Ep. 204: "Soul Memory"
Merlin: This episode of Roderick on the Line is brought to you by Casper.
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Merlin: To learn more right now, please visit casper.com slash super train.
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
John: Well, hello, Merlin Liu.
John: Goodbye, heart.
Merlin: Merlin Liu.
Merlin: I'm so in love with you.
Merlin: Here he comes.
Merlin: That's Roderick's clown.
Merlin: Here he comes.
John: It's Stacy's mom.
John: Walking down the street.
Merlin: Did you watch The Young Ones when you were coming up?
Merlin: I did.
Merlin: Have you heard the news?
John: There's Young Ones news?
Merlin: Breaking.
Merlin: Were you aware that there was a fifth roommate?
John: It was, yeah, it was Sergei or it was... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, Alexei.
John: Alexei Sale.
Merlin: No, Alexei Sale.
Merlin: It's funny.
Merlin: I was just listening to a great interview with him.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Can I spoil this for you and blow your mind?
Merlin: Wait, was it the squirrel?
Merlin: Oh, and the exploding tomato, the smiling talking tomatoes?
Merlin: Uh-huh, uh-huh.
Merlin: No, there's a fifth roommate.
Merlin: In some production stills or like promotional shots, you'll see the four guys and then this, what looks kind of like Cousin It, where it's obviously like a woman with long hair with her hair combed over her face.
Merlin: She makes an appearance
Merlin: in every episode of the first season and i've seen those shows a lot what and i never saw her she's usually in the background and once you see it first of all it's incredibly wild that you never notice that she's there but she's also incredibly creepy because she's just like sitting like crouched in the background behind the couch with hair in her face and it's it's gonna blow your mind when you see what yes yes no yeah
Merlin: Like scenes that I've seen a whole bunch of times, she's just sitting there in the shadows and she looks like a Korean water ghost.
Merlin: It's totally freaky.
John: Okay.
John: That's something to Google.
John: Am I right?
John: Am I right?
Merlin: I'll send you some supporting footage.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: But I heard about it and I was like, oh, is this going to be one of those things?
Merlin: You know, those things on the internet.
Merlin: But it's real.
Merlin: Is it going to be an internet thing or is it going to be a real thing?
Merlin: I got to be honest with you.
Merlin: I thought it was going to be an internet thing.
John: But she's just she's just in the background.
Merlin: She's in like some party.
Merlin: There's a party scene where everybody's doing bong hits and she's at the party.
Merlin: But other than that, mostly, I think she's intermittently occasionally there after the first, as they say, series.
Merlin: But the first season, she's in at least once and sometimes many times in every episode somewhere in the background, not participating in the scene.
John: I'm really into this.
Merlin: And it's horrifying.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: It's nice to find those kinds of things out.
Merlin: Yeah, that's what they call an Easter egg.
Merlin: Am I right?
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Well done.
Merlin: Well done.
Merlin: Easter egg.
Merlin: Did you learn that from 4chan, John?
Merlin: I know a lot about things from 4chan.
Merlin: This is the thing.
Merlin: Here's the thing about you.
Merlin: that a lot of people don't know, is that there's a lot of people don't know about you.
Merlin: And I like that.
Merlin: I like that you deploy personal information tactically.
Merlin: You don't need to let everybody know you know a lot about a thing guy.
Merlin: There's little bits.
Merlin: You dribble, it dribbles.
Merlin: John dribbles out at his pleasure.
John: You got to dribble.
John: I do feel... Did you just hear a sound that sounded like traffic noise in a 1970s movie?
John: I think that was... Could that have been exhaling?
John: Oh, maybe, maybe.
John: Big exhale.
John: Does that sound like Kojak?
John: It did for a brief second.
John: Do you remember in the 1970s where... Yes.
John: Do you remember that traffic sounded a lot louder in the 70s?
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: You only hear that volume of traffic.
Merlin: Like if you're in Manhattan or in some cases in my neighborhood, if you ever like call me when I'm walking down the street, if the train's going by, it's deafening.
Merlin: But growing up in the suburbs, I always thought you're making this up.
Merlin: There's no way traffic is this loud.
John: Well, so this is something that millennials might not know.
John: And even Generation Xers might not remember.
John: But there was a time when there were no governors on the loudness of car horns.
John: So all car horns that came out of Detroit in the 60s and 70s, if you hit your car horn, it was like a boat horn.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Like on an old American, an old American sedan, like you would get an F-sharp from hell.
Merlin: Like you really, really heard it.
John: And so in the cities, this was before there were a lot of campaigns for traffic politeness.
John: Yeah.
John: Cars would pile up and they would just be honking, honking, honking.
Merlin: That's the human condition right there, isn't it?
Merlin: It was a deafening noise.
Merlin: We're unhappy.
Merlin: There's nothing we can do about it, so we might as well be unpleasant.
John: Or whatever.
John: And there were still cars that went.
John: Oh, sure.
John: After Jimmy Carter.
John: And so later on, it was such a problem.
John: Cities were so loud that they actually passed ordinances and and and then furthermore laws.
John: That governed the volume of a car horn so that your car horn could only be a certain number of... Wait a minute, you're telling me this was a thing?
John: Yeah, they actually mommy stated the volume of car horns because noise pollution was such a problem.
John: The whole concept of noise pollution.
Merlin: And, you know, and all those cars... When people first started talking about that, I'm going to interrupt you, but, you know, for a long time, you could understand air pollution because it was hard to breathe.
Merlin: You could understand water pollution because, you know, we couldn't drink the water.
John: It was hard to breathe water.
Merlin: You could understand you don't want dioxin in the eggs.
Merlin: Like, we understand all that, but when people first... I think it was the 70s equivalent of the word microaggressions.
Merlin: When people first heard it, they were like, really?
Merlin: Now noise is pollution?
John: Yeah.
John: But it was so noticeable when they governed...
John: the volume of car horns like it made a tremendous impact on quality of life in cities like right away and and then they took other steps
John: to uh to mandate that your your city factory and your city you know your enterprises had to also be conscious of the noise that they were producing and i think you know car mufflers were a lot louder than
John: It was kind of considered an element of a cool car that it'd be really loud just sitting there idling.
John: You could buy cherry bombs.
John: You could buy thrush.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: You could buy a glass pack.
Merlin: People might vaguely remember seeing a Woody the Woodpecker type character on the back of a muscle car and thought, what was that?
Merlin: And that means that's a person who paid to have their car go pum pum pum pum pum pum pum pum pum pum pum.
John: like so it was fucking loud in the city and every once in a while I'll be watching like an old 1970s movie and there'll just be a traffic scene where that's just sort of an interstitial
John: moment in the film but I'll have this powerful recollection of like oh wow that's right it used to sound like that yep and now it does not sound like that it sounds like this and it's and it's a major change like I had a I have a
John: I have a sense memory or a, you know, like a soul memory.
John: Loudtown.
John: Loudtown.
John: I get that.
Merlin: I've had those soul memories.
Merlin: So what's your biggest soul memory, Merlin?
Merlin: Oh, man, I had one the other day.
Merlin: Oh, I had one that came out of nowhere.
Merlin: I've spoken periodically about my various best friends in life and from different eras.
Merlin: Like, for example, a couple years ago, I reconnected with my best friend from first grade on Twitter.
John: Whoa.
Merlin: Who, as it turns out, is the executive producer of many television shows now.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: I just know him as the guy.
Merlin: He's the first.
Merlin: God bless you, Rob.
Merlin: I hope you're out there.
Merlin: Probably not listening.
Merlin: He's kind of busy.
Merlin: He's making hit TV shows.
Merlin: But he's the first fella with which I competed to see how far we could pee from the urinal.
Merlin: That's big.
Merlin: The first guy you ever do that with.
Merlin: Well, it's not technically a sword fight.
Merlin: I didn't get into that until college.
Merlin: But seeing how far you could step away from the urinal and have your stream still go.
Merlin: so i connect with people sometimes old friends but i had a one of my dear old friends was my friend john from i'm gonna say when i was seven to when i was 11 or 12 like almost every weekend we were at each other's house like sleeping over and he got me into comics he got he was my first person i knew who was really into lord of the rings my uber nerd friend and at one point he got to i'm going somewhere with this at one point he got to move in upstairs to your house at his house
Merlin: He was there for two seasons.
Merlin: I never saw him.
Merlin: He always had his hair over his face.
Merlin: He lived in the attic.
Merlin: By the way, check your messages.
Merlin: I sent you some photos.
Merlin: Oh, okay.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: So, John got to move from his room on the main floor to up into the attic, which is a fairly finished attic.
Merlin: It didn't have a bathroom, but it had a big bedroom and then a little bedroom.
Merlin: Oh, so he was granted the right.
Merlin: Yeah, he got a couple nice accommodations I can tell you about.
Merlin: You're not going to believe what this guy got.
Merlin: But...
Merlin: So that was awesome because we didn't do anything bad.
Merlin: We were like the ultimate good kids.
Merlin: We sat around and talked about D&D or whatever.
Merlin: But what I really remember is that that's also where they put the cat box.
Merlin: And I don't know if you remember cat boxes from the 70s.
Merlin: But a cat box from the 70s, I can just tell you as somebody who now has a cat with two boxes, they are a damn sight away from cat boxes today.
John: Wait, wait, wait.
John: Your cat has two cat boxes?
John: It's kind of standard now, yeah.
John: Why is it standard?
Merlin: Is this some kind of thing?
Merlin: I'm happy to circle back to it.
Merlin: Is this a life hack?
Merlin: It's kind of a life hack.
Merlin: Yeah, it's a cat hack.
Merlin: It's a cat hack?
Merlin: You're not going to believe what happens next.
Merlin: Yeah, well, cat boxes... There's one amazing trick.
John: Cat boxes could pollute...
John: 900 square feet of a thousand square foot apartment.
Merlin: Oh, my goodness.
Merlin: I don't know if it's what the cats were eating or drinking.
Merlin: I don't know if they were their metabolism.
Merlin: I think John Syracuse would call it adaptation or evolution.
Merlin: I think it is the quality of litter.
John: I think it is the non-deodorizing litter.
John: Yes.
Merlin: non-scooping non and so like all but the thing is i all i was doing was i was and this gets to the second accommodation that john got later which i'd love to tell you about but i was sitting there i was just for some reason i was thinking about how cool it was i get to john's house i have my bag we go upstairs we will go up the steps and i just i suddenly got smacked in the face with this soul memory with this sense memory of that cat box
Merlin: And it was 1978 all over again.
Merlin: I smelled it.
Merlin: I smelled the acrid ammonia cat smell so clearly.
Merlin: I imprinted on it.
Merlin: It's the canonical cat box in my head is John's cat, which was named Blackie.
Merlin: They had a cat named Blackie and a dog named Blackie.
Merlin: And the dog was scared of the cat.
Merlin: The cat would chase the dog.
Merlin: It was adorable.
Merlin: Of course.
Merlin: I love John.
John: Of course, because you were living in a sitcom.
John: You know, my dad's cat was named Puppy.
John: And then when Puppy died, he got another cat and he named it Puppy 2.
John: Oh, see, that's a nice story about your dad.
Merlin: So adorbs.
Merlin: Did you look at the photos?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: I don't want to look at them.
John: You're not going to sleep now.
Merlin: I mean, you're not going to sleep twice.
Merlin: On the one hand, you're going to go, holy shit, I've watched that show.
Merlin: You've seen each of those shows at least once.
John: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: So that's weird.
Merlin: But now look at that photo.
Merlin: Doesn't that look like something from like a Japanese horror film?
John: Well, and the problem is when I first saw it, I was like, I don't think I had a soul memory, but I did have some sense of like, oh, I knew that, but I can't remember knowing it.
John: Like, I don't, I think I noticed that person before, but it would have been 1984, and I don't remember why or what, because they never interact with her.
Merlin: You're probably, you're probably, I mean, in our case, it was usually, eventually we watched them on video, but they were, I think they were on MTV.
Merlin: They were.
Merlin: In the U.S.
Merlin: A few years after they were in England.
Merlin: And, you know, you'd be hopped up on Mountain Dew, as you do.
Merlin: As you do.
John: As you do.
Merlin: Right in that one now.
Merlin: Hi, I'm Guy Fieri.
John: For young ones.
John: The other day on Facebook.
John: There are a couple of reporters, let's call them reporters in quotes, for the stranger alternative newspaper here in Seattle, who are just young enough that they... Well, they're not young enough that they can...
John: with any right, maintain the incredibly arrogant, narrow-minded progressivism that they do.
John: If they were 20, you might find it believable, but they're like 30 and writing the political columns for a local alternative paper.
John: It's adorable.
John: Oh my God, they're so...
Merlin: Awful.
Merlin: And one of them – They're so confident.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: They are very confident.
Merlin: Don't you look at them and you're like, I wish I was as confident about anything as you are about whatever you think this week.
John: Yeah.
John: And I mean – and they literally like in the newspaper clench their fists and stamp their feet and go, meh.
John: And they – there was some article in the paper the other day about how meh, homelessness is meh and people are bad.
John: People that wear ties are meh.
John: And Sean Nelson posted it on his Facebook page.
John: And I know for a fact that Sean, this is a person that's a co-worker of Sean's.
Merlin: Sean is very gracious about retuning things from his colleagues.
John: That's right.
Merlin: That's part of what he does in his role as, what's his actual title there?
John: He's an editor of, he's like the... He's kind of a big shot there.
John: He's the life editor or whatever, the liberal arts editor.
John: But he posted this without comment.
John: And I think or with with with an oblique comment such that 90 percent of the people could read it and and he would be doing that New Yorker thing of like retweeting his colleagues.
John: But a few of us recognize that he was retweeting it without comment because he despises this person and like personally despises him and despises it and doesn't like working with him and all these things.
John: And I read the article and it was just like meh.
John: And so I wrote in the comments.
John: You know, reading this guy is like reading Rick from The Young One's Journal.
John: Fascist.
John: Yeah, fascist.
John: And so the guy, the writer...
John: then comments after me because of course right of course he's linked in the article uh he's like i'm sorry i don't get that reference oh if only there was some way to find out what that reference was i know and so i so i if there was some place you could go and say rick from the young ones and find out what that if only if only
John: He probably doesn't have an Apple Watch, which is where you would do that because an Apple Watch is part of the, you know, it's part of colonialism.
John: But in any case, so I replied, oh, don't worry about it.
John: It's a reference from the 60s.
John: And, yeah, I felt like that was that was exactly how many laughs that was worth, like two has.
John: But it was at least I felt good about it.
John: It's a reference from the 60s.
John: Go fuck yourself, Rick, from the young ones.
John: I as you were talking about finding your first great friend.
Merlin: who you tried to pee as far as you could it was a very gentle kind of competition it was almost a journey of self-discovery when men see how far from the urinal they can get it's not really a pissing contest is the ironic part it's more it's a form of bonding really it's not it's funny that it got that term pissing contest but it's really more a way of saying let's see what we can do with this business
John: Well, and there I've been in there are two different kinds of pissing contests I was in there.
John: One was with the Catholic priest on the outside wall of the fish bar in in Ketchum, Idaho, which regular listeners to the show will recognize this as coming from the episode.
John: Yeah.
John: And then there was Peter Nosek who was taught by his father to be able to pee over his own shoulder.
John: Oh, that's tremendous.
Merlin: Can you imagine how many times you got that wrong and you stuck with it?
John: Yeah, right.
John: And Peter and his father, I mean, neither one of them were especially tall.
John: And I think that's an advantage when you're trying to pee over your own shoulder.
John: But also a lot of stream control.
John: And we'd be out somewhere, you know, drinking beer and shooting guns.
John: And we'd have to go pee and we'd go over, start peeing in the ditch or whatever.
John: And then Peter would, he'd do this like pretty cool contortion.
John: He'd drop a shoulder, lean back a little bit.
John: Um, you know, like penis in hand and then just the P would, he would just start just directing it over his shoulder and could just, oh my God, it was a, for an 18 year old, truly amazing.
John: An incomparable talent.
John: I would never have tried it.
John: You know, there was no way I would be able to get away with it.
Merlin: That's the kind of thing that, if memory serves, that's the kind of thing that makes you what I will call a local legend.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Like, you're not going to appear in journals, probably.
Merlin: You're not going to be featured in a national magazine.
Merlin: But you're going to become that one guy that can do that thing.
John: The guy that can pee over his shoulder.
John: And Peter had many, many of these talents.
John: Oh, God bless him.
John: He certainly remains a legend to me.
John: But as you said that, I realized that my childhood best friend was a kid named Aaron Kinnaman.
John: And over the years, over the last 20 years, I have searched for Aaron Kinnaman innumerable times, trying to have the same experience that you're having of like, my first grade friend.
John: That blah, blah, blah.
John: Like, I had a lot of experiences with Aaron Kinnaman.
Merlin: He's got to be out there.
Merlin: He's got to be leaving a tray.
John: No, but he's not.
John: And the problem is I don't know how to spell Kinnaman.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Like, there are 14 different possible spellings of Kinnaman.
John: And I've tried them all, and there's just nothing.
John: And it astonishes me to be...
John: In our contemporary life and have – and Aaron Kinnaman is not the only one.
John: He's not the only person from my past that I have tried to find on the internet that there's just nothing.
John: There's just not a single trace.
John: Not even those terrible like white pages.
John: Right, right, right.
Merlin: We can find this person in this dozen such cities.
John: Yeah.
John: So how do you how do you live in the modern world and be completely invisible on the Internet?
John: I know there are millions and millions, billions, let's say, of people that pull it off.
John: But it's still like, as somebody who spent a lot of time on 4chan, it's hard for me to imagine that even if I wanted to dox Aaron Kinnaman, I couldn't.
John: That's frustrating.
John: It's very frustrating.
Merlin: It does seem weird, though, because everybody leaves a trail, you know?
Merlin: Yeah!
Merlin: When you see this, I'll give you a little bit of inside baseball here.
Merlin: When somebody shows up on the scene and is being very provocative, and especially if they throw the shape of being somebody in their 20s,
Merlin: It feels weird.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And I'm not trying to be creepy, but I'm just trying to say, like, this is just a fact of life, that if you're somebody these days, you know, that's something that's a thing.
Merlin: But it is strange that somebody who's in their 40s, you can't find anything about them.
John: Yeah, yeah, right.
John: Like...
John: Well, I'm trying to think of – I mean, okay, he doesn't have a LinkedIn profile.
John: He was smart.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: He doesn't have a Facebook profile.
John: But, like, his kids never tagged him in anything?
John: Yeah.
John: So his kids don't have a – I mean, it's just – it's very frustrating to me because there are a few people from my past that I would like to get in contact with.
John: With and compare that to all the people I am in contact with from my past that I would rather not be in contact with.
John: It's just it's very frustrating.
John: I dated a girl in college named Latonia Wheeler.
John: You should be able to find Latonia Wheeler.
John: You should be able to, but you can't.
John: Somebody will now, John.
John: I don't think so.
John: I challenge you, Internet.
John: Oh, boy.
John: Please don't challenge me.
John: OK, don't.
John: No, no, no.
John: Stop.
John: I could hear you, Internet, all sharpening your pencils and getting your yellow legal pads out.
John: Stop it.
Merlin: Get off your virtual pad.
John: Stop it.
John: Go back to animating GIFs.
Merlin: John's grandmother...
Merlin: Uh, was married to a guy for a long time and he passed away and they decided that John's grandmother, who they called, whom they called Nani.
Merlin: She was awesome.
Merlin: Nani was going to move in with them.
Merlin: So John's dad, who was a handy guy and was like a woodworker, uh, and I'm sorry, he's a machinist.
Merlin: He worked at one of the great machining plants in Cincinnati.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: All the great machining plants of Cincinnati.
Merlin: All the great machining plants.
Merlin: No, Cincinnati, actually, Cincinnati Millicron, like, they made the tools that, they made the precision tools that made the precision tools in Cincinnati.
John: They made the tools that made the precision tools.
John: I'm still workshopping it.
Merlin: Unfortunately, that industry went away quite a while ago, but.
Merlin: All of the tools.
Merlin: All of the tools that you didn't know you need to make.
Merlin: All the tools you never knew you needed.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: In Cincinnati.
Merlin: Woo.
Merlin: Woo.
John: Cincinnati making all the tools.
Merlin: Easy, Tex.
John: I got kind of tired of making tools and unpacking.
Merlin: Lots of tools, making lots of tools.
Merlin: That show makes no fucking sense without the original music.
Merlin: It's brutal.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: It's so insane.
John: I hate copyright.
John: Although I love copyright.
Merlin: This is like Slow Train coming by the Doobie Brothers.
Merlin: And it's like...
John: Come on, really?
John: DX7 with some synth patches.
Merlin: So John's dad, this is quick, set himself to the task of going through their unfinished basement and making an apartment for her.
Merlin: How great is this?
John: Unfinished basement is an incredible album.
Merlin: Two, three, four.
Merlin: And so John's dad made her a beautiful apartment with like a full bath, you know, with a shower, a kitchen.
Merlin: He put in a false floor?
Merlin: He put in like a, I don't know if it's a false floor.
Merlin: Oh, you're saying so you could hide like a German bearer bonds?
John: No, not like a Al Capone false floor.
Merlin: It was not like a concrete floor.
Merlin: It was carpeted and whatnot.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
Merlin: Okay, okay.
Merlin: It had a big nap to it.
Merlin: I mean, this is, you know, this is the 70s.
Merlin: Sure, it was nappy.
Merlin: So anyway, long story short, they made this, and she lived there for a long time, and she helped with the kids, and she was awesome.
Merlin: And then, you know, uncannily enough, she got married to another guy at our church, like a guy in his 60s.
John: She was probably 48 years old.
Merlin: That's what's so frustrating.
Merlin: She was already a great-grandmother.
John: Oh, she's a grandma.
Merlin: 51 years old.
Merlin: He dipped his camels in Maker's Mark.
Merlin: And so then when she moved out with Jim Beale, Dr. Beale, then John graduated from getting to be in the place upstairs to getting the entire finished basement.
Merlin: He had his own apartment inside the house when he was 11.
Merlin: So...
Merlin: When he was 11?
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: This is when we were pals.
Merlin: I went through John having the original room, into John having the upstairs room, into John graduating down into the room.
Merlin: And it had a ping pong table.
Merlin: All down there.
Merlin: And he had his own little house inside of the house.
Merlin: It was astonishing.
Merlin: And the thing was, we were good kids.
Merlin: We were good Christian kids.
Merlin: The worst thing we did was watching other people do fireworks.
Merlin: One of the kids was really injured.
Merlin: I bet he was.
Merlin: He got burned.
Merlin: He had the weird thing on his neck.
Merlin: This happened to me.
Merlin: Can you imagine that in an apartment, your own apartment?
Merlin: This is John Hodgman's dream, right?
John: Well, John Hodgman actually had like a whole half of a house.
John: Oh, that's right.
John: But I had the same experience.
John: When my mom moved into her new house when I was in ninth grade, right before ninth grade,
John: This was the period when she decided that I was so incorrigible that the way she was going to punish me was by making me go live with my father.
John: And so she moved into the new house and there was a bedroom in there that was that should have been my bedroom, but she turned it into like the fern room or the sewing room or something.
Merlin: The gift wrapping room.
Merlin: The gift wrapping room.
Merlin: I love the idea of the gift wrapping room.
John: That's exactly what it was, right?
John: Just like a bunch of stuff in there.
John: What a giant fuck you to somebody in your family to have a room for wrapping presents.
John: It's a bedroom in the house, and my mom basically climbed into it and said, this is my dog crate.
John: She just populated it with all a bunch of mom shit just to say, like, even if you do move in here and put posters of Porsches on the wall, it's never going to feel like yours because the first thing that was in here was a sewing machine.
John: And so I went to live with my dad.
John: You know, I've told this story.
John: Yeah.
John: But...
John: But then I moved into that room and then over the course of time, like it was just clear that it was – I wasn't – I needed to be somewhat more sequestered.
John: And we had a large basement in this house, footprint of an entire floor that –
John: Was a, was a, a sunken base, or I mean, three of the four walls were just, were just windowless walls.
John: And then the back wall was all windows and, and a sliding glass door, except it was underneath a covered porch that was on the second floor.
John: So basically this entire basement never saw the sun.
John: There was daylight coming in from one wall, but it was Alaska.
John: So in the wintertime, that daylight amounted to nothing, basically.
John: You know, the sun came up at 10 and went down at 2.
John: So there was no – it was dark.
John: And then in the style of the late 60s, early 70s, when they built this place, their decision on how to –
John: How to, how to kid out that basement was they paneled the walls in unfinished rough sawn wood, like a barn.
John: So the walls were barn wood, which is, as, as you know, is very reflective and really light and cheery.
John: No, that was sarcasm.
John: It's not.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: And then they built these – It's like you're living in something that was meant to contain other lumber.
John: Yeah, right, or meant to contain livestock and the kind of livestock that isn't valuable.
John: And then the lighting, up along the walls, they built these sort of like –
John: How would you describe them?
John: They were cantilevered little...
John: not little, enormous light fixtures with that sort of bumpy plastic sheeting inside, you know, the sort of bumpy, translucent sheets of bumpy plastic.
John: I think I know, yeah.
John: And then each light fixture had four light bulbs in it, and there were 10 of these light fixtures throughout the basement.
John: So 40 light bulbs,
John: Going to illuminate this basement.
John: And the boxes were also built out of barn wood.
John: The light boxes were built out of barn wood.
John: With this bumpy translucent plastic.
John: Such that 40 light bulbs going at once.
John: Could not like produce almost no light.
John: It still felt like you were in...
John: This sounds like a John McCain jail.
John: Like, yeah, you were in a Batman's lair, basically.
John: If a Batman's lair was a barn.
John: If Batman's cave was a barn.
John: It sounds like a hard place to be cheerful.
John: It was pretty doomy.
John: But it was built in the late 60s, let's say.
John: as a party space so there was a bar with like orange uh it was like an orange bar with a sink and a refrigerator and a and shelves for glasses and and booze and then around the back there was a sauna and a like a tanning bed in the old in the old style which is a piece of foam
John: On a bench, also orange.
John: And then two light bulbs.
John: Oh, those pitiless sun lamps.
John: Yeah, tanning bulbs.
John: Not a tanning bed with those neon bulbs, but like, yeah, red, hot red light bulbs.
John: Sun bulbs.
John: What were they called?
Merlin: I know what you're talking about.
Merlin: The tanning lamps.
Merlin: Tanning lamps.
Merlin: Like you would get these things and they would get incredibly hot.
Merlin: And they, I mean, I don't know much about the effects of light spectra on our cells and stuff, but they were pretty cancery.
John: Yeah, they produced ultraviolet light of some kind.
Merlin: You would get burned real fast on those things one way or another.
John: And so there was a sauna and these UV bulbs and... This sounds like somebody's little suburban torture dungeon.
John: Sounds awful.
John: And to make it, you know, to finish out the... Were there meat hooks hanging from the ceiling?
John: To finish out the decoration, yeah, there was a giant doll sheep head.
John: Oh, dear.
John: Hanging on the wall above the television.
John: So there was this, like, there was this, and it was a big sheep that had been killed by my mom's boyfriend.
John: It was his little bit of addition to the decor.
John: That's what he chose to keep, huh?
John: So when you were down in the basement with all 40 lights burning...
John: Producing the illumination of like dusk.
John: Dusk in a storm.
John: Dusk in a sandstorm.
John: You would look up and this like dead sheep would be eyeballing you.
John: No matter where you were in the room, the sheep was looking at you.
John: And at a certain point, my mom was like, why don't you just live in the basement?
Yeah.
John: And so they put a bed down there, thankfully sort of close to the windows so that I had a sense of light.
John: But that was fine with me.
John: Like I was a cave dweller anyway.
John: And I had my own.
John: I never used the sauna.
John: No one did.
John: It just became a place to put the Christmas wrapping.
John: And I never used the tanning bed.
John: And I never used the bar for anything But I had this enormous space that was mine that I could you know I could shoot bows and arrows down there It was really I bet you could throw knives You absolutely could throw and it wouldn't even like mar anything
John: I had a 12-foot-long bullwhip that I would sit down there and practice with until I hurt myself very badly, and then I would hang it in the closet again and say, just stop playing with the bullwhip.
John: Leave it.
John: Leave it.
John: Every time you do it, you have a really good time for five minutes, and then you lacerate yourself.
John: You're so close to needing an eyepatch.
John: You do not know how to use this thing.
John: Stop playing with it.
John: And then I would, you know, I'd see it again and I'd be like, this time I'm going to get it.
John: This time I'm going to be like... I'm going to be able to take a gun out of somebody's hand with this thing.
John: And then it would come back and stripe the back of my neck.
John: Ow!
John: Ow!
Ow!
John: But I had a really good time down there.
John: That's where we put our IBM PC with 64K.
John: Oh, sweet.
John: A lot of K. It was a lot of K. That's where I would go make out with my first girlfriend.
John: But I also wasn't the type of nerdy good kid that would watch other people do fireworks.
John: But I wasn't having orgies down there or anything.
John: My mom one time...
John: I was wondering why the humidifier didn't work anymore, and she opened up the top of the humidifier, and it didn't work because it was full of bottles of booze.
John: Oh, see.
John: She was like, hmm, this was a good hiding place.
John: You should have just done it just a little bit better so that it didn't.
John: A for effort, John.
John: Glad you finally got an A. It didn't affect the operation of the machine.
John: It was a great idea.
John: It was the old-fashioned kind of humidifier that actually had a puddle of water in the bottle.
John: So you could sit your liquor bottles in there and keep them cool.
Merlin: Oh, disco.
Merlin: Wow, nice.
Merlin: Super disco.
Merlin: Oh, jeez.
Merlin: I was very into throwing sharp things.
Merlin: I like darts.
Merlin: I liked knives, sometimes kitchen knives.
Merlin: I would take all the kitchen knives and I would see, I would try to get the right distance from the wall where it would get like, you know, a couple little turns.
Merlin: Yeah, that was a good feeling.
Merlin: And eventually I got into, you know, throwing stars, shurikens.
Merlin: You can pick those up at the flea market unsharpened.
Merlin: You sharpen them yourself.
Merlin: And now you could throw shurikens.
John: Shurikens.
Merlin: Shurikens.
John: Did you ever carry shurikens to school?
Merlin: Only in my wallet, yeah.
John: You have a mini throwing star that you carried in your wallet.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Later I had a condom I never used, but for a time I had a shuriken shape in my wallet.
Merlin: And did you deploy it?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: The better ninjas do not keep their weapons inside of a pouch in their back pocket.
Merlin: At least not the primary weapon.
Merlin: That might be the one for after you've been searched.
Merlin: You hope you still have that one in your sock.
Merlin: But no, no, no.
Merlin: I'm not sure who that was for.
Merlin: Did you do things like that?
Merlin: Well, it was clearly for a girl.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: When you pulled your wallet out to pay.
Merlin: Oh, this?
Merlin: Oh, this when I pulled out my Adam and the Ants Velcro wallet and it had a shuriken in it?
Merlin: Oh, this?
Merlin: Oh, this?
Merlin: Here, let me buy your snow cone.
Merlin: Throw it through the air.
Merlin: Bonk.
Merlin: Falls on the ground.
Merlin: Bonk.
Merlin: Oh, here.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Had a little Chinese character on it.
John: So did you think, as you were walking around, did you pretend...
John: as though you were a ninja?
Merlin: I would later on get into functional ninja things, like mostly running around in people's backyards with a sweatshirt over my head.
Merlin: Functional ninja.
Merlin: Did you ever have the toe shoes?
Merlin: No, no, I didn't go that far.
Merlin: We had sweatshirts, we had rubber chucks, and later actual nunchucks.
Merlin: And we would carry things that we imagined a suburban ninja would need.
Merlin: Well, one of the things that defines ninjadom is sweatshirts.
Merlin: You look at any of the original literature, most ninjas wear sweatshirts.
Merlin: So we had that.
Merlin: And mainly it was just about sneaking around at that point.
Merlin: I can't imagine how many retirees we scared by like running past their air conditioner at nine o'clock.
Merlin: They probably weren't thinking ninjas.
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Merlin: They were probably not thinking ninjas.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Honey, did you see that?
Merlin: It's probably just those ninjas again.
John: It's the ninjas.
John: We have nothing to fear.
Merlin: No, but see, this is, again, this is a thing.
Merlin: This has come up in some form or fashion before, but, you know, it's the classic American male thing of, like, for example, I've never driven a car, but I've seen lots of car driving.
Merlin: I've seen fast car driving.
Merlin: I'm pretty sure I'd be a good fast car driver.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I've seen so many fight scenes, I bet I'd be pretty great in a fight.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: And in this case, I've seen stealthy ninjas.
Merlin: Certainly, if there's anything in my grasp, I could be a stealthy ninja.
Merlin: I, too, am a stealthy ninja.
Merlin: Yes.
John: Yes.
John: I spend a lot of time...
John: There were things, so I had to walk home from school, and I spent a lot of time fantasizing during the walk home.
Merlin: You had your key on a red string.
John: Had a key on a red string.
John: Walking home from school.
John: And part of the reason I walked home from school, I mean, there was a bus, but you take the bus and then what would you do?
John: You'd just be home.
John: And I wasn't somebody that went home and read comic books or played video games.
John: You got special projects.
John: Yeah, I would sit at home and just, I would stare at the wall if I was at home.
John: So why not walk home?
John: It would take me an hour or so to walk home.
John: And I would fantasize the entire way home, just in a state of total dream place, right?
John: Where the actual, like, I was perceiving the world outside.
John: I was looking at things also.
John: But in my mind, I was far, far away.
John: And early on, one of the things I...
John: One of my fantasies was that I lived in a richy rich world.
John: Oh, I've had that fantasy.
John: Where I was a very wealthy boy and I had a bunch of adult things that were scaled down a la Bugsy Malone.
John: All right.
John: So I had a Rolls Royce, but it was a half scale, a Rolls Royce silver shadow of
John: but it was a half scale Rolls Royce Silver Shadow.
John: So rather than having to walk home, I would drive myself home in my Imaginarium in my half size Rolls Royce Silver Shadow.
John: Now,
John: I am picturing myself driving this Rolls Royce Silver Shadow on the bike paths of Anchorage, Alaska, right?
John: The fantasy doesn't extend to that I'm living in Monaco.
John: No, it's not plausible.
John: It's not plausible.
Merlin: But in your imaginarium, you can very easily place it there.
Merlin: There's all kinds of ways for a young person to feel fancy in their head.
John: That's right.
Merlin: It seems weirdly plausible.
John: When I see a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow on the road now, and most of them only exist as wedding cars anymore, but I still picture myself in it and picture both me and the car as being about like three-quarter scale.
John: I'd love to see that.
John: But then I got introduced to Lord of the Rings, as we all do, about, you know, I think even now if you get introduced to Lord of the Rings for the first time, it immediately transports you to 1980.
John: Yeah.
John: At least that's how I imagine it works.
Merlin: I mean, in John's case, and, you know, we talked about this here.
Merlin: I've talked about this with Syracuse.
Merlin: It sounds like it's something that somehow most guys who wouldn't even self-identify as a geek or whatever, but you discover usually around middle school, junior high, like late elementary school, middle school, junior high.
John: Is that right?
John: Seventh grade for me.
John: And then I was – then the concept of all of that and Lord of the Rings and D&D came together for me as they should as a package deal.
John: And then I spent the entire time walking home from school conjuring spells.
John: Oh, this is the conjuring era.
John: I was conjuring spells.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: This is this is this a long that I'm starting to interrupt But it was later on that you would attempt to actually conjure an orb.
John: That's a little later right a little later Yeah, this was just the beginning of like and also also like when I was little kid and People in Seattle talked about underground Seattle, which is a neighborhood in the on the first Avenue that
John: They raised the level of the streets at one point during one of their many redevelopments of downtown.
John: And in raising the level of the streets, they just covered over the first floor of shops and stuff downtown and just decided that now the second floor of buildings were going to be the first floor.
John: They did that in Chicago.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: When they wanted, would they add like plumbing?
Merlin: Or they added like a whole like septic sewer system and they raised Chicago like a story.
John: Yeah, they raise it up.
John: Raise it up.
John: In Anchorage during the 64 earthquake, the buildings actually fell a story so that they had to... Oh, it's no good.
John: They call it pancaking here.
John: Yeah, that's not good.
John: Pancaking is bad.
John: But the buildings weren't destroyed.
John: They just dropped one story so that the front door of the buildings was now at the street level.
John: Like a Bugs Bunny cartoon?
John: Yeah, wonk.
John: And they just cut new doors.
John: Like, pretty crazy.
John: But people in Seattle would talk about underground Seattle.
John: And when I was six or seven years old, I imagined that that meant that any time you dug in the ground anywhere in Seattle, there was a city under there.
John: Oh, there's like a second Seattle underneath where you are.
John: If you just know how to get there.
John: If you know how to get there.
John: We dug a lot of holes looking for the roof lines of underground Seattle.
Wow.
John: But by the time I was in junior high, of course, I knew there weren't cities under the ground, but I did suspect that there might be dungeons, right?
John: If you could just find the entrance to the dungeons that were... I mean, I sound like a dumb seventh grader.
John: I wasn't one.
Merlin: You don't, but I mean, think about it.
Merlin: Like, if you've gotten to the point where you have a city...
Merlin: that can sustain even two of a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant, you have to imagine that somebody had the forethought to put a dungeon in.
Merlin: There's so many cooler things that hopefully were made, I'm guessing probably in the 1800s, because that's when you make a dungeon, right?
John: Well, but the 1800s didn't play in Anchorage because there was no 1800s Anchorage.
John: But I still think about my own house and how expensive it would be to retroactively install a dungeon.
John: Oh, you've been wanting tunnels for a while.
John: Tunnels and dungeons.
John: What do you call it, a monk hole?
John: I don't want to talk about it anymore.
John: Understood.
John: But, you know, and I'm not talking about shipping containers buried in the desert dungeon.
John: I'm talking about, like, stonewalled dungeons.
Merlin: Oh, you're not like a 12-year-old girl in a Reader's Digest article?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Not that kind of thing.
Merlin: Not that kind of thing.
Merlin: With a pipe.
Merlin: Oh, I remember reading that.
Merlin: Harrowing.
Merlin: No, that is harrowing.
John: I don't even want to think about that.
John: But you'd make a sexy dungeon.
John: There'd be a sexy component.
John: There'd be safes down there and stuff.
John: It'd be full of safes.
Merlin: It would be safe.
Merlin: It would probably be comfortable.
Merlin: Well, no, but I mean safes.
Merlin: No, no, I'm sorry.
Merlin: I have a problem sometimes of using words.
Merlin: But it would probably be a secure location.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Better put.
Merlin: And I'll bet you could make it comfortable.
John: I would be very comfortable.
John: It wouldn't be made out of barn lumber.
John: I'd be so comfortable down there.
John: Really, I would.
John: And the thing is, if you rang the doorbell, it would flash a light downstairs.
John: And then I'd go on the closed circuit TV and I would look at you and be... Decide if you're going to pull the trap door.
John: That's right.
John: I'd make a decision then.
John: But I never had any ninja... I never had any affection for ninjadom.
John: And I don't know whether it's because I wasn't introduced to Bruce Lee the same way that other people were.
John: Like, certainly he was around in my childhood.
John: All the sort of kung fu fighting was all there.
John: I just never, I never identified.
John: I can tell you why.
Merlin: So here we're talking about the very early 80s.
Merlin: Ninjas were still cool.
Merlin: Ninjas were still a new-ish idea.
Merlin: I think America got burnt out on ninjas.
Merlin: There's too many fucking ninjas today.
Merlin: They're literally, they're ruining TV shows that are on TV right now.
Merlin: There's too many ninjas.
Merlin: You're telling me there are ninjas on TV right now?
Merlin: Oh, they're ruining TV shows.
Merlin: Here's the thing.
Merlin: A ninja, I mean, and there's people who have, like, I think there's published theories about this.
Merlin: The more ninjas that you add to something, the less interesting it gets.
Merlin: You need one ninja that you almost never see.
Merlin: That's cool.
Merlin: It's sort of like the fifth roommate.
Merlin: I'm looking at this photo right now.
Merlin: It's completely freaking out.
John: If your fifth roommate is a ninja...
John: Your TV show is more interesting.
Merlin: But this is why I thought I would want to be a monk.
Merlin: Like, monks were the coolest.
Merlin: Monks were like, well, like, you know, like in D&D, like the character class.
Merlin: Because a monk could do stuff.
Merlin: They had the vibrating palm.
Merlin: They could go down.
Merlin: I think they could fall four feet per level.
Merlin: Wait a minute.
John: What good is a vibrating palm?
Merlin: Brother, you do not want to get the vibration.
Merlin: I can guess.
Merlin: All right, easy.
Merlin: But you can do all kinds of stuff.
Merlin: It was sort of like, what was it?
Merlin: It was part, a lot of fighter, maybe some cleric, but there's a lot of dexterity.
Merlin: And one of the cool thing was, if memory serves, forgive me, please don't van hoot me on this.
Merlin: I'm pretty sure you could fall four feet per level by like bouncing off the wall.
Merlin: Monks were the coolest.
John: That doesn't seem that cool.
John: Falling can be cool.
John: Why would I want to fall four feet for level if I could cast, if I could conjure an orb?
Merlin: But then you've got to rest.
John: It's like, here's two guys.
John: You've got to rest.
John: There's so much resting with the magic people.
John: One guy's got like a big troubling little China-style electric orb hovering above his hand, and the other guy's palm is vibrating.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: And he's falling.
Merlin: It doesn't have the same visual appeal, I admit.
Merlin: But it just seems like you guys on the campaign, you were just always having to take a nap, especially at the lower levels.
Merlin: There was a lot of napping for the magic people.
John: Well, I'm not opposed to it.
John: I'm not opposed to napping as long as there's somebody watching over.
Merlin: So you're walking.
Merlin: I would also like at some point to get back to secret spaces because as recently as last night, I had a dream about a secret space.
Merlin: I dream about them constantly.
Merlin: I think about secret spaces a lot.
Merlin: But you were walking down the path, the bike path, in your three-quarter size Rolls Royce.
Merlin: Eventually, you were thinking about conjuring things.
John: I was.
John: And, you know...
John: This is the thing about junior high.
John: You're not thinking it all the way through, but I was pretty sure that was the way to be successful with girls.
John: If I could, I mean, think about it.
Merlin: Like you, I still continue to not think it all the way through.
Merlin: You don't have to sell me on this.
John: I'm standing at an all-school dance.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: On comes... One guy does a fucking card trick.
Merlin: The cards just keep coming out of his sleeves.
Merlin: That's pretty cool.
Merlin: Where are these cards coming from?
John: I can't get rid of these cards.
John: I can't get rid of the cards.
John: And that's exactly what I mean.
John: I'm leaning against the wall.
John: You want to be Cardini.
John: Here comes Devo's working in a coal mine.
John: John saw John make that orb.
John: The cool girls go out on the dance floor.
John: And I'm like, God, I wish I could go dance with the girls.
John: But if I was over there just like...
John: Oh, by the way, like who would be dancing with these guys?
John: Nobody.
John: You'd be your own private Devo.
John: People would be taking note.
John: And then where are all these cards coming from?
John: And pretty soon I'd be like the king of, I'd be queen of the scene.
Merlin: Fans and fans just coming out of his sleeve.
Merlin: He can't get rid of them.
Merlin: I checked it out.
Merlin: His name's Cardini.
Merlin: People aren't going to know what we're talking about because they don't hear our private conversations.
Merlin: We're talking about the great card artist, Cardini.
John: I go to throw my cigarette away, and there's a cigarette in my mouth again.
Merlin: There's a cigarette again, and then what's with these cards?
Merlin: Perfect fan of cards is produced.
Merlin: He can't get rid of the cards.
Merlin: They just keep coming out.
John: Throws them away, and then they're back again.
Merlin: You know, he was married to that lady.
John: Yes, I did know that.
John: Yeah.
John: And she wore a bellhop outfit.
John: She did.
John: I'm so glad I didn't see that when I was 12.
John: If I could find a woman that would wear a bellhop outfit, I'd be married.
John: Service.
John: Who would stand there with a wastebasket while I threw cards into it.
John: I can't get rid of these cards.
John: She never says anything.
John: She just smiles.
John: She just has like a Cheshire smile and is just picking up the cards.
Merlin: But you know what the cool part is?
Merlin: She'd never get sick of it.
Merlin: She'd still think you're so interesting because of your card sleeves.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: Wop, wop, wop.
Merlin: Oh, and then an orb.
Merlin: This is also, not to take you off your story, this is another boy pattern.
Merlin: I'm pretty sure there's this one thing that if I got really good at this, everything would fall in place.
Merlin: Maybe for some people, that's a ninja.
Merlin: For some people, that's an orb.
Merlin: Well, that's why there are guitar players.
Merlin: Yeah, God.
Merlin: Snatching the coins.
Merlin: Snatching the coins off your elbow, right?
Merlin: There's so many things out there where you're like, if I could just master this one thing, I'd do this at lunch.
Merlin: Frank Kufel's walking around with his tennis racket.
Merlin: I get out there, I produce some cards out of my sleeve, and I'm getting more tail in Sinatra.
Merlin: Did you ever do any cigarette tricks?
Merlin: My cigarette tricks were very modest.
Merlin: I would do match tricks.
Merlin: I could do some match tricks.
Merlin: I could do some very minor, like, first-level Zippo tricks.
Merlin: Oh, first-level Zippo tricks are good.
Merlin: Just the whole, like, this thing.
Merlin: Flunk.
Merlin: Like, where you do your fingers and you open it with the thing.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, the snap.
Merlin: The snap with two fingers.
Merlin: I'm making sort of like a bowling ball gesture with my finger.
Merlin: Your thumb's on the bottom of Zippo, and you make it open and make that noise.
Merlin: Oh, boy, those smelled good.
Merlin: Didn't they smell good?
Merlin: Well, yeah, I carried a Zippo for a long time.
Merlin: I had a Zippo collection.
Merlin: That's one of the few collections I've ever had.
Merlin: You had like Vietnam Zippos?
Merlin: No, I didn't have like Death's Head Zippos or anything.
Merlin: I had like a Kiwanis Zippo.
Merlin: I had a Chesterfield cigarette Zippo.
Merlin: Kiwanis Zippo.
Merlin: I told you the Kiwanis story.
John: Yeah, you did.
Merlin: When you're ready to become a man, you let me know, is what the guy said to me.
Merlin: When he saw my Kiwanis Zippo.
Merlin: Wow.
John: When you're ready to become a man.
John: Well, you know, I've discovered over the course of this program that we have a lot of listeners who are actually Masons.
John: Are they allowed to tell us that, John?
John: I think they are, because as they have reminded me many, many times, there is not the Masonic Brotherhood.
John: is not actually a secret organization.
John: They are more than happy to explain almost everything about Mason-dom.
John: Wow.
John: With the addenda that I not actually use their last name when referring to them.
John: Oh, it's like AA?
John: Well, it's just like they don't want to hear from somebody else in their lodge about it.
John: Oh, okay.
Merlin: I bet it's a little bit like when you're reporting.
Merlin: You got on record, you got off the record, you got background, and you got deep background.
Merlin: On the record is you can say that John Roderick said this.
Merlin: Yeah, like off the record is you can say somebody who's highly or like you can use this information, but you can't say who did it background.
Merlin: I think you can only say stuff like somebody highly placed in the Rotter group said this deep background is you can only use this information to find other information.
Merlin: I'm very interested in deep background.
John: Yeah, deep background is good.
John: I don't as far as the Masons that I know.
John: which is not a small handful of Masons distributed across the country and the world who contact me every time we talk about Masons.
John: Oh, boy.
John: And say, as I've said before,
John: We are not a secret organization.
John: I'd be happy to walk you through the steps.
John: Let me explain again things that you can Google about our fraternal organization that does many helpful things.
Merlin: It's a service.
Merlin: They always point to the service organization part.
John: And the fact that they wear elaborate costumes is just part of the fun.
Merlin: A Shriner is never taller than when he stoops to help a crippled child.
John: Wow.
John: Or when he climbs into a very small car.
Merlin: Believe me, I would see those.
Merlin: Oh, buddy, I would see those and I would look pretty smart driving around in one of those.
John: I wonder if any of our listeners are Shriners.
Merlin: Do they still exist?
Merlin: This is the thing.
Merlin: I'm sure it exists, but I so think of that as something my grandfather is.
Merlin: He was a Freemason, and he was a Shriner.
Merlin: He was in Scottish Rite.
Merlin: He was in Scottish Rite, and he was a Shriner.
Merlin: And he was pretty into it.
John: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: He had the fez, he had the bolo tie.
Merlin: He had it going on.
Merlin: He didn't have the small car, though.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Not that I ever saw.
Merlin: He passed when I was fairly young.
Merlin: There might have been a car that was in the estate.
Merlin: I just never saw it.
Merlin: I think when you pass as a Shriner, I think the car is sent to the next young guy, Hakuna Matata.
John: No, I think you're buried in the car.
Merlin: Actually, comically, my grandfather's funeral was grotesque because, first of all, they did a pretty crap job on his makeup.
Merlin: So he looked like he just had some kind of bad plastic surgery, and then he had the Scottish Rite funeral.
Merlin: So they put all this stuff in the coffin, and we were there.
Merlin: We got to see the stuff they put in the coffin.
Merlin: There's a whole thing.
Merlin: They give you an apron.
Merlin: I think they give you a magic wand, maybe some exploding cigarettes.
Merlin: I'm not sure, but there's a whole bunch of stuff they put in the casket with you to go to your reward.
John: Tell me more about that.
Merlin: I don't remember it super well.
John: I was pretty sad when he died.
John: What was the number one thing you saw in his casket that made you go, hmm?
John: Okay, so it's hazy.
Merlin: I was 12.
Merlin: But also, I don't think we were actively encouraged to be super involved in that part of it.
Merlin: It was like they got the last bite at the apple before they closed the lid.
Merlin: And so I don't know what went in there.
Merlin: I don't think it was a whole car.
John: But it's like they were pounding their Navy SEAL.
John: It might have been a matchbox.
John: They were pounding their seal wings into his coffin.
Merlin: Yeah, so he was pretty into that.
Merlin: Yeah, I assume that it's still around.
Merlin: I guess you're going to find out.
Merlin: People, you can write a letter to John if you would like to talk about Freemasonry.
John: No, no, no.
John: I know plenty about Freemasonry, and I have a good sense of the members of our... Oh, you don't need to be Masons-plained.
John: Our extended family includes many Masons.
John: I have been schooled from many different directions.
John: Some of my best friends are Masons.
John: Oh, and we made a terrible mistake about the Knights of Columbus, and I was corrected on that very intelligently.
John: I didn't.
John: Well, no, you didn't, but I did.
Merlin: They're a Catholic group.
Merlin: Here's the problem.
Merlin: You and I sometimes understand something very well in life and in our head, and then somehow we each manage to say the exact opposite of what the true thing is, even though we know better.
John: Because we have a kind of intellectual dyslexia.
John: Yes, and.
John: Yes, and.
John: Or and yes.
John: No but.
John: But so far, I have never been Shrinersplained.
John: Shrinersplained.
John: So I don't want to hear about masonry again because I'm very up on it.
John: But I do want to hear about Shrinersplained.
Merlin: I got guesses.
Merlin: I got guesses.
Merlin: I think it is like all of these groups, it is presented as a public service organization, which is smart.
Merlin: I think you have to be introduced to the group, like sponsored if you like, again, like AA.
Merlin: And then you probably got to do a lot of scut work for a while.
Merlin: You got to like, I don't know, cut people's cigars, wash cars.
Merlin: I bet there's stuff where there's a hazing period.
Merlin: I know there's a lot of spanking.
Merlin: And then they act like they blindfold you, act like they're going to throw you off a cliff.
Merlin: That's the Masons, right?
Merlin: My mom.
John: Isn't there a lot of spanking?
John: my mom well here's what my mom said my mom so here my mom loves all people to the same degree which is to say not very much yeah but she both my mom and my dad and i've said this before neither one of them they were they were the two least racist people i've ever met in my life they have no they had no uh they saw no color at a time when that was very unusual
John: But my mom was racist against two groups of people, hillbillies.
John: And we've talked about this a lot.
John: She is still racist against hillbillies.
John: I don't think we're supposed to use that term.
John: Because, well, that's how she would describe that.
John: But that's where she's from.
John: Yeah, she's from Ohio.
John: You don't know from rural Ohio until you know Marcia.
John: You don't know from rural Ohio.
John: And if you cross the border of one county and go into the other county, you're now in hillbilly country and she hates them.
John: She hates them so passionately.
John: She says things all the time like, we never should have fought the Civil War.
John: We should have let the South secede and they would be a third world country and we would destroy them in war.
John: And I'm like, okay, mom.
Merlin: Is it a term that she still uses disparagingly about, look at those hillbillies over there?
Merlin: No, she won't do that.
John: But like Trump culture, she's just like, we should have let them secede and then we would destroy them in war.
John: Not like later.
John: We should have let them build their own economy.
John: We should have let them keep their evil practice.
Merlin: It's good.
Merlin: It's like Muhammad Ali in the rope-a-dope.
Merlin: You like let him wear themselves out and then boom.
John: Well, yeah, she was like that whole, that whole, we fought the war at the wrong time, I guess is her philosophy.
John: Like the whole state's rights garbage and keep the union together.
John: We should have ignored that whole thing and fought the actual war about slavery later and then defeated the South and salted the earth.
John: I'm like,
John: hey hey hey hey sherman's march like cool your jet like this is not a thing that we still talk about and she's like oh it's a thing i still talk about so she doesn't so she's racist against hillbilly she's like the opposite of a william faulkner character she's so she has not forgotten but she's not forgotten something very different no she's so north and she says things all the time like this is this is the crazy thing like she sometimes talks about bonaparte
John: The Frenchman?
John: Yeah, Napoleon.
John: We all call him Napoleon, but she still talks about Bonaparte in a way that has been transmitted through the generations of her family from a time when they...
John: When he was a living person and they had a nickname for him and he represented a certain idea of like internationalism, anti-British empirism, like she'll refer to Bonaparte.
Wow.
John: I'm like, Bonaparte?
Merlin: The way people in the early 20th century would refer to Germans as the Huns.
Merlin: Well, yeah.
Merlin: It had this implication of not just identifying your ethnic or geographic background, but something about your character.
John: It's absolutely about his character, and she refers to him familiarly as though we would say like, oh, Bush –
John: you know, or Bush 2 or whatever.
John: She's like, well, Bonaparte would have blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John: Wow.
John: Bonaparte.
John: Bonaparte.
John: But so she has several of those things, and some of them seem like they have been translated through the Quaker side of her family from like Calvinist times.
John: Small, small prejudices against like people of different sects.
John: Like, not against people of different nationalities, but, you know, it's like there's a doctrinaire.
Merlin: But, like, there's this, I know what you're talking about, like, and it's almost like the way that people talk about, not to go all Garrison Keillor here, but, like, you know, Lutherans versus Presbyterians versus howevers, where, like, most people today who are, let's say, areligious or non-religious would go, that is so weird.
Merlin: This sounds like the Butter Battle book.
Merlin: Like, what are you talking, these are non-existent distinctions.
Merlin: They're all just Jesus people.
John: They're like, oh, no, no, no.
John: My mom has very, very strong.
John: Their idea of the Eucharist is flatly wrong.
John: Yeah.
John: Every single different Protestant denomination, my mom could make very sweeping generalizations about their character.
John: We were like that about the Baptists a little bit.
John: Oh, sure.
John: Everybody was.
Merlin: The Baptists seemed pretty extreme.
Merlin: And actually, it turns out my friend John went to a Baptist school for a while.
Merlin: There was no dancing.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: There was no music.
Merlin: And it wasn't like we did a lot of dancing at the Christian church.
Merlin: But the Baptist seemed a little bit—and also the Baptists were famous.
Merlin: No offense to the Baptists out there.
Merlin: But the Baptists were kind of famously evangelical at a time before that became a thing.
Merlin: Like in the 80s, you got used to everybody being like evangelical and in your face.
Merlin: But the Baptist, if you like, so you come to my church, you know, you go to White Oak Christian Church, you're going to go to VBS.
Merlin: You're going to make some shit out of popsicle sticks.
Merlin: You're going to sing an awesome song in a major key.
Merlin: You go and Barry's going to be like, hey, come back anytime.
Merlin: You go to the Baptist church and they're like, you know, you know, you're Catholic and going to hell, right?
Merlin: Like you, you understand, like you nine year old, that you're going to have some problems in the afterlife.
Merlin: These Hollywood fat cats, these Vatican fat cats are not telling you about it.
John: It was the moral majority, the rise of the moral majority.
John: Later, yeah.
John: Well, I mean, I remember that as being early 80s.
Merlin: It definitely was 1980.
John: 1980, I think, is around the time that that really kicked in, yeah.
John: And before that, yes, mom would say things about Baptists that made it sound like they were eating dirt.
John: The hill people.
John: Yeah, they lived on raw crawdads.
John: When there was no crawdads.
John: They ate sand.
John: And they would fight with banjos or whatever.
John: But then all of a sudden Baptists were everywhere.
John: This could be hard or easy, Eustace.
John: Now, I can't meet an indie rocker without finding out that they're Southern Baptist, right?
John: They're like a very large portion of American Christianity.
Merlin: You know, they stored them up for 20 years like hothouse flowers and then started releasing them, I think, in the mid-2000s.
John: Yeah, there was that moment when Christian rock went two different directions.
John: One direction was the direction of Guy Fieri rock, where people were wearing bowling shirts with flames on them.
John: And they were like, Jesus!
John: And then the other Christian rock, which is like man bun rock, where everybody had tattoos of doves on their chests and were playing the glockenspiel very aggressively.
John: And it's like, whoa, that's...
Merlin: we're we're finding jesus that way too there's a lot of different jesus's and i don't know which i don't know which kind of rock to follow but you can still tell it like if we're flipping around on the radio my wife better than me my wife can clock it there'll be some kind of song that comes on that sounds pretty indie rock and she'll be like turn that off that's christian rock i was like oh no come on this is just gentle indie rock
John: I feel like there's a setting on the compressors at the mastering studio, which is like, let's just set those compressors to Christian.
John: It's a little too jolly.
John: Oh, you're talking major key.
John: Yeah, right.
Merlin: But there's something, you know, they sound like they're smiling when they're singing, which is not a bad thing.
Merlin: But if you can really tell that it sounds like someone's smiling, it seems manic.
John: Well, Eddie Vedder smiles when he sings, but it's a grimace smile.
John: It's like a smile.
Merlin: He's more of a rock rictus.
John: A rictus, right.
John: But yeah, you're right.
John: They're smiling because if you frown, it lets the devil in.
John: But over the last 10 years, I have realized that my mom still has very, very strong opinions about the War of the Roses.
John: Yeah.
John: My goodness, really?
John: She takes a side in the War of the Roses and there are people within the British royal family today that my mom cannot abide for reasons that have to do with the War of the Roses.
John: And I'm just like, this is not a regular thing.
Merlin: And just to, I mean, for me and the audience here, your mom grew up on a farm.
Merlin: She did.
Merlin: And I mean, with very, very modest means, right?
Merlin: I mean, it was pretty...
John: Well, her grandfather was a postman and being a postman during the depression was actually a pretty good job because it was a regular job.
John: You weren't going to lose it.
John: He was also a farmer, but like the postman thing.
Merlin: But she wasn't going to Kumon to learn about the War of the Roses.
Merlin: This was something that was, this was part of the, I'm guessing here, this was part of the family's oral history, like what we think, what we believe in.
Merlin: Like we're Coke people, not Pepsi people.
Merlin: This came up like around the house, like more than once a month.
John: Well, her great-grandfather, of course, fought in the Civil War for Ohio.
John: And if you look at a map of the South and a map of America at the time, the South comes all the way up.
John: So on the East Coast, they're like all the way from Maine all the way down to Maryland.
John: You know, the North is pretty long up there versus the South.
John: But at the point where Ohio touches the lake, the North was exactly one statewide, which is Ohio.
John: And so the Civil War had a lot of...
John: The Civil War had a different feeling, I think, from the vantage point of Ohio because the south was much wider than the north at that point.
John: And if you look even within the state of Ohio and the patterns of migration of people to the west, southern Ohio is still – southern Ohio was populated with Scots-Irish.
John: And so who are the people that my mom is referring to when she says hillbillies?
Merlin: That's that's totally my family.
Merlin: That's I mean, I'm from Cincinnati.
Merlin: Most of my family is from Kentucky and they're like all uniformly English and Irish.
John: Yeah.
John: And then in the middle of Ohio, there are people that, you know, there are sort of what you would call northerners.
John: From a Puritan kind of mercantile class.
Merlin: I have to amend that because I almost made a giant error.
Merlin: Also, lots of Germans.
Merlin: I mean, it's Cincinnati.
John: Oh, right.
Merlin: There's a lot in Pennsylvania and throughout Ohio.
Merlin: But anyway, sorry.
Merlin: Continue.
Merlin: I would feel bad if I didn't acknowledge my German heritage.
John: You have to acknowledge the Germans.
John: Man.
John: I mean, look at my last name.
John: Merlin Man.
John: It's not O Man.
John: But then right across the top of Ohio, there's this tiny thin band.
John: It's got to only be 120 miles wide.
John: That is Quakers.
John: And like Quakers and Pennsylvania Dutch are, you know, German Calvinists.
Merlin: And Pennsylvania Dutch, we have learned, is a misnomer.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: They're actually German.
John: They're Pennsylvania Deutsch.
John: Pennsylvania Deutsch, exactly.
John: So there's this tiny little band of what they, I think, in Ohio regarded as the last vestige of civilization.
Right.
John: In the entire like middle portion of of North America and they really still they felt like a bulwark and they and some of that persisted at least into the 50s.
John: I'm not sure how people in like Toledo and Van Wert feel now.
John: I imagine that it's all just Denny's and Sherry's there like it is everywhere else now.
John: But then it was, yeah, it was pretty strong feelings.
John: But what's crazy about it, and I think it's the same in my father's family, their connection to the past is still so strong, even as they have lost exactly what their problem was.
John: or exactly what was going on.
John: Right, yeah.
John: But like my mom, if you start talking about the Lancasters and, you know, and like the Duke of York.
John: The red roses and the white roses, yeah.
John: Yeah, she's gonna, she's gonna, like this whole business with Richard III, she's got real strong feelings about it.
John: Is he the hunchback in the parking lot?
John: In the parking lot.
Merlin: That's a terrific Morrissey song.
John: Yeah, that's a hunchback in the parking lot.
John: Did you read that story recently about when Morrissey appeared on the Johnny Carson show?
John: No.
John: And the other guest on the program.
John: Morrissey finally appeared on the Carson show in like 1991.
John: Right after Carson had announced his retirement, but before he was gone.
John: Wow.
John: And the other guest on the program that day, Bill Cosby.
John: Oh, my God.
Merlin: There should be an ESPN 30 for 30 on that.
Merlin: That's amazing.
John: It's an incredible moment.
Merlin: Top headline, 25 years ago, Morrissey ruined Bill Cosby's appearance on The Tonight Show.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, not only ruined it, but like Johnny Carson said on air several times, I wish I was already retired.
John: Wow.
John: Wow.
John: Because there was all this pent-up Morrissey energy.
John: The Smiths had never appeared.
John: The Smiths never had a hit, really.
John: So within the popular culture, there was very little actual awareness about the Smiths and who the hell is Morrissey.
John: And Morrissey had gone on record several times saying, like, why is Belinda Carlisle on the Carson show and I'm not in his wonderful style, his humble and admirable style.
Thank you.
John: But he arrived on the scene and like everyone in the audience was a Morrissey super fan.
John: They completely disrupted the show, ruined it in every way, screaming for Morrissey throughout.
John: And you can see Bill Cosby and Carson, these two dinosaurs at the, you know, from the end of the, from the long ago times trying to grasp, you know, they make comments about people with blue hair and
John: Really, really like a transitional moment.
John: And I thought that you would I thought that'd be a thing that you would love.
Merlin: Also, I mean, I think about this from my own point of view today.
Merlin: There's a few things that are more insufferable than a loud audience screaming enthusiastically for something you've never heard of.
Merlin: it's kind of maddening i'm trying not to be that guy because i've been that guy uh and i've been on the other end of that i've been on the other end of that but i mean like there's something like on a show like that that must especially with let's be honest with a gay guy coming out i mean that's that was probably that was probably not the best place for him to be but he but it was a triumph for him right in the in that he was able to uh he'd arrived he had he was finally on the carson show and and
John: There was a really good quote from Morrissey when he was like, I am tired of being this successful with no recognition.
John: I bet he said weary.
John: I'm weary.
Merlin: I am so weary of being this successful.
Merlin: I'm weary of success at this level, the level.
Merlin: So weary that I mentioned that I'm weary.
John: Your Morrissey is amazing.
Merlin: I picked this third, and I'm sticking to it all day.
John: I cannot imitate Morrissey for lots and lots of reasons, which should be something.
Merlin: You've seen the footage of when they might be Giants were on there, though, right?
Merlin: It's incredible.
Merlin: We talked about this, I guess, but I can't speak for the Johns, but they seem so legitimately joyful to be playing with Doc Severinsen's fans.
John: Yeah, and they've got the whole band cranking.
John: And, you know, Flans always had that onstage, Flans underwent a transformation in a way that like Linnell had a certain onstage quality that he retains to this day.
Merlin: Yeah, he was like the talented dork at the talent contest, but he never really seemed like he was that happy to be up there.
John: But he was kind of smirk-smiling.
John: Adorable.
John: And looking at the camera to a certain degree.
John: He was impish.
John: He was impish.
John: He recognized he was sort of the front man of that era, and he was...
John: he was, he was present in what was, what he was experiencing and, and still is in the same way.
John: But flans early on never looked at the camera.
John: Like if you look at that Carson thing, he is not looking at the camera at all.
John: And he's doing his, he's doing his flans thing and kind of not in the background exactly, but like he's herky jerky,
Merlin: And he's that was part of the bit, though, like it became like a like a there's so many like kind of bits visually for them that were part of their thing, like the big head guy and all that.
Merlin: But like also in all their videos, there's a lot of deliberately like meta herky jerky dance moves that are clearly to me like meant to be like an art like art rock parody of rock and roll.
Merlin: The Giants invented the term past the dude that we use to this day.
Merlin: When crowd surfing first became a thing, I think Linnell would refer to it as past the dude.
Merlin: I still use that term.
Merlin: They had this not overwhelming but clear distance from the mainstream rock stuff.
Merlin: And so when you saw Flansburg do that, it was tongue-in-cheek.
Merlin: But now you go see them live, he legitimately just fucking rocks out.
John: Whatever that transition was, like not all of us say pass the dude still.
John: I should make that clear.
John: Well, it's not the thing that it was.
John: But if you took Flansburg out of those early day might be Giants moments and it was just Linnell singing and playing the accordion.
John: You wouldn't say that this was nerdy art rock, right?
John: It would just be – there would be something going on.
John: Linnell playing the keyboards especially.
Merlin: It would be closer to like solo Jonathan Richman where it would be fun and enjoyable but it would be a different kind of thing.
John: It would be pop, right?
John: Yeah, right.
John: But something – and this is the thing.
John: It was something happened in –
John: in within the they might be giants dynamic particularly in flansberg a person i know quite well that i do not i'm not sure i was not following closely enough to watch that transition i think it might have been when they added a live band where flans took over to became a different character on stage and then was very much like looking at the audience present in a different way
Merlin: and those arrangements i mean i wouldn't go so far maybe as like a zappa conductor but like having he added so much of the color to what makes that a memorable song no matter who's singing it and he gives so much of the palette and the texture and like deciding what horns go where on the carson show it feels like he is a member of the severinson band in a way like he's interacting with the band which is a huge compliment
John: Yeah.
John: I mean, that's a hell of a band.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, and when they appeared on Letterman for the first time and they had Paul Schaefer and his band.
John: Oh, God.
John: Mugging away on his Hammond.
John: Turn it down, Paul.
John: But, you know, you saw Flans more comfortable or at least differently, like, interacting with the bands.
John: Differently comfortable.
John: Differently comfortable is a perfect description of They Might Be Giants.
John: They Might Be Giants.
John: Differently comfortable.
Differently comfortable.
John: I definitely feel like an heir to that in a way that I wouldn't have said before.
John: Like I wouldn't have in 1989 thought to myself, I'm going to be an heir to this.
Merlin: I mean, does that go down all the way to your comedy rock solos?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But like it's it's it might be seen as ironic, but you're you're playing a rock and roll solo and you're getting into it.
Merlin: Your glasses are flying off and you're falling on the stage and it's actually pretty fucking great.
John: Yeah.
John: But I'm also aware that it is a that it is a pastiche of rock.
John: I'm aware that I am I'm commenting on rock solo, but I'm also really, really enjoying rock solo.
John: And that's a product of the era.
John: And in that sense, it's an air to punk even through a They Might Be Giants refraction, right?
John: Like to whatever degree that They Might Be Giants think of themselves as part of the punk experience and
John: And then they refracted that and, you know, and that ended up influencing me.
John: But you wouldn't listen to my music and think anything, really.
John: You wouldn't think punk.
John: You certainly wouldn't think metal.
John: You wouldn't think, I mean, the music as recorded sounds very much like the very specific music
John: early indie soft rock.
John: And it's not in the songwriting especially.
Merlin: I have trouble putting your stuff, I have a lot of trouble putting your stuff in a box.
Merlin: Somebody tooted at me a few days ago saying, what did he say?
Merlin: So I think he said something along the lines, if he likes the Long Winter stuff and he asked me in particular what I would recommend
Merlin: from today's artists that would be comparable and i felt like there's like three different ways i wasn't sure how to answer not least of which i'm not up on music today but honestly without kissing your ass i've always had a hard time with the comparisons people make i don't hear what they're talking about unless you're overtly like quoting a judas priest or acdc cadence as a thing i i don't hear the rem stuff i don't hear all that
Merlin: Right.
John: And so it's hard for me to even say stuff, which I heard a lot at the time.
John: Really?
John: Are you really influenced by XTC?
John: And I was like, not really.
John: And I don't hear the comparison.
John: Maybe shapes.
John: I, uh, the, the thing I hear a lot is, and I heard it at the time, like people would come to our live shows and they would, they, they didn't tweet at me because it didn't exist, but they would email me or comment on message boards and say, I went to see them live and they were like the fucking who I loved them.
John: But then I listen to the records and it's so soft.
John: I can't get into the sounds because it's so soft.
Merlin: It is very different.
John: And I hear that still from people that are like, I listened to the band and I just couldn't reconcile it with the person I know from the podcast because I like hard rock.
John: And you talk about hard rock and I assumed it would be harder rock.
John: And I'm like, yeah, when we were in the studio, we were recording those tunes and Chris Walla was the producer.
John: And it was an era, a specific era that was suspicious of distortion, suspicious of loud bass and big, heavy, bombastic stuff, even coming from a punk rock place.
John: But your songs didn't want that, I don't think.
John: They could have been recorded in a way that if there was one more guitar on every track that just was going through a rap pedal and playing the E string only, not open E only, but following the chord progression, but just playing on one string.
John: It would just be more rock.
John: It would sound rock.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: I mean, it's your music, but one of the things I treasure about, in particular, the green one, When I Pan to Fall, is, first of all, as I've said before, I think it's a triumph of sequencing in the tracks.
Merlin: And I really, I would not want you...
Merlin: to feel like you had to change Blanket Hog or you had to change It'll Be a Breeze.
Merlin: I'm glad there's not a dung, dung, dung on It'll Be a Breeze.
Merlin: Because that is the pacing.
Merlin: It's an album.
Merlin: It's a fucking album.
Merlin: And I like that it has its little ups and its downs.
Merlin: And then that triumphant last third, when you come out of the second side and it starts... What's that one?
Merlin: What's that one?
Merlin: Start a side two.
John: It's...
Merlin: Stupid!
Merlin: Stupid!
Merlin: See, I'm not a poser.
Merlin: I know your songs.
Merlin: I just don't know what they're called.
Merlin: But the song Stupid, which I always think of as the beginning of Side 2.
Merlin: I don't know if you intend it that way, but that's what it feels like.
Merlin: Because there's like the big sunset of like, oh, the big crazy ending.
Merlin: You got the big like, you know, the end.
Merlin: And then you say, why am I telling you this?
Merlin: Who cares?
John: It's the Tom Petty thing, right?
John: Tom Petty's like, look, man, you got to have the first song on side two has got to be killer.
John: And I was like, yeah, I mean, we got to have a side two.
John: But Stupid's a classic example of a song that when we played it live, it was much harder rock than it was.
John: And even as we were recording it, the drummer Michael Schilling said, why are you not making this more rock?
John: And I was like, well, I got all these little, I got chime.
John: I'm putting chimey guitars on there.
Merlin: Also, when you play it live, what I always remember, if I'm remembering correctly, was it was much more crunchy, but also you would play up the weird rhythms of that song in your guitar figures in a way that you didn't hear in the seemingly, I wrote this on an acoustic guitar version on the record.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: You would play up these funny little specials.
Merlin: I'm trying to remember, but I can't do it off the top of my head.
Merlin: But I would remember always thinking, like, why is he making this, like, more janky?
Merlin: But it worked in a lot of context.
John: The accents are in places that you wouldn't expect.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And that's also how you sing.
Merlin: So it complements how you sing.
Merlin: So it makes it more pokey in the way that you kind of punctuate and do your Anjama Mall, which I think is another great thing from the Miami Giants.
Merlin: Like, line run over.
Merlin: Like, such a great thing.
John: I was trying to make it pokey because that's what girls like.
John: But I think the example, and I can't believe that we have generated to actually music critiquing my own music here.
John: But Prom Night at Hater High, which should not be named that.
John: It was named that by Josh Rosenfeld, the head of the record company, in one of those weird last minute things where the song had always been called Jet City.
John: We still put it on the set list as Jet City.
John: Oh, really?
John: And at the last possible minute, it was Jet City when I started to write it.
John: It was Jet City throughout the whole nine months before the record came out.
John: But Rosenfeld in like that record label thing where the record label owner is like, huh, maybe I should make a contribution to this.
John: Why don't you change the name of the song to Prom Night at Hater High?
John: And I was vulnerable enough or susceptible enough to that kind of contribution.
John: And I was like, oh, OK.
John: And then it went seriously.
John: He said that as we were doing the artwork for the for the record.
John: Do you still think of it as Jet City?
John: It's absolutely Jet City.
John: That's what we write on our, and it's a way better name for the song.
John: But the recording of that tune, which when we play it.
John: In fact, New Girl was actually originally called 14 Point Type.
John: Yeah, it was called 14 Point.
John: No, it wasn't.
John: But when we were recording that song, I mean, when we play Jet City live, we play it like a Rolling Stones song from Exile on Main Street.
John: Yeah.
John: And when we recorded it, I mean, that's how I wrote it.
John: But then as we were recording it, we were like, why don't we get a violin player in here?
John: And then the violin player we got was Sarah from Carissa's Weird.
John: I love her parts on that.
Merlin: And she's playing a kind of fiddle.
Merlin: She's doing a fiddly thing.
Merlin: Plus, don't you have lots of crazy harmonica on that one?
John: Yeah, fiddle and all kinds of other stuff.
John: Hillbilly music.
John: Hillbilly music that really hillbilly-fies the song.
John: And what the song...
John: The way it was written and the way I think now, probably it should have been recorded, was with some... It should have just been a rock and roll song.
John: But that wasn't our instinct at the time.
John: It was like, let's throw the whole refrigerator at this...
John: And we don't have another song with like a hillbilly violin.
John: So that's one thing we haven't explored yet.
John: Let's put it on this song.
John: Like we were trying, if you listen to our music, we're just trying over and over to put every style of everything in the records.
John: You have a credit for Dr. Dre Keyboard, if memory serves.
John: Dr. Dre Keyboard.
John: Scott McCoy is on one of the songs Just Standing in the Studio Quietly.
John: And we have Scott McCoy on a track where really we just, we put up the mics and he stood in there and stared at us through the window.
John: And we just recorded Scott McCoy standing in a room and we included it on the track.
John: So it was that impulse.
John: And that's a very, they might be giants impulse too.
John: Like let's, let's do weird things even in the studio that no one will ever know about.
John: And, but it, but it'll be fun and artistic stuff.
John: But the thing was we never developed, the Long Winters never developed a definable and unified sound that would enable somebody like you now to say like, oh, right, Owl City, they sound like... They sound like, yeah, post-service.
John: I mean, ridiculously like that.
John: Or Interpol sounds like Joy Division.
John: And I use those examples as ridiculous examples.
John: Silver Sun pickups sound like...
John: Billy Corgan the smartest boy in the world but you know there's not you can't even say about the long winners like oh they're rock and roll because it's not I mean that's the way we that's the way we are live and I'm a rock and roll person
John: But at the time, we were exploring the art of recording as separate from the other arts.
Merlin: I'm glad you did.
Merlin: I wouldn't change a stitch of it.
Merlin: I really treasure those records.
Merlin: You know, as much as...
Merlin: The Worst You Can Do As Harm is a really, really good record, but in my head, I still sometimes think that it's—I still encourage people, and I hope you approve or don't hate me for this, but I still encourage people to start with When I Pretend to Fall.
Merlin: I think you might even be able to enjoy where she can do as harm more after that.
John: Yeah.
John: Do you think it should go Chrono?
John: No, not necessarily.
John: I do think that the first record is, you know, I was coming out of the Western State Hurricanes where we were a very rock rock band.
John: And I was I was making a lot of decisions there that were reactive or they were reactionary like.
John: the hurricanes were this thing now i'm doing this other thing which is different and if you do a hurricane song it's going to sound really different super consciously making it sound different uh by pretend to fall i was just writing songs and recording them how i wanted and then uh putting the days to bed which i talk to people all the time where they're like that was the first record of yours i heard that's the one i like the best so weird um
John: And that's one where I was like, again, maybe more consciously saying like, I want to get, I want to bring some rock and roll back into the band.
John: I want the tunes to be a little bit more rocking or, or, you know, to a, to a degree that doesn't seem incongruous, but like, and you know, and that was, that was successful and not successful depending.
John: Um, yeah.
Merlin: The video... It's awful.
John: Don't even talk about the video.
John: Oh, no, no.
Merlin: I hate videos.
Merlin: No, Washington State Hurricanes on 29 Live.
John: yeah still up still up on the youtube that's the problem with the western state hurricanes is that that was i was still coming out of the bun family players with the with the hurricanes and in the bun family players there was no song that we could not ruin with a with a different time change in them like a different time signature you think you like this yeah like this hey what if we what if some what if the drummer stood up at this point what do we make this harder to like
John: Yeah, what if the drummer stood up in the middle of the song, stopped playing the drums and played the French horn for two minutes?
John: That sounds cool.
John: Like completely influenced by not even, I mean, not even they might be giants, influenced by just like equal parts rush and circus contraption.