Jack Tempchin

Jack Tempchin wrote "Peaceful Easy Feeling," hear how it ended up on the first Eagles album. Tempchin also wrote "Slow Dancing," as well as co-writing "Already Gone" with Robb Strandlund, "You Belong to the City" and "Smuggler's Blues" with Glenn Frey, and composing "Someone That You Used to Know" for George Jones. Find out how Tempchin navigated the waters from San Diego to Hollywood, as a solo artist as well as a member of the Funky Kings.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob left Sex Podcast.
My guest today is singer songwriter Jack Tempchin. Jack. Good
to have you on the podcast. Let's start right at
the beginning. How'd you write peaceful, easy feeling?

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Well? Do you want the truth or the story that
I always tell?

Speaker 1 (00:30):
Well?

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Tell both? Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. The truth is I
don't actually remember, but I remember part of it. I
had a buddy of mine made a poster advertising me
when I played in coffeehouses in San Diego, where where
I've always lived, and the poster had quotes from people

(00:53):
like Joni Mitchell said a real man and stuff like that,
which he just made up. He made up this poster.
So a guy in El Centro had a coffee house
and he hired me to play. I went out to
El Centro, and you know, like Warren Zevon's song says,

(01:16):
I went home with the waitress the way I always
do well, I always tried to go home with a waitress,
and this one said, yeah, okay, I'll come back later
and get you and take you to my place. So
I told the people I was with I wasn't going
to need a ride or a place to stay. Well,
she never came back, and I ended up in this
little It was in a little strip mall. It was

(01:38):
this coffee house called the Aquarius, and I just ended
up sleeping on the linoleum floor all night and no girl.
But I had the guitar and so I started writing
on the back of this poster and I wrote a
bunch of stuff. And you know when you start writing
a song, which stops most people, the fact is that

(01:59):
you had a bunch of stuff that's no good and
it's really stupid. Then all of a sudden, you look
back and you go, hey, that was a good phrase,
and you kind of start from there. So the phrase peaceful,
easy feeling popped out, and I guess it was kind
of about my friend at the time was into zen

(02:21):
and this is kind of really early, and there was
these concepts like, you know, if you let go of something,
that gives your hand free to get something else, and
it's only when you stop looking for stuff that you
can find it, and so that was kind of the
ideas like, yeah, the girl didn't show up, I'm not
going to be in love with her, but I'm fine,

(02:43):
everything's going to be fine. So I got back to
San Diego, and I went to a street fair and
I was walking around and I saw this beautiful girl
with these turquoise earrings, so I put her in the song.
And then later I was on in San Diego and
Washington Boulevard at a place called the Der Wiener Schnitzel.

(03:08):
It changed now to Wiener Schnitzel. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
I don't know why they changed it. I mean, I
can understand it. Originally it was Wiener Schnitzel, but we
were all accustomed to Der Wiener Schnitzel. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
And the other funny thing is, forty years later they
had a celebration for me there because I wrote the
last verse of the song sitting there waiting for the
Polish Dog. And I was amazed, of all the things
in San Diego that that place was still there forty
years later, the Der Wiener Snitzel, you know, which was

(03:40):
now Wiener Schnitzel. And by the way, they gave me
that day, they presented me with a solid gold Wiener.

Speaker 1 (03:49):
Literally solid gold, just not painted gold.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
Well, there's at least gold plated. I have it out
in my studio.

Speaker 1 (03:56):
And well, I was to say, you know, if we
hit the apocalypse and it's solid gold old.

Speaker 2 (04:01):
You could live off that. I could use that.

Speaker 1 (04:04):
So anyway, continue, So you go back to San Diela,
go to the street fair. You're waiting for your Polish dog.
It's der wiener Stitzel.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
And then I saw another girl and I wrote the
last verse sitting there at that table. And they put
a plaque that day in the table, and I was
very happy to learn later somebody stole the plaque wow table,
so they must have cared. And I guess I was
ten years ago, because now it's been fifty years. But

(04:34):
I always say, you know, if you were a young
woman walking around forty years ago by the Dreweener Snitzl,
the song could be about you and you'll never even know.
And so basically that's the story of how I wrote it.
And then I I was up in La Well, before

(04:56):
you get up in La Yeaka, you talk about the
song being written over a period of time, three different verses.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
The question is what were you eking it out or
did all three come from inspiration or did you do
like you said earlier, were you just pick and chows
what actually worked from what you'd done previously.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
Well, so in those days I had a Stella guitar
that I bought in a pawn shop in San Diego
for thirteen bucks and came with the string for the strap.
And I walked around all the time. I always had
that thing with me, and I'd walk around and sing.

(05:41):
And so I wrote the song continuously over about three
or four days. So I was just kept singing it
and adding things, you know, to answer your question, until
I got the last verse, and then I had it.

Speaker 1 (05:55):
You know, Okay, just a couple of things. Is that
typical of you that the song evolves? I know you're
doing your Beach series now, which is similar to that.
We'll get to that. Or is it a bolt of
inspiration or is it sitting down I have to write
a song or is it all of it?

Speaker 2 (06:12):
It's all of it. I guess it's different with every
song now. I did try putting myself on a schedule.
At one point, I'm gonna go out every day and
write songs for two weeks, and I'm gonna it's not
the same. I did song a day and that was different.
But I just thought I'll do it on a schedule,
and I did it for a couple of weeks. I
looked at all the songs. I didn't like them, so

(06:35):
threw away that idea. But the songs, you just get
an idea. Sometimes I'm writing with people, but you just
get an idea and you just follow it.

Speaker 1 (06:49):
Okay, well, well we'll get a little deeper as we
go on. But peaceful, easy Feeling is now done. Is
it just another song you wrote or do you say, no,
this one's special.

Speaker 2 (07:00):
Well, I'm playing it for my buddy and I'm I'm
finger I'm flat picking it, and then all of a sudden,
I finger pick it, you know, and he goes, oh, yeah,
now you got something that's really cool, you know. And
then later, of course, after Glenn Fry heard it, he
went back to flat picking it, you know. But those

(07:20):
were just the changes. And no, I did not know
that everyone in the world was going to like the song.
In fact, I was positive was never going to be
a hit song. It didn't have the love chorus. I
just I liked it, but I did not. But the
other point is, in those days I was in folk

(07:43):
music and one of my buddies said, you know, Jack,
there's hundreds of dollars to be made in this folk music.
So and I thought of it. Recently, the fact that
the idea that you were ever going to have a
song on the radio or make money from a song
was completely foreign to us at that point. You know,

(08:05):
I just wrote the song because I was playing in
these coffee houses and they all closed in nineteen seventy two. So,
just to clarify, a coffee house was a place where
they played folk music and they had no alcohol. You know,
it was apple cider, and I was playing it three

(08:29):
or four of those. So it was just to have
songs to sing that I wrote them, and I don't know,
I don't know why. I was just into writing them.
And okay, but I cut you off. So you went
up to La the troubadour Tell me about that. Well, first,
I was going to say that, to follow the thread
of that song. At some point, I was staying at

(08:52):
Jackson Brown's house. He oh that way too fast. Okay,
way too fast. You're in San Diego.

Speaker 1 (08:59):
Jackson Brown from Orange County moves to LA just because
people traveled. How did you know Jackson Brown? Was it
a community at this point or was he just the
one guy you knew?

Speaker 2 (09:11):
Well? I played at a place called the Candy Company Folk,
a folk house, and Jackson came to play there. And also,
this is before quite a while before he recorded anything,
but I already had heard his songs. I knew. I
actually played a song for Adam, and I played these Days,

(09:36):
and I didn't ever play anyone else's songs. So I
heard those and thought they were great. So I met John.

Speaker 1 (09:41):
I'm interested because I how did you hear a song
for Adam? You know?

Speaker 2 (09:47):
I don't. I don't know anymore. It wasn't when he
came down. I already knew the song. So I think
people just had heard these songs on the folk circuit
and had learned them and were just doing him. And
now that's how I heard.

Speaker 1 (10:00):
Them, because these Days had covers. I don't remember a
cover of songs for aut him. But continue he comes
down to the club, you already know these songs.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
Yeah, So that's where I met him.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
And then.

Speaker 2 (10:12):
And the same thing happened with the duo Long Branch
Penny Whistle. They came to that club and played, and
I asked them if they were really good? And I
like those guys. And the place they were going to
stay was a place where the lady liked to have

(10:36):
what we used to call in counter groups in that
era where you'd sit around and they'd pick your brains
and try to destabilize you so they could take over
your mind. And then the facilitator would sleep with all
the women in the in the group, you know. So
that was I said, you guys, don't want to go
do that, and they go, now, we really don't. So

(10:56):
I had a large house had rented with five bedrooms,
and there was a hippie pad, we had washed up
base in the living room, and my brother and I
had a candle shop in the garage, and so they
came to stay with us, and every time they came
to San Diego, it was Glenn Fry and JD Souther

(11:20):
who were in this long Bench Penny Whistle, and so
we became really good friends over time, and so that's
how I met Jackson, and also Glenn and j D.
And then at some point Glenn and JD were living
in Silver Lake and Jackson was living right below them,

(11:41):
so I stayed up there several times.

Speaker 1 (11:46):
Okay, before you get to that point, Yeah, people don't
know how hard it is to make it, and generally
the people who make it least on the way up
are networking. Did you say, while these people are coming
through the club, I need to know them. How did
you make the connection?

Speaker 2 (12:04):
Hm? Well, like I always say as a joke, people go,
how do you make it? And I go, well, just
find some guy. I get to know him and work
with him about five or ten years before he gets
really famous. It's not that hard, you know. But the
real uh, the reality is I was drawn to these

(12:26):
people because of my passion for the music, and I
just they had it, you know. And uh and I
was just drawn to them and anybody else who I
thought was great, you know, So you just naturally fall
in with those people.

Speaker 1 (12:45):
Okay, you were doing you were on that circuit. Anybody
who was great who didn't make it?

Speaker 2 (12:52):
Uh, well that's yes, yes, of course there's always people
like that because there's so much more to making it
than just your talent. There's a guy, Ray Burrow, you know.
So I played at a coffeehouse called the Heritage. The
doorman was Tom Waits, and he was not a player.

(13:14):
He was the doorman and he collected the tickets and anyway,
this an aside. He was a photographer and liked to
take pictures of the homeless guys downtown. Great photographs, but
they got a piano in the club, so he would
stay after hours and practice the piano, and one by

(13:36):
one he sold his cameras to pay for piano lessons,
and then all of a sudden he was doing these
songs like Hope that I Don't Fall in Love with
You and Martha and But there was a guy, Ray Burrow,
and he used to play there all the time, and
Tom and I both would steal any song he came

(13:57):
up with. He didn't write, but he he had fantastic
songs he would find, so I guess just didn't have
the ambition. He's still around, He's made maybe one album.
It's incredibly great. But you know, Tom and I stayed
in the music, but he didn't. And then I've known

(14:19):
a lot of guys who were super talented. They're in
every town, everywhere, but they don't have they don't have
the personality. A lot of people are just as soon
as they get close to the flame of fame, they
run away, you know what I mean. They can't handle it,
and it takes a huge collection of talents to really

(14:42):
make it happen. Ambition, you know, dealing with people, aligning
yourself with other great people to make the music and
all that.

Speaker 1 (14:51):
So yeah, okay, so let's go back to Peaceful Easy Feeling.
You went up to stay with Jackson in silver Lake.

Speaker 2 (14:59):
Well, I stay with Glenn and j D and Silverlake.
But then later they had run into David Geffen, and
these guys were always helping me, and they helped me
all the way through, and so they were going to
introduce me to Geffen. So that's why later after they

(15:20):
moved from silver Lake, I was staying at Jackson's house
and Glenn came over and I was in Jackson's piano
room where he had the curtains closed all the time
because he didn't want anybody seeing or hearing while he practiced.
And I was in there playing Peaceful Easy Feeling, and
Glenn came in and he said, what's that? So he

(15:42):
recorded the song on a cassette recorder, which let's just
pretend that people know what that is, you know, And
then he said, jack I got a new band, and
we've been together about eight days, so so let me
work this song up. I go.

Speaker 1 (16:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:02):
So he came back the next day with the cassette
recorder and played me the Eagles doing a Peaceful Easy
feeling on this cassette recorder, you know. And then I
about a week later, I went and I saw them
rehearse in this tiny little room and I saw Don

(16:24):
Henley saying, you don't miss your water to your well
runs dry as he's playing the drums, and I'm just going, map,
who is this guy? This is like incredible. But that's
how the Eagles got the song.

Speaker 1 (16:41):
And Okay, how long before the record came out? And
how'd you find out it was going to be on
the record.

Speaker 2 (16:48):
I don't know. I think it all happened pretty quickly.
And Glenn said, we're gonna get all these record execs
in here in the room. We're going to put them
right in front of us and play. And then I
guess they got a deal. And I don't know, it
wasn't It didn't seem like it was that long. And
then Glenn, Uh, I'm still living in San Diego. So

(17:10):
then Glenn came back from recording the record, and he
had a two track tape, you know, And I was
the only guy in San Diego who had a tape recorder.
I had a Revox and so that was the standard
back then. Revox was the that was the King of
the Hill and just two tracks one mic boom and uh.

(17:35):
So he came over my house and a bunch of
the people from uh that were my roommates at the
hippie Pad, you know, we all sat around and he
played the two track tape of the first Eagles record.
So the first I'm sitting there and the first song
is take It easy Going.

Speaker 1 (17:57):
Man.

Speaker 2 (17:59):
Wow, that is the best thing I've ever heard.

Speaker 1 (18:03):
It's incredible.

Speaker 2 (18:05):
Then the next song is Witchy Woman and I wing oh, man,
that is the best thing I ever heard. And then
the third song is Peaceful, easy Feeling, and I'm going
this is the best album I've ever heard already, you know.
So so there it was boom. You know.

Speaker 1 (18:26):
Okay, let's dig a little deeper. Did anybody try to
get your publishing or did you remain the owner of
the song.

Speaker 2 (18:35):
Well, so what happened was they introduced me to David
Geffen and he was going to take care of me.

Speaker 1 (18:43):
You know, so those were here quotes.

Speaker 2 (18:46):
This is an audio thing. Yeah, yeah, he's taking care
of me. So he put all of us into Warner
Brothers Publishing, and so all my songs that time went
into Warner Brothers and they're still there now. When Azof

(19:07):
started working with the Eagles, he got all their publishing
back from Warner Brothers, so they own it. But he
didn't get my publishing or JD's or Jackson's publishing back
for those songs. So yeah, so they still owe those songs.

(19:29):
And so in.

Speaker 1 (19:31):
A typical publishing deal, there's one hundred cents on the dollar,
they get fifty cents. You get fifty cents.

Speaker 2 (19:38):
Yeah, and then they get fifteen percent of my fifty
cents for administering. And they never placed anything or did anything,
you know. And then other people have gotten their copyrights
back right since I wrote it prior to nineteen seventy two.
For some ridiculous reason I don't understand. I have to

(19:59):
wait five ten more years before I can get my
song back, and they'll probably not want to give it back,
you know.

Speaker 1 (20:08):
So usually what they do is you come up with
a number for them to keep it. But we aren't
there yet. So is the revenue for peaceful easy feeling?
Even though you get thirty five percent out of one
hundred percent, is that enough to pay your bills?

Speaker 2 (20:27):
Yeah? It has kept me going all these years. And
in the first few years I made a lot of money,
but Reagan was the president and the taxes were about,
I think over eighty percent, you know. And I went
to the accountants that I had now, I said, well,
rich people, when they get a lot of money, they
don't have to pay all these taxes, do they? And

(20:48):
they go, yeah, you do. There's no way to get
out of it. And other people did these oil futures
and cattle ranches, you know, designed to who avoid the
taxes that I didn't do that. My philosophy has always been,
now you just pay all the tax and move on.
But those people years later, they caught up with them

(21:10):
and took back all that money. So but yes, and
I don't think the same thing. Maybe the same thing
could happen today. I don't know what people how people
can do today.

Speaker 1 (21:30):
Let's go back a little bit. Whatever happens, the album
comes out, this is the spring A seventy two or three? Whatever?

Speaker 2 (21:41):
Yeah, and how long.

Speaker 1 (21:43):
Until you see a check let spring A seventy two.

Speaker 2 (21:47):
I don't know, might have been Oh well, let's see.
So in seventy two, David Geffen was paying me two
hundred and fifty bucks a month as a as a songwriter, somehow,
and so I, my girlfriend and I were traveling in
our Volkswagen bus and we go to general delivery at

(22:10):
each town and pick up my check. So that went on.
We traveled for about a year, and so I think
it was about a year before I saw the first
first check.

Speaker 1 (22:23):
And was the money coming in the inspiration for the
trip or the trip would have happened?

Speaker 2 (22:29):
No, No, Well, the money, the two hundred and fifty
a month was a big deal because it was like, hey,
and the other thing. I was just singing on the
street where we stopped somewhere to get some money for
food stuff. So that two hundred and fifty was important.
But then when we got back, I remember, I think
the first check I ever got was something like eight

(22:50):
thousand dollars and it was just like staggering, you know.
I just thought, this has to be a mistake, you know,
So that so let's go wild till I got it.

Speaker 1 (23:01):
And when you got to check for eight thousand dollars,
you treat yourself to anything.

Speaker 2 (23:07):
I don't know. I think I think I just put
in the bank and I had borrowed money from my
folks to buy a piano, so I probably paid them
back at seven and forty bucks, you know.

Speaker 1 (23:20):
Okay, on the second album, I think it's second album
or a third album. All fifty five is on there.
Did Glenn Fry meet Tom Waits as a result of
him being the doorman in the club.

Speaker 2 (23:35):
No, no, don't. I don't think so. I don't think
he ever met Tom. He certainly didn't meet him there
because Glenn Fry wasn't around the Heritage Club. So but
I guess they just liked the song. They'd heard that
song and loved it.

Speaker 1 (23:54):
Okay. So then everyone talks about this personality that he,
Glenn Fry had, that he was the most the coolest guy,
the popular guy, the guy who made things happen. What
was your experience of.

Speaker 2 (24:08):
Him all that and more, you know, especially looking back,
you know, and most of the time that I spent
with him, we were we were the best of friends,
you know, for about forty seven years, so from from
way before he was famous, and and he was all

(24:32):
of that, you know, and and a stand up guy
you know, who would be true to his words, show
up for you. It was kind of weird because to me,
most of the time I spent with him, it was
just me and Glenn because we were writing or whatever,

(24:53):
you know. So it wasn't like and I never worked
for him. Some people worked for him, They go, oh,
I don't know, but I was just partners. We were
just partners with the writing and who I don't know.
You know, looking back, he was just an incredible person.

(25:15):
He had this huge amount of skills that you don't
see when you look at a person. You know, he
was like a sports guy who could put together a
team and motivate everybody and pick the right players to
the right positions, have him to do the right things,
as well as being an incredible musician and azof said

(25:40):
Glenn Fry taught him a lot about business. I mean,
it's amazing. I just saw him as a guy like me,
a folky guy like me. And when I met him,
I didn't even know that he played bass, that he
sang harmony, that he did all these others. So you
don't see the depth of people. And plus he was
an incredibly fun loving guy and the funniest guy that

(26:04):
I ever knew. He was incredibly funny all the time.
So I don't know, there it is. I was lucky
to know him.

Speaker 1 (26:15):
Okay, so you're born in Ohio, before you're really conscious.
In a matter of months, you moved to San Diego.
Why'd you move to San Diego? Why'd your parents moved
to San Diego?

Speaker 2 (26:26):
Well, I'm not sure. I don't know. It was after
the war. My dad was on track before the war
to be a baseball player and he was doing really well.
Then the war happened and that was over. So they
moved to San Diego and he got a job as
a milkman and did that the whole time I was

(26:50):
growing up. And that was a tough job. You had
to get up at four in the morning and they
delivered milk to your house. And this is before refrigerated trucks,
so it was ice. You had to load physically load
in all the ice and all the stuff. And you know,

(27:11):
he pretty soon had three kids, and so there was
no way out of that. He had to just keep
doing that, you know. And my mom, once we were
all in school, she went back to school, got a
master's and became a high school teacher. But he didn't
have the opportunity. And I just looked at that and said,

(27:31):
I don't want to get stuck in a job for
my whole life. I got to find some way of
not doing that myself and every other hippie on the planet.

Speaker 1 (27:42):
You know. Okay, I think I'm correct. You don't have
any children.

Speaker 2 (27:46):
Right, Yes, I do. I have a son.

Speaker 1 (27:49):
Oh how old is your son?

Speaker 2 (27:51):
He's forty? And I have two granddaughters.

Speaker 1 (27:53):
Okay, So if your son was born in the eighties,
to what degree did you consciously not have children, because
it would have you'd want to get locked in like
your father.

Speaker 2 (28:04):
I'll tell you. We didn't have kids for ten years
and then and then we decided to so, which was
only people in our general. We were the first generation
that could make that choice, really, you know. And then
we turned out we can only have one or I
would have had more. So, but I want to announce

(28:25):
that my two granddaughters, who are four and six years old,
a couple of days ago wrote their first song. And
I haven't heard it yet. But you know, Neil Young,
I read an interview they said what's the most important
thing about a song? And he said, oh, the location
where you write it. Now, I had never heard that before.

(28:47):
That was an intriguing idea. Well, so my granddaughters wrote
this song that I haven't heard yet. They went under
the bed under the bed where the adults can't go,
and that's where they were the song. So we'll see
see what happened.

Speaker 1 (29:03):
What does your son do for a living.

Speaker 2 (29:05):
He's an accountant.

Speaker 1 (29:07):
Yeah, okay, So there are three kids in the family.
How many boys, how many girls? And where are you
in the hierarchy?

Speaker 2 (29:14):
I'm the oldest, and then I have a younger brother
and then an even younger sister.

Speaker 1 (29:21):
And what are your brother and sister up to?

Speaker 2 (29:25):
Well, they're kind of retired. My sister counsel's people. And
my brother was physical plant manager for a hospital and
a school, and that's a person who takes care of
every physical item on the campus, all the houses, the

(29:46):
steamlines with a hospital, all the wiring everything, So he
can do all that and I do none of that,
but he can fix anything, build a city. And they're
both incredible people. So I'm very lucky.

Speaker 1 (30:00):
So what kind of student?

Speaker 2 (30:01):
Were you?

Speaker 1 (30:02):
Good or bad? With grades? And were you popular? Were
the shy kid? What we like?

Speaker 2 (30:08):
Well, I think I was a nerd before nerd was
a word, and I was in the advanced class. You know,
they had these you took a test and you were
advanced or not. And then so I was in a
group of other kids that were supposed to be smart,
and I was not good at any sports. So I

(30:29):
didn't have that going for me. But I still had
a good I had a good thing at in school.
It was okay, I don't know. So one day, one

(30:51):
day in high school, about senior year, one kid started
growing his hair really long, and this big, giant football
guy came up to him and said, Hey, how come
your hair's so long? You looked like a girl. And
the guy, Wayne McCracken, said, Hey, I'm expressing my individuality.

(31:12):
And so the big guy John said, oh, oh you are.
And then like the next week he started growing his hair,
and then and then that was my gang and we
were long haired hippies from then on, you know.

Speaker 1 (31:27):
So, okay, was this a result of the Beatles you
were growing your hair?

Speaker 2 (31:33):
No, I had nothing to do, you know, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (31:37):
So when did you graduate from high school?

Speaker 2 (31:40):
Sixty five?

Speaker 1 (31:41):
Sixty five? Okay, here's that book. Whatever happened to the
class of sixty five? What turned you on to music?

Speaker 2 (31:50):
Well? I was just into it because but my parents
had a record player and there was Oklahoma, you know,
the music. There was Harry Belafonte. Most people in the country,
a third of the people in the country had Harry
Belafonte albums, and we would dance and sing around to that.

(32:12):
So I was into it, and I would walk up
and down the street whistling every song I could think of.
But then I was at a party in high school
somebody played the first Bob Dylan record and everybody goes,
I don't know, and I was going, yes, yes, that's it,
that's really cool. But I didn't play guitar until I

(32:33):
was about eighteen or nineteen because other people were doing it,
and so most all the other musicians I know, by
the time they were eighteen, they'd already been in bands,
you know. So I started really late. And then I
went to the coffee house and I would play a song,
like try to play a blue song I heard, and

(32:54):
my friends would go, what did you do to that song?
What is that?

Speaker 1 (32:59):
You know?

Speaker 2 (33:02):
So I'm just saying. I met this guy, Joe Faulkner,
and we'd get stone and sit on the beach and
he would start playing a little pattern and he would
just make up songs for an hour. You go, look,
there's a city in the burning clouds, and we're watching
the sunset, and he would just go on and on
and they were incredible songs. And one day I said, Joe,

(33:25):
maybe we ought to write one of these down or something,
you know, and he just looked at me and said, man,
that would ruin it.

Speaker 1 (33:32):
That would ruin it.

Speaker 2 (33:33):
So I kind of got the idea from him, so
I started writing. I just started making up my own songs.
Nobody could tell if I screwed him up or not.
So okay.

Speaker 1 (33:44):
You know, living on the East Coast in that era,
California was a dream and this was before you now,
this is when you could be localized as opposed to
everybody knowing everything. So what was San Diego like in
the fifties and sixties.

Speaker 2 (34:01):
Well, it was an outlier. There wasn't a fifties and sixties. Yeah,
it was. It was a the fifties life. I mean,
they built the first shopping mall right down by my house.
Of course I didn't know. It was the first college
grove and then the whole shopping mall thing that became,

(34:25):
you know, the United States culture, and it was just
like you're in the fifties. We had it so good
because only one of your parents had to work, and
we just thought all that was normal. And then later
on and then you could be a hippie. When I
moved out, we could just go to the back of

(34:45):
the grocery store and they were throwing away tons of
food and we would just get it, bring it to
the hippie pad and cook it up. But that was
the beginning of the sixties. But the fifties was just
like kind of like Ozzie and Harriet or you know,
just a whole different thing.

Speaker 1 (35:04):
Was there any doubt you were going to go to college.

Speaker 2 (35:07):
Well, not so much.

Speaker 1 (35:09):
You know.

Speaker 2 (35:11):
I went on a fast track to UCSD because Sputnick
had gone up and I was into science and I
had good grades, and I dropped out in a quarter
because guess what, it was really a lot of work.
I just was not into that work. You know. You
had to go to the class. You know, you're supposed

(35:31):
to learn French in one year at the same time
as you're doing calculus, and then in the social sciences
class you only have three classes in that when you
had to read a book a week and write a
report on it. One a book by young you know
what I mean. And I was going no, I was
used to just skating by. So I dropped out in

(35:52):
a hitchhike to Texas to see a girl.

Speaker 1 (35:56):
And how did you know a girl in Texas?

Speaker 2 (35:59):
Well, she had been in San Diego and then she
moved to Texas.

Speaker 1 (36:04):
Okay, well we all hitchhiked back in that era. Yeah,
how much was lonely? You were on the side of
street waiting for ride. You went Texas with your different
San Diego. What was it like hitch hiking to Texas?

Speaker 2 (36:15):
Oh? Man, it was quite an adventure. And I did
quite a bit of hitch hiking. But this was by myself,
and it was lonely and it was cold. And then
I got to I got to her place. She lived
in Far Texas p H A R R. And I

(36:36):
checked in this little hotel and and it was Christmas.
It was Christmas night, so I said, she said, oh yeah,
we're doing Christmas over here. So so I thought, okay,
I'll be by myself, and so I just took some
LSD and and then about an hour later she called said,

(36:58):
oh yeah, my mom says come over. So I come
over and I'm just like anyway, that was a memorable moment.
And then hitchhiking back I don't know. I just remember
being freezy cold and you meet a lot of people
and I guess you can't do it now, but it
was You're right.

Speaker 1 (37:16):
We all did this actually, I you know, because you
also you had to pick people up and return. And
I remember in nineteen seventy four I picked up these
guys with their skateboarders skateboards and they started telling me
where to drive and they went on and there were
three of them in one of me. That was the
last time I picked people up. Yeah, man, it's there, okay.

(37:37):
But you also talked about drugs. You know, a lot
of people across America really didn't mean to marijuana till
the late sixties. So how did you get turned onto
marijuana and LSD.

Speaker 2 (37:52):
H Well, my friend who was a who was into zend,
he had he had researched drugs on the Internet and
things like PAOD and stuff, and we had found out
that that there was this stuff called LSD which was

(38:14):
contained in morning glory seeds. So there'd be like if
you take the three and seventy four morning glory seeds
and they have to be heavenly blue morning glories. They
can't be pearly white they have to be the right color,
and you grind them up then you can get them.

(38:39):
You get them down and you're going to throw them
up later. But if you hold them down long enough,
they have LSD. And that was my first experience with
any drug, was taken those and having this full on
LSD trip.

Speaker 1 (38:56):
And then.

Speaker 2 (38:59):
About two weeks later at the park besides the high school,
that was the first time I smoked a joint. So
I actually had LSD first before anything else.

Speaker 1 (39:09):
Okay, going back to Texas, so you show up figuring
this is going to be great. Yeah, how was it
between you and the girl?

Speaker 2 (39:17):
Well, nothing much. It was a nice little visit, but nothing.
Nothing materialized there. So I came back and then I
started going to a junior college and then worked my
way up to San Diego State College, which is now
a university.

Speaker 1 (39:36):
So did you graduate?

Speaker 2 (39:38):
I did. I went in. I had so many units
of different kinds they gave me a triple major and
said you can get out of here now. So that's
and by the way, as far as drugs, I want
to mention that I did. I did get busted and
had a had a large jury trial and you know,

(39:59):
and all that which is amazing considering now I can
go into a supermarket size dispensary and just buy some pot.
And I've got my own brand of pot coming out
in January. Peaceful, easy feeling cannabis is going to be
for sale in Dreams dispensaries in New Mexico. So I

(40:25):
don't know, it's just kind of an amazing turnaround.

Speaker 1 (40:28):
Yeah, we can't know fifty years ago, six not quite
sixty to talk about legalizing dope, the fact that it
happened in our lifetime. Black Man was president.

Speaker 2 (40:38):
But yeah, yeah, but it took way longer, way longer
than we thought it was going to be any year,
and then it was like forty to fifty years.

Speaker 1 (40:54):
Okay, tell me about getting busted in. What you felt
and what your parents thought.

Speaker 2 (40:59):
Oh yeah, I was horrible. And after the gig, my
friend and I went and sat on a park bench.
We're smoking some weed and I'm going We're just sitting there, going, yeah, man,
this is in the middle of the park. Nothing can
happen here. And all of a sudden, this police car
swoops down and boom, they got us. And I took
the little bag leading through it on the ground, you know,

(41:19):
so they arrested us spent a couple of nights in jail.
I finally my parents found out. And then one of
my relatives was married to an assemblyman who recommended an
attorney for me, and so I got this attorney. And
my friend, who was from Canada, he just he had

(41:41):
a public defender, but then he later hired the guy
for the same amount of money. But my attorney was great,
his attorney was not, and so I got off and
then he got found guilty and sent back to Canada.
So there that ended his music career in the US.

(42:03):
But my attorney was a guy named Peter Hughes, and
he was a prosecutor who had never lost the case.
It was like a fantasy. And he had just turned
decided to be a defense attorney, and he came he
came up with this thing where the pot was on

(42:26):
the ground. So he went to the judge. He said,
you have to split these two cases. You can't try
these guys together. And once he split it, he said, well,
you can't prove that the pot was his. It could
have been the other guys. So the judge instructed the
jury that they had to find me not guilty. It

(42:47):
was like a Perry Mason or something.

Speaker 1 (42:50):
Okay, how much did the attorney cost and who paid him?

Speaker 2 (42:54):
I think my folks paid him. It was seven hundred
and fifty bucks.

Speaker 1 (42:58):
Well that's relatively cheap even back then. Yeah, okay, so
you're in college, to what degree? Are you playing out?

Speaker 2 (43:06):
Really a lot every chance I could? Yeah, So I had.
There was about four or five places, and they each
had what they called a hoot night, which was open
mic night, and eventually I would run the hoop night

(43:29):
and get you know, I get paid a fortune light,
you know, fifteen bucks. And so I did three or
four of those a week, and that's how I amassed
the amount of money to pay my rent stuff. So
I was doing that a lot.

Speaker 1 (43:44):
You graduate across that hurdle than what.

Speaker 2 (43:50):
Gee, I'm trying to think what happened? I just oh, yes,
So I went back to Right before I graduated, San
Diego State College had built a student center and they
had a bowling alley in the bottom, but they didn't
have enough money to finish it. So I turned it
into a folk club and my brother and I built

(44:14):
a big sound booth. It was a huge room, and
I started booking that and doing that and At one
point we decided to carpet the whole place. So I
found that when they take the carpet out of people's
houses at the carpet place, they take the old carpet out,
and what they were doing was that they just piled

(44:34):
it up in the backyard. It was like a fifty
foot pile. So I thought, oh, they let me have it.
So I took all these carpet, these carpets to the place,
and I needed help, and Glenn Fry was staying with me,
so he came with me, and he and I hauled
all these carpets over to the over to this place

(44:55):
which was called the back Door. So I ran that
for about a year, and that convinced me that I'd
rather be the player than the guy that runs the club.

Speaker 1 (45:08):
And so there was no issue of going straight after college.
This is what you were going to do.

Speaker 2 (45:15):
Yeah, as long as I could keep making a living
at it, I guess it was my plan. And what
about the candle shop, Oh, that just did that for
a few years, sold candles at the Delmar Fair. It
was really a lot of fun. But then that let
that go. You know, where'd you get the candles from? Oh? Well,
we made them, you know, that's the whole deal. We

(45:37):
got the wax and we hauled sand from the beach
and have these big pits. And we went to Alcohola
and found a huge old wax melting machine and we
made sand candles and they were gloriously cool and sold out.
So that was a good adventure.

Speaker 1 (45:54):
Okay, just before we leave San Diego behind, to what
degreed did beach culture affect you and affect the town
in general? To what degree was the navy something palpable?

Speaker 2 (46:09):
Well, the Navy thing was very strong, and it made
the whole city was super conservative, you know. And the
beach culture. Yeah, I mean I fell in love with
with the beach culture, but the Navy. So when I
grew my hair long one month, I wrote a remember

(46:32):
because I wrote a song about it. One month, I
got stopped by the cops twenty seven times in one
month just for walking down the street everywhere I went,
you know, because there were police everywhere and they went
to curfews and they you know, it was. It was
that kind of thing San Diego. Then when the first
loven took place in San Diego, it was a major shock.

(46:55):
I went to the park and all these people with
rainbow clothes and bubble and they were you know, I
just couldn't believe it was happening in San Diego.

Speaker 1 (47:05):
Okay, did you ever think of giving up?

Speaker 2 (47:10):
Not? Well, not too seriously. I I remember kind of
moving up to North County and walking on the beach
all the time, figuring out what I was going to do. Now.
At some point I had always passed through Los Angeles
with my parents driving, and in those days it was

(47:33):
incredibly smoggy, and so you're driving you could sort of
see the Capitol Building, you know, the Tower of Records,
but you couldn't really see anything.

Speaker 1 (47:45):
That was horrible.

Speaker 2 (47:45):
I said, I'm never going there. I'm never going to LA.
So instead I said, I got to get into the
music business. So I moved to San Francisco for about
a year, and I went to Berkeley and lived there.
And after about a year, jack there's no music business here,
You're just like So finally I walked on the beach

(48:07):
and I said, well, I'm just going to have to
move up to LA for a while and try it.
And and so at some point Jackson had turned me
on to this place in Sant Clement he called the
Four Muses and he was playing there and I played
there a bit. I saw this band called Hank, and

(48:29):
they're a fantastic band. In fact, they're having a reunion
August fifth at the Coach House and uh, and I'm
going to put open for him there. And they're all
good friends of mine, So this band. So I moved
up to LA and I'm walking around. I see one
of the guitar player from Hank, Richard Steckel, and I go,

(48:49):
what are you doing? He said, we both had moved
up there to make it, you know, to do so
what people.

Speaker 1 (48:54):
Don't know, although this is probably I don't know what's
before I didn't realize I moved to California. The movie
Five Summer Stories was considered to be the surf movie. Yes,
the soundtrack was by Honk. Yes, you know Blue of
your Backdrop and everything and everybody do it. I own
the copy. It was like it never moved out of California.

(49:16):
But Phenom then they got to deal with CBS. I'm
just going to tell that story, and that was kind
of the end. But that first album, Five Summer Stories, unvolved.

Speaker 2 (49:24):
Yeah, and they are all incredibly, incredibly talented. So I'm
walking around, and Richard says, well, let's go see this guy.
He's cool at the ice house, Jewels Shear. So we
went over there and the guy was just as a
solo performer. He was funny, his songs were amazing as singing,

(49:48):
and Juels Sear plays the guitar in a certain way
that no one else in the world does. He only
plays he has his left thumb hooked over the top
of the guitar and he tunes the guitar in a
completely unique way that he invented. And he plays lead
and everything if he has to. It's kind of like

(50:09):
if he covers all the strings, it's a major chord,
and if he only does four, it's a minor. And
then you know, he can do everything and he hears everything.
So he was incredible, and so we set up a
thing to play together. We went over to let's see,

(50:29):
I guess it was Doug Haywood's house, who was the
bass player for Jackson Brown, and Jackson was there and
we all sat down. So Richard Steckel played a song
called mild Pals, an incredible song's it's so amazing that
at Glenn's memorial service, I think Jackson and Don played

(50:56):
that song instead of one of their songs, It's so great.
And then I had my song slow Dancing, I played
Jules Sheer played a song called It's So Easy to
Begin then and the harmony bland and everything was so magical.
Just that moment, that first day, I just knew we

(51:19):
had to do it. We had to do that somehow.
So we got a gig at Quackingham's and we did
one gig and a manager came in and said, you're
you're too good for this, and then that was the beginning.
Within a couple of months, we had this band called
the Funky Kings.

Speaker 1 (51:41):
Okay, why were they called the Funky Kings?

Speaker 2 (51:43):
It was just crazy because we were all nuts and
we just thought, yeah, we're kings and we're funky. You know,
maybe an unfortunate choice of name, but that's the way
it is.

Speaker 1 (51:53):
Okay. And how long thereafter? And how did you end
up on Arista? Well, so I was.

Speaker 2 (52:04):
So David Geffen was was sort of taking care of me,
you know.

Speaker 1 (52:08):
So let's just's go back one second. For the two
hundred and fifty dollars you got a month, what'd you
have to deliver? Oh? Nothing?

Speaker 2 (52:15):
It was just like a publisher advance and Peaceful Easy
Feeling had already been recorded Warner Brothers, so I didn't
have to really do anything for that. So but Glenn
made an appointment for me to go see Clive Davis
at the Beverly Hills Hotel. You know, it was big time.

(52:37):
So I go in, I play him a couple of songs,
and Glenn said, I just wanted you to meet Clive.
You know, he's a real record guy. So I get
home and I get a call in my little apartment
there and it's it's David Geffen. It's going Toeah. I
heard you went to see Clive. I go, yeah, Glenn
took me over there, and he goes, okay, well we're through.

(52:58):
As we're through, I go, what do you mean we're through?
I you know, I just went to see him. You know,
I don't understand, because yeah, that's it. We're through. So
apparently there was a huge feud between Clive and David
Geffen about Laura Nero or something. You know, they were enemies,
and I had no idea about that. So that was

(53:22):
kind of a shock.

Speaker 1 (53:23):
And then.

Speaker 2 (53:26):
I had the band The Funky Kings of Three of
Us Jewels, sheer, Richard Steckel and myself and we had
a rehearsal studio. We went in there and and the
other two guys said, instead of being a trio, we
need a band. So Richard said, look, I'll call some
guys I know from Laguna. And it was Bill Bodine

(53:50):
on bass, Frank Coach and Nolan drums, and Greg Leese
on on pedal steel and guitars and stuff. So he
said they they're gonna come up tomorrow and we're going
to go over a couple of songs with them. So
that night I get a call from Clive Davis and
he says, I'm coming to town and what are you

(54:12):
up to? You got anything? I go, well, I got
this new band, and you know we're rehearsing tomorrow. He goes,
I'll be there. So he comes in. So in the
morning I come I've never even met these other guys.
We play our three songs with these guys who I
don't even know as a band, and then I say, well,
Clive's coming in. So he comes in with one or

(54:33):
two guys and he sits there. We play the three
songs and Clive says.

Speaker 1 (54:39):
I like it.

Speaker 2 (54:40):
So I go oh, okay, cool. Should Should I get
an attorney? And you know, should we talk to you?
Do you want to hear some demos or something? Clive
goes no, I like it. You got a deal. And
I always loved and respected him for that, you know,
he didn't have to ask everybody and run around. And

(55:01):
then he set us up and we recorded with Paul Rothschild,
and then we got to make our album, and then
we went on tour with Holland. Oh.

Speaker 1 (55:13):
We went a little bit slower because Paul Rothschild, I
knew a little bit, was kind of the autocrat, you know,
it was sort of his way or the highway. So
what was it like making the record?

Speaker 2 (55:26):
Well, it was fantastic. And I didn't get that from
him because I was a highly uneducated musician. And when
he had tried to sing a vocal, I had, you know,
I had no concept. I was always a solo guy.
I didn't even know about your trying to stay in time,

(55:49):
much less phrasing. So I would sing the thing differently
every time and they couldn't punch me in. And finally
I remember Paul hitting the button going up, Oh, I
see Jack, I see you are what we call a
natural singer, so he was extremely kind and helpful, you know,
and we were a lot of trouble Richard and Jules.

(56:10):
We didn't believe in producers, and we were a lot
of trouble for him and drove them nuts. But he
was extremely nice to us and did an incredible job.

Speaker 1 (56:20):
You know.

Speaker 2 (56:21):
He brought Barry Beckett in to play keyboard. It was great.
So the album is done. Are you happy with the album? Yeah,
we loved it. And then I remember we go to
the Beverly Hills Hotel, we play it, playing it for
Clive right, and he goes, well, I just hope you

(56:42):
guys are going to be able to handle the incredible success.

Speaker 1 (56:47):
You know.

Speaker 2 (56:48):
So who doesn't want to hear that there's a key
of the music business going yeah, it's going to happen.
And then you know, and then it didn't happen. And
many years later, Clive's given a speech in Sandy Diego goes, yeah, well,
of all the things I signed and thought we're going
to really do good, there's only two that I really
believed in that didn't happen, you know, and the Funky

(57:09):
Kings was one of them. So we're famous.

Speaker 1 (57:12):
I bought it. But in any event, so you finished
the record, you go on the road. When does it
become clear it's not working financially. Well, we started doing
a second record.

Speaker 2 (57:29):
And the band just kind of imploded, you know, we
weren't I wasn't as happy with the songs and just
the way it was going. And I kept defending, you know,
because the record company is going, Jack, we want you
to write most of the songs, and I was going, no, No,

(57:50):
these guys are great writers, we're a band and all that,
you know. But by the time we got into recording
the second record, it just wasn't work. Came out, so
we split up.

Speaker 1 (58:03):
Okay, so you've been spending this. You just tell Caul
Clive say the group broke up. End a story. Nice
to know you.

Speaker 2 (58:11):
Yeah, and then he he still had me under contract.
So I made another record, a solo record. I went
to Muscle Sholes and lived there for three months. And
one of the Muscle Sholes rhythm section guy's Pete Carr,
the guitar player. He produced my record. But it was

(58:33):
kind of cool because I did it at Fame Studio
and I got to hear all the stories about that
and I got to be in muscle Sholes. So but
that record, it seemed really good right until the end,
and then it got a little too sweet for me
with mandolins and stuff, so I don't know, it's okay,
But and then it didn't Clive didn't respond to it

(58:57):
didn't have a hit. So so that was at the
end of me an airest Okay.

Speaker 1 (59:03):
Let's go back to the Funky Kings. So the ben
breaks up, you still talk to those guys.

Speaker 2 (59:11):
Oh yeah, yeah, I remained friends with the fact the
Jewels went on and moved back to New York State,
wrote some hits, but Richard and I remained in bands together.
He was in my bands for many years and Greg

(59:32):
Lease as well, played with me in my bands for
sixteen years, and we played like usually like once a
week at some club in Laguna or something. I've always
had a gig once or twice a week with my
own band, despite whatever else I was doing. So yeah,

(59:55):
and I have tremendous respect for the writing and the
musicianship of those guys.

Speaker 1 (01:00:07):
So it ends with Arista. What's going on in your head?
Do you think, man, this is the end of my
solo career, my recording career. You say, you know, I'm
going to get another deal. I'm still going to become big.

Speaker 2 (01:00:20):
Let's see. So yeah, I mean I didn't know what
was going to happen. And we had some I had
a manager, Larry Larson, and he managed Kenny Loggins and
some other people. Later he managed Michael Jackson with a

(01:00:41):
Victory tour and he was a great guy. So I
started going on the road doing opening act for people,
which I did for years, and I opened, I opened
tours for all kinds of people. So I did that,

(01:01:02):
and meanwhile, I don't know, nothing happened with the record deal.
I guess I was expecting maybe something might. But so
I opened for let's see, yeah, Dave Mason, Poko, Dolly Parton,
I opened the Christopher Cross his whole first tour, Carla

(01:01:24):
bon Off, Emmy Lou Harris tour, Joe Walts tour. So
I did that for a long time. That was what
I did.

Speaker 1 (01:01:32):
Was what was that experience?

Speaker 2 (01:01:34):
Like? Incredible?

Speaker 1 (01:01:35):
I loved it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:35):
And I was always solo. So I go out and
do a solo show before they came on, and I
got to meet all those people.

Speaker 1 (01:01:44):
It was great. Okay, But you know, back then, I
think people came for the opening act more than they
do today. But it's tough being the opening act.

Speaker 2 (01:01:55):
Yeah, yes, And it was funny because, uh, every act
turns out has a different audience, and so the same
thing night after night, the same thing works for that
for Christopher Cross's audience, which was all couples, whereas Joe
Walsh's audience was all young guys. And in order to

(01:02:20):
get their attention, one night I figured out, I just
went on and said, Hey, what did all these petals?
What did all Joe Walsh's pedals down here that he's
using and play guitar? Want me to tell you how
they're set? You know, And everybody's all of a sudden,
I got their attention. He's got this because that they
were just there, you know, to see the magic of

(01:02:42):
how he played guitar and stuff. So uh, but yeah,
they weren't coming to see me because the they were
already just coming to see the other act. But it
was a challenge and I had funny songs and I
had serious songs, So I don't know, I just learned
how to do it and I love doing it and.

Speaker 1 (01:03:02):
It was great. Okay, so tell me the story of
Already Gone yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:03:09):
So back when I was running the back door at
San Diego State the coffeehouse, I really had heard a
lot of country music. Like we all listened to the
Japanese transistor radio, right we were supposed to be sleeping,
and we under the covers we could hear and the
country station. So it was really cool and I wanted

(01:03:31):
to write a country song, but I really didn't have
a clue. So my friend Rob Strandlin, we had a
gig together at the back door, and his parents had
been country singers, and he had an old a Martin
that belonged to his mom, and he lived, you know,

(01:03:52):
way out in the country and had a cowboy boots
and a dog and a horse, you know. And I'm going, yeah,
he lived way out there. Well, actually lived about five
miles from me, but it was out in the country,
you know. And of course, so anyway, we're at the
back door and the back room it was the kitchen,

(01:04:12):
and so we're in there kind of warming up, and
there's this huge refrigerators and so I opened one and
there's a white jug. So I took this white jug
out and this is before I never had a drink
or anything. So we started drinking out of this jug.
We thought it was okay, and it turned out it

(01:04:33):
was hard cider in there, and we got kind of,
you know, feeling really excellent, and wrote Already Gone in
just about twenty minutes, and then we went up on stage.
There's a tape somebody taped us. Well, let's do it,
you know, and we did it, and then the part

(01:04:56):
the chorus I always go woooo, which is like the
I wrote it, you know, because I was feeling so great.
So and then somehow Glenn Fry heard it. And because
I don't think I did it much after it, I
did it. One other time. I went was playing in
Escondido a place called in the Alley, and Jackson Brown

(01:05:19):
was playing. So I was there and opening for him,
and I didn't really know him that well, but I said, Jackson,
I just wrote this new song. I want you. You got
to come on and play it with me. So I
made him come on and sing Already Gone with me
and do woo and everything. And then somebody had recorded that,
and just about two years ago they sent me a

(01:05:40):
tape and here's me and Jackson doing it, you know.
But then I kind of forgot about it. And then
A few years later, Glenn calls me and he says, man,
you know that country song you wrote?

Speaker 1 (01:05:54):
And go, yeah, you know that one?

Speaker 2 (01:05:55):
Yeah, he goes, I think that would make a great
rock and roll song. So I go, well, sure, you
know sure, And then he called me back the next
day and he said, held the phone up to the
speakers in the studio and there was like the Eagles
doing Already Gone and that was on their third record.

Speaker 1 (01:06:12):
So okay, by this time, did you own your publishing? No?

Speaker 2 (01:06:20):
I think Already Gone and Peaceful, Easy Feeling and Slow
Dancing are all owned still owned by Warner Brothers.

Speaker 1 (01:06:30):
So tell me about writing Slow Dancing.

Speaker 2 (01:06:35):
Yeah, well, let's see. So I had a friend who
was an incredible entertainer, one of those guys who could
easily have been a superstar, but he didn't. He didn't
have the desire or whatever, David Bradley, and he called himself.

(01:06:58):
He had a band called Joe Bummer and the ass
Bites from Hell, and I wrote recently wrote a song
about him called who Wants to Be Famous? Like the
record company came and they said, Joe and this band
was going, yes, we're going to make a record, and
he goes guys who wants to be famous, I don't
want to do it. But he played at a club

(01:07:20):
called the Iron Horse, and I watched him. Everybody loved it,
but they didn't get out on the floor to dance
until they played a slow song. So I thought, yeah,
you know, there should be a song called slow dancing,
you know. So then I started working on it. And basically,

(01:07:42):
the girl who I traveled with in the Volkswagen bus
in nineteen seventy two, you know, I was falling in love.
We were falling in love, and so that the song
was about about that. And in just a couple of days,

(01:08:04):
I remember driving back from la and the car. Of course,
you didn't have a cassette record or anything like that,
so you just had to keep singing things over. No,
I couldn't write it down, so I just had to
like remember it and then and then later she and
I got married and were still together. So that's the
that's how that song came about.

Speaker 1 (01:08:24):
Okay, I remember buying the Funky Kings album that was
an obvious hit, so ultimately it was a hit for
Johnny Rivers. Tell us what you know? Were you disappointed?
Wasn't when it wasn't successful the first time around, and
tell me about Johnny Rivers covering it.

Speaker 2 (01:08:40):
Well, it got up to number sixty on the Billboard chart.
That's the only time I was ever singing on the
Billboard chart. And I don't know what. I don't know
what happened after that, you know, I don't know why
it didn't continue. But what I later learned was Johnny
Rivers heard it and he said, man, if that wasn't

(01:09:00):
a hit, I would cut that. And somebody said, it's
not a hit, you know, So he cut it. And
then I think he spent quite a bit of time
traveling through the South going to radio stations and promoting it,
and so he made it hit. So I was thrilled
because it wasn't going to be a hit for me,
and his thing became a huge it. And then I
got to meet him and work with him, so that

(01:09:23):
was really cool.

Speaker 1 (01:09:25):
And there are multiple covers of that song. Is that
song still generate income?

Speaker 2 (01:09:31):
I think so, I mean, yeah, I think it does,
and Johnny's version and some of the others. I mean,
I get these big thick things. And I used to
look at him with all the where each penny came
in but I don't even look anymore. I just kind
of go yeah. And then it got real complicated with
streaming and all that.

Speaker 1 (01:09:49):
So did you have you ever audited to see whether
you were paid accurately?

Speaker 2 (01:09:56):
Well, many years ago one of the guys who was
a manager, Nick phil Ames, he became an auditor, so
he audited Warner Brothers for me, and it turned out
that's the only time I did it. It turned out
they were paying two cents for each record, but the

(01:10:18):
statutory rate had gone up and I said, look, you guys,
you're still paying two cents. It's a seventh cents now
or whatever, and they said, so, you know, so I went, oh, man,
So I I thought, I'm going to have to sue
these guys. I just, I mean, I don't want to,

(01:10:40):
I don't want to get involved, but I just can't,
you know, let them. And I was getting nowhere. So
I went to Lucy's l Adobe restaurant and invited j
D and Jackson Brown JD Salther because they both had
songs on the same record, and they also were under

(01:11:02):
Warner Brothers, and they also were only getting paid two cents,
which they didn't know, and so together we sued and
then we went into mediation, and then there's this non
disclosure agreement, which you know what I mean, I don't
think why should there ever be a non disclosure agreement? Bob?

Speaker 1 (01:11:24):
What do you think? Well, that just means I mean,
I could go on about this, but it just means
they don't have to admit fault. So there's no record
of it and there's no negative words. But you have
these two covers on these Eagles record, and as the
band goes on Hotel California in the long run, they're

(01:11:44):
right in all the material. Do you say, holy shit,
I'm not going to get any covers anymore.

Speaker 2 (01:11:53):
Well, let's see, I mean, but from the Eagles, although
I've actually I eventually they got more covers.

Speaker 1 (01:12:00):
But yeah, I know, but I'm talking about that time
before they booke up the first time. I guess, so
I didn't. I wasn't thinking about it, and I was
writing with other people and get and by myself, and
I was getting other songs cut, you know. So I
mean at some point George Jones did one of my songs,
and I toured with Emmy Lou Harris and she eventually

(01:12:22):
did one of my songs. So I didn't think it
was over, but of course.

Speaker 2 (01:12:28):
The case hits.

Speaker 1 (01:12:29):
And then how did they get I mean, you were
on the road with Emmy Lou Harris, but George Jones,
how did these people who covered their records? Was your
publisher being active? How did they find out about them?

Speaker 2 (01:12:39):
I never got a cover of anything from a publisher.
So and George Jones, it took me years to find out.
I wrote that song with Bobby Whitlock and he did
such a killer demo because he's an amazing singer, and
and I go, how did ever get to George Jones?

(01:13:00):
And then years later my friend Ralph Murphy at ASCAP
told me that he's the one who sent it to
George Jones. So I finally found out how that happened.
But other things, I think I was playing and people
heard somehow they heard the songs, and that's that's how
it happened.

Speaker 1 (01:13:20):
Okay, So the Eagles break up. Glenn Fry is the
first to put out a solo album, No Fun Allowed.
How did you end up getting involved in that project?

Speaker 2 (01:13:31):
Yeah, so Glenn and I had of course, we'd known
each other a long time. I didn't see him that
much when the Eagles were happening. He was incredibly busy,
but he called me and said, yeah, I think we're
gonna stop doing the Eagles once. Come over and see
if we can write some songs because he needed, you know,

(01:13:51):
he needed a new songwriting partner. So I came over
to his place on I think it was Lookout Mountain
Court or something. He had this a frame house that
James Cagney had rented, and I came in and I
just got a video of him playing with the Spreckles

(01:14:14):
theater where he talks about this stuff. But I came
in and he had one hundred candles burning and he
had two bottles of red wine. I said, Glenn, I
don't drink wine. He goes, well, this is songwriter wine
and you have to have some of this. And I go, so,
what about the candles? You had a date Later? He goes, no, man,

(01:14:37):
there's a muse and we're not the only guys trying
to write a song tonight. So we've got to make
this really cool so she'll come down and hang with us,
you know. And so that night we wrote the One
You Love. Because I had been trying to learn some
chords out of the Mickey Baker jazz guitar book, and

(01:14:58):
in order to learn that I could learn him. So
I made up a little song with him, and I
showed him the chords, and of course Glenn just looked
at me doing it once and he had it, and
then so we wrote that song. We also wrote I
Found Somebody same night, and so according to what he
said at the Spreckles Theater gig, he said, so I
didn't look anymore and we just you know, and we

(01:15:23):
had never written before together, but that was it. And
then I wrote with him for fourteen years and when
he made the albums, I was always there because he
just allowed me to be there and I was learning
how to do it and being part of the adventure
and stuff. So that was a glorious time. I guess

(01:15:43):
we wrote about fifteen songs that were in the top
one hundred, you know, I thought that was and then
the Eagles got back together. So but it was unbelievably cool.

Speaker 1 (01:15:57):
Tell me, my favorite song was the opening I Found Somebody.
To remember how that came together?

Speaker 2 (01:16:04):
Yeah, I'm trying to remember who we we eddie something.
We listened to some other record and it was the
groove on that record, you know. And then so we
sort of grabbed that groove and then uh, geez, beyond that,
I'm not sure, you know, it just fell together real quickly.

(01:16:25):
It was the first night or first night we did that.

Speaker 1 (01:16:28):
And how about Smugglers Blues?

Speaker 2 (01:16:31):
Yeah, Smugglers Blues. Well, I have had a little house
in Hollywood for many years. That's where we wrote most
of our stuff. And then Glenn came down to Ensinnita's
and I had a studio room and he had purchased
with irving A's off the rights the movie writes to

(01:16:55):
a book called Snowblind about the cocaine trade all ready. Yeah,
so uh and then the movie never happened, but we
were going to write a song for the movie, which
we did, and I just remember we had my I
think I had eight track tape recorder, but I'm talking tape,
you know. And and Glenn's going, I think I should

(01:17:18):
have some cool slide, you know, And and then you know,
you just started telling the story trouble on the street tonight.
You know, the blood began to spill that. You know,
here's your ticket suitcase in your hand. So it's cool

(01:17:38):
having the story. And then he had the cool slide,
and and also we got to say things about the
war on drugs, so called war on drugs. You know,
we got to say things. And then it turned out that,
you know, Glenn always wore the hippie clothes, but then

(01:18:00):
when he got big, he'd say, well, I gotta He
had a phrase for it, I gotta I got put
on some suits for the man or something. So he said,
you know, I think when I fly first class, I
should wear a suit because you never know who you're
going to be sitting next to. So he sat next
to Michael Mann and who was planning to do Miami

(01:18:22):
Vice TV show. And then our two songs ended up
on the soundtrack, and the Smugglers Blues song they used
it in an episode where Glenn was acting and he
got to be the pilot who flies the stuff in.
So it was just incredible.

Speaker 1 (01:18:42):
What about the other song that was on the album,
You Belonged to the City.

Speaker 2 (01:18:46):
Yeah, I just I just remember, I think, oh, I know,
we were writing that because they sent us a script
to one of the episodes where one of the guys
goes back to New York where he's from and he's
walking the streets and they wanted a song for right there.

(01:19:06):
So I remember Glenn's got these chords and then he's going,
you belong to the city, and I go, yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's it. Boom, and then we just we just put
it together for that scene, right, you know, right from
the story and of course Glenn, you know. And then

(01:19:29):
I was using a thing called the Lynn nine thousand
drum machine, and it was the first thing where you
could sequence other instruments, you could plug in and sequence.
So we sequenced the whole thing in my little room
and that's when Glenn started calling me nine thousand, and
that's how I got my moniker Jack nine k you know.

(01:19:51):
And then he gave me production credit on the thing
because we just took that sequence and took it up
the Hawkwelinsky studio where he hooked up all these machines
and we had a horn player come in and Glenn
sang it, and then that was it. Because Glenn could
hear the whole record in his head when he was
writing a song. You can just hear all the parts,
everything he wanted. And that's why they called him the

(01:20:14):
loan arranger.

Speaker 1 (01:20:16):
So right, right, well, that's great, and I know he's
called the loan arrangeer. I didn't know why, so what's
it like? Okay, In those particular cases, there was an incentive,
you know, there was a potential movie, et cetera. Do
you ever write with someone We walk in and it's
pretty much cold.

Speaker 2 (01:20:34):
Oh yeah. Most of the time, and even with Glenn,
he'd have an idea about let's write an album about
this or something. But most of the time, A lot
of times it's not good to bring your own idea.
You know, I have a million ideas, but it's better
to let the other guy come. So one day I

(01:20:57):
got a call and it was turned out to be
Bobby Whitlock. He was right down the street, and I
had no idea who Bobby Whitlock was. Of course he
had played with Derek and the Dominoes and with Eric
Clapton and all that. But he just said hey. He had,
you know, this southern accent and said, I'm right down
the street. I want to write some songs. So I

(01:21:18):
later found out what he did was he came to
la he looked at the billboard chart. He called he
called the number one songwriter people had the number one
song just called them. They weren't home, and you belonged
to the city. Was number two. So he called and
he had my number. He called me somehow, and I said,

(01:21:39):
come on over. So he came over and we just
sat there at the kitchen table and and I looked around.
I said, he said, what are we going to write about?
I go, well, we got four walls, two chairs in
a doorway and and that's the first line of the

(01:22:00):
song called someone that I Used to know. And that
song was eventually cut by George Jones. So it's just
kind of songs are just there in the air. Everybody's
mind is so full of billions of things coming in
all the time and being processed that it's always just

(01:22:20):
sitting there, you know what I mean, if you're willing
to just get out of the way.

Speaker 1 (01:22:25):
So if you're sitting with another person in the room,
you have inspiration, to what degree do you let the
other person say what you you know? Let's say you
come up with some of the other prinsons, it goes
that sucks you then defend and go no, no, I
really think I have something here, or you just okay,
I got another idea.

Speaker 2 (01:22:44):
Boy. That's a good question, I mean, and it's it's
a challenge. I mean, you have to co writing is different.
I love co writing, you know, I love writing by
myself too, but you have to have a lot of respect,
you know, for the other person. You might go, this
is an incredible line, like Glenn and I. You go, well,

(01:23:05):
this is an incredible line. But this line does not
serve the song. So you just have to go, Okay,
I can use it for something, el whatever, I'll just
put it aside. And you have to You have to
let the other person in and have some confidence. Maybe
it won't work out in the end. But co writing
is different, and a lot of times you're writing with somebody,

(01:23:28):
like if they're an artist and they're going to do
the song, well, then you have to let them in
and have a lot to do with it, you know,
so they can make it their own and relate.

Speaker 1 (01:23:39):
To it stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:23:39):
So that's a challenge.

Speaker 1 (01:23:43):
How do you know when it's finished? And is your
goal to finish it while the two of you are there? Wow?

Speaker 2 (01:23:55):
Well, well, the first thing is it's like one of
them may questions of all art. How do you know
when it's finished? You know? So now in Nashville, I
always thought I'd like to do the Nashville Way, which
was like the real building where they just say, hey,
write a song for this guy, and you write one.

(01:24:16):
I thought that'd be great, But eventually, years later I
went to Nashville and tried it. And you get in
the room and yeah, they want that song to be
done because you have a four hour window. You book
the room and then and it's going to be done.
If you're writing with one of those guys, you know
it's going to be done. And then I've I said, well,
what happens to all these songs? You must write thirty

(01:24:36):
forty songs a month. What happens, Well, one or two
of them get demoed and then they get pitched. I go,
what about the other ones? I just wasn't used to that.
When I write something, you know it's personal, and I
just so, no, don't. I don't usually try to get
it done while while I'm sitting there, and then I

(01:24:57):
take the words, I look at them later and I go,
I could throw this out, I could tweak this, I
could change that, but I guess to really do it.
The final thing is like I sing it. I sit
there and play it and sing it, and then some
little part won't feel right, you know. So ultimately, all

(01:25:19):
my first years were spent in the coffee house. Now
there was almost never anybody in the audience, you know,
But so I got very comfortable with being up there
and playing things that were unfinished or but I could
read even with a few people. You can just read
what's working and what's not. And I don't think people

(01:25:40):
do that now. They don't have that experience, you know,
playing for people a lot who are listening, and you
can just so I'm talking about when the song's done,
and that's one of the ways you tell, you know,
you kind of just oh, I'm singing it to these people,
and it feels right all the way through, and it's

(01:26:01):
all smooth and working.

Speaker 1 (01:26:03):
So okay, So how much do you play out now?

Speaker 2 (01:26:15):
I was doing a touring a bit like going back
East every weekend before the pandemic, but of course that
stopped for a couple of years, and I'm still not
anxious to get on a plane and travel that much
right now. So I'm playing kind of as much as
I can around San Diego and La But of course

(01:26:36):
there's only about fifteen twenty million people here, so you know,
it should be enough. And there's a place called Humphreeze
and seats fifteen hundred people, so I open for American
Boss Gags and then there's the Belly Up the coach House,
and so anyway, I'm playing as much as I can.
And now I think I'm going to go back to

(01:26:56):
getting a weekly gig, and because otherwise it's I'm missing
a lot of the fun which I got into in
the first place, which is playing live. And you know,
now you can have a weekly gig and you can
make it a stage at show or put it on
the internet, so you don't really have to go all
over the world. But so the answer is, yeah, as

(01:27:19):
much as much as I can.

Speaker 1 (01:27:21):
So does that work for you? To do it virtually?
It's one thing if you have no choice because of COVID. Yeah,
But to what do we doing it virtually? What's that like?
Playing live live compared.

Speaker 2 (01:27:33):
It's not It's not the same at all because I
do the beach jams and I record them, put them
up there and people respond. But no, it's not the same.
Playing live is a completely different thing. And I think
it's going to become more valuable once, you know, once
my AI hologram is out there playing too, it's going

(01:27:55):
to be I think you know, somebody's going to go, hey,
this stuff is like done by humans, and that's going
to be a special thing that people want to see.
But yeah, there's something about playing live and it doesn't
have to be a big show. It's just qualitatively different
than anything else. And bottom line is kind of what

(01:28:17):
I got into this for and what I love the most,
although I love the other parts too.

Speaker 1 (01:28:22):
You know. So you essentially had an instructional series online
tell us about that.

Speaker 2 (01:28:29):
I've done a few things like that. One was called
go Write One, and I thought, well, I you know,
Glenn Fry taught songwriting at UCLA and I taught with
him sometimes and then he did it in New York.
But I don't know about teaching people songwriting. I've done that.

(01:28:49):
It doesn't make me happy. I don't know how much
you can teach, you know, So just go write one.
It doesn't tell you how to rhyme or do the
verses or the struck. Sure, it just tells you how
to get in the mood. And I did about forty
of them, you know, And so I did. I put
that up and not too much happened, and then I

(01:29:13):
had some podcasts. Not too much happened with that, so
I just kind of try everything.

Speaker 1 (01:29:20):
They'll give me two tips about getting in the mood.

Speaker 2 (01:29:23):
Oh man, I wish I could remember the brilliant stuff
I came up with. It was like, well, you know,
get your stuff, get your batteries working, you know, so
you can record and oh man, yeah, I'm not thinking
of it right now.

Speaker 1 (01:29:43):
Okay, Well I'll talk about myself and there's certain things
that happened. I'm immediately inspired. But my best idea is
cause when I'm doing something else, I'm in the shower,
I was hiking last night, wasn't thinking about it at all,
and all of a sudden things became clear in my mind.
To what degree is that your experience were as opposed
to sitting down and saying I'm going to write something.

Speaker 2 (01:30:05):
Oh yeah, And Glenn used to say, we're writing a
song and some other song gets jealous and wants to
butt in. You know, it's always like, you know, yeah,
when you're doing something else and it triggers some thoughts
and yes, that's definitely definitely there. You know.

Speaker 1 (01:30:24):
So when you did those albums with Glenn, how long
would it take to write the songs? Would they all
be written at once or multiple times.

Speaker 2 (01:30:34):
We'd write a lot of them in a clump so
we could go in and start recording, but then we'd
you know, take a few days out to write some more. Yeah,
as we went along.

Speaker 1 (01:30:44):
So you would go to some club unannounced and work
out on stage.

Speaker 2 (01:30:48):
Oh no, me and Glenn. Yeah no, no, Glenn, Glenn,
that's me. I would always do things like that. But
Glenn never presents anything unless it's a done deal and
perfect and great.

Speaker 1 (01:30:59):
Oh I thought you, I said club, So I misunderstood.
So tell me about your Beach GM series.

Speaker 2 (01:31:06):
So I'm so excited about it, and it's so strange
during the pandemic. Well, it's always been part of my
process to video when I play, because I always make
up songs and my idea as well. I'll make them up,
come home and then I work on, you know, so
video so I can remember them. So I started doing

(01:31:28):
that at the beach during the pandemic. Come home, throw
the ones away that didn't work, type out the lyrics
to the other ones, and I have They can't see
this book, but you know, you know, this huge three
ring binder is full of song lyrics. You know, so

(01:31:50):
like one year, this last year, during the pandemic. I
made up more songs than I have in my whole life.
So then I decided started listening to these things and going,
it's kind of they're great. I started thinking, these are
great songs even though I just made them up. And
if it's a beach jam, the way I define that

(01:32:13):
is a song that I make it up on the spot.
I don't think about it ahead of time. I don't
go back and do it again, I don't edit it.
It just comes out. So I guess it's like performance art.
It's performance art, and it kind of goes back to
the beatnik eraror where they just made up things on stage.

(01:32:34):
And I've been posting about one of those a day
for about a year now.

Speaker 1 (01:32:42):
So then.

Speaker 2 (01:32:46):
So I'm at the beach and some guys there's a
lot of beach people there, some homeless guys, some super
wealthy guys, all kinds of people from all wah and
some of them like to like to play drum sticks
on the sidewalk, or they played the jumbe or something
that some of them their time isn't very good. There's guitar,
and I just let everybody play in jam with me sometimes,

(01:33:08):
and so I do a lot of that. And then
my friend I saw a guy in a club Jesse, London,
and he plays with me a lot, so I sit
in at his gigs and I started doing this live.
So I go live to a club and I make up.
I play for three hours and I make up all
the songs all night. And I was thinking, I'm not

(01:33:30):
gonna be able to do it. But as soon as
I throw the switch, it's kind of like with your column,
you know, you know, I don't know what I want
to write about. As soon as I throw the switch, Bob,
the song comes out, and I don't know where it
comes from, but hey, I never did know where it
came from, but it just it just comes out. And
then when I listen back, I'm thinking, well, at this point,

(01:33:50):
I got really confused. I didn't know what the rhyme
and I didn't want this goes. But then that all
happened a split second, It turns out and it falls together,
and I'm just constantly amazed that these things are great.
The videos, they're interesting. Most things now are not real.

(01:34:14):
They're produced, they're put together, they're designed, and maybe this
is all real. It's more real than anything else now
it's too much for people. I mean, I know that.
I was thinking, well, what if Bob Dylan put out
one or two songs a day, Jack, would you listen

(01:34:34):
to it? He's your favorite guy and probably, But as
soon as I heard one, I wasn't interested. I mean,
it's just way too much. But I can't help that
because from my end, I'm doing it and I look
at this, I go, wow, that's a great song. I'm
just going to put it up, so I don't know
if anything can happen. And and Bob, when they advise
you to get more viewers, they say, look at other

(01:34:57):
people doing the same thing, and then see what they did.
You know, I can't find anybody else doing that. And
I'm sure other people can do it, they don't want to, maybe,
but I can't find anybody else doing it. But I
thought about quitting, but I just can't. I love it,
I'm into it. It seems to be working. And now

(01:35:19):
I'm still writing other songs, making a record and doing
other stuff the regular way. But this has sort of
consumed me as this is my work of art. Now.

Speaker 1 (01:35:29):
You know, Let's say I went to the gig, would
I be able to tell that you're making it up
on the spot.

Speaker 2 (01:35:36):
Well, I don't know. I don't think so. I don't
think so people, nobody unless I mention it. Nobody ever,
I don't think you'd be able to tell no, no,
I don't think so.

Speaker 1 (01:35:48):
Okay, a lot of people. And you've mentioned earlier writing
a song, you're playing a chord and you're singing and
you're going like this, and then maybe you change a chord.
I mean you just say, okay, he's they flip the switch,
something will come out? What about changes? What about choruses?
Stuff like that?

Speaker 2 (01:36:06):
Well, I'm not in a lot of ways. I'm not
very musically educated, like, but all my life I've tried
to go, well, how how can I get chords to
fit together? So that's kind of been my emphasis. How
do I get the knowledge to just make things up?

Speaker 1 (01:36:27):
You know?

Speaker 2 (01:36:28):
And so I don't know a lot of the songs,
I'll have the same groove. But if I just put
one other groove and learn one other new chord, or
learn one little way that Lightning Hopkins played with only
a thumb and a finger and never used everything else,
and that gives me some new rhythms. You just learn.
It's everything in life, you take everything you know and

(01:36:48):
you add one new thing and that thing compounds. And
so that's what I've always tried to do, and somehow
I can really do it. It's just like I've got
the idea of the song, and what I'm talking about
is flowing, and then I got the melody, and then
I got the chords and the rhythm and the changes,

(01:37:08):
and it just it just all flows out. And then
I got this guy a lot of times, Jesse London,
who's playing guitar with me, and somehow he's following me,
and I have no idea where I'm going next, you know, so,
and i'd like to start doing with the whole band,
you know, you know, you throw away the ones that
don't work. Sometimes I miss a rhyme horribly, you know

(01:37:31):
what I mean, And I would go back and fix it,
but I go, well, I can just go do five more.
But the time it takes to fix it. Now, if
I refine the songs. And I went in and got
a band and record him took a couple of months.
You know, I don't think anybody's going to hear it anyway,

(01:37:51):
you know. So that's one reason I just kind of well,
this is a new era of the Internet. People just
going to listen to it once or whatever. I might
as well just do what I like. I can put
him out there and hope somebody loves it.

Speaker 1 (01:38:06):
How do you decide what the subject matter is? Lyrically?

Speaker 2 (01:38:10):
When I sometimes I have a thought, you know, I'm
sitting at the beach and I see a dog, and
so I start writing, big dog come in my way,
Big dog coming my way. You know, a lot of
times when I pick up the guitar, I start playing,
even at the gig, I have no idea what I'm

(01:38:33):
going to talk about, and then I'll sing one phrase
and all of a sudden, the whole idea of what
the song might be about pops into my head and
I just do it.

Speaker 1 (01:38:43):
And in terms of your everyday life, what do you
do other than this?

Speaker 2 (01:38:49):
You read?

Speaker 1 (01:38:50):
You said you weren't a sportsman. Do you exercise? What
do you doing? To what degree does that inform your songwriting?

Speaker 2 (01:39:00):
Well, the major intellectual pastime for the whole United States
is watching TV, and I do my share of that,
you know, And I read. I read quite a bit
and everything I just reread. Little Sister Raymond Chandler, you know,
and I read some stuff about the music business and

(01:39:21):
biographies of Einstein, and a lot of fiction and science
fiction William Gibson and all those guys. And so yeah,
I do a lot of reading, watching TV. I swim
a little in the morning. Then I go over to
the beach for the sunset, make up some songs, come home,
have dinner, and then after dinner, I sit there and

(01:39:42):
listen to what I made up and type out the
lyrics and post them. And then you go every day,
almost every day. It's not like I have to, but
see I'm in the head. I like to go down
and watch the sunset. Anyway. If I don't, I feel
like I somehow missed the day.

Speaker 1 (01:40:00):
You know, Okay, if you go down to the sun set,
you write one song, or you write multiple songs or
what does it depend.

Speaker 2 (01:40:07):
Upon multiple songs? Because basically I get the guitar out
and set up the set up the iPhone on a
tripod with my little mic, and then I just played
till I get tired of it. So I might get
you know, I mean, I might write seven songs a day,

(01:40:29):
or eight or three or four, and then I get
home and I go, Now, these these aren't very good
and throw them away, and I keep and I'll be going,
maybe I better stop doing this, and all of a
sudden I'll see one and I'll listen to it and go,
oh my gosh, this is incredible, this is really good.
So it keeps me going. So yes, I can write
multiple songs a day instead of when I started, which

(01:40:51):
was like ten songs a year. Oh I don't know
how that happened.

Speaker 1 (01:40:55):
But would you you're making a new solo album, you
send me a couple of tracks, Is that whole different experience?
Or any of these songs going to be on the album?

Speaker 2 (01:41:05):
Yeah, a couple of these songs are going to be
in the album. I've taken a couple and if I
do work on them, generally, what it is is like
they have maybe too many verses they don't need, so
I throw a couple away. But yes, so I'll put
a couple of those on there. Okay, Now the experience
is totally different. You referenced this early or how many

(01:41:25):
people are actually going to see the video hear the video?
So you're still making records. A lot of people don't
even bother anymore. Who are of our evantage? What keeps
you motivated into what degree? Are you depressed that you're
an artist? You want people to experience your art, but
inherently there's so much stuff it's difficult.

Speaker 1 (01:41:45):
To reach people.

Speaker 2 (01:41:47):
Yeah. That's a hell of a question, in't it. Boy. Well,
I keep moving. I'm trying every possible thing. For some reason,
my wife says, you know, you don't have to do anything,
you can just do nothing. And sometimes I slump into that,
but mostly, you know, if I see something on the Instagram, Oh,

(01:42:09):
here's a cool guitar. Oh here's a thing you can do,
I'm just interested. That's what I'm interested in.

Speaker 1 (01:42:16):
And then.

Speaker 2 (01:42:18):
Yeah, the flow of creativity and the desire to do
that and the satisfaction of doing that. And then the
other end is to complete the circle. You want some
human beings to see and appreciate and maybe like what
you did. Those are two different things. I don't know

(01:42:41):
what point is. At one point, I say, well, how
many people? How many people do I need to see
this song, you know, to feel like it's okay, you know,
And then I thought, well, it depends, you know. If
I got one comment saying this is a great song, well,
if it was James Taylor, I go, Okay, that's all
I need. But and I guess maybe I don't have

(01:43:05):
very many subscribers. But you know, like if I add
up the Instagram and the Facebook and all that, maybe
maybe a thousand people. You know, it's hard to tell
because most of the numbers on the internet. I'll tell
you how you're doing, are big fat lies. They're just
big fat lies designed to make you think it's happening.
But the comments, somebody really usually has to write the comments.

(01:43:28):
So it's just it's the dilemma of our time because
there used to be entertainers or performers or creators, and
then there used to be people who, you know, we're audience,
and now everyone is a star. You know, everyone is

(01:43:52):
a performer, and the only way to really interest them
is to get them in on the action and let
them do part of it. So it's just so different
than it's ever been, and it's going to become even
more radically different. So what can we do. We just
have to roll with the flow.

Speaker 1 (01:44:14):
Okay. And in terms of your friends, I find a
lot of my friends. There's a friend of mine calls
them the civilians. They're retiring, they're done Okay, So to
what degree does that affect you this stage of life?
Do you find you're the only person working. What's it

(01:44:34):
like amongst your friends and how to impacts you.

Speaker 2 (01:44:37):
Yeah, well there's a few friends that are frustrated, you know.
But yeah, and some people are retiring.

Speaker 1 (01:44:47):
I don't.

Speaker 2 (01:44:49):
I mean, I don't have a hobby that i'd rather do,
so I'm not going to tire until I'm just too
tired to do it or something.

Speaker 1 (01:44:57):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:45:00):
My friend's writing a book called The Frustrated Creative, but
I don't think he's going to be able to solve
the problem. You know. It's just like you have to,
you have to adjust your mind and say, oh gee,
I don't care. But that's kind of a lie, you know,
especially after having work that so many people are still
listening to. And yet but then I think, well, I

(01:45:21):
can't get anybody to listen to what I'm doing. But
then again, if you know, if Willie Nelson cut my song,
or if all these people they're not on the radio either.
So there, and so I asked an expert what should
I do to get an audience? And the expert was you,
And you wrote back very kindly and said maybe you

(01:45:41):
can get some songs cut in Nashville, you know. So
I tried to do that, but that's not really happening
anymore either. It's so I don't know if people want
to retire. I just don't think I'll be happy if
I'm not creating some kind of musical thing.

Speaker 1 (01:45:58):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:45:59):
It's almost like I feel they're like, yeah, I just
had this breakthrough where I can do stuff way more
and better than I've ever done it before, you know,
But I don't have any Eagles to make the song's hits,
you know, and I don't see that happening.

Speaker 1 (01:46:18):
Well. I mean, the Eagles album that you had a
couple of songs on came out, what two thousand and seven,
and the world has already changed since then sixteen years.
Even if the Eagles cut it, yeah, very few people will.
I mean, the Eagles is a group, but who you know,
let's not go down that road.

Speaker 2 (01:46:35):
Other than the when they did Long Road out of
Eden and then they were going to play and they
cut a couple of my songs on there, but they
were going to play and I said, Glenn, how many
songs are you going to do off your new album? Well,
we're just going to do two because nobody wants to
hear them. That's when they get up and go to
the bathroom when we do the new songs. So and
then I don't think they're interested in doing another record,

(01:46:57):
you know. So yeah, Well, the great.

Speaker 1 (01:47:01):
Thing is you're making music. You've seen the other end
of it, whereas a lot of the people, you know,
we're bitching and moaning that things are different. Listen, it's
frustrating for me too, you know, as I say, used
to be top down. It's not top down anymore anyway, Jack,
I think we have come to the feeling, the end
of the feeling we've known. Just to make sure because

(01:47:23):
we went back and forth an email. Is there anything
I didn't cover that you haven't urge to talk about.

Speaker 2 (01:47:28):
I don't think so. I just have to say, after
reading you for years and now, it's just been a
great pleasure to talk to you. Thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:47:36):
Well. You know, you have this sense of humor that
is just so great and I can see why everybody
wanted you around and in the room. In addition of
writing these great songs and any of it, and it's
really you're an inspiration for people. You got to keep
doing I mean, especially today, when people don't do it
for the music. They do it to become famous or

(01:47:59):
to sell something out else. It's just not enough the music.
But as you say, it's continuing to evolve. In any event, Jack,
thanks so much for doing this.

Speaker 2 (01:48:09):
Thanks Bob, it has been great. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (01:48:11):
You'd bet until next time. This is Bob left sets