Robert Margouleff and Mark Mothersbaugh

Robert Margouleff is one of the most quietly consequential figures in modern music — a sonic architect who helped build some of the most innovative and enduring sounds of the last half century. Together with his partner Malcolm Cecil, Robert created TONTO, the world's largest analog synthesizer, and used it to co-produce a string of era-defining Stevie Wonder classics including Music Of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, and Fulfillingness' First Finale. He went on to work with Jeff Beck, The Isley Brothers, and a scrappy art-punk band from Akron, Ohio called DEVO — helping shape their early sound into something that felt like it arrived from another dimension entirely.

You might remember Robert from his Broken Record interview a few years back. Now he's releasing an audiobook, Shaping Sounds: Stevie Wonder, DEVO, the Synth Revolution and My Life Behind the Music. It's a memoir about creativity, collaboration, and artistic courage, told by someone who was in the room when the future was being invented.

On today's episode Justin Richmond sits down with Robert and Mark Mothersbaugh, the frontman of DEVO, composer, visual artist, and one of the most original creative minds of his generation. They recall working together to make DEVO's Freedom of Choice, and the glory days of recording at the Record Plant studios in Los Angeles in the '80s.

You can hear a playlist of some of our favorite songs from Robert Margouleff and Mark Mothersbaugh HERE.

You can use the code SOUNDS25 at pushkin.fm/shapingsounds to save 25% on the audiobook.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Robert Marglev is one of the most quietly consequential
figures in modern music, a sonic architect who helped build
some of the most innovative and enduring sounds of the
last half century. Together with his partner Malcolm Cecil, Robert
created Tanto, the world's largest analog synthesizer, and used it

(00:36):
to co produce a string of air defining Stevie Wonder classics,
including Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, and Fulfilling
This his first finale. He went on to work with
Jeff Beck the Isisley Brothers in a scrappy art punk
band from Akron, Ohio called Devo, helping shape the early
sound and is something that felt like it arrived from
another dimension entirely. You might remember Robert from his Broken

(00:58):
Record and Review a few years back. Now he's releasing
an audio book called Shaping Sounds Stevie Wonder, Divo the
Synth Revolution in My Life Behind the Music. It's a
memoir about creativity, collaboration, an artistic courage, told by someone
who was in the room. On today's episode, I sit
down with Margolev and Mark Mother's ba, the frontman of
Devo composer, visual artist and one of the most original

(01:20):
creative minds of his generation. They recall working together to
make Devot's Freedom of Choice in the glory days of
recording at the record plant in Los Angeles in the eighties.
You can use the code sounds twenty five at pushing
DOFM slash shaping sounds to save twenty five percent on
the audiobook. This is broken record, real musicians, real conversations.

(01:47):
Here's my conversation with Robert Margolev and Mark Mother's ba.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
We were one step ahead of the digital sampling where
you could like do something like that and then have
it on a key and play it later. So that
came a few years later.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
So you guys actually had to crack a Yeah, we
had a track the whip.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
We had to take turns whipping each other. It was awful.
You know.

Speaker 3 (02:08):
The thing is said, really are worthwhile stick out and
when you think about freedom of choice in general, that
record really has lasted.

Speaker 1 (02:16):
This is Mark Studio. We're in Mark Mothersbaugh Studio and
you guys obviously have a history which we're here to
talk about.

Speaker 3 (02:22):
We have a very long history.

Speaker 1 (02:24):
But I didn't know you had a history with this
building that oh yes, Mark works out.

Speaker 3 (02:28):
It, although I've never actually recorded in this building except
with Tonto. Tonto used to live exactly where Mark is
sitting right now. The instrument was here for about two
or three years. We didn't get a lot done, but
we cameven fiddled around with it more than actually got
serious with it here. But I was off on other

(02:51):
adventures at that time, and I don't know, Malcolm and
I never really sort of put our minds to it
as much as we should have and could have. It
was a remarkable opportunity that I think, I sort of
think we missed out on. That we could have done
more here than he did. But I was off making records.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
Yeah, we were off doing things. Yeah I was. I
had found out about film and TV scoring and that
became my love and so I was deep in that.
But it was but Tonto brought a really great energy
because also at that time I had the building was
fairly new, so like a lot of stuff, like these

(03:33):
racks of tapes, they weren't in this room back then.
Sokna was kind of had the whole room all to itself,
and it was It was pretty amazing because a lot
of people came over and saw Tano and they were
just like knocked over just to even see it. It
was such an amazing piece of art, and and it

(04:00):
had great energy. It was it was kind of like,
you know, Bob. That was probably Bob when his mind
was working. The fact. I don't know if that's true
or not, but you were definitely busy in that time
period to have created that.

Speaker 3 (04:12):
Uh, that instrument I think was around Stevie time too.
So our work together we really well, we did. We
did a freedom of choice before that time, way before that,
before before the synthesogy, before y.

Speaker 2 (04:27):
Yeah, before yeah Tanto was here.

Speaker 3 (04:29):
Yeah, boy, that was something else. I love making that record.
Oh yeah, I have a lot of really good memories
about it.

Speaker 2 (04:36):
Yeah. That's probably, in a lot of ways, probably the
best Divo record. Uh and definitely sonically it was. Uh,
Divo learned a lot from you.

Speaker 3 (04:48):
You know.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
We when we started off, we just had like a
little tax four track and and I was like recording, Okay,
I'll put all the drums on one track based on
one guitar. One. Then I got to mix it all
down and then add a vocal and a solo and
that and that that would like limit esthetically what you
could do back in those days. So so we were

(05:11):
used to that world. And then I mean, there's there's
a lot of good things. We worked with Brian Eno
and Bowie on our first one, but Ino was new
to producing and he he in retrospect said, yeah, you know,
there's I wish I would have known more about how
to produce a band, you know, when he worked with us.
And then the next one was Ken Scott, and he

(05:33):
kind of took our songs apart in a way, in
a in an unfortunate way because because they were written
to be played live, we wrote them while we were
playing in clubs, and then he had us all play
one at a time to a click and that it
just didn't destroy the record.

Speaker 1 (05:52):
Yeah, which is interesting because I mean he got his
start with like those early Beatles records, right, and so
you would you would think his his inclination would be
to do something live, you know, in the studio.

Speaker 2 (06:04):
Yeah, you know, maybe he regretted it afterwards. I don't know.
We never talked again after that, but uh, you know,
it was like Bob came along and he brought so
much to what we were doing, and he had the
right kind of We had the right kind of chemistry.
Bob was a producer who had been you know, not

(06:24):
only very successful, but he was always an artist and
always you know, a technician, and he was the kind
of guy that it was like magical to work with
in a way because he had a great person you know,
he could work with people. He was empathetic in a
way that was really helpful for us because we were
like paranoid and negative or were.

Speaker 3 (06:48):
Come off You'd come off of two albums that really
should have been a lot better and to you artistically, yeah,
and you knew it, Yeah, and I knew it. My
secret was to let you be yourselves and to put
you at a place. And I'm looking back, I'm doing
some research on perceptive listens now, and I found out

(07:11):
that by bringing what I was doing naturally, not only
with Mark but with Stevie and most of my artists
was to bring them into the control room. And the
control room was like a musical instrument that you would habit,
and by bringing them into the control room, we didn't
have to deal with headphones. With the exception of Alan Myers,

(07:31):
the drummer, but he had enough leakage out around his
headphones so that he could hear his drums in space
as well as what was going on in his head.
The entire band was in the control room, and by
listening without headphones, they weren't isolated. I headphones tend to
isolate people one from the other and separate you from

(07:54):
the reality. When we brought the band into Howard Siegel
and I brought the band into the control room and
ditched the headphones. It's one of the main reasons that
they were really able to play together.

Speaker 2 (08:07):
I'd say that's true.

Speaker 1 (08:08):
Yeah, And I know from speaking to you on the
show previously, you were thinking of freedom of choice. Freedom
of Choice as DeVos Funk album.

Speaker 2 (08:18):
Well, that that was our concept when we went into it.
I mean, you know, you have to understand we were
pretty far out there if you look at the way
we dressed, in the way the kind of songs we
were writing, and we were a conceptual band. You know,
we were about ideas first. And you know, we weren't
writing like about sex and drugs and rock and roll
so much. You know, it wasn't we didn't have any

(08:40):
lyrics at where I'm snorting whiskey and drinking cocaine think
I'm going to go insane, and you know, it's like
we were kind of anti all that. I don't know,
it just Bob sunk up with with that really well.
But we were, yeah, we were thinking, how can we
make our stuff sound more funky? And we were you know,

(09:01):
like looking around at who did what and where things
came from. And when we found out about Bob and
saw well he'd worked with Stevie, which was like, couldn't
be any better than that, But he was also this
genius who created this this instrument that was one of
a kind and had an imprint on pop music at

(09:24):
the time. You know, it influenced people even more than
it actually got to be on the records. It's everybody
knew about it and everybody and you saw the picture
of it. It was like an incredible piece of sculpture.
You know. We sought him out and he was interested,
lucky for us.

Speaker 1 (09:43):
The dichotomy of that, even still in hindsight all these
years later, still fascinating to me that you have a
machine as seemingly, at least to me, experimental as Tonto
and avant garde as Tonto, and an artist as pop
as Stevie. You know, or as you know, coming from Motown,

(10:04):
which is very slick and polished. I mean, I love
all the Motown stuff, but there's definitely many years there
was a singular Motown sound, you know. Barry Gordy did
refer to it as a factory, you know, and so
a formula It was formulaic, but not in a very
cool way. But then for Stevie to come out of
that and then to get paired with this sort of

(10:25):
avant guard machine that you created, you and Malcolm Cecil,
is its fascinating still.

Speaker 3 (10:32):
You know. I never I never thought it would end.
We were really in its own space, that's for sure.
In working with Mark, I really did want to pay
attention to the R and B bottom end, which is
I paid strict attention to that in that recording that
we did. Freedom of choice to us to pay strict

(10:52):
attention to the bottom end of the record. Being able
to work in the control room inside and habit the
musical instrument itself, because a lot of the sounds we
made weren't sounds until they fell out of the loud
speaker one way or another. That the control room itself
we were in howbiting a musical instrument and I viewed

(11:13):
it like that. But the other thing that was really
important to me, where I've really had my success in
music was because of the political overtones that Diva was
writing about was something that I really got. I mean,
I was ahead of the curve nineteen fifty eight. You know,
I remember Medgar Evers, I remember Martin Luther King, I

(11:35):
remember John Lewis, I remember the Norman Pettis Bridge. I
remember little black girls being escorted to school by white
marshalls with guns. So when I came out of high school,
I was already the school I went to was really
sort of based around the awareness of civil rights. So
the things that really attracted me at music were things

(11:59):
that had something to do with civil rights and with
the productive, with the sociological effects of civilization on itself,
how it ways our civilization is eating itself. We're consuming
our own our own rubbish in some way right now.
But what attracted me to the to Devo also was

(12:23):
the content of the lyrics it had. Like Stevie, we
were doing things like Living for the City and He's
Mister Noodle, which was about Richard Nixon. For example, Mark
and Jerry were writing music about the human condition and
the prediction of the future, and right now here we
are in twenty twenty six, and what we were singing

(12:47):
about the boys were doing in the studio in nineteen
eighty three or four, whatever it was, they nailed it
right on the right, on the head of the thing.
I mean there was it was predictive. And we see
it today that the predictions, the Devotian predictions are coming true.

(13:07):
How do we how do we stop it? How do
we change the world again? Can we change it through music?

Speaker 2 (13:13):
I wonder, you know what, when I was twenty nineteen seventy,
I remember thinking, Ah, I wish I was born in
the nineteen twentiest, you know, I wish I could have
been in Europe during that incredible period of art where
they were Bajas and Surrealism and Dadaism and Futurism and

(13:36):
all those art movements were happening. I said, I wish
I would have been around for that. I missed out
on that. But that was a really dark period that
was between World War One and World War two, and
fascism was on the rise. And I feel like when
DeVos started in the seventies, it was kind of like
it had come back again, and it created things like

(13:59):
punk and new wave and electronica music and a lot
of things. It inspired artists, just like fascism inspired artists
in the twenties thirties. I think what happened in the
seventies was because Jerry and I were at a school
where we were protesting the war in Vietnam and they

(14:21):
just said, okay, just shoot them, and they shot like
thirty some kids and killed four of them. And they
did that at other places around the country and it
shut everybody down. It's like after that, music turned into
like this like corporate white rock, where it was like
it was basically, I'm white, I'm a misogynist, I'm proud

(14:43):
of it, I'm a conspicuous consumer, you know. And that
was like the politics of music that or it was disco,
which was like had beautiful sounds, but like the lyrics
were all stupid. And Jerry used to go, oh, it's
like a woman with no brain is how we felt
about disco because it didn't have a political message to it.

(15:04):
It was like everything was during the period that punk
and new way was starting. It was like that and
I don't know, I'm an old guy now, so so
like I've been around to see it.

Speaker 3 (15:14):
Notice that.

Speaker 2 (15:15):
Yeah, so it's been so it's like, well, then keep
your prescription that whatever you're wearing just yet. But but
you know, I feel like it's on another It's like
I used to just we used to just talk about
de evolution and things going down. But the reality is is,
I think de evolution and evolution both exist and they're
in constant crisis with each other and conflict. And I

(15:39):
think this time period is going to expec going to
create young artists that are that are going to take
take things from what's going on right now in the world.
They're going to be inspired by that, and they're going
to take the new technology. You know, it's like everybody's
oh Ai AI's evil, but it's also like technology was

(16:00):
back in the seventies. It was like you could use
it for good or bad. And I think what's going
to happen is I think technology and what's happening now
in the world is going to inspire young artists to
do artwork that you and I are going to go, dang,
why didn't I think of that? That's amazing. We're going
to hear stuff from kids. I think it now is

(16:20):
like a really amazing time to be a young artist.

Speaker 3 (16:24):
Yeah, I think, you know, just talking quickly about AI,
you know the WGA for example, the writer's skills that
God forbid you should have at AAI and your dialogue
and your script and you're writing your manuscript, and there's
a tremendous amount of fear of people sticking their heads
in the sand and trying to deny its existence. We

(16:48):
have to really understand that AI is here, it's not
going away, and if we're going to use it creatively,
that's a good thing. But we have to learn how
to use it and understand it. You know, a lot
of stuff. What I'm hearing now musically is like AI
slop is what I call it.

Speaker 1 (17:07):
Even if it's not.

Speaker 3 (17:11):
It's mindless.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
But yeah, but there are people who are.

Speaker 3 (17:15):
Using it creatively in ways that it would not have
even dawned on me. And I celebrate that. I I
think that that's a good thing. I think we got
to take our head out of the sand, understand that
it's here. I mean, AI does good things in medicine.
AI does good things in research. It helps me write
when I'm doing research and I need to know something,

(17:38):
I have a I have my copilot there. It gives
gives me information, it educates me. But I think we're
also you know, the problem with AI and music is,
you know somebody who wrote one song a month maybe
or one song every six weeks and sweat it over
the lyrics and really, you know, did something that was

(18:01):
heartfelt and poetic. That same guy sitting in his kitchen
table at the laptop with the headphones on and writing
five hundred songs in a month and then putting him
up online and then you know, polluting the atmosphere with
what I call AI slop, you know, and there's tons
of it. How do you sort the good, the wheat

(18:22):
from the chaff after all of that. The other problem
is that it totally lacks roboto and feel. I mean,
when you think about it, If you think about it,
a great conductor coming out on the stage and a
guy comes out dressed like a penguin with a stick
and starts waving it around, and suddenly an entire orchestra
is performing as one instrument. He's deciding where the music

(18:44):
speeds up, where the music slows down, which is called roboto,
or where it gets louder and where it gets softer.
And you begin to realize that that whole orchestra's focused
on the end of the stick that he's waving around,
and that his whole emotion is being transmitted to the orchestra,
and they're playing with tremendous empathy. And that's what we

(19:07):
connect with. Whether it's that or it's Taylor Swift in
front of a huge audience or a devo in front
of two thousand or five thousand people, it's that exchange.
It's that vibe that we need to have. That is
the current of sound that we inhabit. I think that
that really what's going circling way back. But I think that,

(19:28):
in a way, was what really made that record successful
was the effect that was played as one instrument. It
was five people playing together as one instrument, everyone playing
their place on the keyboard, so to speak.

Speaker 2 (19:42):
You know, Bob, I totally agree with you, especially about
the orchestra, because I score movies and I score a
lot of animation, and animation no matter how great it looks,
it's like if they show a picture of a field,
there's millions of things happening out in that field, like

(20:03):
little insects you can't see, but you and the wind
blowing and leaves growing. If I just write, you know,
when I write the music, and it's just on my
sense and using my libraries of like orchestral sounds, and
it's a real orchestra going rare. If you hear the
same chord over and over again, everybody, even people that aren't,
you know, very sophisticated musically, they all can say, oh, yeah,

(20:26):
that's that's electronics. That's that's not real people. Whereas when
people come into a room, like whether I'm at Abbey
Road or if I'm in Sony Studios or Fox or wherever,
these people are coming off the streets and if it
was raining outside, they're taking off raincoats and setting them
beside them, and they're setting down their newspapers and their bags,

(20:48):
and they play and it's like you never know exactly
what it's going to sound like, because they've all got
blood going through their veins, they're breathing, they're they're either
bowing up or down, or they're blowing at different rates
and things, so it's never the exact same and it's different,
and it makes the anime looks so much better now

(21:11):
to me. That's why I don't worry about AI because
I remember when technology invented electronic drums and synth sounds,
and we loved all that stuff. But there were people
that were going to the mall and they would buy
a portable home Morgan, and they'd hit a button and
we'd go boom di de boom di di boom, and
they'd be go, oh, look, and then they'd hit a

(21:32):
baseline a boom boom, boom boom, and then they'd play
something over top of it, and they go, look at this,
I just made up a song, you know, And then
they go, let's make another one up tomorrow, you know.
And so I feel like you and I already went
through that, and we saw that, and we were taking
that same equipment and we were looking for artistic ways

(21:53):
to use it.

Speaker 3 (21:54):
I wonder what hop music is going to sound like
in twenty years. I mean, we're as far away from
Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman as you can get. Okay,
Somehow music has evolved over the fifty sixty seventy years
since Glen Miller, you know, Tommy Dorsey or Bing Crosby.

Speaker 1 (22:16):
I think even you know, you think, you know, go
back to It's like Louis Armstrong's Hot fives and seven.
You think about what just happened, that could.

Speaker 3 (22:24):
Think, Yeah, the interesting thing that happened though, it's the
microphone changed everything. When Bing Crosby could walk out on
the stage at Radio City Music Hall with a twenty
five piece dance band orchestra of the big horn section
and everything else, and they would record it and Bing
could get to the mic like this and he would

(22:45):
sing ba ba boo, ba ba boo like that, and
suddenly that was as loud as the entire orchestra because
we rearranged the reality right.

Speaker 1 (22:55):
You didn't have to, and we've been and we've been
re arranging.

Speaker 3 (22:58):
That reality ever since, you know. Uh, But that one microphone.
That's why the girls were all like going crazy for Bing,
because suddenly Bing was sitting right next to you and
you could hear his breath and his teeth and his
all of that stuff. You could. Suddenly it was like
an emotional connection, and that whole orchestra blowing their brains

(23:21):
out in the background was big, was louder than they were.
And suddenly we discovered the ability to rearrange reality with
a microphone in recording, and what we were doing in
the studio. By the time we got to DEVO was
we were rearranging reality and making sounds that never even
ever existed in the real world at all. And to

(23:44):
get Mike to get Mark on the microphone this close,
you know, whip it good to make that as loud
as the whole orchestra, the whole band that was us
rearranging reality.

Speaker 1 (23:55):
DEVO has a very you guys have a DEVO has
a very unique philosophy in terms of I think your
view view of the human condition and the way you
guys presented things, And Robert, I think you also have
a I'm curious, would you guys consider yourselves technologists or

(24:15):
humanists or a blend of book because in one way,
you guys are you both took advantage of technology in
very unique ways and in very forward thinking ways. But
in other ways, I think of both you also as
being deeply concerned about the human condition and experiment.

Speaker 3 (24:31):
I think it's about two things. It's about humanity and empathy.
It's about the ability to connect your feelings with something
poetic that means something to people around you that you
could change the course of their lives by virtue of
your message. And I think that is about empathy and

(24:51):
it's about the human condition, and I think that's what
poetry and art is about, really.

Speaker 1 (24:57):
And taking the advantage of technology in pursuit of that
is Yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:01):
Well, technology to us is a musical instrument. It's no
different than any other musical instrument in a lot of ways.
The thing that's different is when Mark plays keyboards or
synthesizer or keyboards of any kind of massages the medium
he uses his fingers like this, and the fingers you
have to have a certain amount of physical dexterity to

(25:25):
connect your mind to your extremities. Now we're getting to
a place where we don't need to have physical connection.
I mean, if you think of Elon and Nouralink, for example,
Suddenly people are playing video games and we'll start expressing
themselves purely by thinking exactly. And I think that we're

(25:46):
beginning to see that starting to happen in a lot
of ways. Good, it's a bad, I don't know what
it is, but it's there. We cannot deny the existence
of the reality of where civilization is going. All we
can do is hope to do the best we can
in terms of being a human being, having empathy and

(26:07):
joy and trying to reach people and touch them in
some kind of a tender, more than just intellectual way,
but in some kind of humane embrace.

Speaker 2 (26:21):
Yeah, I agree with you on that. You know, it's
like I think the real message of Devo more than
just things are going down, which it was, you know, now,
I feel like it's it's part of a yin yang
of reality. Uh. I feel it was more like humans
were the one species out of touch with nature. And

(26:44):
what I think is really important is AI whatever you know,
medium you use to make your music, if it's just
you know, like like one rubber band that you're strumming
or anything in between. I think it's about people need
to learn how to mutate and not just get stagnated

(27:12):
and just get frozen, like so many people are frozen
by the thought of AI. And like social media now
it's like what's left and what's right are like extreme
they don't even really represent most of the people that
lean either direction. They're like the extremists and they're just
shouting at each other and the rest of us are

(27:32):
all kind of in the middle, and we're all craving
common sense.

Speaker 3 (27:37):
There's no common sense that the extremes that's the problem
we have politically as well.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
Yeah, and so so I just feel like that's part
of what you know, this this turnover when it when
it's you know that artists are going to be addressing
that issue. I feel they'll help lead the way. I think,
you know, like as it's happened in the past, art
has has informed people where where politics and you know,

(28:06):
other mediums. You know, I'm kind of ready for maybe
it's been a long time, it's been thousands years, but
maybe white men could just stand over to the side
a little bit and I'm waiting for women to kind
of take over the planet. I'm looking for a feminist

(28:26):
planet that would you know.

Speaker 3 (28:29):
We need some peace and quiet and a hug.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
And we need the part of humanity that's connected to
nature and that can reconnect. Because I mean, the whole
idea of like, well we'll just use up everything on
this planet and then we move to Mars. I'm like, well,
you better love your your cell phone, because if you
haven't looked at pictures of Mars, it's very boring there

(28:54):
and there's not a good reason to want to go there.
You're going to be in a giant parking lot. We
need humans to connect more with the natural world.

Speaker 3 (29:06):
The real issue for music now is how to get
heard distribution. It's not so much the creation as it
is getting that message out. These guys have been doing
it for fifty years. They got the formula. People know
who who Devo is, just like Stevie too. Everyone knows

(29:27):
who Stevie is. But Stevie, you go out on the
road and he will play virtually songs that are fifty
years old, that were his original material, he'll play. He
can play a whole albusort of the material. The boys go
out and play stuff off of freedom of choice. Those
are the old songs. Where are the new songs? Where
are we going to hear those? How are we going

(29:49):
to change the culture again? How do we get heard?
I mean, you go to a record company now and live.
Guy says, eh, well this is okay, but how many
clicks do you have? You know, it's not about the
music anymore. It's about trying to get heard and to
do something that's meaningful, to touch people emotionally physically.

Speaker 1 (30:11):
We'll be right back after this break. I do wonder
not I mean, I don't want to get too hemmed
up by a conversation about technology and AI and things
like this. But to your earlier point about being a
little optimistic about AI, I think where I get pessimistic
about it is around the specific point you're making is

(30:35):
that sometimes it feels like whereas before, back to bing
crosby example, the invention of certain kinds of microphones allowed
crooning to become a style of music and become a
phenomenon amongst, you know, in popular music. All these years later,
I almost wonder if we've gotten to the point where
the tail now wags the dog, where music is in

(30:57):
service of technology more often than technology is in service
of music.

Speaker 3 (31:02):
I think that technology is our musical instruments. I think
technology drives to the RT. I've said it a thousand times.
If I said at once, our technology really does drive
how we create and what we create and the space
that we live in. I mean, we're here in Mark's studio,

(31:24):
which is a glorious space. You guys got to go
see it upstairs, but it's a marvel of modern technology.
I think there's certain things that have come down the
pike in some ways that have been destructive. I think
that we moved into dance music, for example, and got
locked into the sequencer and suddenly everything that had backbeat

(31:45):
and feel she got transmitted to the kick drum and
the downbeat versus the backbeat. And I think that that
really sort of changed music a lot, and I think
not for the better, because it's turned a lot of
dance music instead of dance music, it's become militant. Four
on the floor is kind of militancy, and I find that,

(32:08):
you know, people want to dance to marching music. But
I think that really makes a real record happen. Like,
for example, we're in the studio. When we were working together,
there was a mark. The band had a marvelous drummers
name was Alan Myers and I'll never forget them. We
used to call mister TikTok. That guy could really, you know,

(32:29):
settle the groove. But when he's but when the band
was going from a verse to a chorus or to
a transition to another section, he knew when to hold
it back, he knew when to speed it up. That
there was a degree of motion and his playing and
what separates him from the machine is that motion.

Speaker 1 (32:48):
Just to go back a bit, you first saw Devo
before that, even their first album came out right.

Speaker 3 (32:55):
I saw them at the Starwood. I was up in
the balcony with all the executives from the record companies.
That you could tell they were executives from record companies
because they were all wearing these letter jackets, you know,
and the thing. And they were all honkering around. Think
this one's good Disband's good disband, isn't you know. Let's
go have some more dirves in a little and you know,

(33:19):
And we'd go to the back room at the Starwood
and they'd honk around. And I was working as a
chief engineer of the record plant at the time, consulting
chief engineer. I was more or less a sonic matre d.
I was taking in what bands. Big bands came into
the record plant, I kind of hold their hand and

(33:40):
helped them get situated and so forth. So it was
an interesting thing. But I also had access to the studio.
If I wanted to do demos or do something recording,
I could always get the free time. So I was
up there in the store. Would always scattered around to
see what was going on. And that was the first
time I saw you guys, and I knew then that

(34:01):
I liked it. And one thing led to another, and
they arrived in the parking lot and I'll tell you
something took the studio by storm. They would normally these
people are non plussed by anything. These guys came in
the parking lot with hoses up their nose and held
it on and the coveralls and boots and stuff, and
the people would completely lost their minds. Right, I said,

(34:25):
I love this. This is for me.

Speaker 2 (34:27):
We were in the middle of a day of filming
with Neil Young for his movie Human Highway, and so
we had our costume. So we just rather than take
everything apart and clean our faces off, we just came
over and did it and then went back and we
were on the set again.

Speaker 3 (34:41):
Yeah, but they turned, they turned the studio. We took
about a tour. Everybody saw it, and everybody lost their minds.
It was fucking crazy. But you know something, that's what
it endeared needed, these guys. And here we are. Mark
and I have been friends now for what fifty.

Speaker 2 (34:59):
Years something like that? Yeah, yeah, maybe more of.

Speaker 3 (35:02):
Yeah, it's been a long wonderful journey. You know. It's uh,
we both d our way in different ways, and we've
had a good fortune of having a great friendship I'm
just glad we're still here. I hope I live in another
twenty years of eighty five now. But if I could,

(35:23):
well it's gonna go on what I'm ninety five, I
would wonder where the where our music is? Is it
gonna still be eight bars of this and eight bars
of that, three and a half minutes of noise making
with words over the top? Or are we going to
go somewhere better, bigger, different? Yeah, that's what I really
hope to see. Mark is still cutting the front edge

(35:44):
of it. He's still gnawing away at it. I admire
that in you. I really do your brave soul. I
let's say, I.

Speaker 1 (35:51):
Guess who sought out who about it? Did Devo look for?

Speaker 2 (35:55):
We were looking for Margo, for somebody like a margle Off,
and then we found Margo Off. He became the guy
that we wanted to meet. And you're talking about business manager?
Did we have the same business managers?

Speaker 1 (36:07):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (36:08):
We had the same okay, And so he made the
connection for us.

Speaker 3 (36:13):
Were you I was just bobbing around, bobbing around, being
bob being bob.

Speaker 1 (36:19):
YEA how aware of like any of those early records
that he did or the records before he worked with
you guys, were I mean of the Stevie records or
the Isley Brothers records, even lowthor in the hand people like,
were any of those records in your orbit?

Speaker 2 (36:36):
Sure, that's all the stuff that made us want to
find him, because we'd see his name on all these
records that were things that we related to, And so
that's what made us look for him and try to
figure out, how do we talk to this guy? Would
he even be interested in working with somebody like we
weren't sure what he would be like or you know,

(36:58):
And so we met him and then we were like, oh,
this is perfect. This is going to be after we'd
had kind of a couple swinging Missus where we left
feeling like I wish we could have wish we could
do that again. This is the album that we never
felt like that about. Freedom of Choice was the first
album that we wrote after we had moved to California.

(37:20):
And Yeah, it was interesting. We were in this little
room on I think Seward where's SI R It's on?

Speaker 3 (37:29):
Yeah, right around the corner for Motown. Yeah, maybe the
oral was flicking off and maybe Studio Motown's LA offices
were directly across the street on the corner.

Speaker 2 (37:41):
Yeah, writing that album was interesting because we did it
in the room about the size of this. That was
a storefront that they'd covered up the window and attached
to that was a big room that was a grocery store,
had been a grocery store and was later going to
become Amba Records. And then I don't know what it

(38:02):
is now because I think Amiba moved out, but apartments.
We remember what's their name, Pink Floyd. They were They
had the big room and they were rehearsing for a
tour and they had three semi trucks and they wanted
to go down to two semi trucks, and so they
were throwing stuff away like old anvil cases and and

(38:24):
lights and stuff, and they set a on dealing on
top of the trash heap, and I was just you know,
watching them because you know, they didn't know who we were.
They were like big and we were just like nobody.
And when they put it on the trash heap, I said, Hey,
what are you guys going to do with that? And
they said, I said you want it? I go yeah,

(38:47):
And so I got this incredible We ended up using
it on something. I can't remember which song, but we
we put it on something.

Speaker 1 (38:54):
Do you know what it ended up on? Do you
know which song?

Speaker 3 (38:56):
Or don't remember? I probably remember tonight we.

Speaker 2 (39:01):
We you know, we ended up meeting after I think
we'd already finished writing this stuff, or we were pretty
far through by the time.

Speaker 3 (39:08):
I went a couple of rehearsals made some suggestions, but
seeing them in the studio in the rehearsal space gave
me a lot of ideas on what I knew when
I saw them that they were the ideal candidates to
bring into the control room. And because the record plant
had big quad monitors, so you have to understand this

(39:29):
was a time when the studios were moving toward quadraphonic
and that meant speakers in the back. They had come
up with a system called san sui QS was supposed
to be able to put quad quadraphonic music quadraphonias. I
think somebody one artists did, but quadraph and they were

(39:54):
supposed to be able to put quad sound and vinyl.
Well that was a miserable failure, but a lot of
people tried to do it, and of course the record
plant was very keen being that there were not only
a fantasy, a psychedel fantasy of Gary Kelgrin's. But the
technology level at that studio was pretty amazing. They built

(40:16):
some QUAD rooms, so when we came on board with Steve,
we had these QUAD spaces, and when I started working
with the Boys, for example, I was monitoring in QUAD
in the control room. We could never get it into
vinyl the right way, and basically QUAD failed. People didn't
want to buy a separate amplifier for the back speakers,

(40:37):
and there's a lot of questions about it, and if
you had a wife used to get the subwuffer out
of the fireplace and were out from under the piano,
and it became you know, if you were wealthy, you
could have quad sound in your home theater. But it
never really took off. But where really took off and
where we really used it was monitoring in the control room,

(41:00):
where I could monitor in QUAD and really self realized
we didn't need to use earphones because we could be
we can get all the cross talk, the right stuff
come out of the right speaker going into your left
ear and vice versa, and that was really what changed
Devo's voice. I was able and they were able to

(41:22):
really hear what was going on. The important thing about
devo and recording in the studio is to keep it simple.
Knock off the overdubbing everywhere you can, stop orchestrating it.
Stop making it a Robert Margoleft record, Make it a
Devo record. The thing sometimes the producer's best thing is
to stay behind the fucking curtain.

Speaker 1 (41:43):
You know.

Speaker 3 (41:44):
I don't want the record to sound like, oh, that's
a Robert Margolef record. I want it to be a
Devo record. I wanted to be a Stevie Wonder record.

Speaker 1 (41:51):
I think he succeeded in that and all it almost
all respects, because.

Speaker 3 (41:57):
You know, looking back on it, I realized how much
how we listen is how it affects the recordings. And
that's what separates the men from the boys in terms
of making great recordings, in my opinion, especially pop records.
But sooner or later you're going to get away from
those eight bars of this and eight bars of that.
I want to see where you go with your film writing.

(42:19):
That's the interesting stuff.

Speaker 2 (42:20):
Well, maybe I should play some things.

Speaker 3 (42:22):
I'd be I'm all ears all the time for you,
my friend. Okay, I would love to go back in
the studio and really create something crazy with you and Jerry.

Speaker 1 (42:32):
That would be great fun with divover make another record
or is that I'm trying to encourage it and I'm
using different lures to get us there.

Speaker 2 (42:43):
So we'll see what happens. You never know, Help you succeed,
hope you succeed. You know. Just when we worked with him,
it was a time before automation. I still love analog
sense and all that. But we'd get our settings and
we'd record them, you know, like on Thursday night, and
then Friday morning we'd come in and listen to it
and go, yeah, what if I wish we would have

(43:05):
done this a little different, you know on the sound
of the bass and stuff. And that's Bob solved that
problem by teaching us how to send like a sense
into three different outputs, for instance, or like put an
amp up in one room that's clean, a namp up
that's distorted in another room, and then a board sound

(43:25):
and then you could the next day you could change
things just a little bit. And that was one of
the things that frustrated us with recording was up until then,
so he was he taught us like really important things
back then.

Speaker 1 (43:41):
So you would make a distorted speaker, a clean speaker,
and then have one channel going right into the board.
You have more of a dry sound and then be
able to play with the next day.

Speaker 2 (43:53):
After because analogs, since you know, they didn't sound exactly
the same from day to day. You plug them in
again and they're warming up and you're playing it and
it sounds different than when it gets fully warmed up.
And there wasn't there just wasn't automation back then.

Speaker 3 (44:11):
Yeah, we had what we called what I called armstrong automation,
which is like doing it by hand. Yeah, that's but
there's something to be said for that, and I missed that.
Now you know, we have digitalists, and that I mean
when we were mixing, for example, and we were at

(44:33):
six o'clock in the morning and we still weren't where
we wanted to be, we put a big piece of
tape across basking tape across the console. Don't touch up nub. Yeah,
it's more than me jobs worth, right, It's that we
had to come back and we thought we walked out
of the room and I just headed out to Malibu

(44:54):
and flying along the freeway at six in the morning. Boy,
that was fucking terrific. It sounded wonderful. Nothing was touching.
We'd come back in the room and we put it
up and I'd expect to be wow. And I said
to myself, dang, sounds like shit. You know, yeah, okay,
you know so. And then we'd be juggling it around

(45:16):
for another six hours.

Speaker 2 (45:18):
Yeah. Before there was then the.

Speaker 3 (45:20):
Jerry Him and Jerry would go out in the parking
lot and argue with each other this, that and the
other thing right, And I said, oh, man, what did
I do this time? You know it was it was
circus man.

Speaker 2 (45:32):
But you but you taught us away to to bypass
out with with the multiple multi channel recording. You know,
there was only five of us and you had twenty
four tracks on a on a two inch tape.

Speaker 3 (45:46):
I had a wonderful time making that record. I really
loved it.

Speaker 1 (45:49):
Were you aware of the kind of I guess. I mean,
I don't know how truly precarious it was, but it
seemed like you guys were kind of in trouble a
bit with the label because of what they felt were
perceived back of sales in the first two You know.

Speaker 2 (46:02):
I think David Bowie kind of pushed Warner Brothers into
signing us in the first place because he wanted to
He wanted to then sign us to Beauley Brothers, which
was his production company, and we didn't do that because
it was like a bad It was a terrible deal.
His lawyer was giving us. It was like we were

(46:22):
going to give away like fifty percent of everything that
we'd ever done and to this and I was like, well, no,
that's not going to work. But he kind of got
him to sign us, and then you know, the first
couple albums came out, and although we'd been on Saturday
Night Live, it was only college stations that were playing
our music. In the US and Europe it was different.

(46:45):
We had, like before we even had our first album out,
we had off of our demos, we had four different
songs going to the top ten, three of them number
one in different countries in Europe. But that meant nothing
in the US because US was the BMF giant monster
for record sales, and you know, Europe was just tiny

(47:07):
compared to that, so they didn't They were just hoping
that something would happen with the with the records, and
it took the third album for for something to get
on on the radio in the US.

Speaker 1 (47:19):
Did you feel that the pressure or did you not
page Like, did you care? Did you not care that
pressure was coming from the label to yees?

Speaker 2 (47:27):
And though I had to try to not care about
it because because for me, I was just thinking, you
know what, I'm living such an amazing life right now
that I get to write music and put it on
a record and go out and play places. I just
felt blessed that I was in the position I was in.

Speaker 1 (47:43):
Yeah, I know with Stevie, there were a lot of
interesting interactions with the with the label, with Motown that
you had stepping into this situation.

Speaker 2 (47:51):
Well, he was feeding Motown, you know, because everybody if
he had a hit song, that made a difference. You know,
for everybody that worked at the record company, Divo was
just so far down the chain that you know, we
were nobody cared about us.

Speaker 3 (48:04):
But did they know you guys cut a mighty bow
wave and look how look how their stuff has lasted,
and how you're still here and still on stage. I
think that's absolutely remarkable, and I really support you for that.
I think that you are really a social mover and
you've brought a lot to music and to people and

(48:27):
all I want to do is see it continue to happen. Thanks,
And I absolutely loved writing a book. It was strange
shaping sounds. I really was shaping sounds. I just felt
that I was doing something that was important to I
really have to say it's important, and what I'm really
enjoying now is giving it away and actually the stories

(48:49):
maybe change people thinking about the creative act. I'm writing
about perception and hearing right now. I'm going to write
a book about it. And it's amazing what goes in
those little holes in the sides of our head and
what's really going in going in there, and how it
affects our brains. We've had music since the cave time
times I would I just I'm just eager to see

(49:12):
where it's gonna go next. And I know that I'm
sort of one of those senior guys. Now I'm not
twenty years old anymore, although I feel I am in
my head until I get try to stand up. Then
I really realize I'm a d five and not nineteen.
But I'm still a boy in my brain.

Speaker 2 (49:30):
Yeah you know, so are you? Yes, there's a part
of us that that defies the downward spiral of the
aging process, the humiliation of getting older.

Speaker 3 (49:46):
I still feel immortal at your age, I'm sure.

Speaker 1 (49:49):
Sort of, sort of, not quite. I still think I'm
twenty one and I wake up and realize them.

Speaker 2 (49:54):
Well, keep that thought in your head.

Speaker 1 (49:56):
No, well, you know, but then I get my older daughter.
I like my daughters are closer to twenty one than I.

Speaker 2 (50:00):
That's a little we're we're kind of grousing a little
bit about AI here, but at the same time, we're
hoping it makes us twenty one again, aren't we absolute.
I'm ready for that. I'd tried it out again.

Speaker 3 (50:13):
Mark is doing something really interesting right now. It's defies explanation.
But the last time I in this room, there were
fog horns, air horns, compressors, all kinds of things, making
pneumatic music with the bellows electric bellows like from a
player piano that would power up all that stuff. And
he was making music with instruments that were totally foreign

(50:37):
to what you would consider a musical instrument. It was
a whole new acoustical kind of living creature. I really
had wanted to go out there to see him do it.
But he's going to some really exciting and different places now.
Because he has the liberty to do it. Yeah, and
I think that that is a great gift that he's

(50:58):
earned to be able to do that kind of stuff,
and I admire it, I really do. I want to
play in that sandbox. I want to bring my bucket
and shovel my bib overalls and down and do some stuff.

Speaker 2 (51:11):
Well, careful what you say, because.

Speaker 3 (51:13):
I'm ready, boy. I like this stuff.

Speaker 1 (51:16):
Yeah, after this last break, we'll be back with more
from Robert and Mark. I'm thinking about the work you
guys did, the fact that you guys did whip it.
You know that you were able to create a signature
song for the band, you know, I mean I don't.
I'm sure you guys think it's going to be like

(51:37):
the hit it was when you created it, right, I
don't know what.

Speaker 2 (51:40):
We thought it was when we created it. It was
kind of like the lyrics were kind of directed towards
Jimmy Carter, but they were also kind of in a
Thomas Pinsion style. I don't know if you ever read
Gravity's Rainbow, but there's like, you have this really complicated
story going on, and then all of a sudden, somebody
will look out a window and they'll they'll watch some

(52:02):
little kids playing on the street and they're just singing
a nursery song that goes on for a couple pages
in Gravity's Rainbow. Then it goes back into this really
intense story, and we kind of liked that. I think
that's what we were thinking about at the time, was
something like that, and we didn't really we didn't really
think it would be a hit song. We thought a

(52:23):
matter of fact, Warner Brothers thought Girl You Want was
going to be the song that would get on the radio,
and they put that out first, and then it was
somebody that programmed discos in Florida that heard whip it
and thought, oh, that would sound good on a dance floor,
and they started adding it and everybody picked it up,
and then it happened that a way.

Speaker 3 (52:45):
It had the energy.

Speaker 2 (52:47):
Yeah, it had the right energy. But for me when
we first came out here, before we came out to
California and we were first just pure artists creating ideas
and music, I was imagining something because I was so
into the twenties, nineteen twenties, nineteen thirties in Europe. We
were thinking, oh, we're gonna have like a cabaret or

(53:08):
we're gonna have a club that we play at and
it'll be theatrical and it'll be you know this extreme music.

Speaker 3 (53:15):
Three penny opera.

Speaker 2 (53:16):
Yeah, And it was yeah, and we thought of what
we were doing was much more extreme. But then when
we started playing places and we used to sound a
lot more like Captain Beefheart meets an Italian sci fi movie.
And in Ohio at that time period in the early seventies,
people were just like they were coming out of factories

(53:39):
and they wanted to go to a bar, have a
drink and listen to the music that they heard on
the radio live. And they didn't want to hear new music,
and they didn't want to hear political music, and they
didn't want to hear weirdo music where things like Jockohomo
or mongoloid, they didn't want to hear that stuff. And
so we were thinking, well, what are we going to do,

(54:00):
and we thought we thought subversion was the way to
get in, and we thought, yeah, we have to do
it like Madison Avenue does it, where they they tricked
people in the eating things and buying cars that are
terrible and wearing clothes that look stupid, and then people
feeling proud of it. We thought, well, we'll use their techniques,
but we'll just have a better product that we're selling.

(54:21):
And so we were looking for what would be our
song that would lure people in, and Whippet was exactly that,
because people would buy the album and then they'd hear
the song freedom of Choice is what you've got, freedom thrum,
choice is what you want, and then they go what
does that mean?

Speaker 1 (54:39):
You know?

Speaker 2 (54:40):
And so it was the song that got people to
listen to us that otherwise would have just gone no.

Speaker 1 (54:46):
I imagine though, having a hit like that must have been
exciting for not only because it seems almost impossible to
get something a hit of that magnitude, but it also
seems like it could be a bit a little stifling.

Speaker 2 (54:59):
Well, you know what happens then, is then when you
do your next album, a record company that had totally
just we're just waiting for you to up your five
album deal and get lost, all of a sudden, they
were like sticking their heads in the door, going, hey,
how's it going. Yeah, whatever you do.

Speaker 3 (55:19):
The letter jackets as I call them.

Speaker 2 (55:20):
Yeah, they go, just make sure you do another whip
it And we'd be like, okay, Well, We don't even
know how we did that one, so don't you know,
it was just kind of it was just kind of accidental. Anyhow, Yeah,
that was an interesting record.

Speaker 3 (55:32):
I remember recording the whip Crack in the hall Howard Siegel,
God bless them, she's gone now. But we were working together.
He was the engineering partner, and he'd be running up
and down the hall at the record plant. We had
this big, long hallway between the studios and the canteen
and stuff. We had microphones down at the end of

(55:54):
the hall, and I think you and Jerry were cracking
the whip. I said, let me try it, and I
cracked it and cracked myself in the face, and I
sort of gave up. But you know, we weren't making
There was no such thing as sampling or you cracked
this whip, or let's do whip crack from this library
or that louck. We had to do everything ourselves, and
then we had to fly everything in because there's no stores,

(56:17):
there's no digital anything, right, right, So I remember us
flying all those whip cracks and then over dubbing stuff
on top of it and doing it. It was like a
crazy bunch of alchemists. Yeah, we were completely nuts.

Speaker 2 (56:30):
We were one step ahead of the digital sampling where
you could like do something like that and then have
it on a key and play it later. So that
came a few years later.

Speaker 1 (56:42):
You guys actually had to crack it.

Speaker 3 (56:43):
Yeah, we had to crack the whip.

Speaker 2 (56:45):
Yeah, we had a real whip, but that we had
to take turns whipping each other. It was awful, you know.

Speaker 3 (56:51):
It's like, yeah, chasing each other around in the parking
lot with the bowl whip. You know, the things that
really are worthwhile stick to stick out. And when you
think about freedom of choice in general, that record really
has lasted.

Speaker 2 (57:06):
Weren't an interesting time, Bob. It's like, you know, it's
like kids now they have these phones where they go, Okay,
I like this band, who did who influenced them? And
then they go, oh, Nirvana, And then they check out
Nirvana and then they go, well who influenced them? And
they go, oh, they did covers of Devo songs and
they were big fans of Devo and so then when
they come to our shows they know the lyrics. It's like,

(57:27):
I got kids out there that are singing along with me,
and it's kind of it's kind of an interesting time.

Speaker 1 (57:33):
What about the music videos? Was there any at any
point when you guys were making the albums you guys
ever talk about how you wanted to present things visually.

Speaker 2 (57:40):
Or always oftentimes we had an idea. We would have
an idea for something in a film, and then we'd say, well,
let's write a song so we can do that. Whip
It was almost kind of like that because we'd found
some magazine that had some guy that was doing a
whip tease and he was like, he was from Las

(58:00):
Vegas and he would whip pieces of the clothes of
his wife off, and we were like, what the hell
is that? You know, we thought that was kind of
but that got us thinking about whip it. Whipping it.

Speaker 3 (58:11):
And Mark is a fine artist as well as being
a musician, and a highly accomplished fine artist, I might add,
I think that we saw that see that energy, and
also Jerry also a filmmaker as well as being a musician.
I think we see a lot of that kind of
energy in their work. And it's always been Devo has

(58:32):
always been a visual, visual band.

Speaker 1 (58:35):
Which would have been really appealing to you. I imagine
it would have been one of the things that we've.

Speaker 3 (58:39):
Come from photography as well.

Speaker 2 (58:41):
And right you were doing films like with Edi Edgwick.

Speaker 3 (58:45):
Yeah, Chile, Manhattan, Yeah, you were doing like it was.
It was a psychedelic time, you know that. In the
studio of the Record Plant was just an amazing place
to work. It was really a fantasy of Gary Kelgren's
who just passed away. It was a sort of wrote
the story of the Record Plant, which was a psychedelic

(59:05):
adventure par excellence. And inside that's akadelic space, and the
place was organic and free, and once you got past
the locked front door, you were in your own space.
You were you could be who you were. Musicians just
used to come down there at night, even if they
weren't recording at that time, just to spend some time

(59:26):
in the canteen and play with the pinball machine or
stop into someone's session. It was a very closed and
very safe place to work. And the boys could really
be themselves there. And it wasn't a bunch of guys
running around with short sleeve white shirts with pencil protectors.
I mean, we're all there. There was a jacuzzi, people

(59:46):
were easy, the pinballs machine were running. Stevie was learning
how to play air hockey, and everybody said, oh, man,
he's playing air hockey. Is he really blind? You know,
because he could hear the puck moving on the table.
You know, that's amazing, and he you know, the place
was just a super permissive and very There were no

(01:00:07):
sharp edges at the record Place in anyway, and I
think it really stoked the boy's creativity.

Speaker 1 (01:00:13):
It.

Speaker 3 (01:00:14):
I think the studio itself was a musical instrument inhabited
by many musicians at the same time. People used to
walk into each other's sessions and feel perfectly free to
be who they were.

Speaker 2 (01:00:26):
We shared our room with we we used the room
at night when it was cheaper, but during the day,
little Richard had had our room, and so we'd show
up and he'd be leaving, and he always had good
stories like, well, you know who ripped me off? You know,
I'm black? That he had He was like really funny
to listen to. But it was good energy, you know,

(01:00:48):
to share a room with him.

Speaker 1 (01:00:49):
Did you ever hear what he was doing in there?

Speaker 2 (01:00:51):
Yeah? We heard, we heard his music.

Speaker 1 (01:00:53):
Yeah, what was he up to with that time?

Speaker 3 (01:00:56):
I'll tell you something. Those are days that it'll never
be repeated.

Speaker 2 (01:00:59):
Yeah, yeah, boy, were they something else?

Speaker 3 (01:01:02):
I'll tell you. But here we are with this.

Speaker 1 (01:01:05):
I want to gloss over a little. You guys said, wait,
you're sharing a room a little rich insanity to me. Well,
I got to be phone friends with little Richard right
before we die. Okay, just talking on the phone was
bizarre enough, because you would just refer himself as mister
Pennyman and would refer to Little Richard as a separate entity.

Speaker 2 (01:01:25):
Oh that's pretty good. I could see that. Well, little Richard,
it's not an incredible.

Speaker 3 (01:01:29):
Well you know, wouldn't call him little hey, little How
you doing you? Oh, mister h.

Speaker 1 (01:01:36):
Who were some of the other great characters that came
through there while you were there? Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:01:40):
Everybody, everybody.

Speaker 3 (01:01:41):
All the eagles came through The Hotel California is written
about the record plant that is the Hotel California.

Speaker 1 (01:01:48):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:01:49):
Yeah, I used to call them the beagles and they
get all upset with me. That was very sacrilegious.

Speaker 1 (01:01:56):
It's a wild time at different times.

Speaker 3 (01:01:58):
I remember when we were recording she get the girl,
the girl you want, Mark, She's just the girl? Yeah,
she get the girl, right, Mark, She's just a girl. Yeah,
she just a girl.

Speaker 1 (01:02:12):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:02:13):
You would always swallow the sd of just I think
we did it one hundred times.

Speaker 1 (01:02:20):
Well, thanks for making the record, guys, and thanks for
time to talk about it and write about it.

Speaker 3 (01:02:26):
Yeah, well it's done now, it's over the edge.

Speaker 1 (01:02:29):
It's really good. It's really good. And I can't wait
to hear it, you know, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:02:33):
Like the book's great. I'd love I can't wait to
hear it. Maybe we'll maybe we'll write a score to
go behind it. How long is the the book?

Speaker 3 (01:02:41):
The book is about ten hours.

Speaker 2 (01:02:43):
We could do it.

Speaker 3 (01:02:44):
Wow, we'll score it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:46):
We'll score it.

Speaker 1 (01:02:47):
Amazing.

Speaker 3 (01:02:47):
I would love to make another DeVault kind of whip
it with you, guys. You know, you never know one
record up who knows, don't, don't say nothing of Our
friendship has lasted a long time, and that's for the
great reason, and I'm just glad it has.

Speaker 1 (01:03:08):
If you enjoyed that Common Station, be sure to check
out Robert Margelov's new audiobook Shaping Sounds, Stevie Wonder debo,
The Sink Revolution in My Life Behind Music, Use Code
Sounds twenty five, That's All Capital so o U and
DS two five at pushkin dot Fm Slash Shaping Sounds
to save twenty five percent on the audio book. Be

(01:03:28):
sure to check out YouTube dot com slash Broken Record
Podcast to see our video interviews, and be sure to
follow us on Instagram at the Broken Record Pod. Broken
Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose, with marketing
and help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer
is Ben Tolladay. Broken Record is production of Pushkin Industries.
If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider

(01:03:48):
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(01:04:10):
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