Ep. 04: "Sears Would Call Me Husky"
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: How are you?
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: Are you well?
Merlin: I'm well.
Merlin: I'm well.
Merlin: Oh, you sound better.
Merlin: I mean, less bad.
John: But I'm not completely well.
John: I'm 90% better.
John: But that 10%, there's a lot of wiggle room in that 10%.
Merlin: Yeah, it's like losing weight since it lasts 20 pounds.
Merlin: Say that again?
Merlin: You never heard that when people say they're trying to lose weight or like the last five pounds?
Merlin: They say it's those last... I don't know.
Merlin: That might be one of those dumb things like you always find things the last place you look.
Merlin: I'm not sure if it makes sense, but they say you can lose a bunch of weight.
Merlin: The last five pounds are the hardest.
Merlin: For you, that's the last mile.
Merlin: Those last 10%.
John: The last 10% of sickness, I could still turn it around and get pneumonia.
John: I could still turn this almost...
John: betterness into total catastrophic sickness so i have to be very careful at this point that i don't go do what my instinct tells me which is to run bareheaded in the rain in my underwear because i will get i will get pneumonia if i do that and that's what my instinct is telling me is that is that an instinct you have a lot about running around without clothes and no hat
John: It is, and that's why when people say, follow your gut, I say, shut up.
John: My gut is telling me to do incredibly stupid things.
John: My gut always told me to fall in love with lesbians.
John: My gut tells me to go out in the rain without a hat.
John: My gut tells me to eat all the pasta.
John: Literally, it's my gut that tells me to do that.
John: I can't trust myself is what I'm saying.
Merlin: I think your gut's probably seen too many things on Cinemax where they make out, the lesbians, and you think, that is very attractive to me.
Merlin: But then you realize that the person that's not featured in the Cinemax movie consistently is you.
John: Well, your Cinemax reference isn't far off, but in fact, the lesbians I have traditionally fallen in love with are the ones with short black hair and the faintest wisp of a mustache...
John: I'm not interested in... Like a 12-year-old boy or John Waters?
John: Well, somewhere in between a 12-year-old boy and John Waters.
John: If John Waters was a lot shorter and had kind of not quite boobs, but lumps, lady lumps.
John: I love that.
John: I spent my entire 20s...
John: chasing after girls that looked like Jane Wheatland from the Go-Go's.
John: And 85% of them were either gay or were going through their gay phase at precisely the time that we were friends and they wanted to talk about their romantic problems with me.
John: I think it's a big part of why I was an alcoholic.
Merlin: The small-breasted lesbians.
John: Yeah, the frustration caused by consistently falling in love with boyish girls.
Merlin: They would always get me.
Merlin: Well, you know, not to name names, but what's her name?
Merlin: Joanna Boulmay.
Merlin: There's this woman that was in, she split in the Minders.
Merlin: She was like an engineer on some Elliot's.
Merlin: You know, she worked at like the K-Record scene.
John: Oh, yeah, yeah, I know her.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: You know her?
John: Well, in a Northwestern way.
John: Sure.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: Like, hey.
Merlin: She's made you drink.
Merlin: Nod.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Nod, smirk.
Merlin: She became, Jane Whelan was obviously in the substrata of the short-haired lesbian cosmology.
Merlin: She was quite a constellation.
Merlin: But when I saw her playing with the minders,
Merlin: I, I, I, I had to go.
Merlin: It was just, she, she's ridiculously skinny and long armed, you know, and she, she, you know, she engineered an Elliot Smith record.
Merlin: So, you know, but man, she can play that bass and she's very, very tall.
John: See, they all play the bass too.
Merlin: That's the bass and the tattoos, right?
Merlin: The tattoos.
John: It all goes together.
John: The, the bass, the tattoos, the short hair, uh, often pierced nipples follow along with that.
Merlin: If you ever get to that point,
John: Piercing my nipples?
John: No, never did.
Merlin: But like on her, how would you tell?
Merlin: Was it just educated guess?
Merlin: Bumps in the hipster tee?
Merlin: Like, how could you tell?
John: Well, I've, you know, I'm not new, right?
John: I mean, I've lived.
John: I've seen what's under the t-shirts.
Merlin: So it went so far as she said, I'm going to step off the reservation, Kimasabi.
John: Who are we talking about now?
Merlin: Well.
Merlin: Just her girl?
Merlin: Just the girls, the girls, the, you know, the type.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, see, that's the thing, though.
Merlin: The pixies.
Merlin: Would you call them, they're not pixies because they're like angry pixies.
Merlin: Riot pixies.
John: Yeah, right, Pixies.
John: Pixies, but spelt with a bunch of R's in the middle.
John: Pixar.
Merlin: That's good.
Merlin: Or how about Pixies with mini X's?
John: Pixars.
John: Let's just call them Pixars.
John: That's pretty good.
John: That's what they are.
John: Yeah, you know, because some of them aren't gay.
John: That's the frustrating thing.
John: The ones that are just going through a gay phase that coincides with you trying to get with them.
John: I think a lot of girls just had a gay phase for the 20 minutes that I was trying to pick up with them, pick up on them.
Merlin: I mean, I think for a lot of them, it's like being into whole wheat pasta or throwing muses.
Merlin: It's something you put yourself into completely for a couple of weeks.
Merlin: But like, I got to live with that now.
Merlin: I don't think I got nothing against throwing muses, but you know what I'm saying?
John: Those memories.
Merlin: Well, you know, and I'm just saying, like, you know, my record was not the one getting dropped on the needle, if you know what I mean.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: I do know what you mean.
Merlin: I spent so much of my life being in that state, sometimes because of pixies, often because of kind of like a vaguely athletic girl with a good family.
Merlin: Those are bad, too.
Merlin: Those are very, because you don't have a chance.
Merlin: You don't have a chance.
Merlin: Their dad makes them laugh.
Merlin: You don't have a chance.
John: I know.
John: That's the worst.
John: When a girl has a really great relationship with her father.
John: Fuck that.
John: And he also is like a rich lawyer.
John: You know what I call those?
Merlin: The cock block docs.
Merlin: Anytime you get an MD that's funnier than you, hogging his daughter.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I bet it's a Mexican doctor.
John: Well, see, that's why I always had tremendous success with girls that had very conflicted feelings about their father.
Merlin: Oh, that's like getting pre-qualified for a loan.
Merlin: I mean, for me, I was fine.
Merlin: I was going through their wallet and stuff.
Merlin: I was trying to always figure that out.
Merlin: Birth control pills, check.
Merlin: Antidepressants, booyah.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: Bauhaus tape, we're good.
John: I waited until they went to the bathroom, and then I tried to read their journal before they were, before they, I could hear them washing their hands.
John: I'd put their journal back.
Merlin: I always like smelling ladies' purses.
Merlin: Again, they really get a big whiff of them.
Merlin: I like a purse smell.
Merlin: Smell their purse?
Merlin: You never smelled a purse?
John: God, a purse is, it smells like a cow's udder.
John: And that's bad how.
John: Ha ha ha ha ha.
John: No, I don't want to smell a girl's purse.
John: That's like smelling inside her pockets while her pants are still on.
John: What kind of pants?
John: Mom jeans.
John: It's like smelling inside of a pair of mom jeans.
John: Okay.
John: It's like bending down and smelling, taking a big whiff of the pockets of some mom jeans.
John: It's not something I want to do.
Merlin: I'm guessing there's probably some squished-up tissues, some from their children's snot, many from her own tears.
Merlin: A coin purse.
Merlin: Those giant keys you have on minivans now.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: A huge ring of keys.
Merlin: Why do keys have to be that big?
Merlin: It really irks me.
Merlin: I've been there, though.
Merlin: I've been there so many times, and I feel like there's so many times where I was the just friend that they could talk to about their problems.
John: Well, see, we're talking about the 90s now, though.
John: Yeah.
John: And I think times have changed.
John: I mean, times have definitely changed.
John: They call them hookups now.
John: They got hookups you can get.
John: Yeah, they send naked pictures to each other on their phones.
John: In the 90s, it was just a... I don't know.
John: It was a terrible time.
John: It was a terrible time to be a young person.
John: It looks good.
John: It didn't even look good.
John: Who am I kidding?
John: No.
John: The 90s were just... We should just... Let's just never speak of them again.
Merlin: I knew it.
Merlin: I knew how useless I was.
Merlin: It's like when we graduated from... I graduated from college in 1990.
Merlin: And it was like...
Merlin: All the people who had been in classes before us had done all these amazing things.
Merlin: They'd done things on campus.
Merlin: They'd done things nationally, internationally.
Merlin: They had Fulbright Scholars.
Merlin: And there was the four years that I was there.
Merlin: I think I had a big effect on this.
Merlin: And then, like, the year after I left, suddenly everybody was doing things to help the environment and getting good people and getting good grants.
Merlin: They were way smarter than us.
Merlin: And I think that was the problem.
Merlin: I blame us.
Merlin: I think we're a big part of the problem.
Merlin: You know, and I blame all your buddies up there.
Merlin: Your community gave the world the wrong idea about everything.
John: Oh, we were terrible.
John: We were terrible, and we were terrible people, too, I have to say.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: It was like the worst of what, like L.A.
Merlin: meets slacker-era Austin?
John: There wasn't anything L.A.
John: about it.
John: It was just take any small town and take the 10 losers that are hanging out under a bridge smoking clove cigarettes and then play them some Dinosaur Junior records, and there you have it.
John: It's the Seattle scene in 1992.
John: The thing that frustrates me is that my whole youth, the fashion was to wear really baggy, untailored, ripped, dirty clothes.
John: And I remember walking across the University of Washington.
Merlin: Deliberately.
Merlin: Choosing over other options to wear those.
John: When I was 24, a girl could not be more fashionable than if she took a sleeping bag, cut armholes in it, and rolled in some manure.
John: That was it, man.
John: Oh my God, she's so pumped.
John: It's like an organic grunge snuggie.
John: But somewhere around 2000...
John: I was walking across the University of Washington campus and I looked around and I realized everybody was wearing clothes that fit.
John: I was furious.
John: I was like, why are people wearing clothes that fit now?
John: I would have liked this.
John: I would have liked to have seen all these people's bodies in these nice clothes.
John: When I was a young man, you had to have x-ray vision.
John: I remember going to the thrift store and I'm looking through the extra large section because I'm an extra large person.
John: And I look around and everybody standing around me is 5'6 and weighs 130 pounds.
John: And I'm like, you people get out of here.
John: This is the extra large section.
John: It should be off limits.
Merlin: It's like stealing a handicapped parking space.
John: It's exactly like that.
John: There are not that many extra large shirts.
Merlin: I need this.
John: And I need it, and you are a tiny person.
Merlin: You should get a hang tag.
Merlin: You should get a large man hang tag.
John: You see the section over there where it says mediums?
John: You go over there.
John: There are more clothes for you anyway.
John: But, you know, no, they smirk and say, meh.
Merlin: I felt a little usurped because I slid.
Merlin: I was taking a different angle.
Merlin: I slid so easily into what became called grunge because that's how I dressed.
Merlin: And I know you went through this as well.
Merlin: I mean, I dressed like Paul Westerberg before I knew what Paul Westerberg was.
Merlin: That's just how you dressed.
Merlin: I've been dressing like that since the Dukes of Hazzard.
John: Here's what's amazing about you.
John: When I look at pictures of you from that era, you had an ironic mustache 20 years before the first acceptable ironic mustache.
John: I think it was more of a satirical mustache.
John: Whatever it was, it was hilarious.
John: It looked great on you, this blonde mustache.
John: I mean, the first time I saw it, I was like,
John: Was he, is that a serious mustache?
John: It was borderline.
John: Like I live in Florida and I have a mustache.
Merlin: It was what I could grow.
Merlin: You know, that's the problem.
Merlin: Like you, this is not a problem for very large men like you.
Merlin: It's like you just, you fall asleep.
Merlin: You wake up in the morning, you're fucking Rib Van Winkle with the giant beard.
Merlin: I mean, I, I, it took, I was one of those people that had to, and I think we've talked about this before.
Merlin: This is the whole problem with the fucking goatees.
Merlin: The goatee is not a decision.
Merlin: It's like what's left after you shaved off the part that wasn't a beard.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: If they could grow a big ass beard, they would.
Merlin: Same with me.
Merlin: And that little nonsense, I had to sit there like a guy with a fucking comb over waiting for that thing to grow and kind of soothing it down.
John: Like you're pinching a loaf and go... Exactly.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: I hope the mustache grew.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: The ironic mustaches.
Merlin: I'm going to find you one of these pictures.
Merlin: There's one in particular where I'm wearing an REM shirt, which I know you enjoy.
Merlin: Isn't that funny that we talked about REM almost and then now REM broke up.
Merlin: Can you believe that?
Merlin: We almost talked about REM and then they broke up.
John: I think we can take credit for it.
Merlin: I think so.
Merlin: I mean, I don't think we have a giant amount of market force going on here, but we did mention that we were going to talk about it, and then it happened.
John: Yeah, I feel like whatever I could say about REM has been said so eloquently.
Merlin: You said that in your toot.
Merlin: It was a great toot you had that was... I'm sorry, I'm cutting you off, but you had a great toot about that where you just said, you know, I was very, very warm.
Merlin: Say what you said.
John: Oh, I don't remember my tweets 30 seconds after I sent them.
John: Yeah, I believe that.
John: But whatever the sentiment was that, you know, the world does not need to hear one more old fuddy-duddy talking about how REM affected them.
John: Right.
John: But here I am tweeting about how REM affected me as a young man.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: I agree with you in the sense that, first of all, I'm just sick to death of all this fucking rip so-and-so.
Merlin: Oh, my God, Senior Wences died.
Merlin: You know, it's like you went on Wikipedia that so you could get on some kind of little fucking gravy train on Twitter.
Merlin: Like, you know, I want to do a new thing, which is I'm going to go find people who are almost dead that you should learn to appreciate so you can, like, pre-mourn them by, like, actually learning what they did before the day you heard something on Google News.
Merlin: I hate that.
Merlin: I hate that.
Merlin: And I think that's kind of what happens with R.E.M.
Merlin: I mean, like my friend Ethan Kaplan, who has done the Murmurs site for something like 14 years or something, he's pals with them, and he had a legitimate reason to change his Twitter icon and stuff like that.
Merlin: I mean, you know, he's pretty good pals with R.E.M., and they meant the world to him, and now they're gone.
Merlin: Did you see that picture of Todd Berry?
John: Todd Berry posted a picture of himself where he had hair, first of all, which was amazing to see.
John: But as a young man standing there with Peter Buck and Mike Mills, and it's amazing because you recognize Todd
John: But you know that he's a much younger person.
John: But Peter and Mike, it's their absolutely iconographic look.
John: It is Mike Mills and Peter Buck in 1984.
John: You recognize them, you know the clothes they're wearing, you know their hair.
John: It's like a picture off the back of their record, except somehow...
John: Like a teenage Todd Barry is in the picture.
John: It's a great photograph and it increased my respect for Todd Barry immeasurably.
Merlin: Morning.
Merlin: I sent you a photo on the robot.
Merlin: Did you hear the bloop?
Merlin: Go to the robot.
John: Well, see, now what I didn't realize about this podcast was that you were sending me things in real time that I could have gone and looked at and it would have increased my... We were having a multimedia experience where you were sending me things through Skype and I kept hearing things go boop and I would look at my computer and say... He figured it was your heart monitor.
John: I was like, what are you doing?
John: What are you trying to tell me?
John: Are you beeping at me for some reason?
Yeah.
John: And then later on, I would close all the windows out and then I would see all this metadata that you were sending me about the conversation we were having in real time.
John: And I was like, I am not utilizing the computer and I'm not utilizing my brain the way Merlin is.
John: Now I'm looking at a picture of you in 1987 in what I can only describe as... Let me just give it to you top to bottom.
John: Mullet.
Merlin: That's not a mullet.
Merlin: It's a mullet.
Merlin: It's much fuller on the sides than a mullet, John.
Merlin: Mustache.
Merlin: I would call it more like a filth helmet.
John: Here's what the description of a mullet is.
John: Does the hair... Is the hair in the front above the ear...
John: And I think we can say yes.
John: I see the ear.
John: Is the hair in the back touching the shirt?
John: Check.
John: Answer yes.
John: Hair in front above the ear, hair in back touching the shirt.
John: Mullins.
Merlin: Sticking up on top.
John: Well, see, that's the Merlin look, right?
John: You've got the porcupine.
John: I can't control that, John.
John: That's like making fun of my goiter.
John: You've got the mustache, which is great.
John: You've got the Merlin shit-eating grin.
John: But then the two things that really put this in 1987, because there's nothing in the background to indicate this is 1987, right?
John: This could be taken yesterday.
John: I think you can see Wang Chung if you look very carefully.
John: Two things that indicate this is 1987.
John: One, long-sleeved t-shirt.
John: which is long sleeve t-shirt that has some kind of like... Long sleeve concert shirt.
John: I'm guessing that that says... Life's Rich Pageant Tour.
John: Oh, wow.
John: Does it really?
John: Mm-hmm.
John: I was going to say it was like an OP t-shirt.
John: Oh, for the love of God.
John: Like a Dr. Zog sex wax.
Merlin: I was a lightning bolt man.
Merlin: And then... OP was for faggots.
John: The thing that knocks it out of the park is the jeans that have been bleached to a powder blue...
John: A powder blue that is lighter than the powder blue that ever appeared on the lightest powder blue Monte Carlo.
John: These jeans are the color of Montana sky.
John: They are completely uniformly almost white, but they started off life as blue jeans.
Merlin: For once you got it right, I think those were bought pre-faded, probably when I was in high school, a couple years earlier.
Merlin: No, actually, this is my first year.
Merlin: This will be my first year.
Merlin: And I think I did do something.
Merlin: Maybe I got some stuff at the county seat to make them extra light when you wash them.
Merlin: Can I just point out one thing?
Merlin: I know your eyes are not good.
Merlin: Something you might be missing if you weren't looking very carefully.
Merlin: I'm wearing a friendship bracelet I had woven.
John: Yeah, I wouldn't have seen that.
John: But there it is.
John: I see the little tail of it sticking out.
John: That's nice.
Merlin: You wove it?
Merlin: Oh, I made a bunch of them.
John: Sure.
John: But a friendship bracelet is something that someone weaves and then gives to you.
John: I didn't find that out until I moved away.
John: So you made them for yourself?
John: Yeah.
John: I also cook myself dinner a lot.
John: Well, it's very important at that age to be a friend to yourself.
Merlin: Happy birthday.
Merlin: No way.
Merlin: No, but there's actually, if you go there and somewhere over there in the, you'll see a tag over there that says Merlin with tragic facial hair as a tag on the flicker.
John: I don't think that that's tragic.
John: I think that it's, you know, it's a little bit Errol Flynn.
Merlin: I don't want to dwell on this too much because I know you've seen some of these, but I just want to refresh your memory on this one.
Merlin: This one I'm pretty proud of.
Merlin: I sent this one to Derek Bostrom, drummer of the Meat Puppets.
Merlin: Yep, yeah.
Merlin: Here I go.
John: I wish that the audience at home... I'm putting these in show notes.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
John: Right, you can listen to this and be clicking through.
John: Oh, my goodness.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Oh, wow.
John: It's in a YMCA in New York.
John: Holy moly.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, again, the genes have...
John: You walk through a bleach storm.
John: 2832.
John: The Meat Puppets t-shirt.
John: It's a great Meat Puppets t-shirt.
John: It's kind of almost Kurt Cobain-y facial hair here.
Merlin: Well, again, though, that's the same mustache.
Merlin: This is two years later, and I think that's the same mustache.
Merlin: You could see, for our listeners who aren't looking at home, it's kind of like if you ever did the project where you got the avocado and you stick the toothpicks in it and drop it in the water, and then your mom has to remind you that you have to put it the other way for the seed to work.
Merlin: You got to flip it over.
Merlin: I think that's what happened here.
John: I think my avocado was... You never did that?
John: Well, I always put the avocado in.
John: Nobody ever told me to flip it over.
Merlin: Oh, I think there's a wrong way, I think.
John: Oh, see, that explains everything.
John: I never was able to get those to grow.
Merlin: I had a meat puppet shirt.
Merlin: Oh, are you ready for this?
Merlin: Oh, this is how bad I was.
Merlin: Oh, I don't think I've ever admitted this.
Merlin: Should I admit this?
Merlin: Yeah, let's hear it.
Oh, my God.
Merlin: I'd only ever heard like two Husker Du songs, but I saw Pete Buck wearing a Husker Du shirt, so I bought one.
Merlin: I had a metal circus shirt before I even had, and then I had the cassette and I loved it.
Merlin: You were a young man.
Merlin: Well, I really, I liked R.E.M.
Merlin: so much that it was weird.
Merlin: The first, well, if you count Chronic Town, like the first four R.E.M.
Merlin: records, I want to come back to this because I think R.E.M.
Merlin: should be four bands.
Merlin: We should come back to this.
Merlin: But yeah, no, I had a bunch of SST shirts.
Merlin: I was a total poser, John.
Merlin: I was a terrible poser.
Merlin: I had a circle jerk shirt.
Merlin: I was a mess.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Complete poser.
John: I understand.
Merlin: Now, you were in Seattle at this point, right?
John: Almost.
John: I was still kind of... I was still bopping around.
Merlin: What do you do in Alaska?
Merlin: You got pictures of fucking igloos and pipes?
John: No, I wasn't in Alaska.
John: That was the era that I was sort of hitchhiking around America looking for my lost country.
Merlin: Oh, it's like that Bridge Over Trouble Water song.
John: A little bit.
John: It's, yeah, it was, I was influenced by the pretenders to go find America.
John: A city that was, to go find a river that was on fire.
John: Yeah.
John: And I went and looked around and it had, it was, it had been gone a long time.
John: And then two of you died from heroin.
John: There were just a few, there were just a few dregs left hanging on.
John: All came to look for America.
John: Spent a couple of years looking.
Merlin: Good for you.
Merlin: How'd that go?
Merlin: What'd you discover?
Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Stuckies, pretty good Stuckies, pecan logs.
John: You know, that was during the era that if you were driving a foreign car in certain parts of America, that people would try and run you off the road.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: I mean, there were some Rust Belt experiences that I don't think anyone would believe if I told them now.
Merlin: These kids do not know how real that was.
Merlin: These kids that do not... I'll tell you another thing that a lot of people don't know, and this sounds jokey, but we definitely got this in Florida.
Merlin: Uh, there were, I would say until fairly recently, a lot of people who, well, first of all, tons of people who would not buy a car made in the U S I think we can kind of get why they did that.
Merlin: But have you not known older people who would not buy a Japanese car and would definitely not buy a German car?
John: Oh, and do I know them?
John: I mean, I've... I mean, not because BMWs are for douchebags.
John: They stood toe-to-toe with me and screamed at me for riding in an Audi.
John: Right.
John: Yeah, that was real stuff.
John: That was, you know...
John: Those were the times.
Merlin: I wonder how they ever got the Volks.
Merlin: I mean, there's a great commercial, whoever, Sachi and Sachi, whoever did.
Merlin: I forget who did.
Merlin: But there was that famous, you know, ad campaign when they launched the bug.
Merlin: But, you know, that was a Nazi car.
Merlin: It was a good Nazi car, the bug.
John: 1936, right?
John: The original design was...
John: It was a Czech car.
John: The first rear-engined, air-cooled little people's car.
John: It was made by...
John: Well, it was made in the Czech Republic and then the Germans stole it.
John: Ferdinand Porsche ripped it off.
John: Are you still there?
Merlin: I am.
Merlin: No, I'm listening.
Merlin: No, I'm just imagining tanks rolling into the Czechoslovakian factory.
John: Oh, no, this is before they stole it during peacetime.
John: It was intellectual theft rather than actual Nazi we're stealing your art theft.
Merlin: They covered the waterfront.
John: There was a lawsuit before the war.
John: The Czech car makers actually sued Ferdinand Porsche for stealing their design.
John: And then Germany invaded Czechoslovakia.
John: And wow, the lawsuit just went away.
John: So, but anyway, you're right.
John: It was hard to find a lawyer.
John: It was really hard to find a lawyer to try that case at the time.
John: We should probably move on.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I never had good luck with girls.
Merlin: Oh, we're back to that.
Merlin: Well, let me ask this.
Merlin: No, you know what?
Merlin: We should drop that.
Merlin: It's just such a legacy of pain.
Merlin: And even when it did work out, it didn't work out.
Merlin: I don't know what the fuck I was thinking the whole time.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: I could have been good in school.
Merlin: I think I could.
Merlin: I got really good grades up until like the eighth grade.
Merlin: You know, whatever.
Merlin: I had like straight A's until I was in like eighth grade.
Merlin: I went to Florida.
Merlin: They put me in consumer math.
Merlin: And then girls were wearing very tight pants.
Merlin: And there was already a speed wagon.
Merlin: It was very confusing.
John: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: And I don't think I adapted well to that.
Merlin: I don't think I've ever come out of it.
John: I don't think you could have done well in school, Merlin.
John: I think that you are a special breed of person who needed a mentor.
John: You should have had an adult male who took you.
John: Like a scoutmaster.
John: Yeah, a scoutmaster who showed you the way.
John: And unfortunately now, as a nation, we're so panicky about pedophiles that we don't let scoutmasters take young, impressionable men and show them the way.
John: And it's unfortunate because there are some... There are some good scoutmasters, though.
John: There are some of us who just needed a scoutmaster, and I'm certainly one.
John: Although I don't think I needed a scoutmaster as much as what I needed was a graduate student.
John: who was good at sports.
Merlin: I just would like to note for the record, I'm going to put this on a card, that I want to appreciate that you have toned that down because I believe your exact quote for me, as early as I want to say 2004, repeated several times over the years was that actually what I need is, quote, a really good ass-kicking.
Merlin: I think you said it.
Merlin: Now, what's funny is at the time, because I don't have a strong father figure in my life, I think I thought you were saying a mean thing.
Merlin: But now I realize you were trying to help me.
Merlin: And I don't think you were necessarily offering to do it unless I kept talking.
Merlin: But it was clear.
Merlin: I think you said – you should say it in your own words because you probably remember.
Merlin: But it was something along the lines of there's nothing wrong with you that could not be solved.
Merlin: And it might have been a couple good-ass kickings.
Merlin: It might have been something where there had to be some follow-up, like a second visit.
John: See, the thing is, when I first met you, you were much more sensitive than you are now.
Merlin: No, I wasn't.
John: Yes, I think you were.
John: I think the internet has cauterized you a little bit.
John: You know, I would say things like, Merlin, somebody should have kicked your ass a long time ago, and it's not too late.
John: You would get a look on your face like I had pulled out a nose hair or something.
John: You would get this terrible look on your face like I'd said something mean.
Merlin: Well, John, you're like a...
Merlin: Gosh, I was going to say an incontinent Mastiff, but probably like four incontinent Mastiffs.
Merlin: There's going to be a breaking in period, right?
Merlin: You're going to have to move some things in the house.
Merlin: You're going to have to make some arrangements for the rugs.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: And I think for a while, people are going to be a little bit scared about the giant fucking dogs.
John: Move your little crystal figurines up to a higher shelf.
Merlin: I think the reason our relationship, if I may say, continues to grow and thrive is that I've... Yes?
Merlin: Is that you have made some accommodations.
Yeah.
Merlin: Well, yes.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Yes.
John: And today, I would just say, fail.
John: No.
John: But the thing is, I don't think one ass kicking would be sufficient.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: That would just scare me, but it wouldn't sink in.
John: You need the first ass kicking.
Merlin: I go into shock.
John: I go into shock, and I miss a lot.
John: You're going to curl up in the corner, holding your knees, and saying, why, why, why?
John: And it's only the second ass kicking where it would really...
John: where you would really get the information that you need.
Merlin: What if it turned out, what if it turned out I was like, uh, like Paul Newman and cool hand Luke, right?
Merlin: What if it turned out that the more you did to me, the tougher I ended up being, you knocked me down your drag line.
Merlin: You say, don't get up.
Merlin: And then I get up and hit me again.
Merlin: I keep getting up.
Merlin: I think it's exactly like that, except I wouldn't get up.
Merlin: Maybe.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: You wouldn't get up.
Merlin: And Paul Newman ends up dead in that movie.
Merlin: And that's, he, they don't know that for sure.
John: Do you?
John: I think that's a good movie.
John: They put him in the car and I don't think they get to get him to the hospital.
John: So you like that movie?
John: No, I've never seen that movie.
Merlin: I'm just, Oh man, I saw the guys at REM wearing a cool hand Luke t-shirt and Diane, Diane, Diane.
Merlin: We're ever into Husker do it all.
Merlin: Not really.
Merlin: That's not your cup of tea.
John: No, here's the thing with Husker Du and the Minutemen and the Meat Puppets.
John: You know, that's my era, right?
John: I was right there for all of that.
John: And I just didn't... It did not connect with me.
Merlin: Nor Dinosaur.
Merlin: I hear you slagging Dinosaur.
Merlin: You're shitting me.
John: Dinosaur Jr.?
John: And here's the problem...
John: I want to hear a pop vocal.
John: Oh, come on.
John: Dinosaur Jr.?
John: He sounds like he's trying to drown himself in a toilet.
Merlin: You're telling me.
Merlin: You're telling... Oh, boy.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: I'm going to put this on a card.
Merlin: It's going to be the things we don't talk about.
Merlin: It's going to go on the SST bands.
Merlin: SST bands.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Well, first of all, first of all... Never mind the bollocks.
John: Because it's got a... It's fine.
Merlin: It's got a vocal.
Merlin: Well, you know, the thing is, the thing people remember about it was all the Malcolm McDowell.
Merlin: What's his name?
Merlin: Malcolm Roddy McDowell.
Merlin: Randy Rowdy Piper was their manager, right?
Merlin: Malcolm Gladwell.
Merlin: Malcolm Gladwell managed them.
Merlin: Nobody remembers that.
John: That's all.
John: I disagree.
John: That's some retroactive.
John: That's like all the people in 1994 saying how punk they were in 1986.
John: Yeah.
John: I was around in 1986 and nobody was fucking punk.
John: Yeah.
John: You could count the punks on two hands in any city.
Merlin: And you didn't like them.
John: They were unlikable.
Merlin: The punks were unlikable then.
John: They were turds.
John: Yeah.
John: But in 1994, oh my God, everybody had a picture of how punk they were.
John: And it was usually a picture that they had taken.
John: It was a picture of them at Halloween dressed as a punk.
John: And they took the picture and they took a Sharpie and they Sharpied out the people on either side of them dressed like Batman and dressed like...
John: I'm Herb from Burger King.
John: And the sharpie on the picture just made it look more punk.
John: And then they thumbtacked it up on their wall, and it's them with a shaving cream mustache.
John: Or, I mean, a shaving cream mohawk, right?
John: They put a bunch of shaving cream in their hair and made their hair into a mohawk.
John: And they're like, I was so punk in 1985.
John: I used to get my ass kicked all the time.
John: And it was a collective conspiracy of the youth of America to rewrite history
John: There were no punks in 1986.
John: I mean, unless you lived in Baltimore, which I didn't.
John: Or in Quincy.
John: There were 30 punks in America, 30 punks.
Merlin: I think your numbers are extremely wrong, but it's a very interesting point.
John: 300 punks nationwide, coast to coast.
Merlin: We had something on our high school called Punk Rock Day as part of Homecoming, and I will find a picture.
Merlin: I think I might have actually posted one of them here.
Merlin: Let me see if I can find it.
Merlin: No, God, no.
Merlin: See, I want to come back to this, John, because there's a more salient point.
Merlin: Salient point, how do you say it?
John: You don't say it.
John: There is a more salient point.
John: You don't like salient.
John: No, I wouldn't say salient.
John: I would say salient.
John: That's troubling.
John: I say Sasquatch, and everyone corrects me and says it's pronounced Sasquatch.
John: That's like pajamas.
John: I've been living in Washington for many, many years.
John: I grew up in the Northwest.
John: I say Sasquatch, and I believe that that is how it should be pronounced.
John: Whether that is the pronunciation or not, I cannot say, but I think that's how it should be pronounced.
John: Oh yeah, Punk Rock Day.
John: What do you think of that?
John: It's three cheerleaders.
John: What are they wearing?
John: What are they wearing?
John: They're wearing garbage bags.
Merlin: They're wearing garbage bags and skinny ties.
Merlin: Garbage bags and skinny ties.
Merlin: Yeah, but what about the hair?
Merlin: One girl's got her hair on the side a little bit.
John: That's pretty punk, right?
John: She's got the side ponytail.
John: The middle girl has a headband and she has girl jeans.
John: With a skinny belt.
John: For you young people who weren't wearing pants in the 80s.
Merlin: I wish.
Merlin: I wish there'd been more girls not wearing pants in the 80s.
Merlin: Where blue jeans...
Merlin: But cut for a woman's figure.
Merlin: Oh, you're talking about like the Tina Fey style mom jeans.
John: Yeah, they were very high-waisted.
John: They made your ass look like a pear that had been sitting in a pole.
Merlin: The pleats, John.
Merlin: The pleats.
Merlin: The pleats were terrible.
Merlin: Everything had pleats.
Yeah.
John: And then the girl on the left has got some... She's got her dad's sunglasses on.
John: And it looks like a chain belt around her garbage bag.
John: Probably from a Goodwill.
John: See?
John: 1983.
John: I mean, I was there.
John: You would throw some Vans on that and a painter's cap.
John: Yeah.
John: But in terms of people who are actually punk rock, who are actually practicing punk rock as a lifestyle, as a belief system...
John: I'm afraid that the numbers have been incredibly inflated over the years.
John: And this is the problem with the Sex Pistols story.
John: At the time, nobody knew that the Sex Pistols were a hoax.
John: That's all retroactive over-smartness.
John: Everybody's like, oh, I knew Rob Halford was gay.
John: I knew he was gay the whole time.
John: No, you did not.
John: Nobody knew Rob Halford was gay.
Merlin: We talked ourselves out of a lot of things.
Merlin: We should have known, John, don't you think?
John: Well, there was so much we should have known.
Merlin: The Green Manalishi era?
Merlin: I mean, like, wow.
John: We don't talk about what we should have known.
John: We should have known that the Russians weren't a threat and that there was never going to... I mean, think about... My entire life was preparing... My entire youth... Nuclear war?
Merlin: We prepared for a nuclear war.
Merlin: That was my single biggest fear.
Merlin: I was terrified.
Merlin: Yeah, and it never happened.
Merlin: Do you remember that, though?
Merlin: The day after and all that, man, I was reading books about it, and I knew there was no chance.
Merlin: I knew.
Merlin: The best I could hope for was going to be to die slowly from burns.
Merlin: Because no matter where you were, they'd show you those maps with the concentric circles.
Merlin: If you're in Chicago, don't worry about it.
Merlin: You're good and dead.
Merlin: Sure, you're vaporized.
Merlin: Maybe not Chicago, but somewhere like if you're near Fort Bragg or whatever.
Merlin: Game over.
Merlin: Don't worry about it.
Merlin: San Diego, you're vaporized.
Yeah.
Merlin: You're right.
Merlin: You're totally right.
Merlin: I think, okay, now I know this is a joke that already Spoon has made in a song, but did you ever see the Quincy Punk episode?
Merlin: Have you ever seen that?
Merlin: I have seen the Quincy Punk.
Merlin: It's pretty famous, pretty hilarious.
Merlin: I wish there was some kind of a mind map diagram for this, because in my head, you've got Nicolas Cage in Valley Girl.
Merlin: You've got the Quincy Punk episode.
Merlin: You've got Fast Times at Ridgemont High, maybe a little bit.
John: Well, but the real key to understanding this era is the punk rock guys that appear in every Charles Bronson movie.
Merlin: Oh, right.
John: Right, where Charles Bronson is walking across a parking garage at night.
Merlin: Literal punks, literal punks.
John: Suddenly you hear somebody go, and then a chill goes up the back of your neck.
Merlin: What about the Baseball Furies?
Merlin: Were there punks in the Warriors?
Merlin: They were kind of like punks.
Merlin: They were kind of like mime, Rocky Horror Picture punks.
Merlin: Remember the Baseball Furies?
Merlin: The guys that dressed in mime and they looked like the Yankees?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: That wouldn't count.
John: Well, I mean, it's a little glam.
Merlin: I have a canonical example here, if I can find it on the YouTube.
John: Do you remember the stage band?
John: You know, these pictures are really, really great.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Everybody has the...
John: Everybody in this picture has their hair parted right down the middle.
John: Straight down.
John: Where it was like, what was that kind of bread where they advertised it that they had butter?
John: Oh, like the butter split top bread.
John: Butter top bread.
John: Sure.
John: And everybody's hair looks like a loaf of butter top bread.
Merlin: You know that guitar cost almost $150 new.
Merlin: Sleeveless shirt.
Merlin: What is that, a Squire strap?
Merlin: Mouse over.
Merlin: It's a Simar.
Merlin: It's a Simar.
Merlin: It's sort of like how Eddie Van Halen turned his Explorer into a fake V. This kind of looked like that, but worse.
Merlin: Oh, I see what you're saying.
Merlin: It's not a mess.
Merlin: It's not a mess.
Merlin: I'm going to send you something on YouTube.
Merlin: You can watch it if you want, but you don't have to.
Merlin: But you get the idea.
Merlin: I'm not going to do it right now.
John: This amount of multimedia is already exploding in my mind.
John: You should get your assistant.
Merlin: There's a scene in Terminator, first Terminator movie, when Schwarzenegger lands, and he's still naked, and he gets menaced by punks.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Do you remember who the head punk was?
Merlin: no bill paxton no yeah bill paxton you know has anybody ever pointed out the the resemblance between you and bill paxton no i'm sorry i've hit a nerve no not till now oh my god i always get bill paxton confused with the other guy who's the other guy no he's the guy who's the guy who's the guy in dumb and dumber
Merlin: There was one guy who looks like me in Dumb and Dumber.
Merlin: There was the other guy, Bill Paxton and Jeff Daniels.
Merlin: No, that's not who I'm thinking of.
Merlin: Bill Paxton.
Merlin: Oh, Jeff Daniels.
Merlin: Jeff Daniels.
Merlin: He's pretty good.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: So my point being, John, you're absolutely correct.
Merlin: I want to say Terminator.
Merlin: I want to say 1984.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: When was Terminator?
John: I'd say 84.
John: That's where he gets the cool leather jacket that he wears for the rest of the film.
John: Yes.
John: Right?
John: He kills the punk rocker.
Merlin: Terminator, a 1984 film by James Cameron before he got all full of himself.
Merlin: Boy, that guy.
Merlin: That guy gets sick, grinds my gears, that guy.
John: I love this mugshot of you taken at the Sarasota Police Department.
John: You like that one?
John: You know, I tried to get the mugshot taken of me by the Boulder County Sheriff's Department.
Merlin: They wouldn't give it to you?
John: Similar era.
John: And here's what they said.
John: We had a fire and it burned down the courthouse and all of our records were lost.
John: Oh, I believe that.
John: And I said, come on.
John: That's some kind of like, you want to make me believe in black helicopters?
John: Give me a story like that.
Merlin: I've had other people, other friends of mine went to the same police station.
Merlin: You don't have to comment on these.
Merlin: I'm just sending them to you for fun.
Merlin: Some of my friends that went to try and do the same thing, they said, no way.
Merlin: I went in there and they gave me two copies.
Merlin: Gratis, free of charge, walked out with my mug shots.
Merlin: I have a tie-dye t-shirt and a cold sore.
Merlin: And I got that hair that you call a mullet in that.
Merlin: I wanted to come back to something here.
John: I wish I could find my mug shots.
John: Have you been arrested?
John: Have I been arrested?
Merlin: John, here's the thing.
Merlin: I don't want to talk about this publicly, but there's an implied third rail.
Merlin: There's some things I never ask you about that I always wanted to ask you about.
Merlin: So maybe in the future I will ask you about them.
Merlin: There are many things.
Merlin: There are many things I would love to ask you about.
Merlin: Not because I'm scared and not because I think you're scared to talk about it, but there are many things that you don't talk about much anymore that I'm very interested in.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: You told me about your teeth one day and I almost fell off my chair.
John: Yeah, that's a terrible story.
Merlin: That's a terrible story, but these are great stories, and this is why you're Charles Nelson Reilly.
Merlin: You should be on shows talking about this.
John: Charles Nelson Reilly is 4'11".
John: I think he passed.
John: Charles Nelson Reilly was 4'11".
John: Mm-hmm.
John: He has a pretty big glasses, just for what it's worth.
John: He did.
John: I mean, he was obviously a polymath, but your constant comparison to me, it's like when people compare me to Bruce Valanche.
John: I'm like, OK, Bruce Valanche is a very funny man.
John: I appreciate that.
John: I appreciate if you mean that as a compliment.
John: But Bruce Valanche is a he has.
Merlin: He's a troll.
Merlin: He looks like a troll.
John: He looks like a pile of ectoplasm with a with like an Emo Phillips wig on.
John: Don't compare me to Bruce Flanch.
John: And I have to say the same about Charles Nelson Reilly.
John: You want to compare me to somebody like... I mean, if you want to compare me to Paul Newman... This is exactly the kind of thing Charles Nelson Reilly used to do.
Merlin: He was forever correcting people on who he should be compared to.
Merlin: He did not like being compared to Clifton Webb because he thought Clifton Webb seemed a little gay.
Merlin: Now, Bruce Flanch, it's sort of like a gay mushroom and a gay troll had gay sex, and Bruce Flanch came out and he had a funny shirt.
Merlin: I heard you don't mess with that guy.
Merlin: That's what I hear.
Merlin: Bruce Valanche?
Merlin: Yeah, who is it?
Merlin: I make fun of him in a song.
Merlin: Oh, was it Bruce Valanche?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: LCD and sound system guy got in a fight with, oh, Michael Musto.
Merlin: The gay don't like being made fun of.
Merlin: Did you know that?
John: Well, some.
Merlin: That's a good record.
John: But you know, the gays are like normal people.
John: Some of them have a sense of humor and some of them are a little shrill.
John: That's not funny.
John: Well, some gays would think it was funny.
John: Other gays would get all meh about it.
John: Closeted, laughed nervously.
John: The thing about Bruce Valanche is that he has so much... He's shaped like a traffic cone.
John: And he has so much... There's so much extra flesh around his neck.
John: I get the feeling looking at him that if a gust of wind came up, that his neck fat would slap him in the face.
John: More than George Lucas.
John: Well, see, George Lucas, what George Lucas has is that he has no face architecture.
Merlin: Oh, if he didn't have that beard, you're saying that, oh, my God, I'm sorry to interrupt you.
Merlin: What I just realized, you just made me realize, he has, if he, it would go straight dewlap to mouth, there would be no... Yeah, from the bottom of his nose to his Adam's apple, there's nothing there but a mouth.
John: He would literally look like Jabba the Hutt.
John: Just sort of floating in a neck space.
Right.
John: And he makes the category error of thinking that you can... This is the Andrew Dice clay error, which is as your face falls apart, you delineate where the face once was by cutting your beard in more and more angular shapes.
John: And it absolutely doesn't work.
John: What you need to do as your face falls apart is just let your beard grow into a huge bushy thing and then nobody can see what's underneath it.
Merlin: That's self-awareness.
Merlin: It's like, what, you're going to run toward Ty Cobb after he hits the ball?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: You follow the ball, not the batter, right?
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Be the ball.
Merlin: See the ball.
Merlin: Be the ball.
Merlin: Be the ball, Danny.
John: Do laugh.
John: You do not want to try and fool people into thinking you have a face by cutting your beard into like a helmet strap.
Merlin: that's what george lucas looks like he's wearing a hair helmet that's held on with a beard strap but you know the way he yes and he knows enough about all of that stuff he has ruined enough movies he's killed enough faces look carrie fisher carrie fisher beautiful woman looks like bozo the clown in the first star wars movie beautiful woman he knows what a face should look like theoretically he has people that could give him photos and maybe some notes he he literally every day he makes a decision to have his dewlap stick out from underneath his beard
Merlin: If you saw him from the side, he would look like a buffo marinus.
Merlin: He would be a large South American marine frog.
John: This is Paul Allen's problem, too.
John: That's one.
John: It's one of Paul Allen's problems.
John: They're rich enough that they surround themselves with people who agree with them.
John: Now, this is not a... I'm not telling you anything you don't know.
John: But it's not just that they surround themselves with people who agree with them.
John: They completely exclude...
John: Anyone who even raises their eyebrow, even the suggestion of somebody who might say, hey, that tie is, I don't know.
John: That guy is out.
John: Like he is out.
John: He comes to the next door and his security card won't work anymore.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like he can't even use the restroom.
John: There's already a security guard standing there with a milk crate with his desk contents and he's escorted out of the building.
Merlin: You're talking about Paul Allen specifically as an analogous thing for George Lucas.
John: You look at Paul Allen and you go, Paul, you're like the fifth richest man in the world.
John: Why are you, first of all, why are you wearing putty-colored dockers?
John: And second of all, I mean, really?
John: The Portland Trailblazers?
John: But third of all, it just seems like, you know, do you know how many librarians Paul Allen has on staff?
John: Paul Allen employs like nine people just to be his librarians.
John: Does he know any dental hygienists?
John: My Christ.
John: Are you looking at a picture of him right now?
Merlin: I mean, I know.
Merlin: You know, I live in Seattle.
Merlin: I used to drink coffee and used to smoke.
Merlin: So I understand teeth stains, but my goodness me.
Merlin: That's yellow teeth.
Merlin: He looks like he's from Yorkshire.
Merlin: Not in a good way.
John: I have to stop talking about Paul Allen because the power is going to go off in my house here in a second.
John: And then...
John: Black helicopters.
Merlin: You're going to wake up with an amp's head in your bed.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: That's kind of funny if you really think about it for a second.
John: You wake up with a fender.
Merlin: Yeah, instead of a horse's head.
Merlin: Pro-reaver head.
Merlin: Now I'm explaining my own jokes.
Merlin: That's pretty good.
Merlin: I want to talk to you about amps, too.
Merlin: That's on my list.
Merlin: I got a lot of stuff on the list.
Merlin: I'll talk about amps.
Merlin: Oh, gosh.
Merlin: I'll say I'll talk about amps.
Merlin: Well, we should close a couple threads here, but I want to just keep in mind there's a lot of things I want to talk about.
Merlin: Okay, so we got Paul Allen.
Merlin: Did you get the thing with the Lucas picture?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: See, now, if George Lucas grew, if he just let his neck hair grow, then you would think, wow, what a lustrous beard.
John: And you wouldn't realize that it wasn't a beard, that it was all flesh, and it just had a coating of hair on it.
Merlin: Not to make this all about you, but I'm thinking, I'm going to look this up.
Merlin: I think you, in that December's video, and I don't know if you professionally curled your beard.
Merlin: Whoa, handsome pictures.
Merlin: No, that's just how it came.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: That's just what your beard was doing then?
John: That's just what it would do.
John: If I let my beard grow for six months, that's what it would do.
Merlin: So that's six months of beard for you?
John: Well, six months where I don't do anything, where I don't trim it.
Merlin: 2005.
Merlin: My gosh.
Merlin: Look at that guy.
Merlin: Okay, I'm going to put this in the notes.
Merlin: See, I'm thinking if George Lucas grew a beard like that, right?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: As you know, John, I am not an architect, but my thinking is this disguises a lot of the problems.
Merlin: It gives his face a shape, which is nice.
Merlin: He doesn't have that.
John: Right.
Merlin: There's no CGI for faces yet.
Right.
Merlin: But it also conceals the fact that there's a big thing under there.
Merlin: They don't know what could be under there.
Merlin: It could be like an unnecessary rat in Mos Eisley.
Merlin: You never know.
John: The thing about George Lucas's face is he has a nice face.
John: It's just that it's sitting on top of a beanbag chair.
John: It's a face that's sitting on, that's sitting on like, you know, remember those, remember those ashtrays that were, that had a bean bag that you were supposed to like use when you were driving to work in your Jeep Cherokee or in bed.
John: His face looks like, like a nice face sitting in a bean bag ashtray.
Merlin: He was actually... I'm trying to find an old one.
Merlin: He was actually super cool looking back in the day.
John: When he was young?
John: Oh, yeah, but we were all super cool looking when he accepted.
Merlin: I'm just saying, like, given the Delta, like, this is a guy...
Merlin: I'm sending you one of, this is a horrible show.
Merlin: This is Merlin sending John pictures from the internet.
John: I'm sorry I ever figured out that I could look at these pictures.
John: No, I'm going to put them all in show notes because this is an important point.
John: But a lot of people listen to this podcast on their iPods while they're driving in their cars and they're going to be like, I can't see these pictures.
John: This is annoying.
John: There's an important point to be made here.
Merlin: Now, I've been accused by many of my – well, by the people, two or three people I know, that I talk too much about Star Wars in grocery stores.
Merlin: So I'm going to stop except to say – I'm going to quote my friend – another one of my friends named John who says –
Merlin: Yeah, he's quoting somebody from Twitter here, but somebody saying that that basically Star Wars has become for George Lucas what Joan Rivers's face is for Joan Rivers.
Merlin: And that makes I thought that was brilliant to begin with.
Merlin: Because why?
Merlin: Because you can't you can't see that these changes are not helping.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You can't stop fucking with it.
Merlin: And it's not helping.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And nobody around you is going, you know what?
Merlin: Knock that off.
John: Right.
John: You should turn your creativity towards something outside of yourself.
Merlin: I think George Lucas may have the same problem with his head.
Merlin: He's got his blindness.
Merlin: He's got Doolap blindness.
John: He does.
John: He does.
John: And we all develop blindnesses about ourselves.
John: I mean, I'm sure when I look in the mirror, I see... I have a kind of...
John: dysmorphia I think this is a common problem for people who aren't billionaires who aren't surrounded by yes men we develop a dysmorphic view of ourselves where we look in the mirror like for instance I look in the mirror and I say I am fat and dysmorphic how
John: I am fat.
John: And although at one level, yes, I am.
John: I think the word that Sears would use is husky.
John: Sears would call me husky.
John: I am a largely, but I'm a large, I have a large frame.
John: I would say you're big and tall.
John: I'm big and tall.
John: But really, I'm not fat.
John: You don't waddle.
John: You're very dignified.
John: Thank you.
John: That's nice of you to say.
John: You carry yourself well, John.
John: I'm high weight proportionate.
John: I mean, I'm a big man.
John: Let's not go nuts.
John: High weight proportionate.
John: You wouldn't say I was HWP?
John: If you were writing a personal ad for me and you didn't want to lie, you wouldn't say HWP?
Merlin: Let's see.
Merlin: Would you say Husky?
Merlin: SWM.
John: Single white male.
Merlin: Is that correct?
Merlin: Single?
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: You're male, right?
Merlin: SWM.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: More of me to love.
Merlin: basement full of eyeglasses, kid, and flatulence problems.
Merlin: Be my dream date?
Merlin: Not a problem.
John: No, it's an opportunity stack.
John: That's right.
John: It's a flatulence opportunity.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: There are people who are into it.
Merlin: I...
Merlin: Oh, there's so many threads to close here.
Merlin: I saw the... Let's come back to this.
Merlin: I saw the... You know what?
Merlin: Never mind.
Merlin: Never mind.
Merlin: Never mind.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: You saw the what?
Merlin: I saw the movie Bridesmaids.
Merlin: I saw the first third of it, and I was prepared for it to be really dumb, but I liked some of the people in it, and I watched it.
Merlin: The first third I've seen, it's one of the funniest movies I've seen in a very long time.
Merlin: It's extremely funny.
Merlin: The first third of it?
Merlin: Well, I had to go to bed.
Merlin: I'm kind of getting older now.
Merlin: Okay, yeah.
Merlin: And the entire time...
Merlin: You can veto any part of this if you want.
Merlin: The whole time, all I could think to myself was... Okay, and the lead is that Kirsten Vig, is that her name?
Merlin: You know, the wonderful, hilarious woman from Saturday Night Live?
Merlin: She's the star, and she's this just fantastic character.
Merlin: But the whole time, anytime I watch anything involving single people, I just say to myself, you know what?
Merlin: A, I'm very happy to be in a good relationship with a good person.
Merlin: But B, I just couldn't stand...
Merlin: having to deal with that, like not being in a relationship and then wanting a relationship and going through all of that stuff.
Merlin: The really singles ads, I just, not for other people.
Merlin: That works for some people.
Merlin: For me, I can't imagine how that could possibly turn out well.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It's all self-reporting.
Merlin: The other people should have to write those ads for you.
John: Well, yeah, but I mean, if you had somebody that was close enough to you that could write a useful singles ad about you, you wouldn't be single.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, I think of it this way.
Merlin: I don't know if you guys, I imagine you guys have the car smogging thing up there.
Merlin: You got to get your car smogged, right?
Merlin: Yeah, we have that.
Merlin: Well, there's like, you know, you go in, there's like, there's places, you know, that will check your smogging, other places will fix your smogging.
Merlin: Again, it's like the Dead Kennedy song, you know, Trust Your Mechanic, right?
Merlin: You want to get a second opinion before you get an operation, you know, especially if it's some elective thing, right?
Merlin: I'm just saying, to keep things above board,
Merlin: There should be you that identifies the need for that ad, right?
Merlin: At the end of the value chain, there should be somebody who puts the ad into some kind of medium.
Merlin: And in between, there should be one or more people, possibly a review board.
Merlin: Well, here's the problem.
Merlin: That vets it for facets and completion.
John: Here's the problem with this theory.
John: The first problem is when you're talking about the girls, somehow along the way,
John: in America at least, the definition of an adult female relationship has become that your female friend, if you are a woman, your best female friends need to be 100% supportive of you.
John: This is now somehow has become the definition of female friendship in America.
John: so that no matter how reprehensible you are as a person, your best female friends can only say to you, girl, you, oh, you rule.
John: You know what?
John: He's not making you a priority, girl.
John: You are the, oh, girl.
John: Your girlfriends can only pump you up.
Merlin: Not to interrupt you, but they say that.
Merlin: The most important part is that they consistently stay on brand.
Merlin: It's like they might even not 100% believe that, right?
John: They don't believe it at all, but they have to stay on brand because that's the definition of friendship.
John: If a woman says to another woman now, you know what?
John: Actually, in this situation, I think maybe you...
John: Dot, dot, dot.
John: You put an ellipsis there and the friendship is over.
John: The girl is like, oh my God, I can't believe it.
John: She was trying to tell me how to live.
John: The definition of female friendship has become completely perverted.
John: You think it's a rubber stamp?
John: It's a rubber stamp.
John: It's absolutely, your friends are just a proxy for your own fucking problems now.
John: So if you had your, in a female situation, the girlfriends would write an even more ridiculously like fantastical definition of their friends because they wouldn't, there's no way one woman would say about another woman, oh, you know, there's more of her to love.
John: Are you kidding me?
John: The flamethrowers would come out.
John: And in the case of the guys, I mean, one guy writes a personal ad for another guy.
John: First of all, that would never happen.
John: But if he was forced to, it would be like, yeah, I mean, he's a dude or whatever.
John: He's, I guess, okay.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: It would be single white male, fine, or whatever, I guess.
Merlin: I'm not gay.
John: Single dude wants a chick.
John: Be cool.
John: Solid bro.
John: Yeah, don't be a bitch.
John: That's it, I guess.
John: Have nice parts.
Merlin: So you're saying if this system was going to work, if the review board system were going to work, you would have to have, really, preferably impartial third parties.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: What you need is a tribunal.
John: What you need is a panel.
John: Of six people who write the personal ads for everyone.
John: A Torquemada type situation.
John: Exactly.
John: So you submit your online profile.
Merlin: You stand accused of being single.
Merlin: Police approach the bench.
Merlin: They do a little bit of research on you.
Merlin: They look at your Facebook pictures.
Merlin: Oh, shit.
Merlin: A little bit of research.
Merlin: I think in the Inquisition, they would have gone to town on that shit.
Merlin: They'd take stuff out of your house.
John: There's millions of people writing personal ads.
John: There's only six people on the tribunal.
John: They need to get through these pretty fast.
Merlin: John, you're a single person telling the world that you're alone.
Merlin: I think that is worth having your house invaded by monks.
Merlin: If they're going to come in, they're very thorough, right?
Merlin: And the thing is, they're probably not going to harm you unless you've got it coming.
Merlin: But they're going to go through all your stuff.
Merlin: They're going to go through your past.
Merlin: Certainly, yes, they're going to suck down your Facebook page, right?
Merlin: And now how many people?
Merlin: Are you thinking three or four?
Merlin: Is it all men?
Merlin: Who's on the tribunal?
Right.
John: No, no, no.
John: It has to be men and women.
John: I think, again, I hate to keep referencing 4chan, but I think this is what 4chan is for.
John: People have been asking, what the hell is 4chan for?
John: I think 4chan is the tribunal that should be writing personal ads for single people because those people are merciless and they know how to find your pictures on Flickr.
John: You know what I mean?
John: I don't care how many levels of security you have.
John: on your internet photos.
John: If you have taken a photo and put it on the internet anywhere, 4chan will find it.
John: Yeah, they're behind seven proxies.
John: They're behind seven proxies.
John: They will find it.
John: They will Photoshop some semen on your face, and then they will write a personal ad for you.
Merlin: There's an open source app you can get called, Semen Shop.
Merlin: Semen Shop?
John: That's an app?
John: It's on the new iPhone 5?
John: It's costly and very hard to update.
John: $2.99.
John: Semen Shop.
Merlin: But I swear to you, that would... You're saying that in addition to not being afraid to give a very honest opinion, they will come in and give you an extremely honest opinion.
Merlin: Maybe honest to the point of being a little bit made up, but that's what you're facing.
Merlin: If you're going to be on a Craigslist, if you're going to be in a Bay Area guardian next to a pod ad and a handjob ad, that's your competition.
Merlin: You need to have something in there that's going to say this has the seal of approval from the monks.
Merlin: We know that this is exactly how fucked up you can expect this person to be.
John: Except the problem with that is that all relationships are based on lies.
Merlin: Why shouldn't they be based on lies from the very get-go?
Merlin: Well, you say that like it's a bad thing, John.
Merlin: But I think at least you could do something.
Merlin: Now, for example, you got the US EPA.
Merlin: People don't love the US EPA.
Merlin: They say nickel is a known carcinogen, right?
Merlin: So they put in a level of safety of like a 10X or 100X, depending on how dangerous they think it could be based on the weight of evidence, right?
Merlin: They say, hey, look, we're probably being safer than we need to be
Merlin: But we don't want you pulling coins out of your pocket and dying from cancer.
Merlin: So we're going to keep that in line.
Merlin: I think that's what we do here.
Merlin: We have a margin of error based on weight of evidence.
Merlin: And if it's clear you may be way more fucking bananas than we can even see from this tribunal, we may add an order of magnitude to that.
Merlin: And I think that's reflected in the ad.
Merlin: That's always going to be true.
Merlin: I think it'll say so right there.
Merlin: Maybe there's, I don't know, a little bat for your bat shit crazy or something.
Merlin: There's something there that gives people a quick indication.
Merlin: It's the equivalent of, you can't see what I'm doing right here, but imagine me holding my left hand up vertically and then making an eee face while I point at my hand like the other person can't see it.
John: Oh, I see.
John: Yeah.
John: Thank you so much for describing that.
Merlin: I think it could...
Merlin: I think it could help a lot of people, including the people who are placing the ads.
John: But here's the thing.
John: You show up for a date from somebody that you met on an internet dating service, and it turns out that that person is 75 pounds heavier than the heaviest picture that they put on their profile.
John: Just in the part they photographed.
Merlin: You might have 75 extra pounds of face.
John: They put a picture of themselves from when they were 15, and now they're 40, and they're 80 pounds heavier.
John: Excuse me, miss, is that a daguerreotype?
John: But the thing is, most of the people showing up on that date have also lied.
John: They're also fatter than the fattest picture on their profile.
John: And in some cases, it only takes them a second to readjust their filters so that they no longer, you know, they reevaluate so that all of a sudden maybe they've found their perfect mate.
John: Whereas if they had read the profile and the profile had been ruthlessly true, they never would have made the trip because in their own mind, they're much better looking and much svelter than they actually are.
Merlin: I think we're going to have to just agree to disagree because I think you put in... Listen, I do not agree to disagree.
Merlin: You know that about me.
Merlin: I will never agree to disagree.
John: Neither do I. I will either disagree or I will agree, but I will not agree to disagree.
Merlin: Think about the famous example though, right?
Merlin: Let's say that you were...
Merlin: someone who could be loved just hypothetically and somebody in your family says maybe a uncle joe says hey i really want you to meet uh hortense you should meet my friend hortense and you go tell me a little more about hortense says she's very sweet she's got a great personality good cook makes her own clothes right right i like her so far okay because you like to eat
John: I do.
John: And, you know, somebody who makes their own clothes, they're great to have after the zombie apocalypse.
Merlin: That's a good point.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: I got to rethink this.
Merlin: I'm just saying that you're not going to hear a lot of asterisks in all of that.
John: Right.
John: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: I'm just saying.
Merlin: Now, what's his name?
Merlin: Uncle Rico or whatever his name is.
Merlin: When he presents that, he might think he's doing her a big favor.
Merlin: I think as they say, he's damning her with faint praise.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: He's underselling her.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I think if he says it's a very heavy girl who probably won't break up with you, you're going to think a little harder about maybe saying yes.
John: Well, see, but this depends on how many times you've had sex.
John: Okay, should that be right in there, you think?
John: Well, no, you can't say that about somebody else, but if you're talking about me personally, or you're talking about a hypothetical guy, like your hypothetical American guy has had sex with, what, five different women?
John: Other people, you mean?
John: Five different people other than himself.
John: Okay.
John: So, you know, he's had sex with enough people that he has a sense of how it works.
John: And he's seen five different naked bodies and some bodies on the Internet.
John: He has a general picture of how this all goes down.
Merlin: He could see himself in the seat of that car.
John: Exactly.
John: So here comes Hortense.
John: And she's anywhere from, you know, being a very skinny girl to being a large girl.
John: She's anywhere from being a pretty girl to being an interesting looking person.
Merlin: She describes herself as Zoftig.
John: She's a smart girl.
John: She speaks a little Yiddish.
John: And so a guy sees himself and he likes her.
John: She gets his jokes.
John: She makes her own clothes.
John: And he thinks, is this going to be good?
John: uh this sex that we're going to have is this going to be good and he has he only has sort of a general sense impression about what that is even what that what he's even asking himself is this going to be good i don't know has he even has he even had good sex before maybe this is the best sex of his life you contrast that with say duff mckagan right i mean duff mckagan's had sex with a lot of girls
John: And it's the standard of what he's, you know, he's not, he's probably, I mean, Duff's married, so that's a bad example.
John: But you use somebody who's had a lot of sex and they're trying to get a different, they're looking for a pheromonal connection.
John: They're probably not even seeing the body type.
John: You know what I mean?
John: I think I do.
John: Fascination with somebody having a perfect body is just a way station on the way down the road.
John: Only pretty immature people focus on perfect bodies.
Merlin: So you're saying somebody like Duff McKagan.
Merlin: I want to circle back to him because I understand he's an investor now.
Merlin: But you're saying somebody like Duff McKagan.
Merlin: He's going to go into the bakery and he's going to say, give me a bear claw.
Merlin: and they're going to give him a bear claw, and he's going to say thanks.
Merlin: He's not going to sit there and spend five years wondering if that's the right bear claw for him.
Merlin: He understands a bear claw is a bear claw, right?
John: Well, Duff McKagan...
John: here's what's going to happen.
John: Duff is not going to say, Duff has seen every kind of female body.
John: He's not going to marry somebody and say, oh, what if I should have been with a brunette?
John: You know what I mean?
John: He knows.
John: He knows.
John: You know what I'm saying?
John: Whereas somebody who's never even been with a brunette girl might spend the rest of their life thinking, oh, maybe a brunette girl was the girl for me.
Merlin: Oh, and this is where you get into my wheelhouse.
Merlin: It's experience and expertise.
Merlin: You go around enough, you know what kind of problems to solve.
Merlin: You're not getting fixated on these fakie barriers.
Merlin: You're sitting there going, I wonder if she'll have satin sheets instead of saying, I wonder if I'll fit through her door.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: No, maybe not.
Merlin: I'm saying you've done it enough, right?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: You've done enough.
Merlin: You've gotten in there.
Merlin: You've been in there.
Merlin: And you know that those are all implementation details.
Merlin: Right.
John: Implementation details, precisely.
John: Say, for instance, some of the best female friends, let's say, the best female companions...
John: In my life, they've been across a spectrum of body types and looks.
John: You know, you wouldn't look at them and say that they all looked the same or that they were all equally endowed or equally pretty.
Mm-hmm.
John: But the good ones really have differentiated themselves from the other ones.
Merlin: And you're sticking with the story that you've had a lot of these so-called friends.
Merlin: Not a lot.
John: But I mean, I'm an old man.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: And I'm a veteran of a thousand psychic wars.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: I spent a lot of time in love with lesbians.
John: I mean, I'm not, again, I'm not new.
Merlin: You think you ever drove any of them to the other bench?
John: No.
John: No, no, no.
John: I don't think that's a thing.
Merlin: I had a friend that did that a couple times.
Merlin: Who knows?
Merlin: Maybe he just had bad luck.
John: They were headed there.
John: You're probably right.
John: You don't drive somebody to be gay.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: No.
No.
Merlin: Unless they were already kicking the tires.
John: But if they were already kicking the tires, it's not like you pushed them over the edge, I don't think.
John: I mean, maybe.
John: Maybe you could be in a relationship and just be like, you know, not only is this not working out, really I don't even like...
John: your parts.
John: I don't want to see your parts on anybody else.
John: I don't want to see anybody with your parts.
John: I don't see that happening though.
John: I mean, parts are parts.
Merlin: You don't feel that way about guitars.
John: After a while, I do.
John: Again, I think it's a thing.
John: It's a maturity thing.
John: When you're a young person, you'll play whatever guitar you can get.
John: But at a certain point, you spend a lot of time talking about guitars and, oh, you only will play this kind of guitar.
John: Oh, it's only this guitar and that guitar and this guitar.
John: And then at a certain point when you've been playing guitar for a long time, you just somebody hands you a guitar, you play the guitar.
John: I reach for whatever guitar is closest to me.
John: And if I'm if I am showing up to a gig and somebody says, oh, I've got a guitar that you can use and an amp you can use.
John: I don't really even ask that many questions about what is going to be there.
John: I'm like, okay, I assume that the guitar and the amp are going to be within the range that I can make it work.
John: And I don't, you know, the, the years and years I spent sitting on a chair, discoursing about her, about the difference between a 55 Telecaster and a 56 Telecaster.
John: Like I could give a care now.
John: I don't, I, most of that, most of that knowledge is,
John: Most of that guitar knowledge has sort of just drained out my ear because I don't, that isn't the profession that I decided to pursue.
John: The guy who sits on a chair and appraises your guitar.
John: And I spent, oh, I spent so many years working in guitar stores where a guy would come in and he'd say, yeah, you know, I bought this 56 Strat, but it's really not the tone.
John: I've been playing it for about six months.
John: It's really not the tone I'm looking for.
John: And I think I want to trade it for a 55 Les Paul Goldtop.
John: And both of these guitars, even then, were $25,000, $30,000 guitars.
John: This is, you know, 15 years ago.
John: Now they're off the charts what these guitars cost.
John: But at the time, they were still expensive.
John: And I'm looking at this guy like, wow, you had a 56 Strat and it didn't have the tone you were looking for?
John: You must be a guitar wizard.
John: You must be a scientist of guitar tone.
Merlin: Like a Lou Reed Zappa level of picky.
John: Absolutely, like totally a Zappa, right?
John: Somebody that's just like, I can't get, this guitar has a notch at 14 hertz or whatever, and I just can't, I can't even bear to hear it.
John: And so I would take this Stratocaster out of his hands, this perfect Strat in a tweed case, and I'd go get this gold top out of the case, and I'd hand it to him, and he'd plug into an amp, and
John: And he would seriously, these guys would play smoke on the water, you know, and they even play smoke on the water without any soul.
John: Sounds good, man.
John: That's awesome.
John: That's the one for me.
John: And they would trade this, you know, they'd trade this guitar in for the other guitar.
John: They'd put an extra five grand on the table or something like that.
John: And out they'd go happy as can be with this guitar that has the tone they're looking for.
John: And I swear to you, it burned out the part in my brain that believed that tone was even a thing.
John: Like it burned that out of me where I was like, you know,
John: Screw you.
John: Kurt Cobain played a Univox, a $75 Univox through a Boss DS-1.
John: And that is like, I can't think of anybody who would play through that stuff.
John: It's so shitty.
John: And yet he's like got some pretty good guitar tones.
John: So I stopped caring.
John: And right now I would, if there's anybody listening to this that wants to send me a free guitar, I'll play it at my next show.
John: I swear to you.
John: And that's why they're like women.
John: Exactly.
John: It's exactly analogous to my relationships with women.
John: You play enough.
Merlin: You get good at the basics, the fundamentals.
Merlin: You practice a lot.
John: Then you start really caring what they look like and what their pedigree is.
John: And then after a while... Anyone will do.
John: If there's somebody listening to this podcast who wants to... Send you a woman.
John: Who is a woman or wants to send me a woman, that's great.
Merlin: I will play her at my next show.
Merlin: But you do have to be up early in the morning.
Merlin: The woman or me?
Merlin: So you should probably go.
John: Well, I've got kind of a compound now, so... Scream all you want.
John: We're miles from where anyone can hear you.
John: There's a whole area where the single women can live.
John: Out by the barn.
John: Duff McKagan's an investor now.
John: You know, I've gotten to know Duff.
John: Yeah, you've talked about him.
John: You're like pals with him.
John: Well, you know, it turns out we're related.
John: I had to refer to him on this podcast in a way that in any way he would take as a disparagement because I think he's an amazing guy.
John: And I only reference him because I feel like he has known a lot of women and now is happily married.
John: So in that sense... Duff Beer on The Simpsons is named after him, I just learned.
John: Is that right?
John: Mm-hmm.
John: But he's a longtime Seattle guy, and it turns out that we're cousins.
John: We just found this out the other day.
John: Did I tell this story already?
John: No.
John: We were at a Slayer concert, and we're backstage at the Slayer concert, and we're standing around.
Merlin: No, you know what?
Merlin: You're not Charles.
Merlin: Your generation's Robert Evans.
John: We're on a Slayer show.
John: And this kid is standing there and he's like, are you John Roderick?
John: And I said, yeah.
John: And he said, oh, I'm like your step-nephew or something like that.
John: And I said, really?
John: And he said, yeah, my mom is married to the brother of the sister of your brother or the sister of your brother's wife.
John: And Duff is standing there and he turns and he goes, what?
John: And it turns out the kid is Duff's nephew.
John: And Duff says, we're related?
John: And I said, I guess we are related.
John: And we stood there and worked it out.
John: We're like cousin uncles of this kid.
John: And yeah, so now the bond is that much stronger.
Merlin: This is an excerpt from an article last week in Bloomberg Businessweek.
Merlin: In his autobiography, It's So Easy and Other Lies.
John: Which is coming out very soon.
Merlin: McKagan, 47, explains how he stopped his gallon of vodka a day habit by switching to 10 bottles of wine, how he drank his own vomit because it had alcohol in it, how he used cocaine just so he could drink more, how he drank so much beer at one point that Guns N' Roses lead singer Axl Rose introduced him as the king of beers, and a producer on The Simpsons asked if they could name the show's beer after him.
Merlin: how his pancreas basically exploded, causing third-degree burns on his other internal organs.
Merlin: And then it goes in to say that he actually is one of the very few people in the entire music industry that was not ripped off by somebody, and how he invested it really well.
Merlin: It sounds like a very interesting book.
John: Well, the thing that you don't realize about Duff McKagan, because you look at those original pictures... Duff McKagan was in Guns N' Roses, we should mention.
John: Yeah, you look at those pictures of Guns N' Roses, and even the earliest pictures of Guns N' Roses, Duff already looks like he's really, really wasted, even in the first promo photos.
John: Really?
John: way way before everybody else is like dying of overdoses or having strokes or whatever and nobody in guns and roses died of an overdose but there's a lot of there's a lot of drugs but duff is really hitting it hard from the start oh yeah but he also was one of the main songwriters like he wrote uh sweet child of mine and stuff like that he's got he's got a credit on that
John: He's the bass player, but he was writing tunes, and that's the key to success in rock.
John: Absolutely.
John: You're writing some tunes, and he was writing some solid gold Guns N' Roses material.
John: No doubt about it.
John: So, you know, he's a triple threat.
John: He's a good-looking guy.
John: Well, and right now, pancreas having exploded or no, he's in the shape of his life.
John: It's all here in the book.
John: Wow, look at him.
Merlin: That's amazing.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Look, if your pancreas explodes, we're not kidding around, right?
John: I mean, that's a serious thing.
Merlin: You're going to have to cut back your workload at that point.
John: You're going to have to do something.
John: You're going to have to make some kind of lifestyle change, even if it's just that you get a mechanical pancreas.
John: Can you do that?
John: The problem with a mechanical pancreas, particularly if you're a recording artist, is the microphones pick it up.
John: Like a 5K buzz?
John: There's a little 40-cycle hum.
John: So you don't want a mechanical pancreas if you're going to do a lot of studio work.
John: You've got to isolate it.
John: You have to isolate.
John: You have to have a pancreas isolation booth.
John: Stand in a booth where you're a box from your nipples to your knees.
John: But he has, you know, talk about a survivor.
John: Yeah.
John: And the thing about Duff, here's the other thing.
John: I mean, you think about these big rock guys like Vince Neil.
John: You don't get the sense that Vince Neil can do...
John: can do very complicated arithmetic, right?
John: I mean, sure.
John: Like 14 plus 11.
John: Sure.
John: I bet Vince Neil could handle that.
John: I think he could figure out a tip, but like 174 plus 250.
John: I think Vince Neil would, he'd be struggling, but Duff, Duff's a smart guy.
John: He's articulate.
John: He's a writer.
John: I have a tremendous respect for him.
Merlin: I bet he didn't do good in school.
Merlin: Hey, factoid, he was one of the drummers for the Fastbacks.
Merlin: That's right, the first drummer for the Fastbacks.
Merlin: Get out of here.
Merlin: Have you ever seen that infographic or that table they've got?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Send it to me on the robot.
Merlin: They've got a whole page of people who was the drummer in the Fastbacks when.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
Merlin: It's very complicated.
John: At least two of those drummers have played in the Long Winters.
Merlin: not Rusty, no, what's the guy's name?
John: Well, we've had, so Jason Finn was in the Fastback.
Merlin: Is he the one with the floppy cymbals?
Merlin: And that Still There's Hope video?
Merlin: Who is that?
John: No, I think that's probably, what, Mike Musburger?
Merlin: Oh, Mike Musburger.
John: And he's also played in The Long Way.
John: Musburger played in the Fastbacks for a long time.
John: Musburger and Finn, you know, they have a longstanding rivalry.
John: Really?
John: Because they're, you know, two Seattle drummers who've known each other for years.
John: And the time that they were both in the fastbacks, that's where their rivalry really reached its apogee because... Oh, it's like a Dick York, Dick Sargent type situation.
John: Exactly.
John: Who's the better man on the throne?
John: I have to reserve judgment.
John: I wouldn't say anything.
John: That's a small town.
John: Yeah.
John: I mean, the answer is clear, but I have to recuse myself.
John: Hmm.
Merlin: Pixar's Punk Rock Day.
Merlin: I'm getting my ass kicked.
Merlin: Yeah, I want to come back to guitars and amps.
Merlin: There's a lot to talk about.
John: I'm sitting in a room right now full of guitars and amps.
John: I have a guitar right here that the Gibson Company just gave me a couple of weeks ago.
Merlin: They're going out of business, aren't they?
Merlin: Who said that?
Merlin: I heard they're in awful shape.
Merlin: That's open tune.
Merlin: What is that?
Merlin: That's a drop D?
Merlin: No, this is...
Merlin: This is an open C. You tuned down to an open C?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: What are you in, entombed?
Merlin: My God.
Merlin: Oh, that's a nice harmonic.
John: Yeah, that's a great chord.
John: I mean, it's not a great acoustic guitar tuning because it's pretty low.
John: The strings are pretty floppy.
John: But it's great for recording.
Merlin: You got me sold on my favorite, well, my third favorite guitar chord.
Merlin: My favorite guitar chord, as you know, is a D with an added F sharp.
Merlin: Yeah, you like that one, I know.
Merlin: And, you know, just like the G, you know, because I'm just a G guy.
Merlin: You are a G guy.
Merlin: But you got me into this is the C with the added low G. Right.
Merlin: So that's the magic.
Merlin: So you start out, you got a regular old... But you do this.
Merlin: And that's magic.
Merlin: You do that to much effect.
Merlin: Oh, you have to put the G down there.
Merlin: What's that on?
Merlin: It'll be a breeze.
Merlin: Do you do that on that song?
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: The G on the top of the C changes everything.
Merlin: You know what, kids?
Merlin: If you're picking up guitar, play everything in the key of G and then use that C. And then when you do the G, I think you add the little extra D on the B string.
Merlin: That's what I do.
Merlin: That's a Pete Bucky thing.
John: Yeah, that's a thing.
John: If you want to really chime, just get it really chiming.
John: If you have a Rickenbacker or want to sound like you have a Rickenbacker, add that little D on the B.
Merlin: Do you include Rickenbackers in your it doesn't really matter about guitar's argument?
John: Well, see, here's the thing.
John: I had this Rickenbacker for years.
John: It was my sound.
John: And it truly was.
John: It did have a very unique sound.
John: And no, I couldn't find another guitar to duplicate this sound.
John: And the guitar, you know, this is a 67 Rickenbacker.
John: It had been broken and glued together a half a dozen times.
John: It had Gibson pickups in it.
John: Is that a 330?
John: What is it?
John: It was a 360.
John: 360, sorry.
John: And, you know, you couldn't build this guitar.
John: Yeah.
John: It's a unique item.
John: And at a certain point, I just couldn't take it on the road anymore.
John: It was too important to me.
John: And I had to go about finding how to make that tone, how to approximate that tone with other guitars.
John: And when I finally started approximating the tone, then I realized, oh, you can make guitars sound...
John: you can make them sound pretty good.
John: They don't have to be great guitars.
John: You can make them sound pretty good.
John: I mean, we're talking about the top 4% of the tone, but 96% of the tone, you can get it there.
John: You know, you get an amp, you mess with the knobs, mess with the knobs on the guitar, you can get there.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, you're playing like you, but one.
Merlin: You're playing in these places with all this smoke and weird humidity, and the sound guy's coked up, and it just seems like there's so many factors.
John: Well, the biggest factor of all is that whatever your guitar tone is, ultimately the sound guy is going to put a beer-soaked SM57 in front of your amp, and he's going to run that SM57 through a Mackie 16-channel board.
John: through a couple of 300-watt power amps that he bought off of Craigslist.
John: Sweeten it up with a little bit of slapback.
John: He's going to put a little lexicon slapback on it, and he's going to run it out into his Yamaha PA, and whatever.
John: I mean, you could be playing through a $200,000 guitar rig, but...
John: except for the five guys that are standing right in front of your amp, everybody else is hearing it through a, through such a fucked up signal chain that, you know, believe me, if you, if you were playing a PV, if you were playing, if you were playing a PV guitar through a PV bandit with the, with the chorus button pushed in, it wouldn't sound any better or worse.
John: You know, my friend, Mike,
John: Just had a guy custom make him a gold top flying V, but a fretless flying V. Is this Pearl Jam boy?
John: No, no, no, no.
John: Mike is... He's just a ding-dong.
John: Seattle ding-dong.
John: But he's got this...
John: He actually used to be in The Long Winters, too.
John: Oh, that Mike.
John: Mike Squires.
John: Oh, sure.
John: Fretless Flying V. And I look at him and I go, Fretless Flying V, what the hell are you going to do?
John: A fretless six-string guitar?
John: What the hell are you going to do with that?
John: And he's like, what do you mean, what am I going to do with it?
John: It's the coolest thing ever.
John: And it's just a kind of insanity.
Merlin: Is fretless kind of the opposite of scallops, you think?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, you'd have to have amazing intonation.
John: Frontless is the opposite of good.
John: That's true.
John: Like, in a perfect world, you would... I mean, there are guys who can play the fretless guitar, and it sounds like a... I've never... I'm sorry, John.
Merlin: I've never heard of a fretless guitar.
Merlin: yeah it's you know you can play a fret any instrument can be fretless like a trumpet if you have incredible intonation your intonation it would have to be completely out of control like how are you going to play a you can play a bar chord on like you wouldn't i don't think you would oh you're just doing spoodily goofy solos with lots of like like vicky slidey bends well that or you could play like little two little two note chords little three note chords i mean you could keep that stuff that sounds very very flexible
John: It's like playing the violin.
John: I mean, how do people do it?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: When I pick up a violin and play it, it sounds like somebody's killing goats with a chainsaw.
Merlin: It's like a Suzuki method for the sixth string.
Merlin: Is that what they call it, the Suzuki?
Merlin: Is that where you learn to count on your fingers?
John: So that's the second Suzuki reference I've heard in as many days.
John: And I think it's like hooked on phonics, right, for music.
Merlin: I think so.
Merlin: Or maybe like the Roy Clark easy guitar or the thing where you put the stickers on the piano.
Merlin: I'm not entirely sure.
Merlin: When I'm doing stuff in the garage band, which you know is a musical instrument, boy, I'm lost on that fretless bass.
Merlin: It's just a mess.
John: Fretless bass, I really appreciate it.
John: I was in a band with a fretless bass player.
Yeah.
John: It's a very different sound.
John: I mean, used incorrectly, it sounds like Dream of the Blue Turtles.
John: Like fretless bass used poorly is the worst kind of... Jaco Pistorius, the late great Jaco Pistorius, Pino Palladino.
Merlin: There are several people that can rock the fretless bass.
Merlin: Oh, fretless bass in the hands of a master?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, there's this one Joni Mitchell song Jaco Pistorius plays on that's just ungodly.
Merlin: But it just seems like, you know, why don't you get a 12-string fretless?
Merlin: Go ahead, go nuts.
Merlin: Why not?
Merlin: If you want a giant freak bass, why don't you go ahead and just do that?
John: It trends over into that Natalie Merchant territory where it's just like, this is not music for, this is not the music for me.
Merlin: Like Michael Hedges.
Merlin: I like Michael Hedges, right?
Merlin: The late Michael Hedges.
Merlin: Amazing guitar player.
Merlin: But boy, you can really get a little too much fretless bass on something.
John: You can get a lot too much.
John: You can get so much fretless bass on a song that it will actually cause you to get your period.
John: Is that right?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I've heard some people say, you know, Greg Calbee says it'll actually literally slide off the record.
Merlin: It'll fall right off there.
Merlin: They try to master it and it can't.
Merlin: It's already on the floor.
Merlin: They call it a jazz puddle.