November 23, 2021 • 50 mins
Dave takes a detour into the ‘90s alternative rock journey of Dog’s Eye View: A young man with talent, drive, and a dream. A cultural moment that’s just right for him. A climb from the basement to the mountaintop, a story of big plans and big changes from a man who’s seen it all. And Dave stumbles on the single word that sums up his Sudden Impact obsession and points a way forward.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
There's a song from the mid nineties that I keep
coming back to. It's called Everything Falls Apart from a
band called Dog's Eye View.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Fall then Against the Shadow Food.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
In fact, it's about being young and frustrated and a
little bit self destructive, which I for sure was at
the time. It came out in nineteen ninety five, right
when Sudden Impacts relationship with Michael Bivens was falling apart,
and its lyrics, whether or not the writer knew it
at the time, are ripped from real life. Dog's Eye
View was a band started by a guy named Peter Stewart.
(00:39):
Peter had always wanted to be a rock star, to
have a song on the radio, to have a video
in rotation on MTV. He'd seen that bon Jovi video
Wanted Dead or Alive, where they're touring the world in
private planes and playing to stadiums, and he said, that's
for me.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
That will make me a whole person.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
And as Everything Falls Apart began to take off that
wish like it was just about to come true. He
remembers a moment in Paris during a European tour when
he heard what he had always dreamed of hearing.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
So We're playing four nights there and maybe night two.
You know this is pre international cell phone, maybe night two.
I go down and there's a payphone downstairs, and I'm
told that my manager wants to talk to me.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Dog's eye View had toured with Counting Crows the year
Counting Crows blew up. Adam Duritz even wore a Dog's
Eye View T shirt on the cover of Rolling Stone.
But what Peter wanted for himself to have a video
on the air on MTV had remained just out of reach.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
And so do do do?
Speaker 4 (01:39):
Do?
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Do? Do?
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Call him up long distance and he says, I have
great news. MTV added you. You're in the buzz bin.
They're playing it six times, sixteen times a week. I
remember this clear as day.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Right.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
The video for Everything Falls Apart didn't just get added
to MTV's rotation. It got added to the buzz a
thing MTV did from nineteen eighty seven until it stopped
playing music videos. The buzzbind was a seal of approval
from the network, like a verified blue check mark that
said this is an artist to keep your eye on.
Other buzzband artists from around this time were Dave Matthews,
(02:15):
band Stone Temple, pilots, counting crows themselves. Dog's eye View
had arrived. Peter Stewart had gotten exactly what he wanted.
A video on MTV sixteen times a week. Guess what
happened next? And I said, wow, why not twenty of course?
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Right? Yeah? Was it?
Speaker 3 (02:35):
That was like there was no moment of jubilation. There
was no there wasn't like there was no arrival. It
was fucking devastating because it was like, I need more,
like that's not that's not enough.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
I'm going to talk to Peter Stewart about the Dog's
Eye View experience, what was good, what fell apart, and
where he is now, and I will continue on my
quest to track down all of Sudden Impact, a group
for whom everything fell apart before it even had a
chance to come together. This is Waiting for Impact, a
Dave Holmes passion project. So here is where we stand.
(03:33):
I have spoken with Aaron Kane, the lead singer of
Sudden Impact, who started as Too Special and later became
White Guys, and then even later became the Outsiders and
then also became Outsiders for life. He has given me
his part of the Sudden Impact story that It all
started with a poster that they showed to Michael Bivins,
who signed them to Capitol Records and put them in
Boys to Men's Motown, Philly video before he even heard
(03:55):
them sing. I've spoken to Tim Byrd, the group's producer
and some say, the sixth member of Sudden Impact. He
confirms all of the above, which is wild, and he's
told me more of the story how the group left
Capital to go to Bivin's biv ten Records, who then
dropped them, and how they then got signed to Boys
to Men's label Stone Creek, which then folded entirely. Aaron
(04:16):
and his brother Noel left the group after that, and
two new members joined. I've tracked one of them down
and I'm going to see if he'll speak to me
about the whole thing. I also have an email into
Sudden IMPACT's main songwriter, Todd White. No answer yet, but
while we wait, let's get into Peter Stewart. I loved
Dog's Eye View in the mid nineties when I was
(04:37):
feeling very alone and very confused, Having his voice in
my ears honestly kept me going. He was alone and
confused too, and if he had found his place in
the world.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
That meant I could too.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Peter had dreams of stardom, he had plans, he had persistence.
But I think what I really connected to about him,
what really inspired me, was his ambition.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
I'm in awe of people who just decid.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Guide what they want from life, no matter how unrealistic
or improbable, and don't let anything stop them from getting it.
I think it's why I'm attracted to the sudden Impact story. Honestly,
if I were those guys, I would have thrown in
the towel three names ago.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
They kept pushing, and I admire that. So did Peter.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Peter got into music with a head full esteem, but
it was what was on his head that might have
made the difference.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
This is where my entire life turns on Jewish hair.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Later in this episode you will learn how the sensible
Long Island buzz cut of Peter Stewart met the infamous
San Francisco hair extravaganza of Counting Crows Adam Duritz and
changed his life forever. But before that chance meeting with
a famous quoth, Peter was figuring himself out. He was
just out of Northwestern University, playing music, living in a
(05:49):
basement apartment in Chicago. That basement apartment, by the way,
with its high windows through which Peter had a view
of people's feet as they walked past, would eventually provide
the name he would go on to record under Dog's
Eye View, but at the time he had not yet
settled on a good name for the folky acoustic sound
he was developing.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
I think we were either called the gravity Beavers at
that point or Monster, both terrible names for what we
were doing. Monster is a bad name in that I
think people think you're going to show up and be heavy,
and then you show up with an acoustic guitar and
and you know, it's sort of you look even less cool.
(06:29):
But yeah, So I was playing in bands and doing
a lot of I don't know if you ever did this,
a lot of putting like a mix of I think
it was flour and water together and hanging posters on
light poles to you know, for your band, Like you know,
pre Internet, pre all that stuff. You'd literally go with
a bucket of this goop and hundreds of pieces of
(06:50):
paper and go around to all the light poles in
the neighborhoods in Chicago and put up these posters for
for your band, and in winter in.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Chic that's a really cold option. That's a really cold
thing to do.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
But you needed that kind of gumption if you were
going to make it in the early nineties, and as
we know from sudd An impact, if the right person
sees the right poster, this guy's the limit. After a
couple of years on his grind in Chicago, he determined
that he was ready for the big time. He packed
up and moved to New York with a pretty sweet
opportunity right off the bat.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
I'd been talking to this woman at a record company
called Imago for months and she was, you know, yeah,
come to New York.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
I'll get you a gig. Come to New York. I'll get
you a gig.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
And she kept saying, you know, every every Tuesday. I
think it, well, I don't know if it's Monday or Tuesday.
Every xt day of the week. There's this guy named
Jeff Buckley. He plays at this place called Shane. I'll
get you a gig. Play before him. You'll see, you know,
you'll play to tons of people. He's the thing in
New York right now, right, I've never heard Jeff Buckley
at this point. Great, so I literally moved to New
(07:52):
York and she gives me this gig at Shane, and
I am, this is it right?
Speaker 2 (07:58):
This is one of many? This is it? That we're
not it?
Speaker 3 (08:01):
But I get there and my first night there, I
go down to Shnee. This is my big gig and
it's literally Shane who ran Shane, and like someone making
coffee and a person because for the first week ever,
Jeff's run has ended. Jeff had finished, he'd finished a
big finale the week before. He's done with Shane, and
(08:23):
he's moved on to greener pastors and off to make Grace.
So my first big gig was literally like thud.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Kiss that is last Goodbye from the classic album Grace
that Jeff Buckley had just left Shane to make. And
that voice is why Jeff Buckley influenced a whole generation
of singer songwriters, including Peter Stewart. We'll come back to
(08:53):
Jeff Buckley a bit later in the show, but for now,
like me in New York in the mid nineties, Peter
is tempting to pay the bill. He's getting some stage
time where he can, and what happens next is a
real ride.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
A friend of mine called me and asked me to
open for a band, an Irish band called The Fat
Lady Sayings, And so I went down I can't even
remember where. It was, some tiny club and I went
down to open for them, and it was fine and
they were cool, but they were taking five to ten
(09:27):
minutes between every song to tune their guitars and like
get their shit together. And they were playing the next
night opening for of all people, Howard Jones at like
the Beacon or somewhere, and I was like, you guys
need some You need a roadie, You need someone to
hand you guitars and tune guitars. And they're like, oh,
that'd be great.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Can you do that?
Speaker 3 (09:49):
I was like, yeah, absolutely, So I went up and
did that for them, and at the end of that show,
they were like, look, we're going off on this two
month tour of the state. We could use a roadie.
You can open gigs for us if you do it.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
How about it? Yes? Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
The band and the sound guy and Peter tour the States.
Seven people, four of them chainsmokers, one van. The tour
is not boring.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
They were sleeping on people's floors in Boston. They were
sleeping on floors of some people who are running guns
for the IRA, so there was a lot of weaponry around.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Terrific.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
We came back to New York where they played Cafe
Wah as an Irish band opening for a funk band
on Funk Night, which was not great. The singer broke
his arm skiing in the middle of the tour, after
we'd had to send the road the sound guy home
because he had a mental break, full psychotic episode. Then
(10:52):
the singer broke his arm and I had to play
guitar for them.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
It was a very exciting tour, but through.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
All of it, Peter is listening to a cause that
of a record that hasn't been released yet.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
I had had an advanced copy of the first Counting
Crows record, August and Everything after someone a friend of
mine who worked at Gefen, had given me a cassette
and I was obsessed with it. I loved it, and
it was before it had come out. I was just
it killed me right. It was right in my vein
of what I like to do and I like to hear.
And so in the middle of this Fat Lady Singhs
(11:23):
tour they were playing. They were the second opening act
for Counting Crows at St. Andrew's Hall in Detroit, and
it was Counting Crow's first ever headlining gig outside of California.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Peter is a big Counting Crows fan at this point,
he's dying to share a bill with them, So, like
Todd and Allen of Sudden Impact, with a dream in
their hearts and a poster in their hands, he takes
a chance.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
I said, look, I know there are two other opening
acts I need to play on this gig. I love
this fucking band. Let me play on this gig. And
someone relented and said, you can play literally at seven
o'clock when the door's open, doors open, you play fifteen minutes.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
So great.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
I'm on the keg fifteen minutes of stage time at
seven pm, before anyone's even left their homes to come
to the venue, while the bartender is still cutting up limes.
But it's enough to give him a little swagger when
he has that important interaction that hinges on Jewish hair.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
So before the show, we're up in the dressing room.
Since just sort of one communal dressing room and Counting
Crows are not known at this point, there's been no
radio play, there's nothing. They're just building up and I
see Adam from across the room, and I walked up
to him and I said, hey, how are you doing.
(12:40):
I'm the opening act, right, which is way better than
saying like I'm a big fan. So I said, hey,
I'm the opening act.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
My name is Peter.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
He's like, oh, hey, great, great, nice to meet. I
was like, listen, I've always wanted dreadlocks. How long did
it take you to grow those? He was like about
like three hours.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Man. I was like, what do you mean.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
He's like, it's a weave, it's it's I was like,
all my life I could have had dreadlocks if I
just like spent money.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
Peter and Adam Durrettz get friendly. They exchanged phone numbers,
and because this is a time in history when you
would talk on the phone, they do.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
And a few weeks later they were coming to maybe
a month later, I'm not sure how long. They were
coming to New York to play a gig at Wetlands.
The night before they played Saturday Night Live, and somehow
I was you know, I was pushy and doing a
lot of finaggling. So I basically said, hey, I have
a band, can we open for you at Wetlands?
Speaker 2 (13:36):
It's like, you're sure open for us at Wetlands. That'd
be great. And I think what it may have even
been worse than that.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
I think there was someone opening for them, and then
they played, and then we closed for them at Wetlands, right,
so after everybody left, we started playing.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
But again it was one of those things like I
just want to be in the game.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
A few days later, Peter's phone rings, and again, because
this is a time when people talk on their phones,
Peter picks up.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Adam called me or his manager called someone did and said, look,
we had an opening act for two weeks. You know,
we're going off on the Northeast tour. We had an
opening act. He just dropped out. Can you do two
weeks of touring with us solo? It's like, yeah, yes,
I can't. Yeah, absolutely it can. So I was along
for this ride where count Crows were this cool band
(14:23):
and there I loved their record, and they're playing the Wetlands,
which was a little club, and we played and and
I was going to go off on tour with him
the next you know, the day after Saturday Night Live,
and they played Saturday Night Live and it just went.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
It just changed, right, It immediately. You know.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
I was on tour with them, and it went from
like playing the Wetlands to playing a bigger place to
the small place you're still booked in is packed and
everyone like, all of a sudden, you could feel this
thing rolling.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
It's very rare.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
That a band has like a meteoric rise like the
Crows had.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
And I rode that. I rode that whole thing. You know.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
It was like they're on the cover of Rolling Stone,
They're on cover of Spin, They're on you know, all
these things they're doing, like these TV shows, and I
got to be along.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
For all of it, right, and just like yeah, yeah,
And they're not just on the cover of Rolling Stone.
Adam Durretz is on the cover of Rolling Stone in
a Dog's Eye view T shirt.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
Yes, which again goes to how annoyingly uh in it?
Speaker 2 (15:26):
For myself I was.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
I mean, I was just constantly pushing, like which I
think you have to do to some degree. But it's
like I'm the guy going, oh, well, what you need
is for me to come on the road and roady
for you and open for you, right, and and Adam's
about to go do the you know, his first ever
like magazine cover shoot, and I'm like, so, so you're
gonna wear my shirt?
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Right?
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Can you please wear my shirt? Well?
Speaker 1 (15:49):
It worked, it did, but it's it's you know, okay, sure, yeah,
it's a little cringey in retrospect. But as we've learned
by now, even the least probable, even the wildest kind
of ambition, can pay off. Peter Stewart has found himself
in the right place at the right time, and that's
because he's made the decision to be everywhere. Roadying for
(16:11):
bands and playing for empty rooms brought him luck, but
it was luck that he manifested through bold action. And
this brings me back to an aspect of my own
personal story that still kind of scares me a little bit.
In nineteen ninety eight, I made the decision to show
up at fifteen fifteen Broadway to audition to be a
VJ on MTV. This is a decision that has fundamentally
(16:32):
changed the entire course of my life to the point
that I honestly don't know where or who I would
be if I hadn't gone. It gave me the life
I have now, and the thing that haunts me about it,
the thing that I think about at three am, when
I can't get back to sleep. Is how close I
came to not going. Here's the deal. The first day
of those auditions at MTV was the day after Easter.
(16:53):
I had spent Easter with my group of friends in
New York City, where we'd cooked bacon and eggs and
taken the Staten Island ferry back and forth because you
couldn't afford brunch in the circle line. I didn't tell
any of them what I was planning on doing. It
felt so foolish, like a thing a child would do.
I figured there would be a lot of big characters
showing up for this thing, so a guy like me,
kind of a low key everyman music nerd, would have
(17:15):
to be seen early before the casting people got tired
of faces and voices.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
So I set an alarm for four AM.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
And when that alarm clock screamed at me that morning,
those tall red digital letters spelling out four too, my
eyes burning and my body horizontal and cozy, I said.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
What am I doing? I'm twenty seven, I have a job.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
It's time for me to put aside childish things like
showing up and trying to be a VJ for a
network who's demographic I aged out of a month ago.
Who does this? How foolish? Go back to sleep and
then go to work like a man. I turned off
the alarm. I blinked a heavy, sleepy blink, and then
another longer one, a third blink, and I would have
(17:57):
gone back to sleep. My eyes would have just stayed
closed until it was time to go to my regular job,
and I would have gone about the business of a
regular day. I would have missed my chance. I don't
know what it is that got me out of bed.
I know I didn't want to get out of bed,
but I did, and I showered, and I put on
a black, tunicy kind of shirt that I guess I
thought was trendy, and I took a taxi to Times Square,
(18:19):
where I was one hundred and sixty eighth in line.
We got brought into the studio in groups of twelve,
and when my group was called in, I was at
audition Station seven, where the casting guy saw something in
me and sent me to another room where I talked
to more casting people for a half hour or so,
and then they told me they'd call by Tuesday at
midnight if I made the top ten. And they called
at eleven fifty seven pm on Tuesday, and I borrowed
(18:41):
a good going out shirt from one of my roommates,
and I showed up the next morning, and then I
made the top five and they gave me access to
the wardrobe room, where I got to wear some of
Matt Pinfield's bowling shirts for the rest of the process because.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
We were the same size.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
I got to practice Awards show podium banter on Live
TV with Pauli Shore.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
I think I made a biodome jo.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Kathy Griffin did a challenge where she was a different
kind of difficult interview for each of us. We had
to run across the street to the Virgin Megastore and
grab our three favorite albums and defend them.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Mine were the first Benfolds five record, day, Las Souls.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Three Feet High in Rising, and Tommy Keene's songs from
the film Perfect Now. It was obvious seeing Jesse Camp,
this tall, beautiful, eighteen year old weirdo, that he was
gonna win. He was a character, and that took the
pressure off of me. I relaxed, I enjoyed myself. I
bantered with Kurt Loder. I sasked him back when he
said he hated Paul McCartney in Wings? How can you
(19:35):
hate Paul McCartney in Wings? And the voters voted and
I lost, And I said, Dave, have your emotions about
this later. Now it's time to put a smile on
your face and go to the after party and start
trying to get in some other way. And I did,
and I pushed, and now I'm here. I wouldn't be here.
I wouldn't be doing this right now, being in this
room talking into this microphone if I had blinked that
(19:57):
third time.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
So I guess the moral here is say yes, get.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Up early for that stupid audition, Print up your poster,
even if there's nothing for that poster to promote. Ask
a famous friend to wear your T shirt, make a
T shirt, take a chance.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Success often really does.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Come down to being in the right place at the
right time, and there will never be a right time
for your right place to be bad. So Peter Stewart
and Dog's Eye View are on tour with Counting Crows,
(20:33):
the band that is becoming the biggest band in America,
and the buzz is growing for Dog's Eye View as well.
What were you hoping? Was it fame that excited you.
Was it connection with an audience that excited you? What
about your music, like, what was the impact you were
hoping to make.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
Well, it's complicated, right, and I've had a lot of
time to think about it, so I'm not sure. At
the time, it was a combination of a couple things, right,
So in it, in the roots of it, it started
with a combination of I was incredibly depressed, very lonely
teenage boy, right, and I picked up the guitar. And
(21:14):
the first thing that happened to me musically in a
lot of ways was you know, my dad had died
when I was really young. I had all this stuff
around it. I picked up a guitar and then someone
turned me on to Cat Stevens and the song Father
and Son, and it was the first time I ever
felt like heard and understood and and and music immediately
(21:35):
became this thing where I felt less alone in the world, right,
and I felt like I got.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
It and it moved me so deeply.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
So part of it was wanting to participate in that, right,
wanting to be moved by music, and wanting to move
people and wanting to you know, explore that. And part
of it was you know, sort of self therapy. Right,
write sad songs about sad things I'm feeling, and I
feel like less sad and if anyone, if it communicates
(22:04):
with anyone, great.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
That's mixed almost fifty to fifty with.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
Being around at the inception of MTV, right and and
I wish that this was less the case right for coolness.
But part of it was the Wanted Dead or Alive
music video by Bonchovi.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Right.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
I was, you know, sitting in my room. I'm you know,
I'm in high school or junior higher high school, and
there are all these shots of like, you know, like
guys getting into like limos and guys getting into planes
and guys getting girls, and you know, I've seen a
million faces and I've rocked them all. It's like, fuck yeah,
(22:49):
fuck yes, that's what I want.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Right.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
So, so it's this weird combination of those two things.
And on the darker side, which comes out, you know,
sort of proves itself later, you know. So much of
it was the chase, like I just want to get
a record out, I just want people to hear me.
I just want that thing. But there was some internal
(23:13):
thing where I thought that that would fix me. Right,
I thought that would make everything okay, And I really,
you know, I couldn't have articulated that to you at
that point, but there was this element of like, well,
surely Jon bon Jovi stepping onto that plane, you know,
or in his leather pants, or you know, seeing a
(23:35):
million faces and I rocked them all on that stage
has no problems, right, Totally, life is you know, heaven
opens up and you feel amazing all the time. So
so part of it was that, right, I really thought
that if I had a record out and or a
hit single, all problems solved, I would immediately become someone
(23:58):
who is comfortable in their own.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
Skin and happy dog's eye view gets to play in
bigger and bigger venues. Peter sees okay, maybe not a
million faces, but certainly into the thousands of faces, and
he rocks most of them softly. But most importantly, he's
selling his homemade cassettes at his merch table and people
are buying. He attracts the attention of Columbia Records, who
fly him to New York to meet the big wigs.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
I literally the next week went to Columbia Records, and
it was sort of like all the dreams.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
You would have of like, you know, Dylan or you
know whoever.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
I went into a conference room at Columbia Records with
Donnie Yner, the president of the Wibel and my manager
at the time, Marty Diamond, and this guy Mitchell Cohen,
and okay, play a few songs in the least acoustically
friendly environment you've ever been in. Right, it's a fucking
conference room that's deadened, and it's like you play guitar
(24:52):
and goes yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
And totally adiseptic and clean and floresca and just just nothing.
But you know, I remember playing the song.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
And just sort of like walking up a chair onto
the table and playing it above them, and I remember going, oh,
you know, I like this kid, I like this, And
you know, a.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Couple days later it was they're going to offer you
a deal.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
The band records the album Happy Nowhere, which contains the
single Everything Falls Apart and honestly about a half a
dozen more bangers. But for a long time, Happy Nowhere
sits on a shelf, waiting to be released and waiting
some more. As we know by now, that happens a lot.
Sometimes those albums never stop waiting. This feels like something
Pixar should explore, and then a very strange gig changes everything.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
The record was either going to come out in ninety
five or ninety six, right late late ninety five or
ninety six, and it was unclear what was going to happen,
and it wasn't necessarily you know, no one necessarily heard
a big hit on it, and it wasn't necessarily a
priority at Columbia. And I had a very weird gig
come up, which I got asked, and this is before
(26:02):
we were assigned, Yeah, I mean before we were the
records out.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
There's no way people really knew about.
Speaker 3 (26:07):
Us, right, So someone reached out to me and said
that Michael Eisner, the head of Disney at the time,
his son is graduating from college and really wants you
to play at his graduation. First of all, I know
that they wanted Soul Coughing to play, or they wanted
Cracker to play, or they wanted someone to play, and
their dads had gone down the list to who's an
(26:30):
artist who we can get to play? Right, There's no way.
First of all, we weren't like a party band, and
second of all, come on, it was a great foreshadowing
of my entire career in music because they picked us
up in New York City in a limo and took
us to a private plane and flew us up to
(26:51):
Cornell or wherever it was, and picked us up in
a bedley and took us to the gig.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
It's a dual graduation party, Michael eisen Son and the
son of Mickey Schuloff, who at the time was the
president of Sony, which owned Columbia Records. It is a
very weird and suddenly a very important gig.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
And then we set up and play and it's among
the worst gigs you can play.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
Right.
Speaker 3 (27:14):
It is both of those families in a restaurant, an
Italian restaurant, both of those extended families and grandparents and
uncles and aunts and some teenagers, you know, and the
kids graduating from college. And the first thing that happens
we step on stage and it's just fucking squealing feedback,
(27:35):
and you will just watch a bunch of old people eating,
just grimace. And then we play some folk songs for
these kids on their college graduation because their parents got
us there. And then the very drunk son of what
the eisnerer kid? Right, the very drunk kid. His dad
pulls me aside says, my kid wants to jam with
(27:57):
you guys, right, And I was like, we don't.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
I don't know. I'm not that kind of guy. I
don't have songs to jam on.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
I don't and we don't have another guitar, so it
wouldn't be appropriate, right, So I turned that down. And
then they asked us to play a second set, and
we do and some kids are like, you know, parents
were like, oh, dance, dance, and we're like, play the
most upbeat, sad folk song you can play.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Thanks probably to an open bar, the gig is a
success and Michael Eisner intervenes on Peter's behalf.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
And Michael Eisner goes, so, when is your record coming out?
And I said, you know, I don't know. It might
be it might be October, it might be next year.
We're not sure. And he goes, no, It's coming out
in October, Mickey October, and literally, like they get into
this weird power play about when Sony's gonna put out
the record, and the next day it got slated for October.
(28:51):
So this single came out in like November of ninety five,
and immediately, you know, immediately started getting traction and being
a being a thing.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
You know what happens next, The video gets added to
MTV's buzz bind, it gets played sixteen times a week,
and the thing that Peter thought would fix him doesn't.
That is very much in keeping with the character of
the lyrics, you know, which I think at the time
like listening to it. So if that if the album
(29:22):
came out in ninety five, I would have been twenty four,
and I was in New York and you know, sad
and lonely and self destructive and self hating and all
those things. So the record really spoke to me on
a deep level in a sense that made me feel like, oh,
I know this guy. I know this guy, and so
to hear you say that, it's like, yeah, I know
that guy would react that way.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
That record continued to grow and continued to be a
hit single, but there was a there was definitely you know.
Part of the reason I mentioned that the ascendancy of
the Crows, right and that thing, is that that just
never happened for us.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
Right, We by by by all.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
Accounts right as successful, like more successful than you could
really hope to be.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Right.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
You play a lot of shows, you get a record deal,
you have a hit single, like that's that's dreams, right.
Thirteen year old me is like yes, right, but there
was a weird thing when it didn't progress to the
next level, right, it didn't. You know, we went on
Letterman and the next day was a day and there
(30:32):
was this sort of slow realization that it was just
it had gone really well and gone up and was
blowing up and things are great and it's a hit
record and now go do another one.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
And how are like, are you psychologically do you have
the self knowledge to know that this is not this
is not feeding you the way that you were hoping
that it would.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
There was a lot of me trying to push it.
I'd done so much to push.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
It uphill, right of like let me be Erodi, let
me wear my shirt, let me do this. You know, push, push, push,
and at a certain point you can't individually push the
machinery anymore.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
Right, So it got to a.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
Point where you know, I would just I mean I
had to, you know, really make amends to my manager
years later because I realized, like I would just call
him twenty times a day and going have you done this?
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Have you done this? Have you done this have you
called this person?
Speaker 3 (31:31):
And so I spent a lot of time worrying about
trying to push it forward and zero time enjoying the
experience of it, the process of it. It didn't fix me,
so it had to get bigger to fix me. Like
I knew then, I knew that if the record sold
a million records or we had a second hit, then
(31:55):
you know, and I was playing bigger venues, then I
would feel better.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
This speaks to a thing I've been thinking about a
lot lately. Dreams are good for you. They can give
your life purpose, direction, discipline. But the essential problem with
dreams is that they don't make sense.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
When you set a big goal.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
You know, when there's like a dream you have for yourself,
you imagine it happening, but it is happening to some
future version of you who's like something has been fixed
in between the dreaming and the event, and ultimately, you know,
I've achieved a few of the goals that I hope
(32:32):
to achieve, and it's like that just happens to you.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
It just happens to the dumb version of you who
was there before.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
Yeah, it happens to the version of you that happened
yesterday and you don't feel any different.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Yeah, it's kind of incredible that Peter Stewart can write
those lyrics I got what I wanted and now my
life is just boring, and then be surprised when they
end up being exactly true to his life. Self knowledge
is a process. But Dog's Eye Views album Happy Nowhere
(33:07):
stalls after everything falls apart as it's run on the charts.
They don't even make a second video from that album,
but they do go back and record a second album, Daisy.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
So that record there.
Speaker 3 (33:17):
Was a combination of things, right, first thing was that
they weren't promoting it. Second, you know, it didn't have
an obvious hit on it. Third, the initial the launch
for that record was, you know, we were going to
go tour Southeast Asia and Australia and New Zealand with
Counting Crows, and like a week before, like that's the
(33:38):
week before the record comes out, and a week before
the tour, they were like, we're not going to do
the tour, and they just canceled the tour. So we
were scrambling. So it just things things weren't working and
and part of what was happening was also I was
I was a big periodic binge drinker the time, right,
(34:01):
So I wasn't you know, I wasn't drinking all the time,
but I definitely like the last show we did on
the Happy Nowhere tour, we literally had all flown home,
and then I landed in Seattle and someone someone caught
me up and said, there's a radio show in Saint
Louis tonight that everyone forgot about, so you need to
(34:22):
fly back to Saint Louis and play. I think it
was Mississippi Knights was the name of the club.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
Right, and play.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
And so we flew back and playing some radio station
show for some radio station that wasn't playing us anymore.
And it was the first time, one of the only times,
but I got completely blackout drunk on stage. I was
so pissed off to be there and so done with it.
And I found out the next day that we that
(34:52):
we did a three song encore that I had no
memory of. I'd been on stage playing in a blackout.
It's a little scary, but it's also a little rock
and roll until it isn't. We played the DC Chili Cookoff,
which is yet another you know gig that sounds as
bad as it is played at noon on a hot
stage in DC. I was wearing Vinyl motorcycle pants perfect
(35:15):
and it was I was. I drank a bunch of
tequila before noon, and during our last song, I jumped
off an amp and landed, you know, like that classic
Eddie Vedder thing, Like I grabbed the top of the stage,
but I'm not strong enough to hang on and i
can't lift myself up, so I'm literally just hanging there
(35:37):
and slowly slipping off as I then fall to the
stage and just crumple.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Like that big Eddie Vetter stage move. The second album,
Daisy does not quite land. Columbia Records drops him. Peter's
on his own again.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
Matchbox twenty would take me out on a tour, playing
second stages on their arena tour, like on their Amphitheater, right,
So I would drive the eight hour Hump alone in
a rental car and then play it two in the
afternoon on the second stage and then watch my friends play,
you know, the lights would go down and people and
I watched them play and I'd think, I'm not this
(36:16):
is not working, man. I'm not growing. I'm not like,
I'm not developing as a human. I'm seeing the same
places over and over.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
I was drinking more because I was miserable.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Peter gets sober and he likes it. He begins to
get work as a sober companion for actors who were
trying not to relapse on set. He gets to travel
the world, and his cover story is that he's the
actor's assistant.
Speaker 3 (36:39):
I'm the assistant who in the person says, hey, get
me a cup of coffee.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
I go.
Speaker 3 (36:43):
You can get your cup of coffee, get your own coffee.
So when a director turned to me one day, he
was like, you're the worst assistant I've ever seen.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
Something else is going on here.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
In the meantime, Peter has recorded an album under his
own name, and the independent label he signed to wants
him to go off on tour the way that he
had been driving himself from town to town. But he's
over that by now, so that album kind of fizzles.
And it's a shame that Peter stewart solo album, Propeller
is really good. It's on streaming services.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
Go listen. He'll get two millions of a penny.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
And the final indignity of my interface with the music
business was literally so I was I had a publishing
deal at the time, and the publishing deal owed me
some money, and I didn't have a lot of money left.
And the label had said, hey, you know what, We're
going to put the record out, but we're just going
(37:36):
to put it out digitally on our digital store. And
I said, and I talked to the publishing company and
they said, your contract stipulates that there has to be
one physical record in one physical store or we.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
Don't pay you.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
So I had to get the record company to print
a box of CDs and go put one at Amiba
Records so that it was in a store that I
could get paid. And I know they printed, you know,
maybe I don't know, a couple hundred CDs and I
have most.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
Of them in my garage.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
But it was just so like on the way out
the door, it was like, here's the thing you gotta do.
You gotta beg for them to print a CD so
you can get paid.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
What had begun with high hopes and ambition ended with
an errand and that was that for music as a profession.
Peter went to graduate school to get his masters in
clinical psychology. He worked in in patient substance abuse treatment
for a few years and now he's in private practice
as a therapist in Austin, Texas.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
Does that fill you in the way that you were
hoping music? Would? You know? Yes? But other things do too.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
Right, if I was looking just to this job for fulfillment,
it wouldn't be enough, you know. And similarly, you know,
if I could go way back and have a life
with other things in it when I was making music,
maybe I would have been more fulfilled by music, right,
But because all chips were in on how my record
was doing on any given day, there was no fulfillment.
(39:09):
And and now I mean I really not to be
too cheesy about it, but being sober and really working
on the underlying issues as a man right as a
human being, and trying to figure out like trying realizing
that there's no number of times that can play the
song that's going to satisfy me. There's no there's nothing
(39:30):
that's going to fill this void. I have to find
contentment in other places. And so to me, doing all
of that work and doing the work to find to
be comfortable in my own skin and have contentment has
allowed me to have a family, allowed me to have
a relationship, and allowed me to have a job that
I really love doing most of the time. But when
(39:53):
I don't love doing it, I have other things that
fill me up, whether it's running or my family.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
Or other things.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
As with a lot of people who decide to get sober,
Peter's decision was motivated by a moment of clarity. And honestly,
Peter's moment of clarity it's pretty fucking glamorous.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
You didn't ask this, but I'll answer it just for fun.
I had a moment like part of my you know,
moment of clarity, as it were, of deciding to get sober,
thinking I might need to get sober. I was in
Las Vegas for a wedding. My girlfriend at the time
had just dumped me, and I was in Las Vegas
(40:31):
on a boat on Lake Mead or whatever it's called
lake whatever, the fake lake is out there sitting on
the roof of the boat, tripping on ecstasy, and I
had this, you know, I was on ecstasy sitting in
the boat.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
I felt amazing.
Speaker 3 (40:48):
Everything was great, and my friend, who had a bunch
of drugs with him, was swimming from the one boat
to the other boat, and I knew he was bringing
more drugs. And as I was to come down from
the ecstasy. I started thinking, you know what, there's not
enough ecstasy in the world to keep me feeling the
way I'm feeling. And there's not enough there aren't enough
(41:11):
women in the world or relationships in the world to
keep me happy, and there's not enough money in the world.
I have to fundamentally change everything and not be looking
for something else to make me happy. And then and
then I had this debate with myself where I said,
what if and this is my big fear, Right, what
(41:32):
if I get happy and I no longer have many
songs to write? Right?
Speaker 2 (41:38):
What happens? Then?
Speaker 3 (41:39):
Am I willing to make that deal? And I didn't
know that was going to happen. But if i'm what if?
I what if it happens? Am I willing to make
that deal? And I just had it.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
I was right. I was like, you know what, fuck it?
Speaker 3 (41:51):
If it's that, if I have to be If contentment
and happiness means I never write another song, I'll take
it because I can't.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
I'm so fucking miserable that I can't do that.
Speaker 3 (42:03):
And as it turned out, I feel like I wrote
my best songs after I got sober. But in a way,
later as as I've eased out of it. You know,
I've written probably three songs in the last fifteen years
because I don't have There's just nothing I want to
I'm not in that pain, I'm not.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
In that turmoil.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
The day after I spoke with Peter, he emailed me,
and I'm just going to read his email out loud.
I woke up with a memory of something that I
wished i'd said on the podcast. Don't know if you
can add more later. Basic gist was this realization I had.
And let's say two thousand and seven or so, I
was doing a sober companion gig in Australia and I
was running on a hotel treadmill, looking at the Sydney
(42:44):
Harbor and thinking about my music career. I must have
been listening to music, and suddenly I had the thought
that at any point in the early to mid nineties
I would have gladly traded my career and life for
the critical acclaim and songwriting talent of Elliott Smith or
the voice, critical ACA and success of Jeff Buckley. Yet
here I was running with a beautiful view of Sydney
(43:05):
and they were both dead.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
It's funny to think about.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
What we're sure we want at the time and how
lucky we turn out to be not to get it.
So I have some leads on the guys from Sudden Impact.
Aside from Dave Smith, I have an interview request out
to Michael Bivens. I am inching closer to finding out
what happened to those guys. But as that story comes together,
the other bigger mystery still eludes me. Why does this
(43:30):
story have meaning for me? Why can't I stop thinking
about it? As I often do when I'm in need
of guidance. I call my friend Scott Gimpo and we
talk about pop music.
Speaker 4 (43:39):
We grew up with records that stayed on the charts years,
but I mean like kids that went once yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
And now is it a volume game?
Speaker 4 (43:53):
Is it just there's so much stuff? It is?
Speaker 1 (43:56):
It's that there's so much stuff. And then it's also
you buy something or no, actually you don't anymore?
Speaker 2 (44:04):
If you stream.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
Something, yeah, like it was, you know, you saved up
a little bit of money and you bought the cassette
or the CD, and then it was there to remind
you that you had it, and you could listen to
it right and play it in your car, and then
that reminds your friend, Oh I got to pick I
gotta get that too, And then that lasts like so now,
even records that I that I stream when they come
(44:25):
out and love the next day, I've completely forgotten and
there's nothing to remind me.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
It's just stuff to keep me swimming forward. A simple
prop to occupy your time, simple to occupy my time.
Speaker 1 (44:41):
You know, we've we've talked about sudden Impact for eighteen
years now, right, and that's the thing that didn't happen,
that stayed in our minds well.
Speaker 5 (44:53):
But there was enough of a repeater that of Motown,
Philly that initially it was like what was that at
the end, Like oh, wait, that thing's coming up at
the end, to like oh I can't wait for that
thing to come out of the end. Yeah, the repetition
of the video engaged your imagination, and I think that
(45:14):
seared it into our brain forever.
Speaker 4 (45:16):
And then in addition to that, it never being fulfilled.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
Yeah, the mystery of it never been satisfied.
Speaker 4 (45:24):
I don't have a good memory, but I know I'll
remember that moment the rest of my life from that video,
and I will never not take a moment to think
about it. Even if you get closure, whatever the ending is,
we know that that record didn't come out. It didn't
there was no music video to follow that up, there
was no additional move to the point point ended it.
(45:49):
And thus it's just a prime example of ambition and potential.
And I don't think it has a negative valance on it.
I don't look upon its unfulfilled potential or anything like that.
I just hold it up. I mean, it is amazing,
but I hold it up as an example of audacious
(46:11):
creative ambition that I want to aspire to.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
There, Scott has said a word that really resonates with me,
a word that gets right to the point of what
I'm trying to say here.
Speaker 4 (46:22):
That word just keeps on coming to mind. Audacious. Wouldn't
want to be audacious like that?
Speaker 2 (46:27):
This is my moment of clarity. Audacity.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
That is what this show is about, people taking bold
action and seeing their lives change because of it. If
VT Nicole Brown showed up at a hotel lobby in
the middle of the night and sang in her idol's face,
so did Hayden. Todd and Allen ran up on a
celebrity and asked him to sign a poster for a
group that barely existed.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
Aaron Kane hit on someone's girlfriend.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
Audacity is what connects all of the people I have
spoken to so far. Karen Kilgareth got up on stage
to do something that scared her to death. Peter Stewart
struck up a conversation about here Damien Fahe spent two
hundred dollars its structure. It's why I connect to the
story of Sudden Impact. The things in my life that
I'm proudest of my book Esquire getting up at four
(47:12):
am to do something embarrassing that bought me a new life,
those are audacious. The things I'm ashamed of, flunking out
of college because I was in a gay shame spiral
are failures of audacity. And if I'm sometimes restless at
this time in my life, if I sometimes find myself aimless,
it's because I've forgotten my audacity, because we've talked about
them so much in this episode.
Speaker 2 (47:33):
Let's put it in Counting Crowe's terms. Listen to this yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
Yeah, That yeah is from the very end of rain King.
From Counting Crowe's debut album August and everything after that
is the yeah of enthusiasm. Of confidence, of optimism. That
is Adam Durrett saying I'm gonna be famous and I
cannot wait.
Speaker 2 (47:56):
That yeah is all of our best selves.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
But too often we get weighed down by self doubt,
by insecurity, by fear or vanity or shame, and we
end up like this, yeah, Yeah, that is the yeah
that ends counting crows a long December just three years later.
All of life can be summed up by those two yeahs.
(48:20):
It's easy to be a long December at this time
in history, but the world needs you at a rain King.
Rain King is the one who gets out of bed
when he wants to sleep, the one who goes out
on a cold Chicago day to paced up flyers for
his show, the one that goes clear across the country
with a poster and a demo.
Speaker 2 (48:37):
Be rain King, Friends, I am getting the life lesson I.
Speaker 1 (48:41):
Didn't even know I needed, and I'm getting it from
Adam Duritz and Sudden Impact. Next time, I'm going to
talk to a guy who joined Sudden Impact in their
final form, the one that actually finally released music. And
because I am going rain King from here on out,
I'm going to track down one of the most famous
faces in music via history, A guy who inspired a
(49:02):
million swoons, and I know that because about four hundred
thousand of them came from me.
Speaker 2 (49:08):
Baby, Baby, you do not want to miss the next.
Speaker 1 (49:10):
Episode of Waiting for Impact, a Dave Holmes passion project.
This has been an exactly Right production written by me
Dave Holmes, produced by Hannah Kyle Crichton, recorded, mixed and
sound designed by Andrew Epen. Additional engineering and assembly by
(49:34):
Analise Nelson. Music by Ben Wise, artwork by Garrett Ross.
Executive produced by Karen Kilgareff, Georgia hard Stark and Danielle Kramer.
Follow the show on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter at exactly
right and follow me at Dave Holmes. For more information,
go to Exactlyrightmedia dot com. Binge The show ad free
(49:58):
on Stitcher Premium for a free month. Head to Stitcher
Premium dot com slash impact and enter promo code Impact
when you select a monthly plan, listen, subscribe and leave
us a review on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you
get your podcasts
There's a song from the mid nineties that I keep
coming back to. It's called Everything Falls Apart from a
band called Dog's Eye View.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Fall then Against the Shadow Food.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
In fact, it's about being young and frustrated and a
little bit self destructive, which I for sure was at
the time. It came out in nineteen ninety five, right
when Sudden Impacts relationship with Michael Bivens was falling apart,
and its lyrics, whether or not the writer knew it
at the time, are ripped from real life. Dog's Eye
View was a band started by a guy named Peter Stewart.
(00:39):
Peter had always wanted to be a rock star, to
have a song on the radio, to have a video
in rotation on MTV. He'd seen that bon Jovi video
Wanted Dead or Alive, where they're touring the world in
private planes and playing to stadiums, and he said, that's
for me.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
That will make me a whole person.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
And as Everything Falls Apart began to take off that
wish like it was just about to come true. He
remembers a moment in Paris during a European tour when
he heard what he had always dreamed of hearing.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
So We're playing four nights there and maybe night two.
You know this is pre international cell phone, maybe night two.
I go down and there's a payphone downstairs, and I'm
told that my manager wants to talk to me.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Dog's eye View had toured with Counting Crows the year
Counting Crows blew up. Adam Duritz even wore a Dog's
Eye View T shirt on the cover of Rolling Stone.
But what Peter wanted for himself to have a video
on the air on MTV had remained just out of reach.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
And so do do do?
Speaker 4 (01:39):
Do?
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Do? Do?
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Call him up long distance and he says, I have
great news. MTV added you. You're in the buzz bin.
They're playing it six times, sixteen times a week. I
remember this clear as day.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Right.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
The video for Everything Falls Apart didn't just get added
to MTV's rotation. It got added to the buzz a
thing MTV did from nineteen eighty seven until it stopped
playing music videos. The buzzbind was a seal of approval
from the network, like a verified blue check mark that
said this is an artist to keep your eye on.
Other buzzband artists from around this time were Dave Matthews,
(02:15):
band Stone Temple, pilots, counting crows themselves. Dog's eye View
had arrived. Peter Stewart had gotten exactly what he wanted.
A video on MTV sixteen times a week. Guess what
happened next? And I said, wow, why not twenty of course?
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Right? Yeah? Was it?
Speaker 3 (02:35):
That was like there was no moment of jubilation. There
was no there wasn't like there was no arrival. It
was fucking devastating because it was like, I need more,
like that's not that's not enough.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
I'm going to talk to Peter Stewart about the Dog's
Eye View experience, what was good, what fell apart, and
where he is now, and I will continue on my
quest to track down all of Sudden Impact, a group
for whom everything fell apart before it even had a
chance to come together. This is Waiting for Impact, a
Dave Holmes passion project. So here is where we stand.
(03:33):
I have spoken with Aaron Kane, the lead singer of
Sudden Impact, who started as Too Special and later became
White Guys, and then even later became the Outsiders and
then also became Outsiders for life. He has given me
his part of the Sudden Impact story that It all
started with a poster that they showed to Michael Bivins,
who signed them to Capitol Records and put them in
Boys to Men's Motown, Philly video before he even heard
(03:55):
them sing. I've spoken to Tim Byrd, the group's producer
and some say, the sixth member of Sudden Impact. He
confirms all of the above, which is wild, and he's
told me more of the story how the group left
Capital to go to Bivin's biv ten Records, who then
dropped them, and how they then got signed to Boys
to Men's label Stone Creek, which then folded entirely. Aaron
(04:16):
and his brother Noel left the group after that, and
two new members joined. I've tracked one of them down
and I'm going to see if he'll speak to me
about the whole thing. I also have an email into
Sudden IMPACT's main songwriter, Todd White. No answer yet, but
while we wait, let's get into Peter Stewart. I loved
Dog's Eye View in the mid nineties when I was
(04:37):
feeling very alone and very confused, Having his voice in
my ears honestly kept me going. He was alone and
confused too, and if he had found his place in
the world.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
That meant I could too.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Peter had dreams of stardom, he had plans, he had persistence.
But I think what I really connected to about him,
what really inspired me, was his ambition.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
I'm in awe of people who just decid.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Guide what they want from life, no matter how unrealistic
or improbable, and don't let anything stop them from getting it.
I think it's why I'm attracted to the sudden Impact story. Honestly,
if I were those guys, I would have thrown in
the towel three names ago.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
They kept pushing, and I admire that. So did Peter.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Peter got into music with a head full esteem, but
it was what was on his head that might have
made the difference.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
This is where my entire life turns on Jewish hair.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Later in this episode you will learn how the sensible
Long Island buzz cut of Peter Stewart met the infamous
San Francisco hair extravaganza of Counting Crows Adam Duritz and
changed his life forever. But before that chance meeting with
a famous quoth, Peter was figuring himself out. He was
just out of Northwestern University, playing music, living in a
(05:49):
basement apartment in Chicago. That basement apartment, by the way,
with its high windows through which Peter had a view
of people's feet as they walked past, would eventually provide
the name he would go on to record under Dog's
Eye View, but at the time he had not yet
settled on a good name for the folky acoustic sound
he was developing.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
I think we were either called the gravity Beavers at
that point or Monster, both terrible names for what we
were doing. Monster is a bad name in that I
think people think you're going to show up and be heavy,
and then you show up with an acoustic guitar and
and you know, it's sort of you look even less cool.
(06:29):
But yeah, So I was playing in bands and doing
a lot of I don't know if you ever did this,
a lot of putting like a mix of I think
it was flour and water together and hanging posters on
light poles to you know, for your band, Like you know,
pre Internet, pre all that stuff. You'd literally go with
a bucket of this goop and hundreds of pieces of
(06:50):
paper and go around to all the light poles in
the neighborhoods in Chicago and put up these posters for
for your band, and in winter in.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Chic that's a really cold option. That's a really cold
thing to do.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
But you needed that kind of gumption if you were
going to make it in the early nineties, and as
we know from sudd An impact, if the right person
sees the right poster, this guy's the limit. After a
couple of years on his grind in Chicago, he determined
that he was ready for the big time. He packed
up and moved to New York with a pretty sweet
opportunity right off the bat.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
I'd been talking to this woman at a record company
called Imago for months and she was, you know, yeah,
come to New York.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
I'll get you a gig. Come to New York. I'll get
you a gig.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
And she kept saying, you know, every every Tuesday. I
think it, well, I don't know if it's Monday or Tuesday.
Every xt day of the week. There's this guy named
Jeff Buckley. He plays at this place called Shane. I'll
get you a gig. Play before him. You'll see, you know,
you'll play to tons of people. He's the thing in
New York right now, right, I've never heard Jeff Buckley
at this point. Great, so I literally moved to New
(07:52):
York and she gives me this gig at Shane, and
I am, this is it right?
Speaker 2 (07:58):
This is one of many? This is it? That we're
not it?
Speaker 3 (08:01):
But I get there and my first night there, I
go down to Shnee. This is my big gig and
it's literally Shane who ran Shane, and like someone making
coffee and a person because for the first week ever,
Jeff's run has ended. Jeff had finished, he'd finished a
big finale the week before. He's done with Shane, and
(08:23):
he's moved on to greener pastors and off to make Grace.
So my first big gig was literally like thud.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Kiss that is last Goodbye from the classic album Grace
that Jeff Buckley had just left Shane to make. And
that voice is why Jeff Buckley influenced a whole generation
of singer songwriters, including Peter Stewart. We'll come back to
(08:53):
Jeff Buckley a bit later in the show, but for now,
like me in New York in the mid nineties, Peter
is tempting to pay the bill. He's getting some stage
time where he can, and what happens next is a
real ride.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
A friend of mine called me and asked me to
open for a band, an Irish band called The Fat
Lady Sayings, And so I went down I can't even
remember where. It was, some tiny club and I went
down to open for them, and it was fine and
they were cool, but they were taking five to ten
(09:27):
minutes between every song to tune their guitars and like
get their shit together. And they were playing the next
night opening for of all people, Howard Jones at like
the Beacon or somewhere, and I was like, you guys
need some You need a roadie, You need someone to
hand you guitars and tune guitars. And they're like, oh,
that'd be great.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Can you do that?
Speaker 3 (09:49):
I was like, yeah, absolutely, So I went up and
did that for them, and at the end of that show,
they were like, look, we're going off on this two
month tour of the state. We could use a roadie.
You can open gigs for us if you do it.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
How about it? Yes? Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
The band and the sound guy and Peter tour the States.
Seven people, four of them chainsmokers, one van. The tour
is not boring.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
They were sleeping on people's floors in Boston. They were
sleeping on floors of some people who are running guns
for the IRA, so there was a lot of weaponry around.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Terrific.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
We came back to New York where they played Cafe
Wah as an Irish band opening for a funk band
on Funk Night, which was not great. The singer broke
his arm skiing in the middle of the tour, after
we'd had to send the road the sound guy home
because he had a mental break, full psychotic episode. Then
(10:52):
the singer broke his arm and I had to play
guitar for them.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
It was a very exciting tour, but through.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
All of it, Peter is listening to a cause that
of a record that hasn't been released yet.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
I had had an advanced copy of the first Counting
Crows record, August and Everything after someone a friend of
mine who worked at Gefen, had given me a cassette
and I was obsessed with it. I loved it, and
it was before it had come out. I was just
it killed me right. It was right in my vein
of what I like to do and I like to hear.
And so in the middle of this Fat Lady Singhs
(11:23):
tour they were playing. They were the second opening act
for Counting Crows at St. Andrew's Hall in Detroit, and
it was Counting Crow's first ever headlining gig outside of California.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Peter is a big Counting Crows fan at this point,
he's dying to share a bill with them, So, like
Todd and Allen of Sudden Impact, with a dream in
their hearts and a poster in their hands, he takes
a chance.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
I said, look, I know there are two other opening
acts I need to play on this gig. I love
this fucking band. Let me play on this gig. And
someone relented and said, you can play literally at seven
o'clock when the door's open, doors open, you play fifteen minutes.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
So great.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
I'm on the keg fifteen minutes of stage time at
seven pm, before anyone's even left their homes to come
to the venue, while the bartender is still cutting up limes.
But it's enough to give him a little swagger when
he has that important interaction that hinges on Jewish hair.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
So before the show, we're up in the dressing room.
Since just sort of one communal dressing room and Counting
Crows are not known at this point, there's been no
radio play, there's nothing. They're just building up and I
see Adam from across the room, and I walked up
to him and I said, hey, how are you doing.
(12:40):
I'm the opening act, right, which is way better than
saying like I'm a big fan. So I said, hey,
I'm the opening act.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
My name is Peter.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
He's like, oh, hey, great, great, nice to meet. I
was like, listen, I've always wanted dreadlocks. How long did
it take you to grow those? He was like about
like three hours.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Man. I was like, what do you mean.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
He's like, it's a weave, it's it's I was like,
all my life I could have had dreadlocks if I
just like spent money.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
Peter and Adam Durrettz get friendly. They exchanged phone numbers,
and because this is a time in history when you
would talk on the phone, they do.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
And a few weeks later they were coming to maybe
a month later, I'm not sure how long. They were
coming to New York to play a gig at Wetlands.
The night before they played Saturday Night Live, and somehow
I was you know, I was pushy and doing a
lot of finaggling. So I basically said, hey, I have
a band, can we open for you at Wetlands?
Speaker 2 (13:36):
It's like, you're sure open for us at Wetlands. That'd
be great. And I think what it may have even
been worse than that.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
I think there was someone opening for them, and then
they played, and then we closed for them at Wetlands, right,
so after everybody left, we started playing.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
But again it was one of those things like I
just want to be in the game.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
A few days later, Peter's phone rings, and again, because
this is a time when people talk on their phones,
Peter picks up.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Adam called me or his manager called someone did and said, look,
we had an opening act for two weeks. You know,
we're going off on the Northeast tour. We had an
opening act. He just dropped out. Can you do two
weeks of touring with us solo? It's like, yeah, yes,
I can't. Yeah, absolutely it can. So I was along
for this ride where count Crows were this cool band
(14:23):
and there I loved their record, and they're playing the Wetlands,
which was a little club, and we played and and
I was going to go off on tour with him
the next you know, the day after Saturday Night Live,
and they played Saturday Night Live and it just went.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
It just changed, right, It immediately. You know.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
I was on tour with them, and it went from
like playing the Wetlands to playing a bigger place to
the small place you're still booked in is packed and
everyone like, all of a sudden, you could feel this
thing rolling.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
It's very rare.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
That a band has like a meteoric rise like the
Crows had.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
And I rode that. I rode that whole thing. You know.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
It was like they're on the cover of Rolling Stone,
They're on cover of Spin, They're on you know, all
these things they're doing, like these TV shows, and I
got to be along.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
For all of it, right, and just like yeah, yeah,
And they're not just on the cover of Rolling Stone.
Adam Durretz is on the cover of Rolling Stone in
a Dog's Eye view T shirt.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
Yes, which again goes to how annoyingly uh in it?
Speaker 2 (15:26):
For myself I was.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
I mean, I was just constantly pushing, like which I
think you have to do to some degree. But it's
like I'm the guy going, oh, well, what you need
is for me to come on the road and roady
for you and open for you, right, and and Adam's
about to go do the you know, his first ever
like magazine cover shoot, and I'm like, so, so you're
gonna wear my shirt?
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Right?
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Can you please wear my shirt? Well?
Speaker 1 (15:49):
It worked, it did, but it's it's you know, okay, sure, yeah,
it's a little cringey in retrospect. But as we've learned
by now, even the least probable, even the wildest kind
of ambition, can pay off. Peter Stewart has found himself
in the right place at the right time, and that's
because he's made the decision to be everywhere. Roadying for
(16:11):
bands and playing for empty rooms brought him luck, but
it was luck that he manifested through bold action. And
this brings me back to an aspect of my own
personal story that still kind of scares me a little bit.
In nineteen ninety eight, I made the decision to show
up at fifteen fifteen Broadway to audition to be a
VJ on MTV. This is a decision that has fundamentally
(16:32):
changed the entire course of my life to the point
that I honestly don't know where or who I would
be if I hadn't gone. It gave me the life
I have now, and the thing that haunts me about it,
the thing that I think about at three am, when
I can't get back to sleep. Is how close I
came to not going. Here's the deal. The first day
of those auditions at MTV was the day after Easter.
(16:53):
I had spent Easter with my group of friends in
New York City, where we'd cooked bacon and eggs and
taken the Staten Island ferry back and forth because you
couldn't afford brunch in the circle line. I didn't tell
any of them what I was planning on doing. It
felt so foolish, like a thing a child would do.
I figured there would be a lot of big characters
showing up for this thing, so a guy like me,
kind of a low key everyman music nerd, would have
(17:15):
to be seen early before the casting people got tired
of faces and voices.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
So I set an alarm for four AM.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
And when that alarm clock screamed at me that morning,
those tall red digital letters spelling out four too, my
eyes burning and my body horizontal and cozy, I said.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
What am I doing? I'm twenty seven, I have a job.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
It's time for me to put aside childish things like
showing up and trying to be a VJ for a
network who's demographic I aged out of a month ago.
Who does this? How foolish? Go back to sleep and
then go to work like a man. I turned off
the alarm. I blinked a heavy, sleepy blink, and then
another longer one, a third blink, and I would have
(17:57):
gone back to sleep. My eyes would have just stayed
closed until it was time to go to my regular job,
and I would have gone about the business of a
regular day. I would have missed my chance. I don't
know what it is that got me out of bed.
I know I didn't want to get out of bed,
but I did, and I showered, and I put on
a black, tunicy kind of shirt that I guess I
thought was trendy, and I took a taxi to Times Square,
(18:19):
where I was one hundred and sixty eighth in line.
We got brought into the studio in groups of twelve,
and when my group was called in, I was at
audition Station seven, where the casting guy saw something in
me and sent me to another room where I talked
to more casting people for a half hour or so,
and then they told me they'd call by Tuesday at
midnight if I made the top ten. And they called
at eleven fifty seven pm on Tuesday, and I borrowed
(18:41):
a good going out shirt from one of my roommates,
and I showed up the next morning, and then I
made the top five and they gave me access to
the wardrobe room, where I got to wear some of
Matt Pinfield's bowling shirts for the rest of the process because.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
We were the same size.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
I got to practice Awards show podium banter on Live
TV with Pauli Shore.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
I think I made a biodome jo.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Kathy Griffin did a challenge where she was a different
kind of difficult interview for each of us. We had
to run across the street to the Virgin Megastore and
grab our three favorite albums and defend them.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Mine were the first Benfolds five record, day, Las Souls.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Three Feet High in Rising, and Tommy Keene's songs from
the film Perfect Now. It was obvious seeing Jesse Camp,
this tall, beautiful, eighteen year old weirdo, that he was
gonna win. He was a character, and that took the
pressure off of me. I relaxed, I enjoyed myself. I
bantered with Kurt Loder. I sasked him back when he
said he hated Paul McCartney in Wings? How can you
(19:35):
hate Paul McCartney in Wings? And the voters voted and
I lost, And I said, Dave, have your emotions about
this later. Now it's time to put a smile on
your face and go to the after party and start
trying to get in some other way. And I did,
and I pushed, and now I'm here. I wouldn't be here.
I wouldn't be doing this right now, being in this
room talking into this microphone if I had blinked that
(19:57):
third time.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
So I guess the moral here is say yes, get.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Up early for that stupid audition, Print up your poster,
even if there's nothing for that poster to promote. Ask
a famous friend to wear your T shirt, make a
T shirt, take a chance.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Success often really does.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Come down to being in the right place at the
right time, and there will never be a right time
for your right place to be bad. So Peter Stewart
and Dog's Eye View are on tour with Counting Crows,
(20:33):
the band that is becoming the biggest band in America,
and the buzz is growing for Dog's Eye View as well.
What were you hoping? Was it fame that excited you.
Was it connection with an audience that excited you? What
about your music, like, what was the impact you were
hoping to make.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
Well, it's complicated, right, and I've had a lot of
time to think about it, so I'm not sure. At
the time, it was a combination of a couple things, right,
So in it, in the roots of it, it started
with a combination of I was incredibly depressed, very lonely
teenage boy, right, and I picked up the guitar. And
(21:14):
the first thing that happened to me musically in a
lot of ways was you know, my dad had died
when I was really young. I had all this stuff
around it. I picked up a guitar and then someone
turned me on to Cat Stevens and the song Father
and Son, and it was the first time I ever
felt like heard and understood and and and music immediately
(21:35):
became this thing where I felt less alone in the world, right,
and I felt like I got.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
It and it moved me so deeply.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
So part of it was wanting to participate in that, right,
wanting to be moved by music, and wanting to move
people and wanting to you know, explore that. And part
of it was you know, sort of self therapy. Right,
write sad songs about sad things I'm feeling, and I
feel like less sad and if anyone, if it communicates
(22:04):
with anyone, great.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
That's mixed almost fifty to fifty with.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
Being around at the inception of MTV, right and and
I wish that this was less the case right for coolness.
But part of it was the Wanted Dead or Alive
music video by Bonchovi.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Right.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
I was, you know, sitting in my room. I'm you know,
I'm in high school or junior higher high school, and
there are all these shots of like, you know, like
guys getting into like limos and guys getting into planes
and guys getting girls, and you know, I've seen a
million faces and I've rocked them all. It's like, fuck yeah,
(22:49):
fuck yes, that's what I want.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Right.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
So, so it's this weird combination of those two things.
And on the darker side, which comes out, you know,
sort of proves itself later, you know. So much of
it was the chase, like I just want to get
a record out, I just want people to hear me.
I just want that thing. But there was some internal
(23:13):
thing where I thought that that would fix me. Right,
I thought that would make everything okay, And I really,
you know, I couldn't have articulated that to you at
that point, but there was this element of like, well,
surely Jon bon Jovi stepping onto that plane, you know,
or in his leather pants, or you know, seeing a
(23:35):
million faces and I rocked them all on that stage
has no problems, right, Totally, life is you know, heaven
opens up and you feel amazing all the time. So
so part of it was that, right, I really thought
that if I had a record out and or a
hit single, all problems solved, I would immediately become someone
(23:58):
who is comfortable in their own.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
Skin and happy dog's eye view gets to play in
bigger and bigger venues. Peter sees okay, maybe not a
million faces, but certainly into the thousands of faces, and
he rocks most of them softly. But most importantly, he's
selling his homemade cassettes at his merch table and people
are buying. He attracts the attention of Columbia Records, who
fly him to New York to meet the big wigs.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
I literally the next week went to Columbia Records, and
it was sort of like all the dreams.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
You would have of like, you know, Dylan or you
know whoever.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
I went into a conference room at Columbia Records with
Donnie Yner, the president of the Wibel and my manager
at the time, Marty Diamond, and this guy Mitchell Cohen,
and okay, play a few songs in the least acoustically
friendly environment you've ever been in. Right, it's a fucking
conference room that's deadened, and it's like you play guitar
(24:52):
and goes yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
And totally adiseptic and clean and floresca and just just nothing.
But you know, I remember playing the song.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
And just sort of like walking up a chair onto
the table and playing it above them, and I remember going, oh,
you know, I like this kid, I like this, And
you know, a.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Couple days later it was they're going to offer you
a deal.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
The band records the album Happy Nowhere, which contains the
single Everything Falls Apart and honestly about a half a
dozen more bangers. But for a long time, Happy Nowhere
sits on a shelf, waiting to be released and waiting
some more. As we know by now, that happens a lot.
Sometimes those albums never stop waiting. This feels like something
Pixar should explore, and then a very strange gig changes everything.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
The record was either going to come out in ninety
five or ninety six, right late late ninety five or
ninety six, and it was unclear what was going to happen,
and it wasn't necessarily you know, no one necessarily heard
a big hit on it, and it wasn't necessarily a
priority at Columbia. And I had a very weird gig
come up, which I got asked, and this is before
(26:02):
we were assigned, Yeah, I mean before we were the
records out.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
There's no way people really knew about.
Speaker 3 (26:07):
Us, right, So someone reached out to me and said
that Michael Eisner, the head of Disney at the time,
his son is graduating from college and really wants you
to play at his graduation. First of all, I know
that they wanted Soul Coughing to play, or they wanted
Cracker to play, or they wanted someone to play, and
their dads had gone down the list to who's an
(26:30):
artist who we can get to play? Right, There's no way.
First of all, we weren't like a party band, and
second of all, come on, it was a great foreshadowing
of my entire career in music because they picked us
up in New York City in a limo and took
us to a private plane and flew us up to
(26:51):
Cornell or wherever it was, and picked us up in
a bedley and took us to the gig.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
It's a dual graduation party, Michael eisen Son and the
son of Mickey Schuloff, who at the time was the
president of Sony, which owned Columbia Records. It is a
very weird and suddenly a very important gig.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
And then we set up and play and it's among
the worst gigs you can play.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
Right.
Speaker 3 (27:14):
It is both of those families in a restaurant, an
Italian restaurant, both of those extended families and grandparents and
uncles and aunts and some teenagers, you know, and the
kids graduating from college. And the first thing that happens
we step on stage and it's just fucking squealing feedback,
(27:35):
and you will just watch a bunch of old people eating,
just grimace. And then we play some folk songs for
these kids on their college graduation because their parents got
us there. And then the very drunk son of what
the eisnerer kid? Right, the very drunk kid. His dad
pulls me aside says, my kid wants to jam with
(27:57):
you guys, right, And I was like, we don't.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
I don't know. I'm not that kind of guy. I
don't have songs to jam on.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
I don't and we don't have another guitar, so it
wouldn't be appropriate, right, So I turned that down. And
then they asked us to play a second set, and
we do and some kids are like, you know, parents
were like, oh, dance, dance, and we're like, play the
most upbeat, sad folk song you can play.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Thanks probably to an open bar, the gig is a
success and Michael Eisner intervenes on Peter's behalf.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
And Michael Eisner goes, so, when is your record coming out?
And I said, you know, I don't know. It might
be it might be October, it might be next year.
We're not sure. And he goes, no, It's coming out
in October, Mickey October, and literally, like they get into
this weird power play about when Sony's gonna put out
the record, and the next day it got slated for October.
(28:51):
So this single came out in like November of ninety five,
and immediately, you know, immediately started getting traction and being
a being a thing.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
You know what happens next, The video gets added to
MTV's buzz bind, it gets played sixteen times a week,
and the thing that Peter thought would fix him doesn't.
That is very much in keeping with the character of
the lyrics, you know, which I think at the time
like listening to it. So if that if the album
(29:22):
came out in ninety five, I would have been twenty four,
and I was in New York and you know, sad
and lonely and self destructive and self hating and all
those things. So the record really spoke to me on
a deep level in a sense that made me feel like, oh,
I know this guy. I know this guy, and so
to hear you say that, it's like, yeah, I know
that guy would react that way.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
That record continued to grow and continued to be a
hit single, but there was a there was definitely you know.
Part of the reason I mentioned that the ascendancy of
the Crows, right and that thing, is that that just
never happened for us.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
Right, We by by by all.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
Accounts right as successful, like more successful than you could
really hope to be.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Right.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
You play a lot of shows, you get a record deal,
you have a hit single, like that's that's dreams, right.
Thirteen year old me is like yes, right, but there
was a weird thing when it didn't progress to the
next level, right, it didn't. You know, we went on
Letterman and the next day was a day and there
(30:32):
was this sort of slow realization that it was just
it had gone really well and gone up and was
blowing up and things are great and it's a hit
record and now go do another one.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
And how are like, are you psychologically do you have
the self knowledge to know that this is not this
is not feeding you the way that you were hoping
that it would.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
There was a lot of me trying to push it.
I'd done so much to push.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
It uphill, right of like let me be Erodi, let
me wear my shirt, let me do this. You know, push, push, push,
and at a certain point you can't individually push the
machinery anymore.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
Right, So it got to a.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
Point where you know, I would just I mean I
had to, you know, really make amends to my manager
years later because I realized, like I would just call
him twenty times a day and going have you done this?
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Have you done this? Have you done this have you
called this person?
Speaker 3 (31:31):
And so I spent a lot of time worrying about
trying to push it forward and zero time enjoying the
experience of it, the process of it. It didn't fix me,
so it had to get bigger to fix me. Like
I knew then, I knew that if the record sold
a million records or we had a second hit, then
(31:55):
you know, and I was playing bigger venues, then I
would feel better.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
This speaks to a thing I've been thinking about a
lot lately. Dreams are good for you. They can give
your life purpose, direction, discipline. But the essential problem with
dreams is that they don't make sense.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
When you set a big goal.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
You know, when there's like a dream you have for yourself,
you imagine it happening, but it is happening to some
future version of you who's like something has been fixed
in between the dreaming and the event, and ultimately, you know,
I've achieved a few of the goals that I hope
(32:32):
to achieve, and it's like that just happens to you.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
It just happens to the dumb version of you who
was there before.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
Yeah, it happens to the version of you that happened
yesterday and you don't feel any different.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Yeah, it's kind of incredible that Peter Stewart can write
those lyrics I got what I wanted and now my
life is just boring, and then be surprised when they
end up being exactly true to his life. Self knowledge
is a process. But Dog's Eye Views album Happy Nowhere
(33:07):
stalls after everything falls apart as it's run on the charts.
They don't even make a second video from that album,
but they do go back and record a second album, Daisy.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
So that record there.
Speaker 3 (33:17):
Was a combination of things, right, first thing was that
they weren't promoting it. Second, you know, it didn't have
an obvious hit on it. Third, the initial the launch
for that record was, you know, we were going to
go tour Southeast Asia and Australia and New Zealand with
Counting Crows, and like a week before, like that's the
(33:38):
week before the record comes out, and a week before
the tour, they were like, we're not going to do
the tour, and they just canceled the tour. So we
were scrambling. So it just things things weren't working and
and part of what was happening was also I was
I was a big periodic binge drinker the time, right,
(34:01):
So I wasn't you know, I wasn't drinking all the time,
but I definitely like the last show we did on
the Happy Nowhere tour, we literally had all flown home,
and then I landed in Seattle and someone someone caught
me up and said, there's a radio show in Saint
Louis tonight that everyone forgot about, so you need to
(34:22):
fly back to Saint Louis and play. I think it
was Mississippi Knights was the name of the club.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
Right, and play.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
And so we flew back and playing some radio station
show for some radio station that wasn't playing us anymore.
And it was the first time, one of the only times,
but I got completely blackout drunk on stage. I was
so pissed off to be there and so done with it.
And I found out the next day that we that
(34:52):
we did a three song encore that I had no
memory of. I'd been on stage playing in a blackout.
It's a little scary, but it's also a little rock
and roll until it isn't. We played the DC Chili Cookoff,
which is yet another you know gig that sounds as
bad as it is played at noon on a hot
stage in DC. I was wearing Vinyl motorcycle pants perfect
(35:15):
and it was I was. I drank a bunch of
tequila before noon, and during our last song, I jumped
off an amp and landed, you know, like that classic
Eddie Vedder thing, Like I grabbed the top of the stage,
but I'm not strong enough to hang on and i
can't lift myself up, so I'm literally just hanging there
(35:37):
and slowly slipping off as I then fall to the
stage and just crumple.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Like that big Eddie Vetter stage move. The second album,
Daisy does not quite land. Columbia Records drops him. Peter's
on his own again.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
Matchbox twenty would take me out on a tour, playing
second stages on their arena tour, like on their Amphitheater, right,
So I would drive the eight hour Hump alone in
a rental car and then play it two in the
afternoon on the second stage and then watch my friends play,
you know, the lights would go down and people and
I watched them play and I'd think, I'm not this
(36:16):
is not working, man. I'm not growing. I'm not like,
I'm not developing as a human. I'm seeing the same
places over and over.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
I was drinking more because I was miserable.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Peter gets sober and he likes it. He begins to
get work as a sober companion for actors who were
trying not to relapse on set. He gets to travel
the world, and his cover story is that he's the
actor's assistant.
Speaker 3 (36:39):
I'm the assistant who in the person says, hey, get
me a cup of coffee.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
I go.
Speaker 3 (36:43):
You can get your cup of coffee, get your own coffee.
So when a director turned to me one day, he
was like, you're the worst assistant I've ever seen.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
Something else is going on here.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
In the meantime, Peter has recorded an album under his
own name, and the independent label he signed to wants
him to go off on tour the way that he
had been driving himself from town to town. But he's
over that by now, so that album kind of fizzles.
And it's a shame that Peter stewart solo album, Propeller
is really good. It's on streaming services.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
Go listen. He'll get two millions of a penny.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
And the final indignity of my interface with the music
business was literally so I was I had a publishing
deal at the time, and the publishing deal owed me
some money, and I didn't have a lot of money left.
And the label had said, hey, you know what, We're
going to put the record out, but we're just going
(37:36):
to put it out digitally on our digital store. And
I said, and I talked to the publishing company and
they said, your contract stipulates that there has to be
one physical record in one physical store or we.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
Don't pay you.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
So I had to get the record company to print
a box of CDs and go put one at Amiba
Records so that it was in a store that I
could get paid. And I know they printed, you know,
maybe I don't know, a couple hundred CDs and I
have most.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
Of them in my garage.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
But it was just so like on the way out
the door, it was like, here's the thing you gotta do.
You gotta beg for them to print a CD so
you can get paid.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
What had begun with high hopes and ambition ended with
an errand and that was that for music as a profession.
Peter went to graduate school to get his masters in
clinical psychology. He worked in in patient substance abuse treatment
for a few years and now he's in private practice
as a therapist in Austin, Texas.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
Does that fill you in the way that you were
hoping music? Would? You know? Yes? But other things do too.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
Right, if I was looking just to this job for fulfillment,
it wouldn't be enough, you know. And similarly, you know,
if I could go way back and have a life
with other things in it when I was making music,
maybe I would have been more fulfilled by music, right,
But because all chips were in on how my record
was doing on any given day, there was no fulfillment.
(39:09):
And and now I mean I really not to be
too cheesy about it, but being sober and really working
on the underlying issues as a man right as a
human being, and trying to figure out like trying realizing
that there's no number of times that can play the
song that's going to satisfy me. There's no there's nothing
(39:30):
that's going to fill this void. I have to find
contentment in other places. And so to me, doing all
of that work and doing the work to find to
be comfortable in my own skin and have contentment has
allowed me to have a family, allowed me to have
a relationship, and allowed me to have a job that
I really love doing most of the time. But when
(39:53):
I don't love doing it, I have other things that
fill me up, whether it's running or my family.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
Or other things.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
As with a lot of people who decide to get sober,
Peter's decision was motivated by a moment of clarity. And honestly,
Peter's moment of clarity it's pretty fucking glamorous.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
You didn't ask this, but I'll answer it just for fun.
I had a moment like part of my you know,
moment of clarity, as it were, of deciding to get sober,
thinking I might need to get sober. I was in
Las Vegas for a wedding. My girlfriend at the time
had just dumped me, and I was in Las Vegas
(40:31):
on a boat on Lake Mead or whatever it's called
lake whatever, the fake lake is out there sitting on
the roof of the boat, tripping on ecstasy, and I
had this, you know, I was on ecstasy sitting in
the boat.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
I felt amazing.
Speaker 3 (40:48):
Everything was great, and my friend, who had a bunch
of drugs with him, was swimming from the one boat
to the other boat, and I knew he was bringing
more drugs. And as I was to come down from
the ecstasy. I started thinking, you know what, there's not
enough ecstasy in the world to keep me feeling the
way I'm feeling. And there's not enough there aren't enough
(41:11):
women in the world or relationships in the world to
keep me happy, and there's not enough money in the world.
I have to fundamentally change everything and not be looking
for something else to make me happy. And then and
then I had this debate with myself where I said,
what if and this is my big fear, Right, what
(41:32):
if I get happy and I no longer have many
songs to write? Right?
Speaker 2 (41:38):
What happens? Then?
Speaker 3 (41:39):
Am I willing to make that deal? And I didn't
know that was going to happen. But if i'm what if?
I what if it happens? Am I willing to make
that deal? And I just had it.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
I was right. I was like, you know what, fuck it?
Speaker 3 (41:51):
If it's that, if I have to be If contentment
and happiness means I never write another song, I'll take
it because I can't.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
I'm so fucking miserable that I can't do that.
Speaker 3 (42:03):
And as it turned out, I feel like I wrote
my best songs after I got sober. But in a way,
later as as I've eased out of it. You know,
I've written probably three songs in the last fifteen years
because I don't have There's just nothing I want to
I'm not in that pain, I'm not.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
In that turmoil.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
The day after I spoke with Peter, he emailed me,
and I'm just going to read his email out loud.
I woke up with a memory of something that I
wished i'd said on the podcast. Don't know if you
can add more later. Basic gist was this realization I had.
And let's say two thousand and seven or so, I
was doing a sober companion gig in Australia and I
was running on a hotel treadmill, looking at the Sydney
(42:44):
Harbor and thinking about my music career. I must have
been listening to music, and suddenly I had the thought
that at any point in the early to mid nineties
I would have gladly traded my career and life for
the critical acclaim and songwriting talent of Elliott Smith or
the voice, critical ACA and success of Jeff Buckley. Yet
here I was running with a beautiful view of Sydney
(43:05):
and they were both dead.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
It's funny to think about.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
What we're sure we want at the time and how
lucky we turn out to be not to get it.
So I have some leads on the guys from Sudden Impact.
Aside from Dave Smith, I have an interview request out
to Michael Bivens. I am inching closer to finding out
what happened to those guys. But as that story comes together,
the other bigger mystery still eludes me. Why does this
(43:30):
story have meaning for me? Why can't I stop thinking
about it? As I often do when I'm in need
of guidance. I call my friend Scott Gimpo and we
talk about pop music.
Speaker 4 (43:39):
We grew up with records that stayed on the charts years,
but I mean like kids that went once yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
And now is it a volume game?
Speaker 4 (43:53):
Is it just there's so much stuff? It is?
Speaker 1 (43:56):
It's that there's so much stuff. And then it's also
you buy something or no, actually you don't anymore?
Speaker 2 (44:04):
If you stream.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
Something, yeah, like it was, you know, you saved up
a little bit of money and you bought the cassette
or the CD, and then it was there to remind
you that you had it, and you could listen to
it right and play it in your car, and then
that reminds your friend, Oh I got to pick I
gotta get that too, And then that lasts like so now,
even records that I that I stream when they come
(44:25):
out and love the next day, I've completely forgotten and
there's nothing to remind me.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
It's just stuff to keep me swimming forward. A simple
prop to occupy your time, simple to occupy my time.
Speaker 1 (44:41):
You know, we've we've talked about sudden Impact for eighteen
years now, right, and that's the thing that didn't happen,
that stayed in our minds well.
Speaker 5 (44:53):
But there was enough of a repeater that of Motown,
Philly that initially it was like what was that at
the end, Like oh, wait, that thing's coming up at
the end, to like oh I can't wait for that
thing to come out of the end. Yeah, the repetition
of the video engaged your imagination, and I think that
(45:14):
seared it into our brain forever.
Speaker 4 (45:16):
And then in addition to that, it never being fulfilled.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
Yeah, the mystery of it never been satisfied.
Speaker 4 (45:24):
I don't have a good memory, but I know I'll
remember that moment the rest of my life from that video,
and I will never not take a moment to think
about it. Even if you get closure, whatever the ending is,
we know that that record didn't come out. It didn't
there was no music video to follow that up, there
was no additional move to the point point ended it.
(45:49):
And thus it's just a prime example of ambition and potential.
And I don't think it has a negative valance on it.
I don't look upon its unfulfilled potential or anything like that.
I just hold it up. I mean, it is amazing,
but I hold it up as an example of audacious
(46:11):
creative ambition that I want to aspire to.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
There, Scott has said a word that really resonates with me,
a word that gets right to the point of what
I'm trying to say here.
Speaker 4 (46:22):
That word just keeps on coming to mind. Audacious. Wouldn't
want to be audacious like that?
Speaker 2 (46:27):
This is my moment of clarity. Audacity.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
That is what this show is about, people taking bold
action and seeing their lives change because of it. If
VT Nicole Brown showed up at a hotel lobby in
the middle of the night and sang in her idol's face,
so did Hayden. Todd and Allen ran up on a
celebrity and asked him to sign a poster for a
group that barely existed.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
Aaron Kane hit on someone's girlfriend.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
Audacity is what connects all of the people I have
spoken to so far. Karen Kilgareth got up on stage
to do something that scared her to death. Peter Stewart
struck up a conversation about here Damien Fahe spent two
hundred dollars its structure. It's why I connect to the
story of Sudden Impact. The things in my life that
I'm proudest of my book Esquire getting up at four
(47:12):
am to do something embarrassing that bought me a new life,
those are audacious. The things I'm ashamed of, flunking out
of college because I was in a gay shame spiral
are failures of audacity. And if I'm sometimes restless at
this time in my life, if I sometimes find myself aimless,
it's because I've forgotten my audacity, because we've talked about
them so much in this episode.
Speaker 2 (47:33):
Let's put it in Counting Crowe's terms. Listen to this yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
Yeah, That yeah is from the very end of rain King.
From Counting Crowe's debut album August and everything after that
is the yeah of enthusiasm. Of confidence, of optimism. That
is Adam Durrett saying I'm gonna be famous and I
cannot wait.
Speaker 2 (47:56):
That yeah is all of our best selves.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
But too often we get weighed down by self doubt,
by insecurity, by fear or vanity or shame, and we
end up like this, yeah, Yeah, that is the yeah
that ends counting crows a long December just three years later.
All of life can be summed up by those two yeahs.
(48:20):
It's easy to be a long December at this time
in history, but the world needs you at a rain King.
Rain King is the one who gets out of bed
when he wants to sleep, the one who goes out
on a cold Chicago day to paced up flyers for
his show, the one that goes clear across the country
with a poster and a demo.
Speaker 2 (48:37):
Be rain King, Friends, I am getting the life lesson I.
Speaker 1 (48:41):
Didn't even know I needed, and I'm getting it from
Adam Duritz and Sudden Impact. Next time, I'm going to
talk to a guy who joined Sudden Impact in their
final form, the one that actually finally released music. And
because I am going rain King from here on out,
I'm going to track down one of the most famous
faces in music via history, A guy who inspired a
(49:02):
million swoons, and I know that because about four hundred
thousand of them came from me.
Speaker 2 (49:08):
Baby, Baby, you do not want to miss the next.
Speaker 1 (49:10):
Episode of Waiting for Impact, a Dave Holmes passion project.
This has been an exactly Right production written by me
Dave Holmes, produced by Hannah Kyle Crichton, recorded, mixed and
sound designed by Andrew Epen. Additional engineering and assembly by
(49:34):
Analise Nelson. Music by Ben Wise, artwork by Garrett Ross.
Executive produced by Karen Kilgareff, Georgia hard Stark and Danielle Kramer.
Follow the show on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter at exactly
right and follow me at Dave Holmes. For more information,
go to Exactlyrightmedia dot com. Binge The show ad free
(49:58):
on Stitcher Premium for a free month. Head to Stitcher
Premium dot com slash impact and enter promo code Impact
when you select a monthly plan, listen, subscribe and leave
us a review on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you
get your podcasts
Host
Dave Holmes
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