. We liked what we did and believed in it.

Speaker 1 (16:39):
Okay, so cut that record? Is that the identical record,
the Columbia Releases or is there any remixing, re recording.

Speaker 2 (16:48):
So that the first record has I'm blanking right now.
It has four or five songs that are actually from
the first session with Barrett Jones that we remixed and
in some case has added things to and then the
rest of the thirteen songs are from the sessions at
Egg's Studios. We put that all together as an album
on pop Lama. It came out in March of nineteen

(17:11):
ninety five. Where we are just at this is when
we're playing every show we play, there are two to
five A and R people there. It's just bizarre. You know,
it doesn't matter whether we went played in some crappy
club and Belling.

Speaker 1 (17:24):
Hill, Okay, but everybody's interested. How long is this period
of time? And why don't you say yes to anybody?

Speaker 2 (17:32):
Because we're this period of time from the time where
all of a sudden we're in Hits magazine is like
September of nineteen ninety four and we committed to Columbia
by the first week in May nineteen ninety five, so
it's pretty short. I mean, our recording period was pretty.

Speaker 1 (17:52):
Short, okay, And when do you cut the record?

Speaker 2 (17:55):
So We cut the record in the fall of nineteen
ninety four and it comes out in March nineteen ninety
five on poplom and it sold about five thousand copies
in Seattle within the first month or two.

Speaker 1 (18:07):
Okay, if everybody was interested, why did you make a
deal with Colombia as opposed to anybody else?

Speaker 2 (18:13):
So, as I said, everybody but Innerscope was interested. It
came down to Colombia and Guio Siri and Freddie at
Maverick and Madonna, who we met with a couple of times,
and we were ultimately choosing between those two. And we
really liked our and our guy at Columbia, Josh Sarabon,

(18:33):
and also Donnie Einer. He was you know, he's a
legendary figure for many reasons. But what we liked about
him was he's very, very direct. He he heard, you know,
the record was out in March nineteen ninety five. These
guys are really trying to sign us at this point,
and he just said, look, you guys, I'll put this

(18:54):
record out as is the first week in May nineteen
ninety five. He said, I will have this record out
by July. If you verbally commit now, it'll take us
another four to six weeks to finalize the long form contract,
but I give you my word, we will set the
record up starting now and we'll give you a full
push launch by mid July. And he fucking did it.
I mean that guy has my respect for lifetime. He

(19:17):
committed verbally in early May. He said, we'll put the
record out exactly as you want. We actually wanted to
remix a couple songs and remaster it, and I'll do
whatever you want. You want to remix it, do it,
just get it done. I'll have the record out. And
you know how long in the physical ERAa it took
to set up a record. It didn't take a month
and a half. It took six months to really push

(19:38):
it out. So that's how we ended up in Columbia.
They just they were really direct with us.

Speaker 1 (19:44):
Oh okay, so now you're making a deal with Columbia.
It's major. You have one step better than garage management.
Who is your lawyer making this deal?

Speaker 2 (19:54):
We had a killer lawyer, David Kottako, thank you very much.
At that time it was Cottaco, Guido and Carol was
the name.

Speaker 1 (20:02):
So how did you get You're in Seattle, they're in
New York. How did you get hooked up?

Speaker 2 (20:06):
We got hooked up. I have to say that our
manager at the time, who Stacey, who's still in the industry.
Ultimately no offense Stacy. Once we had a hit record,
she didn't really she hadn't been through that. She didn't
really know how to max out our opportunities.

Speaker 1 (20:24):
But she was.

Speaker 2 (20:25):
She's my age, she'd been working in the industry since
she was seventeen. She knew everybody, you know, as we
went through the courting process. We did not pay for
a cup of coffee for you know, a year of
getting flown around and courted and showcasing. So she knew everybody.
We met with every lawyer you could mention in the

(20:45):
top five or ten lawyers of that era. Katako was
the guy we hit it off with best. We felt like,
you know, you want an asshole, but he needs to
be your asshole, right, and he felt like our guy.
Ken Hurtz was somebody we almost tied, and I have
a horrible story about having to tell him we weren't
hiring him while playing around to golf.

Speaker 1 (21:06):
Well, we'll tell the terrible stories.

Speaker 2 (21:07):
So we were down to Ken and David Cataco and
I had made plans to I play golf along with
pretty much every other sport, and I'd made agreed to
go play around nine holes with Ken early in the morning.
We were in LA for four or five days, and
the night before we were at Canter's actually the band

(21:28):
and our manager and we all decided we're hiring David.
And we just had this huge pitch from Ken and
his partner. Meanwhile, this is really pre cell phone, right,
this is and so so we'd make the decision at
like nine thirty or ten at night, and the onus
is on me, like, Okay, Dave, you got to tell Ken.
I can't reach Ken. Cannot reach him. He's out at

(21:51):
an event with his wife, his babysitter doesn't know how
to reach him, you know, can't really leave this as
a message. So I meet him at the golf club
the next day. I think it was Brentwood. I can't
remember where he was a member. I meet him. He's
just excited. He's walking out, all smiles, and he's a
great He was a great guy. He's all smiles. You know.
I'm on the driving range already warming up, and he

(22:12):
walks out to the driving range and I got to
tell him the first thing, like can I'm sorry, we're
going with David Cottaco. That was the longest nine holes
of golf I have ever played in my life. There
was It was brutal. He was just steaming and and
we got through it. And anyway, Hi, Ken, you're a

(22:34):
great dude. Sorry it didn't work out.

Speaker 1 (22:37):
I can't believe that you ultimately played. Okay, the record
was done. You're dealing with plumb, You're dealing with Donnie.
Doesn't Donnie want to own the record.

Speaker 2 (22:48):
He wanted us badly enough that we were able to
cut a deal where he didn't own the record. And
I think in retrospect, you know, David was a good
enough lawyer, so they we gave them control of the record,
and I think he felt like there was a weird
confluence of circumstances that allowed to get it back so
quickly after it was a hit, which was the deal

(23:09):
was we got the record back. Basically one of the
windows of opportunity was five years after the termination of
the deal, and because we had such a high peak
and then Chris decided to quit an absolutely adamant that
he wanted to be dropped from Columbia immediately so we
were out of our deal very shortly after having a

(23:30):
hit record, and then there was a five year timeout
on that and that's how we got it back. So
eternal gratitude to David Kottako for that.

Speaker 1 (23:39):
What about the second record? Who owns that?

Speaker 2 (23:42):
Columbia still owns a second record which did about fifth
as well as the first record. It has some good
songs on it that did well, and then we had
the two other kind of hits or valuable recordings we
had are on the third record, which was Pure Frosting,
which they put out after we split up, which has
a bunch of kind of stuff we were working on,

(24:03):
but it has the Cleveland Rocks, which was the theme,
you know, the theme song for the Drew Carey Show
for seven or eight seasons. And it has our cover
of video Killed the Radio Star, which was on the
Wedding Singer record, which sold really really well.

Speaker 1 (24:20):
Okay, why did he Chris quit the band?

Speaker 2 (24:23):
I think at the time it was a few things.
You know, the whole ride was pretty intense, and you know,
he I would you know, it's his story to tell.
But he always had a fantasy that would sort of
be the sex Pistols that we'd break up, you know,
before we even started, that we'd be this kind of colossal,

(24:44):
colossal success slash failure. I think he also just started.
He was in his first marriage at the time, and
his older child was a year or so old, and
I think he was feeling the stress of that, and
he'd gone from you know, I'd had sort of you know,
professional careers in my twenties, but he'd been a guy
who basically owned a phone pad and a fifty dollars

(25:05):
guitar and was just making music. Had committed to like,
I don't care if I have to paint houses and
count checks in the basement of a bank as a temp.
I'm going to do this. So he'd gone from that
to wow, I own a nice house, I'm married, I
got a kid, And I think he just kind of
freaked out, and he you know, it was also a

(25:26):
little bit of a be careful what you wish for,
and he capped to that to me a few years
ago over lunch, just like you know, he said, basically, look,
I was basically ready to quit right as our first
record became a hit. It just freaked me out. So
and there's a lot of pressure there too, as well,
so I think that's why I quit at the time.

Speaker 1 (25:46):
Okay, it's over. Yeah, you know, he's not the first
person to regret, you know. And Tom Petty Ron Blair
was the bass player opened a bikini shop in the
San Fernando Valley. Ultimately, when how we Epstein died, he
came back.

Speaker 2 (26:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:03):
Christine mcviee was living in the UK for ten years
and woke up one day, So what the fuck did
I do? So, you know, usually people wake up, you know,
when no one when the phone isn't ringing.

Speaker 2 (26:15):
I don't you know, we're weirdos, Bob. I mean, I
think our approach was always like, we're not going to
do anything we don't want to do. We always, in
terms of how we've run our business and personal lives,
we're all about the margin and the bottom line. And
we all made a reasonable amount of money, you know,
in the presidents. Chris went on to have a very
very successful career doing music back you know, he was

(26:38):
sort of the first person, I don't know if you
remember Pump Audio, which was one of the first pre
licensed music companies. Through a variety of circumstances, he ended
up getting in early on that so we had thousands
of tracks out being licensed. Then he started a kid's
music thing. I mean, he's like a poster child for music.
Two dot.

Speaker 1 (26:54):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (26:55):
He started a kids music thing, Casper Baby Pants, which
he's now shelved. But he put out I think eighteen
records in ten years and became this absolute fixture in
the Puget Sound area, playing you know, eighty or one
hundred times a year to kids and honestly made a
ton of money doing that and had a great time,

(27:15):
and a whole generation of kids from this region loved
the Casper Baby Pants record. So he's just a real smart,
hardworking guy, you know.

Speaker 1 (27:24):
Okay, did he ever have a day job?

Speaker 2 (27:27):
He has not had any day job since since the
presidents started, nor has Jason and I have only by
choice really for a number of reasons.

Speaker 1 (27:38):
Okay, So Chris says he wants to quit. What do
the two other guys say.

Speaker 2 (27:46):
Fuck, we knew, you know, we had agreed in late
ninety seven that we were going to take a six
month break. Let's have another meeting in two weeks. This
was a Jason's house here in Seattle on Capitol Hill
at the time. Chris walks in the door of the
next meeting. Two minutes later, he's like, we don't even
need to have this meeting because I quit. I've decided

(28:09):
I want to call cottacol right now. I want to
call Columbia. I want out of the deal now. Since then,
years later he admitted that this was not the best
way to make this decision. But he's a he's a
classic mercual, mercurial that's a hard word to say, artist type,
and you know, he's the person when he decides something,
he decides it and commits fully. So I knew there

(28:29):
was no talking him out of it. Was I was
also burned out. I just wanted to take a break
for six months and keep going. The weird thing is
that is that within nine months of us breaking up,
we started a new band with the three of us
and Sir mix a lot called Subset, which frankly should

(28:49):
have been freaking huge, and for a variety of reasons,
we had tracks out on Napster kind of that that
were I think, I'm told down loaded heavily in the
hundreds of thousands, and we made basically a full album,
but it just didn't ever come together. So weirdly, he quit.
But then months later we were in the studio with
the three of us in sir mix a lot making

(29:11):
new recordings.

Speaker 1 (29:13):
Okay, you're not the only one involved. There's a manager,
there's Katakau, there's Donnie and Columbia.

Speaker 2 (29:18):
What did they all say they were? I think they
felt like they'd had a great run with our first
record and our second record did okay. I think they
were very happy to take take the spoils from our
first record and walk away and enjoy that and not
sweat it too much. You know, they talked for a

(29:39):
while they didn't want us to use our name. So
if you see actually in our last video we made,
which was for video Killed the Radio Star on Jason's
kick drum, it says the Quitters and you know, they
didn't want to let us use our name for anything.
But I don't think they And they tried to, you know,
threaten to exercise leaving them or you know, sort of

(30:01):
exclusivity clauses, but they didn't never really put the hammer down,
you know, it was there was no I think they
were very happy to have unexpectedly made tens of millions
of dollars off our first record.

Speaker 1 (30:15):
Okay, why was the second record not as successful I think.

Speaker 2 (30:20):
I don't think it's I think it's a good record
when I listen to it now. The first record is
really an anomaly. It's a very weird record, and I'm
most proud of having made what I think is a
highly authentic piece of art with real integrity that became
wildly popular. I mean even sonically our first record, I mentioned,
you know, some of the tracks are from the first

(30:42):
session with Barrett Jones on a little half inch eight
track machine, which is very low fidelity. Conrad's studio was
sixteen track, one inch I think, and then we transferred
all of that at one point to two inch on
a mobile truck. And even just like the tape hiss
and the tape compression, just the sound of the record

(31:04):
is unlike anything else from that era. It's a and
then you know, we're playing these weird, weirdly strong tuned instruments,
and I mean, it's the first record is crazy. And
I think one of the problems with the second record
is then we had to go out and be like
a loud rock band on tour, and the second records
more of like a rock band, and that's not really

(31:26):
I think our Forte was being like, and I think
of it as like folk music meets the MC five,
you know, with a little bit of psilocybin thrown in.
It's It was a little weirder than direct rock music.
But I just think, you know, lightning strikes not always
more than once. You know that there are moments in time.

Speaker 1 (31:48):
Okay, Lou Christie. The record comes out July.

Speaker 2 (32:00):
Yeah, okay, third week of July nineteen ninety.

Speaker 1 (32:02):
Most people have no idea of the Mailstrom of being
the act at the center of success. So tell us
about that.

Speaker 2 (32:09):
Oh god, it was. It was amazing. So I'm finishing
up at that point, I just, uh, while we were
in the Bob Lang studio in the Seattle area remixing
the record, I'm sitting in one of the ISO chambers
finishing my last work on a master's in urban planning
for the University of Washington. So we're doing that, and

(32:29):
then a few weeks later, they're like, oh, yeah, you're
gonna go. You guys are going to do some promo
tour thing. I'm like, whatever, I guess I'll write my
thesis after this promo tour is over. So all of
a sudden, we start getting this news like the advanced stuff.
There are a few stations, influenced, influential stations around the
country picked up Lump, which is the first single you
know off not even off the advanced single, just stuff

(32:52):
the advanced CD before they even started pushing the single
in early July, and that included WHFS in the DC area,
which was a big taste maker in commercial alternative at
the time. I think ninety nine X in Atlanta. K
Rock was probably a little bit behind it. And so
there's a little momentum, which is great. All of a sudden,

(33:13):
then we go do this promo tour. So for the
month of September nineteen ninety five, our month of August
and September, we did a promo tour in the US
and Europe, and I've apparently was told it was legendary
at Colombia because we were willing to do anything like
the day we did in La Among other things, we
played in the parking lot at Pink's Hot Hot Dogs

(33:36):
on Librea. We played on the third Street promenade in
Santa Monica, and we were doing this every day, flying
from one city to another. We play on the back
of a flatbed truck, played on the Beach in San Diego.
The day we did. I always described the day we
did in New York to try to give people an
idea of what it was like. I think we flew
in from Atlanta, Sony Rep picked us up. We got

(33:58):
in the car at like ten at night at JFK.
He turns on the radio and what's the huge top
forty station in the New York area that it's got
like a Jillian listeners. I'm blanking on it right now.
He turns on that station. I'm sorry, I can't remember
it right now. They're playing Lump. He's clear. I'm sure
he set it up right, you know, down to the

(34:20):
minute we go to the hotel. We go over to that.
It's killing me that I can't remember the name of
the station. We go across the w you know, New.

Speaker 1 (34:28):
York Change after it was wplj NO, and there was
k Rock, there was Scott Shannon station.

Speaker 2 (34:35):
It was the big top forty FM station at the time.
So we go across the river to their place at
you know, like midnight, and there's still a huge audience
at the time. We go on there for fifteen or
twenty minutes, maybe with acoustic guitars, go back to the hotel,
go to sleep. At one thirty, get up, and this
is when we still would agree to do morning drive time.
Get up, Go to one rock station, do an interview,

(34:56):
play three songs live on the air during drivetime. Get
in the van. Go to whatever the commercial alternative station
was at the time. Do an on air segment, play
two or three songs live on the air. Get in
the van. Go to five fifty Madison Avenue, the famous
Philip Johnson AT and T Building, which was Sony headquarters
at the time. Play a full set before lunch to

(35:19):
all Sony employees and anybody who's walking by in the
glass lobby of that building, which is sonically a nightmare
but exciting. Then go upstairs, have marketing meetings. Somebody remembers
to give us a sandwich at some point, right, and
this is August, it's ninety with you know, like ninety
percent humidity. Then we get in the van. We go
down to Washington Square Park. And this is all if

(35:39):
you're lucky to do this right, this is a privilege.
Go down to Washington Square Park. They have a stage
set up in generators in full pa. We played a
full set in Washington Square park for whoever happened to
be walking by. It's like ninety We're right in the sun.
There's no shade, no nothing. Then that we do get
to go back to the hotel for like an hour.
Then we go to some pizza joint and it's a
meet and greet with at the time, all the people

(36:01):
run the one stops and the the you know, the
tower managers and stuff from the Tri State area all invited.
So we stand around and drink beer and eat pizza
and make nice with all the people who are gonna
determine whether we're on the end caps at tower or not.
And then we the band, pushed the air hockey tables aside,
set up a little pa and all our stuff that

(36:21):
we were flying with, and play another full set to
this you know this crowd. And then we go back
to the hotel and I don't know, got up at
six the next morning for another lobby call and went
and did that again. So we did that every day
for two months through the US and Europe, and that
was before we even started proper touring, and meanwhile the

(36:41):
record was blowing lump was blowing up.

Speaker 1 (36:43):
Okay, couple of questions in retrospect was that necessary.

Speaker 2 (36:48):
I don't know if it was necessary, but I think
it helped. I mean some of these things, a lot
of stations were already playing us. You'd have to ask
what John Leche was, the guy who I think was
really the architect of the marketing campaign at the time,
who I'm still in touch with. I don't know how
much of a difference it made, but I think our

(37:08):
willingness to work made a big difference. We were always
on time, ready to go, ready to kick ass, and
we would you know an example, some of the stations.
You know, we went to some markets. Like I said,
WHFS was playing us already. They had set up a
thing where we played in the Inner Harbor in Baltimore.
We had no idea we were doing these things, two

(37:29):
or three of them a day. We show up to
do that and like three thousand kids shows up, show
up the songs. I mean, this place, this Amphitheater on
the Harbor is packed, and we've got this crappy little
traveling drum kit where Jason's kick drum is a suitcase,
and Chris and I have these tiny ams and we
play at full set to other places. We went to

(37:50):
other stations in August where they hadn't added the song
and a couple of those we went into their boardroom
and set up our gear on their boardroom table and said,
come intherfuckers and have your lunch. We're going to blow
your minds. And so I think it had to have
helped to at least some degree. Would I would like
to think so, because it was really hard work.

Speaker 1 (38:10):
Okay, the human body can only take so much. Most
of this is regular roadwork. You're playing to thousands, you
can't calm down. Then the sun comes up. So there
are drugs involved alcohol. How did you guys manage this
physically and emotionally?

Speaker 2 (38:28):
I can speak best for myself. I didn't manage it
very well physically. It didn't really agree with me. I'm
a guy who wants to be like I mean, you
can see my skis on the ceiling behind us. I
want to be out. My bike's right there on the trainer.
I want to be out skiing or climbing with my friends.
That was my whole thing, was doing sports and being outside.

(38:49):
That's my whole life growing up and with my best friends.
And I also don't have I certainly don't have an
iron stomach or an iron constitution. So the whole thing
really disagreed with me. And I think, you know, at
least it feels like it took years off my life,
even just doing it for maybe four years for long.

Speaker 1 (39:08):
Well, did you cope with drugs and alcohol? No?

Speaker 2 (39:11):
I would have coped with alcohol, but my body just can't,
you like, my digestive system just can't handle it. Or
I would have drunk heavily.

Speaker 1 (39:19):
Okay, let's go back. You said you were willing to
do anything. Do you think that was because you were
older thirty or you were unique individuals? You were college graduates.
Why were you willing to do anything and do all
this work?

Speaker 2 (39:34):
I think we had decided, Well, Jason, I would I
try to speak for the other guys. First. Jason had
been through this with Love Battery, and the whole time
we're going through it with the Presidency's like, you, guys,
you don't understand. This is not how it works. You
don't just walk in and everybody wants to sign you.
We were out, you know, Love Battery was out beating
the bushes, you know, put out three records on subpop,
toured the country twenty times in a van. He's like,

(39:56):
this is not normal. So I think he was just
super psyched to get a shot and do it, you know,
with with a lot of juice behind it. I think
for Chris and myself, you know, we, as I said,
like Chris doing his kids music thing, were people who like,
if you're going to do something, do it right. Actually,
you know my dad who has passed, that's one of his.

(40:17):
When I asked my parents as they've gotten older, my
other my stepdad, mom are still alive, like, what's some
advice my dad's his number one was whatever you do
do it well. You know, if you're going to do something,
give it everything. So we and I also think we
felt like we can do it on our own terms.

(40:39):
So we didn't feel like anybody was pushing us. We
felt like we're making all the choices here. We're not
going to do anything that we do. We agreed among
the three of us we're not doing anything we don't
all three of us don't want to do.

Speaker 1 (40:51):
So okay, tell me about making the videos, which we're
all over empty.

Speaker 2 (40:56):
The videos were fun, you know. We did the first
few videos with Roman Coppola, who was just a lovely,
awesome dude, and he came up to Seattle. We made
the Lump video in.

Speaker 1 (41:10):
What was the connection? How did you get cooked up
with them?

Speaker 2 (41:12):
With Roman? You know? Weirdly, it turned out that I
went to Colorado College just for one year of my
freshman year, and it turned out that I one of
my classmates was somebody he went to high school with.
So we ended up having a weird connection. But we
had no connection. We just got set a bunch of
reels and we loved he had made a couple of
videos at that point. He might have made a Rentals
video and maybe a Green Day video. I can't remember.

(41:35):
We just liked his videos the best, and we liked
him the most, and we talked to him on the phone,
and it was a great choice. He was a soup.
We were totally simpatico with him. We were on the
same wavelength, so.

Speaker 1 (41:45):
Well, you know, you talked to most acts. It happened
so fast and retrosect. They said, we didn't really have
any control. It was the director's vision. It's not really
what we want or wanted. What did you feel?

Speaker 2 (41:58):
I love the videos. I think that the Lump. There
are two Lump videos, one of which they wanted We
Columbia wanted MTV to play both. They wouldn't play the
second one because it had Chris jumping up and down
on a tiny battery powered amplifier that was set on
fire in his backyard while we had a barbecue, and
they thought that was too violent. But the first one,

(42:19):
you know, shows us in starts with us in the
swamp in the arboretum, which is kind of in the
university area in in Seattle, which is like a mile
from where I grew up and a mile from where
Chris and I went to middle school and high school together.
So and then the barge that we're out on in
Elliott Bay at the end, that's my stepdad's barge or

(42:40):
was he was in the tug and barge business. So
they were out there with my stepdad driving us around
doing our things. So the whole thing felt very you know,
natural and like us. And then the Peaches video, which
you know was we fight the Ninjas and the and
that was great. Roman came to us and he's like, Peaches,
do you guys have any ideas? And he just had, like,
what if we're under a tree and has Kansas Peaches

(43:02):
hanging out? He's like, yeah, that's great, but that's dumb.
So that's how it starts. And at the time he
was super into these you know, b movie martial arts movies.
He's like, what if you guys fight ninjas at the end.
We're like, like that found sounds awesome. So we spent
the day with the Hollywood ninjas and got launched off
ramps and you know, it was it was blast. I

(43:24):
don't know, he got our sensibility that we were just
taking the piss and having a good time. And the
whole thing. I think our take on the whole thing
as we went through is that ultimately, you know, pop
culture is a cosmic joke, right. The art can be
beautiful and very real and very powerful even if you're
quote unquote goofy like we are. It's you know, I mean,

(43:45):
listen to the Beatles, Like one in three Beatles songs
is Goofy. Chuck Berry's the Goofy is motherfucking lyricist of
all time and he's still the best. But it's it's
authentic art. But it's still a piss take, you know.
That's the fun of it. That's that's what rock and
roll is. It's supposed to be fun, you know, it's
supposed to be a laugh.

Speaker 1 (44:04):
Oh, okay, you're on MTV. They're banging these videos. Do
you start to get recognized?

Speaker 2 (44:13):
Got recognized. I'm a pretty normal looking dude, you know,
I didn't Chris Jason. Already everybody in Seattle knew who
was at that time. For a few years, I would
get recognized in Seattle on the Seattle side of the water,
you know, kind of in neighborhoods where people are younger
and hipper. I had moved as soon as we all

(44:36):
got a big publishing check. I bought a house on
the east side of Lake Washington. And even just going
across the water to the suburbs, I would like the
beer guy at the grocery store would recognize me occasionally,
but very rarely and the only time sort of will
maybe get there. But our first record was big in
the US, but it was absolutely mega in Australia. I

(44:58):
don't know how many times platinum it is now Australia.
The first time we went was the one time where
it was weird where they're like we had aliases at
the hotels, but there would still be forty or fifty
kids in the lobby freaking out when you'd come through
and that for my money. I don't know that. I
didn't like that. I think that would be miserable to
be that famous.

Speaker 1 (45:18):
I will okay, So now you start working, do you
start as a headliner, do you open for other people?
How frequently are you working?

Speaker 2 (45:27):
We went on tours soon as we finished that promo
tour in September of ninety five, the next kind of year.
I actually think we overdid it the first year, and
that's kind of what killed us because between start of
August nineteen ninety five and the end of August nineteen
ninety six, we toured the US sort of two and

(45:49):
a half times, went to Continental Europe or the UK
ten times, went to Japan for ten days, went to
Australia for three and a half week, and recorded our
second record all in a year or thirteen months. So
we just went out and hammered and Columbia. You know,

(46:10):
as at the time, major labels really tried to sequence
the timing of releases so that the band or the
artists could go from territory to territory and promote things sequentially.
I think our record, my understanding, was somewhat blew up
organically in many many territories at once, and so they
wanted us to be everywhere at once. So I'm not

(46:31):
sure that we ever fully capitalized like the time when
we could have been doing our most lucrative touring in
the US in early nineteen ninety six. You know, let's
go back to Germany for the fourth time and see
if we can break that, because the time they were
the maybe third biggest market after the US and Japan.
So we we tried to be everywhere on tour. So
we started in a van and we always headlined. We

(46:52):
got offers, you know, I'll never we had offers to
The best offer when we started out was ac DC.
That was just the most I just still wonder somebody
would have climbed on stage and actually killed one of
us by the middle of the second song if we'd
been out there opening for ac DC. But for some
reason they wanted to open for us. We other offers.

(47:14):
Lenny Kravitz wanted us to open for us, but again
we just decided, now we want to do it the
way we want to do it. And a lot of
the time we had our friends' bands come open for us,
sometimes probably to the detriment of the bill, and they
get booed, and you know, we had I don't know
if you know. He is Jesse Dayton, who's like a
career honky tnker from Beaumont. Originally we connected with him.

(47:36):
He was friends with the Supersuckers and I love the guy,
love honky talk music. We had him open for us
for like two weeks in Texas and Oklahoma, and you know,
people didn't get it, but we didn't care.

Speaker 1 (47:48):
You know, Okay, you're on the road. Are you partaking
of the fruits of the road.

Speaker 2 (48:00):
At that point, I'm thirty, I'm married. My stomach can't
handle heavy drinking, so now I'm just pretty much trying
to survive. I was a true blue guy to my
ex wife.

Speaker 1 (48:11):
I was not.

Speaker 2 (48:13):
I was not partaking. Chris was also married, Jason was not.

Speaker 1 (48:16):
Okay, she's your ex wife. How long were you married?
Why you divorced?

Speaker 2 (48:21):
Been divorced for a few years and married for a
long long time twenty plus So what caused the divorce
just didn't work out? I don't feel like it's I
have a bully pulpit to tell the story. My ex
wife does not, So I'll just leave it as the
gracious thing to say, is I just think it nothing horrible, nothing,
nobody did anything awful.

Speaker 1 (48:42):
Okay, who wanted the divorce? And it's never mutual?

Speaker 2 (48:46):
Wow, that's a hard question too. If I had to
answer that question with my life on the line, I
would say that ultimately I wanted the divorce, but oddly
my wife was the one who filed.

Speaker 1 (48:59):
But okay, so you're thirty, you're already married. When did
you meet this woman and when did you get married?

Speaker 2 (49:07):
We had been together for a long time. We had
been together since we were twenty five and twenty two,
and we got married.

Speaker 1 (49:13):
So how'd you meet her?

Speaker 2 (49:14):
Just friend? A friend actually you know, weirdly name dropper story.
She used to go out with one of my best
friend's younger brothers and their mom lived on the water
on Lake Washington in a house that Duff McKagan is
also an old Seattle homie lives in now and bought
from their mom years ago. Just hanging out at this
friend's house was down the street from my house, and

(49:38):
we met her then. We were friends. We're from the
same social circle. We're friends for three or four years
before we started going out.

Speaker 1 (49:44):
Okay, you're going to graduate school. What is she doing?

Speaker 2 (49:48):
She was an artist and had gone undergrad in art
and went to MFAT in California for a year, but
then was living in Seattle and working and making her paintings.

Speaker 1 (50:00):
What did she think about all of this with the presidents?

Speaker 2 (50:03):
I think she thought it was fun. I mean, she
liked going on the parts of it that you know,
Japan's fun. Oklahoma in December is not as fun, but
you know, I think she thought it was pretty cool.
She was an artist herself.

Speaker 1 (50:18):
How often did she come with you?

Speaker 2 (50:20):
Usually to the fun places, like I said, you know,
to go to Europe, go to Australia, go to Japan.
So a fair amount of the time, as much as
we can muster she was working for at the start.
She was still working full time before she quit, so
once she quit, she came more often.

Speaker 1 (50:35):
Okay, do you have kids.

Speaker 2 (50:37):
I have two wonderful daughters, twenty two and twenty four.

Speaker 1 (50:41):
And what are they up to?

Speaker 2 (50:42):
They are both recent graduates of Enemy of the State,
Columbia University, and one of them is still living in
New York working as a paralegal. She's going to law
school next year, and the others in New York right
now visiting some friends and her undergraduate degree is and architecture.

(51:05):
So younger one graduated last spring and older one a
year and a half ago, and younger ones just hanging
out and joining life for the moment and figuring out
what to do.

Speaker 1 (51:17):
Okay, you mentioned earlier that Columbia made tens of millions
of dollars. Hey, do you think that was that much?
And how much did you make? And do you think
money slipped through your fingers you got ripped off?

Speaker 2 (51:33):
I think there are three parts to that question. One is,
you know, something people don't talk about that's always interesting
is sort of you know, in the film business they
talk about box office, right, what's opening weekend? What is
a move? What box office? That's ticket sales? Right? And
then sort of as a side card of that, to

(51:53):
help us think about it, it's often noted that while
the music business hasn't always been the biggest media business
relative to film or publishing, it's been the most lucrative.
And this is why. Is you take a record like ours,
which costs Colombia nothing to make, right, it was already made.
It didn't cost them that much to sign us. They
gave us a few hundred thousand dollars in advance, and

(52:15):
they spent you know, our marketing campaign was aggressive, but
I don't think it was very expensive for them, right,
So let's say they spent under a million dollars including
probably you know, sunk costs of staff to sign us
and launch the record. The record sells. I think it
ultimately worldwide sold probably five million copies. Let's say that

(52:40):
are accounted for. So retail price of those, if you
look at the box office, right, that's seventy five million
dollars right at let's say average price of fifteen dollars
a ticket. Now, I'm not privy to the exact numbers
for their their what they got out of the whole
all on each one of those, but let's say they

(53:01):
made six or seven dollars a record. If you can
make you know, thirty five to forty million dollars on
a six hundred thousand dollars investment, that's pretty good. So
the record business and the record business is even better
now because they don't have to fucking make anything or
ship it anywhere, right, they don't have to do any
of that. They just you know, press a button and

(53:23):
release it on all major streaming services. So, yes, Columbia
made a lot of money off of us, and that's,
you know, which is great, and we were happy to
make that, you know, devil's bargain. We went in with
eyes wide open. We wanted to be everywhere. We wanted
to reach as many places as possible. So if you
look at us, we're getting whatever, sixteen points or eighteen

(53:43):
points on wholesale, on retail, and you know, we the
first year where the numbers started coming in. I think
over a couple of years, I probably made just over
two million dollars before taxes.

Speaker 1 (54:01):
Okay, you're thirty years old. You manage that money well,
I like to think.

Speaker 2 (54:05):
So I'm comfortable, and I think my ex wife is
reasonably comfortable, and I think I did. I mean, I
had good money manager, bought really nice piece of real
estate in one of the most expensive zip codes in
the country and which I sold a couple of years
ago as part of my divorce settlement, and all those

(54:27):
things seem to have gone pretty well. And then I
kept working my ass off. I mean I made I'm
sure I made.

Speaker 1 (54:33):
I probably might ok wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, let's
let's let's park that for a second. The presidents are dead. Okay,
just for the record, the band is called the President's
United States of America because.

Speaker 2 (54:47):
So I told you we were playing as a duo
in the fall of nineteen ninety three and we're the
low Fis. We were pure Frosting. Oh, we're the dynamic duo.
I'll never forget. Chris called me one must have been
a Sunday morning, because he would have and out Saturday night.
He's like, I got the name for the band. I
got the name for the band. I was at this
party in North Seattle last night and I was just there.
There were people jamming in the basement. So I went

(55:08):
down and started jamming with him and there were like
nine people listening and they were just everybody was super baked.
And I was just making up a different song name.
Between every song. I was like, we're the Electric Bunny Rabbits,
and you know, I was just trying to get a laugh,
and he's like, finally between I don't know what I was,
you know, thinking, I just like, between between two jams,
I was like, we are the Presidents of the United

(55:28):
States of America. And he's like, all nine stone people laugh.
So it's great, let's do it. So we thought it
was great, given that we were this tiny, little as
I described, these kind of two skinny, dorky guys with
little instruments and cheap gear and no real show. The
grandiosity of the name in juxtaposition to you know, the

(55:50):
the ridiculous tininess and sort of cultured patheticness of what
we were doing was a great kind of contrast. It
became a bit of an albatross, but it worked great
for what we were trying to represent as we were starting.

Speaker 1 (56:05):
Okay, so tell me about it being in albatros.

Speaker 2 (56:08):
Well, you know, then you have to go through the
whole thing where like the first single comes out in Columbia,
it's somewhat at our insistence is like, no DJs need
to call the band by their full name the presidents
of the United States of America every time they call
it out, you know, and you know, it's just a
lot of letters and words. There's a lot of characters,

(56:28):
and it's you know, the president's is a lot easier.
And although there was a president's already in a funk
band I think the seventies.

Speaker 1 (56:38):
But did you have to make a deal with the
other band, No.

Speaker 2 (56:41):
We had no issues with them. I mean, I guess
our name was different. We did have one really interesting thing,
actually that's apropos of current political climate and the current administration.
In the interior sleeve of our first record when it
came out on pop Lama is a picture of the
three of us with Bill Clinton, which was a real picture.
We met him. We played at his rally in Seattle

(57:04):
on before Black Tuesday, November nineteen ninety four, when every
dem in the fucking country lost. He came into the
rally in Seattle and the posies and we and a
local gospel choir played before and he walked through the
room and we got the picture. And then when the
record came out with Columbia, their legal counsel would not
let us use it because you can't use the president's

(57:24):
name and likeness for profit. But it turns out maybe
that's not the case, based on what we're seeing.

Speaker 1 (57:29):
Now, that's for sure. Okay, let's go back to the
publishing deal. Yeah, how did you split up the writing credits?

Speaker 2 (57:40):
So the writing credits? We figured that out before it
became an issue, which is one of the smartest things
we did. And frankly, I will take credit for that
because I could see what the problem and we were
lucky to have friends who had been through it. Right.
We're in Seattle in the nineties. We know all these
people who are already famous in huge rock stars, and

(58:02):
some of them are childhood friends. So I was talking
to all those people, and I was reading every book
I could get on the music business. So I was like,
we need to figure this out now. So Chris's clearly
the main writer, and he's written jillions of songs, but
it's also true that we brought the songs to life,
and the only life they'll probably ever have was in
the in the way we represented them in our Masters.

(58:24):
So we just worked it out. You know, we basically
split things forty thirty thirty where Chris gets a little,
he gets a little more that acknowledges that he's the
primary writer. So it's a long story, short version. We
do have some complications now because, for various reasons, we
didn't register them that way. Jason already had been signed

(58:46):
to Universal Music Publishing Group in a bad deal with
Love Battery where they all got to quit their barista
jobs for a what scened at the time a huge
advance to sign away the rest of their rights forever.
So we had to manage that a little bit, but
we choose we split them the way we chose to,
and then we have to manage bringing them in and

(59:08):
then dividing them in the math.

Speaker 1 (59:10):
Okay, so you're saying, if we looked at the registration,
it may say something, but in reality it's forty thirty
thirty roughly.

Speaker 2 (59:17):
Yeah, yeah, right around in there. Yeah, And that took
some doing.

Speaker 1 (59:21):
Took some doing, relative tools, did you.

Speaker 2 (59:23):
Know, personal relationships and Chris Chris wanted to be partly
felt like he deserved more compensation, but in a lot
of ways just more recognition too, you know, as being
the primary songwriter. So it took a lot of it
took a few deep conversations. Let's put it.

Speaker 1 (59:38):
Well, you said forty thirty thirty, and then all of
a sudden you said something like.

Speaker 2 (59:41):
That, Well it's like twenty nine and a half. Twenty
nine and a half.

Speaker 1 (59:44):
Oh, okay, okay, do you own the publishing.

Speaker 2 (59:49):
We own all but the share that Jason controls, which
he had signed a deal with PolyGram Universal Music Publishing Group,
still controls it, and we have tried to negotiate with
them a number of times to just buy it back
unsuccessfully to date.

Speaker 1 (01:00:06):
Okay, if there's a licensing deal or anything, does PolyGram,
whoever the title of the company is today, do they
have any input or they just get a check.

Speaker 2 (01:00:17):
They get a check and they've agreed to everything, and
we it would be nice to have it all right now.
The share the portions that Chris and I control are
administered by Cobalt. We've had many different publishing agreements over
the last thirty years, but we've been with Cobalt for
a while. UMPG's never had an issue with anything. We've
wanted the license because if we can get Jason's back,

(01:00:38):
then we're completely one stop shop for the debut record
because control the masters.

Speaker 1 (01:00:43):
Okay, have you had any offers to buy these songs?

Speaker 3 (01:00:46):
We have had.

Speaker 2 (01:00:48):
We have never seriously entertained any offers, but we occasionally
get offers, and you know, I think we might have
gotten to this via email that for us, the time
value equation with money just does and the offers never
high enough to pay out versus what we make right
now owning the rights and just taking the income from
streaming services.

Speaker 1 (01:01:08):
Okay, so what multiple would you entertain.

Speaker 2 (01:01:14):
The multiple would need to be It would need to
be over twenty.

Speaker 1 (01:01:22):
So if I came, you know, that's hard to get.
But in the heyday of hypnosis, who may or may
not have been interested, somebody comes in with a twenty
three multiple, you're in.

Speaker 2 (01:01:31):
Maybe maybe the problem is it's pretty easy to do
the time value. It's easy to look. Okay, let's say
we do for a multiple of twenty and we get
million dollars. Okay, we pay taxes on that. We got
to pay some capital gains tax on it, we got
to pay various state and federal taxes. We each net

(01:01:52):
you know, let's say somewhere in two thirds to three
quarters of that, our third of that, and Conrad Uno too,
he owns a quarter of the masters. So we take
that and then you sort of if you just do
the math, so like, okay, let's put that in an
income bearing investment, put it in the market. You can
take three to five percent a year, right, sort of
safely while preserving the capital. And that number has just

(01:02:15):
never reached what we're each making from publishing and masters
every year, from the money we're getting from the business.
It's never even really gotten close. And as Jason pointed
out the last time we talked about this, he really
enjoys having a hedge against the markets, right, we all
have investments in financial markets and or real estate. And

(01:02:37):
he's like, well, hey, you know, I'm pretty sure people
are still going to stream our record during the next recession,
so it's a way to be diversified. So the multiple
would have to be pretty high for us all to
just go yep, we'll take it.

Speaker 1 (01:02:50):
But also, you're a sophisticated guy. You worked with the Amazon, etc.
Can you also see in the thirty years since the
record was a hit that there been more opportunities such
for monetization that could not have been envisioned. Has that
been a factor?

Speaker 2 (01:03:09):
It is a factor, and there are more opportunities for monetization.
And one of the arguments for selling the asset or
part of it would be that somebody else could make
better use of it. Right. Like I said, we're pretty
laissez fair punk rock. We just basically sit on this thing.
We don't do much to promote it, and somebody who's
craftier and I'm not sure it's private equity companies buying

(01:03:31):
musical copyrights, but there are certain buyers who are going
to work the asset. They may be able to Those
have been the deals that have been more interesting are like,
maybe sell part of it, but we have an interest
in the upside if they figure out a way to
have it make more money from some of these newer avenues.

Speaker 1 (01:03:46):
Okay, at this late date, overall for the presidents, what
percentage of the income is from masters and what percentage
from publishing.

Speaker 2 (01:03:56):
It's kind of what you'd expect. It breaks down on
that sort of I'd say seventy thirty to eighty twenty.
Seventy thirty at most to publishing, probably more like eighty twenty.

Speaker 1 (01:04:15):
Okay. I realize every year is not identical, but if
you took an average year and the three of you
got paid before taxes, is there enough to live on.

Speaker 2 (01:04:30):
There's enough to live on. Now that I'm a guy
who has a partner who works, and I'm not paying
my kids tuition at Columbia anymore, and you know, I'm
sort of in that contracting phase of my life. I
think when I was in the expanse of trying to
raise a family in an upper middle class way, if

(01:04:53):
one of us were a solo artist, it would be
enough for me as an individual, it wouldn't be enough.
It's a wonderful annuity for me that pays a lot.

Speaker 1 (01:05:01):
Okay at this moment in time, do you have any
other income, active income as opposed to investments?

Speaker 2 (01:05:08):
Nope?

Speaker 1 (01:05:09):
Okay, so this is it. Okay, let's go back, so
five years. You essentially get the record, the master back
in the year two thousand, year two thousand and one
or whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:05:21):
Two thousand and three, we got it back two.

Speaker 1 (01:05:23):
Thousand and three, Different economic landscape, different distribution, etc. What
do you do now that you have the record?

Speaker 2 (01:05:32):
Well, first we have a long conversation of do we
want to just do another deal with Sony and let
them keep it, which of course they were interested in doing.
Do we want to you know, get it back ourselves.
Do we want to talk to other labels? We decided
because since as I said, we've always taken this fairly
DIY contrarian let's do it our way approach, well, let's

(01:05:53):
do it ourselves. And so we took it back. We
created our own little label, and we were lucky that
us getting it back and sort of you know, as
you would imagine, it took Sony Columbia years to wind
down their physical you know, inventory and account for all
of it, and there were a lot of heated exchanges
where it looked like they were wilfully, wilfully still selling

(01:06:16):
it while they didn't have the rights, which I don't
think was the case. I think it's just, you know,
as the saying goes, never assume mal intent when simple
incompetence will explain the problem. So it took a few years.
But as that happened, the iTunes store launched right, which,
as you know, was from like four to twenty twelve,
was the only music store in the world that mattered.

(01:06:39):
And at the time we got the rights back, we
had reformed and we were touring, and we had a
new management team that included a guy you probably know,
Mike Tiraney, who was kind of it. He's he has
my old job at Amazon now actually running music programming,
but he was he's been at labels, PD easton radio. Everything.

Speaker 1 (01:06:58):
Just just go back in the hey, hey, who was
the manager?

Speaker 2 (01:07:01):
A woman named Stacy Slater, who's oh.

Speaker 1 (01:07:03):
No, but it sounds like you got rid of her
at some point now time.

Speaker 2 (01:07:07):
We were trying to get rid of her. Right as
we broke up the first time we were we were
talking to all the people.

Speaker 1 (01:07:13):
Okay, so she rode the ship to the end. Okay,
she got a new manager.

Speaker 2 (01:07:16):
Keep going anyway. So Mike was connected with everybody, and
at the time he knew somebody at iTunes and we
were able to get We did a deal with what
was then Iota that gradually got folded in as part
of the Orchard, now Kevin Arnold. So we did a
deal with him for all the other digital distribution, which
accounted to Bubkas in two thousand and four, two thousand

(01:07:36):
and five, and we were lucky we did a deal.
We were like the last micro label to do a
deal directly with Apple. Somehow Tyranny knew somebody. We got in.
We basically had one record on our label. We later
had two or three more that don't matter that we own,
and so we had direct distribution to Apple from through

(01:07:57):
the whole heyday of the iTunes store, and we were
just and are you know they were taking their thirty
percent off the top and we're getting our seventy percent
on every sale. It was beautiful and that ramped up quickly.
And what was really interesting was we're still getting statements
from Sony right. So by by the two thousand and one,
two thousand and two, we're selling like worldwide, like one

(01:08:19):
thousand records a month. Okay, looking at the statements, nothing right,
and we're getting you know, bupkus on those we're getting
a buck maybe a year. Immediately with the launch of
the iTunes store, not only are we you know, we
own it, so we're getting seventy percent instead of fifteen percent.
We're our volume. All of a sudden, you're selling like, okay,

(01:08:41):
we're selling a thousand records, which is track equivalent maybe
fifteen thousand tracks a month. Right, all of a sudden,
we're selling you know, like, you know, tens of thousands
of tracks a month. You know what that was? The
bizarre thing was like, I get it, the margin was
way better, but the vaulme was way higher too, which

(01:09:02):
was just mine.

Speaker 1 (01:09:04):
So what do you what do you think it counts
for that?

Speaker 2 (01:09:07):
I think people were it was. You got to give
credit to Steve Jobs for seeing the appetite there and
somehow talking the labels in. I don't I was not privy.
I was not really in the trenches in the digital
music industry at that time. But I don't know how
all that went down, But he solved the problem for them,

(01:09:27):
and they sort of solved the problem for him. But
that you know, I think everybody who's had a career
in at a major label or publisher in the last
twenty years should like go to Steve Jobs' grave like
twice a year and put flowers on it. And he
saved the music industry as far as I'm concerned. He
just figured out something that was simple, easy to do

(01:09:48):
between the hardware and the software. Was any numbskull could
figure it out. You've got your iPod, you download the songs,
you put it on there, you take them everywhere.

Speaker 3 (01:09:56):
You know, it just works as the saying goes okay
was the adoption. The sales were those up because in
the physical era, maybe the store didn't have your record. Yeah,
digitally that's what you think was good.

Speaker 2 (01:10:13):
I think that. And then there was obviously I've never
been able to really understand how much piracy there was
in the nineties and into the two thousands, but I
know I can say based anecdotally that you know, at
our peak, we would hear, hey, I was just in
like the Philippines or you know, Columbia, and wow, your
record was everywhere, Like yeah, I don't think we got

(01:10:36):
anything for that, So God knows how much piracy there
was in the you know, the the industry only has
itself to blame. They released music on high quality, unencrypted
digital format for years, right, like pretty easy to copy that, Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:10:53):
Tell me about the transition from sales to streams.

Speaker 2 (01:10:58):
Sales to streams just was gradual, and it was kind
of I saw it from all sides because I was
at Amazon Music during that really where that transition took
off kind of. I was at Amazon Music from twenty
twelve to about twenty seventeen, which is and we conceived
and launched the Prime Music and Music Unlimited. Then, you know,

(01:11:20):
I think Daniel Leck got it done somehow. I don't
you know that's there. There's a whole story there that
I'm sure you can have people on the show who
can tell better than I can, and I'm not sure
I can.

Speaker 1 (01:11:34):
Tell you a lot. But that's not really my question.
My question is, as it goes to streaming, your income
go down up or stay the same.

Speaker 2 (01:11:42):
It's gone up just because because I think more just
the digital music market grew, right. It's every market has
kind of an S curve growth, right, It's slow and
then it ramps up and it's in the steep part
and then it's now it's leveling off right where at
the top half half of the S curve now, So
I think we are seeing more income. But I can't

(01:12:06):
tell you if the iTunes store was still dominant and
just the digital music market had grown. But I don't
think the digital music market would have grown if we'd
stuck with ninety nine cent MP three's. I just think
there were that was a.

Speaker 1 (01:12:18):
Moment in time, just like we have a moment in
time for eight tracks, cassettes, et cetera. Right, But leaving
that in the rear view mirror conventional wisdom, forget about
knowledgeable people or people who work for these companies. You
hear it every minute of the day. Spotify is ripping

(01:12:38):
me off, They're not paying me, blah blah blah. What
is your experience with the presidents?

Speaker 2 (01:12:45):
Yes, Spotify is not ripping anybody off. And Spotify can't
come out and say you have a shitty deal with
your label. They can't defend themselves because they'll piss off
their most important partners. I mean, the whole thing is,
don't I don't even know why or how. And in Spotify,
even on their own, they don't disclose everything. But if
you dig into their website, they pretty much tell you

(01:13:07):
exactly how they do business if you want to know
if you're an artist or a label. So it is
hard math obviously, if you have one hundred let's say
that you only had one hundred Spotify paying subscribers, and
they're each paying ten dollars a month. If you're trying,
you can't pay a penny rate, right because one month
those hundred people might stream five songs each, but the

(01:13:28):
next month they might stream one hundred songs each. So
there is some very tricky math to how it all
works out, and at least so far, it hasn't gone
the way of the black boxes, you know, some of
the pros where you're not sure. I think the math
is pretty clear and fair, and I just don't see
I don't get it. I mean, I get that somebody's

(01:13:50):
resentful because things aren't the way they want it to be.
But too bad. It's not Spotify or Amazon Music or
Apple Music that's screwing you. It's most likely, in most cases,
you have a bad deal with your label or your distributor,
or no one is listening. Well, there's that's a whole
other thing. And as I've said sort of started. You know,

(01:14:10):
from the start of the digital anybody can make a
good sounding record in their bedroom now, right. You used
to have to have a lot of money to have
a board and a tape machine and outboard gear that
it took to make a good sounding recording. I'm using Carmela,
my engineer friend's laptop right now. You can make a
killer sounding record on this Mac laptop with just the
like a one in out right and this microphone that

(01:14:34):
I'm talking on right now. You can make a major
label quality record. But just you know whatever. You know, look,
Marvin Gay would have been a superstar in like fifteen
sixty eight, seventeen sixty eight, nineteen sixty eight, twenty one
sixty eight quality. You know. Not everybody's that good, you know,

(01:14:55):
I mean, that's that's the reality is. And I'm a
big believer in the market, the wisdom of the market
that the cream does actually rise to the top. You know,
people know what they like. It's yeah, you still have to.

Speaker 1 (01:15:08):
Be good, Okay. So you know, there are many avenues
of remuneration. There are certainly streams, there's subscriber streams. I
don't want to get for paid not paid streams on
Spotify it's irrelevant. But there's streams on Pandora that are

(01:15:29):
radio streams. But there's other places where people license music.
A what percentage of your revenue is purely from the
traditional streamers Amazon, Apple, you know? And how much is
these other areas and what are they?

Speaker 2 (01:15:47):
That's a great that's a good question because we've beat
our heads against this wall for twenty years since we
got the rights back. We don't get a ton of film,
TV AD licenses. We've had a couple of good ones
in the last two years. Last summer we had Bush
Beer licensed Peaches for a peach flavored beer, which I
don't want to drink. I don't think I don't think

(01:16:09):
it was in my market. You'll take the check, yeah,
But we don't get a lot of licenses of that nature,
and we've never been able to figure out why. We've
gone through all the options, and anybody who's in the
industry will know what I'm talking about. You there are
people who want an exclusive, and I say, they'll go
out and pitch your stuff to everybody and they'll get
you placements. That's never worked for us. Chris, my bandmate's

(01:16:31):
done more of this. He's found that it's always opportunistic,
so you just got to be out there. So we
just very occasionally get stuff. But I have to say
depend unless it's a weird year, one in three or five,
like ninety five plus percent of our stuff is just streaming.
It's straight up.

Speaker 1 (01:16:49):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:16:49):
We've had a few anomaloust things here and there. The
for a while it looked like as you know, like
Guitar Hero and rock Band were like, whoa, these are
big checks for like three years and then that went away.
So I keep waiting for the you know, the nineties,
the nineties John Hughes style nostalgia film She's Lump, where

(01:17:11):
they're going to give us a two million dollar check.
Use that is the title track. But you know, we
haven't figured out how to tap into that vein as
much as i'd like to. Chris has with his own music,
but we haven't.

Speaker 1 (01:17:23):
Okay, who actually does the business for the presidents?

Speaker 2 (01:17:29):
We do it. I mean I get the emails. I
mean sometimes they still come to Sony if it's a
master license for our debut record, because because people will
think that you'll have the CD and it says on it,
but there Sony's great about you know, we have our
contacts there, they'll email me. So I do most of it.
Jason does some. Chris is very happy to let us

(01:17:51):
do it. Jason, Chris and I both did go to college.
Jason didn't. Although Jason is one of the smartest people
I've ever met in my life. He absolutely brilliant guy.
So we have plenty of you know, capability and horsepower.
We do it. We have a business manager, we use
Summit Business Management down in the Greater LA area, who

(01:18:12):
we were introduced to through our friend weird Al who's
a brilliant, brilliant business person. And we always have a lawyer.
Our lawyer mostly has been Ed Pearson, who was at
Warner Chapel for years and up in Seattle for the
last ten or fifteen years representing Maclamore and Head and
the Heart and a bunch of artists. So we generally, well,
we'll have a lawyer and we have a good business manager,

(01:18:34):
and that's enough really for us. We don't need a manager.

Speaker 1 (01:18:38):
Okay, let's go back to the beginning. So you grow
up exactly where.

Speaker 2 (01:18:43):
I grew up in the Seattle area, in the northeast
part of the town called Laurelhurst, which is like a
you know, when I grew up there, it was stay
at home moms, university professors, professionals. You know, it's a
nice neighborhood near the University of Washington.

Speaker 1 (01:19:02):
And what did your parents do for a living?

Speaker 2 (01:19:04):
My dad was a PR guy. Actually he went his
family business is a great story. But my grandpa and
my uncle ran a fur brokerage business, but my dad
chose not to go into that business, and he started
a PR firm right after the World's Fair in Seattle.
That's this guy Jay Rocky, who was a legend here

(01:19:26):
who got the World's Fair on the cover of Life
magazine twice. And they started a PR firm in the
early sixties and they ran that for years till my
dad retired when he was sixty five. So he was
a words guy.

Speaker 1 (01:19:41):
Okay, how long has your family been in America?

Speaker 2 (01:19:46):
Four to five generations?

Speaker 1 (01:19:50):
Do you know why they came?

Speaker 2 (01:19:51):
Yeah, it's some of them on my dad's side of
the family. My paternal grandfather was German and they were
part of US diaspora of crafts people who went from
Germany sort of the you know alsace lran like the
the western part of Germany in the mid nineteenth century

(01:20:13):
to Tsarist Russia to a particular river valley to be
craftspeople for the czar and there there I've read a
book about it. They sort of then dispersed to northern
US and Canada, and a lot of them in Texas
as well. You know, if you drive around Texas there Flugerville,
there are German place names everywhere. So they moved to

(01:20:35):
Saskatchewan or Alberta, my great great grand my great grandfather
on my dad's side, and then eventually to Montana. And
then my paternal grandfather, who was quite a guy, moved
to Seattle sort of before the start of the depression
and worked his way up from nothing to being the
owner and president of this big for brokerage house. And

(01:20:58):
then yeah, mom's side mostly Irish, Irish Catholic. You know,
I don't know how they ended up over here.

Speaker 1 (01:21:06):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:21:07):
Another side of the family was French, and weirdly this
is on my dad's side. My grandparents were originally from
like five miles away from each other in France and
Germany in that Alsace Lran region, which is just bizarre.
So they came through Yeah, any homesteading in Minnesota.

Speaker 1 (01:21:28):
Okay, you say your parents were divorced. How old were
you when they got divorced.

Speaker 2 (01:21:32):
I was eight when they split up.

Speaker 1 (01:21:35):
Okay, how many kids in the family?

Speaker 2 (01:21:37):
Myself and my sister Claire, who's a writer, and she's older, younger,
she's two and a half years younger than I am,
and she's way more famous than I am.

Speaker 1 (01:21:47):
Now it's okay, But what's it like when your parents
divorced when you're ead?

Speaker 2 (01:21:54):
I think it sucked. I don't think at the time
I was able to really process that. I think I'm
incredibly lucky that my dad, my mom, and my stepdad
whom my mom, they're still together and they got them
getting together as part of my parents splitting up. Are
all like I thought this was normal, But they are

(01:22:17):
all like kind reasonable, rational people who don't lose their tempers,
you know. I mean, I just I didn't know how
much I hit the jackpot with my family until I
got older and saw friends, families and more dysfunction. So
somehow it was okay. I think, you know, there was

(01:22:38):
maybe if anything was missing, it was maybe a chance
to actually get pissed off when I was that young
and sort of expressed.

Speaker 1 (01:22:44):
Me Okay, but you're your parents are divorce in a
totally different era now, it's all you know in terms
of back dead. A lot of times the kid lived
with one parent, usually the mother. You know, there's not
the co parenting there was. What was it like for you?

Speaker 2 (01:22:58):
We lived mostly with my mom and stayed in the
same house that we'd been in, and my dad after
a year or two moved into super cool house boat
that my sister and I own now kind of like
Sleepless in Seattle, down on Lake Union in Seattle. And
he had some other partners in his life, but never long.
You know, he never remarried. And we would spend you know,

(01:23:21):
one to three days a week with him in the winter,
like every weekend we went skiing with him. Summertime, we
go hiking, go to the mountains with him for weeks
at a time, and so we saw both of them often.
We didn't split fifty to fifty. We really did live
at my mom.

Speaker 1 (01:23:35):
Okay, you have a bad day in school, would you
call your father?

Speaker 2 (01:23:39):
I'd call my mom. My mom was my emotional support.
My dad was a very loving, supportive guy, but my
mom was definitely my primary parent.

Speaker 1 (01:23:48):
And what was the story with your stepfather.

Speaker 2 (01:23:51):
My stepfather, interestingly, is younger. My mom is eight years
younger than my dad was, and my stepdad is eight
years younger than my mom, so he he only sixteen
years older than I am. And he was a pretty
young guy when he and my mom got together. He
would have been in maybe twenty four, my mom would
have been thirty two. And he just turned out to

(01:24:12):
be an awesome guy. Just I mean, the whole thing
on paper is just a fucking disaster if you think
about it. It should have been horrible, but somehow everybody
was thoughtful and tolerant, and it was in some ways
I benefited because I saw even more. We ended up
doing things through what my stepdad wanted to do that

(01:24:33):
I never would have gotten to do, which.

Speaker 1 (01:24:35):
Was and would your stepdad do for a living?

Speaker 2 (01:24:37):
He when he and my mom got together, he ran
He was the production manager for Conley Water Skis. He
was just a kind of crafty. He had gotten an
economics degree for the University of Washington, and then he
was a guy. He's one of those people who just
can't sit still and is always doing a project. So
he was the guy who figured out how to you know,
make a water ski press out of nothing, out of
a hydraulic machine, and or figure out how to make

(01:25:00):
a new mill to cut wood. And then he bought
a piece of property on Stuart Island, which is one
of the San Juan islands that doesn't have ferry service.
And he had grown up his dad was a builder
or a you know, a carpenter, and so he had
grown up building houses. So we built a house in
the summers on Stuart Island over a couple of summers.

(01:25:21):
And to do that, we had to build a little
barge that we towed behind our motor sailor to get
the wood to the island. And so we did that,
and then all these people saw the house that he
built and were like, this is really cool. Can you
build me one of these? And somehow Larry, my stepdad,
at some point was in Harbor Town on Puget Sound
and he saw like a forty five foot tug old

(01:25:44):
old wood tug log towing tugboat for sailings, just like,
I'm going to quit my job and buy that and
start a business. Than he did, and it was it
was incredible for me because he eventually turned into be
a pretty big you know like sand and gravel moving
operation with barges and tugs. But the first four or
five years, every summer we would build a house on

(01:26:04):
Stuart Island and we did the tug and barge work
to get the materials over there. And I would get
up every morning and put on my boots, my shorts
and my tool belt and go like getting a skiff
and take the skiff to the job site and dig
holes or pound nails all day. It was I look again,
looking back on that, I'm like, seem normal at the time,
But holy shit, was I lucky to get to do that.

Speaker 1 (01:26:24):
So how many tug boats and how many barges did
he end up with?

Speaker 2 (01:26:28):
He eventually ended up with at the peak of a
couple of boats and a few barges. And his specialty
was sand and gravel. And because you know, where you
have a big waterway like Puget Sound, it's way less
expensive to move that via a barge than via trucks,
right if you can put thousands of yards on a barge.
And then he built this crazy conveyor that could shoot

(01:26:49):
material way way way up on the beach, and it
was unique. So he would and he eventually got to
the point where he could just park his barges and
lease it and other people would deliver the material. He
had this kind of slick set up for getting the
material way up onto the beach or up onto a
job site. And he did that for years, and he
sold business about ten years ago.

Speaker 1 (01:27:10):
How far is Stuart Island from downtown Seattle.

Speaker 2 (01:27:14):
Stuart Island is the most northwesternmost point in the contiguous
forty eight states. So you'd drive, you know, seventy miles
to anacordis and then you'd have to take a ferry
to San Juan Island, the biggest ferry service island, which
takes two or three hours, and then take a skiff
twenty minutes to Stuart Island.

Speaker 1 (01:27:43):
So what kind of kid are you growing up? You
have friends? You don't have friends? Good at school? Not
good at school?

Speaker 2 (01:27:49):
I had I was I was never the boss. I
was always part of a crew. I guess, you know.
I played sports, so my friends were sporty, sporty kids
and probably smart kids. I think I was good in school,
you know, I was usually like in grade school. I
was always you know, like going up a grade or
two to read and our grades. I went to public school.

(01:28:12):
Through fifth grade, and we had a gifted program. I
think I was in the gifted program. And then I
went to I had a really really bad fifth grade teacher,
and my parents decided that and I was getting in
a little trouble at the time. I had shoplifted a
few times, and my parents moved me and actually two
of my best friends. We all moved to a private

(01:28:32):
school in Seattle in sixth grade and I went there
through high school.

Speaker 1 (01:28:36):
Was that boys only, No, it was co ed.

Speaker 2 (01:28:39):
It was a school called the Bush School, which had
been girls only and had gone co ed in the
early seventies. And I got really lucky there. I look back,
I got, you know, a lot of life is luck.
I ended up at this school that was super progressive
and had all these aquarian age teachers who were high
minded and wanted to do stuff with the kids and
take us out in the woods and you know, share

(01:29:00):
their passions with us, and that would just happen again
a moment in time. That school, for that seven or
eight years, I got really lucky.

Speaker 1 (01:29:08):
Okay, so what year are you born in. I was
born in sixty four, so you're born in sixty four.
World's Fair is in sixty two. You know, we have
the blow up of the Seattle scene in the early nineties.
We have the Seattle pilots before that, who leave. Let
was talking about this earlier, you know, in the seventies.

(01:29:30):
You know, you drive in the West, you're out of
cell service. I mean there was no cell service. You
were totally disconnected. Now you're connected everywhere. So it sounds
like a dumb question, and maybe it's all you know,
But what was it like growing up in Seattle in
that time? Let me give you a different experience and
maybe it might help you Know, I'm growing up fifty

(01:29:51):
miles from New York City. There's New York City media,
all the TV shows, and music is coming from Hollywood.
You could you know, what's it like living in the
Pacific Northwest.

Speaker 2 (01:30:03):
That's a great question, and I I would answer that.
So it was a beautiful place. You know, as my
partner Jenna and I talked about it all the times.
You grew up here as well, like you drive around
now and there's trash everywhere. There was you know, it
was clean and people were kind and respectful to each other.

(01:30:24):
It was not very crowded. Yet nobody knew about it
and I mean, one of my ways to answer that
question is I went to Brown University for junior and
senior year of college, so I transferred there and I'd
taken a year off, So I guess they went there
in the fall of nineteen eighty five, and you know,
as you said, we weren't connected. I mean, I remember
people like the first day that late fall it snowed,

(01:30:46):
and someone's like, oh, yeah, you're well, you're used to this.
It's like, you know, they thought Seattle was fucking Alaska, right,
no idea, like, no, it maybe snow's an inch once year.
And then that the real moment was so listen to
a fair amount of jazz growing up. My mom liked it,
and then I, as I started to play guitar, I
really liked jazz and listened to it a lot. And

(01:31:07):
so I'd listened to like, you know, Miles Davis or
Joe Pass or this New York City music in Seattle,
and I dug it. And I'll never forget the Thanksgiving,
the first joy I was there. I had bought this
crappy Vovo wagon and a friend invited me to go
to Thanksgiving at his house in Brooklyn with his family
and So I drove four of us down, you know,
down nine ninety five down through Connecticut into the city.

(01:31:30):
And as you know, that drive, like if you can
imagine what it's like if you grew up in Seattle,
it's like N ninety five is like twelve lanes wide
as you come in north of the city. We come
in and we drive basically all the way down you know,
Broadway right. We went the full length of Manhattan, and
I will never forget pulling into Times Square and it

(01:31:51):
was late, it was probably ten thirty or eleven at night.
I'll never forget pulling up and right in the heart
of Times Square to a stop light, and I had
my window down, and I was like, oh, that's what
I've been listening to, Like that ride symbol. That's when
you listen to, you know, any jazz from the six
fifties or early sixties, that's the sound. That's why they

(01:32:11):
were making that sound, because that's the sound of this city.
You know. Another thing I thought, you know, as we
were coming down nine ninety five, growing up in Seattle,
it's like you'd see McDonald's commercials or like a Buick
commercial in National Geographic, or a Schlitz commercial and you'd
look at the people in the ad and go, who
the fuck are these people? These are not the people
that I'm around ever in the Pacific Northwest. I don't

(01:32:34):
know what this is. And I, you know, forty five
minutes before the jazz moment in Times Square, I remember
being in that traffic twelve lanes, eight lanes wide and
just going, Oh, these are the people who buy the
Schlitz and the Buick, and this is what this is
all about. This is you know, this is this is
the market that I've been seeing. So it was lovely.

(01:32:57):
It was provincial. You know, That's that's really the big
downfall with digital media and the Internet is the loss
of provinciality.

Speaker 1 (01:33:05):
Okay, so you have the revolution and music in nineties,
early nineties to mid nineties. Then Microsoft blows up Amazon
just before the turn of the century. How has that
changed Seattle? What is Seattle like now?

Speaker 2 (01:33:20):
It's so radically different. And you know, my dad died
three and a half years ago, and I used to
talk to him about it about how wow this is.
You know, we're sort of stuck in the middle. We're
not dense enough yet to have all the benefits of
being a you know Brooklyn or a European city, but
we've lost that thing where I can just drive my

(01:33:41):
car an hour in any direction and lay out my
sleeping bag on the side of the road. So we're
sort of stuck. And my dad, he was interesting. His dad,
my grandpa was a big civic booster. He was involved
in putting the World's Fair together, and big civic leader.
And his response was like your grandpa would just he'd
look around and be pleased as punch. This is what
he and all those guys were working toward tirelessly, you know,

(01:34:04):
for fifty years, was to put Seattle on the map.
So it's cool that we're on the map, Seattle Metropolitan
Seattle is sort of unrecognizable because of the influx of
wealth and wealthy singletons and double income no kid people
who have no allegiance to the city other than that
maybe Amazon's you know, they're doing. They're working at one

(01:34:27):
or more of the fang companies. They're going to do
two years at Amazon, then they're going to go to Netflix,
then they're going to go to Google. So we don't
have that sense of identity like we did, but you know,
there is a vibrancy there's live music every night of
the week. There's all sorts of stuff going on. There's,
you know, a good tax base, there's the benefit of

(01:34:47):
having your property value go up, all that stuff, So
you know, you can't really fight. I'm a little bit
of a There was a famous columnist in Seattle for
the Seattle Post Intelligencer, EMMITTT. Watson, and he was an
advocate for quote unquote lesser Seattle. He considered himself the
mayor of lesser Seattle. He was he was always grouching about,
you know, losing the old flavor. But you know, I'm

(01:35:10):
sure they said the same thing during the gold Rush boom,
you know, when people were headed to the Klong Dyke.

Speaker 1 (01:35:15):
You can't Okay, I'm gonna ask a dumb question, but
a lot of people have not been to the Pacific Northwest.
What would you say the difference is between Seattle, Portland
and Vancouver.

Speaker 2 (01:35:30):
Seattle. But we were just talking about this. Carmela, who's
here engineering the session, lived in Portland for ten years.
I think of Portland as simultaneously what Seattle was like
twenty five years ago and what it could have been
if we'd been a little bit better at urban planning Portland.

(01:35:50):
You know, Portland for example, has like an amazing culinary scene,
and now Portland's I think struggling catching up because as
they get better at cost of living goes up, property
values go up. Like if you ever go to Portland,
go try to go to a show at Mississippi Studios
in the Mississippi neighborhood, which is kind of in the

(01:36:11):
north northeast part of the city. That's one of those
neighborhoods you look at, like went there where Elbow, Grease
and sweat Equity could do it, which they haven't been
able to do it in Seattle for thirty years. It's
just too fucking expensive, right, you can't be an artist
and like, you know, live in a squad, which you
could forty years ago. So Portland's sort of twenty years
behind us and twenty years ahead of us. Vancouver is

(01:36:33):
another world because I think being a crown country, all
the y two k influx of wealth from Hong Kong
and or you know, mainland China, they've been way better
at embracing urban density. It's much more of a futuristic
kind of urban environment. Although I have to say their

(01:36:54):
brilliance was Stanley Park, the big park that sticks north
of downtown is one of the most along with Central Park,
is probably the most brilliant piece of civic planning of
all time to preserve the most beautiful spot right in
the middle of your city. So, yeah, Vancouver is it's
like a I don't know, I've spent quite a bit
of time there. It's like friendly blade runner, I guess

(01:37:17):
is what I call it.

Speaker 1 (01:37:19):
Okay, let's go back. So you're growing up, when do
you start playing in the instrument? What music are you
listening to?

Speaker 2 (01:37:28):
One of my earliest memories is musical. I was in
the car with my mom. We had a white Ford
Galaxy five hundred, and I have one of my earliest,
most vivid childhood memories is getting in the car in
the backseat, no kids. You know, I was probably three
or four five at the most, and as you know
back then, you turn the ignition on and if the

(01:37:50):
radio was already on, the radio would come on and
it was some like I don't know what it was,
I just remember that. If I think back, I think
it had to have been like Otis Redding or Wilson
Pickett or something. But it came on and it was
some like super high energy, kind of soul music, and
my mom turned it off, and I just remember having
a massive tantrum, like, turn it back on, turn it

(01:38:10):
back on, turn it back on. So from a very
early age, I really really liked music. We didn't have
a piano in the house. Neither of my parents nor Larry,
my stepdad, played an instrument, but everybody liked music, all
three of my parents and Larry kind of moved in,
and he's a little bit younger, right, so his record
collection was from like the late sixties early seventies. So

(01:38:32):
my mom's listening to Bob Dylan on repeat in the house.
Larry moves in, and all of a sudden, my friend
Eddie Hewletts comes over and sees led Zeppelin four. We're
in like fifth grade, and he's kind of a cool dude,
ended up being a real fixture on the Seattle punk
rock scene. He's like, hey, deater, chick this out, you know,
and he pulls it out of the sleeve, puts it
down and puts black Dog on, and I just I'm like,

(01:38:55):
holy shit, that's what I want to do. So from
that age, I really wanted to do it. And then
and I didn't start playing imber until I was in
eighth grade. There was a guy in my class, Matt Bowman,
who was brilliant ended up going to Yale a year early.
He's a business guy now. He was like a keyboard prodigy. Actually,
when he was in ninth grade, Roger Fisher was leaving

(01:39:17):
Heart and asked him to join his band. So he
was really good, and so we put together a band
in eighth grade. Sagittarius. Bob was the name of.

Speaker 1 (01:39:26):
The Wait wait, wait, wait, way you left out when
you picked up an instrument, So.

Speaker 2 (01:39:29):
Eighth grade that this band was for me. So we're
going to have a band. Sagittarius. Matt, the brilliant piano
player is going to play well.

Speaker 1 (01:39:36):
So you're gonna have a band. And at that time
you would not do not have an instrument.

Speaker 2 (01:39:40):
No, don't have an instrument. So somebody has to play bass.
So two or three of us rent or buy basses
and start taking lessons. I don't get the gig, but
I take the bass back and I rent an acoustic guitar.
And the only lessons I've ever taken really were the
next one or two years. This great guy rest in peace,
Chuck Bennett, who was kind of the first call casuals

(01:40:02):
jazz whatever guy around town. He was my guitar teacher,
and I just started taking guitar lessons and you know,
trying to play with my friends in the neighborhood and stuff.
And they didn't really maybe have a proper band until
senior year in high school. Was probably the first real
band I had. But you know, just music was I mean,

(01:40:26):
once we start talking about music, we're going to need
another three hours because that's getting okay.

Speaker 1 (01:40:30):
But just to stay on this point, you have a
band in high school, is it playing gigs? Are you
getting paid?

Speaker 2 (01:40:39):
I think that band my senior year, Sandino and the Leftists,
I think we played one gig at my school and
probably didn't get paid. And then the next year I
went freshman year school, all of a sudden, I was
in a band there in Colorado College, and weirdly was

(01:41:00):
the same drummer who had been in Sagittarius in eighth grade.
We reconnected, and the guitar player in that band I
gradually learned, you know, started playing whenever I could, and
you get in bands with people like the guitar player
in that band had been in a band that really
played in the Bay Area, were college freshmen and made
records and stuff, so he actually knew kind of how

(01:41:22):
to because it's not about really about playing your instrument,
it's understanding how all the pieces fit together and how
to listen to other people. That's really what music is about.
So then gradually and actually the guy I really had
a band there, moved back to Seattle, took a year
off of school, and my best friend Kermit Rosen and
I had bands for a couple of years in what

(01:41:43):
was really like the immediately pre grunge scene in Seattle,
and we're getting better again. Then I went to Brown
and I resuscitated this funk band that had fallen apart
when someone graduated. And the other guitar player in that
band was the guy whose house I went for Thanksgiving,
Matt MOONISTERI. He became a well known trad jazz guitar

(01:42:04):
player in New York. He was already a he was
from Brooklyn, but somehow became a bluegrass banjo prodigy in
like junior high in high school, and he was a
serious musician, and he was the guy who taught me
how to play music. We played you know, James Brown
and current you know, CAMEO funk music, R and B music,

(01:42:25):
and he was a task master and he could really play.
And he was the first guy, and he was a
bit of a hard ass. He was the first guy
who just sat me down and said, no, that's not
good enough. You're going to sit here with me and
tell we use this metronome and you can actually play
this in time and make it groove. And he good
enough is not good enough? Has to be fucking awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:42:45):
So why did you go to Colorado College? Why did
it not work out? And then how did you end
up at Brown?

Speaker 2 (01:42:51):
Oh? You really? I was enrolled at four schools in
four years I went. I applied to a bunch of
school we actually I only applied to Colorado College in Berkeley.
I got into Colorado College and Berkeley. I decided to
go to Colorado College because I had some friends there
and I just wanted to go climbing, honestly, and they

(01:43:12):
had you know, they have the block program where you
go to school for three and a half weeks. I
just wanted to go climbing for five days every month.
And I had friends climbing friends from Seattle. One was
already there and one was going So that was Colorada College.
I got there, I'm like, this is I don't see
the point of moving fifteen hundred miles to be with
like eighteen hundred other kids. This is just not a
big enough thing for me. So I reapplied to Berkeley.

(01:43:35):
They let me back in, and then that summer my
Kermit and then I started a band, and like a
week before I was supposed to go to Berkeley. This
is cal Berkeley, not Berkeley College of Music. I flaked
out and decided not to go. We kept our band
going the next year. We wanted to keep playing music.
So Kermit and I he had gone to uh.

Speaker 1 (01:43:54):
Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait this being is
in Seattle.

Speaker 2 (01:43:57):
Or yeah, yeah in Seattle. Back in Seattle.

Speaker 1 (01:44:00):
Wait wait how long did you go to Colorado College?

Speaker 2 (01:44:02):
One year?

Speaker 1 (01:44:03):
Okay, one year, you go back to Seattle. You say
you're going to go to Berkeley. You don't go to
Berkeley because you have this band. Continue with your education.

Speaker 2 (01:44:13):
Okay, Yeah, I've got the band, and Kermit and I
are working at this communist pizza restaurant in the university
district and playing music. Keep playing music. The next year.
We want to keep playing music in Seattle go to
the University Washington undergrad for a year, and that also
felt like I was an English major. I was always
the one or two of the kids in the front

(01:44:34):
row actually engaged going to office hours, and it didn't
feel that exciting. My girlfriend at the time went to Brown.
I really liked her, and I thought I need a
bigger challenge, so I only applied to one school. I
applied to Brown, and I got in and just went how.

Speaker 1 (01:44:50):
Long did it you go to Brown? Did it continue
with the girlfriend? And for how long?

Speaker 2 (01:44:55):
It mostly continued for the next two years and maybe
half a year year after that, but it didn't. It
didn't last forever.

Speaker 1 (01:45:03):
Well, but you know, when you go to a school
in the middle, how do you make friends? How does
it work?

Speaker 2 (01:45:11):
Well? I knew her and so I had her friend
group pretty quickly. Somehow I ended up connecting with some
other transfer students that I hit it off with. That
was one guy who became the bass player in the
funk band Dimensioned and was a climber, so we'd like
totally hit it off on the all fronts. Another guy,
Andrew Stevens from Columbia, Missouri, who ended up working for

(01:45:33):
Richard get part for years. Was just a really he
transferred from Vassar. Just a fucking hilarious smart guy. You know,
so I hit it. I'm pretty you know, I'm pretty gregarious.
I'm not a shrinking violin.

Speaker 1 (01:45:47):
Oh okay, since you go to Colorado, which is certainly
different from Seattle, But what do you learn other than
your eye ninety five experiences? And I'm not talking about
classroom What do you learn going to Brown that is
different from what you already know so much?

Speaker 2 (01:46:06):
And this is all going to resonate with you as
an East Coaster who moved to the West coast. You know,
as you said, what was it like growing up in
the Pacific Northwest? I remember just the first week at Brown,
Like you know, if you're a Western kid at least
at that time, Like when you meet people, it's like
what music do you like? Oh, let's go throw the frisbee?
What do you like to do? You meet kids at

(01:46:26):
an Ivy League school, they're like, where'd you prep? Does
your dad know my dad? On the street or on
Capitol Hill. It's like, oh, okay, this is a whole
different game. This is a game I have no interest
in it. And to continue to answer your question. That
was the big value of living there. Two years was
about all it could take. But I got that view of, Oh,

(01:46:49):
these are the people who buy Schlitz and buicks. Oh
these are the people who are going to run the country.
These people I'm going to school with, for better or worse,
are the people who are going to be on Wall
Street and Capitol Hill in five years, ten years, twenty years.
So it was a real window into how the oligarchy
actually functions in the United States. It was a real

(01:47:09):
eye opener. I'm really glad I did it.

Speaker 1 (01:47:10):
It turned out, Okay, you graduate, do you immediately go
back to Seattle? And why No.

Speaker 2 (01:47:18):
I knew I wanted to be an high school English teacher,
and I sent out, you know, not emails letters to
forty or fifty schools, and my only requirement was the
school be west of the Mississippi, I'll be totally honest.
And I ended up at a school in Denver, Kent
Denver School, private school in Cherry Hill.

Speaker 1 (01:47:38):
So just because we're this far, where does the euro
paramour end up?

Speaker 2 (01:47:43):
She ended up kind of continuing she was an anthropology major.
She ended up in flag Staff at a museum there,
and eventually going to grad school in anthropology. And actually
she's been back in the Boston area for twenty five years.

Speaker 1 (01:47:57):
So what broke up the relationship pure distance.

Speaker 2 (01:48:00):
I think just a it just was not She's a
great person, and honestly was you know, just was not
the time of life.

Speaker 1 (01:48:06):
Okay, So you go to teach and you're teaching where
and what?

Speaker 2 (01:48:11):
Teaching at Kent Denver School in suburban Denver, and I
was there two years. I taught English and coach soccer
and basketball.

Speaker 1 (01:48:18):
High school.

Speaker 2 (01:48:19):
Yeah, high school. I had middle school too. Middle school.
Middle schoolers crushed me, but the high school part I enjoyed.
Middle schoolers had my number.

Speaker 1 (01:48:33):
So, okay, you're a teacher for two years, you stop?

Speaker 2 (01:48:38):
Because I decided after two years there, I did want
to move back to Seattle. I missed. I was just
having this conversation with my younger daughter because she's trying
to figure out what to do with her life, and
I knew I wanted to be in a community where
I knew all kinds of people right all ages, where
I had a deep connection culturally and family wise. So

(01:48:58):
I just thought, I'm going to move back to Seattle.
I'm back to Seattle, and I ended up not the
one thing I was sure I wasn't gonna do was
teach at my alma mater. I got back that summer
and the head of the upper school, who I'd stayed
friends with, called me, is like, I got a pregnant
English teacher, you want a job. So I ended up
teaching English and for another three years and coaching soccer,

(01:49:20):
and I did took kids out climbing and you know,
doing stuff in the woods, and that was great. It
was really fun three years. So I taught for three
years and then it was onto the next phase.

Speaker 1 (01:49:31):
Well what was the next phase?

Speaker 2 (01:49:33):
The next phase was sitting around thinking, Wow, I'm getting
better at being a teacher. But one of the big
problems with being a teacher is if you're an ambitious person,
you're inevitably going to become an administrator. And being a
teacher is really really fun, and I think being an
administrator at a private independent school is maybe less fun,

(01:49:56):
pretty hard. You're answering to parents, students, faculty, staff, and
everybody's kind of pissed off at you all the time. Right,
So I sort of saw the writing on the wall.
So I actually made kind of a real conscious decision, like, Okay,
I've enjoyed doing something where I feel like I'm kind
of hopefully contributing to the positive side of the karmic
balance sheet every day. What else do I care about?

(01:50:17):
So this is like nineteen eighty nine, and this was
the start of the influx of chain of out Californians
and other in Seattle. And I loved the natural environment
here and grew up out on the water and in
the mountains, and I thought, well, I want to get
involved in, you know, natural resource issues. So I spent
a year applying to law school, because what do you
do when you're a fucking English major. You go to

(01:50:39):
law school, right, You're not going to go back and
get a PhD and in you know, bioengineering. So I
did that, and I got all my acceptances and rejections,
and my dad and I were in Sun Valley skiing
for a couple of weeks in the spring, and I
remember after dark going over and sitting on the stopped
chairlift at the bottom of warm springs and looking up

(01:51:00):
at the hill and going, I don't want to be
a lawyer. What am I doing? So then I spent
another year working doing some public affairs stuff and applying
to graduate school in urban.

Speaker 1 (01:51:11):
So wirebin planning.

Speaker 2 (01:51:14):
It seemed like the other land use planning seemed like
the one other professional degree that I could angle my
way into with an English degree and where I could
get involved in these natural resource issues that I wanted.

Speaker 1 (01:51:25):
Well, needless to say, you didn't continue on that path,
but before you stopped, was it a good experience in
graduate school?

Speaker 2 (01:51:33):
It was great. I loved it. I was in the Yeah,
I was the University Washington graduate school. I was in
the land use planning track. I was actually writing my
thesis on what at the time was a fairly nascent
subject area, which was green or environmentally conscious golf course
design and management, which in nineteen ninety three was not

(01:51:54):
really a thing. Now it's kind of pro forma. So
my timing was great. I was super excited. So when
we were, you know, a year and a half later,
contemplating Columbia's offer, I was actually a really hard decision
for me. I was like on a path that I'd
struggled to get on, really had taken some work, and
I was ready to go do it. And I just

(01:52:15):
kind of eventually the advance was big enough. I basically
made a very calculated mercenary decision, like I can live
like a grad student for another two years on this advance,
and the industry's buzzing, and I think something's going to happen,
so I guess I'll go for it.

Speaker 1 (01:52:30):
Okay, the band is over.

Speaker 3 (01:52:34):
What do you do?

Speaker 2 (01:52:37):
Well? The band is over. We did the thing with
sir mix a Lot for like a year and a
half subset, which I really thought was going to be massive.
It was so good. Mix a Lot is you gotta
have him on your show. He is the most fascinating,
brilliant dude. You know he is. He's a he's so smart.
And that band was you know, me and Chris and

(01:52:58):
Jason Keys drums, bass, guitar, mix and one of his sidekicks,
out of Sight another rapper, and the recordings are out there,
they're on YouTube, and it was. The shows we played
were like, I mean the Presidents at their heyday, Like
playing at the Crocodile and Seattle was insane. This was
like an order of magnitude. I have never seen an

(01:53:21):
audience like these, you know, maybe the thirty or forty
shows we played. And Mix a Lot was just a master.
He could just hold the audience in the palm of
his hand, just for ninety minutes. But it just didn't
come together. Whether it was timing with the sound or
our management situation or whatever, it just never got any
traction organically. It was just on fire. So we did

(01:53:42):
that and then I kind of started getting I talked
to E Music was interested in me doing a solo
deal with them. That's when they were just starting out
as an electronic music label, not really a you know,
a streaming service. I never forgot to have a meeting
with Sandy Pearlman, who made some of my favorite records.

(01:54:05):
I didn't really I did make some solo recordings that
I still have, you know, sitting around in a box somewhere.
It wasn't that excited about it. Spent some time you
asked if we got screwed, spent some time leading our
auditing of Sony Music and EMI. That was some work
for a while, and eventually kind of just realized, wow,
you know, that was a good chapter in my life.

(01:54:25):
But I like, the reason I like to work is
because I like to learn, So I'm going to keep
doing stuff. So I eventually sort of gravitated back toward
this public affairs stuff i'd been doing, which was around
natural resource issues and civic stuff and social justice, and
ended up back I'd helped in nineteen ninety three start

(01:54:48):
this company called Pyramid Communications, which became a big public
affairs firm in Seattle, and they're still around. Actually the
first two employees were me and Nicole Vandenberg, who for many, many,
many years has run Pearl Jam philanthropic efforts and kind
of co manage them. And so I went back to
that company and ended up working there for a few

(01:55:08):
years and in the meantime on the side. Because I
was an artist and I've sort of managed the president's
stuff and I could put two sentences together, I without
trying became I guess you'd say, a thought leader around
digital music because I get invited to be on panels
or to moderate panels at Digital Music Form West or

(01:55:28):
East or any of these, you know, all these events,
and I'd meet people and get invited to be on
advisory boards. And I got invited to be on advisory
board of a venture backed company in Seattle called Melodio,
who had been one of the first to try to
do MP three downloads to you know, direct to digital phones.

(01:55:48):
And I joined the advisory board, and after a few
years they kept trying to hire me, and at the
end of two thousand and six, I jumped ship from
the public affairs thing, went there, helped run that company
for like four four and a half years. We helped
we sold it to Hewlett Packard. I did two years
at Hewlett Packard, which is a whole episode of The

(01:56:10):
Office that is another conversation. And then my kind of
key hire earnout ended there and I ended up at Amazon.

Speaker 1 (01:56:19):
How'd you end up at Amazon?

Speaker 2 (01:56:20):
I ended up at Amazon because an old friend, Chris
de Vore, who I knew from way back to like
middle school, as an entrepreneur in Seattle, and his brother Andrew,
who I also knew from childhood, is senior counsel there.
And I was having lunch with Chris, and he's like,
you got the other hiring on the music You got
to talk to my brother. And so I talked to

(01:56:40):
Andrew and he put me into the you know, the
the grinder of the Amazon hiring process, and you know,
six months later, I ended up getting hired to do
a job I didn't really want to do at the time,
which was I got hired to run the licensing team
to negotiate with the labels, and did that for about
ten months. And when I joined, we had no plans

(01:57:02):
to launch a streaming service, which was a surprise because
they don't tell you anything when you're interviewing. But in
the ensuing six months we wrote you know, some of
these epic legendary Amazon six pages and got approval to
launch Prime Music. And then as we're getting ready to
launch Prime Music, it donned on everybody, oh, we have
no music programming or editorial function whatsoever. So I sort

(01:57:25):
of put my hand up and wrote the job description
to lead that, and led that for the first few
years and hired the you know, the initial group of
music programmers and editorial people. And that was a whole
other adventure that who you know, who knows my kids
ask you know, who knows what should I do? I'm like,

(01:57:46):
you know, if you told me when I was twenty
three teaching English that ten years later I'd be selling
millions of records, and then told me ten years later
I'd be working for Hewlett Packard, like I wouldn't have
believed any of it, Like, how the hell did this happen?
And I'm risk averse. I'm not a risk taker.

Speaker 1 (01:58:03):
Tell me a little bit more about that.

Speaker 2 (01:58:05):
I'm a fairly self contained, you know, left brain to
a fault, kind of hyper rational linear thinker. I'm not
a look before you leap, and I look back on
what I did, and I'm like, I have no idea
how and why I made these choices, but they were
all deeply considered at the time, and I don't know.

(01:58:26):
It's a mystery to me.

Speaker 1 (01:58:28):
Well, you talk about these old friends, Are you a networker?
Are you the type of person who keeps contact with
old friends?

Speaker 2 (01:58:35):
And the older I get, the more I really just
try to double down on my half dozen closest friends,
you know. And those are all from high school, honestly,
really or before, mostly people that I spent time doing
stuff in the woods with, you know, skiing, climbing, mountaineering
and that kind of stuff. Those are still my best friends.

Speaker 1 (01:58:54):
So how does it end in Amazon?

Speaker 2 (01:58:58):
It ends at Amazon. I did five years on the
music team and kind of reached a point where there
wasn't the right job for me there and they needed
somebody to do BIZDV on the Echo Alexa team to
do deals with the outside music services. So the last
four and a half years, I went to the Alexa
team and I did deals, you know, with to bring

(01:59:21):
Apple Music and Apple Podcasts to Echo Alexa, etc. So
talking to all those Pandora, the obvious partner Spotify, and
I did that for four and a half years, and
the last year I was there, I spent I wrote,
infinitely rewrote one of these six pages on finding ways
to monetize advertising revenue from sports broadcasting cast over Alexa

(01:59:46):
and kind of after iterating a million times, kind of
reached a dead end with that in terms of whether
our team could push it through or not. And at
that point, I'm fifty seven or whatever, fifty eight, and
I knew I wasn't gonna work at Amazon past sixty
at the most. And it was just the right It
was either leave or go to another part of the company.

(02:00:08):
And then you really got to double down for a
few years to prove yourself again.

Speaker 1 (02:00:12):
So it's just the right time, Okay, Is that the
last day job you've had?

Speaker 2 (02:00:16):
It is the last day job, okay?

Speaker 1 (02:00:19):
Interacting with people at Amazon, it you essentially worked there
for ten years, and you were referencing this earlier people
worked for a couple of years they go to Netflix.
Whatever you hear that.

Speaker 2 (02:00:29):
It's a.

Speaker 1 (02:00:31):
Cutthroat is not the right word, but you know, a
harryd lifestyle. They're working you, you know all the time.
There's a lot of pressure, not many human concerns.

Speaker 2 (02:00:43):
What was your experience, my experience. I loved my experience there.
I loved you know, it's a culture of writing for
the most part. Now some of this has changed. When
I joined, there were eight or ten thousand corporate employees.
Now they're like one hundred and twenty five thousand, right,
So I would say the culture is got maybe a
little bit less rigorous. But when I got there one

(02:01:04):
it was kind of an eye opener because the soft
skills that I have that I have worked for me,
like being charming and gary less and being social, weren't
worth shit. It was like, put up a shut up
and write it down. You know, these six pages you write,
single space, ten point font, tiny margin, write out what
you want to do. Fortunately, I like to write. I

(02:01:25):
grew up in a family of writers, and so I
loved that intellectual rigor. I totally thrived on that. Also,
particularly the first four or five years I was there,
I did not I would have to say, every single
person I worked with I felt was smarter than I was.
And that is fun to work with people where you
feel like you have to raise your own game every day.

(02:01:46):
And that's people three levels below me to Bezos, who
I only had one business meeting with, and he was
so fucking smart it was scary.

Speaker 1 (02:01:53):
You know, Well, since you have this experience and you
realize he was smart. What was that meeting?

Speaker 2 (02:01:59):
The meeting was it's the final review before we launched
Prime Music. A few months before we launched it. It
was his final sign off, So it was him and
most of the SVP team and then like maybe five
of us from the music team. And since I was
leading music programming, I was there to share our music
programming strategy. And what I remember from the meeting that
I can share is, you know, you may have heard

(02:02:21):
about these meetings there. They're like grad school seminars. You
come in the room, it's a very dense document. You
sit in silence for at least an hour and read
it and annotate it. And so you do that and
then you start discussing it and marking it up and
if there are problems with it, Like I was in
meetings where people are where the SVP or senior leaders,

(02:02:42):
Like on this page, page one, this you know revenue
number is this, and then you cite the same number
on page four. It's not a different number. So fucking
fix that, and then we'll come back and have the meeting,
because why should I trust anything in this document? Anyway,
our document was okay within the first five minutes of
the meeting. You know this how complicated this stuff is,
like the functionality that you can do in a digital

(02:03:02):
service versus the penny rate you're paying, and sort of
the trade offs there and all the negotiation involved, and
how complicated it is for me, even when I was
working in it full time, Like I have to be
doing that part of the job all day every day
to stay conversant in all the details. And Bezos is
not a music guy. He doesn't he's not into listening

(02:03:23):
to music. He thinks the music business sucked, or he
did for a long time when it was a sales
or an acquisition based business. Within the first five minutes
of the meeting, he asked this question that was so
inside baseball based on product functionality versus the rate we
were paying. I just I was like stupefied. Like my
jaw dropped. I was just like, how the fuck did

(02:03:44):
you do that? This is somebody who doesn't even pay
attention to the music business. And he went like right
to the heart of the kind of the nexus of
where the cost met, what the challenges, what we could
do in terms of what we delivered to customers. It
was it was mind blowing. It was like watching It's
like you're running one hundred meter dash and you're watching
Carl Lewis or Ussein Bolt next to you. It's just like,

(02:04:06):
clearly some people are genetically more gifted in as far
as intelling.

Speaker 1 (02:04:11):
Okay, when you work for Amazon, is it a nine
to five job? Is twenty four to seven job?

Speaker 2 (02:04:17):
It's twenty four to seven. And that's the fun of it, Like,
you know, for me work because I've always wanted to
have jobs. I'm making rabbit ears where I'm into it.
I mean, if you're not into it and you're not learning,
I've never really cared about title or career achievement. If
I'm learning and I believe what I'm doing is sort
of karmically positive and I feel like I'm reasonably well paid,

(02:04:41):
then I'm happy, And oh my god, talk about learning
and also, I you know, different teams are different. The
music team has incredible retention at Amazon. Steve Boom is
an awesome dude. He's a great human being and a
very strong and powerful business leader, which is not always
the case. Ryan Reddington, who now mostly runs the business

(02:05:02):
now that Steve's been promoted, exact same thing, like the
most down to earth guy, super smart, super humble, actually
cares about the people who work on his team. So
I think the music team at Amazon, in particulars has
been I know a ton of the people I hired
ten years ago are still there, which is, you know,
not the norm.

Speaker 1 (02:05:22):
So does every musician in Seattle know each other.

Speaker 2 (02:05:26):
Of a certain generation? For sure? Like my generation? Definitely
there's I mean, we all, okay.

Speaker 1 (02:05:34):
Sir, mix A lot stayed in Seattle. Duff McKagan went
to La Guns n' Roses. How do you end up
playing with Duff mccig.

Speaker 2 (02:05:42):
So, Duff and I grew up in adjacent neighborhoods, and
I met him in seventh grade. And when I went
to private school, the friends that I had from grade school,
I went to the big feeder public middle school that
I would have gone to, which is so good that
I didn't go there because by seventh grade I would

(02:06:03):
have been stealing cars with stuff and the other juvenile
delinquents there because I was into that. I would have
been all into it. So he became friends with, you know,
a bunch of my grade school friends. So I knew
him in like junior high and high school. He went
to Roosevelt High School, which is my neighborhood high school,
and we weren't friends, but you know, everybody knew each other.

(02:06:23):
We were at the same high school class. And then
he and I re met the first time the Presidents
played a show that wasn't a showcase in LA it
was in the La Times. It was kind of funny
because he and I didn't really know each other as kids. Mean,
we you know, we're at the keegar at little Hurst
Park together and had mutual friends. But yeah, we're playing

(02:06:47):
at the Whiskey and I look up in the balcony,
you know, in the green rooms up there by the cocony,
and I'm like, I'm like fuck because he had, you know,
he'd he bought this house in Seattle, like a half
block from my mom's house, and I'd seen him when
he was still drinking heavily and stuff, and I was
just like, see him come out to his car and stuff.
I'm like, I don't really need to stop and say hi.
But this point he's sober. It's nineteen ninety five and
he's up. I'm like, oh, that's tough. And we finished playing.

(02:07:10):
We walk up to the green room door and I
walk over to Duff. I'm like, hey, duff' stave dietere.
You know, like, you went to school with my cousin Mark,
and you're best friends with Brian, you know McCarty who
was you know, we have all these friends in common.
He's like, oh, fuck yeah. And he was so funny.
He's like, you know, he has a period of his
life where he doesn't remember everything, and I'll never forget

(02:07:30):
what he said. He said. I looked at that. I
saw it in the La Times to Day and I
saw that you guys were from Seattle and how old
you are, and I was like, fuck, I must know
one of those guys. So he and I just kind
of hit it off. And then in the late nineties
he was living in Seattle full time for a few years,
so we had a couple bands together. We had this
kind of mellow duo The Gentleman, and then he had

(02:07:53):
this hard rock band loaded, and I played in that
band a little bit, and then he, you know, was
I think it was a benefit for I'm going to
get this wrong, Randy Castillo, somebody from some eighties metal band,
and that was when he and Slash and Saurim got
back together and that led to Velvet Revolver. And he
hasn't been in Seattle as much since then. I think

(02:08:15):
he's around most of the time.

Speaker 3 (02:08:16):
Now.

Speaker 2 (02:08:16):
I haven't seen him much lately.

Speaker 1 (02:08:18):
So to what degree are you still playing music?

Speaker 2 (02:08:21):
I'm playing more than ever and totally into it. It
was for like in the mid two thousands when I
stopped touring, I was really trying to be a great
dad and a good provider and a good husband, and
I just there are only so many hours in the day,
and I'd still play the guitar all the time. But then, like,
I don't know, it's a few different things. Maybe eight

(02:08:42):
or nine years ago, I got invited to an industry
thing at a n arm They had like an industry
legends and rockstar jam thing, you know, at the hotel there,
and I did that a couple of years I'm like,
I'm in the industry and I used to be a
rock star. I should be able to do that. Hey,
do you guys mind if I join you? And that
was fun. My kids started playing music in high school.

(02:09:05):
One of them, a younger one, Lolo, plays the drums,
and Una, older one played bass, and they're in the
jazz band. And we formed a little jazz trio and
we started playing gigs. We probably played fifty gigs in
a year and a half before Una graduated from high school.
And then I just started. I'm in a band, a
kind of like dad band of friends here in suburban Seattle.

(02:09:28):
In another band, Megacat. I haven't been playing with as much,
but I've got a couple of records out on a
subpop imprint, and that band's getting a lot of buzz
right now, so much so that they're so busy I
can't do all the gigs. It's like weirdo instruments like
krungbin meets the banana splits or something. I don't know
how to describe it. As killer in a band Bowie

(02:09:49):
Rex and his Boogie Army all late seventies through early
post punk, which is me and a bunch of other
Seattle pros. It's me and drummers Mike Musburger who was
in the Posy and the Fastbacks. Other guitar players Tim
Degiulio who's in Duff's band right now. Just a killer
band of local season pros. So I'm playing as many

(02:10:10):
gigs as I can play. It's like being a kid
in a candy store again, just for fun.

Speaker 1 (02:10:14):
How many gigs?

Speaker 2 (02:10:15):
Is that? It was too many? Last year I actually
had to back off. I just backed off on Mega
Cat a little bit. Last summer. I had two or
three gigs a week for like three and a half months,
and it was cutting into my recreation time with Jenna,
who still has a full, full time gig. So we
need to be out on our bikes and doing stuff
out in the woods and running.

Speaker 1 (02:10:37):
And Okay, I think we're gonna put a bow on
this chapter. As you said, you know, we could go
deeper into music, but I think this is a good
stopping point. We've covered the basics. Dave. I want to
thank you so much for taking this time to talk
to my audience.

Speaker 2 (02:10:53):
As an absolute pleasure. Thank you, Bob. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (02:10:56):
Till next time. This is Bob left six

Speaker 2 (02:11:03):
Sh