Ep. 199: "The Wrong Kind of Warlock"
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Merlin: And by Cards Against Humanity.
Merlin: This week, they asked Henry Birdseye to help me say hi to John.
John: Now it's time for two dudes that are on the phone.
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Merlin Man.
Merlin: John Roderick.
John: John.
Merlin: I'm kind of disoriented.
Merlin: I am super duper disoriented.
Merlin: Oh, God, I'm so glad.
Merlin: You're really, well, you're, what's the opposite of totally late?
Merlin: You're punctual today.
Merlin: Yeah, I'm super punctual.
Merlin: What's up with that?
John: Well, I just had a sebaceous cyst removed from my head like 20 minutes ago.
John: Yeah.
John: Really?
John: You're recently cyst-less?
John: I'm now cyst-less for the first time in over 10 years.
John: And so I am both quite considerably disoriented, but also here on time.
Merlin: Sebaceous cyst.
John: Sebaceous cyst.
John: Oh no, you had like a lump?
John: A big lump.
John: For 12 years probably, or maybe...
John: 15 years.
John: I don't know.
John: Long, long time.
John: Were you just like touching it all the time?
John: Yeah.
John: And it was on the back of my head, kind of the reverse temple, right?
John: Not directly on the back of my head, but at the same angle of a temple except in the back.
John: Oh, if you had a second face on the back of your head, it would be on its temple.
John: It'd be on the temple.
John: And so I couldn't really wear a hat very comfortably.
John: I couldn't.
John: It interfered with my sleep.
John: You know, it was just sort of back there where your head lies on the pillow.
John: But I never did anything about it because meh.
John: Yeah.
John: Did you know that it was a sebaceous cyst?
John: I did because, you know, when I first got it on the back of my head, I was like, oh, dear.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: You don't you don't want lumps.
John: You don't want a lump on your head.
John: And then I did a little bit of asking around and I was like, oh, it's a sebaceous cyst.
John: Whatever.
John: It's nothing.
John: But then it was just, it's been there forever.
John: And I just got my first primary care physician in years.
John: And I think I even have mentioned it to doctors before.
John: And they were like, oh, yeah, it's a sebaceous system.
John: And you can get it.
John: Like they showed no concern about it.
John: No one even wanted the money that they would get from removing it.
John: They just were like, yeah, you can do it or not.
John: I mean, it doesn't matter.
Yeah.
John: But I finally, I've got this primary care doctor and I was like, yeah, I'm going to get that removed.
John: So I went in today and I realized like I've been thinking about this guy for years.
John: Think about it all the time.
John: Reach up.
John: Anytime I reach up and touch my head, I'm like, uh, and it moved around me.
John: Oh, my goodness.
John: Now, I wouldn't expect that.
John: No, it didn't move around my head, but if you grabbed it and, like, wiggled it, it would move, you know?
John: And it was a party trick, right?
John: I'd say, hey, why don't you grab my cyst?
John: And I realized that I have imagined taking it out myself with an X-Acto knife many, many times.
John: It seems like something you could... You've taken out cold sores bigger than this.
John: Well, except this is a sack the size of a turkey liver.
John: What?
John: I mean, it was enormous.
Merlin: I'm not that familiar with turkey organs.
Merlin: Give me another example.
John: It was the size of a... Like a coin purse or a USB dongle?
John: Yeah, somewhere between a USB dongle and a coin purse.
John: And it was full of hummus.
John: And it was just sitting in there.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: And so finally I was like, why don't you take this?
John: The doctor was like, I'll do it in 20 minutes.
John: And so he put some anesthesia in my sebaceous cyst and he cut it out with his X-Acto knife.
John: And the whole time I was like, listen, you've got to show this to me because I've been thinking about this guy.
John: For 15 years, he and I have a relationship with this little fella, and I don't want to just have you cut it.
John: It's like that thing where they take something out of you, and then you're like, let me see it.
John: And they go, oh, we already threw it away.
Merlin: I can't believe they threw things away.
Merlin: I mean, just for closure.
Merlin: For closure, thank you.
Merlin: You know, I'm not a big burial fan, but I get the open casket.
John: Yeah, right.
John: You're like, is he really dead?
John: Yes, he's dead.
John: Touch him.
Merlin: So it wasn't just a bunch of stuff under your skin.
Merlin: He could actually show you the sealed unit.
John: Well, so they cut it and then they squeeze it.
John: And then they cut out the little sack, which is, like I say, like a bag.
John: A bag that seems like it's made out of chicken fat, except it's a bag.
John: And I was like, listen, I want to see it all.
John: I want to see what was in it.
John: I want to see the bag.
John: I want the whole nine because I don't want to, I mean, you know, I need to say goodbye, but also I want to say fuck you to it.
John: But I just, I've imagined it so much that I want to know what it is.
John: For a long time, I thought it was full of saline.
John: But then I realized like, no, it's full of, it's full of what I would describe as matter.
John: Yeah.
John: But they were describing as tissue.
John: I was like, well, for me, there's a big gap between tissue and matter.
John: Yeah.
John: But, you know, it's nomenclature.
Merlin: I think of tissue as being, I'm not a physician.
Merlin: I think of tissue as being a little bit more solid.
Merlin: Like it could be squishy, but it wouldn't be liquidy.
Merlin: Yeah, it's connected to you somehow.
John: Is this like the fat that you trim off a chicken, John?
John: Is it that kind of thing?
John: Well, that's what the bag looked like.
John: But I swear to you, the stuff that was inside looked like hummus.
John: That's a Mediterranean treat.
John: That's right.
John: The hummus tree.
John: And, you know, so in researching these sebaceous cysts, I discovered that there is an... And for those of you who are eating while listening to the podcast, first, you should know not to do that.
John: We're the ones who eat, not you.
John: But second of all, it's only going to get worse.
John: If you're queasy or that type of person, I don't know, go take a walk around the block.
John: But I discovered...
John: That there is an enormous subculture of people who relax and deal with the stresses of the day by watching YouTube videos of people squeezing pimples.
Merlin: You taught me about this last week.
Merlin: Oh, this was only last week I talked about this?
Merlin: Yeah, it goes by every seven days or so.
John: It must have been because I was thinking of my sebaceous cyst.
Merlin: As recently as a week ago, you're still kind of on the bubble.
Merlin: You're still on the cyst about whether this is something you wanted to get treated.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: But I've thought about it all the time.
John: I'm surprised we haven't talked about it 50 times because I think about it all the time.
John: And within the context of the zip-popping culture, sebaceous cysts are right at the top of things that they want to see on YouTube, the squeezing.
John: Oh, man, talk about closure.
John: Because I dated a girl who was one of those pickers, and I think there are a lot of pickers out there.
John: There's a lot of closet poppers.
John: Poppers and pickers who just want to lay there and pick at you.
Merlin: Well, we've talked before about there's that subclass of people you meet in college or in a college town who want to clean your bong because they want the resin.
Merlin: That seems weird.
Merlin: Okay, it's right there.
Merlin: You're a bong cleaner.
Merlin: Well, yeah, pipe, you know, proto-pipe cleaner.
Merlin: You're a Tuscan Raider.
Merlin: You know, you're out there.
Merlin: But then there are also people who you can tell they're kind of eyeballing you.
Merlin: They're kind of like going, hmm.
Merlin: You're like, what is going on?
Merlin: You're like, can I pop that?
John: That's a thing, right?
John: Well, the thing is, I would never want to pop something on somebody's... Well, frankly, I don't want to pop anything.
John: Well, you're not a popper and a picker.
John: But I dated a girl that was a strong picker, and it was very intimate to her.
John: It was something that we would do after lovemaking.
John: She'd be like, oh, look at that little thing on the back of your neck or whatever.
John: It's very tender.
John: It's like two monkeys.
John: Yeah, it's exactly like two monkeys, but she was...
John: you know, it was tender, but also she would become monomaniacal.
John: And she and her girlfriends would sit and pick at each other.
John: That's kind of hot.
John: And talk about it, talk about it later, you know.
John: Wow, okay.
John: And then I realized that this was not uncommon, but that most people didn't feel that, even people that you were, you know, dating.
John: Certainly it's not a thing to bring up when you're casually dating.
John: But I discovered that given the opportunity,
John: If you broach the topic with somebody, like, what about this picking?
John: Typically, you'll find more people than you thought will go like, oh, really?
John: Could I?
John: You know, like very taboo.
Merlin: It's like a Fifty Shades of Grey for dermatology.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: But like before the internet, you know, like let's say you lived, you might live somewhere and you didn't have the internet and you didn't have magazines and you didn't have Pecable.
Merlin: And you might have some kind of very... What is Pecable?
Merlin: Pecable?
Merlin: I mean, and how can I get Pecable?
Merlin: It's the medieval precursor to Showtime.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
Merlin: The cable, m'lady.
Merlin: Where, you know, you might have something that you don't even realize is your special thing.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: I mean, there are people, you reach a certain age in life and you have enough exposure to the internet, you realize that not only is your special thing a thing.
Merlin: That it's there are a lot of other people who have your special thing and they might have your thing in a way that's much more special than you, which actually kind of makes you feel maybe a little bit normal, maybe in a good way.
Merlin: It's you feel, you know, I'm not the crazy one.
John: I'm not the crazy picker here.
John: I am just a normal picker.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, like, imagine the first person who said on their wedding night, would you spank me?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: The first person that did that.
Merlin: This is probably what?
Merlin: Maybe in the 1600s, right?
Merlin: I think maybe even before, but yeah, right.
Merlin: But, you know, the thing is, though, there's certain kinds of special things that you're aware of, right?
Merlin: Like, you might know about butt stuff things, or you might know about brassieres.
John: Uh-huh, right, or toes.
Merlin: Or you might know about shrimping.
John: Or shrimping.
John: Shrimping, yeah.
John: I don't know about shrimping.
John: That's when you go out on a boat and you get shrimp.
John: Oh, I see.
John: I see.
John: That's not like Hot Carl.
John: That's actually shrimping.
John: Hot Carl.
John: Shrimping.
Merlin: Is a Hot Carl a Dirty Sanchez kind of thing?
John: A Hot Carl is in the family of a Dirty Sanchez.
John: It's like a rodeo?
John: Okay.
John: Um...
John: Yeah, right.
John: Well, and I think this dovetails with finding your duck, right?
Merlin: It's totally finding your duck, but it's also the thing about it, though, is first of all, it's the kind of thing where like, you know what, let's say in 2016, if you're like a 15-year-old girl, it might be much more permissible to say, hey, would you spank me?
Merlin: You could even say it to another lady, and that would not be weird today.
Merlin: Whereas, I think you might still feel some compunction about saying, is it okay if we have some heavy petting, and then I pick at your zits a little bit.
John: Yeah, well, I think this falls into the category of finding your sex duck.
John: Right?
John: Find your sex duck.
John: Because when I was young...
John: You know, spanking was pretty taboo, right?
John: You'd find an 8mm movie about it.
John: Yeah.
John: Where it's like, oh boy, there's some people in Shriner outfits like spanking people in their frilly panties.
Merlin: Yeah, and they make it look like it's just a cute thing you do this one time.
Merlin: But the thing about a special thing is some people's special things, like that could become very much a part of the workflow.
John: Yeah, well, and I think over time we've become desensitized, so now spanking just seems like normal sex play.
John: It's just like spank, spank, spank.
John: Yeah.
John: That's not a big deal.
John: You're not going to need to join a special club.
Merlin: In this day and age, you would not have to find a friend of a friend who could tell you about a spanking bar.
Merlin: Right, right, right, right.
John: Well, and I think what we... I'm not sure how much of this is millennial mythology and how much of it is millennial truth.
John: It's so difficult to tell anymore.
John: But, you know, that whole line of thinking that is attributed to millennials...
John: Which is that they wanted to keep their virginity, but they did engage in butt play.
John: They would put it in one another's butts.
John: Oh, it's a butts first operation.
John: Yeah.
John: And then that kept their virginity.
John: It's kind of false.
John: I think if somebody has been in your butt, your virginity is a done deal.
Yeah.
Merlin: Well, that's a very narrow, old-fashioned view, John.
Merlin: Well.
Merlin: I guess.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I'll put it this way.
Merlin: If somebody had put that idea in front of me, the notion that you could do butt stuff for a couple, three years and still call yourself a virgin, I would have thought that was a little peculiar, circa 1984.
John: Right, because it always seemed that butt stuff was an elevation from normal sexy stuff.
Merlin: Well, it's like saying I speed all the time, but I don't know how to drive a car.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Well, you know, you got to walk before you run.
Merlin: You know, usually you start in the front and move back.
Merlin: But I feel like this is the opposite of how you put on hair product, by the way.
John: Start in the front and move to the back.
Merlin: With hair product, you always start in the back, move to the front.
Merlin: Now, what about wiping?
Merlin: You know, a lot of people, they wipe wrong also.
John: Well, let's not talk about that.
John: That's a thing that dads can talk about, but it's not a thing that's in the general parlance.
John: That's not a thing to say on the second page.
John: I'm seeing a lot of people suffer in silence.
John: You wipe back to front?
John: Hi, good to meet you.
Merlin: See, that's the kind of thing that in a few years that's going to seem really normal.
Merlin: There could be people who have been talking about wiping for years but have never had vaginal intercourse.
Merlin: But they're very comfortable talking about that.
Merlin: I feel the same way about my eyebrows, where I'm not a picker of body parts, I don't think.
Merlin: But I've reached that age.
Merlin: I imagine you've reached this age, too.
John: Where you trim your eyebrows?
Merlin: Well, yeah.
Merlin: Where the production of hair on top, I've got a pretty good head of hair.
Merlin: I'm fortunate in that sense.
Merlin: But I will tell you that the growth, the way they measure the problem with Apple.
Merlin: Everybody's mad at Apple right now because Apple's growth has gone down.
Merlin: It's not that Apple's losing money.
Merlin: It's that their growth has slowed down.
John: Right.
Merlin: So my growth, it has not been a big growth quarter for the top of my head.
Merlin: I see.
Merlin: Whereas over here in the iPhone vertical, you look at the ear, you got the nose, you got the eyebrows.
Merlin: That's where it's all happening.
Merlin: That is a fecundity of apps, my friend.
Merlin: So what'll happen is my daughter will be sitting there, and she might be more of a picker than me, because we'll be sitting there reading a book, and she'll be staring at me.
Merlin: And I'm like, what?
Merlin: Is it an eyebrow?
Merlin: And she says, yeah.
Merlin: She wants to get in there.
Merlin: Well, no, it's really starting to bug her because I think it's, you know, it's occluding some of the light.
Merlin: And so I go into the room, I get the fancy tweezers, and I pull out the one Brezhnev hair.
Merlin: Does she want to see that?
Merlin: No, no, she can't stand blood or eyebrows.
Merlin: She doesn't like any of that stuff.
Merlin: And then it pulls out the little hair sack.
Merlin: That's when you know you've really hit it.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, here's the problem.
Merlin: Here's the problem is it starts out, this is the thing, is it starts out as I'm just going to go in the bathroom for 20 seconds.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: I'm going to pull out this one rogue hair.
John: Oh, but then you get going.
Merlin: Well, then the trouble is now you're looking.
Merlin: You discover two more rogue hairs over here on the other side.
Merlin: And then pretty soon you get to be one of those people who doesn't have eyebrows.
John: Well, my sister, see, my dad got those big wizard eyebrows as years went on.
John: Right.
John: You know, just like unruly eyebrows.
John: He had like dune eyebrows.
John: Yeah.
John: And my sister hated it, you know, and developed this thing that I think your daughter is also developing, which is like she – it became a trigger for her.
John: And so –
John: When I get a rogue eyebrow now, which, you know, because we're young men, we're still young dads, it's not like I have these crazy mad scientist eyebrows, but every once in a while one will get going, right?
John: And it'll be four inches long or whatever.
John: And always kind of with an insouciant curl.
John: But if my sister sees it, she'll get furious, right?
John: Oh, it really is a trigger for her.
John: Oh, it drives her nuts.
Merlin: It takes her back to the wizard days with your dad.
John: Yeah, so she used to sit, I think, and even trim my dad's eyebrows with little scissors.
John: She would get in there just because it drove her bananas.
John: Wow.
John: But so now that I'm doing it, she's like, do not, do not let your eyebrows go.
John: And of course, I'm thinking to myself, boy, when I get really crazy eyebrows, that is going to be awesome.
John: His crazy eyebrows.
John: Come on.
John: What does that say about a person?
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: Well, let me pull this together a little bit here because there's a phenomenon.
Merlin: I wonder if you've seen this.
Merlin: You see somebody, and this is, I'm not trying to be normative, but you see somebody who has like a really distinctive mole.
Merlin: And then you might see somebody who has a distinctive mole that's really more like a hillock.
Merlin: And it's like, oh, that's kind of cool.
Merlin: You got a face mole.
Merlin: You're rolling an Aaron Neville, let's say.
Merlin: And then the thing is, those will grow a hair or four.
John: Oh, I see.
John: Yes.
Merlin: So there's a guy used to be a meanie driver in our neighborhood.
Merlin: And I was hypnotized by this man because he had he had a he had a face mole that was the circumference of a quarter.
Merlin: You know, and I say good on you.
John: Right.
Merlin: It was raised.
Merlin: It was kind of about the same proportions as a pitcher's mound.
Merlin: And he had a mole beard.
Merlin: He had, I'm going to say, four to nine hairs that were two to five inches long coming out of it.
Merlin: So he was operating on another level.
Merlin: He knew that it was there and he was letting it go.
Merlin: He was letting it happen.
Merlin: The thing is, how could you not get rid of those unless that was a thing that you were really exporting?
Yeah.
John: yeah right it's like it's like uh i mean there's owning it and then there's rocking it you know what i'm saying that's that that's a fuck you mole beard yeah right it's like you don't like the mole well how about how about a beard on a mole how you feel about that that's that's rocking it and uh and when somebody goes from that seems like that's right in your wheelhouse
Merlin: In terms of being a large man who wears tight pants, taking pictures of yourself for the internet, and driving around public transit while you got a mole beard.
Merlin: That seems like that's something you could really honor.
John: No, not at all.
John: If I had a big mole on my face, I would almost certainly try and get it removed.
John: Because there are vanities and then there are vanities and big crazy eyebrows that comports exactly with my sense of myself that I should be wearing a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows and marching up and down in front of a in front of a large lecture hall, waving my hands around.
John: The lectern is shaped like an owl.
John: Yeah, with the rubber bands in your beard, conjuring things.
John: The pocket of my pants covered with chalk dust, even though it's a white erase board and no chalk is required.
John: Just chalk dust, right?
Merlin: They probably sell that to tenured professors.
Merlin: You can just get a little packet of chalk dust.
Merlin: I keep a bag of chalk in my pocket.
Merlin: I swear to God, officer, it's just chalk for chalk.
John: It's just a bag of chalk.
John: Is that a sebaceous cyst?
John: You know, so unruly eyebrows.
John: Yes.
John: But but but a large mole with hair growing out of it is the wrong kind of warlock.
John: You know, like I'm I intend.
John: Well, this is the thing.
John: I don't consider myself a warlock.
John: I consider myself a wizard.
John: And I feel like there's a major difference.
Merlin: If you're a warlock, you can wear a mole beard.
Merlin: We're getting into gender issues now.
Merlin: A warlock is the male-gendered version of a witch.
Merlin: Is that correct?
John: Yeah, but I'm not entirely clear on this, but I believe that a warlock has different duties, different skill set than a witch.
Merlin: Maybe different alignment?
John: No, same alignment.
John: I think a warlock and a witch are synonymous, more or less.
John: But like, oh, and here's an interesting thing.
John: Now that I'm thinking about the gendering of magic, is there a female equivalent to a wizard?
John: Or are female wizards just also wizards?
Merlin: Well, don't imagine for a second I'm not thinking about it because I got Harry Potter on my mind and I think they refer to witches and wizards.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Which seems a little bit, I mean, that's kind of like referring to like sergeants and colonels a little bit.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: Right.
John: I mean, I think if you put an E on the end of wizard.
Merlin: I think of wizards as being more in management.
Merlin: I think of them as being at least like a commissioned officer.
John: Yeah, for me, I feel like warlocks and witches are standing around a cauldron, whereas wizards are carrying some kind of ball or staff.
John: Okay.
John: Right.
John: So like a wizard might have a chalk bag in his robes, but also some other stones, some of them, you know, shiny, some of them, you know, semi opaque and a staff and maybe a familiar.
John: In the shape of a large-eared monkey or, you know, like a bat that can talk or an owl?
Merlin: Something I recently learned that you have known since your teen years, I did not know this.
Merlin: I did not know that in the world of Lord of the Rings...
Merlin: that wizards tell me if i'm right here wizards are actually a kind of angel is that right i don't think i don't think i don't think a wizard is a hopped up human i think it's i think it's a human-ish angel and boy are we gonna we're gonna get some else about this one well and i think that's i think that's correct in my experience so having not fully digested the cimmerillion uh
John: But within the Lord of the Rings cosmology that I understand, there is never, ever, ever any mention of God.
John: There are just people that are good and bad and they get more and more powerful.
John: So like Sauron, if there was a God in Lord of the Rings, you would think that God would at a certain point say Sauron is super duper bad.
John: and he's using bad magic, and he's like... I mean, Sauron gives life to bad orcs.
John: Even Saruman was giving life.
John: He was birthing...
John: uh harukai you can't that's not a i mean that's a godlike talent but but i i never got the sense that that gandalf was an other although he's never referred to as a man i i feel like i have to mention something at this juncture because almost everyone i know on the internet is yelling yes i am obliquely referring to a video by friend of the internet cgp gray
Merlin: You should check this guy's videos out, John.
Merlin: You would love this guy.
Merlin: Have you ever seen that video explaining the difference between the British Isles and the UK?
Merlin: Oh, I know these videos, of course.
Merlin: That's this guy, CGP Grey.
Merlin: He's this guy who lives in England.
Merlin: Where he kind of does this entertaining lecture and then there's some zippity-zap graphics.
Merlin: Zippity-zap graphics, but explaining, for example, I mean, this is great stuff, explaining how the history of the monarchy in England.
John: Yeah, that was a great one, although there was one, and I forget which one it was, where I somewhat took issue.
John: I'm not sure which one it was, but the History of England, I like that one.
Merlin: One of his most recent ones is a real mind-blower, and I'm sorry I showed it to my daughter.
Merlin: Basically trying to explain how the teleporter thing on Star Trek works.
Merlin: And basically coming down, the only way that this thing makes any sense is that it is a death machine.
Merlin: That basically kills you and then recreates an exact version of you with your previous memories.
Merlin: Anyway, super fascinating.
Merlin: Yes, Internet, I hear you.
Merlin: Lord of the Rings mythology video by CGP Grey is where I learned about this, and I'll send that link to you for your own perusal.
Merlin: According to Wikipedia, which is never wrong.
Merlin: Wizards of Middle-earth are a group of beings outwardly resembling men, capital M, but possessing much greater physical and mental power.
Merlin: They are also called the Istari by the elves.
Merlin: They were sent by Valar to assist the people of Middle-earth to contest Sauron.
John: I see.
Merlin: Now, hobbits.
Merlin: Hobbits are people, but they're little.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: They must be pickers.
Merlin: They got some serious.
Merlin: Don't they have a lot of like foot hair?
John: I did not.
John: I did not.
John: And I do not believe anywhere in the Lord of the Rings saga that there are any half hobbits.
John: So although elves seem more other and more foreign to men because of their eternal life,
John: You can have a half-elf.
John: A man and an elf can mate.
John: And by man, I mean men, mankind.
John: Capital M, men.
John: Man, capital M. A human person and an elf of whatever, however you describe their gender.
Merlin: Wouldn't you have to get the elf pretty drunk, though?
John: No.
Merlin: Aren't the elves pretty fancy about being elves?
Merlin: Ah.
John: Except humans and Neanderthals mated.
Merlin: I suppose.
Merlin: I mean, I guess it depends on where you're... If you're socked in for the winter, piss on a spark plug, right?
John: My sense of an elf is that, yes, having sex with a human would be slumming somewhat, but when did that ever stop a person?
John: You call it on the DL.
John: Yeah, there's a...
John: Well, on the DL actually started, I think, within the African-American community.
Merlin: I think it's in the African-American community, yeah.
John: As a description for being gay.
Merlin: Secretly.
Merlin: I disagree.
Merlin: I think it started in the African community as a way of saying, yeah, I totally have sex with other dudes, but we are not gay.
John: Oh, yeah, yeah, right.
John: When I say having sex with other dudes on the down low, my assumption is that they are gay but are acting straight.
John: They are claiming not to be gay.
John: They're the sin, not the center.
John: But in fact, that was the only socially acceptable way to do both things.
John: That's down low.
John: So I don't think elves having sex with humans is down low.
John: I think that that's just like... Well, there's an element of sexiness to degradation, right?
John: Yeah.
John: There's a kind of... Sex is dirty.
John: We talk about it as being dirty.
John: They see humans as rough trade.
John: It's a little rough trade.
John: That's exactly right.
John: But I don't have any... I've never seen any reference to a half...
John: And it seems like, is there a rougher trade than having sex with a hobbit?
Merlin: They like to drink.
Merlin: They like to stay at home.
Merlin: They seem like they'd be ideal sex partners in a lot of ways.
Merlin: They love to eat.
John: Well, so in the books, they don't talk a lot about girl hobbits.
John: But in the movies...
John: They really, I mean, the girl hobbits aren't part of the adventure, but the camera loves a girl hobbit in the movies, right?
John: The camera just lovingly pans over these big feasts where all these kind of voluptuous, red-haired, freckled...
John: Girl hobbits are serving big platters of beast.
John: Yeah.
John: And I have to say, watching the films, I was like, why are there no half hobbits?
John: Because I'd make a half hobbit.
John: Sure.
John: They keep them under wraps because of people like you.
John: Well, exactly.
John: Like, send me through a round-doored mound house and
John: And let me make some half hobbits.
Merlin: Can I go in there and pack a pipe?
John: I'm going to go in there and eat a second breakfast.
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Merlin: Do you think they know about second breakfast?
Merlin: Oh, they're going to have a second breakfast all night.
Merlin: Oh my goodness.
Merlin: Now, I'll tell you what throws a lot of this off for me is, you know, you talk about imprinting on something.
Merlin: And the thing is, I imprinted on the word warlock through bewitched.
Merlin: Oh, yes.
Merlin: So that's where I learned the word warlock.
Merlin: We're really bewitched.
Merlin: It's all about the witches.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: You got you got Tabitha.
Merlin: You got Andorra.
Merlin: You got you got sexy bad Tabitha.
John: Yeah.
John: But think about who played the warlock.
John: OK, you got you got Paul Lin.
John: Paul Lin.
John: And anytime Paul Lin is on.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: He is chewing up the scenery.
John: He's stealing the show.
John: Yes.
John: And Paul Lin made Warlock and Sexy.
Merlin: I can think of two other Warlocks.
Merlin: I'm not remembering their names.
Merlin: One of them, one of the Warlocks was, there was Uncle...
Merlin: Was it Uncle Arthur?
Merlin: Uncle Arthur is Pauline, right?
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: You got the one guy, what's his name?
Merlin: Maurice.
John: You got Maurice?
Merlin: And then you got that guy.
Merlin: You got that guy who's like dum-dum-dug, and he's like the guy who always is the bomb guy in World War II movies, you know?
John: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: The guy who always plays like a British officer.
John: Right, right, right, right, right.
John: Yeah.
John: But what I'm starting to notice is that all the warlocks in the Bewitched cosmology are...
Merlin: on the down low right they're all a little gay oh interesting maybe this explains why there's no half warlocks i don't know what a half war i might even i i feel like maybe a half wizard you know what i mean like i'm i'm a wizard that what about the kid what about the kid they disappeared you've got so you got samantha and durwood and they got their kid they had the daughter uh what's the daughter's name
John: Boy, you're deep into it now.
John: I can't go this deep on the... But you got the daughter.
Merlin: And then remember, this is one of the early examples of disappearing a character from a show.
Merlin: They added, they had the strap-on kid.
Merlin: You know, when you have a wedding, you have a strap-on kid.
Merlin: You add a kid to the mix.
Merlin: And they added this little kid.
Merlin: And then the next season began, he's gone.
John: Well, that's not even as close to as baffling as the fact that Darren changed from one completely...
John: one guy to a completely different guy.
Merlin: His whole personality changed, too.
Merlin: The original Darren, Dick York, he was befuddled, but you could tell that he really loved her.
Merlin: And the second Darren, he seemed like... He was a little crabby, wasn't he?
Merlin: He was a little bit crabby, yeah.
Merlin: And I guess that was to kind of amp up how far we're going to take this whole witch in the suburbs thing.
John: Yeah, witch in the suburbs.
Merlin: I mean, when you think about Escape to Witch Mountain...
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Escape to Witch Mountain.
Merlin: That's the brother and the sister to Disney movie.
Merlin: I don't remember much of what happens in that.
Merlin: That was in the Benji era.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: It was in the young Jodie Foster era.
John: Oh, it's Candleshoe she was in, right?
John: That's right, Candleshoe.
John: Escape to Witch Mountain was a very formative film for me.
John: Because the brother and sister had some magic powers, some witchy powers.
John: Yeah.
John: And they were being pursued by Donald Pleasance.
John: Oh, I love that guy.
John: Or Donald Pleasance's, yeah, Donald Pleasance.
Merlin: Oh, no, you're talking about the Donald Pleasance at Avignon Raymond Land.
John: Ray Moland.
John: Right.
John: But they had witchy powers and they were like, you know, they were being adults were bad and adults had authority over them and sort of power over them.
John: But then they could do these little tricks.
John: They could levitate cats and they could, you know, unlock doors.
John: They had telekinesis.
John: And as a kid, as a, you know, eight year old or seven year old, I really, really, I wasn't.
John: I wasn't ready to imagine a world without adults.
John: Imagine a world where adults couldn't put you in your room and lock the door.
John: But I was prepared to imagine a world where I had telekinesis and could unlock the door or could, you know, like get a bowl of ice cream from the kitchen and float it into my room while nobody was watching.
John: Right.
John: So Escape from Witch Mountain, very, very, very influential on me.
John: And it was scary, too.
John: And then, spoiler alert...
John: turns out they're ufos are you even kidding me no they're ufos stranded stranded here because there was an ufo crash i never knew that i never knew that yeah yeah because it's because it's a little confusing at the end you know all the way through the film they're having these flashbacks about like they're they're in the waves there's like their dad and all of a sudden it goes from fantasy to science fiction
John: Hmm.
John: So it's not that they were little witches.
John: It is that they were UFOs and and they didn't even understand it.
John: They were like, what are these weird powers that we have?
John: Because the spaceship crash happened in their very early memory.
John: Okay.
John: What are these little powers?
John: You know, how can we do this?
John: We're such weirdos.
John: Only we understand one another.
John: There's a little incest-y, too.
John: And they can talk to each other, huh?
John: Yeah, they can talk to each other with psionics.
John: Now, psionics, again, my understanding is incomplete, but I believe psionics are strictly a Dungeons & Dragons power.
Yeah.
Merlin: There are several things that mark me as a slack D&D player.
Merlin: As we've talked about in the past, we would never play encumbrance.
Merlin: We wouldn't deal with the turn stuff.
Merlin: We just wanted to have adventures.
Merlin: We also didn't do a lot with psionics, which frustrated some people.
Merlin: I think it depends on what you grew up with.
Merlin: Now, as somebody who came to the X-Men late...
Merlin: And is a fan of Phoenix and stuff like that, or like Scarlet Witch.
Merlin: I think you're talking about Scarlet Witch and Phoenix kind of powers, right?
Merlin: You're talking about mind things.
Merlin: Mind things.
Merlin: So like an illusionist or a magic user, that's a trade almost, right?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, obviously you've got to roll the right numbers, but you don't have to have extraordinary abilities to take that up as a trade.
Merlin: It's like becoming a mechanic.
John: I feel like Ricky Jay is a, uh, this world magic user, right?
John: I mean, Ricky Jay.
John: I think he's an illusionist.
John: Don't you think he's an illusionist?
John: Well, he's an illusionist, but if you could be a magic user in this world, I think he would be able to, you know, we work up some spells, have a little hammer and pestle and, you know, take some, grind up some herbs and make a little, make a little spell.
John: Okay.
John: Causes you to forget the last six hours or causes you to, you know, like it makes a sword.
John: dance makes a candlestick dance you know what i mean um but but a magic user and honestly my first dungeons and dragons character was a magic user because that's what you rolled
John: No, because that's what I sought.
Merlin: That's kind of what we did, too.
John: I was just like, make him a magic user.
John: I think he was also a half-elf magic user.
John: Pretty sure that's what my first character was.
John: Because, again, that's kind of how I thought of myself.
Merlin: You've talked about this a bit in the past, and I don't want to beat it into the ground as a bit, but it sounds like there have been times in your life
Merlin: Not to say that you believed you could conjure an orb, but it wasn't an impossible thing that would definitely never happen.
John: I kept being confused about why I couldn't.
John: Let's say that.
John: I was just a little disappointed and a little confused.
John: And this confusion long, long predated my exposure even to Lord of the Rings or...
John: Really any kind of magic, TV show magic.
John: I just didn't understand.
John: If anybody could do it, it surely would be me.
John: Why can I not do it?
John: Right.
John: And then it was equally hard to accept that nobody can because that didn't seem right either.
John: Like, why?
John: Humans can do quite a bit of magic in the sense that, you know, we build bridges over rivers.
John: It all seems kind of magical.
John: Right.
John: why then would we not be able to act at a distance with just tinkling our fingers or even just holding out your palm in little sparks dance?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: There's some in the Marvel world, especially like in the X-Men, there are –
Merlin: Uh-huh.
Merlin: No, it's really interesting.
Merlin: But basically Scarlet Witch, before she's able to make, you know, Scarlet Witch is such a weird, like huge deal in the comics and increasingly now in the movies.
Merlin: But she was interesting.
Merlin: Her basic skill at the beginning was that she could change the likelihood of things going her way.
Merlin: How awesome would that be?
Merlin: So basically she... But you get people who are... It's only like when Harry Potter takes the good luck serum, right?
Merlin: And same here.
Merlin: You have the ability to somehow alter the odds of how things are going for you and your team.
Merlin: They always give the awesome defensive skills to the women.
John: So it's like now all of a sudden you have a 56% chance of any outcome.
John: But it would seem to me within those worlds that that would...
John: That the temptation would be to just make luck go their way every time.
John: Right.
John: Which wouldn't be as interesting as like, well, let's hope luck goes their way.
John: There's a better chance than even.
Merlin: Yeah, but that's the whole story.
Merlin: That's what makes Peter Parker so great is that like his whole obsession is that like he wants to take what he has and use it in a good way.
Merlin: You know, with great power comes great responsibility.
John: Right, right, right.
John: Well, let me ask.
John: Okay, here we have Professor Bald.
John: Uh, yeah.
John: And his school for mutants.
John: Yeah.
John: Right.
John: If you, cause mutant ability seems to, you know, it comes out across the human spectrum, right?
John: Yeah.
John: There are mutants from everywhere and they have a lot of different powers and it doesn't seem to me, first of all, two things within X-Men.
John: It doesn't seem that you ever get two people who have the same powers.
Right.
Merlin: It depends on how you define that, but no.
Merlin: I mean, there aren't two Cyclops.
Merlin: Yeah, but I mean, especially in the 90s, there were way too many X-Men with way too many powers.
Merlin: And so there's lots of people.
Merlin: There's lots of teleporters.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
Merlin: For example, there are people who can phase through solid things.
Merlin: There's several characters that can do that.
Merlin: I see.
John: But if Cyclops had a baby with another mutant.
John: He did.
John: Did that baby also have Cyclopsian powers?
Merlin: Oh, way bigger than that.
Merlin: Now, it depends on which universe you're in.
Merlin: Oh, I see, I see.
Merlin: So there's one universe where he and Jean Grey had a baby, and there's another universe where he and Madeline Pryor had a baby.
Merlin: But basically, they hope Summers, his daughter, becomes, spoiler alert, becomes the new Phoenix.
John: Oh.
Merlin: But I thought Jean Grey was basically top...
Merlin: Mutant.
Merlin: Jean Grey's, when she became Dark Phoenix, she's even beyond an Omega-level mutant at that point.
Merlin: She basically eats a world.
Merlin: She pulls a Galactus on this entire star system.
Merlin: So she's as big a deal as Big Blue Penis Man?
Merlin: That's interesting, because Big Blue Penis Man, I mean, how do you have more powers than Big Blue Penis Man?
Merlin: I mean, he's got it all.
John: He didn't have the power to just not be interested in what humans thought.
Merlin: Yeah, they compare him to Reed Richards a lot.
John: Isn't Reed Richards the stretchy man?
Merlin: He's the stretchy man, yeah.
Merlin: I also have to owe you an apology.
Merlin: I read too quickly.
Merlin: In the 1975 film Escape to Witch Mountain, that features both Ray Moland and Donald Pleasence.
John: Ray Moland was Donald Pleasence's proxy.
John: Oh, is that right?
Merlin: He was Aristotle Bolt and Lucas Duranian.
John: Yeah, right.
John: So Donald Pleasance was the one that was sitting with a white cat, like slowly petting a white cat on his lap.
John: He literally was.
Merlin: He was, if you remember, I believe he was that guy.
Merlin: I remember all too well.
Merlin: Wasn't he?
Merlin: In the James Bond movie, he was that guy.
Merlin: He was the pet the white cat.
Merlin: What's his name?
Merlin: What's his name?
Merlin: Uh, Boris, uh, Boris Karloff, right.
Merlin: From the great universal movies.
John: But here's another thing about X-Men that I want to ask.
John: This seems like something that is, that I do not know.
John: I don't even have a gag about.
John: Yeah.
John: It's just a question.
John: If you were a mutant who had, so I'm talking about, uh, professor, uh, Groovy lawns, uh, house of mutants.
John: Yeah.
John: School of mutants.
John: Yes.
John: If your mutant power was that every time you sneezed, you sneezed glitter.
John: Let's say you just sneezed glitter.
John: That's definitely a mutant power.
John: Yeah.
John: Like, whoa, if you were a glitter sneezer, your friends and family and stuff would be very concerned and then ultimately not into you.
John: You can't live among us.
John: You're Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
John: That's right.
John: You're very much a mutant, so this glitter sneezer has all the problems of a mutant.
John: Like, don't live around here.
John: Every time you sneeze, we get glitter all over us.
John: Glitter, and it's impossible to get off.
John: I think the character's name is Gesundheit.
John: But is glitter sneezing a big enough mutant power that that Professor Xavier will have you in his school?
John: Oh, like would you pass the audition?
John: Yeah, right.
John: I mean, it's the school can't contain everybody.
John: It can't have every single glitter sneezing mutant.
Merlin: no no it's a good question so where would you go live the mutant gene is out there right the mutant gene causes people to have these mutations they usually appear somewhere around puberty and the truth is for most people like run-of-the-mill like people are trying to pass yeah you know uh they don't want to get clocked as being a mutant because obviously they become an outcast and you know the very the very first like four pages of the 1975 x-men is them trying to like burn down the building that nightcrawler's in because he's a mutant and
Merlin: And so, I mean, that's that's kind of the whole thrust of the story is that these people are different.
Merlin: So you got a lot of people out there who are trying to set the word pass.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: We're trying to pass as being a homo sapien.
John: And and so if you're just out there and the thing, the one thing you can do is like talk to mice, but mice don't really have that.
Merlin: They don't have a way to talk to you.
John: Well, or they can be like having one very powerful walkie talkie.
John: Or even if you can communicate back and forth.
John: Cheese, cheese, cheese, cheese.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Mice don't have that much to say, right?
John: Holy shit.
John: Cheese, cheese, poop, poop, poop, cheese, cheese.
John: Run, run, run.
John: Cat, cat, cat.
John: And so that's your ability.
John: Uh-huh.
John: And you're like.
Merlin: But you're not even like Ant-Man.
Merlin: Ant-Man who initially was so lame.
Merlin: Ant-Man's initial ability was to control ants and communicate with ants.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: the thing is they kept ginning him up within like, like fewer than like 10 issues.
Merlin: They were ginning him up to where he could not only get very tiny, then he became giant man.
Merlin: He'd become really big.
Merlin: But at first, the very first issue of the Avengers, basically Loki has fooled Hulk and is trying to cause, he's basically like trying to cause this, this giant descent.
Merlin: All the Avengers are going after Hulk because they think he's a monster.
Merlin: And it's like, you know, Iron Man is doing this in Captain America.
Merlin: This is before Captain America, but you know, and Thor is doing this.
Merlin: And then it's like, and Ant-Man says, I will send my ants all over the planet to try and find the Hulk.
Merlin: But in this case, you're saying you're not even a mouse wrangler at this point.
John: You're just a mouse whisperer.
John: You can't make the mice do anything because you're like, mice, go to the place.
John: And they're like, ah, cheese, cheese.
John: Cheese, cheese, cat.
John: They're not smart.
John: No.
John: But, you know, my friend Mike Squires, who is a terrible person.
John: He said that if he could have any superpower, it would be to telekinetically, psionically, give anyone explosive diarrhea.
John: talk about spooky action at a distance right because even if you're fighting captain america even if you're fighting gene gray if you give her explosive diarrhea all of a sudden she's got bigger problems she's got something else to think about you give i mean not to cross the universes here you give superman super diarrhea yeah he's all of a sudden in his super drawers he's got a fucking problem
John: He's going to want to get out of there and go get cleaned up.
John: That's pretty good.
John: Right?
John: Because nobody's going to want to fight you when they're all messy.
John: No.
John: It's very distracting.
John: Yeah.
John: So Mike's thing was like explosive diarrhea defeats all other superheroes and bad guys because it's just like think about somebody who's so fucked up that they will continue to fight you.
Merlin: after like it's awful it's an awful idea he's a terrible person but it's kind of fucking great that's a good i see i personally i'm very attracted to what i will call the defensive skills the big you know let's get back to the mutants in a minute because there actually is an explanation kind of for what you're asking about
Merlin: But, like, yeah, some of my favorite skills are the defensive skills.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: Like teleporting.
Merlin: Teleporting is kind of a defensive skill.
Merlin: The ability to create a portal that other people can jump through, that's a fantastic skill.
Merlin: It's wonderful.
Merlin: Katie Pride, one of my all-time favorite characters, she has the ability to basically phase through solid objects.
Merlin: So she can do stuff if there's a hostage situation.
Merlin: She shows up and she can start sneaking people out through the floor and stuff like that.
Merlin: That's good.
Merlin: I love those kinds of skills.
Merlin: So, I mean, like, the banner, like, marquee characters are the people who can pound on each other.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Yeah, but imagine if you could instill really crushing self-doubt in someone, even temporarily.
John: I think the character's name would be Mom.
John: Jewish Mom.
John: Like, here comes Superman.
John: Mike Squires causes him to have explosive diarrhea, and then I give him momentary crushing self-doubt.
John: So he's just like...
John: Oh, fuck.
John: Am I doing this right?
John: No.
John: Why do I even bother?
John: What am I?
John: What's my hope?
John: And he's just like, I died exploding on another planet so you could live like this.
John: Yeah.
John: And he just sort of floats off like brow furrowed.
John: Yeah.
John: Pants soiled.
John: Yeah.
John: Boom.
John: Who cares if he's as strong as as as kryptonite?
John: You know, he can't.
John: There's a lot of strong people that don't have self-confidence.
John: You don't hear about them.
John: Yeah, precisely.
John: So my superpower, the one that I devised after the most awful Mike Squires put into my head that it wasn't necessary that you have like a strength, some kind of like boppo biff power.
John: Yeah.
John: That's when I started calling myself the oxidizer.
Yeah.
John: Oh, you wanted to be rust.
John: I wanted to be rust, right.
John: Right, right, right.
John: I remember this.
John: Because although rust wouldn't work against Superman necessarily, because I'm thinking more of a mutant power rather than like a superpower, but as a mutant on Earth, you could wreak a lot of havoc being able to just rust all metal.
John: That's a very destructive power.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Because, like, once it's rusted, you salted the earth.
Merlin: You can't really use it again.
John: But the thing is, like, it's defensive in the sense that— What if you could turn every car into a Fiat for just a short amount of time?
John: I'd kind of actually be into that because there are a lot of cool Fiats.
John: All right.
John: Okay.
John: But, like, let's say the cops are, like, coming at you.
John: It's not like you're going to kill the cops or even like Magneto, like take their guns away.
John: Because Magneto, it's not that he takes their guns away.
John: It's that he turns the guns on them, right?
John: He's like, he's a baddie.
John: Yeah, he can stop the bullets and turn them around and do all kinds of stuff.
John: Yeah, but what if you just rusted the guns?
John: And then...
John: It's not that you haven't killed them.
John: You're no threat to them.
John: You've just taken away their power.
John: You've taken away their human power.
John: I get it.
John: I get it.
John: Right?
John: And so it's a destructive power if it's misused, but I think it would be a great...
John: I think you could be an agent of peace, Merlin, because you'd go over to conflict areas.
John: You'd turn swords into rusty plowshares.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: Exactly.
John: You'd hammer swords into, yeah.
John: One of the great bluesmen.
John: Old rusty plowshares, they called him.
John: Old rusty plowshares who had the power of tetanus.
John: Tetanus and slow blue james.
John: He was blind.
John: He was blind at birth.
John: But yeah, think about that.
John: You could go over and there's big armies attacking each other and you're just like rust.
John: And then what do they do?
John: They have to play soccer on Christmas Day.
Merlin: Don't we increasingly have fewer things made out of metal, though?
Merlin: I mean, you got things like you got to think about the armor that people wear.
Merlin: Isn't that kind of like a super plastic?
John: Yeah, but I think that I think that the metal like here's your big titanium airplane.
John: Right, here's your stainless steel, whatchamacallits.
John: But then the clamp that's holding the wires,
John: that are part of the fly-by-wire system.
John: Like the staple that ultimately holds it all together is still made out of steel.
John: I get it, I get it.
John: And so you just take it apart like all those ceramic guns that people are worried about getting through airports or whatever.
John: The barrel is still metal.
Oh.
John: Right.
John: It's, there's a lot of ceramic in it, but as far as I know, there's no ceramic barrel.
John: And, and then ultimately like there aren't ceramic bullets.
John: The casings are still metal.
Merlin: It would suck to have a kind of power that when they come up with it in the 40s, 50s, 60s is incredibly powerful, but then over time it just becomes less and less relevant.
Merlin: You have the ability to disrupt 9,600 baud modems or something.
John: Or the ability to cause all hair pomade to suddenly be gone and all the pompadours fall.
John: He has the ability to blunt a straight razor.
John: Right.
John: That would be terrible because, yeah, gradually.
John: I mean, I feel a little bit like that.
John: A lot of my superpowers are becoming more and more irrelevant.
John: Like the ability to tell a 54 Les Paul from a 56 Les Paul is not nobody cares anymore.
John: Don't seem like such a wizard anymore.
John: The ability to argue with someone for four hours about whether or not the long and winding road is a good song.
John: Is not, I mean, although I was practicing that just yesterday, but I feel like 20 years from now, it's going to be a lot harder.
John: Can I ask what side you're on on that?
John: The Long Unwinding Road?
John: Yeah.
John: I'm an originalist, so I do not like Let It Be Naked.
John: I mean, I like it as a document, like an interesting sort of like, oh, that's interesting.
John: Sort of like all that Beatles box set stuff that came out.
John: But you're saying this is the one that went up on the screen.
John: How do we feel about that?
John: Right.
John: And I don't feel I do not at all believe the Paul McCartney revisionism because, A, I do not believe McCartney revisionism.
John: just in general as a blanket because i do not trust paul mccartney to not be working to try and preserve what he imagines he wants his legacy to be yeah right like paul the whole like i was the first one to take lsd it's like hmm
John: I don't know, Paul, maybe.
John: But it seems weird that you're saying that now.
John: But Paul's whole business of we never wanted Phil Spector to do all that just seems a little suspect.
John: Like,
John: You sure you didn't?
John: Are you sure?
Merlin: See, I buy that with XTC and Todd Rundgren.
Merlin: Because I get the feeling Todd Rundgren had this record.
Merlin: And it's like, this is a pretty good record.
Merlin: But I'm going to make this way better.
Merlin: I'm going to go away for a little while.
Merlin: I'm going to do some stuff to it.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Now, as it happens, I happen to be one of the people who likes what he did to it.
Merlin: And I think in the fullness of time, even Andy Partridge kind of came around on Skylarking and said, you know, actually, he did a really good job with that.
Merlin: But the Phil Spector stuff, the problem is, I don't hate the Long and Winding Road, but I think it's somewhat slight as a song.
Merlin: I mean, the bones of the song are not that great.
Merlin: It's a little...
Merlin: Grandma-y, as John would say.
Merlin: It's not a bad song.
Merlin: It's not a bad song.
Merlin: But what you remember about that song probably is the Phil Spector part.
John: That's exactly right.
John: Bum, bum, bum, bum.
John: That's what people remember.
John: I mean, if you think about the lyrics, like, the wild and windy night that the rain washed away has left a pool of tears crying for the day.
John: That is terrible.
John: That's no and your bird can sing.
John: Right.
John: And not only is it terrible, but it's the very beginning.
John: It's the foreshadowing of all of McCartney's garbage lyrics from the 70s.
John: Yeah.
John: Right.
John: And so here it is.
John: This is the moment in the Beatles where John is no longer contributing to Paul.
Right.
John: where John is with Yoko somewhere, he's having a bed in, and he's strung out.
Merlin: I have an albatross here, which is I used to be one of those people that I now kind of roll my eyes about.
Merlin: I didn't know the full facts about what John's life was like.
Merlin: I thought he was mostly just being an asshole.
Merlin: He was incredibly depressed.
Merlin: He was, what, probably addicted to heroin at that point?
John: He was on heroin at that point.
Merlin: But John was a very, very troubled person.
Merlin: I guess I consider myself a Beatleologist, which is silly because I never really knew the extent to which, even by 1965, 66, John was not a happy person in the Beatles.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: What I think of as their creative zenith was almost an improbable fluke that they had two or three records as good as they did because John was so checked out.
Merlin: I mean, he was depressed.
Yeah.
John: Well, he was depressed.
John: And I think when I think about that, I think it is because John was an anti-authoritarian and he was happiest when he was assailing the walls of the castle.
John: And then once he was inside the castle, who could he hate?
John: Right.
John: He was the top.
John: And everyone kowtowed to him, right?
John: Think of the bowing and scraping and groveling that most people did around John Lennon circa 66, 67.
John: And so he could no longer be the anti—I mean, he could give back his MBE.
John: Or at the very least, he always considered himself an underdog and an outsider.
John: Right, underdog and outsider.
John: And all of a sudden he was the consummate insider.
John: Whereas Paul, he just loved it.
John: He was a performer.
John: He was a performer.
John: He was having a good time in 62.
John: He was having a good time in 66.
John: And I think that's Paul's greatest strength.
John: But John must have found Paul incredibly intolerable when John's role as the gadfly and the sniper was
John: Was was gone because, yeah, Paul flourished in that world.
John: But heroin, I think, took him out of the game and also disinterest.
John: And so, you know, when Paul comes to you and says, woke up to let a bit like John could be like, yeah, but.
John: you know, here we go.
John: Right.
John: Like he's going to give you the, he's going to give you the, the, the ugly side, the dark side.
John: Whereas when, you know, he's sitting there kind of half nodding out and Yoko is cleaning his ear with a fucking toothpick.
John: And Paul's like the wild and windy night that the rain washed away has left a pool of tears crying for the day.
John: And John's just like, whatever, man, fine.
John: Okay.
John: You know, good.
Yeah.
John: Good, because Paul's like, he recognizes at that point that he's trying to get up to John's thing.
John: He's trying to appease John with using the word tears and crying.
John: You know, he's like, he's making it, he's trying to make it morose because Paul wants to fill every space.
John: So he's trying to preempt John's criticism.
John: By saying like, no, no, no, this isn't like a vaudeville song about how happy I am.
John: This is like, no, the wild and windy night.
John: It's like, that's some George Harrison style stuff.
John: Did you notice I sound sad?
John: Yeah, I'm sad now.
John: So there's, so you have no, there's no criticism you can offer, right?
John: You're not going to add anything to my sad song.
John: And John's like, ugh, fine.
John: And Yoko's picking nits out of his hair or out of his beard.
John: And it's just like, yeah, it's all gone to shit here.
John: But within the Beatles canon, I am not somebody.
John: I mean, think about why don't we do it in the road, which obviously is a great rock and roll song.
John: But a pretty weak effort from a songwriter's perspective.
Merlin: He's pandering not to the audience, but to John.
Merlin: Because he knows that the one thing that will get John out of bed in the morning is rock and roll via the blues.
Merlin: It's like a 12-bar blues song, basically.
John: Yeah.
John: I mean, so he's, you know, Paul's trying every angle here.
John: To like, not only to win back John, but also to, you know, to fill, to fill the space that John previously occupied.
John: And Paul, that's not, that wasn't the best job for Paul, right?
John: Paul's job was to, was to make the killer, the killer melodies and the kill.
John: He's, you know, he's killer, right?
John: But like,
John: Many times I've been alone and many times I've cried.
John: Anyway, you'll never know the many ways I've tried.
John: That's good.
John: That's good.
John: Because he writes a great bridge.
John: A great bridge.
John: He's the bridgemeister.
John: Top bridgemeister.
John: If he was just like a script fixer,
John: for other bands, just, just like you bring your song to Paul.
John: He writes the bridge.
John: You get out.
John: I mean, he would pop music would be better, but, but so I don't subscribe.
John: I don't think Phil Spector should have gotten involved.
John: I think that that was some fashion.
John: That was some trendy pandering.
John: That was like having Eric Clapton play on while your guitar gently weeps.
John: Didn't belong there.
John: They shouldn't have done it, but they were bored and,
John: and they were bored and they were insecure, right?
Merlin: Well, but didn't they also say that... I don't remember exactly when this happened, but when they added Billy Preston, didn't that kind of liven things up?
Merlin: He was such a positive presence, such a great player, such a great team player, but also such a positive presence on the scene that he was a welcome distraction for a time.
John: Yeah, super fun guy, and he's out there, he's adding just brilliant shit all the time.
John: And the thing about Billy Preston is they don't push him forward, right?
John: He's not like... Billy Preston's not putting...
John: uh, he's not Clapton on, uh, while your guitar gently weeps.
John: He's just, he's just filling up the space and you could, what he's playing, the way it's mixed, you could listen to it and not think what's this foreigner doing here, right?
John: It could have been, it could have been just a London studio guy.
John: It could have been, it could have been Paul, George Martin could have been George Martin.
John: Right.
John: But it's not, it's a, it's a fun friend.
Right.
John: Like that doesn't bother me.
John: But I think the combination of Dylan, Dylan in 64, I think, or yeah, 66, really destabilized the Beatles because he was so cool and he and John wanted to be the kind of cool that Dylan was, not the kind of cool that he was.
John: So that inserted this insecurity.
John: And then Swingin' London, right?
John: Swingin' London of the late 60s where everybody was an artist and everybody was having fun in sexy times.
John: And Paul in particular, but the Beatles in general, were out in the clubs.
John: They were trying to be part of the swingin' scene.
John: And they really felt like they had to... I think that's where the Phil Spector stuff comes from.
John: That's where the Clapton stuff comes from.
John: They're trying to make it within this cool scene that probably on the street level...
John: When Paul walked into a club, there was a lot of like, oh, Paul's here.
John: But there was probably also from the cool kids a lot of like, oh, Paul's here.
John: And Paul could feel that and he didn't like it, right?
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: And then all of a sudden you got The Long and Winding Road.
John: Whereas when Tony Lash mixed Nevermind,
John: And two years later, Kurt was totally disavowing it in the press.
John: I think at the time when they got those mixes back, Kurt was like, this is incredible.
John: This is so much better.
Merlin: What gets lost in that is that he loved, I mean, it's so funny because for a long time he would name check the Raincoats a lot.
Merlin: And then you go and you listen to the Raincoats and you're like, oh my God, this is a twee band.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: The thing is, he had a huge pop sensibility.
John: He loved it.
Merlin: He liked the Meat Puppets poppy songs.
Merlin: He loved pop music.
Merlin: He liked R.E.M.
Merlin: And how you could tease out what was happening, not just obscuring it in layers of Big Muff, but being able to pull out what this song wants to be.
John: Yeah, all the harmonies.
John: I mean, he loved what Tony Lash did.
John: Do not ever make that mistake.
John: But then two years later, because every time Kurt Cobain walked into a room where he wanted to be cool, a Mudhoney house,
John: And there was that same thing like, oh, you know, Kurt's here.
John: And then also like, Kurt's here.
John: Oh, God.
John: All of a sudden, he's like, oh, I didn't like the sound of Nevermind.
John: I wanted it to be raw and grittier and...
John: It's like, no, you didn't, first of all.
John: And second of all, those songs, you could have made them sound as bad as you wanted, but they were fucking pop songs.
John: Like there's nothing, you know, touch me, I'm sick.
John: There's no way you can record that where it doesn't sound like it sounds.
John: You could mix that any way you wanted.
John: It's still fucking touch me, I'm sick.
John: But like, you know, come as you are.
John: You can't make that.
John: You couldn't have made that dirtier.
Merlin: Well, even even in Bloom, you know, in terms of like theme and execution, like it's it's kind of like a chorus is just like a like a three chord pop song.
John: Yeah, there's some sugar on everything he did.
John: And it just it disgusted me at the time.
John: Right.
John: Because I was right in the thick of all that.
John: I was like what are you doing asshole don't disavow that shit don't try and pander to those fucking scumbags that Olympia bullshit like that's the worst thing that's the worst part of this whole culture I'm standing knee deep in this culture and I know that's the worst part of it that whole oh Kurt's here like
John: fuck you yeah and but that was the that was the voice in his head that was his dylan in 66 you know dylan made those guys wait they they came to royal albert hall and you know and somebody came back and they're like the beatles are here and he's like oh are they
John: That's like, fuck.
John: Yeah, they are.
John: The Beatles are here.
John: Like, put your teacup down and fucking talk to them at least.
John: Give me a break.
John: But Dylan's like, oh, hmm.
John: You know, maybe they can come back here in a minute.
John: After I, you know, after I type up some more nonsense.
John: And I'm a huge Dylan fan.
John: I'm not shitting on Dylan.
John: I'm just shitting on his attitude.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
John: Oh, fucking attitude.
John: Yeah, that was his brand.
John: I was so mad at Kurt Cobain, Merlin.
Merlin: I think I've expressed this before.
Merlin: Because, well, but I mean, you know, I don't mean the Monday morning Cobain here, but part of that also is like he got way more famous than he wanted to be.
John: I don't even know about that.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Well, I think he wanted to be that famous.
Merlin: Don't you think it was part of trying to reject, in rejecting fame or the appearance of wanting fame, which is just anathema in the Pacific Northwest?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Like, don't you think, in part of needing to appear like he's rejecting fame, it's useful to also then reject the thing that you all like him for being famous for?
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: And that's exactly right.
John: He wanted to appear to reject fame.
Yeah.
John: But he was so caught up in the culture that he couldn't separate wanting to appear to reject fame from actually internalizing it and rejecting fame.
John: Like I think in 1990, 91, early 91, I read several interviews with him where he was like, we're going to be the biggest band in the world.
John: And he was being ironic and he was being sarcastic because he never thought it would happen.
John: And he was yanking everybody's chain like, we're going to be the biggest band in the world.
John: Fuck you.
John: And then he was the biggest band in the world.
John: And all of a sudden it's like, well, did you?
John: Did you want to be?
John: And what pissed me off was that he was and he could have used that power and he could have used that money and he could have used all that attention to accomplish the things that he wanted to do.
John: And he could have made the world a better place.
John: I was watching him.
John: closely because i wanted we all we all i mean it george herbert walker bush was the president like we were ready to flip it and it and it was the moment where you know where our generation came online and it was like yes we're here and look what we can do and then it was like oh yeah what we can do is you know sit in a thrift store chair and barf on ourselves and then die
John: Well, that's a little bit anticlimactic.
John: Sit in a thrift store chair in a loser T-shirt, barf on ourselves from heroin sickness, and then die.
John: I was like, oh, well, all right.
John: I guess that wasn't my role model after all.
John: And for me, that meant spending five more years sitting in a Godfather's Pizza restaurant
John: eating garbanzo beans because nobody would miss them and wondering what the fuck.
John: Look what he did to you.
John: Look what he did to you.
John: Right?
John: It's just like I'm sitting there stealing garbanzos from a salad bar and thinking... Nobody's counting those.
John: Nobody's counting garbanzos.
John: Nobody uses those.
John: And now Clinton's president and nobody in the culture really has anything to say about it.
John: And Kmart is selling grunge hats.
John: And it just all went to shit.
John: And now we have stained.
John: You know, it just was like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
John: And I just put it all back on Kurt's lap.
John: And, you know, whatever.
John: Courtney wasn't even picking nits out of his beard.
Merlin: You know what they make garbanzo beans into?
John: Sebaceous cyst pus.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Cyst pus.
John: A little bit of garlic.
John: It's good stuff.
John: Do you do this where you go by, you're at the grocery store and you're like, you know what?
John: I want to be the kind of person that eats hummus.
John: Aspirational shopping?
John: It's aspirational hummus, right?
John: I want to be somebody that's got hummus in the fridge.
John: I want to be somebody when he's looking for a snack, he gets some hummus and he wipes it on something.
John: Put a hummus wipe on something.
John: But then I buy hummus and it sits in the fridge for six months.
Merlin: Well, you do because, I mean, it's a good aspiration.
Merlin: It's a good aspiration.
Merlin: But for example, for me, a better one with those would be like mixed nuts.
Merlin: And here's why.
Merlin: Because you pop the top off the mixed nuts and you eat them just as a thing.
Merlin: Hummus doesn't tell you this on the shelf, but hummus wants other things.
Merlin: Yeah, it's a condiment.
Merlin: And what does hummus mostly want?
Merlin: Bread.
John: Oh, it wants pita bread.
Merlin: Yeah, which you shouldn't eat a lot of.
Merlin: I'm trying to avoid that.
Merlin: But you know, you could also have carrots.
John: See, that's what I want.
John: I want to dip a carrot in a hummus because if I'm at a party, let's say I'm at a party and there's no antipasta tray.
John: There's just, it's like they got the vegetable platter.
John: Oh, the crudités.
John: I'll sit and dip a mini carrot into hummus all day.
John: Yeah.
John: Happy as can be.
John: But if I open my fridge and it's like, yeah, there's some mini carrots all right.
John: There's some hummus all right.
Merlin: And it just sits there.
Merlin: It's like, I'm still fucking here, dude.
Merlin: I'm not going anywhere.
Merlin: It's not a thing I'm going to pull out.
John: You bought me, asshole.
John: That's right.
John: You bought me.
John: And then, you know, after like three weeks, it's like, is that even still good?
John: The mini carrots are starting to get a little dried out.
Merlin: We did an example of that.
Merlin: See, my wife wants us to live.
Merlin: She tries to, you know, have nice things in the house for us to eat that are, you know, they come from a good point, but they can be kind of aspirational.
Merlin: One of the primary disconnects is that my wife sometimes buys things, even though I tend to do the more than 50% amount of the cooking.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: So like, but like, here's the kind of thing that happens is my daughter goes out to the garden at school, tears off a postage stamp size thing of kale and eats it and says, I love kale.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And she did in that moment because it's fun to tear off a postage stamp of kale and eat it.
Merlin: And that's probably as much kale as most people want.
Merlin: So but then we get kale and independently, my wife and I both get kale.
Merlin: And now we have two giant refrigerator filling bags of kale sitting there saying, that's right, asshole, you bought me and you bought my brother here to the kale brothers.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Then they're just they're just staring at us.
Merlin: And like, there's not that many nights where like, you know, when I start to cook is when I'm hungry.
Merlin: I don't, I sometimes when I'm doing sous vide stuff, I got to think ahead.
Merlin: But when it comes down to like 5.15 and time to make dinner, you know, pretty much the last thing on my mind is kale.
Merlin: Kale is maybe a third.
Merlin: It comes in third.
Merlin: You got a protein, far and away the number one.
Merlin: Focus heavily on protein.
Merlin: There are nights when I make just a protein, and then I'll cut up some demonstration cucumbers just so I can say I gave my kid a vegetable.
John: Right.
Merlin: But you got the primary protein, then you got the second thing, which is often a starchy thing.
Merlin: It could be a rice.
Merlin: It could be a noodle.
Right.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: Rice or noodle.
Merlin: And that's the main part of the meal for my daughter because she's a child.
Merlin: She'll eat all the noodles.
Merlin: She'll eat ramen.
Merlin: She'll eat egg noodles.
Merlin: She'll eat pasta, whatever.
Merlin: She's all about the noodles.
Merlin: And then, you know, I got to be honest with you.
Merlin: Like if it's getting to be 545, I might leave off the kale.
John: Right.
John: Well, yes.
John: You have a juicer, though.
Merlin: Yeah, we have a juicer, but it's a whole thing.
Merlin: You've got to take it out.
Merlin: You have to interact with it.
Merlin: I'm a range top man.
Merlin: I do a lot of things with the range and the microwave.
Merlin: But you've got gas.
John: We've got gas, yeah.
John: My house is plumbed for gas, but I have one of those cooktops that's like a black glass cooktop.
John: That just makes me, I don't know what it makes me want to do.
John: It makes me want to break it with a hammer.
Merlin: Yeah, that's one of those decisions where even if it does produce the same BTUs, it feels like a design-based decision rather than a functional decision.
John: Precisely.
Merlin: We wanted this to look pretty.
Merlin: We didn't want to have those coils like our parents.
John: Yeah, I don't want it to look pretty.
John: I want it to look functional and cool.
John: Yeah.
John: Incidentally, I need to go back, and I'm sure I've already gotten 40 tweets about this, but it was not...
John: Tony Lash, who mixed, never mind.
John: Butch Vig.
John: No, Butch Vig produced it.
John: It was Andy Wallace who mixed it.
John: Andy Wallace, famous for having mixed the Slayer records or produced the Slayer records.
John: Is that right?
John: Yeah.
John: So they picked Andy Wallace because Slayer was heavy and cool.
John: And they wanted to sound like Slayer, which again feels like an ironic, somewhat ironic choice.
John: Like, yeah, let's get the Slayer guy.
John: And then he made it like cool, like weird sounding, a little bit, you know, new wave.
John: And according to Wikipedia, which is never wrong, both Wallace and Vig noted years later that upon hearing Wallace's work, the band loved the mixes.
John: After the album's release, however, members of Nirvana expressed dissatisfaction with the polished sound the mixer had given Nevermind.
John: Cobain said in Come As You Are, the definitive rock book by my pal, said, looking back on the production of Nevermind.
Merlin: I don't know who that is.
Merlin: Who?
Merlin: Come As You Are author.
Merlin: You're going to make me look this up, aren't you?
Merlin: Who wrote it?
Merlin: Emily Nagowski?
Merlin: Nagowski.
John: Emily Nagowski?
John: I'm trying to figure out who wrote Come As You Are.
John: Well, wait a minute now.
John: Hang on.
John: Now I'm Googling.
John: I don't even know what I'm Googling.
John: Oh, no, that's a book about sex.
John: That's a book about sex.
John: I'm so sorry I derailed us.
Merlin: Anyway, as they mentioned in the book,
John: Oh, right.
John: Let me go back here.
John: Butch Vig.
John: Oh, no.
John: Michael Azarad.
John: Oh, that guy from This Band Could Be Your Life.
John: Yeah, right.
John: That guy's great.
John: And he's like a super nice guy, too.
John: And he runs now the Talk House...
John: website where I have written several articles.
Merlin: That's him, huh?
John: I really enjoyed that book.
John: Yeah, and he's a very smart guy and he's very committed to music journals.
Merlin: He seems to like music.
John: Within his book Come As You Are, Kurt says the following.
John: Looking back on the production of Nevermind, I'm embarrassed by it now.
John: It's closer to a Motley Crue record than it is a punk rock record.
John: Boo!
John: Boo!
John: What an asshole thing to say.
John: B, it was never a punk rock record, you ding-a-ling.
John: And C, what an asshole thing to say.
John: Like, okay, well, why don't you go make a record with Steve Albini while he actively scorns you through the entire production?
John: My sense of being in that studio...
John: With Albini being like, yeah, that was pretty good.
John: I mean, fine.
John: I don't know.
John: I think he sounds like a pretty straight-up guy to work with.
John: Well, yeah, but Albini went on record saying he thought that Nirvana was like a middling punk band, like kind of a middling mid-talent band, and he wasn't that impressed with them.
John: Wow.
John: And it's like, well, if you're going to say that after having made a record with them, I can only imagine what you were like...
John: day to day.
Merlin: You know, he's walked a lot of stuff back in recent years.
Merlin: He seems like he's mellowed a lot.
Merlin: And I'm not trying to apologize for him, but there's a lot.
Merlin: He's said some very controversial things in the past that he's kind of walked back because I think he realized he was being kind of a dick.
John: Well, yeah.
John: I mean, I think we don't think of Albini as being young because he seemed like prematurely old and wise to us.
John: Right, right, right.
John: But yeah, he was not he was not that old.
Merlin: Did you ever hear the tracks?
Merlin: It was recorded kind of as a lark, but he and Cheap Trick were doing a record, and then they ended up recording a bunch of tracks from In Color, re-recording them with him.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It's really good.
Merlin: I mean, you know, everybody listens to that, because, of course, In Color is famously, like, this very thin-sounding album.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: With some great songs on it.
Merlin: Like, if you ever hear the... Many people would be surprised to hear the original version of I Want You to Want Me, because it's pretty thin.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But that was kind of the style, you know?
Merlin: The thing is, now, of course, they tour on that for 20 years, and then they record this thing with Albini in 1998, and it's got barely any overdubs.
Merlin: It's very basic, but it sounds fucking great.
John: Yeah, well, and his, like, no overdubs thing, totally, like, I get it, right?
John: That was the Seattle band that I had in the mid-'90s, the drummer,
John: a friend of mine named Lewis and he's a wonderful guy but he was he said to me very early on in the time that we were playing together he was like listen reverb is shit don't use reverb on anything it's garbage
John: And I was like, really?
John: I mean, it's a knob on my amp.
John: It says reverb.
John: Why wouldn't I, why wouldn't I turn it kind of like I turned the mids?
John: Like, I don't know what the mid knob does either, but why wouldn't I use the reverb knob?
John: And he's like, reverb's garbage.
John: And he was coming out of that school of like, gated snares are garbage.
John: It's like, well, gated snares are just an effect.
John: They're an effect like chorus.
John: They're an effect like anything.
John: Reverb's just an effect.
John: You can put it on or not put it on.
John: You can use it as a tool.
John: It's just a musical sounding thing.
John: Right, right.
John: But all these prohibitions on what you could and couldn't do in order to make music that sounded whatever.
John: It's like, fuck.
John: And I was influenced by this.
John: So I'm walking around for five years going, oh, reverb is bad.
John: I didn't believe it, but I also didn't know how to counter it.
John: And, and what it turned out was I liked reverb and I didn't have enough, I didn't have enough knowledge, self-knowledge because I wasn't a record listener.
John: I wasn't, I didn't stay contemporary.
John: I was just sort of, I was, you know, I was, I was susceptible.
John: Right.
John: But I mean, Albini was 30 years old when he made in utero.
John: And I,
John: Yeah.
John: I mean, I remember being 30 years old.
John: I probably still would have said, uh, reverb sucks or whatever.
John: You know, like I would have, I wouldn't have known better.
John: And he probably knew a lot better than me.
John: But he would do stuff with the room.
John: It wasn't... Yeah, he'd move the mics around.
John: He did it like old-fashioned style.
John: But, you know, there's a difference between doing the thing strictly because it sounds good and...
John: And doing it slightly motivated by the feeling that if you say you did it this way, that sounds good.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like if you move the mics and it sounds better to you, yes.
John: If you put the mic in a coffee can and it sounds better to you, yes.
John: But if you put the mic in the coffee can, sort of kind of thinking about how that's going to read in an interview after you do it, oh yeah, we put the mics in a coffee can.
John: That changes things.
John: And I was never 100% able to...
John: It seemed to me a lot of that stuff was in order to say that you didn't do any overdubs more than because overdubs didn't sound good.
Merlin: Which is not it's a little bit sophomoric.
Merlin: It's a little bit ignorant is too strong of a word.
Merlin: But when you make blanket statements about anything like that anymore, it's the same kind of people who say like, oh, you know, CGI is ruining movies.
Merlin: which is a common thing people say, which is such a silly statement and such an ignorant statement because it indicates so little understanding of how movies are actually made.
Merlin: I was saying this to Syracuse the other day.
Merlin: It's almost like people saying salt is ruining food.
Merlin: Well, salt ruins food if you use it too much and it's all you can taste.
Merlin: But salt actually does a lot of good stuff.
Merlin: A chorus that you barely even notice, reverb that has a certain effect in this one part, that can be extremely effective.
Merlin: You wouldn't just reject it out of hand.
John: Well, and also, I mean, think about Band of Horses and what they do with reverb, right?
John: It's absolutely crucial to their sound.
John: And it enables you to sing like...
John: And it sounds big, right?
John: It's like we think about reverb as something that Enya uses.
John: And first of all, Enya is great sounding.
John: If you think about what I think Enya did the music to the Gladiator.
Merlin: Enya is fascinating.
Merlin: I just read a very long article about Enya.
Merlin: What did Enya do?
Merlin: Enya did a music, did a song that got used by CNN after 9-11.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: And she got, you know, residuals, whatever you would call it.
Merlin: Like she paid for it.
Merlin: Every time they would go to their, let's talk about 9-11, they would play this little bit from an Enya song.
Merlin: And she was making money like a doorknob in a wet sweater.
Merlin: And now she lives in a castle with cats and doesn't talk to people.
John: Doesn't talk to people, right.
Merlin: Fascinating.
Merlin: What a way to go.
Merlin: Wouldn't it be great?
Merlin: Wouldn't it be great to just go live in a castle with some cats?
John: Well, see, we've talked about this before, right?
John: I always wanted to live in a castle with cats until I moved out to Rainier Beach and I realized, oh, shit, I just kind of want to sit in a cafe and be around people.
John: I don't want to talk to them, but I don't want to not be around them.
John: And if I lived in a castle in Northern Ireland and never saw anybody, I think I would go bananas, which I think is what's happening.
Merlin: Yeah, well, I mean, like, you know, my friend in college used to say, you are your options.
Merlin: So I'm just saying, if one of your options is a castle full of cats, that's a nice thing to have in your utility belt.
John: See, that's very dope.
Merlin: I wouldn't want that to be my only resonance.
Merlin: You probably get great reverb in there, too.
John: Well, so here's Albini in 2011.
John: Albini says, I can't really express how much my admiration for Nirvana grew during the course of making that record.
John: In utero.
John: In utero.
John: This is 2011.
John: I was familiar with them, but I wouldn't have considered myself a fan prior to working on that record.
John: But during that making of that record, I genuinely came to respect them as artists.
John: Now, this is the type of quote that people will send me to refute my contention.
John: Like, oh, no, he came to respect them.
John: That's what he says.
John: Well, that's what he says in 2011.
John: But I remember in 1993 or 4 reading him say, I was familiar with them, but I wouldn't have considered myself a fan.
John: And then following up that statement with, and I found that they were a pretty mediocre punk band.
John: in the course of recording them.
John: And, you know, and I'm, I understand revisionism.
John: I know it happens all the time.
John: Uh, I got into fucking big flame war on the internet with four or five people that I ended up blocking when I was talking about Tom Petty, the look on Tom Petty's face when Prince stole the show at the, uh, at the rock and roll hall of fame induction of George Harrison.
Um,
John: There are a lot of people that were forwarding me an article written just recently where they interviewed Tom Petty and he was like, oh, I was so psyched.
John: I was so amazed at Prince and I was so psyched.
John: And he looked over at me and I was like, go, man, go.
John: It's awesome.
John: I think there's a couple of ways you can read that face.
Merlin: That's one of them.
John: Well, I don't think you can read it that way, but, but okay.
Merlin: You thought it was more like, okay, tiger, dial it down.
John: Well, not even that.
John: I thought it was like night, you know, like way to step on my way to step on this awesome celebration of my friend.
John: George Harrison with your ego solo.
John: Yeah, that's what I saw.
John: With his compulsive one-offsmanship.
John: Well, and also like Prince, I mean, a lot of people have responded to me in this, but I think a very interesting comment and, you know, we're in that stage of lionizing Prince.
John: Yeah, this is the wrong month to open a critical...
John: Critical appraisal of Prince.
John: Right.
John: But, you know, one of the things about Prince was he wasn't above showing off in a way that wasn't necessarily...
John: like musically brilliant, not, you know, he was capable of sitting down and playing fucking brilliant stuff.
John: But when he was on stage, he understood that his job was to show off and to put on a great show.
Merlin: Well, and especially as he got more and more kind of isolated or choosing to not be out much, like it was always an opportunity for him to, seemingly as fans, the way we read that is, it was always his opportunity to remind us that the kids still got it.
John: Yeah, right.
John: And so his solo is thrilling.
John: It's incredible, but it's not.
John: I mean, he pulls out every little... You know, he's like doing stuff that's kind of corny almost.
John: And the guys on stage are going to recognize that too, right?
John: Those guys are no dummies.
John: Everybody on that stage knows that when Prince goes... It's...
John: he's showing off right so anyway you sure you want to pursue this anyway i i saw that look on tom petty's face and it could i it could have been clearer to me but you know it his uh his response several years later 10 years later when somebody interviews him is oh yeah we totally loved it and it was amazing and
John: He claims in that interview that he had three or four interactions with Prince during that solo where Prince came over and they were looking at each other and he was like, keep it going, man, keep it going.
John: And you don't see any of that in the footage.
John: And another person commented to me that how convenient that all these moments where Petty was going, do it, do it, man.
John: didn't make it into the final cut.
John: And of course there were cameras on everybody at that show.
John: And you know, if you were directing that film, that if Tom Petty was saying to Prince, keep it going, man, that that would have been, you would have zoomed in on that.
John: That's not a thing that you would have said, well, we could look at that or we could spend that two seconds zooming in on the keyboard player.
John: So that kind of revisionism, I understand it 100%.
John: Nobody wants to say, yeah, I used to shit talk Nirvana a lot and now my opinion has changed.
John: The impulse is to say, oh, no, I really came to respect them over the course of that record.
John: Well, no, you really came to respect them over the course of 10 years of thinking about that record.
John: I don't know.
John: You don't get very far in my world shit-talking Nirvana.
John: I'm sorry, shit-talking Steve Albini.
John: And that's not what I'm doing, right?
John: I'm just making an observation.
John: One of the things I've never understood, and this is such a can of worms at this stage of the podcast.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: But I've never understood Ian McKay.
Merlin: Huh.
Merlin: You know what I saw the other day that was really good?
Merlin: Ha ha ha ha!
Merlin: This episode of Roderick on the Line is brought to you in part by us.
John: Hi, John.
John: That's right.
John: We actually have a product to sell and we're doing a commercial read.
John: Hi.
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: You can go and buy our t-shirts.
Merlin: You go to CottonBureau.com and you can buy our t-shirts.
Merlin: You can also look in the show notes for this page at RoderickOnTheLine.com.
Merlin: If you look at episode 199, you will see that we have two.
Merlin: Well, one very new brand new design and another updated and streamlined design.
John: That's right.
John: So two different T-shirts.
John: One is, I mean, the Super Train one from before.
John: We just took the Roderick on the Line part off because if it says hashtag Super Train, that's self-explanatory.
Merlin: It's better in a lot of ways because that's a code.
Merlin: You're going to find each other out now on the road with your fellow travelers.
Merlin: You can see Pound Sign Super Train.
Merlin: You're going to know.
John: Yeah, Pound Sign Super Train.
John: So that's the one shirt, and that's for people that like to wear black shirts.
John: And then there is another great shirt, which is a shirt with the picture of my orange belt.
Merlin: The original bell, the bell that you've been hearing, except no substitute, you can have this bell.
Merlin: And it's got, what do you call those, ding rays?
John: It's got some ding rays on the side.
John: There was some... But it's got the little ding rays so that it's not just a bell, it's a ringing bell.
John: It's a fucking bell.
John: And it does say Roderick on the line in smaller letters underneath.
Merlin: Yeah, but this is complicated.
Merlin: classy this is a classy shirt this is another very heavily coated shirt so here's what you need to know you can go to show notes for this episode at roderick on the line.com you can also go to cotton bureau.com and find it there just go to the show notes and you have until i believe may 23rd yeah there's two weeks where you can order these shirts that's right and then they're not gonna be available they'll ship in early june but you need to go and do this now do it quickly tell your friends uh two very handsome shirts and uh we're proud of these we really love the way these look
Merlin: Don't sleep on this.
John: If you live in Denmark, if you live in Christchurch, let's say you live... What about the Balkans, John?
John: If you live in the Balkans, absolutely you want one of these shirts.
John: If you live in the Maldives, order this shirt.
John: You'll be one of a very few people in the Maldives.
John: Uh, and, uh, that has a shirt and you'll feel very proud of yourself.
Merlin: Here's the thing that happens is people say to us, they say, how can we support your show?
Merlin: How do we give you money?
Merlin: And you know what?
Merlin: We don't like, we don't like to ask for your money.
Merlin: We're not asking for, for your, your cash in hand.
Merlin: We're saying if you want to support the show and you would like to have a t-shirt, this is your opportunity.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: This is the way that we do this.
Merlin: And if you would like to be somebody who shows their support for the show, it's one of the very rare times where I will say to you, this is a way that you could do that.
Merlin: And if it's a shirt that you'd like and would wear, I would be grateful if you would consider buying one.
John: Even if you don't wear T-shirts, these are suitable for framing.
Merlin: Yes.
John: And if you've never been in a house where someone has framed a T-shirt, it's fucking amazing.
John: And if we ever see you wearing it, we will sign it, whether you like it or not.
John: Oh, right.
John: I'll jump on you and sign it.
John: Make a little half hobbit.
John: If you wear it to an event that we're having, or you wear it to like a tweet up, or you wear it around thinking that we're going to bump into each other, that offer is no longer applicable.
Merlin: So please go buy a shirt.
Merlin: Thank you to our friends at Cotton Bureau, or especially our friend Jay for helping us out there.
Merlin: And thanks to us for supporting Roderick on the line.
Merlin: Yay, thanks us!
Ha ha!
Merlin: You know what I love?
Merlin: I love the song.
Merlin: I love the song Overkill by Men at Work.
Merlin: I've always loved it.
Merlin: Even at the time, it was one of those songs I felt like I don't exactly know what this is about, but it seems important.
Merlin: And I remember even then thinking this song is kind of a cut above the typical like new wave hit.
Merlin: And I mean, I'm always drawn to what's his name?
Merlin: Colin Hay performances like Colin Hay just playing that solo.
Merlin: He's still doing it.
Merlin: It still sounds fucking great.
John: I think that the amazing thing about them is how dark they were in all of the tunes other than the super hits and even kind of in the super hits.
Merlin: Super hits still had like even a dark sense of humor or something a little bit like, hmm, these guys aren't quite right.
John: Right.
John: They're goofing.
John: And in a way, they're not goofing like they might be giants.
Merlin: But they have kind of like, almost like, this is going to sound weird, but like a who circa 1967.
Merlin: Sort of like, oh, this could be about diddling kind of feeling.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
John: Something could be fucked up here.
John: Super fucked up.
John: And I mentioned they might be giants in the sense that their songs are really dark, a lot of them, if you dig into them.
Merlin: If you listen to the lyrics.
John: If you listen to the lyrics and think about it even for a second.
John: But like, you know, Be Good Johnny.
John: You know, it's not just it's not an overkill, right?
John: Yeah.
John: It's a mistake.
John: Like those tunes, if you really dig into them, even sonically, they're dark.
Yeah.
John: You know, there are a lot of weird minor chords and strange sort of sonic constructions that even at the time when there was a lot of stuff on the radio like Men Without Hats, like Men at Work versus Men Without Hats.
John: I couldn't dig into anything deeper on Men Without Hats than Safety Dance.
John: Yeah, it's a terrific song, but it's kind of a novelty song.
John: Yeah, whereas Men at Work, I felt like there was a reason, in a way, and this is another can of worms, in a way like Dire Straits.
John: There was a lot of deep dive on Dire Straits.
Merlin: Oh God, are you going to criticize them?
John: No, my God, I couldn't.
John: The man's too big, the man's too strong.
John: That's one of those songs I listened to 40 times in a row because it was imparting so much to me.
John: But Dire Straits, I don't understand a single criticism of them.
John: Maybe a little bit...
Merlin: Who they socialize with, maybe?
Merlin: Their hit record, like so many of the hit records of that time, does sound a little dated.
Merlin: But, you know, how can you blame that on anybody?
Merlin: Whereas something like even like their second, third record, like still, I mean, they sound like maybe like a record from the 80s, but I think Sultans of Swing has a timelessness to it.
John: Well, not just that, but like, okay, you take Money for Nothing out.
John: Let's just say Money for Nothing is just out.
John: It's just, we're not even going to talk about it.
John: But like Brothers in Arms, the tune.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: I'm going back.
Merlin: I'm looking here.
John: There is some weird production on that, like the sound of rain falling that you're a little bit like, really?
John: Thunder and lightning on it.
John: Okay.
John: I'll let it, you know, that's a little bit Bob Seger, but yes.
John: But the tune itself, incredible.
John: You think of So Far Away.
John: That's a good song.
John: I mean, there's even in, you know, like industrial disease is a little bit sort of proto money for nothing.
John: But Romeo and Juliet.
John: That's a terrific.
Merlin: I mean, that's what I'm thinking of, like, or that Skateaway song.
John: Well, that's Romeo and Juliet, right?
Merlin: uh i i just you know what's funny is like i remember i knew sultan's a swing from when it came out but then dire straits were one of those bands oh no skate away is the name you're right yeah but it was one of those um it was one of those i'm going back a little oh that alchemy live record was so good
Merlin: But it was, you know, one of those bands where they would have these videos, these weird videos on MTV that were not like other videos.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: They were just, they were more like, well, it's not bucolic, but they were like sort of, I don't know, just weird like little like tone poems or something.
John: Yeah.
John: I mean, so they're goofball songs, Twisting by the Pool, Money for Nothing, and...
John: I don't know, like Calling Elvis or... I mean, they had some tunes that were a little herp derp.
John: But they had so many, so many good tunes.
John: And I think that the fact that Mark Knopfler is friends with both Eric Clapton and Sting...
John: is one of the reasons that it's hard it's hard for people to casually appraise them because it's like a a he wore a headband b he was friends with sting normally that would be all you have that's as deep as you had to go right that's two strikes two strikes and you're out headband and people won't remember that even by this time sting was seeming pretty insufferable pretty bad during the synchronicity era
Merlin: the outfits that he would wear and and i will the interviews the interviews with him it's like oh with his stunt classes and yoga talk i would never criticize that album because uh
Merlin: what overrated so overrated wow that's that's tough talk synchronicity too it's a good song but i mean it's it's no uh like ghost in the machine okay all right i agree with that i mean ghost in the machine and was not zeny adam and data what's the other one um but ghost machine what was the one right before it um
Merlin: Yeah, Senyata Mandata.
John: Senyata Mandata.
Merlin: Holy shit, those two albums.
Merlin: I mean, but Ghost in the Machine was like, wow, here's Senyata Mandata.
Merlin: You're like, oh my God, what more could they do?
Merlin: And then Ghost in the Machine, oh my God, so good.
John: Well, and this is, I mean, if you think about the first, what, four REM records?
John: Yeah.
John: The first four U2 records?
John: Yeah.
John: I mean, all those early police records, it's, there's a lot of good stuff there.
John: And then it all went to shit in all three cases.
Yeah.
John: so anyway uh colin pay is a great singer walking in your footsteps come on synchronicity to king of pain even if you hate wrapped around your finger it's still a good tune oh yeah i guess every breath you take look oh come on you're killing me every breath you take is like you two's one
John: If it was, if anybody else, any other band did that tune, you would think, even as a one-hit wonder, but like if, even if Dire Straits had done Every Breath You Take, but like if Every Breath You Take had been done by Donovan even, I mean, it would be like the best song in their catalog.
Merlin: Let me read you five titles.
Merlin: Can I read you five titles?
Merlin: You ready for this?
Merlin: Go ahead.
Merlin: Number one, Spirits in the Material World.
Merlin: Number two, Every Little Thing She Does is Magic.
Merlin: Number three, Invisible Sun.
Merlin: Number four, Hungry For You.
Merlin: Number five, Demolition Man.
Merlin: That's side one.
John: All right.
John: That's a tough act to follow.
Merlin: I mean, that's up there with Master of Puppets for an amazing side one.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: And then you got Omega Man.
Merlin: Oh, man.
Merlin: Even their throwaways are so fun.
John: And admittedly, Tea in the Sahara is... Is that another Andy one?
John: No, no.
John: Tea in the Sahara is Sting doing his Sheltering Sky song.
John: Like, he read Sheltering Sky...
John: And he wrote a song about it.
John: And it's so awful.
John: Because it's like, well, it's like his song about Lolita.
John: Right?
John: Like, don't read a book...
John: And then, I mean, because you just feel like he's not commemorated, he's not like, it's not a tribute to it as much as it is a co-optation of it, right?
Merlin: Okay, here's the thing is I remember reading an interview with him in probably like maybe guitar player.
Merlin: No, but it was some major music magazine.
Merlin: It was around the time of Dream of the Turtles or whatever.
Merlin: Dream of the Turtles.
Merlin: And then like they're talking about the interview and Sting's sitting there and his bare feet like with his yoga outfit on and he's got a yellow legal pad and a rhyming dictionary.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And for some reason, and I was like, you know what?
Merlin: Like, that's why that's so awkward.
Merlin: Because here's the situation.
Merlin: I want to write a song.
John: Parents went away on a week's vacation.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Parents ain't nothing but trouble.
Merlin: But so, you know, Sting is sitting there going like, I want to mention that I've read this book.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: You know, but I can't just, you know, I don't want to just mention it.
Merlin: Like, it has to be a little more sly than that.
Merlin: So I'll just mention the author's name.
Merlin: Oh, but here's the problem.
Merlin: His name's kind of hard to rhyme.
Merlin: She starts to shake and cough.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Just like the old man in that book by Nabokov.
Merlin: Oh, God.
John: still still pretty great you just you want to kick him in the shin but also like go watch that video go watch that video and tell me you don't want to be in that band if that was the only if that was his only crime yes you get you just say like awesome right yeah it's one of those crimes where it's like that was awesome and then reflecting back on his later crimes you go oh that was just a harbinger
Merlin: It was troubling for a long time when Elvis Costello got this beef for being a racist where he had used the wrong word to describe Ray Charles and also called him blind and ignorant.
Yeah.
Merlin: Now, that was the story that went around for a long time.
Merlin: Turns out, from what I hear, he was doing that to troll... Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Bonnie Raitt.
Merlin: Not Bonnie Raitt.
Merlin: Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But basically, he was trolling them because they were being all like...
Merlin: a certain way yeah he was he was he was as it happens elvis costello not only loves ray charles's music but like is a giant fan of huge amounts anyway but basically he it was a total troll total troll now is that true that's what i've heard yeah i think then he got punched in the eye i think not only do i feel like it's true but absolutely plausible and as you know the kind of thing elvis costello would do
John: As you know, I was Elvis Costello's driver for two days.
John: That's true, you were.
John: And Elvis Costello, that is absolutely in keeping with him.
John: And it just so happened that that kind of, that that trolling happened in earshot of a reporter that wanted to take him down.
John: And what can you say?
John: I mean, yeah, it negatively affected his career and...
John: maybe that taught him a lesson, right?
John: I mean, he pulled that same stunt on Saturday Night Live and they never had him back.
John: Or a similar degree of like,
John: I'm going to stop the song that we agreed I was going to do, and I'm going to do the song that we agreed I could not do.
Merlin: Right.
John: That you specifically told me not to do.
John: Yeah, right.
John: And you specifically told me not to do it because of bullshit corporate reasons.
John: One, two, three, four.
John: And it's like, yeah, that was cool, except the people watching probably didn't realize how cool you were being.
John: Yeah.
John: And the people who were... Your kids are going to love it.
John: Yeah.
John: The people who were running the show, it was not cool to them.
John: And yeah, so Elvis Costello did a lot of things that in the fullness of time...
John: we look back and they seemed kind of legendary.
John: Like, wow, he, he did that.
John: Whoa.
John: He, you know, and you forgive him, you forgive him for what he said about Ray Charles, because it's a little bit like the, it's a little bit of Mussolini's train running on time.
John: Like it's, he was being, he was being ironic just as the Italians were being like, and it, and it entered the, it entered the lexicon as a thing meant to, you know, as a thing taken straight when it was meant to be, you know, taken to mean the opposite.
Um,
John: So what do you, you know?
Merlin: Anyway, Colin Hay is a fantastic singer still today.
Merlin: I'm going to read you six titles.
Merlin: I'm going to read you six titles.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Don't Stand So Close to Me.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Driven to Tears.
Merlin: Driven to Tears.
Merlin: And then, of course, you go straight into When the World is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around.
Merlin: Number four, Canary in a Coal Mine.
Merlin: Number five, Voices Inside My Head, Six Bombs Away.
Merlin: And what I don't know... It's also got Man in a Suitcase and da-da-da-da-da-da.
John: What I don't know is that we're talking about albums from an era where we bought albums and listened to them all the way through until you knew every song.
John: You bet.
John: Knew every song.
John: Not only knew every song, but every transition.
John: You would get to the... If you hear one of those songs on the radio now at the end of it... And it doesn't go into When the World is Running Down.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You start singing the next tune before it starts.
Merlin: That's like playing We Will Rock You without playing We Are the Champions.
John: And I wonder if that will ever return to a time when people digested complete works in that same way.
John: Those first four police albums, all of the Beatles records, all of the...
John: I mean, in a way, for me, all of the early ZZ Top records, although I know not everybody follows me there.
Merlin: Well, but I know I take you mean like right now you're going like, oh, I hear the Beatles are good.
Merlin: Let's do a mash them up with a super shuffle.
Merlin: And here, boom, she came in through the bathroom window.
John: And you're like, oh, give me a fucking break.
Merlin: Yeah, that's not a song you hear.
Merlin: That's a that's a that's a part.
Merlin: That's a part.
Merlin: That's like that's like that's like only reading the nouns.
John: Yeah, well, and, you know, the Beatles' number ones, right?
John: That was put out as a record.
John: I mean, oh, but here's the problem.
John: The blue album and the red album are albums to me.
Merlin: Oh, God, that was where it started for me.
Merlin: Right, and so I... I started with the, I want to say the blue album.
Merlin: I started with the second one.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: That's not unusual.
Merlin: Lady Madonna.
Merlin: Oh, my God, I love that album so much.
John: So when I get to the end of a song...
John: I'm as likely to think of the next song on the Blue album as I am to think of the next song on the album that those records, those tunes came out on.
Merlin: That's me and Neil Young's decade.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: That is, I mean, like, that's one of those ones where you're like, hey, you know, if you only want to have one Neil Young title in your house, that's arguably, and I'm not even the biggest proponent of going out and buy a best of, but that covers so much ground and has so many extremely good songs on it.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
John: Yeah.
John: Well, like R.E.M.
John: 's Eponymous.
John: Oh, my God.
John: Very early to do a greatest hits record on a band that.
Merlin: But, you know, but it comes with a free copy of Dead Letter Office.
Merlin: But I'm sorry.
Merlin: I'm sorry.
Merlin: Not Eponymous.
Merlin: Dead Letter Office had the outtakes.
Merlin: Plus, it came with a copy of Chronic Town, which felt like magic to me.
Merlin: Pretty smart.
Merlin: And Eponymous was pretty good, though.
Merlin: That was their IRS hits, right?
Merlin: Right.
John: And that was IRS trying to do.
John: I mean, was that a contractual obligation record?
John: I think, but also trying to capitalize on... The Warner success?
John: Yeah, and the fact that, like, hey, you guys, this is all good shit back here, you know, and we've got this catalog, and please... Well, that's a strong record.
John: It's so good.
John: Yeah.
John: You know?
John: But what do you...
John: like greatest hits records can also be awful i mean the eagles greatest hits are kind of the only thing you need to own and even then you well i don't know maybe not maybe not maybe the eagles are your reverb yeah maybe you're right i mean i'm and i i watch that did you watch that uh that two-part movie on netflix i did
Merlin: I watch it like once a year.
Merlin: I really love it.
Merlin: Just for Joe Walsh, if nothing else.
Merlin: But I don't know.
Merlin: I get a lot from watching that.
John: When you think about the Eagles, when they looked their best, it's kind of like the Beatles during Sgt.
John: Pepper.
John: Like the Eagles looked so good when they looked their best.
John: And then they looked so bad when they didn't look their best.
John: Like Glenn Frey.
Merlin: Glenn Frey was empirically hot.
Merlin: He was a really cool, good-looking guy.
Merlin: When he had a mustache and was wearing... The aviator glasses and the furry, the collar?
John: Yeah, and the faded, like, very tight bell-bottom denim.
John: When they all were wearing that denim, like the denim era of the Eagles, they couldn't have been cooler looking.
John: And then almost immediately...
John: when Glenn Frey like got into weightlifting or put gel in his hair, whatever, whatever it was, they all of a sudden looked awful.
John: And I don't, I don't know how, I don't know how that would have, how you, and I mean, I have to say like maybe I, I,
John: I fell prey to this myself.
John: Like every photograph that my band ever took and publicized looked awful because I kept shaving two days before our photo shoot.
John: For some reason.
John: For some reason, I kept feeling like the beard was a thing that I wore all the time as a muffler, as a scarf.
John: An existential muffler.
John: Yeah, but when it came time to actually represent the band and show up for a photo shoot, I'd shave it.
John: You'd hear your dad's voice in your head, like put on a tie.
John: And then I looked like shit.
John: Yeah.
John: And then I immediately grew the beard back.
John: And so everywhere I went, here I am with my beard and my shaggy hair feeling good.
John: And I'd walk into the club and there'd be an enormous picture of me with my big fleshy face that was... Looking like the cousin you're not sure if you want to invite to the wedding.
John: Yeah, I look so terrible.
John: And it was not just that, but I had only shaved two days before.
John: So my face was kind of raw.
John: Like it just wasn't...
John: And so when you think about the Eagles during that period, you're like, dudes, don't shave your mustaches.
John: You look amazing.
John: And they're just not thinking that way.
John: Right.
John: Don Henley in his in his like literally his Henley shirts.
John: Literally.
John: I don't know if he did that on purpose.
John: But all through the 70s, he was wearing Henleys like collarless shirts.
Right.
John: which we call Henley's.
John: I didn't know that.
John: And his name is Don Henley, and you're just like, really?
Merlin: He's a visual pun.
Merlin: It's a little bit punny, but... We should talk about handsome guitar players, and I want to talk about David Gilmour someday.
Merlin: That guy was super handsome when he was young.
Merlin: Oh, he's so handsome.
Merlin: And he was really... He was a good player.
John: Well, and he's posh, too.
John: I think all those guys are posh.
John: They're pretty posh.
John: David Gilmour is my...
John: If I were a wizard, I would have kind of three choices for what my familiar would be.
John: Okay.
John: And I think two, I could have any two, right?
John: I feel like if I were, and I do believe I may be half wizard, but if I were a full-fledged wizard and when I wasn't making half hobbits with the hobbit wenches...
John: I would be walking around.
John: Making little bilbos.
John: Making little, well, not bilbos.
John: They'd be bill rods.
John: Bill rod, the half hobbit.
John: Little bill rod, half hobbit, half wizard.
John: If wizards are angels of some kind.
John: But I would have two familiars, right?
John: I would have a raven that was flying ahead.
John: And checking for Nazguls.
John: And just, you know, he's just flying ahead, right?
John: He's watching.
John: Sure, sure.
John: I see you, Crow.
John: And then he's either coming back to report to me or he's psionically reporting to me.
John: He's the three-eyed raven.
Merlin: But he's also a little like a Rottweiler where he knows when to go off and do his own little campaign and then come back.
John: Yeah, he's doing his own business, and he's a little bit independent of me, right?
John: Sometimes he's not dependable because he's working his own angle, right?
John: But he's mostly allied with me, but he's an independent guy.
Merlin: You don't have a formal raven-to-human relationship.
Merlin: But it's something where, like, out of friendship and mutual admiration and really mutual mission, you kind of need each other most of the time.
John: Yeah, he keeps close.
John: But if there are a bunch of other ravens, it's not like he's not going to go up.
John: He doesn't work for you.
John: Exactly.
John: He's like the giant eagles.
John: Like if Gandalf can summon giant eagles to rescue Frodo as Sauron's mountain of fire collapses, why couldn't Gandalf have just summoned those eagles to take him there in the first place, obviating the need for the entire quest?
John: I guess it's because Sauron would have seen the eagles coming.
John: But it also seems like maybe the eagles could have taken them quite a ways, right?
John: If Gandalf can just call eagles, maybe they could have taken the party all the way up to Gondory, at least.
Merlin: Okay, so familiar number one.
Merlin: Choice number one in this array, Jon considers the raven.
John: The raven is there, and he comes and goes, but he's a pal.
John: Okay, familiar two.
John: And then a raccoon.
John: Okay.
John: A raccoon who is kind of scampering along.
John: I imagine a raccoon kind of like the Guardians of the Galaxy raccoon, although maybe not that contentious.
John: But like a raccoon that also can kind of communicate with me, and he's a little bit of a trickster.
John: If I'm having a confrontation with somebody on the trail, he'll sneak around behind them and...
John: That's what he's there for.
Merlin: That's his performance character.
Merlin: You don't tell a raccoon not to camper and Twitter and jive.
Merlin: That's what he does.
John: He skitters.
John: Right.
John: I'm arguing with some trolls.
John: I mean, literal trolls.
John: And the raccoon is going through their luggage, right?
John: Yeah, he's going through their luggage.
John: He's fucking with them.
John: He's untying their shoelaces.
John: Looking for Middle Earth Traveler's Checks.
John: Yeah, right.
John: He's squirting some toothpaste on their bag, and then I can say, oh, you've got a leak in your bag, and then I fucking rip them off.
John: Yeah, it's kind of like Paper Moon.
John: You and your raccoon have a long con in Middle Earth.
John: That's exactly right.
John: You can become a Bible salesman.
John: If you think about the combination of a raven and a raccoon as your two familiars, I'm thinking that's some wizardry right there.
John: But if I had a third familiar, it would be David Gilmour.
Merlin: Well, just out of curiosity, what would he do for you?
Merlin: He'd just be handsome.
Merlin: Think about traveling with David Gilmore.
Merlin: You know what, though?
Merlin: He's a ranger, right?
John: He's exactly a ranger.
John: You're exactly right.
Merlin: Because he's got charisma, he's got wisdom, he's got strength, and he's got very high charisma.
Merlin: And I think he could probably do a lot of sweet talking, but I bet he has great taste.
Merlin: We all know he has great taste.
Merlin: He's very restrained.
Merlin: He's going to keep you on an even keel.
John: He's super regal.
John: Now, think about you're coming into a border town.
John: Yeah.
John: Right?
John: You get through the gates, and you're going to the inn.
John: And you walk into the inn and everybody in there is smoking pipes and they've got their hoods on their cloaks up.
John: And the conversation stops when you walk in the door and everybody turns and looks at you.
John: And then...
John: normally they would go back to their conversations and you would feel like sort of, oh, okay, let's saddle up to the bar and see if there's a room at the inn.
John: But now reimagine that scene with David Gilmore.
John: You push him a little bit forward.
John: He walks in, stands in the doorway of the bar.
John: Everybody turns and listens and stops talking.
John: Hello.
John: And then they continue to stop talking because it's fucking David Gilmore there.
John: And he walks over and is like, your finest room, please.
John: And they give you the finest room.
Merlin: And he smiles.
Merlin: There's a little sparkle.
John: Fucking David Gilmore is here, right?
Merlin: He was very, very handsome.
John: Well, and when David Gilmore walks into a club in 1969, London, and everybody goes, David Gilmore's here.
John: No one says, David Gilmore's here.
John: Right?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: He looks like he could be in the dismemberment plan, you know, if he was less handsome.
John: He's so wonderful.
John: Look at that guy.
John: And, I mean, when David Gilmour says, here's how I record my solos, I turn the amp all the way up.
John: The end.
John: You're like, I believe you.
John: I believe that.
John: And I don't think that that is a put on.
John: I don't think that's pretentious at all.
John: He turns his amp all the way up.
John: And that's how he gets his sound.
John: That's all you need to know.
Merlin: If he described anymore, it would ruin the lesson.
John: Yeah.
John: That's everything you need to know.
John: Now you go figure it out.
John: Yeah.
John: Turn your amp all the way up.
John: Right.
John: And then your guitar will respond differently, and that's... Yeah, but the thing is, it's not a recipe.
Merlin: It's a way of life.
Merlin: You can't use a way of life to make toast.
Merlin: That's what a recipe is for.
Merlin: That's a recipe, right?
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: And then also...
Merlin: It's not a recipe in the sense of going like, okay, you're going to have a perfect sourdough bread after you turn up your amp.
Merlin: No, that's not it at all.
Merlin: Turn up your amp and now go play for 20 years.
John: Yeah, go play.
John: Well, and also be inspired and brilliant and wonderful.
John: Yeah, be really good.
John: That's the other thing.
John: That's the other tip.
John: That's the other tip.
John: I don't think having David Gilmore as your father would be very great, though.
John: I think that he is maybe a little bit of a love withholder.
John: Oh.
John: If you get my drift.
Yeah.
Merlin: That still, that does not count him out for the campaign, though.
Merlin: You got a raven, a raccoon, and David... You got a raven, a raccoon, and David Gilmour.
John: I think you're going to have a very interesting campaign.
John: Yeah, well, and the thing is, I don't need love from David Gilmour in that moment, because the raven's not giving me any love, and the raccoon barely is.
John: And frankly, I'm getting my love from two things.
John: Hobbit girl and a young Linda Ronstadt.
John: Oh, man.
John: Is she wearing skates?
John: Well, is she on the campaign in skates?
John: Oh, my God.
John: Yeah.
John: Right.
John: Right.
John: Even the Nazgul would turn away.
John: She's wearing giant hoop earrings and roller skates and a raccoon and a raven.
John: Yeah.
John: David Gilmore and Linda Ronstadt.
Merlin: It's giving me Blue Bayou just thinking about it.
John: I mean, shit.
John: Why is this not my life now?
John: This should be a module.
John: This should be.
John: I mean, talk about, like, I didn't roll for this character.
John: I chose this character.
John: Oh, I'm so sad.
Merlin: Buy our t-shirts.
Merlin: Oh, shit.
Merlin: Yeah, but we can't talk about it too much.
Merlin: We're two hours in.