Ep. 166: "Hella NPR'd"
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John: Seep, seep.
John: Beep, boop, beep.
John: Poo-tee-weet.
Merlin: Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
John: Is it hard doing two podcasts?
John: Boy, I would have to ask the master.
John: I'm afraid I don't know who you mean.
John: This is the first time in all the years that we have started our podcast without saying hello, but rather with some strange bird noises.
Merlin: They were...
Merlin: I don't know, kind of tropical, kind of domestic, a little mix of the old world and the new world.
John: You're giving me some good insight into how to have more than one podcast at a time.
Merlin: Yes, and?
Merlin: Yes, and?
John: No, that's all I got.
John: Yes, and?
John: There's so much to talk about, and now I can't remember whether I talked about it on my other podcast already.
John: Geez, this is what I was worried about.
John: Did I already talk to you about the time that I... Or was that the other podcast?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: How do you feel about scrambling eggs?
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: Is it okay when you take the egg in your right hand and you tap it on the edge of the bowl?
John: Oh, wait a minute.
John: Hold on.
John: Stop right there.
Hmm?
John: You crack that egg on the edge of the bowl, Merlin, you're going to get all of the bacteria from the bowl right in the egg.
John: You get cross-contamination.
John: You get cross-contamination.
John: You know, on the way in today, I was sitting here, I'm drinking my coffee in one of my beer steins, and I realized that probably 15% of everything I put in my body is coffee mold.
John: I've got coffee mold...
John: I'm breathing coffee mold at all times.
John: Oh, God.
John: And I'm drinking coffee mold from a variety of sources.
John: The primary source is I've never cleaned my coffee maker.
John: So it's full of coffee mold.
Merlin: John, that has a huge impact on the quality of your coffee.
John: You've got to clean your coffee maker.
John: And then I buy – boy.
John: See, I'm so used to lying since my political days.
Merlin: Oh, you know, it's going to be a long road.
John: The road to truth.
John: That I can't even remember what's a lie and what's not.
John: This is going to be a good one.
John: I've never bought a pound of coffee in my life.
John: I started talking like when I buy coffee as though I ever buy coffee.
Merlin: You're like Hal Holbrook doing Mark Twain, except you're doing yourself.
John: I think it reads better if I say I buy a pound of coffee at a time.
John: Buy a pound.
John: So what happens to me is that someone gives me a pound of coffee.
John: That is how I get coffee.
John: People give me coffee.
John: And the reason people give me coffee is that coffee, as you know, on the West Coast in particular, is one of the primary schwag elements.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Right?
John: You go to a thing.
John: And they're putting together a gift bag or a gift basket.
John: And the first thing they do, the first thing they put in a gift basket is a pound of coffee because there's a tremendous coffee surplus here.
John: There's so much freaking coffee and everybody is a coffee roaster or a coffee grinder or a coffee importer.
John: And so they've just got warehouses full of coffee.
John: And everywhere I go, somebody's putting a pound of gourmet coffee beans in my hand.
John: And so I bring it home and there was a while there where I had like 30 pounds of coffee in my freezer.
John: And then there are all the people that are like, never freeze your coffee.
John: What are you talking about?
John: You freeze your coffee.
John: It's going to ruin the... And I'm just like, you know what?
John: I've got 30 pounds of coffee.
John: I'm good.
John: I'm good way past the apocalypse, right?
John: Everybody, people are going to be gnawing on each other's shin bones and I'm going to be sitting on top of a giant pile of frozen coffee.
Merlin: Like that image.
Merlin: So I'm confident in my choices.
Merlin: Seeing starving zombie-like creatures shuffling towards you and your butt's nice and cold.
Merlin: Nice and cold.
John: I got, you know, frozen coffee makes a good ice pack, too, if you sprain a wrist or something.
John: Oh, life hack.
John: Yeah.
John: But so lately, I've had some coffee and it's been sitting out on the counter.
John: For a month and a half.
John: And from what I know about coffee mold, which I have learned from reading magazine articles and from hearing you make that sound whenever I talk about it, and presumably what I've learned from Dan Benjamin telling you about coffee mold, because I'm sure that conversation's happened.
John: I realize now that that coffee that's been sitting on my counter for a month and a half is probably 50% mold.
Wow.
John: And I just make it and drink it and it tastes like mold.
Merlin: You have so many in the chain of custody from whatever coffee grows on to being expelled through you.
Merlin: The chain of custody is just riddled with problems.
Merlin: There's all kinds of places for the introduction of different kinds of unsavory things.
Merlin: It's terrible.
Merlin: You're not keeping a tight lock on that.
John: And this isn't even coffee that's been through a civet's butt.
John: Right.
John: So I just – and then I'm thinking like –
John: Then there's all the coffee cups I leave lying around, both in the garden and in my office.
John: There's just got to be so much coffee mold.
John: If I had some They Live glasses, but instead of seeing aliens among us, they could just see coffee mold.
Merlin: Part of it might also be the nature of the stein.
Merlin: I don't want to introduce new things here, but the stein, it's probably like a pottery kind of stein, right?
Merlin: It's not like a plastic or something.
Merlin: It's probably somewhat porous.
Merlin: It's a pottery stein.
Merlin: It's a pottery stein.
Merlin: So there could be all kinds of invaginations that the mold could get into, maybe start a family.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
John: Well, I mean, there's coffee mold under my fingernails.
John: I'm not worried about it in the porous surface of my... My daughter will just start chewing.
Merlin: We're not at the movies yesterday.
Merlin: She starts chewing on a fingernail.
Merlin: And I'm like, you've been downtown for three hours.
Merlin: Do you really want three hours of San Francisco in your mouth?
John: Well, worse than that, I went to the ICU yesterday to visit a friend in intensive care.
John: I spent, you know, a few hours.
Merlin: That wasn't funny, but for some reason when you said, I thought you were doing that like for a friend.
Merlin: No, you were actually going to see another person.
Merlin: It wasn't you?
Merlin: It wasn't you.
John: I went to the ICU yesterday for a friend.
John: I went to the insane client posse yesterday.
John: No, to visit a friend.
John: And I was in there and, you know, and it was it's very intense.
John: Right.
John: You put on a you put on a rubber gown and gloves and a face mask and a face mask with like a shield.
John: Oh, my God.
John: I'm so sorry.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: No, it's not a nice place.
John: But then I was in there for I mean, it's a wonderful place in the sense that if you are if you need the services that they provide, that is where you want to be.
John: You would much rather be there than sitting on top of a pile of frozen coffee beans.
John: Yeah.
John: And then as I'm walking out of the ICU, you know, and it's just like you take the stuff off and you deposit it in a biohazard container and you walk through a container.
John: pressurized aperture and all this stuff.
John: And then you, and then I'm, I'm on my way to the parking garage and I'm just chewing on my fingernails.
John: Oh, and I was like, and I caught myself doing it.
John: I'm like, huh?
John: Well, welcome MRSA to the otherwise completely toxic environment inside of me.
John: I hope you can fight it out with the coffee mold and we'll see which, which toxin, which neurotoxin is the, uh, is the one that survives.
John: Um,
John: It starts subtly, subtly affecting how I think.
Merlin: I can't dive too deep on this, John.
Merlin: I got to deal with this on another show.
Merlin: But I started this weekend for, I believe, possibly the fifth time I decided to read the first 10 pages of Infinite Jest.
Merlin: And this time I'm going to stick with it.
Merlin: I'm going to get to at least 20, 30 pages.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Go deep.
Merlin: I think I can finish a chapter if I break it into pieces.
Merlin: But, you know, in that beginning part, he's in the office, you know, talking about getting the scholarship.
Merlin: And he has this flashback of when he was a little kid.
Merlin: And this is Hal has a flashback of when he came.
Merlin: He's like a toddler and comes out of the basement screaming something.
Merlin: And his mother can't hear what he's screaming because she's running a tiller in the yard.
Merlin: And he's holding a...
Merlin: A giant piece of mold, he broke off the part of the basement and has like orange and yellow spikes in it.
Merlin: And he starts screaming, I ate this, I ate this.
Merlin: And for some reason now, it's hitting me extra hard because the predominant image of mold in my head for the last few days is a giant piece of basement mold with like yellow stalagmites on it.
Merlin: And so when you say coffee mold, it could be something, it could just be one of those like little booger looking droplets.
Merlin: But I'm thinking about eating basement mold.
Merlin: That's a long book, John.
Merlin: Did you ever read it?
Merlin: No, you know, I read Gravity's Rainbow.
Merlin: Oh, you know what?
Merlin: You clapped out.
Merlin: You don't have to read any other books.
John: Yeah, and that's exactly how I felt about it.
John: In 1992, I went into the bookstore here that used to be where they destroyed the entire building to build a subway stop for the subway that still hasn't opened.
Merlin: It's deep in the painful analogy district.
John: Yeah, thank you.
John: Um, everybody that worked there was a LARPer.
John: Uh, there were 50 cats there and it was owned by a woman who was a very nice woman, but also had a, um, she was not a nice woman.
John: Let's be honest.
Merlin: Um, cats bookstore dander.
Merlin: I can see that the slams on that is not adding up to nice person.
John: But she was someone who kept a coterie of younger men working at her store that she was, I think, running through her function machine, if you know what I'm saying.
John: Very much like a chain mail culture.
John: I think chain mail figured highly there.
John: But I spent a lot of time in this bookstore.
Yeah.
John: And that's where I discovered Sinclair Lewis, not him personally, but his – that was when I first arrived in town and I didn't have any money.
John: I would go there and I'd buy the – whatever the thickest book on the 99-cent rack was.
John: And Lewis at Zenith was one of those, and I became like a St.
John: Clair Lewis fan.
John: But that's a different story.
Merlin: Is this where you found your rainbow?
John: So I went in there one time, and there was the guy with the beard and the long hair who was shaped kind of like a Hershey's Kiss was behind the counter.
John: And I was like, what's your favorite book, man?
John: And he was like, oh, my favorite book?
John: It's a little book you might have heard of called Gravity's Rainbow.
John: And I was like, Gravity's Rainbow?
John: I have heard of it and I have been avoiding it like the plague.
John: And he was like, oh, do not tarry another moment, my good sir.
John: And he went and like...
John: uh, dislodged himself from his perch and went and got me, I think his personal copy or some special copy of gravity's rainbow and brought it on.
John: He was like, voila, here you are.
John: Good luck.
John: Godspeed.
John: And I spent so long trying to read that freaking gravity's rainbow.
John: I read it.
John: I read that's the, that's the book where I was reading it in four different places at one time.
John: I was reading it, then I was reading back 50 pages, then I was reading back 150 pages, and then I had started it over again, all at the same time.
John: So having done that,
John: When Infinite Jest came out, I was like, I will not be fooled again.
John: I won't get fooled again.
John: Same boss.
John: And so – but now I feel bad about it because – It's held up.
Merlin: Here's the thing.
Merlin: Let me put my cards on the table.
Merlin: As long as you're out of politics and being honest, I might as well be honest too.
Merlin: OK, go ahead.
John: Did you ever read Gravity's Rainbow?
Yeah.
Merlin: No, I haven't even cracked the spine on Crying of Lot 49.
Merlin: Oh, well, that's a delightful, delightful read.
Merlin: Yeah, I know.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: I have a lot of these.
Merlin: I have a lot of these.
Merlin: In my post-college age, I've bought a lot more books than I've read.
Merlin: But, oh, my God, it was an epic, epic fresh air.
Merlin: So Fresh Air on Friday.
Merlin: As you know, on Friday, sometimes Terry Gross isn't there.
Merlin: And so it was Dave Davies in for Terry Gross on Fresh Air, which happens a lot of the time these days.
Merlin: Dave Davies of the Kinks?
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: He got punched right in the face.
Merlin: He hosts Fresh Air?
Merlin: No, different Dave Davies.
Merlin: Dave Davies.
Merlin: And they refer to him as, what do they call him, like a contributor.
Merlin: They don't even refer to him as the substitute host.
Merlin: It's pretty weak.
Merlin: You are talking about Fresh Air as though it's a program I have ever heard.
Merlin: Okay.
Okay.
Merlin: Is that how we're going to do it?
Merlin: But go ahead.
Merlin: Go ahead.
Merlin: I'm listening.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: You've never heard of Cat Butt?
Merlin: The band?
Merlin: You're not familiar with Cat Butt?
Merlin: Cat Butt?
Merlin: I'm just very surprised.
Merlin: I was at the first show.
Merlin: You seem like someone who enjoyed music.
Merlin: This is very surprising to me.
Merlin: Dave Davies is in for Terry Gross.
Merlin: Okay, you sit this one out.
Merlin: Everybody else can listen.
Merlin: Dave Davies is in for Terry Gross, and it's on the occasion of the release of this new film,
Merlin: With the kid from Facebook and the guy from Freaks and Geeks, a Facebook movie.
Merlin: It's about a famous week of interviews.
Merlin: I think it's called The End of the Tour.
Merlin: And it's Jason Segel.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: I hear good things about this movie.
Merlin: Yeah, right, right, right.
Merlin: So it's kind of about that movie.
Merlin: And it's kind of about, you know, DFW.
Yeah.
Merlin: And so what they put together on this day when Dave Davies was in for Fresh Air was an interview with David Foster Wallace from 1996 to celebrate the release of the paperback of Infinite Jest.
Merlin: It was a fantastic interview, as always.
Merlin: And then they talked to Jason Segel about Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which had just been released on DVD in 2009.
Merlin: So it's a pretty classic.
Merlin: What is this show about Fresh Air?
Merlin: I like it.
Merlin: I like it.
Merlin: But I listened to it and, you know, I've read a lot of his short stuff.
Merlin: I don't think I've ever, I never finished one of his novels, but I love, you know.
Merlin: His essays.
Merlin: Oh my God.
Merlin: Well, you know what I did wrong in January.
Merlin: I reread A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again for the fourth time, right before I stepped onto the gangplank of a cruise ship.
John: And I remember you walking onto the cruise ship and seeing in your eyes the fact that you had just read A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again.
John: I could see it in the way you carried yourself across the gangplank.
John: And I was like, my friend, free yourself from mental slavery.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: It was.
Merlin: But anyway, boy, is that ever a fantastic essay?
Merlin: Yes, it is.
Merlin: My God.
Merlin: It's amazing.
Merlin: I mean, like, OK, let's be white guys and talk about how David Foster Wallace is a good writer.
Merlin: But like his ability, his elevated language, but he's elevated without sounding snooty.
Merlin: And he's clever without sounding snarky.
Merlin: And the way that he observes and describes a situation, the language he uses to describe even the most mundane situations, it's just an utter delight.
Merlin: It's total like mouth candy.
Merlin: I feel the words in my mouth when I'm reading it.
Merlin: I love it.
Merlin: And I thought, you know, everybody says this is like the best book of the last 25 years or whatever.
Merlin: And I own two copies of it, one of which is being used to hold up part of a bed right now.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And I thought this time I'm going to try it again.
Merlin: I don't think I'll make it through, but I'm trying.
Yeah.
John: Well, when you're done, I'll loan you my complete copy of the Gulag Archipelago.
John: Oh, my goodness.
John: That's a long one, huh?
John: Yeah, which is currently – I'm pretty sure it's –
John: I'm pretty sure it's like a large part of my living room furniture.
Merlin: That's a nice way to wind down at the end of the day is to just really, really tuck into a multi-volume bit of sad.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Oh, well, and I'm halfway through Mein Kampf by the Swede.
John: Hmm.
Merlin: It's a sweeted version of Mein Kampf.
John: Did you not get on board the My Struggle train about a year ago?
Merlin: This might be my fresh air.
Merlin: You're going to have to give it to me in Pigs and Bunnies.
John: What are you talking about?
John: So...
John: So this guy, Carl Ove, Carl Ove Nausgaard.
John: That's the fakest name I've ever heard in my life.
John: He's literally named Carl Ove Nausgaard.
John: nows guard news guard uh is a uh is like a depressed norwegian guy yes of course i heard about this right about our age and uh like and in the style of like depressed norwegian he's sort of impossibly handsome in a having smoked two packs of cigarettes a day kind of way looks like a wise catcher's mitt
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: You know who looks like a catcher's mitt is Kevin Spacey.
John: I was watching that political program of his where he talks directly into the camera.
John: And once I realized that his face looked like a catcher's mitt, I could not stop seeing it.
John: And I really kept feeling like it was distracting me from the program.
Merlin: I don't get that from him.
Merlin: I think he looks like a thumb with a wig.
Yeah.
John: Well, now look at him as a catcher's mitt and imagine like – and not even a baseball catcher's mitt but like a softball catcher's mitt.
John: Just imagine a softball just going right in there and just nestling in between his cheeks.
John: I think you'll see it.
John: Anyway, so I was in New York about a year ago and I was being courted by a young book editor.
John: Who is very smart and young.
John: With the purpose of writing a book?
John: He was courting me.
John: Okay, okay.
John: Yes, for the purpose of – well, he was courting me as a potential author for him, a writer, let's say.
John: And he's been very supportive of me and he's – he likes the things that I've written and he's like, let's write a book.
John: I am a book editor.
John: I work for a book publisher or – I'm sorry, not a publisher but like a –
John: It's the equivalent of a manager.
John: They get your book published.
Merlin: An agent.
John: An agent.
John: There you go.
John: That's the word.
John: And so we're walking around Park Slope, Brooklyn together.
John: And he's a young person, but he's wearing big glasses.
John: So it kind of feels like...
John: I always imagined that my book agent would look like Rob Reiner.
John: And this one is younger, but he's got big glasses on, so it feels very book editor-y.
John: And we're just sort of wandering around Park Slope, and we pass a bookstore, and he's like, oh, let's go into the bookstore.
John: And I'm like, this is perfect.
John: I'm in New York.
John: I'm walking around with my book agent.
John: We're going to walk into a bookstore like la-di-fucking-da.
Yeah.
John: And we wander in.
John: And, of course, he immediately greets all the employees of the bookstore.
John: And they all love him, right?
John: They all know him.
John: And they're all chit-chatting.
John: And like, oh, have you heard from this author?
John: And they're talking books with each other.
John: All these young people working in books.
John: And I'm just feeling like this is so sophisticated.
John: I'm here from the West now.
John: This is the that's the way I love to go to New York, right?
John: You go to New York and you're just you just get sort of swooshed into some cool New York thing where it feels like, of course, the writer from Seattle is here traipsing around.
John: Never written a goddamn thing.
John: But here I am.
John: And he says, oh, have you read?
John: Have you read my struggle?
John: yet as though i were a writer who read all of the books that were coming out yeah it must have felt a little like a test you know well but you know it's that type of let's say i've been doing it for 25 years in music like oh have you heard the new cat butt and i would always be like oh uh tell me more and then you know that's every time i go into a record store somebody puts five records in my hands that i don't want
John: But so I'm standing there at the counter and I'm like, oh, My Struggle, huh?
John: You mean My Struggle?
John: That's a very familiar book title.
John: I think I remember reading a version of My Struggle written by an author named Hitler.
John: And they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
John: It's a new epic novel written by this depressed Norwegian guy about your age who has just exhaustively chronicled his entire life with total honesty.
John: And I was like – and I could just feel my stomach sinking like, oh, first of all, that's my gig.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And second of all, why do I – oh, no.
John: And so pretty soon three huge volumes are put in my hands.
John: Each one costs $35.
John: Yeah.
John: Three hardbound books.
Merlin: Oh, now here's the test.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: I mean, no, I mean, because I mean, if you go, um, like these are pretty heavy.
Merlin: Yeah, I'm like $100 for books.
John: But I was like, sign me up.
John: I'm having a great day.
John: And so I walk out of there carrying the Manhattan phone book.
John: And I started to read them.
John: And I read the first one.
John: And I got about halfway through the second one.
John: And they really are... He really does talk about his life pretty much on a day-to-day basis.
John: And then when I was seven...
John: I sat in the kitchen and waited for my cereal bowl to be filled by my mother, who was emotionally absent.
Merlin: That sounds like Bergman without an editor.
John: It was really, woo!
John: And then Scott Simpson...
John: I tweeted about it and I realized that, oh, we were all of us, all of us depressed dads were reading it all at once.
John: And that sort of bounced me out of it for a minute.
John: I was like, I can't.
John: So now it's sitting on my bed table.
John: I'm like, there he is.
John: Carl.
John: Carl.
John: Carl.
John: Carl.
John: Carl.
John: Nos guard.
John: Nos guard.
John: And then he was doing a book tour and it was one of those book tours that every middle-aged author dreams of where he's being swept around the world and people are genuflecting.
Merlin: I can hear it in your voice.
Merlin: I can hear it.
John: You want that to be you a little bit.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, the thing was the entire time he was sort of disavowing that he liked this at all.
John: Well, of course he would.
John: You love being swept around.
John: I do like being swept around.
John: Oh, my God.
John: So now I understand it to be six books long.
John: I only have the first three.
John: Oh, my goodness.
John: Better get cracking.
John: I'm so busy.
Merlin: And this shows what an ignoramus or philistine I am, but it isn't a thing where you kind of feel like you get the flavor after one or two?
John: It is not a thing that you even feel like... So this is the thing about Gravity's Rainbow too, right?
John: Where you are 500 pages into a book and you have no idea what the flavor is yet.
John: Right?
John: Like you're reading...
John: And you are reading and reading and reading and you don't know what's happening and you don't know, you don't even know if you like it yet.
John: And you've invested 500 pages.
John: You've invested, you know, weeks of your life because it's not 500 easy pages.
John: And it's not that like Carl Nalsgaard is hard, not Gravity's Rainbow.
John: Like it's not difficult to read, but it's, but you're in there and you're like, do I like this person?
John: Do I like this world?
John: Yeah.
John: Do I feel like this world, even if I don't like it, do I feel like it's important?
John: Do I feel like I need to be here?
Merlin: I hate that feeling.
Merlin: I hate that feeling because I feel like when I do that, I'm battling this kind of peer pressure in my head, whether it's real or not.
Merlin: This should be something where I get to be the guy who suggests this book to other people and then seem surprised that they haven't read it.
Merlin: I feel that kind of pressure that I'm eating my vegetables when I read a book like that.
John: You know me.
John: I like to be punished, and I like to suffer.
Merlin: It's really when you thrive in a lot of ways.
John: Yeah, so I have experienced a lot of culture that...
John: It was true suffering for me to endure it, but I understood that through suffering I was going to be delivered to another place.
John: That the piece of culture that I was consuming was a ferry boat that was taking me from the prior land to this dark new land.
Merlin: You might not know what land.
John: That's right.
John: And...
John: I was not paying the ferryman until he got me to the other side.
John: Don't even fix the price.
John: That's right.
John: So I'm on the book, and I am saying, or I'm on the piece of art, and I'm saying, you are punishing me, you art, but you may deliver me to Candyland.
John: And a lot of the times, you know, the fucking thing sinks and you have to swim back.
John: But the jury's still out on this because, and I think this is the big question, the David Foster Waller's question, the Dave Eggers question, now the Carl Nausgaard, Alsengaard question.
John: And it's a primary question of the work that I do and of you do, which is at what point – like all art is somewhat autobiographical.
John: We have stripped away a lot of the artifice from it and have arrived in a place now where –
John: autobiographical – like the autobiography with almost no additional work added on to it?
Merlin: You can be somebody who writes a memoir that's a thing on its own without it being about like my life in pro wrestling or something.
John: Yeah, right.
John: It's just like I'm just – I'm a schmo and here's my autobiography.
John: People have been doing that for thousands of years but now it seems like that is –
John: That is – well, everybody is an autobiographer now because we're all documenting our own lives constantly.
John: And to what end?
John: And if you're not adding something else to it, which is either like –
John: a philosophical take or... Okay, I get it.
Merlin: Yeah, this has been an angle for you for a while in your reflective, ruminative moments is like, what are we producing beyond this sort of ephemera?
John: Yeah, and with Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, I mean, I read those guys obviously earlier in my life at a time when it seemed like what they were doing was magical because they were, as you say, like...
John: Turning language – the language itself was beautiful.
John: And then their life experiences or the way their minds worked were interesting and beautiful in a way.
John: And that was enough.
John: They didn't turn it into a novel about –
John: some other people.
John: It was, it was a diary more or less, but that, that diary then was elevated.
John: And, uh, and now I feel like we're entering into a realm where the diary doesn't even have to be elevated.
John: It just has to be long, um, or it has to be comprehensive.
Um,
John: And I don't know if that quite passes muster with me.
Merlin: Yeah, I don't read a lot of those.
Merlin: But I think I know what you mean.
Merlin: I'm thinking about stuff that I... I had a class in... I guess my third year of college that was really great, but difficult, which is called Long Poems.
Merlin: And it was a survey of long poems.
Merlin: And it had all the usual suspects in it.
Merlin: And kind of doing like a...
Merlin: close reading of things like The Wasteland or things like William Carlos Williams' Patterson or Leaves of Grass.
John: Leaves of Grass.
Merlin: Well, so Leaves of Grass is on the edge.
Merlin: Now, Patterson is great.
Merlin: The Wasteland is a riot.
Merlin: But even Leaves of Grass, but I have to just say, so going back to what the people were actually making, I just gotta say, man, I feel like you clap out with what's the pension?
Merlin: Pension book.
Merlin: Oh, Gravity's Rainbow.
Merlin: Gravity's Rainbow.
Merlin: I never read that.
Merlin: But also, like, Keats' Endymion.
Merlin: Reading this, it's all couplets, and it's just really, really, it's an extremely long undersea adventure by Keats that involves lots of, like, you know, tridents and stuff.
Merlin: And it was – but it really felt like I was eating my vegetables.
Merlin: It was not fun.
Merlin: It was – it's one of those things though like where you're like – it wasn't even like a hate watch kind of thing.
Merlin: Whatever.
Merlin: He's Keith.
Merlin: He's great.
Merlin: But like I kind of like the other kind of stuff better.
Merlin: These epic poems just feel like –
Merlin: just like this grind and I have to say that now even at the time now I get to do what I get to drop that I've read Keats's Endymion look at me like I get the white ribbon for that like I'm the guy who read that you know I don't know I just it's just some of the sounds unkind but I don't want the Keats haters or the Keats fans to get on me you know they're out there I know I know but yeah I don't know I don't read like I used to I don't know how you find the time to read you seem like you're very occupied with lots of different things
John: Yeah, yeah, but I do try to – I admire that version, that earlier version of a fully-fledged adult who is –
John: who is up with the current reading.
John: And I don't know if that fully fledged adult is still, if that's still a model.
John: You know, obviously there are plenty of people, plenty of adult people who are still living according to that.
John: But I don't know if we're minting any new people like that.
John: But then again, I just described my young New York agent who's still living in that world.
John: But it seems like that version of being a grown-up where you've got the Times literary supplement and you are –
John: You're working through it every week?
Merlin: Well, I'm thinking about – you think about like an Algonquin roundtable kind of situation where you've got a bunch of people who are very competitive, very smart, very clever people who are doing a lot of writing and –
Merlin: If you worked at The New Yorker, you were doing a lot of reading too.
Merlin: And being the kind of person who was like extremely up to date on and had an opinion about virtually everything that came out.
Merlin: People were just reading, reading, reading all the time.
Merlin: That's what they did for a living.
Merlin: You know, people forget that writers also read.
Merlin: Like there's a lot of reading involved.
John: Yep.
Merlin: And, you know, but the thing is, like, you look at that and everybody looks at that and goes, oh, wow, look at that.
Merlin: They're smoking and wearing hats, you know, and talking about, you know, life.
Merlin: And that's really fascinating.
Merlin: But I don't know.
Merlin: I mean, how incredibly different is that from somebody like me?
Merlin: Well, I'm not saying this is noble, but, like, I love how great TV is right now and how there are, if you look, there are great movies.
Merlin: And I feel I like being kind of up to date on what good TV shows are.
Merlin: Well, that's the thing.
John: If you were Dorothy Parker sitting in the lobby of a hotel ashing your cigarette in someone else's tea, you didn't have all that TV.
John: You also felt like you had to know about.
John: And you didn't also – you weren't reading like BuzzFeed.
John: Right.
John: There's a lot to keep up on now.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah, there is.
John: You got to go to click hole and see all the funny stuff that those guys are coming up with.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I'm just I'm just I can only speak for myself, which is that like I've read a lot of stuff.
Merlin: I think I've probably read more than a lot of people have read.
Merlin: I had to read so much in college, some of which was amazing.
Merlin: I mean, I'll read me some Absalom, Absalom any day.
Merlin: The Ambassadors, you can keep it.
Merlin: But there were so many, like Moby Dick, not a fan.
Merlin: Like all the things that you have to read that were extremely long and varied in there, how great they were.
Merlin: Or how much you could even understand it.
Merlin: But you had to because that was the process.
Merlin: That's what you're going to.
Merlin: You get a Voltaire occasionally and that's a lot of fun.
Merlin: But there was just a whole bunch of stuff that I had to read.
Merlin: But I have to admit, I mean, a lot of that was because I had to read it for class.
Merlin: And also it made me feel a little fancy.
Merlin: It made me feel a little bit fancy that a kid from like Central Florida was reading the great authors.
Merlin: And some of it was really great and enjoyable.
Merlin: Some of it was very edifying.
Merlin: But there's a part of me that was I kind of wanted to be snooty.
Merlin: That was one big piece of it.
Merlin: Being able to talk about Umberto Eco made me feel smart.
Merlin: And I mean there's still – God, there's so much I get from that stuff every day, all the great books.
Merlin: But like I have to admit that at the time I was doing it, it wasn't that noble.
Merlin: It wasn't like I was trying to become a judge or something.
Merlin: It was because I wanted – I liked feeling smart.
Merlin: And one way to feel smart is to read a lot of stuff that other people will not admit they don't understand.
Merlin: So I can't speak for other people, but I think there will be these au courant things that come along sometimes that everybody's supposed to – it's almost like an emperor's new clothes kind of situation where you're expected to say, oh, of course.
Merlin: Of course.
Merlin: How many times have I read Ulysses?
Merlin: My goodness.
Merlin: But that's work.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I think literacy is changing.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah, well –
John: I always had the... I always had a difficult relationship with the people who read for... Read in the way that you're describing.
John: To read as a...
John: Because I was often in a situation where I would be sitting in a salon of some kind listening to people talk about books and realizing that they were talking about books in the same way that people talk about sports.
Merlin: Maybe in the same way, when Pitchfork was at its snarkiest, I haven't read Pitchfork in years, but when they first started to become so annoying, it was almost like, so you could learn about these records in order to know what to roll your eyes about.
John: Right, right, right.
John: Well, to learn about the records or to learn about the books as though knowing about them was its own thing.
John: And for me, the point of art is always that you have an emotional, that is a door to an emotional state.
John: or an intellectual state that you didn't have prior access to.
John: And so to read a book and to not feel something is fine, but that's the evidence you're looking for.
John: I read this thing and I did not feel something.
John: Okay, that tells me something, right?
John: Or I did feel something and here's what I felt, either negative or positive or something I can't describe and so forth and so on.
John: Like those pieces of art are always portals to a better understanding of your emotions or your mind.
John: And so – and music and books and paintings and all of that.
John: And so listening to people talk about books as though they are commodities –
John: And this is the same about record collectors.
John: What's important about them is the date they were published, the author's prior relationship with some other author, the number of books that it sold, the way that that book fits into the canon in terms of how it's –
John: It's relationship to its time or other books.
John: I mean, all that is also interesting, but it's addenda.
John: And for a lot of people, it's not addenda.
John: For a lot of people, that is the primary interface with the literary world or the painting world.
Merlin: Maybe that's why you say it's like sports, where part of the joy of it is the more complex it becomes.
Merlin: This is exciting, because the more I know about this, the more I want to know about this.
John: Well, and so – but what was frustrating for me is that I would sit in these situations where I would be with smart people who were – and I've told you before, right, that when I was growing up in Anchorage, I had a Vespa, and so I thought I was a mod, and I loved the clothes that the mods wore, and I had the only Vespa in Alaska.
John: So as far as I knew, like I was the only mod –
John: In the whole state in the 1980s, at least the only one that I knew.
John: And then when I moved down to Seattle and I met some real mods, I was so excited.
John: I was like, I'm a mod and I found the mods.
John: I was young.
John: And I went to a mod party or two and then I was so disappointed to discover that they were incredibly boring.
John: The mods were not smart even or interesting.
John: They were just fashion-y people that had chosen a weird fashion.
John: But so...
John: To be around book people and have the conversation be like, have you read this book?
John: Well, yes, I did.
John: I read that book because I earlier read this other book and then this book, of course, is the next book that you read.
John: Oh, well, did you realize that the author of that book actually had this other book?
John: Oh, yes, I read that book.
John: Did you read this book?
John: And they were playing a game.
John: which was the connector game, right?
John: That you read a book and then you know...
John: you know that that book is pointing to a different book in the way that people think about the literary culture.
John: And so you are playing this reference game where you're hopping from lily pad to lily pad and the other person is also playing that game with you and trying to get ahead of you and reference a book in advance of where you're going to be in this conversation.
John: And you're...
John: You're using books as sort of social chess pieces with one another.
John: And I would kind of sit in these conversations and every once in a while lean in and say like, oh, that book was really interesting.
John: It made me sort of question like my masculinity in a way.
John: And the conversation would come to a screeching halt and everybody would kind of look at me.
John: And then they'd go back to talking about the next book and the publisher of that book.
John: They were not interested in talking about what the books did to them.
John: And that is what passes for intellectual conversation a lot of the time.
John: You're not really exploring the work.
John: And in a lot of cases, I wasn't sure that they had read them.
Merlin: It reminds me a little bit of the way people sometimes talk about comic books, where when you're talking about a comic book or a character or a story arc, it mostly leads you to the next character or book or story arc.
Merlin: And you're right.
Merlin: There's not a lot of times where you sit down and talk about how it made you feel.
John: Yeah.
John: And so much of that comic book talk is like this artist, this anchor, this – where it fits into the canon –
John: And never where it resides in your, in your heart or if it even does.
John: And that's the thing.
John: Like people give me, give me stuff all the time and I read it and it's the rare thing and it should be rare that you read something and go like, Oh fuck.
John: Now I am forever changed by this.
John: Like this got inside me.
John: Um, yeah.
John: And for me, unfortunately, if a thing doesn't get inside me, then I don't want to talk about it.
John: I don't care about where it fits in the can, and I don't care that this is a work in somebody else's work pile.
John: I'm looking for the thing that nabs me, and if it doesn't, then I don't care about its relationship.
John: And that makes it hard for – and that's part of the problem of me with fanboy or that's how – that's why I can't be a fanboy exactly because how many great works are there?
John: Not that many.
John: And if you're just a – if you just want to talk about the things that connected with you, it's going to be different for every person and you don't have that like bonding –
John: over the marvel universe for instance like what about the marvel universe really grabs me there are several things but but but not enough that i want to spend a lot of time talking about all the stuff that doesn't you know right and that's just you know that's hard about rock and roll too i mean i i listened to the strokes yesterday
John: i wanted to hear the strokes i hadn't heard the strokes in in 10 years and i i was like i want to hear that i want to try and remember that feeling that i heard the first time i heard the strokes and felt like oh shit why didn't i think of that right they were definitely one of those bands yeah why didn't i think of that it was right there it was sitting there right all along
John: And nobody thought of it until they thought of it.
Merlin: How did it feel after, what was it, about 2000?
Merlin: 2001 probably was when their record hit big.
Merlin: How does it feel now?
John: 2001 is when the record hit big.
John: And I can't separate that from the fact that that is when the first Long Winners record came out.
Merlin: I can't separate it from 9-11 because they had to pull that song New York City Cops from the album.
Merlin: They chose to because they thought it was in poor taste given what happened.
John: yeah so 2001 wow that's when um wow really 2001 first long winner's record came or yeah first long winner's record was done it didn't come out until 2002 but it was we were done making it and then the strokes record came out and it was like oh wow fuck right that sound
John: Dang, dang, dang, dang, dang, dang, dang, dang.
John: And 5,000 bands duplicated that.
John: But it had a lot of energy.
John: It had a lot of swagger.
John: But without too much obvious...
John: You know that – whatever that dumb song by that Australian band.
John: Are you going to be my girl?
John: And it was like, oh, that's so fucking – It was easy swagger.
Merlin: It felt natural and it was – minimalist is the wrong word.
Merlin: But it wasn't overdone.
Merlin: It was just pretty much just like straight up rock and roll where it's another one of those things like the faces.
Merlin: The faces come along and you're like –
Merlin: why did people not do this before?
Merlin: It's like the Rolling Stones more distilled in some ways.
Merlin: Those bands are Pixies or these bands that come along and you're like, oh man, why did nobody do this before?
John: Yeah, and I feel like when that first Long Winners record came out, the reaction from people was like, oh, yes, this.
Merlin: I remember that All Music Guide review.
Merlin: Made me so mad.
Merlin: Everybody would say you sounded like R.E.M., and I never understood that.
Merlin: Yeah, that I personally sounded like Michael Stipe.
Merlin: Well, yeah, that the band sounded like R.E.M., which maybe I just think of R.E.M.
Merlin: as a different band than the one they're comparing it to.
Merlin: But I mean, I can hear how something like, what, maybe Cinnamon has some instrumentation that could be reminiscent of
John: of a like early to mid 90s rem but well also it had does that one pete buck played on yeah it actually has pete buck and there there was a there was a review uh during that era that was like this band sounds like rem and they actually got peter buck to play on it that is a bridge too far
Merlin: Yeah, but, like, that's so lame.
Merlin: I mean, I remember he produced a Feelys album I liked a lot in college and played guitar on one of the songs.
Merlin: But it still sounded like the Feelys.
Merlin: It didn't sound like R.E.M.
Merlin: I mean, yeah, you got a bad rap for a while, as long as we're digging up old wounds.
Merlin: You got a bad rap for a while for the whole, like, well...
Merlin: People talk about this band because it has people from other bands in it that are more famous.
Merlin: And it's like, it's missed the entire point of why, you know, especially those first couple albums have such a place in my heart.
Merlin: They're just really just fucking good albums.
Merlin: They don't sound like anybody.
Merlin: I just don't get that.
John: They don't.
John: But, you know, I can't.
John: When I think about all the bands that came out, all the bands of my friends, all the bands that came out during that era that didn't get any attention.
John: that didn't move the needle at all.
John: I can't look back and, you know, through that whole period, I kept really, really, I mean, more than anything, really wanting to be...
John: to be suddenly important in that way that sometimes I mean kind of not sometimes every season there's a band that's suddenly important and you look at it you listen to the music and you go yeah I mean I hear what's cool about that that song is
John: But I'm not sure if I get why this band is suddenly important and that band isn't.
John: I ended up meeting and really liking the singer of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah or Foster the People or I mean the number of bands that in the course of my own career in music were just the band of the moment.
John: And I've met enough of those people and been friends with enough of them that very few of them
John: have a death cab career where they're just kind of the band of the moment multiple times until they, until they're a stadium band.
John: And you kind of go, wow, how, how did that happen?
John: Like clap your hands.
John: Say, yeah, isn't just, it didn't, it didn't keep happening for them, but they definitely had a, had a six month period there where they were the, they were the band that people were talking about.
John: Yeah.
John: And yeah,
John: And when you ask them about that experience, they're like, oh man, I wish that that hadn't happened.
John: I wish that we had had a chance to be more organic and take our time.
John: And it was really weird and it blew up and then it went away.
John: And I think about when I was putting out those first couple of records and I just wanted to be the band of the moment so badly.
John: And then I realized I was lucky that
John: I was lucky to get the attention I got, and clap your hands, say, yeah, I was lucky to get the attention they got.
John: Like, you really only get your shot at it, and I had mine, and there was so much snark in the air at the time, and some of it landed on us, but...
John: But what is our Metacritic rating?
John: I mean, it's still above 60.
John: I think we were appraised pretty accurately in the long run.
John: Really?
John: I mean, I don't know.
John: I would love to have – I mean, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
John: came out right around the same time as the first long winner's record.
John: And Yankee Hotel Foxtrot had all that story about how they took it to the majors, and the majors didn't want it, and they got it back and put it out themselves, and it was a validation of indie culture and a validation of fuck the man, even though they put it out themselves on another imprint of their major label.
John: And they made that film...
John: There's a lot of stories.
Merlin: Also, just the whole how it supposedly started with the idea of hearing those weird radio broadcasts that seem to be to no one in particular.
Merlin: There's all kinds of things NPR could write a story about with regard to that album.
John: It was hella NPR'd.
John: Yep.
John: And it was indie rock NPR for sure.
John: Everybody had a story and it was right at the peak moment of that notion, that sort of
John: Sean Marshall, Cat Power, Bonnie Prince Billy idea of indie rock artist who doesn't want to be famous, who's really tortured by their fame and tortured by their own complicated mental world.
John: And so...
John: And so they didn't want it, man.
John: They didn't want it.
John: They were forced into it because their work was so amazing.
John: And sitting on the other side of it and saying like, well, Bonnie Prince Billy may be living in a tree fort and he may not want it, but he sure seems to pose for a lot of photo shoots.
John: Do you know how long it takes to do a photo shoot for a major feature in a magazine?
Merlin: Somebody is paying his publicist.
John: Yeah, it takes a whole day of standing around getting your picture taken to get that picture that's on the cover of Mojo or whatever.
John: And there's a different picture of him every time I open a magazine.
John: So he's doing a lot of photos.
Merlin: Janine Garofalo regarding Eddie Vedder in a Kaiser helmet.
Merlin: It's like...
Merlin: Well, you know, if you don't want to be photographed in a Kaiser helmet, like stop showing up at photo shoots wearing a Kaiser helmet.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: Pretty much.
Merlin: You know, if you quit being – but it is certainly way more complicated than that.
Merlin: It's super complicated.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: But Yankee Hotel Foxtrot aesthetically –
John: Was exploring a lot of similar ground to the first Long Winters record, right?
John: We were using Americana styles, but we were spending a lot of time with broken keyboards and weird little, like...
John: xylophones and stuff before before that became ubiquitous and they were yankee hotel foxtrot has a lot of sort of sonic landscapes which was also what we were trying to do on the first long winners record and we were making those records or they were somewhat contemporaneous with one another like
John: I forget when Yankee Hotel Foxtrot came out, but it was already after we had finished the first Longwinners record.
John: And maybe they came out about the same time.
John: And the way that their record was discussed in the popular culture as though it was –
John: you know, a life changing event for everybody and, and a real like new idea and, and sitting with our record kind of there in my hand, offering it up to the world and saying like, this is a, this was motivated by similar, similar ideas and the song and their songs here that are, that are equivalent, equivalently good.
Um,
John: And to have it sort of not only like not be embraced at that same level, obviously, but not discussed in that way even.
John: The language used to describe our record was not the same.
John: And that was the big – my initial big resentment toward the Decembrists was that –
John: Their record came out and people were like, it is the literary – this is the music that smart people will listen to.
John: Have you heard these lyrics?
John: Have you sat down with your pince-nez on and read these lyrics?
John: Because this is where – this is the future of smart people music.
John: And I was like, I also have –
John: lyrics that that i would i would love it if you would read them a couple of times everyone hello and you know and our our reviews were like you know indie rock stuff here here's a band making some indie rock music and and you know there it is right uh that's what we were doing but but i i could never quite figure out how to get yourself in the lens of that
John: of that culture sniper and, and, and, and honestly, everybody that makes stuff kind of wants to be there.
John: And then as soon as they are, they don't want to be there and they disavow ever having wanted to be there.
Mm hmm.
Merlin: Well, because it happens before you have time to really realize it's happening sometimes.
John: Well, I may have told you about this before, but in early 1991, I was sitting in a cafe in Seattle and reading, I think, The Rocket, which was one of – at the time, Seattle had like four alternative newspapers.
John: And The Rocket was the rock and roll one.
John: And it was a long interview with Nirvana pre-Nevermind.
John: during which Kurt Cobain kind of spent a lot of the interview saying, like, we're going to be the biggest band in the world.
John: Our record is the best record anybody's ever made, and we're going to be huge.
John: And just really lapping it up and loving it and wanting it.
John: And I remember reading it at the time also being a 21-year-old who wanted to be a rock star and being like, yeah, man, that's the attitude.
John: That's that rock and roll attitude.
John: And there was some irony in it for sure.
John: But he was also saying, we've made the best rock and roll record you've ever heard and I can't wait for you to hear it.
John: And he was talking about Nevermind.
John: But it hadn't come out yet.
John: And he was just like, this is going to blow people's minds.
John: It's fucking killer.
John: And fast forward a year.
John: And reading the press where he was like, this record didn't sound like we wanted it to.
John: It was too polished.
John: It was too rock and roll.
John: The major label hired an outside mixer and made it all slick.
John: And that's not who we are.
John: And, you know, the story had really changed.
John: And I imagine in his mind...
John: It was true what he was saying.
John: And I've never been able to find that Rocket interview.
John: I've never heard anything like that from him that I know of.
Merlin: I'm not a scholar of Kurt Cobain, but I'm much more familiar with the other kind of story.
John: Yeah, right.
John: The other story became the canon.
John: But the early talk from him on that was like, this is going to kick ass.
John: And because they were 21 and had made a killer rock record and they, you know, they had to know it.
John: Right.
John: And they were excited.
John: They were excited.
John: because you don't wear a Kaiser helmet to a photo shoot unless you want your picture taken wearing a Kaiser helmet.
John: And honestly, you don't make a kick-ass rock record unless you want to be a kick-ass rock band.
Merlin: Yeah, and you always got to remember that there was no Nirvana before Nirvana, that whatever happened in the two or three years after that, you see as there was a precedent with them.
Merlin: But it must have seemed like a really big deal, because of all the bands that you could pick out of the lineup in 1990 or 91,
Merlin: They would not necessarily be the one you would pick to be the ones that get a DGC contract and get the biggest record in years.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I mean, you tell me.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: No, I don't.
John: When you pick the Fastbacks before that.
John: Well, or Mudhoney.
John: I mean, around Seattle, like what was cool, like Mudhoney was cool.
Mm hmm.
John: And Nirvana was kind of seen as like Mudhoney wannabes because Mudhoney had that like, fuck you, man.
John: That was in their sound and in their attitude.
John: And if you look at Mudhoney photo shoots from that era, they didn't show up wearing a Kaiser helmet.
John: They showed up covered in vomit.
John: And so according to the standards of the time, according to the language of the time, they were way cooler and more authentic and their sound reflected that and the shit that they said.
John: I mean they were funny –
John: rye but also they were they were the they were the punk rock monkeys or the punk rock hard days night where instead of saying like turn left at Greenland they would take the reporter's microphone and and dunk it in a bucket of beer and say this interview is over fuck you
John: And by comparison, Nirvana was polished and – I mean more polished and more ambitious and they had that – there was that song –
John: I mean, there were a couple of Nirvana lyrics that were kind of cribbed out of Mudhoney lyrics enough that it was noticeable and that people remarked on it.
John: Wow.
John: Like, didn't Mudhoney already write that song?
John: I think they did.
John: But the Nirvana version of it was just a little bit more listenable.
John: And also, we think of Kurt Cobain as being very photogenic now, but they weren't very photogenic.
John: Just the contrast between Chris, who was 6'7", and Kurt, who was 5'7", it was weird looking, right?
John: I mean, they were only cute after...
John: after they had a little bit of style put on them.
Merlin: Well, so Kurt Cobain had almost like a Manson vibe sometimes.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: He looked really manic.
John: And bad skin and didn't know how to, you know, that whole period where he was dyeing his hair black and stuff.
John: Just no, thank you.
John: But after the fact, you look back and it all seems like it was fated to be.
John: when i got to seattle they were already up they were a big band because bleach had come out and they were one of the they were one of the big bands but they were playing at the okay hotel it's not like they were even playing the show box um they were they could sell three four hundred tickets and people it's people weren't like snipping off a lock of his hair or anything yeah um
John: But then that record came out, and boy, it really connected.
John: And it connected with everybody immediately.
John: 24.
John: Five years ago.
John: 24 years ago.
John: 24 years ago this month, right?
John: It came out in August or September.
Merlin: Right, right.
Merlin: I first heard it on MTV, I think.
Merlin: I didn't even hear it on the... You know what?
Merlin: I might have heard it on the college radio station, but I very specifically remember when the video... Because I was watching MTV a lot then.
Merlin: And when the video came out and I taped it and I was in its thrall, I thought it was one of the greatest songs I ever heard.
Yeah.
John: Yeah, it was such a good song that even Al Yankovic's version of it was something that I wanted to hear.
Merlin: It had so many good parts to it.
Merlin: I mean, you know, I say this too much, but there was so many hooks in that song.
Merlin: But the hooks were sometimes so weird or just so satisfying.
Merlin: I mean, the drums on that song alone are just like...
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: And wasn't he a fairly recent addition to the band at that point?
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: He was an outsider.
John: Not even from the Northwest, man.
John: He's from Virginia.
John: This interview's over.
John: Fuck your corporate rock magazines, man.
John: Here we are.
John: Here we are, 25 years later, and that's our legacy, right?
John: It's not like, oh, yes, the Freedom Riders.
John: Oh, yes, we ended the war in Vietnam.
John: No, it's like, oh, fuck your corporate rock magazines, man.
Merlin: Yay.
John: Hooray.
John: That's us.
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John: That'll be our epitaph.
John: I'm depressed now.
John: Sorry.
John: Yeah, I know.
John: It happens a lot.
John: It happens a lot.
John: And what – oh, you know what the latest one for me was?
John: What?
John: It was realizing that Barack Obama was elected president of the United States when he was 47 years old.
John: And at the time when he was 47 years old, I was, what, 30 –
John: 38?
John: What was I?
John: 39?
John: You weren't that young.
John: I was 39, but able to say like, oh, right.
John: Well, 47, of course, is like presidential age.
John: Right.
John: It's not like he's getting elected president at 39.
John: Right.
John: Which is still a young man.
John: 39.
John: Still got a lot of living to do.
John: A lot of living.
John: But now, Merlin, next month I will be 47 years old.
John: I will be 47 years old and I can't even make it through the primary of a Seattle City Council election.
John: Let alone get elected President of the United States.
John: you didn't win that primary didn't win it huh was it close wasn't even close hmm was not close pretty definitive not really a lot of opportunity to step in and say like i believe there were some voting irregularities i would i demand a recount like none of that was that uh there was not an opportunity for that uh it's been a couple weeks now
John: It's been a couple weeks.
John: Just about a couple weeks tomorrow.
John: A couple weeks, yeah.
John: Yep.
John: Yep.
John: Sort of still processing it in the same way that they used to say that if you smoked pot, you could still detect it in your hair and your fingernails several weeks after, months after.
Merlin: And if you smoke a cigar, you'll get high again.
Merlin: Remember that one?
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: So how's your hair doing?
Merlin: Is it coming out?
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: The pot?
John: Of elections?
Merlin: I don't even know what the analogy is anymore.
John: I'm just cycling.
John: I'm just pushing it out through my pores.
John: I'm sure that campaign is still going to be in my fingernails and my hair for a while.
John: But the part of it that...
John: would be detectable in my urine is maybe now starting to pass.
John: Um, and I'm getting back on, uh, I'm getting back on a regular, uh, a more, a more normal, even keel.
Merlin: You sound a lot better.
Merlin: I don't know if that means anything, but you sound better.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You sound less bad.
John: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: If you want to wait a week, we could also talk about Evel Knievel.
John: Well, yeah, I do want to share my whole experience with everybody.
John: And I always knew that that would take a little bit of processing time.
John: And I'm still processing it.
John: So why don't we talk about Evel Knievel.
John: I was kind of kidding.
John: And I will put a bookmark – I'll put a little attack in it because I do want to –
John: I do want to discourse extensively on the experience now that I am not under such intense scrutiny.
John: Right.
John: Because I feel like I owe that to everybody.
John: And also, it will be interesting for me, but...
John: But I'm very, very interested in Evel Knievel.
John: I don't know why I brought it up.
John: Is that a thing?
John: Is Evel Knievel back in the news?
Merlin: You know, you're talking about how people talk about books kind of jump from one thing to the next.
Merlin: I do that sometimes when I'm watching TV.
Merlin: It's one reason why I frequently don't watch a whole movie.
John: So you have one of those remote control dinguses that allows you to jump around?
John: Or are you talking about you actually touch the mouse pad?
Merlin: Oh, no.
Merlin: No, I mean, I have a television.
Merlin: I'm not an animal.
Merlin: You know, I watch things on the TV.
Merlin: But...
Merlin: Yeah.
John: You watch things on the TV, but they are coming from the internet.
John: They can.
John: They can.
John: Oh, but you also have cable.
John: No, I'm a cord cutter.
John: So you cut the cord.
John: I cut the cord.
John: Do you have a disc or a dirt?
Merlin: I have a Blu-ray slash DVD player that's not currently plugged in, but it's there if it needs to be called upon.
Merlin: No, I mean like a rooftop satellite dish.
Merlin: We don't get any TV in the normal sense at our house, which is what makes going to a hotel room so staggering for my family.
Merlin: Because my kid's been brought up in a house that just doesn't have commercials.
Merlin: It's so weird because she loves them so much.
Merlin: I think it's her favorite part of the show.
Merlin: The commercials.
Merlin: Loves the commercials.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: We talked about this.
Merlin: Like we'll be going out to eat because, you know, you can't go out to eat unless there's televisions everywhere.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And she'll just be rapt attention.
Merlin: She'll just be staring at like the infomercial about golf.
John: They're much louder and much brighter than the normal show.
Merlin: Oh, absolutely.
Merlin: Yeah, absolutely.
Merlin: But no, she's entirely entranced by those.
Merlin: But it's strange because that means that she's grown up watching reality shows like Project Runway where they do the whole big cliffhanger and then they go to commercial and then they come back and there's the cliffhanger music and they say what they just said right before they went to commercial.
Merlin: And it's like, well, why did they say that twice?
Merlin: It's like, well, because there was like two minutes of commercials there that we didn't see.
John: Right.
Ha ha ha ha.
Merlin: No, I don't know.
Merlin: I was texting you last night because I was watching a movie about Evil Knievel, and it just made me think of you.
Merlin: Because in the first few minutes, they interviewed Matthew McConaughey and Guy Fieri and Uncle Bob Einstein, all in the first few minutes.
John: So, yeah, you sent me on a little bit of a Bob Einstein trip last night where I watched...
John: I watched his comedians in cars getting coffee.
Merlin: Oh, good.
Merlin: Did you enjoy that?
John: With the Mercedes 300 SEL.
Merlin: That's a hell of a car.
John: It's a beautiful car.
John: I was looking for one of those for a long time.
John: I thought that that would be the car.
John: And I actually went and test drove some.
Merlin: And it had a 300-horsepower engine in a car that size?
John: Yeah, 280 horsepower.
John: Yeah, it was like the big Mercedes V8 that they kind of just slammed into the regular size car.
John: And yeah, they're amazing.
John: But, you know, they were amazing at the time.
John: The problem is now any...
John: like any like base model Kia with a four cylinder motor, we have, automotive technology has improved so much that, you know, through the, through the alchemy of like torque and, and revs and tuning, they have basically achieved the,
John: with these tiny little motors in these tiny little cars, an ability to go way faster.
Merlin: Well, it feels like the pickup is where it's changed.
Merlin: It feels like every, you know, we lived through those years where pretty much every American car was not that super good.
Merlin: Some were nicer than others.
Merlin: But it feels like any car, American or internationally produced, almost any car from the last even 10 years that I've sat down in felt fine and had enough pickup to be able to get you onto the highway.
Merlin: And it just didn't used to be that way.
Merlin: Is that fuel injection?
Merlin: How do they do that?
John: Yeah, it's all that kind of stuff.
John: Physics.
John: Yeah, the cars don't have carburetors anymore.
John: They're all fuel injected, and they all are geared in a way where your first gear and your second gear are really...
John: So they, so you get all this off the line sort of jump.
John: Like my, my high school car was a 19.
John: This is before I bought the Fiat.
John: My, the first, the first real car I had, I inherited from my dad and it was a 1972 Chrysler Newport Imperial.
John: And it was a coupe, a two door with a sort of opera window.
John: And it had a vinyl top.
John: And the color was like metallic copper.
John: A metallic copper coupe.
John: Wow.
John: But when you think of a coupe, like a two-door, you think of it being a hot rod car.
John: But this Chrysler Newport Imperial was 45 feet long.
Wow.
John: And was in the style of the time, right?
John: Pre-energy crisis.
John: Oh, my God.
John: What a boat.
John: And that is exactly what we called it, the boat.
John: That's a two-door?
John: Yeah.
John: It's just – the trunk looks like it's 20 feet long.
John: The trunk is 20 feet long.
John: Oh, my God.
John: And the inside was like –
John: upholstered in exactly the fabric that you would have on like a grandmother's couch.
John: Maybe it was a 74.
John: It was.
John: It was a 74 Imperial.
John: Oh, it looks kind of like an LTD.
John: Yeah, but bigger.
John: And Chrysler.
John: Right, right.
Merlin: I mean, just in terms like I think of like a LTD or Continental from Ford is what it reminds me of.
Merlin: It looks like it's a nod to that.
Merlin: But it's a little sportier.
Merlin: And it's long in the front.
Merlin: It's long in the back.
Merlin: It's long in the middle.
Merlin: This is impossibly.
Merlin: My God, this is ridiculous.
John: And so my Chrysler had a 440.
John: Yeah.
John: Like a very, very big motor.
John: The displacement of the motor was pretty much as large as you could get.
John: There obviously were bigger motors.
John: The Cadillac had like a 472 or something.
John: But 440 was a very, very big engine.
John: And...
John: And yet the car was geared and designed to cruise on America's highways.
John: And from a stoplight, if I would slam down the pedal, it would immediately burn two gallons of gas.
John: But the car didn't, like, peel out.
John: It didn't... It sort of, you know, it's...
John: Its initial reaction to having the gas pedal slam down was sort of like, oh, God, really?
John: Okay.
John: And it like lurched forward and then hit its stride at about 65 miles an hour.
John: Do you know what it weighed?
Yeah.
John: 5,000 pounds.
Merlin: Yeah, 5,000 pounds.
Merlin: It weighed over two tons.
John: Yeah.
John: So it would – if you were doing a quarter mile against somebody, like any Scirocco or any Volkswagen Golf could just school it.
John: in a quarter mile.
John: But if you were doing a mile or, you know, or a, or a two mile straight away, like forget about it.
John: This car could, could go 140 miles an hour and, and it just wanted to like the faster it went, it just kind of would sit down on its haunches.
John: It just kind of got, it would just get lower and darker.
John: Like there was a gear, it switched gears constantly.
John: At 110, there was another gear at 110 miles an hour.
John: It would go into a further like overdrive and you'd be going like it would downshift at 110, which means that it was meant to stay up there.
John: They designed it in such a way that it was like, well, at 110, you're going to want to have a cruising gear at that point, right?
John: So that mentality, and I mean, and obviously it was burning a gallon of gas every minute.
John: But that mentality compared to cars now where none of these little cars can go 100 miles an hour, and if you got one up to 100 miles an hour, you wouldn't want to stay there.
John: They'd shake themselves apart.
John: So that Mercedes, that 300, it's a fast car and a very cool, smooth-running car, but it's the same thing.
John: It's designed to go 100 miles an hour all day long and kind of sit there like a brick on ice.
Merlin: My stepfather, I'm pretty sure, had the successor, which is the Chrysler New Yorker Brown.
Merlin: Oh, that's a big car.
Merlin: That's a really big car.
Merlin: It was hard to close the doors.
Merlin: They were so – it had electric windows, which of course made it even heavier.
Merlin: It was so impossibly heavy.
John: It was hard to close the doors because the doors themselves weighed so much.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, I mean there was a lot of velocity.
Merlin: Once you got it moving, you could like lose a kid in that door.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: We had a lot of fun in that car, but unfortunately I was not –
John: I was a late bloomer, so all of the wonderful sexcapades that I potentially could have had if I was a little bit more of a fast mover, by the time I was ready to really make out with somebody on the comfortable couch in the back seat of that car, the car was gone.
John: Did I ever tell you what happened to that car?
John: I got back to Anchorage...
John: after some trip and I was like where's the boat and my dad said oh I gave it to the city of Fort Yukon
John: My dad at the time was working as a – the city of Fort Yukon had encountered some financial problems and was kind of going bankrupt.
John: And it was governed by a board, by a kind of city council, but it was –
John: It was also part of a native corporation.
John: And so my dad went there to help them straighten out their town and kind of ended up for a time being a sort of unelected
John: mayor, chairman, or, you know, like consigliere to the city.
Merlin: Oh, just like kind of an ad hoc burgemeister?
John: Yeah, somebody to come up there and my dad and my uncle both sort of helped the city of Fort Yukon over the course of several years figure out how to govern itself.
John: Because there were alliances between families in the town and there was a board that was sort of run by a guy and they had in the style of the time like there was the town but they also owned an airline.
John: The town owned its own airline.
Yeah.
John: And they were right on the river, and it was a confusing place.
John: Anyway, we used to go up there quite a bit when my dad would have business there.
John: But I came home from some long trip, and he said, I gave your car to the city of Fort Yukon.
John: And I said, that was my car.
John: It still had my stuff in the trunk.
John: Oh, man.
John: Did you open the trunk and empty it out?
John: And he was like, oh, no.
No.
John: i didn't and i was like there was there was my stuff was in it like uh in the in the in the back seat my coat and um a lot of things uh that seems really i mean there was like a package of oreos in the glove box that i was still working my way through and he was like well you know they for whatever reason i needed i i felt like
John: It was sitting in my driveway and they needed it.
John: And so it's now the city car.
John: I mean, there were other cars in Fort Yukon, but this was now the city government car.
Merlin: Jeez, I mean, that's very generous, but like what a cautionary tale.
Merlin: I never want to do that to my kid's car.
John: Well, and also in order to get it to Fort Yukon, he had to drive it up to the end of the road.
John: And put it on a barge and ship it down the Yukon River because there's no road to the city of Fort Yukon.
John: You can only get there by airplane or by barge.
John: And he barged it to Fort Yukon.
John: And then, of course, the river froze.
John: And, you know, I was arriving home in December or something.
John: And it was like there's no getting – you can't get the car.
John: Even if you went up there and said give me my car back, there wouldn't be any way to retrieve it.
John: That took a lot of work.
John: It was a big, yeah, my dad, you know, he never did anything half-assed.
John: Well, that's not true.
John: He did everything half-assed, but he did not give my car away half-assed.
John: He gave my car away in the most fully-assed way possible.